that the monks might engage in repeated transgressions. His description of second and third offenses by nuns manifests the general ecclesiastical perception that faults of speech were especially common for women. The bodily punishments for women, contrasted with the financial punishments for men, underline concerns about female carnality, pointing to a desire to address the source of the problem: the unruly female flesh. Significantly, the system of monetary fines in the male community does not chastise the flesh but rather ultimately contributes to the physical improvement of the house (i.e., the work of the floors), leading to better living conditions for all.
Silence and regulation of speech are clearly important parts of monastic life for both men and women.38 The verse and prose translations, however, construct a system of social relations in which, as in Hoccleve’s “Remonstrance,” male authorities (significantly, in both translations those with access to Latin) have the right to speak, while female hearers are commanded to keep silent on spiritual matters, listening rather than speaking. This particular framing of monastic silence, like that constructed in the injunctions, recalls the cultural desires evident in antitranslation rhetoric—that is, the desires to keep dangerously carnal women quiet and obedient.
The verse translation does not include chapter introductions and concluding prayers as the prose version does, but it attempts to minimize the potentially disruptive power of the vernacular and of women in other ways. For example, preceding the Rule’s prologue beginning “Asculta, o filia, disciplina[m] magistre tue,” it contains a prologue added by the translator. This additional prologue explicitly states that the text is a translation for women who do not know Latin:
Monkes & als all leryd men
In latyn may it lyghtly ken,
And wytt þarby how þay sall wyrk
To sarue god and haly kyrk.
Bott tyll women to mak it couth,
þat leris no latyn in þar ʒouth,
In ingles is it ordand here,
So þat þay may it lyghtly lere. (Verse 9–16)
This passage illustrates the translator’s connection of Latin with a masculine, learned elite and the vernacular with a feminine, unlearned, inferior group. The repetition of the word lyghtly sets up apparent sameness that is actually difference. The prologue indicates that both men and women can easily (lyghtly) learn the doctrine of the Benedictine Rule; however, monks and all educated men learn it easily in Latin while women only learn it easily in English. The passage implies that the English of this version will say the same thing as the Latin, an implication proved false by a comparison of the translation with the Latin. What monks and educated men learn from the Latin is not at all the same as what women religious learn from the vernacular verse translation. The Latin and English versions of the Benedictine Rule do not shape men’s and women’s work, their service to Holy Church, as either the same or equal in spite of the theoretical sameness the passage implies. In the verse translation of the Benedictine Rule, language difference in fact marks gender difference, and difference is, in the course of this version, once again an indication of the lesser perfection of the feminine.
Although the verse translation lacks any references to “sain benet” that position him as an authority figure, it does retain Latin chapter headings. It also contains many more full lines of Latin in the body of the text than the prose version does. The general practice of the prose version is to include one or two words of a Latin quotation followed by a fuller version of the passage in English.39 The verse translation, on the other hand, contains fifty-five full verse lines in Latin, and only once does it employ the technique so common in the prose translation of abbreviating with “&c.”40 The Latin lines in the verse break both meter and rhyme, standing out from the surrounding English. Thus, the Latin language of authority, the language of the original Rule as well as of the Scriptures, stands in a place of distinction from the feminine vernacular. This positioning works to assert Latin’s priority, power, and authority over the vernacular. The Latin chapter headings, together with the lines of Latin included within the body of the text, attempt, like the figure of St. Benedict in the prose version, to ground the translation in a hierarchical relation with the Latin text, prioritizing the authoritative original.
The Latin chapter headings and lines suggest a correspondence between original and translation while simultaneously revealing, as does the added translator’s prologue discussed above, differences. These differences further emphasize the lesser perfection and subordinate position of both the feminine vernacular and the female audience. The English translations given for the Latin lines included in the text sometimes enact this strategy by altering the meaning of the passage, and in the verse version, alterations from Latin to English tend to involve issues of authority.41 The vernacular text reduces the scope of women’s authority in religion as part of the strategy to contain potentially disruptive forces and prevent women religious from asserting newfound power.
The new opportunities for independent participation in spiritual life offered to women by the spread of vernacular literacy and the increased availability of vernacular texts proved particularly disconcerting for conservative ecclesiastical authorities, coinciding as they did with the late medieval “feminization” of sanctity.42 This process, like that of vernacular translation, presented new spiritual possibilities to women. The paradigm of the “virile woman,” in which women made themselves masculine in their pursuit of a spiritual life, gave way to one which Barbara Newman has aptly termed “womanChrist,” that is, “the possibility that women, qua women, could participate in some form of the imitatio Christi with specifically feminine inflections and thereby attain a particularly exalted status in the realm of the spirit.”43 In the model of womanChrist, then, female particularity and difference came into their own as sources of spiritual power.
Chapter 2 of the verse version concerns the qualities and responsibilities of the superior, who in the masculine Benedictine tradition is said to hold the place of Christ in the monastery since he is addressed by a title of Christ. The Latin reads, “Christi enim agere vices in monasterio creditur, quando ipsius vocatur pronomine, dicente apostolo: Accepistis spiritum adoptionis filiorum, in quo clamamus: abba, pater” (RB 1980 172). John E. Crean, Jr., who has examined Middle High German translations of the Benedictine Rule for women, describes this passage as “pivotal in evaluating any feminine RB version. In question is the persona of the abbess as perceived by the editor.”44 As Crean says, the way in which a translator deals with “Christi Pronomine” is “a kind of litmus test of how intimately the abbess may be understood to ‘hold the place of Christ in the monastery.’”45
The Middle English verse does not describe the prioress holding the place of Christ at all. Rather, it says:
And to be honored euer hir aw;
Bot in her-self sche sal be law,
Pryde in hert for to haue none,
Bot loue god euer of al his lone
And wirchip him werld al-wais,
Als þe apostel plainly sais
Vn-to all folk, who so it be,
Pat takes swilk staite of dignite:
“Accepistis spiritum adepcionis.”
He sais: “ʒe take þe gaste of mede,
Pat lele folk vnto lif suld lede,
In þe whilk gaste we call & cry
Vnto
