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From the origins of Christianity in the first century CE, women were intimately involved with the Christian religion and were full participants in the Roman Catholic Church. This chapter will first address how women expressed their religious views in medieval Christian society. The second part of the chapter will address those medieval women who made religious devotion their vocation and lived as nuns or members of religious communities. Religious devotion for women took many forms. Women lived in communities or by themselves; they might be virgins, married women, single women, or widows; and, despite the rigors of religious life, their vocations sometimes allowed them unusual forms of power and influence. They were often upper-class women, but poorer women could also seek to live religious lives. Religion could provide opportunities for self-expression and self-determination for women of many backgrounds.
DAILY RELIGIOUS PRACTICE
In the Middle Ages, belief in the Christian God and, by extension, the ritual and theology of the Roman Catholic Church, was dominant. In the early Middle Ages, as the Roman Catholic Church expanded across Europe, its leaders sought to make religious practice uniform and diverse customary beliefs orthodox. This effort stretched into the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the church was at the peak of its power and influence. Views of God and religion shaped everyday life for medieval people.
In the fourth century CE, the doctrine on the nature of God had been decided by a series of meetings held between bishops of the major Roman cities, the most important of which was the Council of Nicaea (325 CE). By 400 CE, the church understood God to be three persons in one: God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Mankind, because of the errors of Adam and Eve, was doomed to be damned to a fiery hell but could hope for salvation through the merits and forgiveness offered by Jesus. Medieval women, therefore, lived in a society that believed that salvation should be the goal of every Christian. This salvation hinged on faith, religious practices such as prayer, and divine grace. As we saw in chapter two, women were considered to have a spiritual deficit because of the story of Adam and Eve, so preachers consistently emphasized to them that they were naturally inferior to men and were worse sinners than men.
Concern with salvation affected not only women’s behavior on Sundays but also dictated the calendar of the year, which revolved around a series of major holidays, especially Christmas (December 25), Easter (in the spring on a varying schedule), and Pentecost (five weeks after Easter). As we saw in previous chapters, religious beliefs about salvation also informed the ceremonies that attended birth, marriage, and death. Seven of these ceremonies, called the sacraments (a word that means “to consecrate”), were understood as active signs of God’s grace. Most of them required the presence and participation of a priest. Baptism took place shortly after a child’s birth and confirmation, around age twelve or thirteen. Marriage was not considered a sacrament until the early thirteenth century, as discussed in chapter two. Penance was the ceremony by which an individual was forgiven of their sins, usually after confession to a priest. Holy orders consecrated a man (women were not allowed to be priests) to the priesthood. At the end of life, extreme unction followed the last confession and prepared the believer for death.
Among the sacraments, the Eucharist, or Holy Communion, particularly influenced medieval women’s religious lives. The Eucharist consisted of a ceremony in which bread and wine were blessed in order to make them turn into the body and blood of Christ, a doctrine called transubstantiation. This made the Eucharist a way of directly having contact with Christ. Among medieval Christians, some people took part in the Eucharist only once a year, but some people with strong religious beliefs, like the mystics described below, took the Eucharist every week or sometimes even every day. The Eucharist was embedded in a larger ceremony called the mass, a series of religious practices done in a prescribed order several times a day. Beginning in the twelfth century, families sometimes financially supported masses or priests with money in the hopes that their sins or their relatives’ sins would be forgiven (Lynch 1992, 280). Religion was intertwined with most issues in the daily life of medieval people.
Hours and Days
The medieval day was divided into sections referred to as the canonical hours, referring to the specific prayers that were said at particular times of the day and night. Monks and nuns, as we will discuss below, observed a worship schedule according to the canonical hours. Upper-class women outside of the cloister, some of whom had books of hours, could keep the canonical hours themselves by praying specific prayers at specific times of day. Cecily, Duchess of York (1415–1495 CE), provides an example of a noblewoman who organized her day around religious services: she rose at seven in the morning, prayed with her chaplain, heard two masses before lunch, prayed extensively in the afternoon, and heard the last service of the day before retiring at eight o’clock. Cecily also read the work of women mystics such as Mechtilde of Hackeborn and Catherine of Siena, introduced below (Leyser 1995, 232–233).
Women with less leisure to worship quite so extensively were also encouraged to observe religious practices whenever they could. In the early fourteenth-century poem “How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter,” the speaker advised her child to “Go to church whene’er thou may,” and to be quiet and respectful while she prayed the rosary (Furnivall and Rickert 1908, 31). As in many societies, affluence and education allowed for a broader range of religious practices; only women who could afford to do so had the liberty to devote large parts of their lives to observation of religious duties.
Saints, Relics, and Pilgrimage
Medieval Christians believed that certain people, known as saints, had lived lives or had suffered deaths devoted to God and had the power to intercede with God on their behalf. As the people of the Middle Ages understood God to be remote and all-powerful, many chose to depend on saints to intercede for them before him. Contact with the saints could be achieved through prayer or by touching or venerating the relic of a saint, often a bone or personal item that had belonged to him or her. The most important saint of the Middle Ages was certainly the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, whose veneration as a saint became especially popular in the thirteenth century and continued throughout the late Middle Ages. Medieval women often devoted their prayers to Mary. According to the list of Mary’s miracles compiled in the early fifteenth century, Mary heard all prayers made to her and performed dramatic miracles, even for those who had sinned. In one story, a nun called Beatrice, who had been very devoted to Mary, left the convent and became a prostitute. When she returned to her convent one day, she asked the gatekeeper if he knew a nun named Beatrice. He replied that he had never met her, because Beatrice was a nun who had never left the convent and who had lived a blameless life. To her astonishment, Beatrice found that the Virgin Mary had assumed her looks and had kept her place in the convent during the years when she had been a prostitute. She returned to the convent and confessed her sins (Shinners 1997, 135–136). Stories like this one, widely circulated in sermons and by word of mouth, increased devotion to Mary all around Europe.
Slightly below Mary in importance was a level of saint whose veneration was widespread, such as the twelve apostles or important historical martyrs like St. Catherine of Alexandria (ca. fourth century). Some of these saints were credited with healing specific health problems. Medieval people sometimes chose to make journeys called pilgrimages to visit the relics of an important saint, believing that their illnesses would be cured or that their sins would be forgiven. Pilgrimage became especially important beginning in the eleventh century, when peaceful travel became easier and more people chose to take the road to visit famous sites. Jerusalem and Rome were, by far, the most important pilgrimage sites, but there were many sites closer to home for medieval women. Two of the most visited were the cathedral of Cologne, which claimed to have relics of the Three Magi, and Santiago de Compostela, in Spain, which claimed the relics of the apostle James. After the murder of the archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket in 1170 in England, his relics also became the foundation of an important pilgrimage site, as is recorded in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (late fourteenth century). Visiting some of these major sites earned the pilgrim a plenary indulgence, which meant forgiveness of all one’s sins. Some smaller pilgrimage sites offered lesser spiritual benefits.
Aside from more well-known saints, many communities had their own local holy people—some approved by the central church and some not—whom they solicited for help. Before the church developed its official method of declaring sainthood in the twelfth century, communities venerated their local holy people as they chose; in the later Middle Ages, local communities pushed for the canonization of their holiest citizens through official channels. In 1318, the people of Cortona, Italy, sent representatives to the papal court to speak for the canonization of Margaret of Cortona (1247–1297), a local Franciscan tertiary who lived a life of intense piety and service. Unfortunately, the people of Cortona did not succeed in attracting the attention of anyone powerful in the papal government, so Margaret was not canonized. Instead of continuing to push for her official recognition, the city honored St. Margaret with a feast day and later built a church that was consecrated in her honor. In this way, local communities sometimes got around the requirements of the papacy by going forward on their own (Vauchez 1993, 158–160).
Documents from pilgrimage sites confirm that women often went on pilgrimage, despite worries from authorities that traveling out in public would be an opportunity for wanton sexual behavior (Craig 2009, 261). When women went on pilgrimage, they often emphasized their roles as caregivers of the ill and suffering, taking to the road to pray for others. As we saw in chapter two, women often connected relics to successful pregnancies or births, so many miracles recorded at saints’ shrines were miracles having to do with fertility or with lactation (producing milk). Saints’ relics were also understood to work on mental illness, interpreted as demonic possession, along with physical illness. Bishop Adalhelm of Sées (ninth century) recorded in his Miracles of St. Opportuna one example of such a miracle. A woman named Olbiregis suffered for a long time under a condition that caused her limbs to flail about uncontrollably. Her husband brought her to Opportuna’s grave where, after some setbacks, she eventually regained control of her body and senses. She and her husband recognized this as a miraculous cure, and the story says Olbiregis spent the rest of her life serving God in thanks (Rubin 2009, 223–224).
One of the well-known woman pilgrims of the Middle Ages was Margery Kempe (1373–1438), whose autobiography told of the life experiences of a laywoman in England at the turn of the fifteenth century. Kempe’s experiences provide us with one image of the everyday life of a middle-class medieval woman. Kempe began to have mystical experiences later in life and traveled to multiple pilgrimage sites, including Jerusalem, Rome, and Compostela. Her mystical experiences, which came with uncontrollable weeping and a great desire to correct other people’s faults, did not always endear her to her traveling companions. We can appreciate, however, the ways in which spirituality became the backbone of her life, to the exclusion of all other commitments. (Read more about Margery Kempe in chapter seven.)
Origins of Female Monasticism
From the time of early Christianity, some women chose to dedicate their lives exclusively to serving God. This service, according to the early church, required self-denial, such as chastity, solitude, and devotion to prayer. By the fourth century CE, some Christian men and women chose to live solitary lives as hermits, often in the deserts of Syria and North Africa. Anthony of Alexandria (251–356 CE) was one of the early practitioners of desert asceticism, but his biographer states that before he became a hermit, Anthony settled his younger sister with a community “of faithful virgins of good repute to be brought up according to their example” (White 1998, 10). Specific information about these early communities is hard to find, but consecrated women of this period in church history seem to have lived in communities more often than men did. In the early fifth, century a bishop named Palladius surveyed the hermits in Egypt and reported that there were 18,900 men and 3,095 women living as hermits in the desert. He also reported finding twenty thousand women and ten thousand men living religious lives in Oxyrhynchus, an Egyptian city (Ranft 1996, 2). Almost constant devotion to prayer and sometimes intentional physical suffering, through self-whipping or long periods without food, made the life of a hermit difficult to sustain. Still, some women believed that their salvation depended on such ascetic practices. One famous example is that of St. Mary of Egypt (fourth to fifth century), who lived as a hermit in the desert. A former prostitute, she felt such guilt at her sinful nature that she stayed in the desert, naked except for her hair, for decades.
The harsh life required of hermits prompted some groups of men and women to gather in institutions called monasteries. In the fourth and fifth centuries, many important women’s monasteries were founded in Europe. In France, Lérins, off the coast of southern France, was founded by Honoratus of Arles in 410; Marseilles was founded in 415 by John Cassian. Both of these communities had a women’s and a men’s house situated near each other. The French houses were founded before women’s houses in Britain, the earliest of which date from the seventh century, and which were founded by Anglo-Saxon royal women (Schulenberg 1989, 265–266). German foundations followed in the eighth and ninth centuries, including Nonnberg, founded by Bishop Rupert of Worms, a nunnery that is still active today. Spain, Dalmatia, and Bohemia had Benedictine monasteries by the eleventh century, while Poland and Portugal had foundations that dated from the twelfth century. The Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark also had Benedictine foundations that dated from the early twelfth century (Ranft 1996, 45).
Recent scholarship has shown that early women’s religious houses used many types of literature to form their own guidelines for living a religious lifestyle: letters, sermons, and saints’ biographies could all provide guidance for women gathered together in a convent (Lifshitz 2014, 148–149). By the sixth century, some male writers had begun producing written rules for such communities. The first was Caesarius of Arles (ca. 470–542), who founded a convent for his sister Caesaria in honor of St. John in about 512 CE. Caesarius’s The Rule for Nuns of St. Caesarius of Arles was informed by the theological writings of St. Augustine and other writers, but it was also a practical guide to the monastic life for women. Caesarius insisted that all the nuns of the convent of St. John be literate and specified that each nun should spend at least two hours a day reading. They were also to dress in undyed clothes and spend their work time producing wool fabric to supply the house (Caesarius 1960, 175–176, 179). Most importantly, Caesarius promoted what was called enclosure: the nuns were not allowed to leave the monastery at all without the abbess’s permission. He wrote that “no one of you up to the time of her death, [should] be permitted to go forth from the monastery . . . or presume on her own to go out” (Caesarius 1960, 188). Ecclesiastical authorities argued that enclosure increased the safety both of the nuns and of the general public (meaning men), who might be tempted by unmarried women. The abbess controlled how strictly this rule was applied.
Apart from St. John’s, the only other women’s monastery that used the original rule of Caesarius was the monastery of Holy Cross at Poitiers, founded around 560 by Radegund of Poitiers (ca. 520–587) alongside a men’s monastery called St. Mary. Radegund is one of the best-known women of the early Middle Ages, because three different biographies of her are still extant. A daughter of the king of Thuringia, she was married to the Merovingian king Clothar I but eventually convinced him to help her found the monastery, where she became the guiding force for a vibrant community of nuns who were highly educated, wrote creatively, educated children, and cared for the poor and sick (Ranft 1996, 22–23).
Like Radegund, abbesses of women’s monasteries in the sixth and seventh centuries enjoyed a period of unprecedented autonomy and influence. In Ireland, Brigid of Kildare (ca. 456–524/5), Moninne of Killeedy (d. ca. 518) and Ita of Killeedy (d. ca. 570) founded monasteries for women. Queen Bathilda of Ascania (ca. 620–ca. 679), wife of the Frankish king Clovis II, revived the monastery of Chelles; her contemporary, the Anglo-Saxon abbess Hilda (614–680), became the abbess of the powerful monastery of Whitby in the 650s. Many of these foundations were double monasteries, in which a men’s monastery and a women’s monastery were side by side, often sharing churches, and in which an abbess was the ruler of both houses (Ranft 1996, 16–27). The abbesses of these houses were powerful and prominent in their local communities, functioning as leaders, witnesses to legal contracts, and sometimes judges.
During the Carolingian period in the eighth and ninth centuries, monastic reformers sponsored by the crown sought to make monks and nuns observe more uniform instructions for the religious life. The most influential of the rule writers for this period was Benedict of Nursia (ca. 480–ca. 547), author of the Rule of St. Benedict. Benedict wrote in his rule that he wanted to found a “school” for serving God. Unlike some of the desert ascetics who ate and drank only sparingly and prayed constantly, Benedict’s monks and nuns were devoted to prayer but also to shared communal work and would not practice the harsh asceticism of Anthony and the early hermits.
The moderation of Benedict’s approach helped his rule become widely practiced. In 814, a church council under Charlemagne declared Benedict’s rule the required rule for both monks and nuns, and the rule has continued to shape the monastic life into the twenty-first century. As more women became nuns, Benedict’s rule provided the structure of much of their religious lives. This development carried with it, however, a disadvantage: early women’s monasteries, under powerful, usually noble abbesses, had been largely independent of royal control. The imposition of the Rule of St. Benedict robbed abbesses of the autonomy they had enjoyed in previous centuries by subjecting them to male church authorities (Ranft 1996, 32). Furthermore, the Rule of St. Benedict was designed primarily for men and had to be adjusted to make it usable for women’s houses. In the twelfth century, Héloïse of Argenteuil, abbess of a monastery, complained in a letter to her former husband that the Rule of St. Benedict did not cover important questions for her nuns. These included methods for dealing with menstruation, since monks did not normally wear underwear. Héloïse also suggested that women were biologically able to drink more alcohol than men and should therefore be allocated more wine. (Read more about Héloïse in chapter seven.)
The Rule of St. Benedict set out four vows for nuns and monks who wanted to join a monastery: poverty, meaning having no personal possessions; chastity, refraining from all sexual activity; obedience to the abbot or abbess of the monastery and to the church hierarchy; and stability, meaning staying in the same monastic house for life. Some women were given to monasteries as children and raised there until they were old enough to take vows. Other women chose to become nuns on their own or were committed to the monastic life by their families, entering the monastery as teenagers or adults. Widows, particularly those who were well-off financially, sometimes retired to monasteries. Even women who were political prisoners might live out their lives in a monastery rather than a prison.
Professing, or taking vows as a nun, was, for the most part, confined to upper-class women who could afford to pay the required contribution for the monastic profession. Most women brought money or property to the monastery in the form of a dowry, which was often not as much as a genuine marriage portion might be but which would, in theory, support the new nun in her career. In France in the central Middle Ages, the average monastic dowry was less in comparison to dowries intended for marriage. A doctrinal controversy arose over the practice of accepting dowries in the late twelfth century. Some jurists regarded giving dowries as making payments, which made them a form of simony, selling church positions for money, an abuse that the church had been trying to eliminate. Parents, however, continued to wish to dower their daughters, and the practice remained in effect in nunneries all over Europe (Johnson 1991, 24–25).
A woman who professed as a nun became an important connection between her family and the monastery, and families often had close relationships with monasteries where their family members were nuns. Aunts and nieces or mothers and daughters might decide to profess at the same religious house. Sisters professing at the same house were even more frequent, either because younger sisters looked up to older sisters as examples or because their families already had relationships with the religious houses. Documents show that these relationships were often long-lasting. A knight called Walter of Rupefort gave land to make it possible for his three daughters, Joanna, Alice, and Philippa, to become nuns at the French abbey of Notre-Dame des Voisins in the thirteenth century, making a bargain to provide for his daughters’ future (Johnson 1991, 20). Similar documents exist for many other women’s monasteries throughout the Middle Ages.
Some moralists of the period criticized families who had several children and chose to commit some of them to the religious life, saying their motives were more to feed their excess children than to make offerings to God. Documents that record the profession of nuns, however, emphasized the gift of a child as benefiting the souls of her parents and further kinship group as an oblate—literally, an “offering.” Becoming a nun required a trial period of one year, and then a period of learning called the novitiate for three years. Novices were clothed with a nun’s habit but did not receive the nun’s signature veil (an over-the-head covering, often black) until they made their final vows to stay in the monastery for the rest of their lives.
Daily Routine in a Benedictine Monastery
The central focus of the religious life under the Rule of St. Benedict was prayer. Religious women in monasteries performed a rigorous series of services in which texts from the book of Psalms were sung in a prescribed order according to a calendar. The sisters performed these canonical hours every day. They rose at around two o’clock in the morning to take part in the night service, called matins. Services then followed on a roughly regular schedule: lauds (at dawn), prime (about six o’clock), terce (about nine o’clock), sext (about noon), nones (about three o’clock), vespers (about six o’clock), and compline (just before bedtime at around nine o’clock). In winter, when the days were shorter, the intervals between services were shrunk so that the canonical hours would still be distinct from each other (Lawrence 1984, 29).
Between services, the Rule specified that the sisters would do manual labor and attend to the administration of the monastery, including producing food and clothing. By the High Middle Ages, the demands of the prayer schedule led to a class-based division between the nuns: in wealthy nunneries, the upper-class women who entered the monastery became choir nuns, whose job was to sing the church services, and lower-class women became lay sisters, who were charged with doing most of the manual labor. In wealthy houses, the choir nuns were given manual tasks such as needlework or manuscript copying. In poorer communities, however, the choir nuns did their own housework.
The person who oversaw the administration of the monastery was the abbess, whom the nuns called “mother.” She supervised the other officers of the monastery: the cellarer, who was responsible for the food supply; the sacristan, who prepared the vessels and other items for religious services; and the infirmarer, who maintained an infirmary for nuns who fell ill or required care. In large houses, the abbess had a second in command who was called the prioress. These officers oversaw a group of buildings that generally included a church, a dormitory with a refectory (a dining hall), latrines, stables, a kitchen and bakery, and a chapter house where the nuns could congregate for periodic administrative meetings. The church and dormitory were often connected by a cloister, an open area surrounded by a covered walkway. In larger monasteries, the abbess might have her own residence, and in many, a guest house provided lodging for visitors (Williams and Echols 1994, 120).
The main meal of the day was luncheon, right after the canonical hour of Sext, which St. Benedict directed should consist of two or three cooked dishes in addition to bread (one pound or 0.45 kg per day, per person) and about half a bottle of wine per person (approximately half a liter). During the meal, one of the sisters read aloud from a religious book chosen by the abbess, but otherwise, the sisters ate in silence.
Clothing was to be simple and inexpensive and suited to the climate where the monastery was located. Nuns under the Rule of St. Benedict had little personal space, especially by modern standards, and very little privacy. St. Benedict directed that all the nuns in a given religious house should sleep in one room, if possible, though this directive was relaxed as the centuries passed to allow individual cells (small rooms) for sleeping. A light was kept burning in this dormitory all night to prevent sexual activity or disruption.
The Rule was very strict with regard to personal deportment and behavior. It required unquestioning obedience to the abbess without grumbling. A sister who grumbled might be privately chastised to show better respect, but if that sister continued to complain, the abbess might excommunicate her. In this context, excommunication consisted of banishment from the table during meals, eating only after the other sisters were served, or even solitary confinement. After a period of time, the abbess ordered a ceremony in which the excommunicated sister could attain forgiveness.
The abbess of a Benedictine monastery was required to question a potential novice at regular intervals over the course of a year to make sure the postulant truly wanted to adopt the religious life. If at any point the novice wished to, she could renounce the religious life and leave the monastery. If she stayed, she eventually took her solemn vows to stay in the monastery for the rest of her life (Fry et al. 1981, 220–223, 266–269).
It is difficult to know how often women who entered monasteries actively chose the life for themselves, since women’s choices were constrained by class and family obligations. Sources on both sides show that some women had strong desires to fulfill their religious beliefs by taking the veil, and some women clearly chafed against the discipline of a religious life they had not chosen. One example is Christina of Markyate (ca. 1096–1155), an Anglo-Saxon woman who wanted to serve God so passionately that she ran away from home and from her fiancé to avoid the loss of her virginity. Christina eventually became an anchoress who was confined to a small room next to the church and lived the rest of her life in prayer, attracting a group of followers around her that developed into a monastic settlement (Ranft 1996, 43). Later medieval saints’ lives have many examples of upper-class women who resisted their families’ attempts to marry them off and pursued the religious life instead. Margaret of Hungary (1242–1270), having entered a Dominican convent, aroused the opposition of her father, King Bela IV of Hungary, by refusing to marry. When he attempted to take Margaret from her convent, she refused and said she would cut her face with a knife rather than be married, saying, “To me it is better to be without lips in paradise than to go to hell with my nose and lips” (Vauchez 1993, 179, 304). Horrified, her father gave up.
There are also examples of women who disliked the religious life or who found the vow of chastity to be a burden. When Archbishop Eudes Rigaud visited the French monastery of La-Salle-aux-Puelles in 1249 to conduct an inspection, he found that several of the nuns had relationships with men, and one of the sisters had even given birth to a child (Amt 2010, 203). In chansons de nonne, “nuns’ songs,” poems in which the narrator is a nun, the speakers complained about their circumstances and wished to leave the convent. One author wrote, “God give much unhappiness to the one who . . . put me in the cloister” (Williams and Echols 1994, 122–123). A story from the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) depicted the nuns of a small convent as promiscuous, wearing out the man who worked in their garden with sex. One of the nuns in the story remarked that these sins were unimportant, for “We are constantly making [God] promises that we don’t keep!” (Boccaccio 1995, 195).
FINANCES AND ENDOWMENTS
In the early Middle Ages, some nunneries became very large and wealthy, supported by donations from aristocratic families and by the property that women brought when they professed as nuns. Such wealthy monasteries were places where royal women could and did become nuns, living in comfort. Matilda of Ringelheim (ca. 894–968), queen of Germany and empress of the Holy Roman Empire, founded the monastery of Quedlinburg in 936 in memory of her husband, Henry I. Quedlinburg was a foundation made up of canonesses living under the rule of St. Augustine, and many noble women chose to become sisters there. One of the biographies of Queen Matilda states that the queen and her husband decided to move a group of nuns living at Wendhausen to the nunnery at Quedlinburg. At Wendhausen, the women were from good families but were distressingly poor, so much so that their “kinfolk were unhappy to have them remain amidst so much poverty” (Scheck 2009, 30). We must assume, then, that the foundation at Quedlinburg allowed the sisters to live in a more comfortable style. In contrast, some nunneries were smaller, poorer, and dependent on their donors for support. When Eudes Rigaud, archbishop of Rouen, visited the small Cistercian nunnery of Saint-Saens in 1257, there were sixteen nuns who farmed and subsisted on “income in coin and in kind from tenants.” The nunnery was heavily in debt and was forced to sell some of its endowed property to keep the nuns fed (Johnson 1991, 221–222).
NEW AND REFORMED RELIGIOUS ORDERS
As new religious orders proliferated in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, women and their monasteries enthusiastically sought entrance into them. Medieval ideas about women, however, shaped the opportunities that they had inside the newer religious orders. Some male monastics felt that women could not endure the tougher demands of some of the newer orders. Others resented the cura monialium, or care of nuns, which took away from men’s resources and opportunities by demanding that they supervise nuns and provide their priestly services. As a result, the roles of women inside the new movements were constrained by rules and regulations designed to keep religious women and their houses under control.
In the eleventh century, a monastic reform emanated from the monastery of Cluny, located in Burgundy, under abbot Hugh of Cluny (1024–1109). The Cluniac order claimed to strictly observe the rule of St. Benedict, and the Cluniac message attracted many wealthy donors. Hundreds of affiliated monasteries (called priories) for men, subordinate to Cluny, were founded by the time Hugh founded its first women’s house, Marcigny, in 1056. Marcigny was intended to be a religious house for women whose husbands or other male relatives chose to enter Cluny. Along with careful application of the rule of St. Benedict, Marcigny’s nuns observed strict enclosure. This pattern applied to many women’s monasteries founded under the guardianship of Cluny.
The founding of the order of Citeaux, or Cistercian order, in the early twelfth century in the region of Burgundy was the result of discontent with current Benedictine practices. The Cistercian experience provide a common model of women’s entrance into male-dominated monastic orders: resistance first; then incorporation; and finally, increasing supervision. As the order spread, women’s houses petitioned to be allowed into the order, but the Cistercian leadership resisted. Women, they argued, were not sufficiently strong to bear the discipline of the Cistercian practice. The leadership attempted to stop nunneries from being associated with the order several times. Powerful nobles intervened. Alfonso VIII of Castile (1155–1214) pressured the Cistercians to accept the nunnery he had founded, Las Huelgas de Burgos, in 1187, and the pope himself requested the incorporation of a nunnery at Vezella, in Lombardy, in 1230 (Ward 2016, 179). The number of Cistercian nunneries grew tremendously. The heads of the order prohibited letting more women’s monasteries join the Cistercian fold in 1228, but this did not solve what they saw as a problem: increasing female interest in the order, such that there were more Cistercian women’s monasteries than men’s monasteries in Germany and the Low Countries, and growing numbers in other areas as well. In addition, supervising houses that contained aristocratic women used to governing their own affairs proved to be a challenge for the administrators of the order. Two abbots made a visit to the Cistercian nunnery at Colonges in 1250 to give the nuns instructions on how to elect a new abbess, but the prioress, not recognizing their authority over her, denied them access and would not follow their instructions (Lawrence 1984, 184–185). Some Cistercian women maintained the strict lifestyle of the order but rejected the supervision of their houses and maintained control over their own administrations.
In the early twelfth century, popular preachers like Robert of Arbrissel (ca. 1045–1116), Gilbert of Sempringham (1083–1190), and Norbert of Xanten (ca. 1075–1134) were also responsible for groups of women who demanded to live a religious life under their interpretations of monasticism. Robert founded the monastery of Fontevraud in western France in 1101 to provide his female followers with a place to live. Fontevraud was a double monastery—a place in which a community of nuns and a community of monks lived on the same site but were kept entirely separate from each other. Within the community of nuns, widows, virgins and married women made up one section, while another section housed repentant prostitutes. The house also included a section for those who were ill. An abbess controlled the entire monastery, including the men’s community. Robert chose prominent noblewomen from the area to supervise the house: the first abbess was Petronilla of Chemillé, from a local noble family, whose leadership expanded the reputation of the house and its priories. The order of Fontevraud grew throughout the twelfth century and thrived throughout the Middle Ages. By 1200, the abbess of Fontevraud supervised almost seventy religious houses in central France, and the queen of England, Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122–1204), chose to retire and spend her last years at Fontevraud (Ranft 1996, 46–47; Venarde 1997, 63).
In England, Gilbert of Sempringham, founder of the Gilbertine order, also found that women were attracted to his preaching and wanted to pursue a monastic life under his direction. Gilbert placed the first seven nuns in an enclosure next to the church at Sempringham and recruited lay sisters and some lay brothers to minister to the nuns’ needs. As the community grew, Gilbert requested to have it accepted into the Cistercian order, but he was unsuccessful. Ultimately, he established the order for nuns under the rule of St. Benedict and the order for male canons under the rule of St. Augustine in an arrangement similar to that of Fontevraud. The order grew rapidly, and the nunneries became quite large. The largest, Watton, housed 150 women and 70 men. Women generally outnumbered men in Gilbertine houses; altogether, the houses totaled nine hundred women and five hundred men (Venarde 1997, 80).
Norbert, founder of the Premonstratensian order, also kept his male canons and nuns in double monasteries, adapting some of their observances from the strict rule of the Cistercian order. The order spread across Flanders and Brabant in the 1130s. Women in the order were strictly enclosed, mostly tending the sick or cleaning and mending clothes, while the men of the order traveled to preach in the region (Venarde 1997, 69–70). The structure of the double houses, however, made the leaders of the order concerned about the opportunities for temptation inherent in having men and women too close to one another. The Premonstratensians were sufficiently worried about this problem that they attempted to reorganize their double houses after Norbert’s death in 1134 (Ward 2016, 179). Houses of nuns were relocated to areas away from the male canons, ostensibly to resist temptation. As a result, some of the Premonstratensian houses for nuns were relatively short-lived, as the nunneries sometimes failed to thrive in their new locations (Venarde 1997, 70).
The orders of preaching friars also presented women with opportunities to serve, though not in the same ways as the male friars. Dominic (1170–1221), founder of the Dominican order or Order of Preachers, founded a monastery in 1206 for women who had been accused of the Albigensian heresy (discussed below) but had repented and were now serving penance. This early foundation included twelve nuns. Unlike the men recruited to the Dominican order, however, the sisters were not allowed to preach or teach publicly: they were to support the efforts of their male counterparts through prayer (Lawrence 1984, 215). Dominic understood the activities of the Dominican nuns as reflecting the part of Mary in the Bible (Luke 10: 38–42) and his order of male preaching friars as taking the role of Martha. Thus, both halves of the order were essential to making the work successful (Ranft 1996, 70).
Similarly, nuns of the Franciscan order, called the Poor Ladies or the Poor Clares after Francis of Assisi’s friend and follower Clare of Assisi (1194–1253), were made to separate themselves from the world in monasteries under a rule very similar to the rule of St. Benedict. Francis set out in the rule for his order that the members should own no property and support themselves by the charity of others. Clare herself deeply felt the necessity for the nuns to own absolutely no possessions, which she considered an essential part of the vita apostolica, or apostolic life. Around 1215, believing that her nuns would be forced into owning property by the administrators of the order, Clare appealed to the pope, Innocent III, who wrote a papal bull supporting the Poor Clares’ right to refrain from owning property. The bull, called the “Privilege of Poverty,” declared that no one present or in the future could attempt to make the nuns give up apostolic poverty. After Innocent’s death in 1215, however, later popes advocated the strict enclosure of all Franciscan nuns and required the houses to own property to support them. Clare was bitterly disappointed and spent the rest of her life attempting to restore what she saw as a genuine imitation of the apostles (Ranft 1996, 67).
The Bishop of Assisi gives St. Clare, founder of the Poor Clares, a palm leaf. (The Cloisters Collection, 1984. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
Their piety and asceticism made the women’s orders of the Dominicans and the Poor Clares attractive to many women and made them very successful: by the 1300s there were 150 Dominican convents in Europe, and of the Poor Clares, there were twenty-five in Germany, twenty-three in Italy, and various other foundations from England to the crusader states (Ward 2016, 175–177). In terms of religious life, however, they had more in common with enclosed orders like the Benedictines than with the men’s orders. It was considered to be dangerous not only to the women themselves but to society if nuns were allowed to wander freely to preach.
By the thirteenth century, many of the monastic orders incorporated third orders, called tertiaries, in order to allow for greater piety for laymen and women who wished to be part of a religious order but could not commit to the monastic life. Tertiaries followed the monastic lifestyle while living in their own homes, often fasting, praying, and caring for the poor. Beginning in the early 1220s, some men and women chose to live specifically as Franciscans, eventually being adopted into the Franciscan order as its third order. Other monastic groups, such as the Dominicans, also developed third orders during the thirteenth century.
LAY PIETY AND BEGUINAGE
Although their names are not in the sources, all these orders owed some of their success to the determination of women who fought to be part of religious life and, sometimes, distinguished themselves so highly that they became venerated as saints of the church. Not all these women, however, joined traditional religious orders. In the late twelfth century a movement broadly called the Umiliati appeared in northern Italy, made up of laypeople who wanted to live a religious life outside of the normal religious orders. The Umiliati were the beginning of a larger movement of laypeople who believed in living in poverty like the apostles. In 1221, Pope Innocent III approved the Order of the Penitents, called the Ordo Poenitentiae. Members of this order lived at home, wearing distinctive undyed robes. They fasted more strictly than regular Christians and recited the canonical hours daily. Married women who were part of this order had to have their husbands’ permission to join, but otherwise women could participate fully in the lifestyle shaped by the movement (Vauchez 1993, 121–122).
In northern Europe, also beginning in the late twelfth century, the growth of cities and towns produced a surplus of women who were unmarried and who wished to pursue a religious life but who could not or did not want to become nuns or tertiaries in established religious orders. Some women chose to live lives of poverty and prayer in their own homes, and in northern cities, in areas such as Flanders and Brabant, groups of women collected together in urban houses that took the place of monasteries. Their purpose was to live the vita apostolica, or life in imitation of the apostles. They were called by many different names, including mulieres sanctae, meaning “holy women,” and Beguines, a word of uncertain origin. Although they practiced poverty and chastity, Beguines did not take vows and could leave to marry if they wished. Some communities of Beguines worked lace, made textiles, or otherwise supported themselves by working in concert (Lawrence 1984, 187–188). Some women who began living as Beguines eventually became tertiaries of religious orders.
The Beguine movement gave rise to many important religious women, both inside and outside of orthodoxy. Marie of Oignies (1177–1213), who was from an upper-class family in Belgium, lived a life of harsh asceticism in the city of Liège. Her follower and confessor, Jacques de Vitry (ca. 1160–1240), praised her extraordinary ascetic practices and her devotion to prayer in the biography he wrote shortly after her death. Marie’s example inspired many women, and her biography was central to the growth and support for the Beguine movement in Flanders (de Vitry 1989, 5–6). One of the most famous Beguines was Marguerite Porete (d. 1310), whose visions were recorded in her book the Mirror of Simple Souls (ca. 1300). The book circulated widely despite having been deemed heretical by ecclesiastical authorities. Porete refused to disavow her visionary experiences and was burned at the stake in Paris in 1310 (Ward 2016, 206). (Read more about Marguerite Porete in chapter seven.)
The burning of Porete, concern about the sexual habits and religious orthodoxy of the Beguines, and a heresy called the Free Spirit provoked Pope Boniface VIII into calling a church council at Vienne in 1311–1312. He decreed that Beguines were not to be allowed the privileges of an order of nuns because they did not take vows like nuns or follow a rule. Ecclesiastical officials began to force Beguines into more established (and usually enclosed) orders in the fourteenth century. By the fifteenth century, the movement had largely disappeared into the other monastic orders of the period.
MYSTICISM
A mystic is a person who seeks spiritual union with God through religious practices. Christian mysticism has deep roots in the scriptures, but mystical writing in the early Middle Ages belonged to men. Beginning in the twelfth century, however, women like Marie of Oignies and Marguerite Porete expanded on the notion of experiencing God personally through spiritual union. Over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, women mystics proliferated around Europe. They came from very different backgrounds. Some were from wealthy families, like Mechtilde of Hackeborn (1240–1298), who was born to a noble Thuringian house and entered the monastery of Helfta at the age of seven. Others were from middle-class families, like Margery Kempe (1373–1438), discussed above, who began having visions after she was married and had borne fourteen children. In general, female mysticism in the Middle Ages was emotional and ecstatic, often provoking intense feelings of love and joy. Women were stereotyped as being overemotional, but women mystics of the period succeeded in using this stereotype to their advantage, expressing their love and sometimes their sexuality through their visionary experiences. In this way, they made what was perceived as feminine weakness into a strength based on religious fervor.
One of the earliest of the medieval female mystics was Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), a Benedictine nun and natural philosopher who began experiencing visions as a small child. Hildegard wrote three major visionary works: Scivias (an abbreviation of Sci vias domini, Know the Ways of the Lord), Liber vitae meritorum (Book of the Rewards of Life), and Liber divinorum operum (Book of Divine Works). After Pope Eugenius III (ca. 1080–1153) approved her first book, Scivias, she became a famous preacher, traveling around Germany and as far as France (Fox 2002, 3–4). (Read more about Hildegard in chapter seven.) Hildegard was not afraid to challenge important people whose behaviors she thought to be immoral, and she even wrote letters to kings. She used the moral weight that she gained from her visions to have influence over others.
Many mystics experienced ecstasies in which they had personal experiences with Christ as an infant or as an adult. Angela of Foligno (1250–1309) had visions in which she saw and touched the baby Jesus. Lutgardis of Aywières (1182–1246) had a vision in which Jesus reached into her chest, plucked out her heart, and then replaced it with his own (Ward 2016, 216; Williams and Echols 1994, 123). These kinds of experiences were characteristic of the intense female spirituality which flourished during the period.
In the thirteenth century, the monastery of Helfta, founded in 1229, became a center of female mysticism and spirituality under the abbess Gertrude of Hackeborn (1232–1291). Although the nuns of Helfta followed Cistercian practices, they were influenced by the spirituality of the Dominican order, as well as the Beguine movement. In 1270, the brilliant and controversial mystic Mechtilde of Magdeburg, a former Beguine, joined Helfta, bringing with her a large mystical work titled The Flowing Light of the Divinity. Mechtilde was one of the first mystics to write in a language other than Latin; her works were in Low German, making them more accessible to laypeople. She found a vibrant learned community and apt students for her particular form of spirituality at Helfta. Among them were Mechtilde of Hackeborn (1250–ca. 1298) and Gertrude of Helfta, often called Gertrude the Great (1256–ca. 1302). Both these women were writers and saints who became well-known for their works during the later Middle Ages (Ranft 1996, 74–75). (Read more about the women of Helfta in chapter seven.)
Mystics like Gertrude and Mechtilde occupied a difficult space within medieval religious life. Visionary experiences could give women a great deal of local and international fame. Women who spoke to God or the saints directly, however, could be accused of ignoring the role of the priesthood in mediating their relationships with God. The concept of sainthood was also becoming more complex. In the early Middle Ages, most saints were acclaimed by their local communities, and no papal authority was required; however, in the twelfth century, the church hierarchy took increasing control over the definitions and requirements for sainthood. As a result, women who were prominent in public because of their holiness had to be very careful to get an ecclesiastical stamp of approval. No one doubted that their mystical experiences were real, but visions were supposed to originate from either God or from the devil. Many writers tackled the difficult question of how to discern where visions came from. Raymond de Sabanac, a fourteenth-century writer, opined that a woman who had visions needed to be closely questioned to ascertain if she were “spiritual, discreet, mature, virtuous, Catholic and approved” (Rubin 2009, 290).
Catherine of Siena (1347–1380), an Italian mystic and Dominican tertiary, experienced ecstatic visions in which she talked to Christ, Mary, and several saints. She even envisioned a “mystical marriage,” in which was married Jesus. Such experiences gave Catherine a great reputation for holiness, and in her many letters—380 of which are still extant—she exhorted her correspondents to obey the pope and to cooperate with the church in Rome. Catherine’s fame and many travels, however, provoked criticism from those who thought she should stay home or in the cloister like a nun. Catherine replied that she traveled and preached with no other purpose in mind but the glory of God (Luongo 2006, 23–25). (Read more about Catherine in chapter seven).
Some mystics were credited with supernatural experiences that went beyond ecstasy. St. Margaret of Hungary (1242–1270) was reputed to have levitated while praying. She also received the stigmata, meaning that her hands, feet, and side were wounded as Jesus’s had been during the crucifixion (Rubin 2009, 275). The Belgian mystic Christina Mirabilis (her name can be translated as “Christina the Astonishing”), according to her biographer Thomas of Cantimpré (1201–1272), levitated, balanced on the tops of fences, climbed into ovens, and submerged herself in frigid water. She believed she could allow others to exit purgatory and stop their suffering by willingly suffering in her own body (Petroff 1986). Motivations like this one characterized female mysticism throughout the Middle Ages, though few women engaged in such starkly unusual behaviors as Christina’s.
St. Catherine of Siena, an influential mystic, gives Christ her heart in one of her visions. (Jim Emmons)
JOAN OF ARC: SAINT OR HERETIC?
Joan of Arc (ca. 1412–1431) belongs in a discussion of women and the church because her controversial, tragically short career illuminated the broad conversation considering women and their lived experiences in society in the fifteenth century. Her life has inspired a multitude of published works in many different languages, a broad filmography, and even conspiracy theories. Joan was born in a village called Domrémy, in the Vosges region of France, during the Hundred Years’ War. She belonged to a well-off peasant family. Her early life and everyday habits can, in some ways, be reconstructed from the testimony she gave at her trial and from the witnesses at her retrial some years after her death. Joan lived a normal life for a fifteenth-century girl: she had three brothers and one sister, shared a room with her sister, sewed, spun, and looked after her family’s animals. She even told her inquisitors that “in sewing and spinning she feared no woman in Rouen” (Taylor 2009, 8). Her friends found her serious and devout.
As an adolescent, she began hearing voices that she eventually identified as Saint Margaret of Antioch, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and the archangel Michael. These voices encouraged her to leave home and offer her military service to the dauphin of France, Charles de Valois (later Charles VII, 1403–1461), who was embroiled in a difficult war with England and its ally, Burgundy. Her first attempts to convince the local commander, Robert de Baudricourt, of her visions were unsuccessful, but in 1429, she persuaded him to allow her an escort to join the dauphin at Chinon. The dauphin required Joan to submit to questioning by ecclesiastical officials to determine whether her mystical experiences came from God or the devil. Joan convinced them that she could aid the dauphin both in raising a difficult siege at the city of Orléans and in freeing the city of Rheims, where he would be crowned king of France. She was a leader of the forces that achieved both these goals. Wearing armor and men’s clothing, Joan became the inspiration of the forces in France.
Over the course of the next year, from the spring of 1429 to the spring of 1430, Joan and her allies, deputized by the new king of France, continued to take towns and strongholds for the French army. She carried a sword that she had predicted would be found behind a church altar, although it seems to have been purely honorary. It seemed that her forces could not lose. In May 1430, Joan was attempting to protect the city of Compiègne when she was cut off from her followers and captured by the Burgundian army. She was interrogated over the course of several weeks by the bishop of Beauvais and several other ecclesiastical officials, again to determine whether she was a saint or a heretic. Not surprisingly, the pro-English judges found her guilty of heresy and handed her over to the secular government to be executed. She was burned at the stake in Rouen on May 30, 1431. Several decades later, the papacy required a retrial, this time under French control, at which Joan’s conviction for heresy was withdrawn and her reputation rehabilitated. She was made a saint in 1920.
Joan’s story fascinates modern people because of the amazing circumstances: an ordinary peasant girl from northern France was catapulted into prominence because of her mystical voices. Unlike other mystics of the time, however, her prominence was political rather than religious. The records that survive of her interrogation in 1430 provide a window onto what the judges thought was most suspicious about her mystical experiences. It was simple for them to claim that her voices were of demonic rather than heavenly origin. They particularly emphasized that she wore men’s clothing, against which a number of Bible verses could be quoted, and argued that she was indecent as a result. One English noble referred to her as “that disorderly and deformed travesty of a woman who dresses like a man” (Hotchkiss 1996, 57).
In her second trial, however, when the judges were more favorably disposed toward Joan, her voices and her wearing of men’s clothes were recast as evidence of her heavenly inspiration. The theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) wrote that a woman might assume men’s dress in times of necessity, particularly for the sake of modesty or protecting her virginity. Writers of the period argued that Joan, while certainly protecting her virginity, had also taken on an aspect of masculine identity in order to do God’s will (Hotchkiss 1996, 57–60). By abandoning her everyday life and its chores, Joan provoked extremely strong reactions, both positive and negative, depending upon the political affiliation of those who wrote about her.
CONCLUSION
When we study women’s everyday lives in the Middle Ages, we must take their religious lives strongly into account. Rituals and visions could provide ways through which medieval women connected directly with God, bypassing male control. The people of the Middle Ages believed in the afterlife, the need for the remission of sins, and most believed in the role of the church for forgiveness. Women of the period understood their duties and responsibilities to rest on a foundation of religious morality. Immoral behavior, therefore, was not just wrong but also dangerous to an orderly society. In the next chapter, we will discuss the women who violated the moral underpinnings that medieval society set.