to which the vibrant textual cultures at the Benedictine house of Barking and the Brigittine house of Syon bear witness.7 He posits that as a result of “what most men would have seen as their limitations,” nuns may have enjoyed a “richer, fuller, and, one might say, more up to date” spiritual life than male monastics, who for the most part “were still mired in the consequences of a conservative and traditional education.”8
Burgeoning vernacular literacy among women religious was clearly not the only vernacular literacy that posed a problem in the eyes of some clerical authorities. In fact, the vernacular literacy of nuns may have been somewhat less a source of ecclesiastical anxiety than the vernacular literacy of secular women (as in the case of Lollard women) and of rebellious lay men. Women religious were, after all, at least theoretically cloistered and less able to make trouble. The Church’s already conflicted attitude toward female spirituality, though, made ecclesiastical authorities ever vigilant.
Vigilance likely seemed particularly necessary since the boundary-shifting, socially transformative properties of translation, as well as the connections between bodies and words, were well understood by the clerics opposed to vernacular translation of scripture in the early fifteenth century. The antitranslation faction argued that “translation into the mother tongue will allow any old women (vetula) to usurp the office of teacher, which is forbidden to them (since all heresies, according to Jerome, come from women); it will bring about a world in which the laity prefers to teach than to learn, in which women (mulierculae) talk philosophy and dare to instruct men.”9 This is a dire vision of a “translated” world turned upside down in which the nature, condition, and appearance of society itself are dramatically altered as all “proper” boundaries are breached. The passage makes clear the negative associations of the vernacular with women, creatures of inferior bodies and minds who introduce discord and disorder.
The hysterical, even apocalyptic, tone of the antitranslation passage highlights as well the conservative clerics’ anxieties about the threats posed by the vernacular to their monopoly on spiritual knowledge, which they had historically enjoyed, thanks to their virtually exclusive access to Latin learning and sacred texts.10 By undermining the foundations of clerical authority—that is, the clergy’s position as sole possessors and interpreters of these sacred texts—translation shifted boundaries demarcating hierarchies. As a result, the clergy’s privileged access to cultural and material resources, which followed from their monopoly on spiritual knowledge, was threatened. The socially transformative properties of translation put the English clergy who opposed it in the position of having to, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, “save the market.”11 Translation appeared, from a clerical perspective, as the source of diverse dangers, and so the struggle to preserve all the conditions of the social field which afforded the clergy the greatest access to symbolic and material capital likewise focused on translation.12
One clerical strategy to save the market emerges in Arundel’s Constitutions of 1407–1409. The Constitutions sought to control the spread of the vernacular, and the social disruption perceived as accompanying it, by requiring episcopal authorization of all translations of texts containing Scripture. The requirement of episcopal authorization attempts to replace, by means of the vernacular itself, the social boundaries and hierarchies displaced by the spread of the vernacular. That is to say, the Constitutions use officially sanctioned translation to reassert clerical authority over both the vernacular language and the potentially unruly female/feminized readers of vernacular texts.13
The yoked threats of the feminine vernacular and the female body surface again, famously, in Hoccleve’s “Remonstrance Against Oldcastle”:
Somme wommen eek, though hir wit be thynne,
Wole argumentes make in holy writ.
Lewed calates, sitteth down and spynne
And kekele of sumwhat elles, for your wit
Is al to feeble to despute of it.
To clerkes grete apparteneth þat aart.14
A callot is, according to the Middle English Dictionary, a foolish woman or a harlot;15 the connections of sexual promiscuity and lack of “wit” in Hoccleve’s use of the epithet underline the association of the disruptive feminine vernacular and the disruptive female body.
While Hoccleve thus plays with the same associations evident in the argument made by the antitranslation faction, his market-saving strategy is somewhat different than Arundel’s. Hoccleve styles himself in this poem as the staunch defender of orthodoxy against the rebel John Oldcastle, who, in Hoccleve’s eyes has, as Ruth Nissé observes, been “feminized” through Lollardy,16 and against Oldcastle’s Lollard associates, whose vernacular translations were the target of the Constitutions. Rather than clerically authorizing the vernacular in order to replace the very boundaries it breaks down, though, Hoccleve uses a vernacular poem to position the vernacular as inferior—at least in spiritual matters—to the “aart” of “clerkes.”17 This art (learned and Latinate, and so legitimate) is definitively more worthy than the “cackling” of “lewed calates.” Hoccleve at once works to reinstate a linguistic hierarchy of Latin and vernacular for spiritual subjects as well as a social hierarchy of male, clerical authorities over lay, female/feminized subjects.
In the face of the possibilities for independence both spiritual and material offered to later medieval nuns by their vernacular literacy and the increased availability of vernacular texts, clerics who made translations of monastic rules for women engaged in textual, market-saving strategies resembling those of both Arundel and Hoccleve. In other words, they used the mother tongue for their own benefit, manipulating translation, the source of instability, to replace the very boundaries it broke down or shifted. They also devalued the mother tongue and the feminized speakers of it, thus asserting their own masculine, Latinate authority.18
Saving the Market: The Female Body and the Feminine Vernacular in Translations of the Benedictine Rule for Women
The fifteenth-century prose and verse translations of the Benedictine Rule for women strain very hard to make translation serve traditional, hierarchical relations of masculine and feminine, Latin and vernacular, sameness and difference.19 Just as the text of the rule is translated into the vernacular for women, so too is the version of Benedictine monasticism these rules create for women a “translation.” The Benedictine Rule is adapted not only linguistically but also ideologically for women to fight social and religious transformations by enforcing a rigorously hierarchical sex/gender system.20 Like Arundel’s Constitutions, the vernacular translations of the Benedictine Rule seek to “save the market” by manipulating the vernacular to control its transgressive power and that of the women who read it, putting both firmly under the control of reaffirmed clerical authority. Like Hoccleve’s “Remonstrance,” the translations do their utmost to emphasize the femininity, and corresponding inferiority, of the vernacular in the spiritual realm, also attributing this combination to the audience of women religious.
Putting the vernacular “in its place” (that is, under the authority of Latin) is a step in a larger process of putting women religious firmly in their place vis-à-vis the male clergy. This process was deemed especially pressing in light of prevalent associations between the “barbarous” vernacular and “an uneducated readership with a ‘carnal understanding of the truth’ “who were likely to rebel.21 The prose translation of the rule asserts the strong authority necessary to avert such danger by introducing the chapters with a phrase indicating that what follows is said by, spoken by, or commanded by St. Benedict.22 For instance, at the beginning of chapter VII, significantly a chapter addressing meekness, the masculine authority of St. Benedict and Holy Scripture coalesce as they speak together in Latin: “Of mekenes spekis sain benet in þis sentence, & sais with
