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Virgins on the cutting-room floor
Excerpt from Chapter Nine: Heaven and Earth
Holy, powerful, and capable, via their own mystical engagements with the Divine, of experiencing God directly without the intervention of ordained clergy or the sacraments, the consecrated virgins of the Church were a powerful presence in the medieval world. They were also a threat. As unmarried women who were not directly controllable by the church and who existed, for the most part, beyond the direct control of men, they constituted a clear and present challenge to both religious and secular male-dominated hierarchies. As a result, the history of consecrated virginity is simultaneously a history of powerful virgins, it is also a history of attempts to rein virgins in and make them subject to the direct control of men.
The success of these attempts was mixed, but the various attempts to control virgins inevitably left their frequently misogynist, sometimes pornographic, often slanderous traces on the accumulated body of what was believed to be true of virgins and virginity. The numerous and contradictory negative notions we have about virgins--fragile hothouse flowers, frigid and uptight and in need of a good screw, prone to stinginess and prudery, and so forth—are partly a legacy of medieval efforts to “manage” powerful and sometimes difficult virgins.
Naturally, like any other group of people, virgins and even nuns are only human, and prone to the various failings to which the flesh is heir. Certainly there were occasional lustful nuns, avaricious abbesses, cruel prioresses. We have documents that confirm that some convent residents failed to keep their vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty. Assuredly there were some whose devotion was a sham designed to keep prying eyes away from shockingly dissolute tendencies. But if we are going to look back at these women through the eyes of their critics, as historians so often end up doing, we also owe it to them and to ourselves to understand that these were exceptions and moreover, that they became stereotypes. Stereotypes may contain a kernel of truth, but that truth is neither universal nor universally applicable. We should also bear in mind that criticism and mockery of nuns and consecrated virgins is often fueled by class conflict, the derision of the privileged by the less-privileged. Consider the source, in other words, and keep the saltcellar close to hand.
To understand the gist of some of the criticisms leveled at medieval convent residents, it helps to know how very different a convent life then was, compared to contemporary women's monasteries. For one thing, not all women who lived in convents were nuns. At any given time, a medieval convent might have contained not only professed nuns who had taken vows and veils, novices, and postulants who intended to become professed nuns, but also several different categories of lay women who lived within the community but did not take vows. Canonesses, women who lived in monastic communities without taking vows—thus without declaring any intention to remain permanently celibate, to be obedient to an order or even an abbess, or giving over their property to the abbey or church generally—were a substantial portion of the convent population until well after the year 1000. We get some inkling of just how popular canonesshood was, and just how resistant women were to giving up the option of effectively having the best of both worlds, by the fact that not only the Roman synod of 1059 but the Lateran Council of 1139 and the Council of Reims in 1148 issued stern injunctions against it, insisting that all canonesses had to agree to take on the discipline of a monastic rule if they were to remain part of the religious establishment. Even then, actually abolishing the practice of having canonesses in the convents and bringing all convent inhabitants under the control of monastic rules took several centuries.
In addition to canonesses, there were also conversae, individuals from the lower classes who acted as servants and laborers. Virtually every monastic establishment, whether male or female, had its own share of conversae, but oddly enough, only the conversae in convents were seen as being a problem. The fact that male monks might have numerous women living under the monastic roof rarely raised eyebrows, but then it was quite normal for men to have women in their households who cooked, cleaned, laundered, and so forth. Too many unmarried women in one place, though, were regarded as if they were in danger of reaching some sort of eminently destructive feminine critical mass, particularly if a number of those women were not only lower-class but were not under the restraint of holy orders.
Convents also housed guests, cared for the sick and the poor, and received oblates, all practices that had their own effects on both convent populations and the dynamics of monastic life. The practice of monastic hospitality meant that religious houses were obligated to house and feed guests, who sometimes stayed for months at a time. In the case of some noble visitors, a visit might mean not only the nobleman or noblewoman in question, but a retinue of attendants and all their horses and horsemen, too. It was not uncommon for visiting nobles to conduct their various secular business from temporary quarters in monasteries, with streams of visitors and associates constantly coming and going. Such visitors could put massive strain on a convent’s resources, as well as being thoroughly disruptive.
Convents also were under varying levels of obligation to help provide for the needs of the sick and poor. A convent might share its material resources by offering alms, food, or clothing, or it might operate complete establishments including poorhouses, orphanages, hospitals, and leprosaria on convent grounds. Convents also frequently ended up serving as residential hospitals and old age homes whether they intended to or not. Not only were there aged nuns who required care, but it was not uncommon for widows to retire to convents because they knew that there they would be able to count on a relatively dignified senescence and the presence of others when they died.
A large number of women, however, were sent to convents simply because convents were a convenient, respectable place to stash extraneous daughters. A father who wanted to concentrate his available resources on providing the best possible dowry for his eldest daughter in order to attract the most advantageous match might find himself without resources to do the same for his younger daughters. Convents, after all, would accept relatively small dowries by comparison to the expectations of high-ranking men. Some families used convents as storage vaults, keeping their daughters out of harm's way until such time as they could be advantageously married off, then plunking them right back into the monastery the minute they became widowed, as if the convent were a sort of savings and loan of female flesh. Women shoved into convents against their will often ended up resenting both the convent and the family of origin that had put them there. Not a few lamented the loss of the opportunity to marry and have children.
Chronically ill women and the insane were also frequently consigned to convents when their families could not or would not provide care for them. Women with disabilities, including blind, deaf, and retarded women, were also frequently consigned to convents. Considered for the most part unmarriageable and frequently not able to be as productive as their able-bodied sisters, many were given to convents as child oblates to live out their lives in cloisters regardless of their own desires or, indeed, their ability to withstand the rigors of monastic life.
The temporarily or permanently unmarriageable were not the only women to be placed in conventual cold storage. In addition to all the rest, convents were also expected to serve as women’s prisons. Each convent kept an “interior cloister” of highly secure rooms reserved for women who were disobedient or who refused to follow the house Rule. While these maximum-security arrangements would from time to time have been of use to the convents themselves, they were more notoriously made use of by forces well outside the cloister. In the ninth century, when Lothar, king of the Germanic region of Lotharingia, decided that he wanted to divorce his wife Theutberga so that he could marry his mistress, Lothar accused Theutberga of incest, sodomy, and abortion and attempted to have her imprisoned in the abbey at Avenay. In a similar move, Charlemagne’s son Louis I accused his wife Judith of sorcery and imprisoned her in a convent when she sided with his elder sons when they rebelled against their father.
When early fifteenth-century monk Bernardino of Siena characterized convent virgins as “the scum and vomit of the world,” he was echoing a very visible part of the reality of female monasteries of his time: the convent as dumping ground. Prison, asylum, hospice, hotel, warehouse—all were among the roles of the medieval convent. The assumption that a woman living a life of perpetual virginity must either not be able to do any better, or that there must be something very wrong with her, is not a new one. In the middle ages it was often, although through absolutely no fault of the women in question, quite demonstrably true.
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