passive enclosure for nuns received “sustained legal interest” throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It was even reenacted “with the addition of stern penalties for its violation, at the Council of Trent (1545–63).”17 The brides of Christ were not only required to be “off the market” but also out of the marketplace.18 Nuns’ chastity was a commodity whose circulation had to be closely regulated in order to protect it from devaluation and debasement, which could, as the records of episcopal visitation discussed below reveal, result even from rumors of questionable behavior, rumors often sparked by nuns’ participation in the realm of commerce.
Claustration was certainly not perfectly kept in practice; later medieval episcopal communications attest to frequent breaches of the strict requirements for enclosure. For instance, in 1387, episcopal injunctions sent to Romsey and Wherwell mention with displeasure numerous instances of nuns’ leaving the cloister.19 There are also, however, cases of apparent ecclesiastical surrender to what must have come to seem the inevitability of such breaches. The English canonist John of Ayton says of the requirement that bishops enforce Periculoso, “Cause to be observed! But surely there is scarce any mortal man who could do this: we must therefore here understand ‘so far as lieth in the prelate’s power….’ [W]e see in fact that these statutes are a dead letter or are ill-kept at best. Why, then, did the holy fathers thus labour to beat the air?”20 Even the pessimistic (or perhaps merely pragmatic) John of Ayton does not give up utterly on Periculoso, though. He follows his grim assessment by praising prelates who do work to enforce enclosure, saying, “Yet indeed their toil is none the less to their own merit, for we look not to that which is but to that which of justice should be.”21
Episcopal records make clear that even in the later Middle Ages some prelates did in fact attempt to enforce Periculoso strictly. For instance, in 1376 Bishop Brantyngham of Exeter invokes Periculoso in a commission sent to canons of Exeter deputed to curb “the wanderings of the nuns of Polsloe.”22 When strictly enforced by such zealous prelates, the requirement for claustration had the potential to diminish a nunnery’s opportunities for economic success. As Elizabeth Makowski observes, the strict enclosure mandated by Periculoso “threatened to undermine the economic stability of these communities…. It severely limited the capacity of nuns to solicit funds from outside benefactors, to conduct schools within conventual precincts, or to engage in any kind of revenue-producing labor outside the cloister.”23
Before comparing Brigittine and Franciscan profession services with profession for nuns in the Benedictine tradition, it is instructive to consider the distinctions that emerge in a comparison of Benedictine profession for monks and nuns. Rather than mobilizing nuptial imagery, the profession service for Benedictine monks centers on the “idea of renovatio of the whole person.”24 Whereas nuns become brides of Christ, monks “‘pu[t] on the new Christ’—thereby identifying themselves directly with Christ.”25 As Johnson points out, “The differences by gender emphasize the hierarchy’s view of women as dependent and men as autonomous.”26 Furthermore, from the twelfth century, monks increasingly took holy orders as priests,27 which bolstered their identification with Christ, since as priests they were Christ’s earthly representatives. Benedictine monks thus share in the authority of Christ, receiving all the material and spiritual benefits such status conveys, while Benedictine nuns become Christ’s spouses deeply subject to patriarchal authority.28
Nuns’ identification as brides of Christ led to gendered interpretations of elements of monastic life shared by monks and nuns, variations which reinforced monks’ autonomy and nuns’ subjection. For instance, canon lawyers and theologians used the construction of the nun as the bride of Christ as grounds to distinguish between monks’ and nuns’ vows of chastity. If a monk broke his vow of chastity, the offense put his own soul in jeopardy. The unchastity of a nun, however, was deemed “a direct offense against her Spouse, the King of Heaven.”29 In his gloss on the canon Sanctimoniales attributed to Archbishop John Pecham, William Lyndwood, an influential fifteenth-century English canonist, discusses the rape of Dinah, daughter of Jacob, by Shechem, son of Hamor. Lyndwood “then explains, following a hallowed patristic tradition, that Pecham’s reference to ‘a more pernicious corruption’ reflects the fact that Dinah’s sin was one of simple fornication, while a nun’s corruption, in view of her marriage to Christ, would be adultery.”30 This formal distinction between monks’ and nuns’ vows of chastity helped encourage much stricter enforcement of enclosure for women. Because the spouse to whom nuns were subject was not physically present to guard their chastity and supervise their conduct, claustration and close supervision by the clergy, the divine spouse’s earthly representatives, were necessary.
Nuptial discourse structuring profession for women thus subjects the Benedictine nun, unlike the Benedictine monk, to a hierarchical, patriarchal complex of familial relations. For nuns, the bishop (or the officiating priest if the bishop did not perform the ceremony) “acted symbolically as parent and spouse,” representing both Christ the bridegroom who received her vows and her father, who as head of the family inquired into her suitability for the match.31 The familial relationships such alignment evokes emphasize male control over the nuns themselves and their material resources.
This nexus of familial relations, and the limitations that come with it, are echoed in the textual transactions of the Benedictine profession service. In the services for both monks and nuns, after making the vow, the candidate places the written profession on the altar. Beyond the symmetry in this moment in the service are implications which reinforce the different status of men and women religious in a textual economy. For the new nun, this text, representing her self, passes permanently out of her hands into those of the priest celebrating the mass. This priest occupies a position that the nun, unlike the monk, can never fill. The nun is not allowed to remain in the masculine position of scriptor, nor is she able to retain possession of the text she has written.32 The textual body—the writing placed on the page by female hands—and with it the female self come irretrievably into the control of the male clergy, a group from which women are barred.
Furthermore, the dynamics of the exchange at the altar reinforce the status of male clergy as producers of value and of women religious as vessels of a value which is alienated from their own possession. The service of profession creates new nuns, and while the nun certainly plays a role in making herself a bride of Christ by taking vows, she cannot perform the sacerdotal work necessary to make more nuns. Like the sacrament of the Eucharist, which is a key part of the profession service and which is performed at the very altar upon which the nuns have placed their written vows, the profession service represents an exclusively male, clerical form of production. It is, in a sense, a male replacement of the maternal reproduction which nuns forego upon entering religion, since profession represents not only marriage to Christ but also a “birth” into a new life of religion as spiritual daughters of clerical fathers in Christ.33
The identity of bride of Christ and the system of social relations it trails with it are also prominent in Franciscan and Brigittine profession services. The Rewle of Sustres Menouresses Enclosid highlights nuptiality in the description of the habit which the Franciscan nuns are to wear. The description reads, “it falliþ nat to hem whoche ys weddid to þe kynge perpetuel þat sche chiere none oþer but him, ne delite her in none oþer but in him.”34 According to the Middle English version of the Brigittine Rule, called The Rewyll of Seynt Sauioure, when a candidate has completed the year of proof before profession she is called “the newe spouse,” and nuptial imagery abounds in the Brigittine consecration service.35 As might be expected, when the bishop blesses the ring and bestows it on the candidate, such imagery is at the forefront. The bishop prays, “Almyʒty god euerlastyng. that hast spowsed to þe a newe spowse … blisse þoue this rynge. so þat as thi seruante beryth þe signe of a newe spowse in hir handes owtewardly. so mote she deserve to bere ynwardly thy feyth and charite” (Rewyll fol. 49v). Furthermore, the consecration service underlines the connection between the nun’s spousal status and her status
