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Preface

In 1308, King Edward II founded a priory of Dominican friars at King’s Langley to fulfill a vow.¹ The house was dependent on the Exchequer, and, after a time, Edward II became dissatisfied with this state of affairs. Because the Dominican friars could not own property, he sought to find a means of endowing the house for the support of one hundred religious.² To this end, Edward II determined that the Dominican friars of Guildford should surrender their house to a foundation of Dominican nuns to be created at Dartford, who would in turn hold endowments for and be subject to the Dominican friars of King’s Langley.³ Edward II sent several papal petitions regarding his desires, but he did not receive papal approval to proceed until November 1321. Before he could complete his intentions, though, he was dethroned. Edward III finally completed the plans set in motion by his father. In November 1349, he applied to the pope for confirmation of the house of nuns at Dartford,⁴ and, the confirmation granted, the house at Dartford became “the complement of Langley priory.”⁵

The Dominican sisters “were subject in spirituals to the Friars Preacher of King’s Langley,” and the prior of King’s Langley appointed the friars who were to reside at Dartford with the nuns.⁶ In December 1356, Edward III granted the prioress and sisters license to acquire property to the value of £300 to sustain their community and that of the friars of King’s Langley.⁷ In the ensuing years, Dartford received numerous endowments, always destined to support not only the sisters but also the friars at King’s Langley.

In spite of its obligation to support King’s Langley, Dartford became, in the course of its history, extraordinarily wealthy. At the dissolution, Dartford had a gross annual income of £488 per annum, which made it the seventh richest nunnery in England.⁸ In the early sixteenth century, the prioress, Elizabeth Cressener, drew up the Rentale giving detailed records of the house’s holdings of land and property together with the rents and services owed to the house.⁹ This document testifies not only to the wealth of the house but also to the nuns’ skill in business practices.

That the Dartford nuns were capable managers is not surprising, since the house was a center of female education, including Latin learning. Extracts from the records of the Masters-General of the Dominican Order include permission given in 1481 for “Sister Jane Fitzh’er” to have “a preceptor in grammar and the Latin tongue.”¹⁰ The house possessed numerous books,¹¹ and not only novices and nuns but also daughters (and even some sons) of the local nobility and gentry were educated at Dartford.¹²

I began with this brief account of Dartford’s foundation and history because it provides a snapshot of the key issues I address in this book. First and foremost, the case of Dartford highlights the involvements of women religious in multiple, mutually informing systems of production and exchange. From the community’s beginning, the Dartford nuns were enmeshed in material, symbolic, textual, political, and spiritual economies in ways which at times harmonized with and at times conflicted with each other. Exploring the relationships among these systems and considering their importance for the construction of religious identities are at the foundation of my methodology in this book. I therefore consider a wide range of sources, from monastic rules to nunneries’ financial accounts, from devotional treatises to works traditionally designated as literary.

Furthermore, the case of Dartford demonstrates the permeability of the convent wall. The Dartford nuns clearly had important connections with King’s Langley as well as frequent interaction with the larger community in their business and educational affairs. I thus seek to breach the cloister wall, which was not an impenetrable boundary in later medieval society but which is so often treated as such in modern scholarship, in my study of female monasticism. My analysis consequently considers the impact of “worldly” forces (for instance, economic trends and political conflicts) on “religious” life in nunneries as well as the “worldly” value of “religious” practices (for instance, politically motivated acts of monastic foundation). In doing so, I hope to breach other boundaries which have been erected in contemporary scholarship on the Middle Ages, particularly those demarcating the sacred and the secular, the material and the symbolic, the literary and the historical.¹³

Dartford’s material success and the continued respect the community enjoyed from benefactors illustrate that later-medieval English nunneries for women were not, as has so often been argued, necessarily the victims of financial and spiritual decline. Nor was Dartford a community in which the women religious were uneducated and woefully incompetent at managing their affairs. These negative perceptions of later-medieval female monasticism have long been prevalent, and they have frequently led scholars either to discount the social importance of female monasticism or to treat nuns in appendix to a work on “monasticism,” implicitly defined as male monasticism.

Eileen Power was a pioneer in women’s history, and her Medieval English Nunneries is still valuable in many regards. Her book did much, however, to solidify the perception of later medieval nunneries as poverty stricken, ill managed, riddled with corruption, and filled with illiterate women. The work of such scholars as Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Roberta Gilchrist, Marilyn Oliva, and David Bell has done much to build on and refine Power’s analysis, but far too many works on medieval religion still give short shrift to female monasticism.¹⁴ Furthermore, the perception that female monasticism was in decline in the later Middle Ages has encouraged feminist scholars working on religion in England to pay more attention to nunneries during the Anglo-Saxon era, since monasticism is perceived to have offered women more opportunities for authority and spiritual independence during that period.

One of my aims in this book is therefore to demonstrate the complex vibrancy of material and spiritual life in later medieval nunneries. Concomitantly, I seek to emphasize the centrality of female monasticism to the flowering of later medieval female spirituality, and, indeed, its importance to later medieval culture at large. The book is thus arranged in two sections—a boundary, yes, but one across which many incursions occur in both directions. Part I explores theories and practices of monastic life; Part II examines the ways in which these theories and practices circulate in the secular world.

A return to the example of Dartford will help to make clear the logic of this organization as well as to illustrate the complex connections between the two parts. The fact that this community was founded by kings for explicitly financial reasons calls attention to the important interactions of the social, the material, and the spiritual in the most fundamental constructions of religious identity. I address such interactions in Chapter 1 on profession and visitation and in Chapter 2 on translations of monastic rules for women. These texts and ceremonies provide nuns with basic “ideological scripts” which have far-reaching implications for religious identities.¹⁵

Because Dartford was the only house of Dominican nuns in England, it was distinctive in more than just the circumstances of its foundation. Such distinctive aspects of religious identity in different orders are also central considerations in Chapters 1 and 2. In these chapters I direct my attention to the ways in which elements of monastic life that seem to be shared by monks and nuns of the same order, as well as by nuns of different orders, are realized in practice in profoundly different ways.

I take these differences quite seriously; thus, I consider religious traditions both individually and comparatively. In this respect, I depart from two common trends in scholarship on later medieval religion: treating female monasticism as a unified institution or studying one order in isolation. In adopting a combined approach, I hope to preserve the benefits of both macrocosmic and microcosmic analyses while avoiding some of their individual pitfalls. In order to present a nuanced portrait of female monasticism which preserves variations in monastic cultures, I focus at length on the Benedictine, Brigittine, and Franciscan traditions.

I have chosen to allow these particular religious traditions to illuminate each other for a variety of reasons. All three orders maintained a significant presence in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, and medieval versions of the Benedictine, Franciscan, and Brigittine rules for women are available.¹⁶ Fairly extensive records (including financial accounts, legal and administrative documents, and letters) exist for houses of all three orders. These documents, which I investigate in Chapter 3, provide insight into nuns’ everyday practices, and they give us glimpses of the ways in which nuns saw the world and their place in it. Through their involvement in the quotidian affairs of running a religious house, like the enterpreneuring activities of the Dartford nuns, women religious make visible identities which complicate and expand those shaped in foundational texts and ceremonies.

Furthermore, I have chosen to consider the Benedictine, Brigittine, and Franciscan orders because monastic texts and paradigms drawn from them circulated widely beyond the cloister, playing, as I argue in Chapter 4, important roles in identity formation for those living in the world. Interpretive schemes based on female monasticism were mobilized by clerical writers in efforts to regulate secular women’s conduct and so neutralize anxieties that masculine religious and economic dominance might be waning. Images and practices drawn from female monastic traditions were also, however, embraced by secular women—and even by men—as they crafted empowered spiritual and material lives. That some of the same elements of female monasticism might be mobilized for such different, even contradictory, purposes highlights the complexities of identity formation and recalls the contradictions present in the foundations of monastic identities.

Since Dartford was created to benefit the friars and the souls of those royal founders and favorites for whom the friars were to pray, the nuns functioned as political and symbolic as well as financial resources. Similarly, as I explore in Chapters 5 and 6, female saints, nuns, and holy women served as resources of symbolic capital for those seeking to gain political legitimacy and literary success. In Chapter 5, I examine Lancastrian and Yorkist symbolic strategies to consolidate royal authority through associations with St. Birgitta, St. Anne, the Virgin Mary, and Syon Abbey. In Chapter 6, I read the Lancastrian John Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady and the Yorkist Osbern Bokenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen as texts making partisan cases for political authority as well as personal cases for literary auctoritas.

One final aspect of Dartford’s history is instructive. The Dartford nuns did not prove to be a passive and easily controlled commodity for the friars of King’s Langley, and those who mobilized female saints, nuns, and holy women also found that these women were liabilities as well as assets. In 1415, the Dartford nuns attempted to escape their subjection to King’s Langley. As the result of a dispute (apparently concerning the election of the prioress), Dartford made a bid for independence, threatening the economic well-being and the spiritual authority of the friars. The friars took action, and the Provincial of the Dominican Order visited Dartford in 1415 to attempt to reimpose the nuns’ obedience to the friars.¹⁷ The matter came before the pope, and on July 16, 1418, Martin V decided entirely in favor of the Provincial and King’s Langley “to whose obedience the sisters were enforced by ecclesiastical censures.”¹⁸

In Chapters 6 and 7, I address the problematic aspects of using holy women in literary and political representational schemes. I focus first on the negotiations in which Lydgate and Bokenham must engage as they try to balance their masculinist literary, political, and clerical authority with the spiritual and social authority of the women upon whom their success depends. In Chapter 7, I then return to figures encountered in previous chapters—Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick; John, duke of Bedford; and Bishop William Alnwick—examining their involvements with Margery Kempe, fifteenth-century nuns, and Joan of Arc in the contexts of the Hundred Years’ War, war between England and Scotland, and civil strife within England. This exploration of the relationships between political figures and holy women both heterodox and orthodox, both cloistered and uncloistered, illuminates the profound cultural anxieties that existed in fifteenth-century England about the power and value of female spirituality.