Benedictine abbeys of nuns succeeded in obtaining the kind of exemption from episcopal visitation enjoyed by some male houses of corresponding stature. In fact, even nunneries belonging to such exempt orders as the Cistercians were consistently subject to episcopal visitation.66 In the fifteenth century, church officials, “unlike their Gregorian predecessors, aggressively sought to take the cura mulierum into their own hands. They wanted to direct the spiritual life of women even at the cost of carrying the burdens of responsibility.”67 Outside of the three houses of Franciscan Minoresses and the one house of Dominican nuns existing in England in the later Middle Ages, which were visited by the ministers of their orders, the only real exemptions to episcopal jurisdiction over female foundations were the communities of nuns dependent on male houses where the head of the male house sometimes acted as visitor.
As Johnson notes, prelates had a “vested interest” in maintaining strong authority over both male and female houses in their diocese or province.68 “The obedience of a monastery increased the episcopal power base and added to the diocesan’s income through court fees and procurations.”69 In addition to acquiring material resources, a diocesan could also gain symbolic capital, resources stored in nonmaterial form, by asserting his authority as visitor, as “writer” of ideological scripts, and regulator of community life.70 Because English nuns were more subject to visitation than monks, the bishops’ gain of material and symbolic capital were achieved at greater expense to the nuns—another respect in which visitation was not gender neutral.
The material burdens of visitation, while borne by nuns and monks alike, would have been comparatively greater for nuns, since nunneries were generally poorer and less well-endowed than male monasteries. Nunnery accounts indicate that these material costs could be heavy indeed. When a bishop or his deputy came to the house on the business of visitation, the nuns had to pay for the entertainment of the visitor and his retinue; they also had to pay various parties engaged in the textual transactions, such as bringing summons, returning with injunctions, and writing accounts. The treasuress’s account from St. Michael’s Stamford from 2–3 Richard II includes the following instances of such expenses:
| Primerment pour expensus del Evesque al visitacion | xls |
| Item a 1 home portant la lettre del visitacion | iis |
| Item a 1 altre home portant 1 lettre apres le visitacion | xiid71 |
William Alnwick, bishop of Lincoln, visited St. Michael’s Stamford in 1442, and a list of creditors of the house at the time of that visitation includes a debt of £8 10s to Thomas Colston.72 Colston, a canon of Lincoln Cathedral, was Alnwick’s notary and was present at the visitation, so it is quite likely that the debt is related to visitation costs. Nunneries incurred expenses even when the visitation was not performed by the bishop. A prioress’s account from St. Mary de Pré (4–5 Edward IV) records “iis id in expensus” for the house’s visitation by the prior and sacristan of St. Alban’s together with their servants as ordered by the abbot.73
The gendered effects of visitation extend still further. Visitation in fact produces and reinforces very specific, differing identities for monks and nuns as men and women in religion. In visitation records and injunctions for Benedictine houses, gendered differences, which reinforce the divergent subject positions set out in profession for monks and nuns, are clearly revealed with a heightened emphasis on female weakness and vulnerability throughout. Injunctions concerning the exclusions of seculars from the cloister provide a particularly striking illustration of the way in which visitation encourages gendered religious identities. While it is the case that seculars did have access to both male and female houses on a regular basis, and indeed lived as corrodians in male and female monastic communities, ecclesiastical concern with the presence of seculars persisted. Even in cases where the theory and practice of monastic life are at odds, the continuing clerical desire to align theory and practice, and the reasons expressed for invoking the theory as the ideal, reveal gendered definitions of religious life.
In injunctions for male houses, visitors express concern with the disturbances seculars might cause to the monks. For instance, Bishop Flemyng’s 1421–1422 injunctions for Huntingdon Priory prohibit seculars’ passage through the cloister “in order that the devotion of the singers in quire or the peace of those who are sitting in the cloister may be in no way disturbed by those seculars.”74 In a set of late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century injunctions for Newnham, Bishop Gray echoes these concerns, ordering that the house restrain the recourse of seculars, especially women, to cloister precincts and prevent them from sharing meals in the frater “so that the quiet of the canons in cloister at the time of contemplation or the reading in the frater at breakfast-time be in no wise hindered.”75
The emphasis on preserving an atmosphere of quiet for the male religious’ contemplation, services, and study demonstrates the Church’s view of their mental and spiritual labors as valuable, productive work which seculars should not to be allowed to disrupt. These labors replaced the manual labor which had long since practically disappeared as a defining aspect of monastic life. A passage from the statutes of the 1343 chapter of the Benedictines, which was restated without change in the statutes of the 1444 chapter, indicates the importance of study and intellectual labor in monastic life: “Abbates … monachos suos claustrales loco operis manualis … certis facient exerciciis occupari, videlicet studendo, legendo, librosque scribendo, corrigendo, illuminando pariter et ligando.”76 It is clear that this passage represents a watershed change in the definition of monastic labors because, significantly, “the word legendo (i.e. reading with commentary to students; cf. the ‘reader, at universities) is not in the corresponding decree of the chapter of 1277.”77
The reasons visitors give for prohibiting access of seculars to female houses differ dramatically from the reasons given in injunctions for male houses. For female houses, the prohibitions tend to be expressed in terms of alarm at the spread of public slander resulting from seculars’ access and corresponding concern with the damage to the nuns’ reputation seculars thus caused. In his 1445 injunctions to the Benedictine nuns of Littlemore Priory, Bishop Alnwick orders that they prevent the access of outsiders because “ye and your said place are greuously noysede and sclaundrede” as a result of the “gre[te and] commune accesse” seculars have.78 In his 1445 injunctions to the Benedictine house of Godstow, Alnwick also prohibits access of seculars with the exception of the house’s officers or “other that are of your consaile and fee.”79 The reason given for this prohibition is that “youre saide monastery and diuerse singulere persones ther of are greuously noysed and sclaundred.”80 The nuns’ “honesty” appears as a related concern in injunctions dealing with the access of seculars to the nuns’ cloister. In 1421–1422, Bishop Gray prohibits secular boarders among the Benedictine nuns at Elstow Abbey because they damage the “purity of religion” (“religionis puritas “) and the “pleasantness of honest conversation and character” (“conuersacionis honeste et morum suauitas”).81
Contemplation, study, and divine service were as important to women as to men in monastic orders, and perhaps even more so, since women could not become priests. While English nunneries, with the exception of Syon, most likely did not have the extensive libraries available in some male houses, books appropriate for study and contemplative reading were certainly part of nuns’ spiritual lives, even in houses that, unlike Syon, were not exceedingly wealthy.82 The rhetoric of visitation records, however, appears less concerned with preserving an atmosphere conducive to contemplation, study, and divine service in female houses. The visitors’ concern with the nuns’ reputation rather than with their ability to engage in spiritual labor shows that the value of women religious, as far as the Church was concerned, did not lie in their work. While the Church identified monks as producers of valuable spiritual resources whose labors should be facilitated, the value of women religious did not stem so much from their contemplative and
