clerics saw in nuns’ reading and study opportunities to reinforce the kinds of proper conduct that would maintain their vital essential purity and unblemished reputation. As Anne Clark Bartlett observes in her discussion of clerical directives on how to read, “Ideally, an audience should assimilate a devotional text enthusiastically and comprehensively, attempting to reinscribe its words on their bodies by imitating the virtuous behavior that it models.”83 This clerical desire that nuns read so as to behave properly rather than so as to become learned is evident even in the translator’s prologue to the Brigittine Myroure of Oure Ladye.84 The translator advises the nuns, “Dresse so your entente. that your redyng & study. be not only for to be connynge or for to can speke yt fourthe to other; but pryncypally to enforme your selfe. & to set yt a warke in youre owne lyuynge.”85
Clerical concerns with nuns’ conduct and episcopal visitors’ overwhelming desire that nunneries avoid slander align with canonists’ assumptions that “although sexual abstinence and virginity were central values, essential to any life of religious dedication, nuns were specially blessed (or burdened) with an obligation to preserve a chastity that took on an almost mythical significance and importance.”86 For instance, Joannes Andreae “stressed that continence as well as virginity were included in the term chastity, and he equated the holiness of nuns with that single virtue.”87 According to both canonists and diocesan visitors, nuns’ value lay in their chastity (so essential to their status as brides of Christ) and in the good repute which proved their intrinsic worth.
A concern not only with chastity but also with good reputation stemmed from the need to make the unknowable knowable and the invisible visible. A nun’s spiritual condition was very much a public matter; fama or communis fama, defined as “the general opinion of serious and well-informed neighbors, were invoked in defining her status as holy or sinful.88 Sherry Ortner has noted that in societies where marriage is potentially a vertical transaction for women (hypergamy), both the economic value of a woman (what she can bring as dowry to the marriage) and her mystical or spiritual value, her “inner worthiness for such an alliance,” become matters of great importance.89 Ortner observes that virginity and chastity are “particularly apt for symbolizing such value.”90 A nun’s union with Christ is perhaps the ultimate instance of hypergamy, and thus those who administered and supervised the union were particularly concerned with securing the actual sexual purity of women religious as well as the reputation which provided a guarantee of value.
Episcopal injunctions concerning the proliferation of households known as familiae beyond the three traditionally tolerated—that is, the households of the superior, the frater, and the misericord—also reveal gendered constructions of Benedictine religious identity. Familiae ate together, frequently catering for themselves rather than relying on common stores. For male communities, visitors criticize numerous familiae as impractical, wasteful, or contrary to obedience to the monastic rule. For example, in Alnwick’s 1439 visitation of Ramsey Abbey, a large male Benedictine house, numerous households eating in diverse places are said to damage religious discipline and waste temporal goods—although in the past there were only three households, “iam sunt perplurima, propter quod religio perit et bona consumuntur.”91 In the injunctions from this visitation, Alnwick orders that the almoner, sacrist, and hostilarius not keep separate households including servants because they waste the resources of the house.92 In Thompson’s three volumes of fifteenth-century visitations of religious houses in the diocese of Lincoln, familiae are mentioned in the visitations of five male communities. In addition to the case of Ramsey, waste figures in two other cases. At Bardney, the waste of alms through excess familiae is condemned,93 while at Thornton the prior declares that, although waste has been a problem, it is not due to familiae but to other factors.94 At Peterborough, the prior simply asks the bishop to affirm the steps he (the prior) has already taken in doing away with separate eating places for monks in their seynies (that is, those monks undergoing periodic bloodletting performed for health reasons) and those excused from the frater.95 Finally, at Spalding, the bishop actually approves the existence of more than three households.96
For female houses, as in injunctions concerning the access of seculars, visitors tend to frame their concerns with excess familiae in terms of preventing slander. In his 1442 injunctions for Catesby Priory,97 Bishop Alnwick commands the prioress to ensure that the nuns “aftere your rewle lyfe in commune, etyng and drynkyng in oon house, slepyng in oon house … levyng vtterly all pryuate hydles, chaumbers and syngulere housholdes, by the whiche hafe comen and growen grete hurte and peryle of sowles and noyesfulle sklaundere of your pryorye.”98 Concern with a house’s reputation and repugnance toward public gossip about irregular activities there crop up frequently in visitation records for male and female houses. Slander is, however, only mentioned once in injunctions concerning familiae in a male house, and in this case (Ramsey) the slander is connected with the waste of alms rather than directly with the proliferation of familiae. So, since bishops use very different rhetoric to describe their concern with both enclosure and familiae in male and female communities, it seems fair to say that the repeated stress on reputation in the cases involving women reveals the Church’s gendered ideologies of religious identity for monks and nuns.
Visitation records highlight that familiae allowed women religious increased autonomy and more direct control of whatever resources were available.99 In the 1440 visitation of Gokewell, the prioress reports that “the nuns do keep divers households, to wit two by two; and yet they receive nothing of the house but bread and beer.”100 At Langley in 1440 the prioress also indicates that the nuns “keep separate households by themselves two and two.” She hastens to add that they eat “in the frater every day,” but she goes on to report, “the nuns receive naught from the house but their meat and drink.” Finally, she indicates that “she herself keeps one household on her own account.”101
Nunneries’ financial records similarly bear witness to internal economies which allowed the women religious some personal control of resources. Each month the prioress and nuns of St. Mary de Pré (a Benedictine house dependant on St. Albans Abbey), who numbered between eight and ten, shared between 33s and 35s for their “commyns,” that is, money for basic foods beyond bread and ale. St. Mary de Pré’s accounts also indicate cash payments for potages (dishes of cooked food).102 These developments manifest the very type of distribution of resources which injunctions limiting familiae sought to prevent.
The autonomy familiae enabled for nuns may well have prompted the clergy to focus on slander when addressing the proliferation of households. The visitors’ connection of excess familiae and nuns’ ill repute (which would potentially devalue nuns’ essential purity) resonates with a common later medieval tendency to sexualize, and thus stigmatize, economic activity which allowed women any measure of independence.103 Nuns were in fact frequently subjected to double-barreled, mutually reinforcing critiques which linked the sin of proprietas (that is, irregular possession of private property) with unchastity. While the link between proprietas and unchastity was at times made for both male and female religious, the slope leading from proprietas to unchastity was seen as particularly slippery and dangerous for the brides of Christ. The fifteenth-century German reformer Johann Busch declared of nuns, “First, losing the fear of God through the dissolution of their life, they fall into proprietas in small things; then in greater things, and then, descending farther to the personal possession of money and garments, they at last rush into the lusts of the flesh, and the incontinence of outward senses, and so to wickedness of act, not fearing to give themselves up to all filth and uncleanness.”104
Tellingly, references to excess familiae appear more frequently in visitations of female houses. Familiae are mentioned in seventeen cases in A. Hamilton Thompson’s three volumes of fifteenth-century visitations of religious houses from the diocese of Lincoln. Five references to familiae occur in visitations of male communities
