worthy” (Myroure 26). For the Brigittines, though, “our lorde wyl do that reuerence to his holy mother, that in thys order the houres of her shall be sayd after the houres of the day to her most worshyp” (Myroure 26). Mary as the genetrix of salvation receives the position of greatest prominence. Rather than subordinating themselves by allowing the brothers to say their hours first, the sisters are in fact identifying with Mary’s agency in salvation and laying claim to her position of superlative worthiness. The glorification of Mary’s maternal body which makes the Word flesh is mirrored by the sisters who, in saying their “most worthy” hours, themselves embody the divine word.
In an order dedicated to the Virgin Mary it is not unusual that Mary’s maternity should receive significant emphasis. The importance of Mary’s maternity goes beyond the miracle of the virgin birth. Luce Irigaray notes that in order to found the patriarchal lineages which undergird masculine authority, the “genealogy of women” is erased.87 The genealogy of women, the roles of the mother and the mother tongue, are suppressed in the clerical attempt to found a universal, Latin genealogy of sacred knowledge and to preserve their concomitant privileges. Brigittine texts restore the genealogy of women, foregrounding the significance of the maternal in salvation and the mother tongue in sacred knowledge.88
The potentially empowering idea that salvation originates in a genealogy of women is especially clear in the service for Tuesday Matins. In this service in which language and maternity intermingle, Eve’s word leads to sin and provokes God to the wrath of damnation when she “of pryde had sayd in her harte, as if she wolde be made euen to god” (Myroure 193). However, Mary’s “worde shulde draw the charyte of god to grete comforte. to the. and to all dampned by the worde of Eue” (Myroure 193). Eve’s word cast Adam, Eve, and all Mankind into great sorrow but “thy blessed worde o mother of wysdome. broughte the to grete ioye. and opened the gates of heuen to all that wylle enter” (Myroure 193). This “worde” is the Word that Mary, “mother of wysdome,” brings into the world. This service clearly outlines the “genealogy of women” who, through their words and maternity, save mankind. “The frayle mother, ys Eue. the doughter ys oure lady that is mother of her father, for she is the mother of god that ys father to all that he made” (Myroure 194). Salvation history does not begin with Adam’s felix culpa and proceed, through God the Father, to Christ. Rather it begins with the felix culpa of Eve’s speech and proceeds through Mary, the mother of the Father. Women’s language and women’s bodies are not sources of disruption which, being inferior in their difference, must be contained. Rather, they are sources of redemptive power which are celebrated for their particular role in salvation.
In the Myroure, as in the nineteenth-century novels by women which Margaret Homans examines in her study of language and female experience, significantly entitled Bearing the Word, maternity is one of the ways in which women “reclaim their own experiences as paradigms for writing.”89 Two of the recurrent “literary situations or practices” that Homans examines in the novels are fused in the Myroure: “the figure of the Virgin Mary, who gives birth to and is frequently imaged carrying (thus two senses of ‘bear’) a child who is the Word, the embodiment of the Logos” and “the theme of women characters who perform translations from one language into another or from one medium to another.”90 The Brigittine services repeatedly focus on Christ’s birth as the process of the Word being made flesh. The first lesson at Sunday Matins, for instance, declares, “Ryght so also had yt bene vnpossyble that thys worde that ys the sonne of god. shulde haue bene touched or sene, for the saluacyon of mankynde. but yf yt had bene vned to mannes body” (Myroure 104).91 It is of course Mary’s body that “mynystered vnto hym the mater of his holy body” (Myroure 141). Maternity is translation at once corporeal and textual; the Myroure gives female readers access to an incarnational textuality in which the “mother tongue” is salvific rather than lacking and unruly. Mary shifts cosmic boundaries by bearing the divine Logos across into the human realm; her female body translates the invisible, incomprehensible Word of God into the comprehensible and redemptory “mother tongue,” the human body Christ receives from his mother. In the Myroure, Christ—the ultimate source of authority invoked by the very clerics opposed to vernacular translation of the Scripture—is a text in the mother tongue produced by a woman.
3
Accounting for Themselves
Nuns’ Everyday Practices and
Alternative Monastic Identities
Brigittines and Minoresses: Autonomy in Practice
Profession services, visitation ceremonies, and monastic rules shape nuns’ identities through their impact on nuns’ participation in financial, textual, and spiritual economies. Nuns’ everyday practices provide another perspective, making visible identities which at times harmonize with and at times compete with the complex interpretive schemes set out in foundational texts and ceremonies. Obedientiaries’ accounts and legal documents are valuable records of such quotidian practices; they indicate what nuns possessed, what they needed, and how they obtained these things. They also provide insights on nuns’ interactions with each other and with the world outside the cloister. What these documents say and the ways in which they say it illuminate women religious’ views of themselves, the world, and their place in it.
The English Brigittines and Minoresses provide prime examples of nuns’ temporal independence; in these communities are found degrees of financial autonomy and success in keeping with, and possibly enabled by, the enlarged spiritual and material foundations laid down in profession and visitation. I wish to stress that I am not arguing for a simple or direct correlation between modes of profession and visitation and material success or lack thereof. There were certainly Benedictine nunneries (for instance, Barking) that achieved notable economic success, and there were houses of Minoresses (for example, Bruisyard) of decidedly modest means. Furthermore, it is important to note that the much more recent origins of the Franciscan, and especially the Brigittine, Rules allowed for a closer “fit” between monastic theory and later medieval practice than that enabled by the centuries-old Rule of St. Benedict. Clare, Isabella, and Birgitta had the advantage of observing the difficulties inherent in shaping Benedictine monasticism for women, and they were able to craft religious identities with reference to systems of social relations they themselves inhabited.
Houses of Brigittine and Franciscan nuns were fortunate to be not only generally wealthy but also largely independent of secular and ecclesiastical authorities. This status allowed them to manage their property without a great deal of outside intervention and to increase their wealth. Syon’s foundation charter, for example, gives the community significant privileges. Henry V granted that during a vacancy, the nuns would have custody of all lands, rents, tenements, profits, and emoluments “without the interference of us, our heirs or successors.”1 They were not even required to present “any accounts thereof … to us, our heirs or successors” at the time of the vacancy.2 When a new abbess was created, the charter ensured that the community would not have to pay any charges for the right to nominate, nor would they “be charged in future with the giving, granting, or assigning of any pension, portion or maintenance for any person or persons at the request of us, our heirs, or successors.”3 This was no small freedom, since the right of a founder to nominate women religious or corrodians was a common feature of nunneries’ foundation charters. Supporting those nominated members of the community could be a financial as well as a social burden for the nuns.4
In 1447, Syon was granted “vast liberties … so that the tenants upon its estates were almost entirely exempt from royal justice.”5 Their perquisites of justice extended to “all issues and amercements, redemptions and forfeitures as well before our heirs and successors, as before the chancellor, treasurer and barons of our exchequer, the justices and commissioners of us, our heirs or successors whomsoever made, forfeited or adjudged … of all the
