þinge notable ageynis þe visitoure or ageynis his felawes” is found, it is to be reported to the Minister General (Rewle 94). He, like the sisters, may become part of a body of knowledge, a textual corpus. Not only those visited, but also the visitor, is subject to examination and classification. Both parties thus have the opportunity to mobilize textual practices to their own advantage.
Even more strikingly, the Isabella Rule disrupts the textual dissemination of knowledge about women religious, putting control of their textual corpus back into their own hands. The visitor is to “kepe priue, ne schewe hit nat bi his knowinge to none bodi” (Rewle 94) that which he finds in visitation. G. G. Coulton notes that in visitation records, “one of the most serious offenses contemplated is that of revealing the secrets of the chapter…. To reveal the details of a visitation was one of the worst and most heavily-punished monastic offenses.”124 In the case of the Minoresses, the prohibition is stated with reference to the visitor instead of the visited. Information concerning the visitation could only be reported to the Minister General of the Order “bi þe counsayle of moste wise sustris of þe couent” (Rewle 94).
Most dramatically, the Isabella Rule alone among rules for Franciscan nuns specifies that “assone as misdedis schal be redde & penaunce enioynid, alle þat whoche is writen schal be brent bifore þe couent” (Rewle 94). The visitor is not permitted to keep that which he accumulates as he writes the visitation documents. The required destruction of the texts allows the sisters following the Isabella Rule to escape being caught in the network of clerical textual exchanges. Unlike Benedictine nuns, who put themselves in textual form into clerical hands at their profession and remain in visitation documents part of a textual corpus permanently in the hands of ecclesiastical authorities, the Minoresses elude the defining, confining power of writing.
The wealth, aristocratic patronage, and the generally high social status of Brigittine and Franciscan nuns may have been factors enabling clerical acceptance of the less intrusive visitation practices at Syon and in houses of English Minoresses. Since important, wealthy Benedictine abbeys of nuns did not succeed in obtaining the kind of exemption from episcopal visitation enjoyed by some male houses of corresponding stature, though, money and social status did not in and of themselves ensure nuns’ autonomy. In considering the more liberal visitation practices of the Brigittine and Franciscan traditions, it is also important to remember that both rules were written for women (not for men and then adapted for women) by women who were very interested in preserving distinctive 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,
