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Vows and Visitations

Textual Transactions and the

Shaping of Monastic Identity

Brides of Christ

Documents of monastic profession and visitation provide nuns with fundamental “ideological scripts,” the impacts of which exceed the textual realm, shaping nuns’ participation in material, spiritual, and symbolic systems of exchange.¹ As the idea of a script suggests, these documents, and the ceremonies in which they are generated and circulated, bear witness to the interplay of the desires of the “script writers” (those in the ecclesiastical hierarchy charged with the regulation of female monastic communities) and of the “actors” (the nuns themselves who perform religious identities). For later medieval nuns, the role of bride of Christ is central to these ideological scripts, and while this role is common to a range of women religious, what it actually means for a nun to be a bride of Christ is differently realized in different religious orders.

A nun’s spousal role is, as Jacques Derrida observes of Plato’s pharmakon, “ambivalent … because it constitutes the medium in which opposites are opposed, the movement and the play that links them among themselves or makes one side cross over into the other.”² The identity of bride of Christ is at once constraining and empowering; that which necessitates supervision by the clergy also provides opportunities for spiritual and temporal autonomy. Furthermore, degrees of constraint and empowerment vary as nuptial relations are constructed in different orders’ foundational discourses and as the subject positions shaped for nuns by these texts are taken up in diverse socioeconomic contexts. By examining profession and visitation in the Benedictine, Brigittine, and Franciscan traditions, I hope to demonstrate not only the various ways in which ideological scripts are written but also the innovative ways in which they can be modified, supplemented, and rewritten as they are put into practice.³

The Material and Symbolic Consequences of Profession

Because candidates formally take sacred vows and become members of preexisting, rule-governed communities in profession services, the future implied by the entry discourse of a particular order conditions a postulant’s expectations. For women becoming Benedictine nuns, the role of bride of Christ is the primary one scripted in profession. For example, the fifteenth-century “furme how A Nouice sall be made” describes the instructions the head of the house gives the candidate before her profession. In explaining the obligations of life under the rule, the superior says to the candidate, “þe behouis to liue chaiste, and take god to þi spouse, and forsake all þi lust, & þi liking of þi flesche.”⁴ “The Method of makeing a Nunn,” also from the fifteenth century, includes the texts of the prayers the priest uses in hallowing the nun’s habit. Here, nuptial imagery is prominent in the prayer spoken over the veil, which is “the outward sign of inward chastity” and the “the one distinctively female part of the nun’s habit.”⁵ The officiating priest, referring to the story of the wise virgins who were prepared for the bridegroom’s coming (Matthew 25:1–13), prays that the novice’s body and soul be kept pure “vt quum ad perpetuam sanctorum remuneracionem uenerit, cum prudentibus virginibus et ipsa preparata te perducente ad perpetue felicitatis nupcias intrare meriatur. Per dominum.”⁶ The “Method” also mentions the ring, which the new nun places upon the altar with her “profession-boke” after reading her vow.⁷

The identity of bride of Christ has manifold consequences both material and symbolic for women religious, as the focus on the body and chastity in these excerpts from profession services suggests. Marriage, even at the imagistic level, necessarily raises questions of exchange.⁸ The spousal relationship constructed in monastic profession has little in common with the ecstatic nuptial unions found in the visionary experiences of some female mystics. Rather, to borrow the feminist anthropologist Renée Hirschon’s analysis, the “marriage transactions” of monastic profession are means of transmitting resources “whether productive assets or personal valuables.”⁹ In her work on marriage, Marilyn Strathern rightly problematizes the view that women are exchanged as “objects,” that women in marriage transactions become “things” rather than persons.¹⁰ The baggage accompanying the construction of the nun as bride of Christ in later medieval England reminds us, however, that even if nuns were not simply objects of exchange, nuptial discourse limited the possibility that they could act as fully empowered agents in textual, economic, and spiritual exchanges. Roberta Gilchrist’s description of nuns is particularly apt in this regard. While she does not say that nuns were property, she describes the brides of Christ as “metaphors for private property.”¹¹ A striking example of such “commodification” of nuns and the alienation of their resources occurs in a promise of obedience made by the prioress and convent of St. Michael’s Stamford to the abbot of Peterborough, the Benedictine abbey to which the nunnery was subject. The promise, preserved in the registers of Peterborough, “states that the nuns and all their belongings were at the disposal of the abbot and the monastery.”¹²

Becoming a bride of Christ thus dramatically restricted nuns’ control of both “personal valuables” and “productive assets.” Nuns’ “personal valuables,” which many women were required to bring with them as entry gifts (often called dowries), were officially transferred to the control of the community as nuns renounced rights to private property.¹³ Nuns’ “productive assets”–their (licit) reproductive capabilities—were also transferred out of their control. Gilchrist observes that “in contrast to the asexuality of the celibate priest, nuns committed their virginity to the church as Brides of Christ,” thus placing their bodies in the Church’s possession.¹⁴ In doing so, nuns, unlike priests, became “a private space inaccessible to others.”¹⁵

The importance of maintaining nuns’ inaccessibility, and so guarding the vital chastity of the brides of Christ, had temporal consequences exceeding in some respects those of the vow of poverty, which was in practice greatly modified for both Benedictine nuns and monks.¹⁶ For instance, although it proved difficult to enforce, the papal bull Periculoso mandating strict active and passive enclosure for nuns received “sustained legal interest” throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It was even reenacted “with the addition of stern penalties for its violation, at the Council of Trent (1545–63).”¹⁷ The brides of Christ were not only required to be “off the market” but also out of the marketplace.¹⁸ Nuns’ chastity was a commodity whose circulation had to be closely regulated in order to protect it from devaluation and debasement, which could, as the records of episcopal visitation discussed below reveal, result even from rumors of questionable behavior, rumors often sparked by nuns’ participation in the realm of commerce.

Claustration was certainly not perfectly kept in practice; later medieval episcopal communications attest to frequent breaches of the strict requirements for enclosure. For instance, in 1387, episcopal injunctions sent to Romsey and Wherwell mention with displeasure numerous instances of nuns’ leaving the cloister.¹⁹ There are also, however, cases of apparent ecclesiastical surrender to what must have come to seem the inevitability of such breaches. The English canonist John of Ayton says of the requirement that bishops enforce Periculoso, “Cause to be observed! But surely there is scarce any mortal man who could do this: we must therefore here understand ‘so far as lieth in the prelate’s power….’ [W]e see in fact that these statutes are a dead letter or are ill-kept at best. Why, then, did the holy fathers thus labour to beat the air?”²⁰ Even the pessimistic (or perhaps merely pragmatic) John of Ayton does not give up utterly on Periculoso, though. He follows his grim assessment by praising prelates who do work to enforce enclosure, saying, “Yet indeed their toil is none the less to their own merit, for we look not to that which is but to that which of justice should be.”²¹

Episcopal records make clear that even in the later Middle Ages some prelates did in fact attempt to enforce Periculoso strictly. For instance, in 1376 Bishop Brantyngham of Exeter invokes Periculoso in a commission sent to canons of Exeter deputed to curb “the wanderings of the nuns of Polsloe.”²² When strictly enforced by such zealous prelates, the requirement for claustration had the potential to diminish a nunnery’s opportunities for economic success. As Elizabeth Makowski observes, the strict enclosure mandated by Periculoso “threatened to undermine the economic stability of these communities…. It severely limited the capacity of nuns to solicit funds from outside benefactors, to conduct schools within conventual precincts, or to engage in any kind of revenue-producing labor outside the cloister.”²³

Before comparing Brigittine and Franciscan profession services with profession for nuns in the Benedictine tradition, it is instructive to consider the distinctions that emerge in a comparison of Benedictine profession for monks and nuns. Rather than mobilizing nuptial imagery, the profession service for Benedictine monks centers on the “idea of renovatio of the whole person.”²⁴ Whereas nuns become brides of Christ, monks “‘pu[t] on the new Christ’—thereby identifying themselves directly with Christ.”²⁵ As Johnson points out, “The differences by gender emphasize the hierarchy’s view of women as dependent and men as autonomous.”²⁶ Furthermore, from the twelfth century, monks increasingly took holy orders as priests,²⁷ which bolstered their identification with Christ, since as priests they were Christ’s earthly representatives. Benedictine monks thus share in the authority of Christ, receiving all the material and spiritual benefits such status conveys, while Benedictine nuns become Christ’s spouses deeply subject to patriarchal authority.²⁸

Nuns’ identification as brides of Christ led to gendered interpretations of elements of monastic life shared by monks and nuns, variations which reinforced monks’ autonomy and nuns’ subjection. For instance, canon lawyers and theologians used the construction of the nun as the bride of Christ as grounds to distinguish between monks’ and nuns’ vows of chastity. If a monk broke his vow of chastity, the offense put his own soul in jeopardy. The unchastity of a nun, however, was deemed “a direct offense against her Spouse, the King of Heaven.”²⁹ In his gloss on the canon Sanctimoniales attributed to Archbishop John Pecham, William Lyndwood, an influential fifteenth-century English canonist, discusses the rape of Dinah, daughter of Jacob, by Shechem, son of Hamor. Lyndwood “then explains, following a hallowed patristic tradition, that Pecham’s reference to ‘a more pernicious corruption’ reflects the fact that Dinah’s sin was one of simple fornication, while a nun’s corruption, in view of her marriage to Christ, would be adultery.”³⁰ This formal distinction between monks’ and nuns’ vows of chastity helped encourage much stricter enforcement of enclosure for women. Because the spouse to whom nuns were subject was not physically present to guard their chastity and supervise their conduct, claustration and close supervision by the clergy, the divine spouse’s earthly representatives, were necessary.

Nuptial discourse structuring profession for women thus subjects the Benedictine nun, unlike the Benedictine monk, to a hierarchical, patriarchal complex of familial relations. For nuns, the bishop (or the officiating priest if the bishop did not perform the ceremony) “acted symbolically as parent and spouse,” representing both Christ the bridegroom who received her vows and her father, who as head of the family inquired into her suitability for the match.³¹ The familial relationships such alignment evokes emphasize male control over the nuns themselves and their material resources.

This nexus of familial relations, and the limitations that come with it, are echoed in the textual transactions of the Benedictine profession service. In the services for both monks and nuns, after making the vow, the candidate places the written profession on the altar. Beyond the symmetry in this moment in the service are implications which reinforce the different status of men and women religious in a textual economy. For the new nun, this text, representing her self, passes permanently out of her hands into those of the priest celebrating the mass. This priest occupies a position that the nun, unlike the monk, can never fill. The nun is not allowed to remain in the masculine position of scriptor, nor is she able to retain possession of the text she has written.³² The textual body—the writing placed on the page by female hands—and with it the female self come irretrievably into the control of the male clergy, a group from which women are barred.

Furthermore, the dynamics of the exchange at the altar reinforce the status of male clergy as producers of value and of women religious as vessels of a value which is alienated from their own possession. The service of profession creates new nuns, and while the nun certainly plays a role in making herself a bride of Christ by taking vows, she cannot perform the sacerdotal work necessary to make more nuns. Like the sacrament of the Eucharist, which is a key part of the profession service and which is performed at the very altar upon which the nuns have placed their written vows, the profession service represents an exclusively male, clerical form of production. It is, in a sense, a male replacement of the maternal reproduction which nuns forego upon entering religion, since profession represents not only marriage to Christ but also a “birth” into a new life of religion as spiritual daughters of clerical fathers in Christ.³³

The identity of bride of Christ and the system of social relations it trails with it are also prominent in Franciscan and Brigittine profession services. The Rewle of Sustres Menouresses Enclosid highlights nuptiality in the description of the habit which the Franciscan nuns are to wear. The description reads, “it falliþ nat to hem whoche ys weddid to þe kynge perpetuel þat sche chiere none oþer but him, ne delite her in none oþer but in him.”³⁴ According to the Middle English version of the Brigittine Rule, called The Rewyll of Seynt Sauioure, when a candidate has completed the year of proof before profession she is called “the newe spouse,” and nuptial imagery abounds in the Brigittine consecration service.³⁵ As might be expected, when the bishop blesses the ring and bestows it on the candidate, such imagery is at the forefront. The bishop prays, “Almyʒty god euerlastyng. that hast spowsed to þe a newe spowse … blisse þoue this rynge. so þat as thi seruante beryth þe signe of a newe spowse in hir handes owtewardly. so mote she deserve to bere ynwardly thy feyth and charite” (Rewyll fol. 49v). Furthermore, the consecration service underlines the connection between the nun’s spousal status and her status as divine “property”; the bishop says, “I blisse the in to the spouse of god. and in to his euerlastyng possession” (Rewyll fol. 50v).

The similarity in profession services is not surprising given the ties between the Benedictine tradition and the Brigittine and Franciscan traditions. The Brigittine Rule has close connections with the strict Cistercian interpretation of the Rule of St. Benedict,³⁶ and Franciscan nuns were initially professed formaliter under the Benedictine Rule, according to the terms of which enclosure was imposed on the women religious.³⁷ The Brigittine and Franciscan traditions depart from the Benedictine model of monastic life in significant ways, though, as their profession services begin to make clear.

Although nuptial discourse is quite important in Franciscan and Brigittine profession services, it is offset and partially counteracted by the imagery of maternity. Just as earthly marriage is prohibited for nuns, so too is bodily maternity. Profession services for Franciscan nuns, and, to an even greater extent, those for Brigittine nuns, though, open up the potentially empowering possibilities of the maternal in religious identity. The abbess and Mary as strong maternal figures model subject positions of authority and autonomy which the insistent nuptiality of Benedictine profession tries (although, as we shall see, not always successfully) to deny. Felice Lifshitz has rightly observed that the “maternal responsibility to nurture” does not contain the “maternal authority to command.”³⁸ The abbess and Mary, however, transcend the approved function for nurturing mothers in patriarchal society, that is, the function of “maintain [ing] the social order without intervening so as to change it.”³⁹ While the presence of the maternal in Franciscan and Brigittine profession services does not fully negate the limiting aspects of nuptial discourse as a structuring principle for female monastic identity, maternal figures do in fact intervene in the social order. They provide models of female authority and legitimate women’s autonomous possession of, exchange of, and profit from their own resources.

In the Benedictine profession service for women, while the clergy symbolically stand in for spouse and father, the role of mother is largely neglected. Neither the abbess as mother nor Mary as mother figure prominently in this service in which clerics engage in the “reproductive” work of making nuns. While the abbess does play an important role in the Benedictine profession service (for instance, she “removes the novice’s secular dress while the priest or prelate blesses the habit and veil”⁴⁰), her status as mother, and the authority implied by that status, are not specifically emphasized. In the verse translation of the Benedictine rule, the chapter on receiving nuns into the community also gives Mary a mere token role. While the Latin, masculine version describes the postulant as making his vows “Coram Deo et sanctis eiis,”⁴¹ the English briefly adds Mary to the equation. The candidate makes her vow “vnto god” and to “al halows of heuyn chere” as in the Latin but also “Vnto mary, cristes moder dere.”⁴² The “Method of makeing a Nunn” in MS BL Cotton Vespasian A. 25 similarly gives Mary a relatively minor role in the service—brief mentions of her as virgin mother occur in three prayers.⁴³

The Franciscan vow resembles the Benedictine vow in that Mary, here not specifically named as a mother, appears in a list with others whom the candidate addresses: “I Suster … bihote to god & owre ladi blissid mayde marie & to seynt Fraunces, to myne ladi seint Clare & to alle seyntis” (Rewle 83–84). Mary as mother nevertheless comes to the fore in the rule’s description of a woman’s motivation for entering this order. The rule envisions the influence of a “Marian trinity,”⁴⁴ referring to “Eche womman whiche bi þe grace & gifte of þe holi goste schal be brouht to entre in þis ordre for to nyʒe to god owre lorde Ihesu Criste & to his ful swete moder” (Rewle 82). While the Holy Spirit provides the desire, Mary the Mother takes her place with God the Father and Jesus the Son as those to whom the nun will draw near when she enters religion.

Moreover, the abbess as a specifically maternal authority figure is also central. The candidate does not make her profession to a clerical stand-in for husband and father but rather “in hondes of þe Abbesse bifore alle þe couent,” declaring, “I Suster … bihote … in ʒoure hondes, moder, to lyue after þe rule of myne lorde þe apostle Boneface þe eytiþ correctid & approuid be alle þe time of myne life” (Rewle 83–84). Although as Lifshitz correctly notes, etymologically “an abbatissa, or abbess, is not a mother” but rather “a female father,”⁴⁵ the abbess here in fact is a mother, explicitly addressed as such. The Franciscan profession is thus an exchange between women in which women are in charge rather than a transaction in which the reproductive role is coopted by clerics and in which women are subjected to male, clerical representatives of fathers and husbands.

An extremely strong emphasis is placed on maternity in the Brigittine tradition. In St. Birgitta’s revelations, when Christ describes to her the new order he wants her to found, he says, “This religion þerfore I wyll sette: ordeyne fyrst and principally by women to the worshippe of my most dere beloued modir” (Rewyll fol. 42r).⁴⁶ Given this emphasis, it is not surprising that the abbess as mother plays, as she does in the Franciscan service, an important role in Brigittine consecrations. While during the consecration service the candidate makes her promise of obedience to both the bishop and the abbess,⁴⁷ on the eighth day following her consecration she writes her profession in the register. The Syon Additions for the Sisters indicates that during this ceremony the new nun makes her promise “to the abbes of thys monastery, and to thy successours,” and specifically to the abbess as mother: “I delyuer and betake to ʒour reuerent moderhode, thys wrytyng.”⁴⁸ In this textual transaction, the Brigittine nun does not come into male hands and under male control as the Benedictine nun does in placing her written profession on the altar. When the new Brigittine nun writes her profession in the register, which remains in the community’s possession, the textual exchange is one between women in which female, maternal authority is emphasized.

The Brigittine Rule similarly emphasizes maternal authority when it says that the abbess as mother stands in Mary’s stead as head of both male and female members of the community; the abbess “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). In describing how the confessor general (the highest-ranking male official in the community) and the abbess “schal behaue them,” the Syon Additions for the Sisters states that they “owe to be as fader and moder” (198). Then, altering the traditional hierarchy of father and mother, the text specifies that the abbess “is hede and lady of the monastery” and the confessor general is to “feythfully assiste the abbess” (Sisters 198).⁴⁹

The authority constructed for the abbess in the Brigittine tradition did not go unchallenged. In the process of papal approval, the Rule encountered difficulties, since Pope Urban V disapproved of the “subordination of the men to the women.” Consequently, he insisted on revisions which redefined the role of the abbess, diminishing her power over the male religious of the community.⁵⁰ The abbess at Syon was also not immune from challenges to her authority. The foundation charter initially gave her control over both spirituals and temporals, but an ecclesiastical council subsequently reduced her control to that of temporals only.

The Syon Additions for the Sisters itself results from a struggle between the abbess and clerical officials regarding her authority and the rights of the community. At a conference of “distinguished abbots” held in January 1416, one of a series of meetings in which the Additions were drawn up, “the claim of the sisters against the performance of certain kinds of manual work, such as cooking and baking, was refused: and the claim of the abbess Matilda Newton to be obeyed by the confessor and brothers was also refused.”⁵¹ The degree to which the Syon Additions still enables the abbess at Syon to mobilize the maternal authority originally bestowed by the Brigittine Rule is thus all the more remarkable.

In accordance with the foundation of the abbess’s maternal authority in Mary’s maternal authority, Mary is appropriately advanced in the Brigittine consecration service as a figure with whom the candidate is encouraged to identify. In the consecration service, the candidate asks for entry into religion in the name of Jesus Christ and in “worshipe of his holy modir mari virgyn” (Rewyll fol. 49r). A red banner depicting Christ’s body on one side and that of the Virgin Mary on the other precedes the candidates in the procession “so that the newe spowse beholdyng þe signe of the newe spouse sufferyng on the crosse. lerne paciens and pouerte. And in beholdyng the virgyn modir: lerne chastite and mekenes” (Rewyll fol. 49r). The candidate is simultaneously to become Christ’s “newe spowse” and “virgyn modir.” Furthermore, while the bishop may stand in for Christ the spouse and for the nun’s father, the candidate too can align herself with Christ, from whom she is to learn.⁵² Mary and Christ, represented so frequently in Brigittine texts as co-redemptors,⁵³ are portrayed as two sides of the same coin, so to speak, providing equally important models for identity formation.

The instruction to Brigittine novices to learn chastity and meekness from Mary shows, on one level, the dominance of a traditional ideology of female spirituality in Brigittine texts. Brigittine texts also, however, represent Mary’s meekness and chastity as empowering qualities, as sources of authority. For instance, in the Liber celestis, the definitive collection of Birgitta’s revelations which was translated at least twice into Middle English, Christ compares Mary to “a flowr þat grew in a vale, a-bowte which vale wer v high mountaynes.”⁵⁴ He identifies Mary with the vale for the “mekenes” which she had “a-fore all oþer,” and he continues by saying, “This vale passed v mountaynes.”⁵⁵ Thus, Mary’s meekness raises her above five Old Testament leaders—Moses, Eli, Sampson, David, and Solomon. Christ also declares that Mary’s chastity makes her even greater than the clergy, his earthly representatives; he says, “In thyn abstynence þu arte more than any confessore.”⁵⁶

Nuptial imagery, with all the baggage it carries, is thus not the only identity-shaping imagery available in Brigittine profession. The Brigittine consecration service contains a “complex cluster of ideas—virginity, marriage, intercourse, fertility” which lies at its heart.⁵⁷ While in the Benedictine profession service maternal reproduction is recast as the priestly production of new nuns, the language of the hymn accompanying the procession into the chapter house following the consecration highlights pointedly the combination of maternal and nuptial possibilities available to Brigittine nuns. While processing, the community sings sponse iungendo filio, which is also sung at compline on Thursdays; one line reads, “The wombe of mary is the chambre. her soule is the spousesse.”⁵⁸ The hymn emphasizes:

that the virginal conception of Christ was, at the same time, an intimate intercourse between him and the soul of the Virgin Mary which produced a whole host of “fayre children.” … The newly professed is thus truly what the Extrauagantes first called her, a daughter of the Virgin…. She is also … the spouse of the Virgin’s son: at the same time, therefore, daughter, wife, and mother to be …, herself another Virgin Mary.⁵⁹

Like the banner in the consecration service, the identity of the new Brigittine nun has more than one side.

It is quite appropriate that the Brigittine and Franciscan traditions work in their profession services, and, as we shall see, in their visitation practices, to shape religious identities which celebrate female spiritual power. Both orders originated with women who were profoundly committed to developing new, distinctive roles for women in religious life, and both share a common heritage of later medieval continental religious protofeminism. The Brigittine Rule, divinely revealed to St. Birgitta and ordained, in accordance with Christ’s command, “first and principally by women,” strives, in spite of affinities with the Cistercian tradition, to “dissociate itself from existing monastic practice.”⁶⁰ Birgitta’s design of a double order headed by an abbess, which was extremely unusual in the fourteenth century, also likely harkens back to an earlier attempt to carve out new religious possibilities for women—the creation of the Fontevrauldine Order by Robert of Abrissel.⁶¹

St. Clare of Assisi devoted her life to procuring the privilege of poverty (in her view the defining aspect of Franciscan identity) for her community at San Damiano, and she, together with Blessed Agnes of Prague, succeeded in having Pope Innocent IV remove the requirement that the nuns observe, even formaliter, the Rule of St. Benedict. The early versions of the Franciscan Rule for nuns were revised by Blessed Isabella, sister of Louis IX of France, into a distinctive modification known as the Isabella Rule, which, although it does not embrace the radical poverty so loved by Clare, seeks to underline the equality of Franciscan nuns and friars. That the nuns and friars are, to borrow Penelope Johnson’s terms, “equal in monastic profession,” is underlined by the Isabella Rule’s specification that the women who follow it be called “Minoresses,” so indicating their “privileged position” and “closer connection with the ‘Fratres Minores’ than the rest of the Order.”⁶² It is this rule which was followed by the English Franciscan nuns.

Through the origins of their orders in Sweden, Italy, and France, English Brigittines and Franciscans were linked with such continental developments in female spirituality as the “feminization of sanctity.”⁶³ Ties with continental innovations in religious practices were furthered by the direct connections of English houses of Franciscan and Brigittine nuns with those in France and Scandinavia. English houses of Minoresses were settled with nuns from Isabella’s foundation of Longchamp in the diocese of Paris, and nuns from the Brigittine motherhouse in Vadstena came to facilitate the beginnings of the community at Syon. Textual circulation also reinforced ties with burgeoning new forms of female spirituality across the Channel. Syon, for instance, possessed a copy of The Orchard of Syon, a Middle English translation of the Dialogues of Catherine of Siena. In these regards, the opportunities for independence both spiritual and secular offered to English Brigittine and Franciscan nuns in their profession services were part of a much larger social phenomenon.

Visitation Documents and Gendered Identity

Episcopal visitation, like profession, plays an important part in the construction of religious identity, since in visitation every element of monastic life, from performing divine service to serving meals, comes under scrutiny. Visitation also has long-term consequences, since the injunctions become part of the statutes of the house, superseding previous documents of the same kind. In visitation, documents impacting religious identity proliferate. During a typical visitation of a Benedictine religious house, upon the arrival of the diocesan, a clerk preached a sermon, and then the head of the house presented a certificate of the receipt of the summons to visitation and of its delivery to the various persons summoned. Next, the head of the house was required to exhibit certificates of election, confirmation by the diocesan, and installation in office. The superior then had to exhibit the foundation charter as well as information concerning the current financial condition of the house. Through this documentary profusion, the house accounted for its temporal circumstances and reaffirmed its material origins.

After these preliminaries of communal accountability, the business of personal accountability began. Members of the house appeared singly before the bishop or sometimes before clerks deputed to examine members simultaneously. Notaries took down the depositions, known as detecta, and then the comperta (matters discovered by the bishop) were formed from the detecta and the results of preliminary inquiry. At the end of the visitation proceedings, the visitor published the detecta and comperta to the assembled community and delivered brief verbal injunctions. Finally, soon after his departure, he sent written injunctions to the community which were added to the statutes of the house.⁶⁴

The textual transactions associated with episcopal visitation have often been considered formulaic and homogenous across orders and genders;⁶⁵ just as the important imaginative work of constructing gendered identities gets done in profession services, however, so too is it performed through the seemingly bland official language of visitation documents. While it is true that episcopal visitation was a fact of monastic life for monks and nuns alike, in England nuns were more subject than monks to episcopal jurisdiction. In this respect, then, the process was not gender neutral, since not even the most powerful and important Benedictine abbeys of nuns succeeded in obtaining the kind of exemption from episcopal visitation enjoyed by some male houses of corresponding stature. In fact, even nunneries belonging to such exempt orders as the Cistercians were consistently subject to episcopal visitation.⁶⁶ In the fifteenth century, church officials, “unlike their Gregorian predecessors, aggressively sought to take the cura mulierum into their own hands. They wanted to direct the spiritual life of women even at the cost of carrying the burdens of responsibility.”⁶⁷ Outside of the three houses of Franciscan Minoresses and the one house of Dominican nuns existing in England in the later Middle Ages, which were visited by the ministers of their orders, the only real exemptions to episcopal jurisdiction over female foundations were the communities of nuns dependent on male houses where the head of the male house sometimes acted as visitor.

As Johnson notes, prelates had a “vested interest” in maintaining strong authority over both male and female houses in their diocese or province.⁶⁸ “The obedience of a monastery increased the episcopal power base and added to the diocesan’s income through court fees and procurations.”⁶⁹ In addition to acquiring material resources, a diocesan could also gain symbolic capital, resources stored in nonmaterial form, by asserting his authority as visitor, as “writer” of ideological scripts, and regulator of community life.⁷⁰ Because English nuns were more subject to visitation than monks, the bishops’ gain of material and symbolic capital were achieved at greater expense to the nuns—another respect in which visitation was not gender neutral.

The material burdens of visitation, while borne by nuns and monks alike, would have been comparatively greater for nuns, since nunneries were generally poorer and less well-endowed than male monasteries. Nunnery accounts indicate that these material costs could be heavy indeed. When a bishop or his deputy came to the house on the business of visitation, the nuns had to pay for the entertainment of the visitor and his retinue; they also had to pay various parties engaged in the textual transactions, such as bringing summons, returning with injunctions, and writing accounts. The treasuress’s account from St. Michael’s Stamford from 2–3 Richard II includes the following instances of such expenses:

Primerment pour expensus del Evesque al visitacion	xls
Item a 1 home portant la lettre del visitacion	iis
Item a 1 altre home portant 1 lettre apres le visitacion	xiid71

William Alnwick, bishop of Lincoln, visited St. Michael’s Stamford in 1442, and a list of creditors of the house at the time of that visitation includes a debt of £8 10s to Thomas Colston.⁷² Colston, a canon of Lincoln Cathedral, was Alnwick’s notary and was present at the visitation, so it is quite likely that the debt is related to visitation costs. Nunneries incurred expenses even when the visitation was not performed by the bishop. A prioress’s account from St. Mary de Pré (4–5 Edward IV) records “iis id in expensus” for the house’s visitation by the prior and sacristan of St. Alban’s together with their servants as ordered by the abbot.⁷³

The gendered effects of visitation extend still further. Visitation in fact produces and reinforces very specific, differing identities for monks and nuns as men and women in religion. In visitation records and injunctions for Benedictine houses, gendered differences, which reinforce the divergent subject positions set out in profession for monks and nuns, are clearly revealed with a heightened emphasis on female weakness and vulnerability throughout. Injunctions concerning the exclusions of seculars from the cloister provide a particularly striking illustration of the way in which visitation encourages gendered religious identities. While it is the case that seculars did have access to both male and female houses on a regular basis, and indeed lived as corrodians in male and female monastic communities, ecclesiastical concern with the presence of seculars persisted. Even in cases where the theory and practice of monastic life are at odds, the continuing clerical desire to align theory and practice, and the reasons expressed for invoking the theory as the ideal, reveal gendered definitions of religious life.

In injunctions for male houses, visitors express concern with the disturbances seculars might cause to the monks. For instance, Bishop Flemyng’s 1421–1422 injunctions for Huntingdon Priory prohibit seculars’ passage through the cloister “in order that the devotion of the singers in quire or the peace of those who are sitting in the cloister may be in no way disturbed by those seculars.”⁷⁴ In a set of late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century injunctions for Newnham, Bishop Gray echoes these concerns, ordering that the house restrain the recourse of seculars, especially women, to cloister precincts and prevent them from sharing meals in the frater “so that the quiet of the canons in cloister at the time of contemplation or the reading in the frater at breakfast-time be in no wise hindered.”⁷⁵

The emphasis on preserving an atmosphere of quiet for the male religious’ contemplation, services, and study demonstrates the Church’s view of their mental and spiritual labors as valuable, productive work which seculars should not to be allowed to disrupt. These labors replaced the manual labor which had long since practically disappeared as a defining aspect of monastic life. A passage from the statutes of the 1343 chapter of the Benedictines, which was restated without change in the statutes of the 1444 chapter, indicates the importance of study and intellectual labor in monastic life: “Abbates … monachos suos claustrales loco operis manualis … certis facient exerciciis occupari, videlicet studendo, legendo, librosque scribendo, corrigendo, illuminando pariter et ligando.”⁷⁶ It is clear that this passage represents a watershed change in the definition of monastic labors because, significantly, “the word legendo (i.e. reading with commentary to students; cf. the ‘reader, at universities) is not in the corresponding decree of the chapter of 1277.”⁷⁷

The reasons visitors give for prohibiting access of seculars to female houses differ dramatically from the reasons given in injunctions for male houses. For female houses, the prohibitions tend to be expressed in terms of alarm at the spread of public slander resulting from seculars’ access and corresponding concern with the damage to the nuns’ reputation seculars thus caused. In his 1445 injunctions to the Benedictine nuns of Littlemore Priory, Bishop Alnwick orders that they prevent the access of outsiders because “ye and your said place are greuously noysede and sclaundrede” as a result of the “gre[te and] commune accesse” seculars have.⁷⁸ In his 1445 injunctions to the Benedictine house of Godstow, Alnwick also prohibits access of seculars with the exception of the house’s officers or “other that are of your consaile and fee.”⁷⁹ The reason given for this prohibition is that “youre saide monastery and diuerse singulere persones ther of are greuously noysed and sclaundred.”⁸⁰ The nuns’ “honesty” appears as a related concern in injunctions dealing with the access of seculars to the nuns’ cloister. In 1421–1422, Bishop Gray prohibits secular boarders among the Benedictine nuns at Elstow Abbey because they damage the “purity of religion” (“religionis puritas “) and the “pleasantness of honest conversation and character” (“conuersacionis honeste et morum suauitas”).⁸¹

Contemplation, study, and divine service were as important to women as to men in monastic orders, and perhaps even more so, since women could not become priests. While English nunneries, with the exception of Syon, most likely did not have the extensive libraries available in some male houses, books appropriate for study and contemplative reading were certainly part of nuns’ spiritual lives, even in houses that, unlike Syon, were not exceedingly wealthy.⁸² The rhetoric of visitation records, however, appears less concerned with preserving an atmosphere conducive to contemplation, study, and divine service in female houses. The visitors’ concern with the nuns’ reputation rather than with their ability to engage in spiritual labor shows that the value of women religious, as far as the Church was concerned, did not lie in their work. While the Church identified monks as producers of valuable spiritual resources whose labors should be facilitated, the value of women religious did not stem so much from their contemplative and intellectual labors as from an imagined essential purity.

Indeed, clerics saw in nuns’ reading and study opportunities to reinforce the kinds of proper conduct that would maintain their vital essential purity and unblemished reputation. As Anne Clark Bartlett observes in her discussion of clerical directives on how to read, “Ideally, an audience should assimilate a devotional text enthusiastically and comprehensively, attempting to reinscribe its words on their bodies by imitating the virtuous behavior that it models.”⁸³ This clerical desire that nuns read so as to behave properly rather than so as to become learned is evident even in the translator’s prologue to the Brigittine Myroure of Oure Ladye.⁸⁴ The translator advises the nuns, “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.”⁸⁵

Clerical concerns with nuns’ conduct and episcopal visitors’ overwhelming desire that nunneries avoid slander align with canonists’ assumptions that “although sexual abstinence and virginity were central values, essential to any life of religious dedication, nuns were specially blessed (or burdened) with an obligation to preserve a chastity that took on an almost mythical significance and importance.”⁸⁶ For instance, Joannes Andreae “stressed that continence as well as virginity were included in the term chastity, and he equated the holiness of nuns with that single virtue.”⁸⁷ According to both canonists and diocesan visitors, nuns’ value lay in their chastity (so essential to their status as brides of Christ) and in the good repute which proved their intrinsic worth.

A concern not only with chastity but also with good reputation stemmed from the need to make the unknowable knowable and the invisible visible. A nun’s spiritual condition was very much a public matter; fama or communis fama, defined as “the general opinion of serious and well-informed neighbors, were invoked in defining her status as holy or sinful.⁸⁸ Sherry Ortner has noted that in societies where marriage is potentially a vertical transaction for women (hypergamy), both the economic value of a woman (what she can bring as dowry to the marriage) and her mystical or spiritual value, her “inner worthiness for such an alliance,” become matters of great importance.⁸⁹ Ortner observes that virginity and chastity are “particularly apt for symbolizing such value.”⁹⁰ A nun’s union with Christ is perhaps the ultimate instance of hypergamy, and thus those who administered and supervised the union were particularly concerned with securing the actual sexual purity of women religious as well as the reputation which provided a guarantee of value.

Episcopal injunctions concerning the proliferation of households known as familiae beyond the three traditionally tolerated—that is, the households of the superior, the frater, and the misericord—also reveal gendered constructions of Benedictine religious identity. Familiae ate together, frequently catering for themselves rather than relying on common stores. For male communities, visitors criticize numerous familiae as impractical, wasteful, or contrary to obedience to the monastic rule. For example, in Alnwick’s 1439 visitation of Ramsey Abbey, a large male Benedictine house, numerous households eating in diverse places are said to damage religious discipline and waste temporal goods—although in the past there were only three households, “iam sunt perplurima, propter quod religio perit et bona consumuntur.”⁹¹ In the injunctions from this visitation, Alnwick orders that the almoner, sacrist, and hostilarius not keep separate households including servants because they waste the resources of the house.⁹² In Thompson’s three volumes of fifteenth-century visitations of religious houses in the diocese of Lincoln, familiae are mentioned in the visitations of five male communities. In addition to the case of Ramsey, waste figures in two other cases. At Bardney, the waste of alms through excess familiae is condemned,⁹³ while at Thornton the prior declares that, although waste has been a problem, it is not due to familiae but to other factors.⁹⁴ At Peterborough, the prior simply asks the bishop to affirm the steps he (the prior) has already taken in doing away with separate eating places for monks in their seynies (that is, those monks undergoing periodic bloodletting performed for health reasons) and those excused from the frater.⁹⁵ Finally, at Spalding, the bishop actually approves the existence of more than three households.⁹⁶

For female houses, as in injunctions concerning the access of seculars, visitors tend to frame their concerns with excess familiae in terms of preventing slander. In his 1442 injunctions for Catesby Priory,⁹⁷ Bishop Alnwick commands the prioress to ensure that the nuns “aftere your rewle lyfe in commune, etyng and drynkyng in oon house, slepyng in oon house … levyng vtterly all pryuate hydles, chaumbers and syngulere housholdes, by the whiche hafe comen and growen grete hurte and peryle of sowles and noyesfulle sklaundere of your pryorye.”⁹⁸ Concern with a house’s reputation and repugnance toward public gossip about irregular activities there crop up frequently in visitation records for male and female houses. Slander is, however, only mentioned once in injunctions concerning familiae in a male house, and in this case (Ramsey) the slander is connected with the waste of alms rather than directly with the proliferation of familiae. So, since bishops use very different rhetoric to describe their concern with both enclosure and familiae in male and female communities, it seems fair to say that the repeated stress on reputation in the cases involving women reveals the Church’s gendered ideologies of religious identity for monks and nuns.

Visitation records highlight that familiae allowed women religious increased autonomy and more direct control of whatever resources were available.⁹⁹ In the 1440 visitation of Gokewell, the prioress reports that “the nuns do keep divers households, to wit two by two; and yet they receive nothing of the house but bread and beer.”¹⁰⁰ At Langley in 1440 the prioress also indicates that the nuns “keep separate households by themselves two and two.” She hastens to add that they eat “in the frater every day,” but she goes on to report, “the nuns receive naught from the house but their meat and drink.” Finally, she indicates that “she herself keeps one household on her own account.”¹⁰¹

Nunneries’ financial records similarly bear witness to internal economies which allowed the women religious some personal control of resources. Each month the prioress and nuns of St. Mary de Pré (a Benedictine house dependant on St. Albans Abbey), who numbered between eight and ten, shared between 33s and 35s for their “commyns,” that is, money for basic foods beyond bread and ale. St. Mary de Pré’s accounts also indicate cash payments for potages (dishes of cooked food).¹⁰² These developments manifest the very type of distribution of resources which injunctions limiting familiae sought to prevent.

The autonomy familiae enabled for nuns may well have prompted the clergy to focus on slander when addressing the proliferation of households. The visitors’ connection of excess familiae and nuns’ ill repute (which would potentially devalue nuns’ essential purity) resonates with a common later medieval tendency to sexualize, and thus stigmatize, economic activity which allowed women any measure of independence.¹⁰³ Nuns were in fact frequently subjected to double-barreled, mutually reinforcing critiques which linked the sin of proprietas (that is, irregular possession of private property) with unchastity. While the link between proprietas and unchastity was at times made for both male and female religious, the slope leading from proprietas to unchastity was seen as particularly slippery and dangerous for the brides of Christ. The fifteenth-century German reformer Johann Busch declared of nuns, “First, losing the fear of God through the dissolution of their life, they fall into proprietas in small things; then in greater things, and then, descending farther to the personal possession of money and garments, they at last rush into the lusts of the flesh, and the incontinence of outward senses, and so to wickedness of act, not fearing to give themselves up to all filth and uncleanness.”¹⁰⁴

Tellingly, references to excess familiae appear more frequently in visitations of female houses. Familiae are mentioned in seventeen cases in A. Hamilton Thompson’s three volumes of fifteenth-century visitations of religious houses from the diocese of Lincoln. Five references to familiae occur in visitations of male communities (see above), while twelve occur in visitations of female houses: the Cistercian house of Catesby,¹⁰⁵ the Benedictine house of Elstow (two different visitations),¹⁰⁶ the Benedictine house of Godstow (two different visitations),¹⁰⁷ the Cistercian house of Gokewell,¹⁰⁸ the Austin house of Gracedieu,¹⁰⁹ the Benedictine house of Langley,¹¹⁰ the Cistercian house of Nuncoton,¹¹¹ the Benedictine house of Stainfield,¹¹² the Benedictine house of St. Michael’s Stamford,¹¹³ and the Cistercian house of Stixwould.¹¹⁴ This difference might mean that excess familiae were in fact more common in female communities, a possibility given nuns’ greater reliance on gifts, annuities and the like.¹¹⁵ It might well mean, though, that visitors were more concerned with familiae and their implications in female houses.

That visitors go further in restricting familiae in female communities than in male communities suggests that ecclesiastical unease with the material autonomy which familiae enabled for nuns did lead to heightened concern about the proliferation of households. For example, rather than insisting on a return to the traditional three familiae, in 1440 Bishop Alnwick restricts the Benedictine nuns of St. Michael’s Stamford to a single familia, requiring them to “stande alle holy wythe the prioresse in hire householde.”¹¹⁶ Alnwick similarly enjoins that the Benedictine nuns at Godstow abandon their diverse familiae in favor of dining all together. He additionally requires that the abbess of this house “do mynystre to thaym of the commune godes of the house mete and drynke owte [of] one selare and one kychyn.”¹¹⁷ This last injunction clearly reveals ecclesiastical desires to restrain the more individual administration of resources that occurred in female houses with numerous familiae. The point was not so much to promote the nuns’ spirituality by encouraging them to live a communal life as to limit the need of the brides of Christ to engage in financial decision making in the commercial marketplace, activity which was perceived as posing such a risk to their valuable purity.

As they do in their profession services, the Franciscan and Brigittine orders demonstrate distinct similarities with the Benedictine tradition in their visitation practices, and in many respects they do not call into question male, ecclesiastical authority over women. The visitor has a great deal of authority under the Isabella Rule, which grants to the Minister Provincial þe ordinaunce of þis ordre, þe gouernaunce, þe cure, þe visitacioun, þe correccioun, & reformacioun” (Rewle 95). The Bulla Reformatoria of Martin V, included in translation in the Syon Additions for the Sisters, begins by confirming episcopal jurisdiction over Brigittine houses in terms that stress a gendered, hierarchical, familial relationship between the nuns and the visitors. The bull states that English bishops in whose dioceses Brigittine foundations are located are to do all their offices as ordinary and to be “faders and iuges in al cases and causes, that toche the sustres or brethren, and also visitours and proctours of the seyd monasteryes” (Sisters 47).

The Brigittine and Franciscan traditions do, however, place limits on a visitor’s power to impact the particular identities nuns have within them. As the preceding examples regarding familiae indicate, injunctions can require modifications of the community’s ways of life and use of resources, aspects of monastic life fundamental to identity formation. The Isabella Rule short-circuits these potentially transformative aspects of visitation, stating, “And ouer alle þinge we defende þat none Ministre ne visitoure bi here auctorite make none constitucionis in þe Abbey ageynis þe forme & rule aforseyde” (Rewle 96). Any constitutions impinging on the rule could be made only “þi consentment of alle þe couent” and, strikingly, “ʒif ani soche nyew ordinaunce be made, by no maner þat þe sustres shul be boundyn þer to” (Rewle 96). Through these provisions, the Isabella Rule grants the nuns a significant amount of control over how visitation proceedings affect their community and their identity.

Texts associated with Brigittine visitation also place limits on visitors’ powers and give the nuns significant control over the impact of visitation on the community. The Bulla Reformatoria limits the scope of the bishop’s authority, preventing him from giving “any maner of sentence of cursynge, suspension, or interdiccion, / general or special” without “commission and special commaundmente of our see” (Sisters 47). Bishops visiting Syon were thus largely deprived of one of their primary tools for enjoining obedience, that is, the threat of excommunication which occurs almost universally in episcopal injunctions. Furthermore, the bull requires that the bishop commit the execution of “correccions, penaunces, and peynes, that be to be sette and enioyned to the trespasers” to “the abbes or the sadder parte of the sustres” (Sisters 45). Tellingly, the bull also states that the bishops are not to “aske any costes of them” (Sisters 47), thereby circumventing the financial burdens of visitation and mitigating the costs of hospitality which were often so heavy for houses. Since Syon’s great wealth might have been a tempting prospect for a less than circumspect prelate, the papal document’s assurance that material capital will remain in the nuns’ hands is particularly beneficial.

Ultimately, and perhaps most significantly, Franciscan and Brigittine visitation documents blur the rigid hierarchy between observer and observed. This distinction is an important marker of gendered, authoritative status in religion. The writing of Petrus de Ancarano, a contemporary of Joannes Andreae and, like Andreae, a commentator on Periculoso, is instructive on this point. In some respects Petrus is more moderate than Joannes in his interpretation of claustration; however, following Joannes’s Novella, Petrus “agrees that even abbesses may not leave their monasteries save for expressed purposes, and that conducting visitations is not one of those purposes, since the abbess herself is bound by the rules such visits seek to enforce.”¹¹⁸ Abbots, however, could and did visit communities under their jurisdiction in lieu of the diocesan.

Franciscan and Brigittine visitation practices do not go so far as to allow abbesses to conduct visitations of houses themselves. The Syon Additions for the Sisters, however, specifies that the bishop is not to visit “but in hys proper persone,” and he is to be accompanied by two or three companions (Sisters 39). Significantly, one of these companions is to be a “religious manne of the order of benett or bernarde” chosen by the abbess and confessor general in consultation with the “elder and wholer” sisters and brethren (Sisters 39). The members of the female community thus take an active role in organizing the visitation, and the Syon Additions for the Sisters, in calling for the participation of the abbess in choosing officials to carry out in the visitation, typifies the way in which Brigittine texts work to augment her position in the community of both men and women.¹¹⁹

A symbolic representation of the abbess’s maternal, authoritative identity in the corporate body occurs in the Brigittine visitation ceremony itself. In bishop’s registers, one of the phrases frequently used to describe the bishop’s role is that he sits in the capacity of judge in a tribunal: “In primis sedente dicto domino commissario iudicialiter pro tribunali in huiusmodi visitacionis inchoande negocio.”¹²⁰ The head of the house and the convent then traditionally appear before the bishop seated in this capacity. The visitation procedure to be used at Syon, however, states that when the bishop takes his seat, “he shal make the abbes to sytte on hys ryghte hande” (Sisters 40). The head of the house in this case does not submit to the bishop seated in judgment but rather sits in judgment with him.¹²¹ The abbess, whom the Brigittine Rule describes as occupying the position of the Virgin Mary, is placed here on an equal level with the bishop, the representative of Christ. This placement echoes frequent description of the Virgin Mary as co-redemptrix in Brigittine service texts, and it recalls the equal focus on Mary and Christ as models for the nun in the consecration ceremony.¹²² Through limiting episcopal power and foregrounding the abbess’s authority, texts associated with Brigittine visitation do much to change the visitation process’s “ways of making the world.”¹²³

The Minoresses’ Isabella Rule also changes the ways in which the world of the religious community is “made” in visitation. For instance, it stipulates that the visitor’s behavior is just as subject to scrutiny as the sisters’ behavior. The text specifies that he is to be “soche one whoche is wel knowen of stedfastnesse of religious life & gode vertuis” (Rewle 92). Furthermore, if, after the visitation, “any þinge notable ageynis þe visitoure or ageynis his felawes” is found, it is to be reported to the Minister General (Rewle 94). He, like the sisters, may become part of a body of knowledge, a textual corpus. Not only those visited, but also the visitor, is subject to examination and classification. Both parties thus have the opportunity to mobilize textual practices to their own advantage.

Even more strikingly, the Isabella Rule disrupts the textual dissemination of knowledge about women religious, putting control of their textual corpus back into their own hands. The visitor is to “kepe priue, ne schewe hit nat bi his knowinge to none bodi” (Rewle 94) that which he finds in visitation. G. G. Coulton notes that in visitation records, “one of the most serious offenses contemplated is that of revealing the secrets of the chapter…. To reveal the details of a visitation was one of the worst and most heavily-punished monastic offenses.”¹²⁴ In the case of the Minoresses, the prohibition is stated with reference to the visitor instead of the visited. Information concerning the visitation could only be reported to the Minister General of the Order “bi þe counsayle of moste wise sustris of þe couent” (Rewle 94).

Most dramatically, the Isabella Rule alone among rules for Franciscan nuns specifies that “assone as misdedis schal be redde & penaunce enioynid, alle þat whoche is writen schal be brent bifore þe couent” (Rewle 94). The visitor is not permitted to keep that which he accumulates as he writes the visitation documents. The required destruction of the texts allows the sisters following the Isabella Rule to escape being caught in the network of clerical textual exchanges. Unlike Benedictine nuns, who put themselves in textual form into clerical hands at their profession and remain in visitation documents part of a textual corpus permanently in the hands of ecclesiastical authorities, the Minoresses elude the defining, confining power of writing.

The wealth, aristocratic patronage, and the generally high social status of Brigittine and Franciscan nuns may have been factors enabling clerical acceptance of the less intrusive visitation practices at Syon and in houses of English Minoresses. Since important, wealthy Benedictine abbeys of nuns did not succeed in obtaining the kind of exemption from episcopal visitation enjoyed by some male houses of corresponding stature, though, money and social status did not in and of themselves ensure nuns’ autonomy. In considering the more liberal visitation practices of the Brigittine and Franciscan traditions, it is also important to remember that both rules were written for women (not for men and then adapted for women) by women who were very interested in preserving distinctive religious identities. I do not wish to argue that Birgitta, Clare, and Isabella escaped or entirely rejected traditional gendered ideologies in religion. Furthermore, the rules which gained papal approval were not precisely what these women first envisioned. The Brigittine and Isabella rules do, however, bear witness to their female creators’ concerns with the power dynamics in relationships between women religious and the clergy. Additionally, although Franciscan and Brigittine ceremonies of visitation, like services of profession in these traditions, have much in common with Benedictine procedures, the differences have far-reaching implications. The structures of textual, material, and symbolic exchanges in Franciscan and Brigittine visitation ceremonies are less restrictive than in the Benedictine tradition. Franciscan and Brigittine visitations reinforce nuns’ legitimate access to material and spiritual resources (access grounded in profession in these orders), and they present additional opportunities for women religious to lay claim to specifically female authority.

The Benefits of a Divine Spouse, or Brides of Christ, Part 2

The preeminence of nuptial identity in Benedictine profession, which prompts clerics to stress the value of nuns’ chastity, to underscore the need to protect nuns’ reputation as a guarantee of that value, and, concomitantly, to emphasize claustration, clearly results in certain material detriments for Benedictine nuns. Submission to the authority of clerical stand-ins for earthly fathers and the divine spouse is not, however, the end of the story of religious identity for Benedictine brides of Christ. The identity of bride of Christ is Janus-faced; the very elements of that identity which lead to constraint also lead to empowerment. McNamara has observed that the nuptial discourse of profession metaphorically empowers the nun as “consort of the lord of the universe,”¹²⁵ an identification which suggests the symbolic capital available through profession to Benedictine women religious in conjunction with the constraining baggage of nuptiality. Additionally, while, as I have argued, the potential for the authority created for Brigittine and Franciscan nuns through mobilizations of maternity is largely absent from Benedictine profession and visitation ceremonies, the possibilities suggested by maternal imagery are not entirely unavailable to Benedictine nuns in other ideological scripts. To explore these complexities of religious identity for Benedictine nuns, I turn now to the Ordo consecrationis sanctimonialium used at the Benedictine nunnery of St. Mary’s, Winchester, and a fifteenth-century ritual for the benediction of an abbess used in Benedictine houses.

The version of the Ordo consecrationis sanctimonialium used at St. Mary’s, Winchester, in the early sixteenth century is in MS Cambridge, University Library Mm 3.13. As Anne Bagnall Yardley, who has published an edition of the eleven primary musical portions of the Ordo, notes, “The manuscript is attributed to St. Mary’s on the basis of the inscription on a blank leaf at the beginning of the manuscript: ‘Hic liber attinet ad monasterium monialium sanctae mariae in civitate winton. Ex dono Reverendi in Christo patris, Domini Ricardi Fox, ejusdem civitatis Episcopi, et dicti monasterii benefactoris praecipi.’”¹²⁶ As Yardley points out, this manuscript provides us with a version of the service intended for use by the nuns themselves, and it therefore contains “more detailed rubrics than most of the pontificals.”¹²⁷ Since it illuminates in detail the ways in which the nuns participated in the ritual, it allows us to consider the ways in which the nuns may have interpreted the ideological scripts given to them as they engaged in this highly significant performance of religious identity.

Nuptial imagery and discourse are central to the service; there is, for instance, an elaborate, complexly dramatized ceremony in which the nuns’ rings are blessed and presented twice to them.¹²⁸ The chants are drawn from the liturgies for Saints Agnes and Agatha, who are certainly “appropriate female images” and saints whose “great devotion to Christ as spouse would serve as an example” for the nuns.¹²⁹ The chants which the nuns sing do not, however, merely reinforce the nuns’ submission to spousal authority, since Agnes and Agatha are not simply meek and obedient brides of Christ. Indeed, the vitae of these saints reveal that they used their marriages to Christ as grounds to resist patriarchal authority embodied in fathers and suitors. For instance, when the prefect’s son proposes to St. Agnes, offering her great treasure if she will marry him, Agnes refuses, saying she has a richer, more powerful, and more worthy lover.¹³⁰ Jocelyn Wogan-Browne has persuasively argued for the potentially empowering aspects of the stories of virgin martyrs for female audiences, aspects that supplement the regulatory elements of the hagiographical texts. She points to the “possibility of resistant readings which in particular contexts may constitute relative empowerment or recuperation.”¹³¹ She observes, for example, that the “virgin heroines can both gaze and answer back and are shown as much cleverer than their tormenters.”¹³² The presence of Agnes and Agatha—active and authoritative brides of Christ—via their liturgies in the ideological script of the Benedictine Ordo also suggests the potentially empowering dimensions of the identity of divine spouse for Benedictine nuns.

The language of the chants also reveals the symbolic capital available to the nuns through the high social status inherent in their hypergamous unions with Christ. As Johnson argues, “The rich tradition of the nun as the espoused of Christ gave to professed women a unique valued status in the Middle Ages.”¹³³ For instance, after the ring is first placed on the nun’s finger by the bishop, she sings Anulo suo from the liturgy of St. Agnes: “Annulo suo subarravit me Dominus meus Ihesus Christus et tanquam sponsam decoravit me corona Alleluya.”¹³⁴ The instructions in the manuscript direct the nun to hold up “hir hand soo hygh that the people may see it.”¹³⁵ She thus publicly proclaims that she, like Agnes whose words she sings, has the highest ranking spouse possible, and so, as the image of the crown suggests, is entitled to the social as well as the spiritual benefits of such status.

Just as the constraining baggage of nuptial discourse had material manifestations for Benedictine nuns, so too did the symbolic capital translate into concrete benefits. The Benedictine nuns of Barking, for instance, enjoyed a rich textual culture, as attested by their observation of the Benedictine requirement for the annual distribution and mandatory reading of books.¹³⁶ The nuns’ status as brides of Christ may have increased their chances to read sophisticated religious texts. Their already high social rank was perhaps raised even higher by the symbolic “boost” nuns enjoyed as brides of Christ, the highest-ranking spouse of all. As Nicholas Watson has argued, in the period following Arundel’s Constitutions, the aristocracy, rather than society as a whole, became the only audience permitted to read vernacular theology.¹³⁷ So, any enhancement of social status could only play a beneficial factor in enabling the Barking nuns to gain access to works of vernacular theology in the post-Arundelian era when such texts were regarded with suspicion and even criminalized. Significantly, as A. I. Doyle observes, the nuns at Barking “were in the fore-front of the public” for these works of vernacular theology, and they were “readliy supplied” with such texts as The Clensyng of Mannes Sowle.¹³⁸ Indeed, the nuns at Barking possessed a text which seems likely to have been regarded as especially dangerous—BL Add. MS 10596, a fifteenth-century manuscript including selections from revised translations of the Lollard Bible, which remained in the community’s library at least through the late fifteenth century or early sixteenth century.¹³⁹

Nuns, living under clerical supervision and theoretically enclosed (and so prevented from disseminating widely any threatening ideas gleaned from independent-minded reading of vernacular theology), were certainly a less troubling audience for such texts than other lay women and lay men. The vernacular translations of the Benedictine Rule examined in Chapter 2 reveal, however, that those clerics opposed to vernacular theology were not unaware of the empowerment such texts enabled for nuns, nor did they ignore what were, from their perspective, the attendant threats posed by nuns’ access to these texts. These facts further highlight the significance of the sophisticated literate cultures of some Benedictine communities, attesting to the brides of Christs’ ability to command respect both socially and spiritually.

The symbolic capital to which the Ordo suggests that Benedictine nuns had access when they became brides of Christ is accompanied in rituals for the benediction of newly elected Benedictine abbesses by opportunities to lay claim to maternal authority. In a form of the ritual used in the fifteenth century, the bishop tells the abbess, “Take here the moderly overseying and provydence of this the flock of God, and the cure and charge of ther bodyes and of ther sowles. And be to them a mother, a guyder, and a faythfull governer.”¹⁴⁰ His final speech to her also grants her “plenary and full power and auctoryte of all this monastery and of all therunto belongynge, ynwardly and owtewardly, spiritually and temporally.”¹⁴¹

This ritual for benediction does take pains to reinforce patriarchal hierarchy and to undercut maternal authority. The Benedictine abbess as mother is repeatedly reminded of her spousal role and of the feminine weakness which necessitate her and her nuns’ subordination to paternal figures. For instance, the abbess is especially charged to keep the nuns of the monastery “pure and chaste virgyns”–that is, to preserve the essential purity vital for brides of Christ. In order to protect this crucial chastity, she is admonished to “have dylygente watche and good eye on them, that they wander not abroad.”¹⁴² She is directed to keep “the rules ordeyned of the holy fathers” as well as her “frayle nature will permytt and suffer.”¹⁴³ Furthermore, the ritual opens with the abbess promising the bishop “fidelyte and true subjectyon, obedyence, and reuerence … to yow Reverend Father yn God.”¹⁴⁴ In spite of these strictures, though, given an abbess’s experience of the daily business of running a religious community, she might easily hear the language of maternity in the benediction as a mandate for her autonomy and authority, for her “maternal right to command.” Additionally, as we shall see in the second chapter, the possibilities of abbesses wielding maternal authority, and the larger implications of such authority for the status of women in the spiritual realm, were disturbingly real enough to figure prominently in clerical efforts to reinforce their own authority over nuns.

The Ordo from St. Mary’s, Winchester, and the Benedictine ritual for the benediction of an abbess underline the complexities and contradictions inherent in the construction of religious identities. These complexities and contradictions were amplified as later medieval nuns went about the daily business of living as brides of Christ in the marketplace. Ecclesiastical authorities continually reinforced material and spiritual restrictions on women religious, as the exploration of vernacular translations of monastic rules for nuns in the next chapter demonstrates. As we shall see in the third chapter, however, nuns’ everyday practices continually provided “visible indices” of identities that both expanded and reinterpreted the complex identities provided for them in their foundational ideological scripts.¹⁴⁵