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Virgins on the cutting-room floor
Excerpt from Chapter Nine: Heaven and Earth
Virginity provided a troublesome sanctuary. The Church could not fault virgins for their virginity, but neither was it able to tolerate the existence of unregulated, uncontrollable women who might take things into their own hands. In the eyes of the Church, virginal sanctity was simply no excuse for acting as if one were not still a daughter of Eve, subject to every bit of regulation and suspicion that such difficult, fluid, changeable, contradictory creatures deserved.
The clear solution was to lock all the women up where responsible males could keep an eye on them and force them to behave. Cloistering, the practice of confining a monastic population to the space enclosed by the walls of their monastery grounds, had been a voluntary practice of early ascetic monastics and had been in use for centuries by the time medieval monasticism took root. Whether cloistering was practiced by any given Catholic monastic community at any given time, however, depended upon what type of Rule (if any) was practiced within it, what order the house belonged to (if any), and was influenced by whether the community was able to maintain itself materially if it cloistered itself.
Then along came Pope Boniface VIII. In 1298, he issued the bull known as Periculoso and overnight, every religious woman in Christendom was, in essence, sent to her room... permanently. It did not matter who she was or what rank she held, what her family background was, whether she had the responsibility of managing the equivalent of a duchy or even a kingdom, was qualified to be called to sit on parliaments, had convened courts of law, or was knowledgeable and articulate enough to engage in theological wrestling matches with the greatest male minds in the Church had to offer. All nuns, present and future, were to remain perpetually within their cloisters, without “power of going out of those monasteries for whatever reason or excuse,” remaining completely “withdrawn from public and mundane sights.”
Boniface, influenced by the misogynist attitudes of his era as well as by thinkers like Tertullian, who wrote that “every public exposure of a good virgin is a rape,” felt that nuns had fallen into “a perilous and detestable state.” Enclosing them would not only make sure that they were not coming into physical proximity with men, it would make sure that they were not coming under the male gaze, which was believed to be every bit as dangerous. Additionally, and not at all coincidentally, it would keep them away from forms of independent thought, action, and economic participation that might prove challenging to their dependency upon (and thus ability to be controlled by) the centralized Church.
Where earlier attempts at putting meaningful limitations on how consecrated virgins regulated their lives had limited, case-by-case successes where they had them at all, Periculoso stuck. Unlike earlier reforms, Periculoso was a top-down decree from the highest possible level of the Church’s central command. It was also enforceable, by dint of being enshrined in the Sext, Boniface VIII’s addition to canon law, in a way that previous reform attempts were not.
To be sure, given the time it took for word to travel from one place to the next in the late thirteenth century, it took some time before word of the directive filtered out to everyone to whom it could be applied. When it did, there was often resistance: when the Bishop of Lincoln brought a copy of the bull and read it to the nuns at Markyate in 1300, they threw the document at his head. It took nearly three centuries of continual reinforcement and uncounted numbers of penances and punishments administered to resistant nuns before the cloistering of women religious was more or less accepted as writ.
It sometimes seems as if the history of nuns and convents has surprisingly little to do with virginity per se. But as a source of ideologies of virginity which remain deeply embedded in our larger culture, it is without peer. From this history, as we have seen, we derive the notion of the preternaturally gifted rebellious virgin who succeeds valiantly in “male” pursuits (a motif which later reached apotheosis in the form of Joan of Arc), the virgin as mystic, the virgin as sexually repressed virago, the virgin as reject and pawn.
The devoted daughter of Jerusalem, God’s ascetic and self-denying handmaid, is always virginal even if she might have entered the convent with sexual experience. The stolen virgin as a sexual trophy, and her mirror image, the hypocrite loose woman who feigns virginity to avoid censure, pepper the medieval literature, and the selfish virgin who refuses both marriage and vows in order to have her cake and eat it too joins them along the way. The virgin who nurses the sick and dying, whose chastity frees up more of her energy for succor, is a motif that underscores the popular history of nineteenth-century virgin Florence Nightengale. The idea of the virgin as an innately vulnerable ready-made victim who must be paternalistically kept from being violated by knowledge of the world continues to inform United States health policy on both domestic and international fronts. Few of us think about medieval nuns on anything resembling a regular basis, but the legacy of these women, their institutions, and their sexuality lives on.
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