Spiritual Economies. Nancy Bradley Warren
religious identities. I do not wish to argue that Birgitta, Clare, and Isabella escaped or entirely rejected traditional gendered ideologies in religion. Furthermore, the rules which gained papal approval were not precisely what these women first envisioned. The Brigittine and Isabella rules do, however, bear witness to their female creators’ concerns with the power dynamics in relationships between women religious and the clergy. Additionally, although Franciscan and Brigittine ceremonies of visitation, like services of profession in these traditions, have much in common with Benedictine procedures, the differences have far-reaching implications. The structures of textual, material, and symbolic exchanges in Franciscan and Brigittine visitation ceremonies are less restrictive than in the Benedictine tradition. Franciscan and Brigittine visitations reinforce nuns’ legitimate access to material and spiritual resources (access grounded in profession in these orders), and they present additional opportunities for women religious to lay claim to specifically female authority.
The Benefits of a Divine Spouse, or Brides of Christ, Part 2
The preeminence of nuptial identity in Benedictine profession, which prompts clerics to stress the value of nuns’ chastity, to underscore the need to protect nuns’ reputation as a guarantee of that value, and, concomitantly, to emphasize claustration, clearly results in certain material detriments for Benedictine nuns. Submission to the authority of clerical stand-ins for earthly fathers and the divine spouse is not, however, the end of the story of religious identity for Benedictine brides of Christ. The identity of bride of Christ is Janus-faced; the very elements of that identity which lead to constraint also lead to empowerment. McNamara has observed that the nuptial discourse of profession metaphorically empowers the nun as “consort of the lord of the universe,”125 an identification which suggests the symbolic capital available through profession to Benedictine women religious in conjunction with the constraining baggage of nuptiality. Additionally, while, as I have argued, the potential for the authority created for Brigittine and Franciscan nuns through mobilizations of maternity is largely absent from Benedictine profession and visitation ceremonies, the possibilities suggested by maternal imagery are not entirely unavailable to Benedictine nuns in other ideological scripts. To explore these complexities of religious identity for Benedictine nuns, I turn now to the Ordo consecrationis sanctimonialium used at the Benedictine nunnery of St. Mary’s, Winchester, and a fifteenth-century ritual for the benediction of an abbess used in Benedictine houses.
The version of the Ordo consecrationis sanctimonialium used at St. Mary’s, Winchester, in the early sixteenth century is in MS Cambridge, University Library Mm 3.13. As Anne Bagnall Yardley, who has published an edition of the eleven primary musical portions of the Ordo, notes, “The manuscript is attributed to St. Mary’s on the basis of the inscription on a blank leaf at the beginning of the manuscript: ‘Hic liber attinet ad monasterium monialium sanctae mariae in civitate winton. Ex dono Reverendi in Christo patris, Domini Ricardi Fox, ejusdem civitatis Episcopi, et dicti monasterii benefactoris praecipi.’”126 As Yardley points out, this manuscript provides us with a version of the service intended for use by the nuns themselves, and it therefore contains “more detailed rubrics than most of the pontificals.”127 Since it illuminates in detail the ways in which the nuns participated in the ritual, it allows us to consider the ways in which the nuns may have interpreted the ideological scripts given to them as they engaged in this highly significant performance of religious identity.
Nuptial imagery and discourse are central to the service; there is, for instance, an elaborate, complexly dramatized ceremony in which the nuns’ rings are blessed and presented twice to them.128 The chants are drawn from the liturgies for Saints Agnes and Agatha, who are certainly “appropriate female images” and saints whose “great devotion to Christ as spouse would serve as an example” for the nuns.129 The chants which the nuns sing do not, however, merely reinforce the nuns’ submission to spousal authority, since Agnes and Agatha are not simply meek and obedient brides of Christ. Indeed, the vitae of these saints reveal that they used their marriages to Christ as grounds to resist patriarchal authority embodied in fathers and suitors. For instance, when the prefect’s son proposes to St. Agnes, offering her great treasure if she will marry him, Agnes refuses, saying she has a richer, more powerful, and more worthy lover.130 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne has persuasively argued for the potentially empowering aspects of the stories of virgin martyrs for female audiences, aspects that supplement the regulatory elements of the hagiographical texts. She points to the “possibility of resistant readings which in particular contexts may constitute relative empowerment or recuperation.”131 She observes, for example, that the “virgin heroines can both gaze and answer back and are shown as much cleverer than their tormenters.”132 The presence of Agnes and Agatha—active and authoritative brides of Christ—via their liturgies in the ideological script of the Benedictine Ordo also suggests the potentially empowering dimensions of the identity of divine spouse for Benedictine nuns.
The language of the chants also reveals the symbolic capital available to the nuns through the high social status inherent in their hypergamous unions with Christ. As Johnson argues, “The rich tradition of the nun as the espoused of Christ gave to professed women a unique valued status in the Middle Ages.”133 For instance, after the ring is first placed on the nun’s finger by the bishop, she sings Anulo suo from the liturgy of St. Agnes: “Annulo suo subarravit me Dominus meus Ihesus Christus et tanquam sponsam decoravit me corona Alleluya.”134 The instructions in the manuscript direct the nun to hold up “hir hand soo hygh that the people may see it.”135 She thus publicly proclaims that she, like Agnes whose words she sings, has the highest ranking spouse possible, and so, as the image of the crown suggests, is entitled to the social as well as the spiritual benefits of such status.
Just as the constraining baggage of nuptial discourse had material manifestations for Benedictine nuns, so too did the symbolic capital translate into concrete benefits. The Benedictine nuns of Barking, for instance, enjoyed a rich textual culture, as attested by their observation of the Benedictine requirement for the annual distribution and mandatory reading of books.136 The nuns’ status as brides of Christ may have increased their chances to read sophisticated religious texts. Their already high social rank was perhaps raised even higher by the symbolic “boost” nuns enjoyed as brides of Christ, the highest-ranking spouse of all. As Nicholas Watson has argued, in the period following Arundel’s Constitutions, the aristocracy, rather than society as a whole, became the only audience permitted to read vernacular theology.137 So, any enhancement of social status could only play a beneficial factor in enabling the Barking nuns to gain access to works of vernacular theology in the post-Arundelian era when such texts were regarded with suspicion and even criminalized. Significantly, as A. I. Doyle observes, the nuns at Barking “were in the fore-front of the public” for these works of vernacular theology, and they were “readliy supplied” with such texts as The Clensyng of Mannes Sowle.138 Indeed, the nuns at Barking possessed a text which seems likely to have been regarded as especially dangerous—BL Add. MS 10596, a fifteenth-century manuscript including selections from revised translations of the Lollard Bible, which remained in the community’s library at least through the late fifteenth century or early sixteenth century.139
Nuns, living under clerical supervision and theoretically enclosed (and so prevented from disseminating widely any threatening ideas gleaned from independent-minded reading of vernacular theology), were certainly a less troubling audience for such texts than other lay women and lay men. The vernacular translations of the Benedictine Rule examined in Chapter 2 reveal, however, that those clerics opposed to vernacular theology were not unaware of the empowerment such texts enabled for nuns, nor did they ignore what were, from their perspective, the attendant threats posed by nuns’ access to these texts. These facts further highlight the significance of the sophisticated literate cultures of some Benedictine communities, attesting to the brides of Christs’ ability to command respect both socially and spiritually.
The symbolic capital to which the Ordo suggests that Benedictine nuns had access when they became brides of Christ is accompanied in rituals for the benediction of newly elected Benedictine abbesses by opportunities