Spiritual Economies: Female Monasticism in Later Medieval England

Preface

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PART I

Monastic Identities in

Theory and Practice

1

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 veil⁴⁰), 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