The yoked threats of the feminine vernacular and the female body surface again, famously, in Hoccleve’s “Remonstrance Against Oldcastle”:
Somme wommen eek, though hir wit be thynne,
Wole argumentes make in holy writ.
Lewed calates, sitteth down and spynne
And kekele of sumwhat elles, for your wit
Is al to feeble to despute of it.
To clerkes grete apparteneth þat aart.14
A callot is, according to the Middle English Dictionary, a foolish woman or a harlot;15 the connections of sexual promiscuity and lack of “wit” in Hoccleve’s use of the epithet underline the association of the disruptive feminine vernacular and the disruptive female body.
While Hoccleve thus plays with the same associations evident in the argument made by the antitranslation faction, his market-saving strategy is somewhat different than Arundel’s. Hoccleve styles himself in this poem as the staunch defender of orthodoxy against the rebel John Oldcastle, who, in Hoccleve’s eyes has, as Ruth Nissé observes, been “feminized” through Lollardy,16 and against Oldcastle’s Lollard associates, whose vernacular translations were the target of the Constitutions. Rather than clerically authorizing the vernacular in order to replace the very boundaries it breaks down, though, Hoccleve uses a vernacular poem to position the vernacular as inferior—at least in spiritual matters—to the “aart” of “clerkes.”17 This art (learned and Latinate, and so legitimate) is definitively more worthy than the “cackling” of “lewed calates.” Hoccleve at once works to reinstate a linguistic hierarchy of Latin and vernacular for spiritual subjects as well as a social hierarchy of male, clerical authorities over lay, female/feminized subjects.
In the face of the possibilities for independence both spiritual and material offered to later medieval nuns by their vernacular literacy and the increased availability of vernacular texts, clerics who made translations of monastic rules for women engaged in textual, market-saving strategies resembling those of both Arundel and Hoccleve. In other words, they used the mother tongue for their own benefit, manipulating translation, the source of instability, to replace the very boundaries it broke down or shifted. They also devalued the mother tongue and the feminized speakers of it, thus asserting their own masculine, Latinate authority.18
Saving the Market: The Female Body and the Feminine Vernacular in Translations of the Benedictine Rule for Women
The fifteenth-century prose and verse translations of the Benedictine Rule for women strain very hard to make translation serve traditional, hierarchical relations of masculine and feminine, Latin and vernacular, sameness and difference.19 Just as the text of the rule is translated into the vernacular for women, so too is the version of Benedictine monasticism these rules create for women a “translation.” The Benedictine Rule is adapted not only linguistically but also ideologically for women to fight social and religious transformations by enforcing a rigorously hierarchical sex/gender system.20 Like Arundel’s Constitutions, the vernacular translations of the Benedictine Rule seek to “save the market” by manipulating the vernacular to control its transgressive power and that of the women who read it, putting both firmly under the control of reaffirmed clerical authority. Like Hoccleve’s “Remonstrance,” the translations do their utmost to emphasize the femininity, and corresponding inferiority, of the vernacular in the spiritual realm, also attributing this combination to the audience of women religious.
Putting the vernacular “in its place” (that is, under the authority of Latin) is a step in a larger process of putting women religious firmly in their place vis-à-vis the male clergy. This process was deemed especially pressing in light of prevalent associations between the “barbarous” vernacular and “an uneducated readership with a ‘carnal understanding of the truth’ “who were likely to rebel.21 The prose translation of the rule asserts the strong authority necessary to avert such danger by introducing the chapters with a phrase indicating that what follows is said by, spoken by, or commanded by St. Benedict.22 For instance, at the beginning of chapter VII, significantly a chapter addressing meekness, the masculine authority of St. Benedict and Holy Scripture coalesce as they speak together in Latin: “Of mekenes spekis sain benet in þis sentence, & sais with hali scripture: ‘Omnis qui se exaltat &c.’” (Prose 11). Ralph Hanna III writes, concerning translation, “Perhaps most distressing for the conservative, Englished Latin had been cut free from the Latin tradition…. It had become ‘open.’”23 The insertion of the figure of St. Benedict in the introductory phrases, which are not present in the Latin, links the vernacular firmly to the Latin tradition, reasserting closure. The insertion of the figure of St. Benedict, like the episcopal authorization required by Arundel’s Constitutions, shores up the system of social relations in which the clergy and Latin are dominant by putting a strong authority figure in place as a prophylaxis against rebellion, as a way of ruling the potentially unruly.
Bishop Richard Fox’s sixteenth-century translation of the Benedictine Rule for the nuns in his diocese of Winchester similarly contains “frequent repetitions of phrases like ‘Be holde susters (sayth seint Benet)’ or ‘O dere susters (sayth seynt Benet).’”24 The voice of St. Benedict in the text, to whom the “susters” are commanded to listen, merges with the voice of Fox, who also speaks to the sisters and commands obedience. The strategy works, as in the fifteenth-century prose translation, to reinforce masculine, clerical authority over the women religious, reinforcement which Fox, in spite of his open-minded humanist attitudes towards vernacular learning, was very anxious to effect.25 Such desires are evident, for instance, in a letter Fox wrote to Cardinal Wolsey on January 18, 1527. Fox declares of the nuns in his diocese that “if I had the auctoritie and powre that your grace hathe, I wolde indever me to mure and inclose theyre monasteries accordyng to thordynance of the lawe.”26 The insertions of the figure of St. Benedict in his translation also aid Fox in advancing his aims of “legitimiz[ing] his own position as a self-conscious auctor,”27 as one of the “clerkes grete” to whom the art of spiritual discourse belongs. Fox, as master of the “Latin tonge” of which the nuns “have no knowledge nor understondinge”28 and as translator of what “sayth seint Benet,” is able to claim, through Benedict and his Latin text, his proper position in the classical, clerical lineage of auctoritas, with all accompanying social and symbolic benefits.
The brief prayers that conclude most of the chapters in the fifteenth-century prose translation of the Benedictine Rule may not initially appear to replace boundaries by reasserting hierarchies of languages and genders as the introductory phrases do.29 In fact, though, the prayers set up a dynamic in which the voice of masculine authority addresses and subordinates passive, feminine hearers and readers. These prayers, which are typically only one or two lines long, request help, aid, knowledge, or mercy in connection with the topic discussed in the chapter. For example, chapter XLVIII on labor and study ends with the prayer, “Lauerd for his pite giue vs sua to wirk, and sua vre lescuns at vnderstande, þat we at te ende til heuin be broght. Amen” (Prose 33). The prayers almost all speak in first person plural.30 The “we” of the prayers reflects the monastic convention of praying communally and for all Christians, but the “we” is never one of full solidarity. The sameness and unity of the “we” put forth in the prayers is actually difference masked as sameness, and when this difference is unmasked, the inferiority of those who are “other” emerges.
For instance, chapter XXXVII addresses provisions for the elderly and children. The introductory phrase, “Of þe alde &