LITMIR.BIZ

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      Vows and Visitations

      Textual Transactions and the

      Shaping of Monastic Identity

       Brides of Christ

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

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

       The Material and Symbolic Consequences of Profession

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

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

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

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

      Claustration was certainly not perfectly kept in practice; later medieval episcopal communications attest to frequent breaches of the strict requirements for enclosure. For instance, in 1387, episcopal injunctions sent to Romsey and Wherwell mention with displeasure numerous instances of nuns’ leaving the cloister.¹⁹ There are also, however, cases of apparent ecclesiastical surrender to what must have come to seem the inevitability of such breaches. The English canonist John of Ayton says of the requirement that bishops enforce Periculoso, “Cause to be observed! But surely there is scarce any mortal man who could do this: we must therefore here understand ‘so far as lieth in the prelate’s power….’ [W]e see in fact that these statutes are a dead letter or are ill-kept

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