The Nun's Tale (46 page)

Why did Joanna choose the convent? As the daughter of a wealthy merchant and a high-born mother, her most acceptable roles would be those of either wife or nun. In late fourteenth-century England, women were making inroads into middle-class occupations in the cities, but, then as now, not everyone can succeed in business. Joanna is not an entrepreneur like Bess Merchet, nor has she been trained in a profession like Lucie Wilton. She considers the nunnery a safe haven until she comes up with a better plan. The life of a nun was seen as a respectable career; not all who took the veil had religious vocations, and convent life could be quite comfortable. The number of documents reiterating the rule of enclosure (that a nun’s place was in the cloister, not outside in the world) and admonishing sisters for wearing finery and keeping pets suggest less rigid establishments than we might imagine. And although St Clement’s was considered a small, poor nunnery, the description is relative; it could boast neither the size nor the wealth of Shaftesbury or Barking, but it was the third wealthiest of the Yorkshire nunneries and held considerably property. Joanna might have lived out her life in quiet contentment at St Clement’s – and perhaps the real Joanna of Leeds did.

¹
Desmond Seward,
The Hundred Years War: the English in France, 1337–1453
(New York: Atheneum, 1978), pp. 105–106.

²
Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World
(New York: Dutton, 1987), p. 115.

³
R. B. Dobson and Sara Donaghey, York Archaeological Trust for Excavation and Research, 1984, p. 15.

⁴
Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor
(New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1994).

⁵
Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) p. 54.