The Brigittine and Franciscan traditions do, however, place limits on a visitor’s power to impact the particular identities nuns have within them. As the preceding examples regarding familiae indicate, injunctions can require modifications of the community’s ways of life and use of resources, aspects of monastic life fundamental to identity formation. The Isabella Rule short-circuits these potentially transformative aspects of visitation, stating, “And ouer alle þinge we defende þat none Ministre ne visitoure bi here auctorite make none constitucionis in þe Abbey ageynis þe forme & rule aforseyde” (Rewle 96). Any constitutions impinging on the rule could be made only “þi consentment of alle þe couent” and, strikingly, “ʒif ani soche nyew ordinaunce be made, by no maner þat þe sustres shul be boundyn þer to” (Rewle 96). Through these provisions, the Isabella Rule grants the nuns a significant amount of control over how visitation proceedings affect their community and their identity.
Texts associated with Brigittine visitation also place limits on visitors’ powers and give the nuns significant control over the impact of visitation on the community. The Bulla Reformatoria limits the scope of the bishop’s authority, preventing him from giving “any maner of sentence of cursynge, suspension, or interdiccion, / general or special” without “commission and special commaundmente of our see” (Sisters 47). Bishops visiting Syon were thus largely deprived of one of their primary tools for enjoining obedience, that is, the threat of excommunication which occurs almost universally in episcopal injunctions. Furthermore, the bull requires that the bishop commit the execution of “correccions, penaunces, and peynes, that be to be sette and enioyned to the trespasers” to “the abbes or the sadder parte of the sustres” (Sisters 45). Tellingly, the bull also states that the bishops are not to “aske any costes of them” (Sisters 47), thereby circumventing the financial burdens of visitation and mitigating the costs of hospitality which were often so heavy for houses. Since Syon’s great wealth might have been a tempting prospect for a less than circumspect prelate, the papal document’s assurance that material capital will remain in the nuns’ hands is particularly beneficial.
Ultimately, and perhaps most significantly, Franciscan and Brigittine visitation documents blur the rigid hierarchy between observer and observed. This distinction is an important marker of gendered, authoritative status in religion. The writing of Petrus de Ancarano, a contemporary of Joannes Andreae and, like Andreae, a commentator on Periculoso, is instructive on this point. In some respects Petrus is more moderate than Joannes in his interpretation of claustration; however, following Joannes’s Novella, Petrus “agrees that even abbesses may not leave their monasteries save for expressed purposes, and that conducting visitations is not one of those purposes, since the abbess herself is bound by the rules such visits seek to enforce.”118 Abbots, however, could and did visit communities under their jurisdiction in lieu of the diocesan.
Franciscan and Brigittine visitation practices do not go so far as to allow abbesses to conduct visitations of houses themselves. The Syon Additions for the Sisters, however, specifies that the bishop is not to visit “but in hys proper persone,” and he is to be accompanied by two or three companions (Sisters 39). Significantly, one of these companions is to be a “religious manne of the order of benett or bernarde” chosen by the abbess and confessor general in consultation with the “elder and wholer” sisters and brethren (Sisters 39). The members of the female community thus take an active role in organizing the visitation, and the Syon Additions for the Sisters, in calling for the participation of the abbess in choosing officials to carry out in the visitation, typifies the way in which Brigittine texts work to augment her position in the community of both men and women.119
A symbolic representation of the abbess’s maternal, authoritative identity in the corporate body occurs in the Brigittine visitation ceremony itself. In bishop’s registers, one of the phrases frequently used to describe the bishop’s role is that he sits in the capacity of judge in a tribunal: “In primis sedente dicto domino commissario iudicialiter pro tribunali in huiusmodi visitacionis inchoande negocio.”120 The head of the house and the convent then traditionally appear before the bishop seated in this capacity. The visitation procedure to be used at Syon, however, states that when the bishop takes his seat, “he shal make the abbes to sytte on hys ryghte hande” (Sisters 40). The head of the house in this case does not submit to the bishop seated in judgment but rather sits in judgment with him.121 The abbess, whom the Brigittine Rule describes as occupying the position of the Virgin Mary, is placed here on an equal level with the bishop, the representative of Christ. This placement echoes frequent description of the Virgin Mary as co-redemptrix in Brigittine service texts, and it recalls the equal focus on Mary and Christ as models for the nun in the consecration ceremony.122 Through limiting episcopal power and foregrounding the abbess’s authority, texts associated with Brigittine visitation do much to change the visitation process’s “ways of making the world.”123
The Minoresses’ Isabella Rule also changes the ways in which the world of the religious community is “made” in visitation. For instance, it stipulates that the visitor’s behavior is just as subject to scrutiny as the sisters’ behavior. The text specifies that he is to be “soche one whoche is wel knowen of stedfastnesse of religious life & gode vertuis” (Rewle 92). Furthermore, if, after the visitation, “any þinge notable ageynis þe visitoure or ageynis his felawes” is found, it is to be reported to the Minister General (Rewle 94). He, like the sisters, may become part of a body of knowledge, a textual corpus. Not only those visited, but also the visitor, is subject to examination and classification. Both parties thus have the opportunity to mobilize textual practices to their own advantage.
Even more strikingly, the Isabella Rule disrupts the textual dissemination of knowledge about women religious, putting control of their textual corpus back into their own hands. The visitor is to “kepe priue, ne schewe hit nat bi his knowinge to none bodi” (Rewle 94) that which he finds in visitation. G. G. Coulton notes that in visitation records, “one of the most serious offenses contemplated is that of revealing the secrets of the chapter…. To reveal the details of a visitation was one of the worst and most heavily-punished monastic offenses.”124 In the case of the Minoresses, the prohibition is stated with reference to the visitor instead of the visited. Information concerning the visitation could only be reported to the Minister General of the Order “bi þe counsayle of moste wise sustris of þe couent” (Rewle 94).
Most dramatically, the Isabella Rule alone among rules for Franciscan nuns specifies that “assone as misdedis schal be redde & penaunce enioynid, alle þat whoche is writen schal be brent bifore þe couent” (Rewle 94). The visitor is not permitted to keep that which he accumulates as he writes the visitation documents. The required destruction of the texts allows the sisters following the Isabella Rule to escape being caught in the network of clerical textual exchanges. Unlike Benedictine nuns, who put themselves in textual form into clerical hands at their profession and remain in visitation documents part of a textual corpus permanently in the hands of ecclesiastical authorities, the Minoresses elude the defining, confining power of writing.
The wealth, aristocratic patronage, and the generally high social status of Brigittine and Franciscan nuns may have been factors enabling clerical acceptance of the less intrusive visitation practices at Syon and in houses of English Minoresses. Since important, wealthy Benedictine abbeys of nuns did not succeed in obtaining the kind of exemption from episcopal visitation enjoyed by some male houses of corresponding stature, though, money and social status did not in and of themselves ensure nuns’ autonomy. In considering the more liberal visitation practices of the Brigittine and Franciscan traditions, it is also important to remember that both rules were written for women (not