of Elstow (two different visitations),106 the Benedictine house of Godstow (two different visitations),107 the Cistercian house of Gokewell,108 the Austin house of Gracedieu,109 the Benedictine house of Langley,110 the Cistercian house of Nuncoton,111 the Benedictine house of Stainfield,112 the Benedictine house of St. Michael’s Stamford,113 and the Cistercian house of Stixwould.114 This difference might mean that excess familiae were in fact more common in female communities, a possibility given nuns’ greater reliance on gifts, annuities and the like.115 It might well mean, though, that visitors were more concerned with familiae and their implications in female houses.
That visitors go further in restricting familiae in female communities than in male communities suggests that ecclesiastical unease with the material autonomy which familiae enabled for nuns did lead to heightened concern about the proliferation of households. For example, rather than insisting on a return to the traditional three familiae, in 1440 Bishop Alnwick restricts the Benedictine nuns of St. Michael’s Stamford to a single familia, requiring them to “stande alle holy wythe the prioresse in hire householde.”116 Alnwick similarly enjoins that the Benedictine nuns at Godstow abandon their diverse familiae in favor of dining all together. He additionally requires that the abbess of this house “do mynystre to thaym of the commune godes of the house mete and drynke owte [of] one selare and one kychyn.”117 This last injunction clearly reveals ecclesiastical desires to restrain the more individual administration of resources that occurred in female houses with numerous familiae. The point was not so much to promote the nuns’ spirituality by encouraging them to live a communal life as to limit the need of the brides of Christ to engage in financial decision making in the commercial marketplace, activity which was perceived as posing such a risk to their valuable purity.
As they do in their profession services, the Franciscan and Brigittine orders demonstrate distinct similarities with the Benedictine tradition in their visitation practices, and in many respects they do not call into question male, ecclesiastical authority over women. The visitor has a great deal of authority under the Isabella Rule, which grants to the Minister Provincial þe ordinaunce of þis ordre, þe gouernaunce, þe cure, þe visitacioun, þe correccioun, & reformacioun” (Rewle 95). The Bulla Reformatoria of Martin V, included in translation in the Syon Additions for the Sisters, begins by confirming episcopal jurisdiction over Brigittine houses in terms that stress a gendered, hierarchical, familial relationship between the nuns and the visitors. The bull states that English bishops in whose dioceses Brigittine foundations are located are to do all their offices as ordinary and to be “faders and iuges in al cases and causes, that toche the sustres or brethren, and also visitours and proctours of the seyd monasteryes” (Sisters 47).
The Brigittine and Franciscan traditions do, however, place limits on a visitor’s power to impact the particular identities nuns have within them. As the preceding examples regarding familiae indicate, injunctions can require modifications of the community’s ways of life and use of resources, aspects of monastic life fundamental to identity formation. The Isabella Rule short-circuits these potentially transformative aspects of visitation, stating, “And ouer alle þinge we defende þat none Ministre ne visitoure bi here auctorite make none constitucionis in þe Abbey ageynis þe forme & rule aforseyde” (Rewle 96). Any constitutions impinging on the rule could be made only “þi consentment of alle þe couent” and, strikingly, “ʒif ani soche nyew ordinaunce be made, by no maner þat þe sustres shul be boundyn þer to” (Rewle 96). Through these provisions, the Isabella Rule grants the nuns a significant amount of control over how visitation proceedings affect their community and their identity.
Texts associated with Brigittine visitation also place limits on visitors’ powers and give the nuns significant control over the impact of visitation on the community. The Bulla Reformatoria limits the scope of the bishop’s authority, preventing him from giving “any maner of sentence of cursynge, suspension, or interdiccion, / general or special” without “commission and special commaundmente of our see” (Sisters 47). Bishops visiting Syon were thus largely deprived of one of their primary tools for enjoining obedience, that is, the threat of excommunication which occurs almost universally in episcopal injunctions. Furthermore, the bull requires that the bishop commit the execution of “correccions, penaunces, and peynes, that be to be sette and enioyned to the trespasers” to “the abbes or the sadder parte of the sustres” (Sisters 45). Tellingly, the bull also states that the bishops are not to “aske any costes of them” (Sisters 47), thereby circumventing the financial burdens of visitation and mitigating the costs of hospitality which were often so heavy for houses. Since Syon’s great wealth might have been a tempting prospect for a less than circumspect prelate, the papal document’s assurance that material capital will remain in the nuns’ hands is particularly beneficial.
Ultimately, and perhaps most significantly, Franciscan and Brigittine visitation documents blur the rigid hierarchy between observer and observed. This distinction is an important marker of gendered, authoritative status in religion. The writing of Petrus de Ancarano, a contemporary of Joannes Andreae and, like Andreae, a commentator on Periculoso, is instructive on this point. In some respects Petrus is more moderate than Joannes in his interpretation of claustration; however, following Joannes’s Novella, Petrus “agrees that even abbesses may not leave their monasteries save for expressed purposes, and that conducting visitations is not one of those purposes, since the abbess herself is bound by the rules such visits seek to enforce.”118 Abbots, however, could and did visit communities under their jurisdiction in lieu of the diocesan.
Franciscan and Brigittine visitation practices do not go so far as to allow abbesses to conduct visitations of houses themselves. The Syon Additions for the Sisters, however, specifies that the bishop is not to visit “but in hys proper persone,” and he is to be accompanied by two or three companions (Sisters 39). Significantly, one of these companions is to be a “religious manne of the order of benett or bernarde” chosen by the abbess and confessor general in consultation with the “elder and wholer” sisters and brethren (Sisters 39). The members of the female community thus take an active role in organizing the visitation, and the Syon Additions for the Sisters, in calling for the participation of the abbess in choosing officials to carry out in the visitation, typifies the way in which Brigittine texts work to augment her position in the community of both men and women.119
A symbolic representation of the abbess’s maternal, authoritative identity in the corporate body occurs in the Brigittine visitation ceremony itself. In bishop’s registers, one of the phrases frequently used to describe the bishop’s role is that he sits in the capacity of judge in a tribunal: “In primis sedente dicto domino commissario iudicialiter pro tribunali in huiusmodi visitacionis inchoande negocio.”120 The head of the house and the convent then traditionally appear before the bishop seated in this capacity. The visitation procedure to be used at Syon, however, states that when the bishop takes his seat, “he shal make the abbes to sytte on hys ryghte hande” (Sisters 40). The head of the house in this case does not submit to the bishop seated in judgment but rather sits in judgment with him.121 The abbess, whom the Brigittine Rule describes as occupying the position of the Virgin Mary, is placed here on an equal level with the bishop, the representative of Christ. This placement echoes frequent description of the Virgin Mary as co-redemptrix in Brigittine service texts, and it recalls the equal focus on Mary and Christ as models for the nun in the consecration ceremony.122 Through limiting episcopal power and foregrounding the abbess’s authority, texts associated with Brigittine visitation do much to change the visitation process’s “ways of making the world.”123
The Minoresses’ Isabella Rule also changes the ways in which the world of the religious community is “made” in visitation. For instance, it stipulates that the visitor’s behavior is just as subject to scrutiny as the sisters’ behavior. The text specifies that he is to be “soche one whoche is wel knowen of stedfastnesse
