that the virginal conception of Christ was, at the same time, an intimate intercourse between him and the soul of the Virgin Mary which produced a whole host of “fayre children.” … The newly professed is thus truly what the Extrauagantes first called her, a daughter of the Virgin…. She is also … the spouse of the Virgin’s son: at the same time, therefore, daughter, wife, and mother to be …, herself another Virgin Mary.59
Like the banner in the consecration service, the identity of the new Brigittine nun has more than one side.
It is quite appropriate that the Brigittine and Franciscan traditions work in their profession services, and, as we shall see, in their visitation practices, to shape religious identities which celebrate female spiritual power. Both orders originated with women who were profoundly committed to developing new, distinctive roles for women in religious life, and both share a common heritage of later medieval continental religious protofeminism. The Brigittine Rule, divinely revealed to St. Birgitta and ordained, in accordance with Christ’s command, “first and principally by women,” strives, in spite of affinities with the Cistercian tradition, to “dissociate itself from existing monastic practice.”60 Birgitta’s design of a double order headed by an abbess, which was extremely unusual in the fourteenth century, also likely harkens back to an earlier attempt to carve out new religious possibilities for women—the creation of the Fontevrauldine Order by Robert of Abrissel.61
St. Clare of Assisi devoted her life to procuring the privilege of poverty (in her view the defining aspect of Franciscan identity) for her community at San Damiano, and she, together with Blessed Agnes of Prague, succeeded in having Pope Innocent IV remove the requirement that the nuns observe, even formaliter, the Rule of St. Benedict. The early versions of the Franciscan Rule for nuns were revised by Blessed Isabella, sister of Louis IX of France, into a distinctive modification known as the Isabella Rule, which, although it does not embrace the radical poverty so loved by Clare, seeks to underline the equality of Franciscan nuns and friars. That the nuns and friars are, to borrow Penelope Johnson’s terms, “equal in monastic profession,” is underlined by the Isabella Rule’s specification that the women who follow it be called “Minoresses,” so indicating their “privileged position” and “closer connection with the ‘Fratres Minores’ than the rest of the Order.”62 It is this rule which was followed by the English Franciscan nuns.
Through the origins of their orders in Sweden, Italy, and France, English Brigittines and Franciscans were linked with such continental developments in female spirituality as the “feminization of sanctity.”63 Ties with continental innovations in religious practices were furthered by the direct connections of English houses of Franciscan and Brigittine nuns with those in France and Scandinavia. English houses of Minoresses were settled with nuns from Isabella’s foundation of Longchamp in the diocese of Paris, and nuns from the Brigittine motherhouse in Vadstena came to facilitate the beginnings of the community at Syon. Textual circulation also reinforced ties with burgeoning new forms of female spirituality across the Channel. Syon, for instance, possessed a copy of The Orchard of Syon, a Middle English translation of the Dialogues of Catherine of Siena. In these regards, the opportunities for independence both spiritual and secular offered to English Brigittine and Franciscan nuns in their profession services were part of a much larger social phenomenon.
Visitation Documents and Gendered Identity
Episcopal visitation, like profession, plays an important part in the construction of religious identity, since in visitation every element of monastic life, from performing divine service to serving meals, comes under scrutiny. Visitation also has long-term consequences, since the injunctions become part of the statutes of the house, superseding previous documents of the same kind. In visitation, documents impacting religious identity proliferate. During a typical visitation of a Benedictine religious house, upon the arrival of the diocesan, a clerk preached a sermon, and then the head of the house presented a certificate of the receipt of the summons to visitation and of its delivery to the various persons summoned. Next, the head of the house was required to exhibit certificates of election, confirmation by the diocesan, and installation in office. The superior then had to exhibit the foundation charter as well as information concerning the current financial condition of the house. Through this documentary profusion, the house accounted for its temporal circumstances and reaffirmed its material origins.
After these preliminaries of communal accountability, the business of personal accountability began. Members of the house appeared singly before the bishop or sometimes before clerks deputed to examine members simultaneously. Notaries took down the depositions, known as detecta, and then the comperta (matters discovered by the bishop) were formed from the detecta and the results of preliminary inquiry. At the end of the visitation proceedings, the visitor published the detecta and comperta to the assembled community and delivered brief verbal injunctions. Finally, soon after his departure, he sent written injunctions to the community which were added to the statutes of the house.64
The textual transactions associated with episcopal visitation have often been considered formulaic and homogenous across orders and genders;65 just as the important imaginative work of constructing gendered identities gets done in profession services, however, so too is it performed through the seemingly bland official language of visitation documents. While it is true that episcopal visitation was a fact of monastic life for monks and nuns alike, in England nuns were more subject than monks to episcopal jurisdiction. In this respect, then, the process was not gender neutral, since not even the most powerful and important Benedictine abbeys of nuns succeeded in obtaining the kind of exemption from episcopal visitation enjoyed by some male houses of corresponding stature. In fact, even nunneries belonging to such exempt orders as the Cistercians were consistently subject to episcopal visitation.66 In the fifteenth century, church officials, “unlike their Gregorian predecessors, aggressively sought to take the cura mulierum into their own hands. They wanted to direct the spiritual life of women even at the cost of carrying the burdens of responsibility.”67 Outside of the three houses of Franciscan Minoresses and the one house of Dominican nuns existing in England in the later Middle Ages, which were visited by the ministers of their orders, the only real exemptions to episcopal jurisdiction over female foundations were the communities of nuns dependent on male houses where the head of the male house sometimes acted as visitor.
As Johnson notes, prelates had a “vested interest” in maintaining strong authority over both male and female houses in their diocese or province.68 “The obedience of a monastery increased the episcopal power base and added to the diocesan’s income through court fees and procurations.”69 In addition to acquiring material resources, a diocesan could also gain symbolic capital, resources stored in nonmaterial form, by asserting his authority as visitor, as “writer” of ideological scripts, and regulator of community life.70 Because English nuns were more subject to visitation than monks, the bishops’ gain of material and symbolic capital were achieved at greater expense to the nuns—another respect in which visitation was not gender neutral.
The material burdens of visitation, while borne by nuns and monks alike, would have been comparatively greater for nuns, since nunneries were generally poorer and less well-endowed than male monasteries. Nunnery accounts indicate that these material costs could be heavy indeed. When a bishop or his deputy came to the house on the business of visitation, the nuns had to pay for the entertainment of the visitor and