(Verse 327–40)
While the verse version does include the first line of the scripture passage in Latin connecting the superior with Christ, the English changes the passage’s meaning. The father abbot in the English is identified with God the Father rather than with Christ as in the Latin, but the female superior herself, who is made subordinate, receives no such validation of her position.46 The three Middle High German versions Crean examines, which range from the fourteenth century to 1505, all identify the abbess with Christ to a greater or lesser extent. The Middle English verse, however, instead instructs the abbess to be meek and to love and worship God. The translator thus constructs her “persona” to be consistent with current, sanctioned ideals of female religious life. The identification of the abbess with Christ would have made the radical possibilities inherent in the image of womanChrist all too real and would have been dangerously counterproductive to clerical strategies to save the market.
Bishop Richard Fox’s early sixteenth-century translation of the Benedictine Rule for the nuns in his Winchester diocese shows less anxiety about female authority in religion than the fifteenth-century verse translation does. Fox’s translation gives abbesses “the standing of diocesans, describing them as ‘oure right religious diocesans.’”47 As Barry Collett points out, “In chapter 2 … he ascribed to an abbess all the authority of an abbot.”48 Significantly, though, even in the humanist-influenced sociopolitical environment of the Tudor era, Fox still does not equate the abbess with Christ. He, too, modifies the Latin, and in doing so he “avoided any confusion between the full authority which pertains to an abbess, and the office of a priest. His clear belief that full authority, with its divine origin, could certainly be held by a woman did not imply that women could assume a priestly function.”49
Other important differences between the Latin and English verse treatments of the superior arise in chapter 64, which discusses the election of a superior and outlines the qualities that make a person an ideal candidate. Strikingly, the need for learning, described as desirable for an abbot but perceived at this period as so problematic for women, is absent from the English description of the female superior. Textual knowledge and education for the abbot become simply knowledge of proper conduct for the prioress. In describing the desirable traits of an abbot, the Latin reads, “Oportet ergo sum esse doctum lege divina, ut sciat et sit unde proferat nova et vetera, castum, sobrium, misericordem, et semper superexaltet misericordiam iudicio, ut idem ipse consequatur” (RB 1980 282). The English verse reads:
Al if scho be highest in degre,
In hir-self lawest sal scho be.
Hir aw to be gude of forthoght
What thinges to wirk & what noght,
Chaste & sober, meke & myld,
Of bering bowsum os a child. (Verse 2263–68)
In addition to making a shift from a male superior who has textual learning to a female superior who knows how to behave properly, the different emphases in these passages exhibit a desire to neutralize the potential threat of female authority.50 Saying that the female superior should be “lowest” echoes the stress put on meekness for the female superior in chapter 2 of the verse translation in accordance with contemporary ideals of female spirituality. While both the abbot and the prioress should be chaste and sober, the desire that the prioress be “meke & myld” is a departure from the Latin account of the abbot. The abbot is to be merciful (misericordem) rather than meek, and having mercy implies having power and authority.
Earlier in the Middle Ages, twelfth-century Cistercian abbots used maternal imagery in discussing the exercise of authority out of a need “to supplement their image of authority with that for which the maternal stood: emotion and nurture.”51 The description of the prioress’s meekness and mildness does not, however, participate in this tradition, for indeed, she is not described here as a mother. She is not to be maternal (not even to the extent of being emotional and nurturing) but rather to be “of bering bowsum os a child.” The possibilities of maternal authority available to the Benedictine abbess in the ritual for her benediction are undercut, and this diminished version of her authority would have been reiterated through required, regular readings aloud of the rule to the convent.
Unlike the translator of the fifteenth-century verse version, Bishop Fox does describe the abbess as a mother, saying, “thabbot [is] to be to his convent a fader and thabass a moder.”52 Fox’s translation also exhibits a very different attitude toward female learning than the verse translation, one which resembles the attitude evident in the Brigittine Myroure of Oure Ladye discussed below. The treatment of women’s learning in Fox’s translation reveals Fox’s own humanism and love of learning. Fox says that the abbess “must be well learned in the law of God, and her religion, and that she understand, and be that person that can show and teach the laws, rules and constitutions of the religion, with such histories of holy scripture and saints’ lives as be most expedient for the congregation.”53 Collett notes that Fox’s translation of chapter 64 “bring[s] out the point that authority rests upon clear knowledge and understanding. When he referred to learning it is clear that he assumed a fair deal of scholarship in an abbess, and that there were in his diocese educated women able to fulfil these requirements.”54
Fox’s commitment to female learning may not, however, be entirely thoroughgoing. In discussing the necessities with which the abbess is to supply the nuns, Fox mentions “bokes / and instrumentes for their crafte and occupacions,”55 suggesting the nuns’ literacy and the importance of reading in their spiritual lives. He does not, however, mention the knife, pen, and tablets listed in the Latin version. These omissions may, of course, indicate, as Greatrex suggests, that “few of them could write.”56 The omissions might also indicate, though, that Fox saw reading as a passive consumption of authoritative texts which would be entirely appropriate work for the nuns, while the production of these texts (or even the scribal reproduction of them, which would allow opportunities for making interpretations and revisions that might subsequently be accepted by future readers) was work proper to such masculine auctors as himself. Such an attitude would harmonize with that manifested by other Tudor era “religious authorities” who “believed in education” but whose belief in the value of learning was tempered by being situated “in a context in which the written vernacular was always liable to be seen as a dangerous instrument that needed to be corralled by any mechanism available.”57
The fifteenth-century prose translation also contains, like the verse version, passages which change the sense of the Latin and aim to limit the dangers of the feminine. The prose translation resembles Fox’s translation, though, in that it does not exhibit great anxiety about female authority in religion, since it does not emphasize the superior’s meekness to the same extent as the verse translation does. Rather, the prose translator demonstrates unease with the threats posed by potentially unruly women themselves. In chapter IV the rule sets out the “Instruments of Good Works.” After the instruction to deny oneself and follow Christ, the Latin instructs the monk, “Corpus castigare” (RB 1980 182). The prose translation, however, advises the nun to “halde þe in chastite, and iuil langingis do away” (Prose 8). The shift from a command to chastise the body to a command to keep the body chaste harmonizes with the later medieval ecclesiastical emphasis on a particularly enclosed kind of chastity in women’s spirituality, an emphasis evident in the frequent reiteration of claustration requirements for nuns.58 Rather than engaging in active physical asceticism which might lead to the excesses in corporeal spirituality so distrusted in late medieval holy women, women religious are to preserve their chastity and expel desires that might lead to its breach.59 The change in the prose translation manifests the “static perception” of female monasticism
