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 to lay claim to maternal authority. In a form of the ritual used in the fifteenth century, the bishop tells the abbess, “Take here the moderly overseying and provydence of this the flock of God, and the cure and charge of ther bodyes and of ther sowles. And be to them a mother, a guyder, and a faythfull governer.”140 His final speech to her also grants her “plenary and full power and auctoryte of all this monastery and of all therunto belongynge, ynwardly and owtewardly, spiritually and temporally.”141
This ritual for benediction does take pains to reinforce patriarchal hierarchy and to undercut maternal authority. The Benedictine abbess as mother is repeatedly reminded of her spousal role and of the feminine weakness which necessitate her and her nuns’ subordination to paternal figures. For instance, the abbess is especially charged to keep the nuns of the monastery “pure and chaste virgyns”–that is, to preserve the essential purity vital for brides of Christ. In order to protect this crucial chastity, she is admonished to “have dylygente watche and good eye on them, that they wander not abroad.”142 She is directed to keep “the rules ordeyned of the holy fathers” as well as her “frayle nature will permytt and suffer.”143 Furthermore, the ritual opens with the abbess promising the bishop “fidelyte and true subjectyon, obedyence, and reuerence … to yow Reverend Father yn God.”144 In spite of these strictures, though, given an abbess’s experience of the daily business of running a religious community, she might easily hear the language of maternity in the benediction as a mandate for her autonomy and authority, for her “maternal right to command.” Additionally, as we shall see in the second chapter, the possibilities of abbesses wielding maternal authority, and the larger implications of such authority for the status of women in the spiritual realm, were disturbingly real enough to figure prominently in clerical efforts to reinforce their own authority over nuns.
The Ordo from St. Mary’s, Winchester, and the Benedictine ritual for the benediction of an abbess underline the complexities and contradictions inherent in the construction of religious identities. These complexities and contradictions were amplified as later medieval nuns went about the daily business of living as brides of Christ in the marketplace. Ecclesiastical authorities continually reinforced material and spiritual restrictions on women religious, as the exploration of vernacular translations of monastic rules for nuns in the next chapter demonstrates. As we shall see in the third chapter, however, nuns’ everyday practices continually provided “visible indices” of identities that both expanded and reinterpreted the complex identities provided for them in their foundational ideological scripts.145
2
The Value of the Mother Tongue
Vernacular Translations
of Monastic Rules for Women
Shifting Boundaries: Translations and Social Relations in Later Medieval England
The entry for “translaten” in the Middle English Dictionary includes six definitions: to relocate a person or thing (including a cleric, a saint’s relics, knowledge and culture, an episcopal see, or allegiance); to take away a kingdom or duchy from its ruler or people; to take into the afterlife without death; to change the nature, condition, or appearance of someone or something; to replace, turn, or move; and—finally—to render into another language.1 These definitions reveal that translation is an operation performed on both bodies (dead and alive) and words. The far-reaching implications of the textual exchanges of monastic profession and visitation call attention to the intimate connections between bodies and words in later medieval culture, connections that heighten the dramatic social significance of translation.2 Corporeal and textual translation share more than a common sense of change in location or form; they are linked by their socially transformative ability to change existing boundaries.3
In later medieval versions of monastic rules for women the process of translation from Latin to the vernacular is, like the religious identities these rules help shape, Janus-faced; it is ambiguous in its socially transformative functions. Translation works to shift boundaries and to shore them up. The vernacular acts both as servant of orthodoxy and as agent of subversion, serving to empower as well as to constrain, and sometimes doing both at once.
The ambiguous status of the vernacular and the problematic nature of translation in Middle English monastic rules for women are intimately connected to social changes involving literacy; particularly significant are the facts that in the fifteenth century, literate culture expanded among non-noble women, and nuns were in one of the best situations available to women for gaining literacy skills.4 The Latin literacy of later medieval nuns has been generally considered lacking; vernacular literacy, however, was another story altogether. Financial accounts and court records, for instance, manifest nuns’ active participation in business affairs, involvement which would have required significant literacy skills.5 As women religious achieved levels of pragmatic and professional literacy, “their social visibility and power” increased;6 presumably, from a clerical point of view, their potential as a source of disruption also increased accordingly.
Further enhancing the potentially advantageous and potentially threatening position of women religious was the dearth of textual production and engagement in fifteenth-century male monasteries. In his analysis of the libraries of nuns, David Bell finds that “the interest
