Status and Visibility

There were changes to the status of abbesses and prioresses over the later Middle Ages. The oldest female religious houses had often been founded, endowed, and populated by aristocratic families, and enjoyed the income from a portfolio of dependent churches and landed property. Their abbesses were important figures within regional economies, sometimes holding power akin to that of bishops. As the European economy grew and political power intensified from the year 1000 onward, aristocratic female monasteries found themselves competing for land and influence with other secular and ecclesiastical institutions. Depending on their ability to retain their independence during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, such abbesses might be leading thriving houses with enduring prominence or presiding over dwindling resources and a shrinking horizon. Meanwhile, female houses founded within the new monastic orders of the twelfth century, such as the Cistercians (across Europe) and Gilbertines (in England), and within or adjacent to the mendicant orders of the thirteenth century, such as the Franciscans and Dominicans, were generally less wealthy than their older counterparts and the heads of these institutions commanded correspondingly more meagre resources. During the fourteenth century, demographic shocks resulting from the “great European famine” of 1315–17 and plague from 1348 onward placed enormous pressures on institutional landholders, leaving some female religious houses shadows of their former selves.2

There were somewhere in the region of 150 heads of female religious houses in England and Wales at any one time during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The agency of abbesses and prioresses was thus familiar to the men who governed the church. In fact, it was not uncommon for a bishop to be related to a head of a female convent, such as Katherine, the prioress of Clerkenwell (d. 1384) and sister to Robert Braybrooke, the bishop of London, or Joan, the prioress of Swine circa 1400 and sister of Walter Skirlaw, the bishop of Durham.3 But what did bishops think of the status possessed by their female fellow prelates?

There is evidence to suggest that governance and rule were widely assumed to be the responsibilities of abbesses and prioresses and, therefore, within the competencies of women. From the thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman version of the life of St. Modwenna, who was said “to govern” (guverner) her house, through to Bishop Richard Fox’s 1516 adaptation of the Benedictine Rule for nuns, which referred to abbesses possessing “rule and governance,” references to a female capacity for authority were commonplace. The abbess of Denny, Cambridgeshire, was described as possessing “abbatial rule” in 1349; later in the fourteenth century, the bishop of Winchester acknowledged that the abbess of Romsey, Hampshire, was “placed in authority” over her nuns; the fifteenth-century “Northern Metrical Version” of the Benedictine Rule spoke of the abbess being “sovereign.”4 These medieval assumptions have only recently begun to shape historiographical discussions of the female religious, revising an older scholarship that downplayed the significance of women in positions of authority.5 Writing about the British Isles, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne has observed that abbesses represented female “rank and rule in the religious life,” while Valerie Spear notes the “exercise of independent authority by a woman” in the abbatial role. Jennifer Edwards’s work on western France and Annalena Müller’s on France, Germany, and Switzerland, has similarly characterized female abbacy as a “commonplace” and “natural” position of authority for women across the European Middle Ages.6

While historians now accept the reality of women in power, we must acknowledge that the influence of an abbess or prioress was constrained. Crucially, for the purposes of the present book, it is necessary to note that they were never delegated as commissioners in diocesan governance, after the manner of the officers and clergy discussed in chapter 1. While the heads of some male religious houses sat in Parliament and were often used by bishops for administrative tasks such as levying royal taxation, female religious were commissioned to act on behalf of a bishop only regarding matters internal to their convent.7 A typical example would be Bishop Buckingham of Lincoln’s 1366 appointment of Matilda, the subprioress of Sewardsley (Northamptonshire), as executor of the goods of her prioress, who had recently died.8 Matilda could be instructed to act on behalf of the bishop because this business was internal to the convent.

Outside the convent, abbesses and prioresses encountered ambivalence and censure. Nuns were meant to be enclosed behind walls, but their leaders had duties—discussed in more depth in the following sections—that made them visible abroad in the world. As Elizabeth Lehfeldt has demonstrated, nuns “regularly transgressed the boundaries of the cloister, interacting with their families and patrons and making their mark on secular society and the local economy.”9 At the end of the thirteenth century, Pope Boniface VIII issued a decretal known as Periculoso, named for its first word in Latin, which sought to put a stop to “the dangerous and abominable situation of certain nuns” moving freely outside their convents. The decretal called for strict physical enclosure, permitting abbesses to leave their houses only in order to conduct legal business. The imagined need for such legislation indicates that abbesses and prioresses had before 1298 been seen often outside the confines of the cloister, and the exception for legal business suggests that little would in fact change as a result. This proved to be so. Travel with a retinue of priests and lawyers, for the purposes of defending her house’s interests, was normal and allowed under the terms of Periculoso.10 An abbess would often mingle with other leaders of church society: abbots, priors, bishops, and judges. Several such occasions are revealed in the serendipitous survival of a large cache of loose visitation documents for Lincoln diocese in 1299, a year after Periculoso was issued, although before it was widely known in England. In one instance, the dean of Calcewaith confirmed that the Cistercian prioresses of Greenfield and Legbourne would appear before the visitor to answer for their churches alongside three abbots or priors and at least a dozen representatives of the secular clergy.11 She and her status were highly visible in an otherwise male public sphere.

By the late fourteenth century, when Geoffrey Chaucer penned his famous, though much-misunderstood, portrait of a fictional prioress Eglentyne riding on pilgrimage, worldliness in a female convent head was a subject for satire, but a satire we should not rush to simplify.12 While some modern critics have interpreted Chaucer’s portrait as wholesale hostility to nuns at large in the world, Katherine Lewis’s recent analysis demonstrates that Eglentyne was not simply “too worldly” but worldly in the wrong way, fond of fine living and amusements.13 Her self-presentation as the leader of a prestigious institution with business to conduct in the world would not have surprised contemporaries, but the poet’s prickly satire hints that it may have offended them in some way. The requirement for women religious to be enclosed within their cloister was well known, yet their leaders were a familiar presence in several public settings. If, as Merridee Bailey has proposed (see the introduction), frustrated moral judgments could find expression in anxiety, it is possible to think that churchmen feared the reality of female abbatial authority.

Indeed, possessing “governance” was something of a silent rebuke to the male monopoly on diocesan power. As we have seen, abbesses and prioresses were not commissioned to carry out governance acts on behalf of bishops, so alongside their visibility and acknowledged status, we should ponder the nature of their invisibility.

In one sense, women in positions of authority were perfectly visible. Yet the world as written in the commissions of church government was a world largely without women (except where female religious were themselves being regulated). In not writing to women as possible participants in diocesan governance, bishops—as I argue over the course of this chapter—forgot that they were in fact qualified as such. Bishops knew and simultaneously did not know what women could do. It would have felt unnatural to commission a woman to collect a royal subsidy, despite her natural ability. There is denial, disturbance, and arguably fear in this combination of knowledge and silence, something that historians have noted before. For instance, commenting on medieval writers’ hypersexualization of women religious, Jo Ann McNamara has argued that “the idea of women concentrated together in highly charged spaces, bursting with barely controlled sexual desire, terrified men.” For McNamara the fear was psychosexual, born of an equation between convents and brothels; she describes women beyond male control as “haunting” male writers who became “obsessed with women’s power.” Other scholars, such as John Coakley, have seen male institutional authority as the fascinated but anxious counterpart to female charismatic authority.14 This chapter, and indeed this whole book, takes up the suggestion that men in the church were obsessed with women’s power. But it does not locate the source of the obsession wholly in sexuality or spirituality, nor does it seek its articulation only in the binary dyad of misogyny or devotion. Instead, I propose that abbesses and prioresses also caused anxiety in men because of their aptitude for governance. This anxiety occupied the space between women’s capacity for authority—their status, skills, and experience—and its denial to them, manifested in the contrasting ways that men in power addressed their male and female subordinates.

Skills

Since church government was conducted by letter, with written mandates used to issue instructions and the expectation that a documentary “certification” or report would be returned, literacy was the sine qua non without which there would be no female potentiality to speak of. Were the female heads of religious houses able to participate in this documentary culture? Despite the skepticism of some modern historians, there is now a substantial body of scholarship that allows us to answer this with a qualified “yes.”15

Although the records of female monasticism are depleted, they are still relatively abundant. The difficult question is whether the letters, grants, accounts, and other records of a convent were penned by women or by male clerks. In general, there is as little evidence for men’s as for women’s identity as the scribes of particular documents, but historians’ presumption against female writing has been slow to dissipate. Notable examples of administrative or professional literacy among women religious cover a variety of administrative genres. For example, we have petitions written in Latin and French sent by the abbess of Godstow (Oxfordshire) between 1283 and 1310, Godstow’s cartulary was composed in 1403–4 by its prioress Alice Eaton, the fifteenth-century accounts of Blackborough Priory (Norfolk)—while drawn up by male auditors—referred to working papers prepared by various nuns, and the cellarer’s accounts of Syon Abbey (Middlesex) for 1483–85 were prepared by the intriguingly named Sister Anne Clerk.16 But one did not have to be proficient in writing oneself to write letters. Dictation to a clerk was common. Even reading could be done by proxy. In one mid-fourteenth-century lawsuit discussed by Bronach Kane, for example, the nuns of Wykeham in Yorkshire testified that they knew their house was exempt from paying tithes on its lands because of papal bulls and privileges that they had “seen and heard many times.”17 Whether this means that the witnesses had read the documents themselves or had listened while someone else read them is unclear but also beside the point. The second possibility would point to a vicarious, but still highly functional, Latin literacy.

Most female religious houses certainly participated in documentary culture. They had to. The viability of monastic estates depended on writing.18 For example, in 1332, the prioress of Marrick in Swaledale, North Yorkshire, demanded that her bailiff provide her with his written account, and in 1434 the prioress of Coldstream in southern Scotland, Mariota Blackburn, arranged for all of her house’s charters, “evidences,” grants, and confirmations to be copied. She was worried that fire, flood, or an English invasion could raise the danger “that truth of the original might perish.”19 Without the ability to communicate in writing or to rely on their archives, women’s religious houses could find it hard to defend their property rights and such autonomy as they possessed. For example, in 1322 Joan de Brotherton the prioress of Moxby in Yorkshire was prevented from writing to her contacts outside the convent as part of a raft of penances imposed by Archbishop William Melton in response to her alleged faults.20 Melton must have known the effect this would have on Brotherton; he was depriving her of agency in the world to incentivize her compliance with his demands. Unlawful means were also sometimes used to limit the capacity of nuns to conduct literate business and administration. During the English peasants’ revolt of 1381, for instance, rebels destroyed the records of female convents with as much fervor as those of any other landowner. Margaret de Enges, the prioress of Carrow (Norfolk), was forced to hand over the priory’s documents when insurgents threatened her “life and limbs,” before watching the charters and rolls go up in flames. Other more isolated incidents were motivated by local grievances. For instance, the London Minoresses had their archive stolen during litigation over tithes in the 1520s.21 That the writing and archives of nuns were targeted by hostile forces tells us that they were important.

Mariota Blackburn’s association between truth and writing is an eloquent reminder not only that senior female religious were just as habituated as their male counterparts to documents, a key component of church government, but also that they were experienced in handling orders and instructions that came in written form, albeit their scope for doing so was limited to the convents under their authority. Notably, it was to abbesses and prioresses that bishops addressed injunctions for reform following a visitation.22 In successive visitations of female convents in the diocese of Lincoln in the 1430s and 1440s, prioresses were asked whether they had “observed and caused to be observed” the injunctions given at the last visitation.23 In this regard, bishops treated the heads of female monasteries just as they would any other recipient of written instructions, but this only serves to make their exclusion from diocesan governance all the more worthy of our attention.

Experience

The normal responsibilities of abbesses and prioresses also fitted them for all forms of governance. They had to appoint and supervise servants and lay officers of various kinds, hold courts, litigate on their own behalf, and manage their estates.

The appointment of lay officers was a task undertaken by all bishops and heads of religious houses, the latter whether they were male or female. Like the prioress of Coldstream in 1551, Jonet Hoppringle, they would have taken “ripe advise” and given the matter “long deliberation” so as to select men they could trust.24 Stewards, bailiffs, rent collectors, and gatekeepers were among the main lay servants of abbesses and prioresses, but we can also count chaplains working for convents among the men who experienced the female exercise of power.25 Authority over others was a key marker of governance. It inspired confidence in other power holders that a person could be a reliable partner or agent. But no matter how competent or powerful, abbesses were never invited into the male networks of church governance, whose operation was explored in chapter 1.

One significant field of authority from which later medieval abbesses were excluded was spiritual jurisdiction over laypeople, as exercised by some male abbots. Certain ancient monasteries, such as St. Albans and Glastonbury, had the right to hold church courts, but there is no evidence that any female house possessed such power.26 An abbess or a prioress was, however, “a female lord by virtue of her office,” which meant exercising secular justice, providing hospitality, and managing tenants, property, and revenue. It is often difficult to tell whether any medieval lord presided over their manorial courts in person, let alone whether an abbess or prioress would do so. But the evidence from Lacock Abbey (Wiltshire), discussed by Valerie Spear, suggests that it was not unusual for an abbess to receive the homage of male tenants in her hall or to be present at other important moments, such as the completion of an estate survey.27

They were also well used to litigating to protect their estates from a variety of threats, requiring them not only to engage with male authority figures and travel beyond the convent, but also to command male representatives. For example, in 1301 and 1302 the prioress of Clerkenwell secured two royal writs, the first banning sports and games that were damaging the nuns’ property and the second enforcing the collection of her rents; in 1360 the abbess of Lacock successfully recovered 300 acres of her abbey’s lands that had been occupied by someone else; in the 1470s the nuns of Denny sued a local lord who was disturbing their manorial courts; in 1501 the prioress of Haddington pursued a complex claim against a secular male lord, commissioning several male agents to act as her proctors, including the prior of St. Andrews and a lay advocate.28 Such cases, which could be multiplied many times from the surviving documentation, are evidence that female heads of religious houses were active in discharging their public responsibilities. This is further evidence that they would have been familiar figures in the late medieval public sphere.

This also applied to the day-to-day work of managing estates for the sustenance and profit of a convent. Although prioresses worked through male servants, they would have kept a knowledgeable eye on processes like rent collection, demesne cultivation, labor services, leasing arrangements, and credit relationships. For example, in the 1480s the bursar of Godstow, Clemency Rufford, was described as overseeing the work of the abbey’s “receiver” or estate manager.29 Because few nunneries produced just what they needed for subsistence and no more, most would have been involved in local and regional markets as purchasers and vendors, and by the fifteenth century, many were reliant on rental income from their small property portfolios. For abbesses and prioresses this would have meant a detailed knowledge of local agricultural, market, and demographic conditions. This is reflected in the late medieval miracle stories told about St. Modwenna, the semimythical seventh-century founding abbess of Burton-upon-Trent, which were very often related to estate management.30

Praising competent management as miraculous was, however, a denigration of very ordinary capabilities. Rents successfully collected: what wonders! Yet women heads of religious houses were not miraculous in their everyday governance; they were simply competent and experienced. Rejecting the narrative of exceptionalism that is baked into hagiography and also, regrettably, into some of the older historiography on women in power in the Middle Ages, we can ask instead how abbesses and prioresses honed their skills in unremarkable circumstances.31 Clearly, a good deal of the expertise lying behind day-to-day female governance was acquired on the job, but some women—particularly those who had run substantial households as wives before taking religious vows—may have been qualified by previous experience.32 Ela, the countess of Salisbury who served as sheriff of Wiltshire on several occasions during her widowhood in the 1220s and 1230s before founding and running Lacock Abbey, may be the most extensively experienced person to have run a convent, male or female, in the later Middle Ages.33 She is, however, simply the highest-profile and one of the best-evidenced examples of a widespread phenomenon.

Additionally, whether or not a mother superior had previous firsthand experience of managing estates, if she came from a noble family—as was most common in the thirteenth century—she would have been able to call on all sorts of connections and assistance from her relatives and her class-based network.34 Many more women from gentry families, who dominated female monasticism in the fifteenth century, likewise brought the self-assurance of landed widowhood and social connections to their roles as prioresses. For instance, in the 1430s St. Mary’s Priory in Derby was controlled by Isabel Stanley, widow of a powerful local knight: her defense of the house’s interests was so strenuous that she was sued in Chancery for intimidating the servants of the abbot of Burton. A woman of similar background, Joan Fitzwilliam, was the bursar at Stainfield Priory in Lincolnshire in the 1440s; having entered the convent after the death of her husband, she kept a stern eye on the accounts.35 Like their noble counterparts, women from gentry families would endeavor to capitalize on the position of their male relatives. Eileen Power for instance noted the example of Joan Wiggenhall the prioress of Crabhouse (Norfolk), who solicited financial and other help from two cousins who were rectors of churches. Pumping their networks and exploiting their estates in order to secure the finances of their houses, abbesses and prioresses took part in a practice of lordship common to male and female, dynastic and institutional lords. They did it all, but how was this regarded by the male church hierarchy?

The Gendering of Women’s Action

Whatever they achieved, women in positions of religious leadership were always constrained within certain limits. When late medieval authors wrote about the power of abbesses and prioresses, they engaged in a “gendering of authority” that policed those boundaries. This was true of misogynist male writers like Chaucer but also of male and female authors who praised their subjects.36 In chapter 1 we explored the gendering of the concept of virtue in relation to governance. Though it could be used to describe both men and women, virtue operated differently as a label depending on the person to whom it was applied. Archbishop Chichele, for example, referred to the abbess of Polesworth as possessing the “gifts of virtue” when commending her appointment in 1414; virtue here implied masculine strength.37 It was in fact common for men praising women to use masculine-gendered terms or to say explicitly that a woman was “like a man.” According to St. Ambrose, the biblical Deborah “without being at all restrained by the weakness of her sex . . . undertook to perform the duties of a man.”38 Deborah was used many times as a model for female authority in the later Middle Ages. Although Ambrose added that “it is not sex but valor” that instills strength or virtue, this was a literary artifice that relied on some doublethink about gender. Virtue might not have been exclusively equated with maleness, but its association with masculinity (including among women) achieved much the same effect. As Felice Lifshitz argued in 1979, positive references to female abbatial power typically treated it as a form of fatherhood rather than motherhood.39 That they did so emphasized that such virtues did not strictly “belong” with women. Treating successful women as exceptional and as honorary men was a strategy calculated not to disturb the order that kept most women in their place.

But it was not only men who wrote about women religious in this way. The eulogy for Euphemia, the abbess of Wherwell in Hampshire, written by her monastic sisters around 1257, similarly praised her building projects saying that “she seemed to have the spirit of a man rather than a woman.”40 Despite this, her obituary omitted much of what she would have done outside her convent, the sorts of governance activities surveyed in the foregoing paragraphs: nothing of how she projected authority in her own and other people’s courts, how she gathered, recorded, and conveyed information, or how she issued orders to servants and subordinates. The silence is worth pondering. Why would the nuns who knew and loved her restrict their praise in this way? Why, having said she was like a man, could they not celebrate the fact that her role involved doing the things that all lords and heads of religious houses had to do? The answer may be that there was self-censorship at work. Perhaps her eulogy was written to conform to a picture of female authority with which the world was comfortable, in which women’s involvement in the tasks of governance was quietly ignored; seen but not seen; known but not known.

This is certainly the picture gained from an examination of the way in which bishops habitually addressed the heads of female religious houses. The following analysis of letters to and about abbesses and prioresses complements the investigation in chapter 1 of the masculine language of diocesan governance, with which it should be compared. Episcopal language was conditioned by commonplace attitudes toward women, the bishop’s reasons for writing, and the religious vocation of the addressees. It was consistently patriarchal in the most literal way. Whatever the reality of their personalities, autonomy, and power, abbesses and prioresses were placed firmly in a subordinate and dependent position by being addressed as “beloved daughters in Christ” (dilectis in Christo filiabus, or, in Middle English wele belufed doghters).41 This was a formulaic honorific whose repetition constituted an unquestioned assumption about women in power: whatever authority they had, they were subordinates. While the men of the church were often referred to by superiors as “sons in Christ,” that phrase was generally followed—as we saw in chapter 1—by evocations of equality and masculine friendship. When women in authority were referred to as daughters, without any subsequent acknowledgment of their autonomy, it entrenched male ecclesiastical authority as paternal, and women religious as children in need of governance. It is important to note that they were not called daughters of Christ but daughters in Christ: the bishop’s spiritual daughters. As fathers, bishops wrote to abbesses and prioresses ordering them to do things: to accept a new nun, to accept the bishop’s decision about a new abbess, to reform their community following a visitation.

For instance, when Archbishop Chichele wrote to the abbess and convent of Wilton (Wiltshire) in 1414 instructing them to accept a novice on his recommendation, he called them his “beloved daughters in Christ.” The same form of words was used by Bishop Wykeham of Winchester in 1372, telling the abbess of Romsey (Hampshire) to admit his kinswoman to her community.42 These were orders to subordinates, lacking any acknowledgment that abbesses or convents might have preferences of their own. It was a denial of agency. It was also a formal style habituated through long usage and wide dissemination. The cartulary of Godstow Abbey, for instance, recorded papal confirmations of the nuns’ privileges made in 1145 and 1191 that addressed the abbess as “beloved daughter in Christ.” The papal form was then echoed in the way that successive bishops of Lincoln referred to the abbess of Godstow or her nuns. Other female religious houses, such as Chatteris in Cambridgeshire or Clerkenwell in London, received letters from bishops, archbishops, and popes that deployed the same simple paternalist appellation. Variations were minimal, with occasional passing mention of the “poverty and honesty” of the beloved daughters, of their role in “serving God,” or their duty to be welcoming and good-natured (morigerata).43

Visitation injunctions sometimes expanded on such nullifications of female authority, repeating the paternal appeal to “beloved daughters in Christ” and making plain that this father-daughter relationship was necessitated by female weakness. It was, however, often wrapped up in gendered approbation. For instance, when the abbess of Wherwell was disciplined by Archbishop Pecham in 1284, he explained that while “virgins of God” could be “sweeter, more painstaking, firmer” (dulcius, sedulius, firmius) even than men, women’s hearts and mouths were weaker (est corde vel ore fragilior) and required his reforming attention. He did not, he explained, regard her as his adversary but as his daughter (nullam tibi imaginanes esse adversariam sed filiam). This praise and reassurance was all prelude to the abbess being demoted and placed under supervision. Similarly in Bishop Wykeham of Winchester’s injunctions to his “beloved daughters in Christ” at Romsey Abbey in 1387, the bishop cast himself as the protector of helpless nuns from the “bites of wolves;” they in turn were expected to accept his orders with devotion and humility.44 The currency of such praise was therefore strikingly gendered. Women in positions of leadership had the capacity to be better than men, but this lay in their sweetness, attention to detail, and deference to authority (tropes of femininity with a long history ahead of them) rather than in an authority that commanded others and stood on its own merits. The obverse of this coin was feminine weakness in heart and mouth, the tendency to be led astray by personal impulses and to speak out of turn (again, features of an everyday sexism that endure to this day). But the archbishop’s main message was that an abbess’s authority was limited and subject to his higher power. She was subordinate to him. In other, less verbose, preambles to visitation injunctions this was boiled down to one word. Nuns, superiors included, were simply subditae (“subjects” or “subordinates”).45 This was how bishops commonly referred to the laity. Although submission was required of all religious, not just women, the context we have examined indicates that the attitude toward abbesses was heavily and negatively gendered.

This language of inferiority and subordination was given especial power to circumscribe women’s sphere of authority by the fact that it was never accompanied by the friendship discourse that characterized episcopal communication with the men involved in diocesan government. We saw in chapter 1 that assertions of equality, trust, and friendship were the lifeblood of the system whereby bishops commissioned governance acts from men within the ecclesiastical hierarchy: orders were accompanied by acknowledgment of autonomy and discretion. The absence of this discourse from episcopal communication with abbesses and prioresses had deep historical roots in the cultural masculinity of power, and contemporary resonance in other spheres of women’s activity.46 Laying down a pattern of thought that would—as we saw in chapter 1—be extremely influential on the culture of political friendship, Cicero had allowed that while women and the weak might seek the protection afforded by friendship, their implied neediness was incompatible with the independence that it demanded. Given the debt that the high medieval dictatores and later medieval episcopal correspondence owed to Cicero, it seems that this fundamental attitude persisted, erecting a barrier to women’s participation in the masculine culture of friendship, trust, and virtus and disqualifying them from governance roles by default.47 Cicero’s influence on the gendered assumptions surrounding friendship in later centuries is borne out by a fascinating study of the exclusion of noblewomen from male circles of power in the twelfth century by Rebecca Slitt, which finds that the language of communication had the effect of “effacing and undermining women’s participation in political friendship.”48

As studies by Slitt and others have shown, women were not wholly excluded from formalized circles of friendship in the Middle Ages. In addition to secular networks, women religious took part in the culture of monastic friendship that was one of the models for the epistolary culture discussed in chapter 1.49 This literary and spiritual tradition is most famously associated with the twelfth-century monk Aelred of Rievaulx, for whom all relationships were configured on the basis of Christian love.50 However, such transcendence of gender did not extend to the realm of church administration, and monastic friendship was never thought to qualify nuns—even capable abbesses and prioresses—for governing responsibilities beyond the cloister. Unlike the bishop’s male commissioners, no abbess was ever instructed as a virtuous, trusted, and equal friend. Such omissions were strong if silent significations of their unsuitability for acts of public governance.

Cause and effect are not perfectly linear in this situation of course, since action and language shape one another. The heads of female religious houses were not addressed as the bishop’s friends because he was not engaging them in the tasks of public governance; he instructed them only in the proper administration of their private lands and responsibilities. How he wrote to them was in all probability automatic and not necessarily motivated by any conscious misogyny. But this should not be thought to have diminished the historical significance of the language. Quite the opposite, the very fact of letters being formed of conventional phrases strengthened the gendered assumptions they carried, making female authority beyond the convent seem unnatural.

And this was only emphasized in the transactional discourse it stimulated. To be considered a safe pair of hands and not to be the object of suspicion, heads of female religious houses knew they had to play the part allotted to them. A good example of a woman who knew the rules of the game was Joan Stoke, the prioress of Polesworth in Warwickshire, who in 1414 had to inform the archbishop of Canterbury that her abbess had died. The archbishop was responsible for choosing, or confirming, a successor. Joan wrote to him calling herself his “humble and devout daughter,” and Henry responded by addressing her as “beloved daughter in Christ.”51 Stroke for stroke, each author followed the expected script, reinforcing the hierarchies within which they lived, but doing so was also one way in which female heads of religious houses ensured that they achieved limited goals. They struck what Deniz Kandiyoti has called the “patriarchal bargain,” seeking to maintain their position within an unequal hierarchy rather than to change it.52 Looked at in this way, it is somewhat easier to understand why the Wherwell eulogist chose to praise certain activities of her abbess and draw a veil over others. Euphemia may have been a woman with the spirit of a man, but that made her an exceptional prodigy, a marvel. To have enumerated all her achievements in the spheres of worldly governance—estate management, litigation, relationships with powerful men, the production and transmission of written information—would have made her successes too quotidian, too real. Men in power in the church could not, or did not want to, acknowledge this universal female capacity for governance. It was something they knew but did not know. An abbess’s freedom or agency was not something that could be publicly acknowledged. Rather, it was ignored or repressed.53

What this brief analysis of epistolary language has shown is that approbation, admiration, and even silence could contribute to gender inequalities. I do not disagree with Jennifer Edwards’s recent contention that “the ecclesiastical community as a whole retained a high respect for abbatial authority from monastic women” in the later Middle Ages.54 But it is important to interrogate the nature of that regard. The way in which women were respected and praised, and what was not said, drew limits around their scope for public action and went a long way to justifying their exclusion from diocesan governance. If someone celebrated their competence within the cloister but was too embarrassed to mention their regular demonstration of a more public and worldly role, that omission contributed to what the literary scholar Alcuin Blamires has called the “cumulative strategies and habits of thought” that kept women out of church office.55 I think Blamires correctly identifies the linguistic mechanism ordering medieval assumptions about women, regardless of their actual capacities: words were probably more important than laws. But the “strategies and habits” he was referring to were antifeminist satire and misogyny. What the present discussion has shown is that women—and the threat they seemed to pose to male monopolies—could also be kept in check through positive yet highly gendered language.

Masculine Anxiety about the “Ghostly Power” of Women

But can we go further than this? Keeping women in check through paternalist care and approbation seems like no mental effort whatsoever, a far cry from masculine anxiety. However, the full picture comprises not only gendered silences and approbations but also misogyny of precisely the sort that Blamires highlights and the evidence of actions as well as words. It is, after all, the contention of the present book that gender relations and gender history need to be understood as holistically as possible: there is nothing to be gained from looking at covert but not overt misogyny or at masculinity without femininity.

There is abundant evidence that bishops were indeed worried about the legitimate exercise of female power in convents and on the monastic estates, particularly women’s authority over men: appointing servants and issuing instructions to employees. While female authority figures were somewhat free to act as surrogate men (as seen in the Wherwell eulogy), they were also circumscribed by formal male oversight. For nuns under the Benedictine and Augustinian rules this meant regular oversight by bishops at visitations, elections, and disputes, while in the Cistercian and Gilbertine orders, it was the male abbot of a superior house who filled this role. When there was no public suspicion about a prioress’ exercise of her authority, such male supervision need not have disrupted her power, but if it did come into question, she could find her freedom of action severely constrained. In certain cases male “guardians” might be appointed to take responsibility away from an abbess who was thought to have shown herself incapable.56 Such arrangements need not have been oppressive on a conscious level: as John Coakley has argued, “the presence of males did not mean an outright subordination of women to men, but rather implied a more complex interplay of responsibilities in which the validity of women’s institutional authority was routinely recognized.”57 Nevertheless, the cumulative effect of such individual occurrences was to sustain a gendered system for arranging hierarchies of authority. When we think about episcopal supervision of female religious, it is important to reflect on the nature of our evidence, because documents produced by bishops give a very different impression of female abbatial agency to that provided by the records of women’s monasticism itself. In contrast to the active competence, initiative, and projected authority discussed here, the visitor’s records focus on exceptional cases of malfeasance and neglect and celebrate the role of the reforming bishop—a male authority figure—to the detriment of our impression of women’s own capabilities.58

Janet Burton, Louise Wilkinson, and Lindsay Bryan have all found that the heads of female convents were removed or deposed with far greater regularity than their male counterparts, further depressing our sense of their freedom to exercise authority and hinting at the anxiety animating male church leaders’ interactions with women religious.59 In particular, it seems that bishops were perturbed when abbesses exercised too much of the freedom and discretion that characterized the masculine sphere of governance, as outlined in chapter 1: when they treated their position within the community as if it were a form of personal authority in a world without men. Hence the obsession in episcopal injunctions with private dining and sleeping arrangements and with superiors who conducted convent business without consultation.60 A powerful woman’s capacity to determine her own lifestyle, with no male oversight, spoke of freedom and the capacity to rule. Such apprehension may have lain behind the greater strictness with which bishops tried to enforce enclosure on nuns compared to monks, an urge that was repeated in successive visitations and is likely to have influenced episcopal attitudes toward abbesses.61

It was, nevertheless, on the personal behavior of abbesses and prioresses that governing anxieties alighted. Perhaps because of how closely they were required to cooperate in the management of a convent’s estates, the relationship between a prioress and her male servants and officers was often subject to suspicion. For instance, at Markyate (Bedfordshire) in 1433 the prioress, Denise Loweliche, was disciplined and eventually forced to resign for “incestuous, adulterous, and sacrilegious embraces” with the long-serving steward of the priory’s estates.62 Although it was not explicit in that case, prioresses disciplined or deposed for sex with male clergy and servants were also commonly associated with economic mismanagement. One of the best-known examples of this concerns Isabella Hermit, the prioress of Redlingfield in Suffolk, who was investigated and disciplined for a series of faults and offences in 1427. She was accused of sleeping too often in a private room, assaulting one of the nuns, entering false accounts, alienating the priory’s goods, encouraging fornication, and erasing entries in the priory’s court rolls (which, incidentally, is a strong indication of her familiarity with documents and estate management). In addition, she was accused of lollardy and of sexual incontinence with the priory’s bailiff “under the heggerowes and trees.”63 The conjunction of fraud with breaking a vow of chastity was compounded by the nature of her “heresy”: the prioress was accused of teaching her nuns that disobedience to her was worse than sexual sin. Here was a monastic leader who seemed to abuse all standards of female authority. She allowed lust and pride to pollute what authority she properly possessed. Proof, surely, for contemporaries of why women ought not to exercise authority within the church more widely.

Once again, however much it was supported and praised, female abbatial authority was regarded as something with the potential to disrupt wider hierarchies within the church. While sexual relations with men inevitably drew attention to female heads of religious houses, it was not only sexual sin that troubled outside authorities. For instance, it is notable that when the prioress of Wintney in Hampshire was punished in 1405 for, among other things, eating and sleeping with a priest who often stayed the night, it was not only the breach in monastic celibacy that concerned the visitor. The archdeacon also noted an inversion of the gender order in reporting that the prioress “has long kept and keeps” this priest.64 As we see in chapter 4, “to keep” in the sense of maintain and support had strong connotations of masculine householder status. Perceiving anxiety about the gender order, and not just about sexual sin, in the visitor’s formulaic words certainly entails reading between the lines. But I think this is warranted. It is not that the prioress of Wintney’s economic and implicitly patriarchal hold over a man was to the forefront of his mind, but it was present, nagging at his sense of the gender order. Heads of religious houses who were disciplined in such ways were probably a minority, and the charges are often agitated and feverish. They may or may not reveal the truth of what happened in particular cases, nor can they be taken as representation of general conditions. But they do always reveal something of the visitor’s presumptions about female authority and how it could fail: profligacy in all material matters, of the body and with the monastic finances, was regarded as symptomatic of women’s unsuitability for governance.

Any resistance by an abbess to her bishop was silently subsumed by the tendency of episcopal documentation to record a view of the world compatible with masculine assumptions while at odds with the fullness of reality. And abbesses do not seem ever to have taken aspects of diocesan government into their own hands. (The parallel picture for the parish is very different, and there, as discussed in chapters 3 and 5, we can see what happened when latent or “ghostly” power became real.) At the level of the diocese, the ghost of female potential represented by the heads of female religious houses only distantly haunted the church’s imagination. While there is no example of an abbess or prioress usurping a bishop’s role in late medieval England, other evidence can be brought to bear that indicates something of how a bishop might react to a woman who seemed to challenge him.

The case of Isabella Sampson illustrates one of the ways in which powerful women could be seen as a threat to church governance. Sampson was a laywoman, the wife of Devon landowner Richard Sampson, but she was also related to two canons of Exeter Cathedral—John and Henry Bloyou—who were important to Bishop Grandisson’s government of the diocese. In 1328, Richard Sampson died without making a will, and the bishop took control of his estate. Although the details are never made clear, it seems that Isabella objected very strongly to this, causing Grandisson to censure her for “certain articles touching the correction of her soul.”65 Her response was to secure an “inhibition” from the Court of Canterbury, the appeal jurisdiction of the archbishop, preventing Grandisson’s diocesan court hearing any suit concerning her (or, presumably, her late husband’s estate). This prompted fury from Grandisson, who wrote to the archbishop, Simon Mepham, in terms that reveal how easily powerful women could trigger ecclesiastical fragility: “It does not deter us what she, or indeed you and she, emptily believes in a womanly way, when you glory in 1000 Marks, as it is said, from the goods of a prostitute.” Isabella’s lawsuit was, he said, “frivolous.”66

Associating the archbishop with the “goods of a prostitute,” and calling him womanly for believing a woman, is a striking example of how church governance and authority were understood in gendered terms. Ideas about the effects of female influence on men are further discussed in chapter 6. Despite the high regard in which many abbesses and prioresses were held, respect and proper procedure were (as discussed in chapter 1) considered inherently manly. Women asserting themselves outside their allotted roles were characterized as obstructive and disrespectful. Isabella’s defense of her position was seen as an affront to the bishop’s authority, and in January 1329, Grandisson took things further, requiring her to perform public penance for her “damage to our honor.” He wrote to his lawyers, calling Isabella “a devilish daughter of our diocese whose life is shameful and shocking according to common opinion.” But the bishop’s reputation and the archbishop’s masculinity were not the only things apparently threatened. The supervision of Isabella’s penance was delegated to her kinsman Henry Bloyou, and Grandisson was careful to point out their family connection. Bloyou’s own credibility, authority, and masculinity were clearly also on the line, compromised by his connection with a troublesome woman.67

Tellingly, the only way in which the female relatives of churchmen could be welcomed as positive influences was if they were cloistered in a convent and their influence not allowed to extend beyond its walls. In this sense, Isabella Sampson is the antithesis of such well-behaved women as Margaret and Alice Rich, the sisters of Edmund of Abingdon, archbishop of Canterbury from 1234 to 1240. Following the death of their mother, Edmund secured the abbacy of Catesby in Northamptonshire for Margaret, and Alice joined her there as a nun. They are mentioned in the vita written for Edmund, on the way to his becoming a saint, only as patrons of chapel building and loyal guardians of his memory.68 Women’s authority was idealized as cloistered, obedient, and quiet.

It is important to state that this was not a distinction based on a total circumscription of female power to a “private” sphere, in contrast with a public sphere inhabited only by men. That is a binary whose applicability to the real world has been comprehensively skewered by feminist anthropologists and historians.69 As we have seen, abbesses and prioresses possessed plenty of real power in the world, even as the wealth and influence of their houses came under threat during the economic and political upheavals of the later Middle Ages. But the potentiality for an equal role to that of men, inherent within their capabilities, was denied by their exclusion from the legitimate public realm and its realization in written instruments of government where, as we saw in chapter 1, men encountered one another as pretended equals. So, whereas on the plane of action some women showed themselves capable of participating in all the tasks of church government, on the ideological plane they were disqualified by a curious combination of overt misogyny, praise that assiduously policed gender roles, and a consistent habit of ignoring what women really did. Given what we have seen of the way bishops addressed female heads of religious houses, it may not be entirely true, as Katherine Lewis has suggested, that “positive assessments of women remained in the minority.” However, she is completely correct that “neither these [assessments], nor the evidence of capable leadership provided by women who actually managed convents, estates and businesses, challenged the powerful ideologies or contemporary social arrangements which assumed that women were inherently inferior to men.”70 The psychology of all this is intriguing. Such was the male hierarchy’s capacity to take offense and be frightened by capable women that their default mode of engagement was to not talk about what women really did.

Whereas the men in church government were asked to subscribe to the fiction that they were all equally gifted, women’s exertion of authority was fictionalized as exceptional. Neither claim was true, but these lies about gender structured the social order. And while episcopal letters of instruction to men seemed to grant them extensive freedom of action, women were, as we have seen, denied public agency when addressed by bishops. In the introduction I summarized historical approaches to the moment in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries when clerical identity was substantially reformed. Celibacy was demanded, the purchase and inheritance of church office was prohibited, and the door was silently closed on female ordination. Here we have seen that there existed the potential for a very different history of the succeeding centuries through to the Reformation, a shadow of the institutional church. The abbesses and prioresses discussed in this chapter were a ghostly appearance of power that haunted the ecclesiastical imagination. That haunting was mostly unconscious and it is perceptible to historians only as the dark matter that shaped the gendered language of diocesan government.