Prescribing a method of reading is not, though, the end of the story, and the prophylactic is not necessarily effective. Reading is not just a passive act, a behavior that can be contained by a method of correct training. As Certeau argues, reading is an act of productive consumption; a reader takes what she is given and “makes something of it.” Reading is one of the prime opportunities for engaging in tactics, manipulations which are the “arts of the weak” enacted in the “space of the other.”86 Reading is thus, in a sense, an economic activity. What the reader produces from the text “belongs” to her, if only momentarily, and she can use that production of her own volition and to her own advantage.
The possibilities for “making something of” the text of the Myroure in spite of the attempts to contain interpretation are particularly rich since the text itself so resists the constraints of the feminine and the vernacular imposed upon it in the prologue. In its presentation of the Incarnation and redemption, the text of the Myroure sets up relationships of bodies and words, production and reproduction, language and gender, which relentlessly assert the value of female difference. The Myroure is thus potentially quite empowering for women religious who might wish to “play the market” by accessing the value of the female body and the mother tongue in the religious sphere. For example, the translator of the Myroure includes part of the Reuelaciones extravagantes capitulo iii to explain why the sisters say their hours after the brothers. The explanation begins with an allegory in which a poor man delivers a city besieged by a mighty man. The city is Mankind, which is saved when Mary submits her will to be the instrument of the Incarnation. On the one hand, Mary’s maternity is described as submission and obedience. On the other hand, however, the explanation continues with Christ saying, “my mother & I haue saued man, as yt had be with one hart” (Myroure 25). Thus, Mary’s maternity is not simply an instrument of, but a primary agent of, salvation.
The translator further elucidates why the brothers perform their services first by aligning Mary’s poverty of spirit in submitting to the Incarnation with the poverty of spirit the sisters are to exhibit by giving precedence to the brothers. The discussion that follows, however, complicates this convenient equation. Christ says that in other churches, the custom is “to say fyrste the seruyce and houres of our lady, as lesse worthy. & afterwarde the houres of the day as more worthy” (Myroure 26). For the Brigittines, though, “our lorde wyl do that reuerence to his holy mother, that in thys order the houres of her shall be sayd after the houres of the day to her most worshyp” (Myroure 26). Mary as the genetrix of salvation receives the position of greatest prominence. Rather than subordinating themselves by allowing the brothers to say their hours first, the sisters are in fact identifying with Mary’s agency in salvation and laying claim to her position of superlative worthiness. The glorification of Mary’s maternal body which makes the Word flesh is mirrored by the sisters who, in saying their “most worthy” hours, themselves embody the divine word.
In an order dedicated to the Virgin Mary it is not unusual that Mary’s maternity should receive significant emphasis. The importance of Mary’s maternity goes beyond the miracle of the virgin birth. Luce Irigaray notes that in order to found the patriarchal lineages which undergird masculine authority, the “genealogy of women” is erased.87 The genealogy of women, the roles of the mother and the mother tongue, are suppressed in the clerical attempt to found a universal, Latin genealogy of sacred knowledge and to preserve their concomitant privileges. Brigittine texts restore the genealogy of women, foregrounding the significance of the maternal in salvation and the mother tongue in sacred knowledge.88
The potentially empowering idea that salvation originates in a genealogy of women is especially clear in the service for Tuesday Matins. In this service in which language and maternity intermingle, Eve’s word leads to sin and provokes God to the wrath of damnation when she “of pryde had sayd in her harte, as if she wolde be made euen to god” (Myroure 193). However, Mary’s “worde shulde draw the charyte of god to grete comforte. to the. and to all dampned by the worde of Eue” (Myroure 193). Eve’s word cast Adam, Eve, and all Mankind into great sorrow but “thy blessed worde o mother of wysdome. broughte the to grete ioye. and opened the gates of heuen to all that wylle enter” (Myroure 193). This “worde” is the Word that Mary, “mother of wysdome,” brings into the world. This service clearly outlines the “genealogy of women” who, through their words and maternity, save mankind. “The frayle mother, ys Eue. the doughter ys oure lady that is mother of her father, for she is the mother of god that ys father to all that he made” (Myroure 194). Salvation history does not begin with Adam’s felix culpa and proceed, through God the Father, to Christ. Rather it begins with the felix culpa of Eve’s speech and proceeds through Mary, the mother of the Father. Women’s language and women’s bodies are not sources of disruption which, being inferior in their difference, must be contained. Rather, they are sources of redemptive power which are celebrated for their particular role in salvation.
In the Myroure, as in the nineteenth-century novels by women which Margaret Homans examines in her study of language and female experience, significantly entitled Bearing the Word, maternity is one of the ways in which women “reclaim their own experiences as paradigms for writing.”89 Two of the recurrent “literary situations or practices” that Homans examines in the novels are fused in the Myroure: “the figure of the Virgin Mary, who gives birth to and is frequently imaged carrying (thus two senses of ‘bear’) a child who is the Word, the embodiment of the Logos” and “the theme of women characters who perform translations from one language into another or from one medium to another.”90 The Brigittine services repeatedly focus on Christ’s birth as the process of the Word being made flesh. The first lesson at Sunday Matins, for instance, declares, “Ryght so also had yt bene vnpossyble that thys worde that ys the sonne of god. shulde haue bene touched or sene, for the saluacyon of mankynde. but yf yt had bene vned to mannes body” (Myroure 104).91 It is of course Mary’s body that “mynystered vnto hym the mater of his holy body” (Myroure 141). Maternity is translation at once corporeal and textual; the Myroure gives female readers access to an incarnational textuality in which the “mother tongue” is salvific rather than lacking and unruly. Mary shifts cosmic boundaries by bearing the divine Logos across into the human realm; her female body translates the invisible, incomprehensible Word of God into the comprehensible and redemptory “mother tongue,” the human body Christ receives from his mother. In the Myroure, Christ—the ultimate source of authority invoked by the very clerics opposed to vernacular translation of the Scripture—is a text in the mother tongue produced by a woman.
3
Accounting for Themselves
Nuns’ Everyday Practices and
Alternative Monastic Identities
Brigittines and Minoresses: Autonomy in Practice
Profession services, visitation ceremonies, and monastic rules shape nuns’ identities through their impact on nuns’ participation in financial, textual, and spiritual economies. Nuns’ everyday