LITMIR.BIZ

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nurturing) but rather to be “of bering bowsum os a child.” The possibilities of maternal authority available to the Benedictine abbess in the ritual for her benediction are undercut, and this diminished version of her authority would have been reiterated through required, regular readings aloud of the rule to the convent.

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

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

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

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

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

       Brigittine Texts and the Power of the Feminine

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

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

      Just as the status of women is firmly established as positive and primary in the foundation of the Brigittine Rule, so is the status of the vernacular. The rule was revealed by Christ to St. Birgitta in her own mother tongue

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