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The Value of the Mother Tongue

Vernacular Translations

of Monastic Rules for Women

Shifting Boundaries: Translations and Social Relations in Later Medieval England

The entry for “translaten” in the Middle English Dictionary includes six definitions: to relocate a person or thing (including a cleric, a saint’s relics, knowledge and culture, an episcopal see, or allegiance); to take away a kingdom or duchy from its ruler or people; to take into the afterlife without death; to change the nature, condition, or appearance of someone or something; to replace, turn, or move; and—finally—to render into another language.¹ These definitions reveal that translation is an operation performed on both bodies (dead and alive) and words. The far-reaching implications of the textual exchanges of monastic profession and visitation call attention to the intimate connections between bodies and words in later medieval culture, connections that heighten the dramatic social significance of translation.² Corporeal and textual translation share more than a common sense of change in location or form; they are linked by their socially transformative ability to change existing boundaries.³

In later medieval versions of monastic rules for women the process of translation from Latin to the vernacular is, like the religious identities these rules help shape, Janus-faced; it is ambiguous in its socially transformative functions. Translation works to shift boundaries and to shore them up. The vernacular acts both as servant of orthodoxy and as agent of subversion, serving to empower as well as to constrain, and sometimes doing both at once.

The ambiguous status of the vernacular and the problematic nature of translation in Middle English monastic rules for women are intimately connected to social changes involving literacy; particularly significant are the facts that in the fifteenth century, literate culture expanded among non-noble women, and nuns were in one of the best situations available to women for gaining literacy skills.⁴ The Latin literacy of later medieval nuns has been generally considered lacking; vernacular literacy, however, was another story altogether. Financial accounts and court records, for instance, manifest nuns’ active participation in business affairs, involvement which would have required significant literacy skills.⁵ As women religious achieved levels of pragmatic and professional literacy, “their social visibility and power” increased;⁶ presumably, from a clerical point of view, their potential as a source of disruption also increased accordingly.

Further enhancing the potentially advantageous and potentially threatening position of women religious was the dearth of textual production and engagement in fifteenth-century male monasteries. In his analysis of the libraries of nuns, David Bell finds that “the interest of the nuns in fifteenth-century books and literature stands in marked contrast to the unimpressive record of their male counterparts”—interest to which the vibrant textual cultures at the Benedictine house of Barking and the Brigittine house of Syon bear witness.⁷ He posits that as a result of “what most men would have seen as their limitations,” nuns may have enjoyed a “richer, fuller, and, one might say, more up to date” spiritual life than male monastics, who for the most part “were still mired in the consequences of a conservative and traditional education.”⁸

Burgeoning vernacular literacy among women religious was clearly not the only vernacular literacy that posed a problem in the eyes of some clerical authorities. In fact, the vernacular literacy of nuns may have been somewhat less a source of ecclesiastical anxiety than the vernacular literacy of secular women (as in the case of Lollard women) and of rebellious lay men. Women religious were, after all, at least theoretically cloistered and less able to make trouble. The Church’s already conflicted attitude toward female spirituality, though, made ecclesiastical authorities ever vigilant.

Vigilance likely seemed particularly necessary since the boundary-shifting, socially transformative properties of translation, as well as the connections between bodies and words, were well understood by the clerics opposed to vernacular translation of scripture in the early fifteenth century. The antitranslation faction argued that “translation into the mother tongue will allow any old women (vetula) to usurp the office of teacher, which is forbidden to them (since all heresies, according to Jerome, come from women); it will bring about a world in which the laity prefers to teach than to learn, in which women (mulierculae) talk philosophy and dare to instruct men.”⁹ This is a dire vision of a “translated” world turned upside down in which the nature, condition, and appearance of society itself are dramatically altered as all “proper” boundaries are breached. The passage makes clear the negative associations of the vernacular with women, creatures of inferior bodies and minds who introduce discord and disorder.

The hysterical, even apocalyptic, tone of the antitranslation passage highlights as well the conservative clerics’ anxieties about the threats posed by the vernacular to their monopoly on spiritual knowledge, which they had historically enjoyed, thanks to their virtually exclusive access to Latin learning and sacred texts.¹⁰ By undermining the foundations of clerical authority—that is, the clergy’s position as sole possessors and interpreters of these sacred texts—translation shifted boundaries demarcating hierarchies. As a result, the clergy’s privileged access to cultural and material resources, which followed from their monopoly on spiritual knowledge, was threatened. The socially transformative properties of translation put the English clergy who opposed it in the position of having to, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, “save the market.”¹¹ Translation appeared, from a clerical perspective, as the source of diverse dangers, and so the struggle to preserve all the conditions of the social field which afforded the clergy the greatest access to symbolic and material capital likewise focused on translation.¹²

One clerical strategy to save the market emerges in Arundel’s Constitutions of 1407–1409. The Constitutions sought to control the spread of the vernacular, and the social disruption perceived as accompanying it, by requiring episcopal authorization of all translations of texts containing Scripture. The requirement of episcopal authorization attempts to replace, by means of the vernacular itself, the social boundaries and hierarchies displaced by the spread of the vernacular. That is to say, the Constitutions use officially sanctioned translation to reassert clerical authority over both the vernacular language and the potentially unruly female/feminized readers of vernacular texts.¹³

The yoked threats of the feminine vernacular and the female body surface again, famously, in Hoccleve’s “Remonstrance Against Oldcastle”:

Somme wommen eek, though hir wit be thynne,

Wole argumentes make in holy writ.

Lewed calates, sitteth down and spynne

And kekele of sumwhat elles, for your wit

Is al to feeble to despute of it.

To clerkes grete apparteneth þat aart.¹⁴

A callot is, according to the Middle English Dictionary, a foolish woman or a harlot;¹⁵ the connections of sexual promiscuity and lack of “wit” in Hoccleve’s use of the epithet underline the association of the disruptive feminine vernacular and the disruptive female body.

While Hoccleve thus plays with the same associations evident in the argument made by the antitranslation faction, his market-saving strategy is somewhat different than Arundel’s. Hoccleve styles himself in this poem as the staunch defender of orthodoxy against the rebel John Oldcastle, who, in Hoccleve’s eyes has, as Ruth Nissé observes, been “feminized” through Lollardy,¹⁶ and against Oldcastle’s Lollard associates, whose vernacular translations were the target of the Constitutions. Rather than clerically authorizing the vernacular in order to replace the very boundaries it breaks down, though, Hoccleve uses a vernacular poem to position the vernacular as inferior—at least in spiritual matters—to the “aart” of “clerkes.”¹⁷ This art (learned and Latinate, and so legitimate) is definitively more worthy than the “cackling” of “lewed calates.” Hoccleve at once works to reinstate a linguistic hierarchy of Latin and vernacular for spiritual subjects as well as a social hierarchy of male, clerical authorities over lay, female/feminized subjects.

In the face of the possibilities for independence both spiritual and material offered to later medieval nuns by their vernacular literacy and the increased availability of vernacular texts, clerics who made translations of monastic rules for women engaged in textual, market-saving strategies resembling those of both Arundel and Hoccleve. In other words, they used the mother tongue for their own benefit, manipulating translation, the source of instability, to replace the very boundaries it broke down or shifted. They also devalued the mother tongue and the feminized speakers of it, thus asserting their own masculine, Latinate authority.¹⁸

Saving the Market: The Female Body and the Feminine Vernacular in Translations of the Benedictine Rule for Women

The fifteenth-century prose and verse translations of the Benedictine Rule for women strain very hard to make translation serve traditional, hierarchical relations of masculine and feminine, Latin and vernacular, sameness and difference.¹⁹ Just as the text of the rule is translated into the vernacular for women, so too is the version of Benedictine monasticism these rules create for women a “translation.” The Benedictine Rule is adapted not only linguistically but also ideologically for women to fight social and religious transformations by enforcing a rigorously hierarchical sex/gender system.²⁰ Like Arundel’s Constitutions, the vernacular translations of the Benedictine Rule seek to “save the market” by manipulating the vernacular to control its transgressive power and that of the women who read it, putting both firmly under the control of reaffirmed clerical authority. Like Hoccleve’s “Remonstrance,” the translations do their utmost to emphasize the femininity, and corresponding inferiority, of the vernacular in the spiritual realm, also attributing this combination to the audience of women religious.

Putting the vernacular “in its place” (that is, under the authority of Latin) is a step in a larger process of putting women religious firmly in their place vis-à-vis the male clergy. This process was deemed especially pressing in light of prevalent associations between the “barbarous” vernacular and “an uneducated readership with a ‘carnal understanding of the truth’ “who were likely to rebel.²¹ The prose translation of the rule asserts the strong authority necessary to avert such danger by introducing the chapters with a phrase indicating that what follows is said by, spoken by, or commanded by St. Benedict.²² For instance, at the beginning of chapter VII, significantly a chapter addressing meekness, the masculine authority of St. Benedict and Holy Scripture coalesce as they speak together in Latin: “Of mekenes spekis sain benet in þis sentence, & sais with hali scripture: ‘Omnis qui se exaltat &c.’” (Prose 11). Ralph Hanna III writes, concerning translation, “Perhaps most distressing for the conservative, Englished Latin had been cut free from the Latin tradition…. It had become ‘open.’”²³ The insertion of the figure of St. Benedict in the introductory phrases, which are not present in the Latin, links the vernacular firmly to the Latin tradition, reasserting closure. The insertion of the figure of St. Benedict, like the episcopal authorization required by Arundel’s Constitutions, shores up the system of social relations in which the clergy and Latin are dominant by putting a strong authority figure in place as a prophylaxis against rebellion, as a way of ruling the potentially unruly.

Bishop Richard Fox’s sixteenth-century translation of the Benedictine Rule for the nuns in his diocese of Winchester similarly contains “frequent repetitions of phrases like ‘Be holde susters (sayth seint Benet)’ or ‘O dere susters (sayth seynt Benet).’”²⁴ The voice of St. Benedict in the text, to whom the “susters” are commanded to listen, merges with the voice of Fox, who also speaks to the sisters and commands obedience. The strategy works, as in the fifteenth-century prose translation, to reinforce masculine, clerical authority over the women religious, reinforcement which Fox, in spite of his open-minded humanist attitudes towards vernacular learning, was very anxious to effect.²⁵ Such desires are evident, for instance, in a letter Fox wrote to Cardinal Wolsey on January 18, 1527. Fox declares of the nuns in his diocese that “if I had the auctoritie and powre that your grace hathe, I wolde indever me to mure and inclose theyre monasteries accordyng to thordynance of the lawe.”²⁶ The insertions of the figure of St. Benedict in his translation also aid Fox in advancing his aims of “legitimiz[ing] his own position as a self-conscious auctor,”²⁷ as one of the “clerkes grete” to whom the art of spiritual discourse belongs. Fox, as master of the “Latin tonge” of which the nuns “have no knowledge nor understondinge”²⁸ and as translator of what “sayth seint Benet,” is able to claim, through Benedict and his Latin text, his proper position in the classical, clerical lineage of auctoritas, with all accompanying social and symbolic benefits.

The brief prayers that conclude most of the chapters in the fifteenth-century prose translation of the Benedictine Rule may not initially appear to replace boundaries by reasserting hierarchies of languages and genders as the introductory phrases do.²⁹ In fact, though, the prayers set up a dynamic in which the voice of masculine authority addresses and subordinates passive, feminine hearers and readers. These prayers, which are typically only one or two lines long, request help, aid, knowledge, or mercy in connection with the topic discussed in the chapter. For example, chapter XLVIII on labor and study ends with the prayer, “Lauerd for his pite giue vs sua to wirk, and sua vre lescuns at vnderstande, þat we at te ende til heuin be broght. Amen” (Prose 33). The prayers almost all speak in first person plural.³⁰ The “we” of the prayers reflects the monastic convention of praying communally and for all Christians, but the “we” is never one of full solidarity. The sameness and unity of the “we” put forth in the prayers is actually difference masked as sameness, and when this difference is unmasked, the inferiority of those who are “other” emerges.

For instance, chapter XXXVII addresses provisions for the elderly and children. The introductory phrase, “Of þe alde & of þe barnis spekis sain benet in þis sentence” (Prose 27), serves as a reminder of masculine, ecclesiastical authority and the right to speak. However, no prayer ends the chapter, and there is no use of the first person plural. There is no assertion by the voice of masculine authority of unity with these most feminized members of the community. Chapter LXII on the ordination of priests also lacks a prayer.³¹ There can be no “we” here because the female audience cannot participate in the role of the priest treated by the chapter. Women’s very bodies, “other” and, like those of the elderly and the young, less than perfect, bar them from clerical status.

Chapter VI provides perhaps the most striking illustration of the way in which the withdrawal of the first person plural in the prayers functions to replace boundaries. This chapter, which addresses silence, begins with the introductory phrase, “Sain benet spekis in þis sentence of silence, how ʒe sal it halde” (Prose 10). Not only is there no “we” in a prayer in this chapter, but the text also repeatedly addresses its female readers or hearers as “ʒe,” saying, “he bidis þat ʒe do als þe prophete sais: ‘kepe ʒour tunge, it sp[e]ke no scaþe, & ʒour lippis fra iuil, & kepe ʒow fro dedly synne.’… þe maistires aw at speke for to lere hyr dicipils wisdom. þe decipils sal here þar lesson & understand it” (Prose 10). This is a significant departure from the Latin, which speaks with a participatory first person plural in prescribing restrained speech, and, in quoting Scripture, uses the first rather than the second person: “Faciamus quod ait propheta: Dixi: Custodiam vias meas, ut non delinquam in lingua mea.”³² The language and grammar of the translated passage set up a hierarchy, absent in the Latin, which goes beyond daily monastic practice of silence and which is important in considering issues of gender, power, and authority. In contrast to the female listeners, “þe maistires,” a group of those (male) individuals with sufficient authority and knowledge, are to speak. Included among these “maistires” is, arguably, the translator. He has access to the original text and he, being by virtue of his knowledge and gender exempted from the requirement of silence put forth by the chapter, “leres” the hearers of the text’s wisdom through the translation just as Bishop Fox does in his translation.³³ “Sain benet spekis,” as does the translator, but the nuns do not. The text does its utmost to constrain the feminine vernacular and contain the female voice which would speak this language with potentially disruptive consequences.

The verse translation in MS BL Cotton Vespasian A. 25 sets up the same hierarchical relationship in which a voice of male authority subordinates a female audience. It makes the requirement of silence apply more strictly to women than to men. On the ladder of meekness, the eleventh step of humility concerns speaking few words. The Latin ends the section with the verse, “Sapiens verbis innotescit paucis” (RB 1980 200). The English verse translation reads:

“Sapiens in paucis verbis expedit—

He þat is wise in word & dede,

His wark with fone wordes wil he spede.”

And naymly women nyght & day

Aw to vse fune wordes alway. (Verse 1081–84)

While it is an indication of virtue, a sign of wisdom, for a man to use few words, women in particular (naymly) have an obligation to (aw to) use few words.³⁴ This emphasis reflects widespread clerical attitudes about women and speech; “aside from carnality in general, the vice most frequently assigned to women was loquacity.”³⁵

Differing ecclesiastical attitudes toward silence for men and women religious appear in episcopal injunctions to male and female houses, amplifying the differences evident in the verse translation of the Benedictine Rule. In his 1432 injunctions to the male Benedictine house of Ramsey Abbey, Bishop Gray enjoins that “silence be kept henceforward in the cloister, church, dorter, and frater, under pain of one penny to be paid out of the commons of every monk who shall transgress herein, towards the work of the floors aforesaid.”³⁶ Bishop Flemyng, in his 1421–1422 injunctions for the female Benedictine house of Elstow Abbey, enjoins:

silence be kept by all without distinction at the due times and places, to wit in the house of prayer, the cloister, and the dorter, under pain of fasting on bread and water upon the Wednesday and Friday following; and, if any nun shall make default in this particular, let her be constrained to that penalty: the second time, let the same penalty be doubled; and, if she be proved to have made default in this matter a third time, let her be from that time enjoined to fast on bread and water every Wednesday and Friday for the next half year, and on Monday and Thursday, let her be content with bread and beer.³⁷

Notably, the penalties for women who break silence are from the outset more severe than those for men (for whom a simple fine suffices), and the punishments mandated for women escalate with repeated offenses. The bishop, however, does not envision that the monks might engage in repeated transgressions. His description of second and third offenses by nuns manifests the general ecclesiastical perception that faults of speech were especially common for women. The bodily punishments for women, contrasted with the financial punishments for men, underline concerns about female carnality, pointing to a desire to address the source of the problem: the unruly female flesh. Significantly, the system of monetary fines in the male community does not chastise the flesh but rather ultimately contributes to the physical improvement of the house (i.e., the work of the floors), leading to better living conditions for all.

Silence and regulation of speech are clearly important parts of monastic life for both men and women.³⁸ The verse and prose translations, however, construct a system of social relations in which, as in Hoccleve’s “Remonstrance,” male authorities (significantly, in both translations those with access to Latin) have the right to speak, while female hearers are commanded to keep silent on spiritual matters, listening rather than speaking. This particular framing of monastic silence, like that constructed in the injunctions, recalls the cultural desires evident in antitranslation rhetoric—that is, the desires to keep dangerously carnal women quiet and obedient.

The verse translation does not include chapter introductions and concluding prayers as the prose version does, but it attempts to minimize the potentially disruptive power of the vernacular and of women in other ways. For example, preceding the Rule’s prologue beginning “Asculta, o filia, disciplina[m] magistre tue,” it contains a prologue added by the translator. This additional prologue explicitly states that the text is a translation for women who do not know Latin:

Monkes & als all leryd men

In latyn may it lyghtly ken,

And wytt þarby how þay sall wyrk

To sarue god and haly kyrk.

Bott tyll women to mak it couth,

þat leris no latyn in þar ʒouth,

In ingles is it ordand here,

So þat þay may it lyghtly lere. (Verse 9–16)

This passage illustrates the translator’s connection of Latin with a masculine, learned elite and the vernacular with a feminine, unlearned, inferior group. The repetition of the word lyghtly sets up apparent sameness that is actually difference. The prologue indicates that both men and women can easily (lyghtly) learn the doctrine of the Benedictine Rule; however, monks and all educated men learn it easily in Latin while women only learn it easily in English. The passage implies that the English of this version will say the same thing as the Latin, an implication proved false by a comparison of the translation with the Latin. What monks and educated men learn from the Latin is not at all the same as what women religious learn from the vernacular verse translation. The Latin and English versions of the Benedictine Rule do not shape men’s and women’s work, their service to Holy Church, as either the same or equal in spite of the theoretical sameness the passage implies. In the verse translation of the Benedictine Rule, language difference in fact marks gender difference, and difference is, in the course of this version, once again an indication of the lesser perfection of the feminine.

Although the verse translation lacks any references to “sain benet” that position him as an authority figure, it does retain Latin chapter headings. It also contains many more full lines of Latin in the body of the text than the prose version does. The general practice of the prose version is to include one or two words of a Latin quotation followed by a fuller version of the passage in English.³⁹ The verse translation, on the other hand, contains fifty-five full verse lines in Latin, and only once does it employ the technique so common in the prose translation of abbreviating with “&c.”⁴⁰ The Latin lines in the verse break both meter and rhyme, standing out from the surrounding English. Thus, the Latin language of authority, the language of the original Rule as well as of the Scriptures, stands in a place of distinction from the feminine vernacular. This positioning works to assert Latin’s priority, power, and authority over the vernacular. The Latin chapter headings, together with the lines of Latin included within the body of the text, attempt, like the figure of St. Benedict in the prose version, to ground the translation in a hierarchical relation with the Latin text, prioritizing the authoritative original.

The Latin chapter headings and lines suggest a correspondence between original and translation while simultaneously revealing, as does the added translator’s prologue discussed above, differences. These differences further emphasize the lesser perfection and subordinate position of both the feminine vernacular and the female audience. The English translations given for the Latin lines included in the text sometimes enact this strategy by altering the meaning of the passage, and in the verse version, alterations from Latin to English tend to involve issues of authority.⁴¹ The vernacular text reduces the scope of women’s authority in religion as part of the strategy to contain potentially disruptive forces and prevent women religious from asserting newfound power.

The new opportunities for independent participation in spiritual life offered to women by the spread of vernacular literacy and the increased availability of vernacular texts proved particularly disconcerting for conservative ecclesiastical authorities, coinciding as they did with the late medieval “feminization” of sanctity.⁴² This process, like that of vernacular translation, presented new spiritual possibilities to women. The paradigm of the “virile woman,” in which women made themselves masculine in their pursuit of a spiritual life, gave way to one which Barbara Newman has aptly termed “womanChrist,” that is, “the possibility that women, qua women, could participate in some form of the imitatio Christi with specifically feminine inflections and thereby attain a particularly exalted status in the realm of the spirit.”⁴³ In the model of womanChrist, then, female particularity and difference came into their own as sources of spiritual power.

Chapter 2 of the verse version concerns the qualities and responsibilities of the superior, who in the masculine Benedictine tradition is said to hold the place of Christ in the monastery since he is addressed by a title of Christ. The Latin reads, “Christi enim agere vices in monasterio creditur, quando ipsius vocatur pronomine, dicente apostolo: Accepistis spiritum adoptionis filiorum, in quo clamamus: abba, pater” (RB 1980 172). John E. Crean, Jr., who has examined Middle High German translations of the Benedictine Rule for women, describes this passage as “pivotal in evaluating any feminine RB version. In question is the persona of the abbess as perceived by the editor.”⁴⁴ As Crean says, the way in which a translator deals with “Christi Pronomine” is “a kind of litmus test of how intimately the abbess may be understood to ‘hold the place of Christ in the monastery.’”⁴⁵

The Middle English verse does not describe the prioress holding the place of Christ at all. Rather, it says:

And to be honored euer hir aw;

Bot in her-self sche sal be law,

Pryde in hert for to haue none,

Bot loue god euer of al his lone

And wirchip him werld al-wais,

Als þe apostel plainly sais

Vn-to all folk, who so it be,

Pat takes swilk staite of dignite:

“Accepistis spiritum adepcionis.”

He sais: “ʒe take þe gaste of mede,

Pat lele folk vnto lif suld lede,

In þe whilk gaste we call & cry

Vnto our lord god al-myghty,

And ‘fader, abbot,’ þus we say.” (Verse 327–40)

While the verse version does include the first line of the scripture passage in Latin connecting the superior with Christ, the English changes the passage’s meaning. The father abbot in the English is identified with God the Father rather than with Christ as in the Latin, but the female superior herself, who is made subordinate, receives no such validation of her position.⁴⁶ The three Middle High German versions Crean examines, which range from the fourteenth century to 1505, all identify the abbess with Christ to a greater or lesser extent. The Middle English verse, however, instead instructs the abbess to be meek and to love and worship God. The translator thus constructs her “persona” to be consistent with current, sanctioned ideals of female religious life. The identification of the abbess with Christ would have made the radical possibilities inherent in the image of womanChrist all too real and would have been dangerously counterproductive to clerical strategies to save the market.

Bishop Richard Fox’s early sixteenth-century translation of the Benedictine Rule for the nuns in his Winchester diocese shows less anxiety about female authority in religion than the fifteenth-century verse translation does. Fox’s translation gives abbesses “the standing of diocesans, describing them as ‘oure right religious diocesans.’”⁴⁷ As Barry Collett points out, “In chapter 2 … he ascribed to an abbess all the authority of an abbot.”⁴⁸ Significantly, though, even in the humanist-influenced sociopolitical environment of the Tudor era, Fox still does not equate the abbess with Christ. He, too, modifies the Latin, and in doing so he “avoided any confusion between the full authority which pertains to an abbess, and the office of a priest. His clear belief that full authority, with its divine origin, could certainly be held by a woman did not imply that women could assume a priestly function.”⁴⁹

Other important differences between the Latin and English verse treatments of the superior arise in chapter 64, which discusses the election of a superior and outlines the qualities that make a person an ideal candidate. Strikingly, the need for learning, described as desirable for an abbot but perceived at this period as so problematic for women, is absent from the English description of the female superior. Textual knowledge and education for the abbot become simply knowledge of proper conduct for the prioress. In describing the desirable traits of an abbot, the Latin reads, “Oportet ergo sum esse doctum lege divina, ut sciat et sit unde proferat nova et vetera, castum, sobrium, misericordem, et semper superexaltet misericordiam iudicio, ut idem ipse consequatur” (RB 1980 282). The English verse reads:

Al if scho be highest in degre,

In hir-self lawest sal scho be.

Hir aw to be gude of forthoght

What thinges to wirk & what noght,

Chaste & sober, meke & myld,

Of bering bowsum os a child. (Verse 2263–68)

In addition to making a shift from a male superior who has textual learning to a female superior who knows how to behave properly, the different emphases in these passages exhibit a desire to neutralize the potential threat of female authority.⁵⁰ Saying that the female superior should be “lowest” echoes the stress put on meekness for the female superior in chapter 2 of the verse translation in accordance with contemporary ideals of female spirituality. While both the abbot and the prioress should be chaste and sober, the desire that the prioress be “meke & myld” is a departure from the Latin account of the abbot. The abbot is to be merciful (misericordem) rather than meek, and having mercy implies having power and authority.

Earlier in the Middle Ages, twelfth-century Cistercian abbots used maternal imagery in discussing the exercise of authority out of a need “to supplement their image of authority with that for which the maternal stood: emotion and nurture.”⁵¹ The description of the prioress’s meekness and mildness does not, however, participate in this tradition, for indeed, she is not described here as a mother. She is not to be maternal (not even to the extent of being emotional and nurturing) but rather to be “of bering bowsum os a child.” The possibilities of maternal authority available to the Benedictine abbess in the ritual for her benediction are undercut, and this diminished version of her authority would have been reiterated through required, regular readings aloud of the rule to the convent.

Unlike the translator of the fifteenth-century verse version, Bishop Fox does describe the abbess as a mother, saying, “thabbot [is] to be to his convent a fader and thabass a moder.”⁵² Fox’s translation also exhibits a very different attitude toward female learning than the verse translation, one which resembles the attitude evident in the Brigittine Myroure of Oure Ladye discussed below. The treatment of women’s learning in Fox’s translation reveals Fox’s own humanism and love of learning. Fox says that the abbess “must be well learned in the law of God, and her religion, and that she understand, and be that person that can show and teach the laws, rules and constitutions of the religion, with such histories of holy scripture and saints’ lives as be most expedient for the congregation.”⁵³ Collett notes that Fox’s translation of chapter 64 “bring[s] out the point that authority rests upon clear knowledge and understanding. When he referred to learning it is clear that he assumed a fair deal of scholarship in an abbess, and that there were in his diocese educated women able to fulfil these requirements.”⁵⁴

Fox’s commitment to female learning may not, however, be entirely thoroughgoing. In discussing the necessities with which the abbess is to supply the nuns, Fox mentions “bokes / and instrumentes for their crafte and occupacions,”⁵⁵ suggesting the nuns’ literacy and the importance of reading in their spiritual lives. He does not, however, mention the knife, pen, and tablets listed in the Latin version. These omissions may, of course, indicate, as Greatrex suggests, that “few of them could write.”⁵⁶ The omissions might also indicate, though, that Fox saw reading as a passive consumption of authoritative texts which would be entirely appropriate work for the nuns, while the production of these texts (or even the scribal reproduction of them, which would allow opportunities for making interpretations and revisions that might subsequently be accepted by future readers) was work proper to such masculine auctors as himself. Such an attitude would harmonize with that manifested by other Tudor era “religious authorities” who “believed in education” but whose belief in the value of learning was tempered by being situated “in a context in which the written vernacular was always liable to be seen as a dangerous instrument that needed to be corralled by any mechanism available.”⁵⁷

The fifteenth-century prose translation also contains, like the verse version, passages which change the sense of the Latin and aim to limit the dangers of the feminine. The prose translation resembles Fox’s translation, though, in that it does not exhibit great anxiety about female authority in religion, since it does not emphasize the superior’s meekness to the same extent as the verse translation does. Rather, the prose translator demonstrates unease with the threats posed by potentially unruly women themselves. In chapter IV the rule sets out the “Instruments of Good Works.” After the instruction to deny oneself and follow Christ, the Latin instructs the monk, “Corpus castigare” (RB 1980 182). The prose translation, however, advises the nun to “halde þe in chastite, and iuil langingis do away” (Prose 8). The shift from a command to chastise the body to a command to keep the body chaste harmonizes with the later medieval ecclesiastical emphasis on a particularly enclosed kind of chastity in women’s spirituality, an emphasis evident in the frequent reiteration of claustration requirements for nuns.⁵⁸ Rather than engaging in active physical asceticism which might lead to the excesses in corporeal spirituality so distrusted in late medieval holy women, women religious are to preserve their chastity and expel desires that might lead to its breach.⁵⁹ The change in the prose translation manifests the “static perception” of female monasticism which follows from ecclesiastical stress on the importance of chastity (and in particular, the importance of intact virginity) for women. Unlike a monk, who undertakes a “quest” to attain his spiritual ideal, a nun, in this male conception of female monasticism, ideally begins and ends in the same state.⁶⁰

The prose translation makes another subtle change to the sense of the Latin which points to negative clerical attitudes about the ways in which female spirituality and nature differ from male spirituality and nature. Chapter XX concerns the proper way to pray. Both the Latin and the English prose version say prayer should be brief and devout; both, however, make exceptions to this rule. The Latin makes the exception “nisi forte ex affectu inspirationis divinae gratiae protendatur” (RB 1980 216), but the English says, “Bot yef it sua bi-tide, þat any falle in mis-trouz; þan sal scho pray gerne to god” (Prose 19). According to the Middle English Dictionary, “mis-trouz” means doubt, disbelief, suspicion, or mistrust, quite a departure from the exception of “affectu inspirationis divinae gratiae” for which the Latin allows.⁶¹ The Latin envisions the positive possibility of the inspiration of divine grace leading to prolonged prayer for men; the English envisions the negative possibility of a fall into doubt necessitating especially fervent prayer for women. The feminine is once again stigmatized as inferior in its difference.

The need for especially fervent prayer by nuns in the face of “mis-trouz” may also suggest, given the date of the translation, the translator’s misgivings about the nuns’ orthodoxy and their susceptibility (heightened, perhaps, by feminine physical and spiritual weakness) to heresy.⁶² As I discuss in the first chapter, at least some Benedictine nuns had significant access to works of vernacular theology. While high social status, combined with the status the nuns commanded as brides of Christ, likely did much to enable these textual privileges, some clerics did not ignore the problematic possibility that heresy—so strongly associated with vernacular reading—might raise its head in nunneries. Indeed, William Alnwick, while bishop of Norwich, found it necessary to organize a visitation of the Benedictine priory of Redlingfield, where the prioress was accused of Lollardy.⁶³ As is so often the case, the vernacular simultaneously brings benefits and detriments to the nuns. Vernacular literacy and access to vernacular texts enable the nuns to expand their horizons beyond those delimited for them, but that same ability and access prompt clerical suspicion and, at least in some cases, increased supervision.

Brigittine Texts and the Power of the Feminine

The two English translations of the Benedictine Rule for women engage in diverse textual strategies to save the market for the preeminence of Latin in order to shore up clerical authority and the clergy’s privileged access to material and symbolic resources. As we shall see, though, the boundary-shifting power of translation is not so easily contained, and the negative associations of the vernacular with the feminine and the female body are not perfectly stable. The later medieval translations of the Benedictine Rule for women had a competing counterpart in vernacular Brigittine texts. These English versions of Brigittine texts, unlike the fifteenth-century Benedictine translations, do not present Latin as the preeminent language of authority in an attempt to save the market. Rather, they present women religious, as well as women in the world (with whom Brigittine texts were very popular), with opportunities to mobilize the feminine vernacular and the female body in the realm of religion.⁶⁴ They thus enable women to capitalize on the power of the very differences deemed inferior in Benedictine texts.

Although the Benedictine tradition created for men has a conflicted history in shaping monastic life for women, Brigittine monasticism is founded “per mulieres primum et principaliter,”⁶⁵ or, as The Rewyll of Seynt Sauioure recounts Christ’s declaration of the rule to St. Birgitta, “This religion þerfore I wyll sette: ordeyne fyrst and principally by women to the worshippe of my most dere beloued modir. whose ordir and statutys I shall declare most fully with myn owne mowthe.”⁶⁶ In the Brigittine Rule there is no question of requiring women to “translate” themselves in order to participate in religious life. In fact, in spite of some borrowing from Benedictine and Cistercian traditions, the Brigittine Rule “takes great pains to dissociate itself from existing monastic practice.”⁶⁷

Just as the status of women is firmly established as positive and primary in the foundation of the Brigittine Rule, so is the status of the vernacular. The rule was revealed by Christ to St. Birgitta in her own mother tongue of Swedish, as was the text of the Brigittine lessons. The prologue of The Myroure of Oure Ladye, the English version of the Brigittine services, contains an account taken from the Reuelaciones extravagantes describing the way in which the Brigittine service and lessons came into existence. While St. Birgitta was in Rome, she pondered what lessons the nuns should read. She prayed, and Christ told her that he would send an angel who “shale reuele & endyte vnto the the legende”⁶⁸ (hence the name Sermo angelicus given to the Brigittine lessons). Christ then commanded her, “write thou yt as he saith vnto the” (Myroure 18). Each day after saying her hours and prayers, she collected writing materials. On the days when the angel appeared to her he “endyted the sayde legende dystynctely and in order. in the moderly tongue of saynte Brygytte, and she full deuoutly wrote yt eche day of the Aungels mouthe” (Myroure 19).

After the angel has revealed all the lessons to her, he tells her that he has “shapen a cote to the quiene of heuen the mother of God” and directs Birgitta “sowe ye yt togyther as ye may” (Myroure 19). Here the vernacular, rather than being limited and inferior, is an avenue of direct communication with the divine. The image of a vernacular text as a garment for Mary, the Queen of Heaven and Mother of God, positively associates the vernacular with the feminine and the maternal. The mother tongue is not seen as lewd, debased feminine “cackling” but rather as glorious and of high value. The angelic command that Birgitta sew together the coat also conflates women’s vernacular textual work with stereotypically female textile work.⁶⁹ The association demonstrates the ability of women and the vernacular to perform the most spiritually exalted work, and it serves as an empowering counterpart to Hoccleve’s dismissive command for women to leave off speaking of spiritual matters and “sitteth down and spynne.”⁷⁰

The hours and hymns of the Brigittine offices, unlike the lessons, were revealed not to St. Birgitta herself but rather to St. Birgitta’s confessor “master Peter,” who “taught her grammer & songe, & gouerned her & her housholde” (Myroure 16). As a cleric and her confessor, Peter has authority over Birgitta; through his mastery of Latin, he has greater cultural and linguistic capital. In the account of the revelations he receives, however, the dynamics of power change. The revelations to Peter are situated in relation to female authority, and it is Birgitta who receives and passes on to Peter Mary’s divine authorization of the text he will bring forth. Mary stands in relation to his text as the figure of St. Benedict stands in relation to the prose translation of the Benedictine Rule. Indeed, it is Mary’s effort on Peter’s behalf that makes him worthy to receive the text. Mary tells Birgitta, “I haue furtheryd him so moche in to the charite of the same holy trinite, that he ys one of the pryestes that god loueth most in the worlde” (Myroure 16).

Even more dramatically, the assertion of clerical, paternal authority attempted by Arundel’s Constitutions is reversed in the Myroure.⁷¹ The text indicates that the revealed material needed to be translated into Latin for review and dissemination among “moo men of dyuerse contryes and language” (Myroure 20). The translation from the mother tongue to Latin is then divinely authorized through a woman when the angel tells Birgitta to take the legend to Peter “for to drawe yt in to latyn” (Myroure 20). Although translating the vernacular into Latin might initially threaten to recontain the mother tongue and feminine power, Latin actually serves to uphold the priority and authority of the vernacular. Rather than a vernacular translation of a Latin text receiving paternal legitimation through clerical authority, here a Latin translation of a vernacular text receives maternal authorization from Mary and Birgitta. Moreover, Mary reinforces the value of simple language and undercuts the universal values of Latin and clerical authority when, in talking about the texts revealed to Peter, she says, “For though in my songe there be no masterly makynge ne no Rhethoryke Latynne, yet thoo wordes endyted by the mouthe of this my loued frende, plese me more, then sotel wordes of eny worldely maysters” (Myroure 17).

In Brigittine texts, feminine authorization of the mother tongue and the vernacular’s position of worthiness for the highest spiritual tasks correspond with the construction of female authority (modeled on Mary’s maternal authority) as equal to, or in some cases superior to, male clerical authority. The Brigittine Rule places the abbess as the head of the entire community of men and women; whereas in Benedictine monasticism the abbot represents Christ, here the abbess represents Mary, who, after Christ ascended into heaven, was head of the apostles and disciples.⁷² The alignment of the abbess and Mary gains further significance from the frequent portrayals of Mary as co-redemptrix in the Brigittine texts and from the simultaneous applications in Brigittine divine service of Scripture passages to Mary and Christ. For example, at the Sunday service of Tierce the explanation of the chapter “Et sic in Syon …” reads, “These wordes ar redde bothe of oure lorde Iesu cryste, and also of oure lady. for by her; we haue hym” (Myroure 147).⁷³ The Brigittine focus on Mary as co-redemptrix combats women’s spiritual inferiority, their “translatedness.”

Whereas Benedictine monasticism in many respects sets up a system in which the resources most readily available to women are devalued and in which women are situated as lesser because of their differences from a masculine ideal, the Brigittine tradition allows women access to the full potential inherent in the model of womanChrist. In fact, the traits that mark women as lacking, and thus inferior and subordinate, in Benedictine monasticism empower women in the Brigittine tradition. While meekness is substituted for more “masculine” traits in the description of desirable qualities for a female superior in the verse translation of the Benedictine Rule, in the Brigittine Rule meekness and humility are the foundation for female authority. “The preeminence of the Abbess is, like that of the Virgin whose deputy she is, one of humility; hence her prelacy is defined as ‘onus humilitatis’ (Extrav. 21.4).”⁷⁴ Brigittine texts wield the very terms of female spirituality that are used to subordinate women to clerical authority in the Benedictine translations to change systems of social relations in ways favorable to the status of women religious.

In spite of difficulties stemming from the generally subordinate role envisioned for men in the Brigittine order, the potentially disturbing power of the abbess,⁷⁵ and the early fifteenth-century nervousness about women assuming powerful roles in religious life, The Rewyll of Seynt Sauioure (unlike the fifteenth-century translations of the Benedictine Rule) does not attempt to reduce the scope of female authority. The Middle English text directly follows the Latin, which reads, concerning the abbess’s authority, “Que ob reuerenciam beatissime Virginis Mariae, cui hic ordo dedicatus est, caput et domina esse debet, quia ipsa Virgo, cuius abbatissa gerit vicem in terris, ascendente Christo in celos caput et regina extitis apostolorum et discipulorum Christi.”⁷⁶ The Middle English reads, “The abbes … for the reuerence of the most blessid virgyn marie to whomme this ordre ys halwyd. owith to be hedde and ladye. ffor þat virgyn whose stede the abbes beryth in eerth. cryst ascendynge in to heuyn. was hedde and qwene of the apostelis and disciples of cryst” (Rewyll fol. 56r-56v).

This close correspondence between the description of the abbess in the Latin and the Middle English is typical of the translation practices evident in the Brigittine Rule as Englished for Syon.⁷⁷ An important aspect of the Brigittine preservation of female authority emerges in the contrast between the verse translation of the Benedictine Rule, in which textual knowledge for the abbot is changed into knowledge of proper conduct for the prioress, and the Middle English version of the Brigittine Rule, in which, as in Bishop Fox’s translation of the Benedictine Rule, learning is construed as fundamental to spiritual life for all nuns and especially for the abbess. At first the Brigittine Rule allows the nuns to have only books necessary for performing divine service, but it “immediately extends this permission to cover all books needed for study.”⁷⁸ Ellis notes, “Religious, indeed, are to have these books not as they need, but rather as they want, them…. To make desire rather than need the term of one’s reading, therefore, is to set the very highest store by the getting of wisdom: to make true learning a quasi-sacramental act.”⁷⁹ Mary is not only the foundation of the abbess’s authority but also the model of wisdom for the order.⁸⁰ In the Brigittine order, the female wisdom embodied by Mary encompasses female learning and specifically textual knowledge.

The general absence of textual strategies to replace boundaries in the Middle English translation of the Brigittine Rule may partly be a result of the status of the Brigittine Rule itself. It was, necessarily under the terms of Lateran IV, actually accepted as constitutions to the Rule of St. Augustine rather than as an independent monastic rule. Anxieties about the status of the vernacular, and related anxieties about the status of female learning and women’s place in religious life, are not, however, entirely mitigated by the officially subordinate status of the Brigittine Rule. The translation practices evident in The Myroure of Oure Ladye do at times reveal the translator’s nervousness about the status of the feminine and the vernacular, anxieties consistent with a desire to save the market. This desire is at odds with, and perhaps even prompted by, the content of the Brigittine texts being translated.

Various candidates for authorship of the Myroure have been proposed. John Henry Blunt, who edited the Myroure, suggests Thomas Gascoigne (1403–58) of Merton College, Oxford, later vice-chancellor of Oxford, who was a lifelong devotee and scholar of St. Birgitta. A. Jeffries Collins finds Gascoigne an unlikely candidate since Gascoigne was not a professed member of the Brigittine Order and probably could not have acquired the “masterly knowledge of the Bridgettine rite and ceremonial displayed throughout the book” at Oxford.⁸¹ Collins suggests two possibilities—Thomas Fishbourne (d. 1428), the first confessor general at Syon, and Symon Wynter, Fishbourne’s contemporary in the order (d. 1448)—finding Fishbourne the more likely possibility.⁸² In any case, the Myroure was created by a cleric in the first half, and likely some time in the second quarter, of the fifteenth century, squarely in the period in which vernacular translation was such a vexed issue.

The Myroure, like the verse translation and Fox’s version of the Benedictine Rule, is specifically designated for women religious without knowledge of Latin in order that they “shulde haue sume maner of vnderstondynge of [their] seruyce” (Myroure 49). It is clear that the translator of the Myroure is concerned about the cultural status of the vernacular. Part II of the prologue ends with assurance that the translation of Scripture passages has been licensed by the bishop in accordance with Arundel’s Constitutions. The translator writes, “And for as moche as yt is forboden vnder payne of cursynge, that no man shulde haue be drawe eny texte of holy scrypture in to englysshe wythout lycense of the bysshop dyocesan. And in dyuerse places of youre seruyce ar suche textes of holy scrypture; therfore I asked & haue lysence of oure bysshop to drawe suche thinges in to englysshe to your gostly comforte and profyt” (Myroure 71). The translator, who has already recounted the divine authorization of the vernacular text’s translation into Latin through Mary and Birgitta, returns to episcopal authorization of translation of Latin into English. This movement works to reassert masculine control of the mother tongue and to recuperate ecclesiastical authority.

Leading up to the statement of license for translation is a complex negotiation of the relationship between Latin and English in the text of the Myroure, the general thrust of which is to reassert the primacy of Latin. The translator explains the physical layout of the translation, saying that the first word of each hymn, response, verse, etc. “is writen in latyn with Romeyne letter that ye may know therby where yt begynneth” (Myroure 70). These Latin lines do more than merely help the nuns keep their place. The Latin openings perform a function similar to that performed by the figure of St. Benedict or the Latin lines in the Benedictine translations; they remind the women of the preeminence of Latin over the vernacular, reinforcing simultaneously the inferiority inherent in the nuns’ inability to access the language of divine knowledge and their necessary dependence on clerical authorities. Following the Latin opening lines is the “selfe englyshe” of the Latin “imprynted wyth a smaller letter” (Myroure 70). Even in the text’s physical appearance, Latin is superior to and prior to the vernacular. That this reassertion of Latin’s authoritative superiorty is emphasized in the layout of the printed edition, produced in 1530 by Richard Fawkes, indicates, as do elements of Fox’s translation of the Benedictine Rule, the strength of clerical market-saving desires over 120 years after Arundel’s Constitutions were promulgated.

That there is more at stake than convenience in the layout of the text emerges even more clearly when the translator discusses how the Myroure should be read aloud. He says that, depending on the nature of the passage, either the opening words of the Latin or the Latin at the beginning of each clause should be read so “that ye shulde redely knowe. when ye haue the latyn before you. what englysshe longeth to eche clause by yt selfe” (Myroure 71). The translator continues to specify the correct use of the translation in divine services, offering the following caveat: “This lokeynge on the englyshe whyle the latyn ys redde. ys to be vnderstonde of them that haue sayde theyre mattyns or redde theyr legende before. For else I wolde not counsell them to leue the herynge of the latyn. for the entendaunce of the englysshe” (Myroure 71). Hearing the Latin, even if one does not understand it, is more important in divine service than reading the English.

The extended efforts to ensure that the audience comprehend the hierarchical relationship between the vernacular and the Latin are “strategic” in Michel de Certeau’s sense of the term—that is, by ensuring the place of Latin, the cleric seeks to distinguish his own place, the place of his power and will.⁸³ Placing controls on the vernacular works by extension to place controls on the female readers of the vernacular with whom it is so strongly associated and who might, like the women in apocalyptic antitranslation materials, gain independence and power from the access to knowledge enabled by the vernacular text.

It is significant that the efforts to reiterate the hierarchical relationship of Latin and vernacular come in a section prescribing reading methods which themselves seek to contain the potentially threatening female learning that is, according to the Rule, so fundamental to Brigittine spiritual life. The section concerning “how ye shall be gouerned in redyng of this Boke and of all other bokes” (Myroure 65) serves a disciplinary function, striving to limit possibilities for interpretation, for participation in the sorts of textual exchanges demonized by the antitranslation faction. In discussing Fox’s translation of the Benedictine Rule, Wogan-Browne et al. observe that it envisions reading taking place in an all-female group, without clerical supervision or participation.⁸⁴ Such a context for nuns’ reading may help explain Fox’s desire, as well as that of the translator of the Myroure, to insert a guiding clerical “presence” into the text—for Fox, the speaking figure of St. Benedict whose voice merges with his, for the Brigittine translator, a detailed methodology of correct reading.

The translator first specifies what types of books are to be read—“no worldely matters. ne worldely bokes. namely suche as ar wythout reason of gostly edyfycacyon” (Myroure 66). He sets out the purposes of particular kinds of books, and he describes the proper “disposition” for reading—“with meke reuerence and deuocyon” (Myroure 66). Finally, he puts forth a program for ensuring proper comprehension, admonishing, “ye oughte not to be hasty to rede moche at ones. but ye oughte to abyde thervpon. & som tyme rede a thynge ageyne twyes. or thryes. or oftener tyl ye understonde yt clerely” (Myroure 67).

The directive to read slowly in order to ensure clear understanding resembles directives to monks to read “ruminatively,” and so is not necessarily or entirely a restriction on women’s reading.⁸⁵ The translator, however, further constrains the reading process by his explanation of what texts are and his specification of the correct motivation for reading them. The translator conceives of books for the nuns in terms of a regulatory and corrective specularity appropriate to his title, of which he says, “And for as muche as ye may se in this boke as in a myrroure, the praysynges and worthines of oure moste excellente lady therfore I name it. Oure ladyes myroure. Not that oure lady shulde se herselfe therin, but that ye shulde se her therin as in a myroure, and so be styred the more deuoutly to prayse her, & to knowe where ye fayle in her praysinges, and to amende” (Myroure 4). Books provide mirrors for examining one’s conduct; the nuns are exhorted, in reading the Myroure and other texts, to “beholde in yourselfe sadly whether ye lyue & do as ye rede or no” (Myroure 68). If the reader does not see her life “rewled in verteu” but feels that she lacks “suche verteows gouernaunce as [she] rede[s] of,” she is directed, “kepe in mynde that lesson that so sheweth you to youre selfe & ofte to rede yt ageyne. & to loke theron. & on your selfe. with full purpose & wyll to amende you & to dresse youre lyfe therafter” (Myroure 68).

In conjunction with this presentation of texts as regulatory mirrors, the translator works to transform women’s reading from something potentially disruptive into a means of advancing a clerically approved mode of religious life for women. Women religious are not to read in order to acquire knowledge which they can exchange for authority or resources, either material or symbolic. Rather, they are to read and use the knowledge gained to shape their own conduct within approved parameters. They are advised, “dresse so your entente, that your redyng & study. be not only for to be connynge. or for to can speke yt fourthe to other; but pryncypally to enforme your selfe. & to set yt a warke in youre owne lyuynge” (Myroure 67). This directive calls to mind the transformation of the desirable qualities of an abbot (to be learned and have textual knowledge) into those of the prioress (to be meek and have knowledge of proper conduct) in the verse translation of the Benedictine Rule. The proposed reading method denies the powers of female and vernacular particularity so prominent in Brigittine texts; it is a prophylactic against the possible escapes of the feminine, the maternal, and the mother tongue from the hierarchical relations so crucial to the designs of those who wish to save the market.

Prescribing a method of reading is not, though, the end of the story, and the prophylactic is not necessarily effective. Reading is not just a passive act, a behavior that can be contained by a method of correct training. As Certeau argues, reading is an act of productive consumption; a reader takes what she is given and “makes something of it.” Reading is one of the prime opportunities for engaging in tactics, manipulations which are the “arts of the weak” enacted in the “space of the other.”⁸⁶ Reading is thus, in a sense, an economic activity. What the reader produces from the text “belongs” to her, if only momentarily, and she can use that production of her own volition and to her own advantage.

The possibilities for “making something of” the text of the Myroure in spite of the attempts to contain interpretation are particularly rich since the text itself so resists the constraints of the feminine and the vernacular imposed upon it in the prologue. In its presentation of the Incarnation and redemption, the text of the Myroure sets up relationships of bodies and words, production and reproduction, language and gender, which relentlessly assert the value of female difference. The Myroure is thus potentially quite empowering for women religious who might wish to “play the market” by accessing the value of the female body and the mother tongue in the religious sphere. For example, the translator of the Myroure includes part of the Reuelaciones extravagantes capitulo iii to explain why the sisters say their hours after the brothers. The explanation begins with an allegory in which a poor man delivers a city besieged by a mighty man. The city is Mankind, which is saved when Mary submits her will to be the instrument of the Incarnation. On the one hand, Mary’s maternity is described as submission and obedience. On the other hand, however, the explanation continues with Christ saying, “my mother & I haue saued man, as yt had be with one hart” (Myroure 25). Thus, Mary’s maternity is not simply an instrument of, but a primary agent of, salvation.

The translator further elucidates why the brothers perform their services first by aligning Mary’s poverty of spirit in submitting to the Incarnation with the poverty of spirit the sisters are to exhibit by giving precedence to the brothers. The discussion that follows, however, complicates this convenient equation. Christ says that in other churches, the custom is “to say fyrste the seruyce and houres of our lady, as lesse worthy. & afterwarde the houres of the day as more worthy” (Myroure 26). For the Brigittines, though, “our lorde wyl do that reuerence to his holy mother, that in thys order the houres of her shall be sayd after the houres of the day to her most worshyp” (Myroure 26). Mary as the genetrix of salvation receives the position of greatest prominence. Rather than subordinating themselves by allowing the brothers to say their hours first, the sisters are in fact identifying with Mary’s agency in salvation and laying claim to her position of superlative worthiness. The glorification of Mary’s maternal body which makes the Word flesh is mirrored by the sisters who, in saying their “most worthy” hours, themselves embody the divine word.

In an order dedicated to the Virgin Mary it is not unusual that Mary’s maternity should receive significant emphasis. The importance of Mary’s maternity goes beyond the miracle of the virgin birth. Luce Irigaray notes that in order to found the patriarchal lineages which undergird masculine authority, the “genealogy of women” is erased.⁸⁷ The genealogy of women, the roles of the mother and the mother tongue, are suppressed in the clerical attempt to found a universal, Latin genealogy of sacred knowledge and to preserve their concomitant privileges. Brigittine texts restore the genealogy of women, foregrounding the significance of the maternal in salvation and the mother tongue in sacred knowledge.⁸⁸

The potentially empowering idea that salvation originates in a genealogy of women is especially clear in the service for Tuesday Matins. In this service in which language and maternity intermingle, Eve’s word leads to sin and provokes God to the wrath of damnation when she “of pryde had sayd in her harte, as if she wolde be made euen to god” (Myroure 193). However, Mary’s “worde shulde draw the charyte of god to grete comforte. to the. and to all dampned by the worde of Eue” (Myroure 193). Eve’s word cast Adam, Eve, and all Mankind into great sorrow but “thy blessed worde o mother of wysdome. broughte the to grete ioye. and opened the gates of heuen to all that wylle enter” (Myroure 193). This “worde” is the Word that Mary, “mother of wysdome,” brings into the world. This service clearly outlines the “genealogy of women” who, through their words and maternity, save mankind. “The frayle mother, ys Eue. the doughter ys oure lady that is mother of her father, for she is the mother of god that ys father to all that he made” (Myroure 194). Salvation history does not begin with Adam’s felix culpa and proceed, through God the Father, to Christ. Rather it begins with the felix culpa of Eve’s speech and proceeds through Mary, the mother of the Father. Women’s language and women’s bodies are not sources of disruption which, being inferior in their difference, must be contained. Rather, they are sources of redemptive power which are celebrated for their particular role in salvation.

In the Myroure, as in the nineteenth-century novels by women which Margaret Homans examines in her study of language and female experience, significantly entitled Bearing the Word, maternity is one of the ways in which women “reclaim their own experiences as paradigms for writing.”⁸⁹ Two of the recurrent “literary situations or practices” that Homans examines in the novels are fused in the Myroure: “the figure of the Virgin Mary, who gives birth to and is frequently imaged carrying (thus two senses of ‘bear’) a child who is the Word, the embodiment of the Logos” and “the theme of women characters who perform translations from one language into another or from one medium to another.”⁹⁰ The Brigittine services repeatedly focus on Christ’s birth as the process of the Word being made flesh. The first lesson at Sunday Matins, for instance, declares, “Ryght so also had yt bene vnpossyble that thys worde that ys the sonne of god. shulde haue bene touched or sene, for the saluacyon of mankynde. but yf yt had bene vned to mannes body” (Myroure 104).⁹¹ It is of course Mary’s body that “mynystered vnto hym the mater of his holy body” (Myroure 141). Maternity is translation at once corporeal and textual; the Myroure gives female readers access to an incarnational textuality in which the “mother tongue” is salvific rather than lacking and unruly. Mary shifts cosmic boundaries by bearing the divine Logos across into the human realm; her female body translates the invisible, incomprehensible Word of God into the comprehensible and redemptory “mother tongue,” the human body Christ receives from his mother. In the Myroure, Christ—the ultimate source of authority invoked by the very clerics opposed to vernacular translation of the Scripture—is a text in the mother tongue produced by a woman.