Virgin: The Untouched History (20 page)

As for the sexual continence expected of nuns, it seems that relatively few among those who voluntarily entered orders seem to have found it a particular difficulty, although there is evidence that a few nuns were troubled by lust in a manner similar to the way it so often tormented male monastics. Allegorical stories of the period allude to the difficulties some nuns may have had in successfully obeying the rules. One describes how a nun and a monk, in love with one another, arrange a nighttime rendezvous, but when the nun tries to sneak out of her convent to meet her monk, she finds the way barred by thickets of crucifixes. In one version of the story, the nun fetches an ax to chop the crosses down, only to find that when she hoists the ax it miraculously becomes stuck to her shoulder, which jolts her into realizing the error of her ways. In another version of the same story, the nun prays to the Virgin Mary to remove the crosses instead, which makes the Virgin so angry that she slaps the errant nun across the face, knocking her unconscious. Unsurprisingly, she is mightily repentant when she comes to.

Many women, however, not least the numerous widows who only had a chance to take the veil after their husbands' deaths, were relieved to enter the convent. But neither women nor men would have entered the monastic life under the misapprehension that they were giving up some nonexistent no-holds-barred carnal cornucopia. Regular required abstinence from sex was a way of life for virtually all medieval married, couples. Many followed a (originally Jewish) custom of abstaining from sex during a woman's menses. Sex might similarly be avoided during pregnancy or while a woman was still nursing an infant. It was also a common teaching that couples were to abstain from sex during the penitential season of Lent, during Pentecost, and for the four weeks of Advent, as well as refraining on Wednesdays (in memory of Christ's arrest), Fridays (in memory of Christ's death), and-Saturdays (in memory of Mary). Significant sexual restraint was an unremarkable commonplace for those on the outside of the monastery walls as well as for those within them.

Such a constant and deep relationship between sexuality and religion helps, in some ways, to explain some of the mystical eroticism we find in writings by medieval nuns. Mystical meditation was the mode of choice through which medieval women interacted with religious subjects. The mystical writings and teachings of women like Hildegard of Bingen, Elisabeth of Schonau, Catherine of Siena, Margery Kempe, and Birgitta of Sweden were not only well known during their own time—Hildegard's visions were so famous and highly regarded that she received dispensation to make four separate tours as a preacher during a period when women's preaching was technically outlawed by the Church—but have endured, coming down to us across the ages as important documents of women's literature and Christian thought.

Looking at these women's writings, as well as at the stories of other medieval women saints, we often find them describing intensely bodily and intimate interactions with the Divine. Saint Ita, an eighth-century Irish saint, was one of many women who had visions of "heaven's King who every night / Is infant Jesus at my breast." Women rejoiced passionately in visions of being embraced by their heavenly spouse, or in touching their lips to his wounds. Famous English mystic Margery Kempe sometimes fell to the ground crying out and writhing in bodily ecstasies when she meditated on the sufferings of Christ on the cross, and described a vision of Jesus in which he gave Margery permission to "boldly take me in the arms of thy soul and kiss my mouth, my head, and my feet as sweetly as thou wilt."

As tempting as it may be to think of these kinds of things as nothing more than the neurotic projections of erotically deprived virgins, this would be both inaccurate and unfair. A more accurate way to think about it is in terms of the overall dynamic that made sexuality an important aspect of Christian spirituality in the first place: the relationship between heaven and earth. If controlling one's bodily sexuality could help to engage the spiritual self and transform it into a zone of joyous communion with God, it only makes sense that communion with God might engage the earthly body, too, transforming the experience of the physical and even the erotic into something quite transcendent.

This is certainly the impression one gets from the writings of Hildegard of Bingen. As abbess, she sometimes dressed her well-born nuns in beautiful crowns and elegant silk veils, put golden rings on their fingers, and permitted them to sing in church with their hair unbound because of her belief that the requirements of modesty "do not apply to the virgin, for she stands forth beautiful in the simplicity and integrity of paradise." For Hildegard, there could be no shame for a nun in being beautifully female, because virginity transformed flawed femaleness into embodied spiritual perfection.

To the medieval mind, virginity was by no means just a state of not having had sex. It was a state of mind, a form of spiritual practice, a key with which to gain access to the divine and its mysteries, and an assurance of sanctity. Additionally, it was a means of transcending rigid gender roles and a scaffolding that allowed women to ascend to heights of intellect and earthly power that they were otherwise rarely permitted to contemplate. Virginity permitted some abbesses to enjoy power and wealth on a level with bishops and kings.

In some cases virgins simultaneously held enormous ecclesiastical and secular power. Tenth-century abbess Mathilda of Quedlinburg, daughter of Saxon emperor Henry I, not only wielded bishop-level power in nonsacramental matters, but acted for a time as empress regent. Other abbesses, like those of Shaftesbury, Barking, and Nunnaminster in England, controlled sufficient territory that they were summoned to serve in parliaments. Only queens regularly exercised similar levels of power, and for them to do so usually required extenuating circumstances that removed their husbands or fathers from the picture. To be sure, abbesses were almost always of aristocratic stock, but where their married sisters only rarely had the chance to take the reins of power, virgins might well become old hands in the saddle.

Sex and the Sacred Virgin

Women entered convents to escape from the demands of the world, only to discover that the world followed them in, willy-nilly. The most personal, and in some ways the most insidious, of the ways that the world entered the convent was through sex.

Consecrated virgins have always had to defend their right to their own sexual decisions. If a family had pinned its hopes on good marriages for its daughters, having a daughter devote herself to virginity could seem disastrous. Family resistance could be substantial. Some vowed virgins, like Christina of Markyate, had to contend with their families actually instructing men to seduce or rape them (she escaped), or were forced into unwanted marriages (she convinced her husband to accept a celibate marriage).

But entering holy orders, even with the blessing of one's family, did not grant medieval virgins a reprieve from the threat of sexual violence. The medieval crime known as
raptus
is usually translated as "rape" today, but its literal meaning was something closer to "the theft of a woman."
Raptus
typically included kidnapping, the literal physical removal of a woman from her convent, as in the case of Gerberga, a ninth-century aristocratic nun from northern Spain who was kidnapped by her brother's enemies, charged with witchcraft, and murdered. More commonly, the
raptus
of a nun was followed by forced marriage, since that was the most common legal remedy for rape at the time. For aristocratic men who had little to bring to the marriage market—younger sons, for example, who could not expect to inherit in the same measure as their elder brothers—this could make the prospect of simply snatching a wellborn bride out of the local convent quite appealing. The "sporting" aspect of abducting a nun from her cloister also contributed to convent
raptus.
At various places, at various times, wellborn rakes apparently considered it a fine challenge to see if they could make off with a young virgin from a convent.

Between the voluntary and involuntary comings and goings of nuns, the well-known phenomenon of the disaffected nun placed in a convent by her parents, and the many ways in which the all-female world of the convent seemed a strange and exotic alternate universe, it is little wonder that many an outside observer felt entitled to assume that whatever went on behind the mysterious doors of convents had to be sexy stuff indeed, leavened as it was presumed to be with the yearnings of repressed virgins. Urban legends about nuns and convents are so common as to be stereotypical, but few appear to have had any basis in fact.

In truth, nuns were the objects of constant suspicion. If they went out from the cloister to do the economically necessary work of visiting and administering lands and properties, seeing to the provisioning of the convent and the sale of its various products, and interacting with merchants and guildsmen, they were tainted by worldliness and suspected of unlawful dalliances with the men with whom they had contact. Unfortunately for the nuns, economic survival depended on such "suspicious" activities. Attempts to force the various religious orders to which individual convents belonged to provide for their material support were only sporadically successful. Monastic orders, with the notable exception of the Franciscans, openly resented the responsibility and the financial outlay of the
cura mulierum,
the care of women: the Carthusians referred to their five convents as "the five wounds of our order." The installation of monks who would act as the nuns' business agents only proved that these monks had few scruples about skimming a convent's profits.

Of course, having even these men in contact with convent virgins was also considered suspicious. According to the medical wisdom of the day, women were inherently lustful and liable to give in to their base natures at any time. Even if they succeeded in staying completely chaste, they were still women and thus an attractive nuisance for men. As resentment of nuns increased, veiled virgins were frequently depicted as being so enticing that their presence might compel even a pure man to commit rape. Popular literature, song, and legend provided convent-abduction and disgraced-nun stories galore, producing what passed for "proof " of these supposedly incontrovertible facts.

There is certainly sufficient mention of convent
raptus
in the medieval legal literature, including Gratian's
Decretum,
that we know it was a real and relatively significant problem. But the degree to which vowed virgins might have willingly engaged in illicit activities is significantly harder to gauge. Despite the sardonic use of the term "brothel" to mean convent and "nunnery" to mean brothel—as in the notoriously double-edged line Shakespeare has Hamlet spit at poor Ophelia—the odds are quite against it having been an apt comparison. Neither father confessors nor abbesses typically kept detailed records of nunly transgressions, and overall we have relatively few logs of such things even in civil criminal records. In the few cases where historians have been able to compare female and male monastery records in regard to sexual transgressions, however, it does not appear that women were any worse than men.

Women's sexual misconduct, however, has always been seen as being worse than men's. The whole ideology of virginity that underpins the female monastic system means that even the slightest breach is unforgivable, whereas male unchastity is merely "incontinence" and usually easily swept under the rug or explained away as an instance of "boys will be boys."

Stories of genuinely dissolute convents (like the Venetian abbey of Sant' Angelo di Contorto, where nuns not only received lovers in their cells but were also, with their paramours, sometimes taken out on picnics by the abbess) were, as in a game of "telephone," widely repeated as well as distorted and inflated. This happened regardless of whether or not the tale was actually true. It seems probable that a great many of the stories told about naughty nuns, wayward abbesses, and vicious virgins were nothing more than fiction. But like today's urban legends about rock stars or big corporations, they were also frequently accepted as figuratively true.

As eminent scholar JoAnn MacNamara points out in her works on convent history, however, it does not make practical sense for it to have been possible for frequent transgression, and particularly sexual transgression, to have been commonplace among female monastics. The reason for this is simple: the continued existence of female monastics depended upon the public's impression of the reliability of their sanctity and intercessory prayers, and the reliability of women's sanctity and prayers depended directly upon their virginity. Virginity, again, functioned as a bridge between heaven and earth.

Unlike sacraments given by priests, who receive an official imprimatur (ordination) that renders their sacraments uniformly effective, nuns' prayers are not guaranteed by the Church. What gives weight to a nun's spiritual efforts is her personal holiness and the sanctity of her community. A patron who supported convents would have been unlikely to support nuns whose spiritual interventions on the patron's behalf seemed likely to fail. Pilgrims would scarcely bring offerings to a shrine whose nuns' reputations had been tarnished. Women who valued their own ability to participate in monastic life were not likely to be tolerant of having other women put their vocations at risk. Indeed, judging from what hard evidence we do have on the subject, such as convent rules that prohibited nuns from spending time alone together, required them to sleep in barracks like communal dormitories, and forbade affectionate touch and hugging, most built careful fences around the law to avoid even the hint of sin.

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