CHAPTER 1 The Puzzle of the Nuns’ Priest

Anxiety and Oversight: The Medieval Sources

Dangers and troubles feature prominently in the few medieval sources that discuss men’s spiritual care for religious women, creating the impression that the provision of care for nuns was primarily a “problem” for priests. Churchmen agreed that nuns required the services of one or more priests, as well as the material support of various canons or brothers, and—by the twelfth century—the oversight of a provost, prior, or spiritual father, who held ultimate authority over the women (generally with the help of a prioress or magistra).¹¹ As the twelfth-century monk Idung of Prüfening noted, reflecting a trend toward male supervision of women in material as well as spiritual matters: “it is not expedient for that sex to enjoy the freedom of having its own governance.”¹² Yet despite widespread agreement that nuns needed men’s services (and that female monasteries should not be allowed to function without them), the means by which such services should be provided had been topics of anxious commentary from the very origins of monasticism. From the standpoint of male spirituality, the most pressing problem lay in the contact with women that men’s provision of pastoral care required. Already in the third century, sexual renunciation was a hallmark of the religious life, with many of the desert fathers famed for their total avoidance of women. “A woman’s body is fire,” one brother had declared, explaining his refusal to touch even his own mother: “simply because I was touching you, the memory of other women might come into my mind.”¹³

In keeping with the idea that contact with women was spiritually dangerous for men, rules and prescriptive texts from the earliest centuries of monasticism depict the provision of care for nuns as a perilous assignment, one that was most appropriate for men whose age and reputation signaled their likelihood to withstand temptation. As Basil of Caesarea (d. 379) advised in the fourth century, men chosen to care for women should be “of mature years and reverent in their comportment and character,” advice that was repeated (although not always followed) throughout the medieval period.¹⁴ But even advanced age could not fully prevent temptation, as churchmen feared.¹⁵ Accounts of men like the sixth-century monk Equitius, who was (miraculously) made a eunuch in order to safeguard his chastity among nuns, reinforced the sense that temptation for priests serving among women was inevitable (the story of Origen’s auto-castration, although deplored, underscored the presumption that only a eunuch could serve safely among women).¹⁶ Limitations were therefore put in place to guard further against both sin and—perhaps just as important—the suspicion of sin. Private conversations with women were to be avoided, as a succession of early rulings advised, recommending that no meeting take place without witnesses to guarantee its blamelessness.¹⁷ According to the seventh-century Council of Seville, which was known and cited during the twelfth century, even the abbot was prohibited from talking with nuns of an affiliated monastery. As a practical matter, he was permitted to speak with the abbess—but only “with two or three sisters for witness.”¹⁸ The early ninth-century Institutio sanctimonialium likewise ruled that a priest serving in a female house should bring a deacon and a subdeacon with him as witnesses. The men were to enter the inner spaces of the women’s cloister only to visit the sick and to celebrate the Mass (which the women were to observe from behind a curtain); once their purpose had been fulfilled, they were to leave.¹⁹ Lingering in the women’s cloister was expressly forbidden.²⁰

Sources from the eleventh and twelfth centuries—the particular focus of this book—reflect the mix of anxiety and oversight that had characterized early medieval discussions of pastoral care for women. Stories of religious men who succumbed to sexual temptation while serving women spiritually (or of nuns who became infatuated with their priests) stoked fears that the pastoral relationship could provide an opening for sin. The Speculum virginum (c. 1140), written as a model dialogue for monks engaged in the spiritual care of nuns, recounted the fate of one unhappy cleric who fell in love with the prioress of the monastery where he served. Having broken into the women’s dormitory to wait in the prioress’s bed for her return, the “insolent madman” was “strangled by the very angel who had tempted him.” The prioress, coming back from Lauds, was horrified to discover his corpse.²¹ Even more worrying than stories of sexual temptation was the fear that men’s licit, spiritual admiration of devout women could give way to sin. Writing for a male audience, the abbot Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167) explained the insinuation of vice this way: “someone’s interest is aroused by hearing about a nun extolled for her holiness of body and spirit, her sincere faith, her outstanding discretion, her rock-solid virtue of humility …, her remarkable abstinence, her excellent obedience.” Admiration turns to “dutiful” attachment, which leads to “dear” attachment, and then, inexorably, to “vice-prone” attachment.²² According to this line of reasoning, the most pious women and men were, paradoxically, the most susceptible to temptation.

Concerns relating to the potential for sexual sin in the pastoral relationship had a long lineage within the monastic life. Even so, there were fresh challenges in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The church reform movement, with its campaign for clerical celibacy, warned secular priests explicitly against marriage, but implicitly against any involvement with women.²³ As R. I. Moore has noted, reform was—at its heart—a project to sharpen the distinction between the spiritual and the secular and to exalt the clergy over the laity.²⁴ Although women may not have been a direct or intentional target of reform, as some scholars have suggested, they nevertheless became a fault line separating clerical from lay men. Marriage, the production of heirs, and (therefore) women were essential to the fulfillment of the secular roles assigned to laymen. For the clergy, however, women were deemed superfluous, and even dangerous.²⁵ Priests were urged to keep themselves distant not just from their own one-time wives (whom Peter Damian famously vilified as “hoopoes, screech owls, nighthawks, she-wolves, leeches … strumpets, [and] prostitutes”),²⁶ but from women in general, who were associated in the rhetoric of reform with sexuality, pollution, and sin, as Jo Ann McNamara and Dyan Elliott have shown.²⁷

Within the context of reform in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, some male religious communities withdrew not just from women, but even from nuns, and from the spiritual and material care that women’s houses required. The Templar Rule (c. 1129), deciding against female members, declared the “company of women” to be “a dangerous thing, for by it the old devil has led many from the straight path to Paradise.”²⁸ The slightly later Rule of Grandmont (c. 1140–1150) likewise invoked women’s “snares” as a danger to men, which justified male monastic separation from them: “If the most mild David, the most wise Solomon, and the most strong Samson, were captured by feminine snares, who will not fall to their charms?”²⁹ Men in communities such as these found nothing in the Benedictine Rule to require their engagement with women, even in the essential role as priests for nuns. Indeed, the Rule, which had been recognized as the principal guide for the monastic life since the Carolingian reforms, had nothing whatsoever to say on the subjects of women’s receipt of care or men’s provision of it.³⁰ More strikingly, since Benedict had written his Rule explicitly for men, it neglected to mention nuns at all, suggesting that the religious life—for monks, at least—could be an entirely single-sex experience.³¹

Nuns, Their Priests, and the Single-Sex Monastic Ideal

The presumption that male monasticism was a single-sex experience has had a formative influence on scholarship, reinforcing the sense of the nuns’ priest as a spiritual and institutional anomaly. Admittedly, some monks did refuse all contact with women, barring women from their churches and shrines.³² However, for women, the monastic life consistently and necessarily included men, contributing to the puzzle I mentioned above.³³ In addition to the priest who celebrated the Mass, and the deacons and subdeacons who were to accompany him as witnesses and helpers, other men were regularly present within the female monastery, even before the reforms of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the introduction into many houses of a spiritual “father.” These men—whether monks, canons, or lay brothers—attended to the women’s material needs, overseeing the community’s buildings, witnessing its charters, aiding in the management of its finances and estates, and representing the community in its public dealings.³⁴ Some women’s houses—chiefly the aristocratic Frauenstifte—had communities of clerics attached to them.³⁵ These male communities served both the spiritual and the material needs of the women and were often sizeable: during the early ninth century, the women’s monastery of Sainte-Croix at Poitiers had the resources to support up to 30 clerics, alongside 100 women.³⁶ Although early medieval rules required that clerics lived outside the women’s enclosure, entering it only when necessary, men associated with houses like Sainte-Croix could nevertheless develop close friendships with the women, as Venantius Fortunatus, possibly chaplain at Sainte-Croix (and later bishop of Poitiers), did in the late sixth century.³⁷

As female monasticism expanded during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, men continued to be present in women’s communities, and even—in some cases—to live in them. The late twelfth-century necrology of Obermünster in Regensburg, a community of canonesses founded in the ninth century, included the names of sixty-six priests as well as sixty-nine canons, pastors, deacons, and hermits. These men are identified as “brothers living in the upper monastery” (Figure 1).³⁸ Newer women’s communities, too, included an often sizeable male presence. The Cluniac community of Marcigny, founded in 1055 by Hugh of Cluny (d. 1109) with his brother Geoffrey II of Semur, included between 10 and 20 monk-priests, and by 1117 had almost 100 women.³⁹ Renco, an older monk who was described as a “wise teacher” and “true philosopher of God,” served as the community’s first prior.⁴⁰ A charter from 1088 mentions brothers of Cluny who lived at the women’s house; other documents referred more specifically to brothers and sisters “of Marcigny,” implying the men’s primary association with Marcigny.⁴¹

The presence of men in communities typically viewed as “women’s” houses was, in fact, not unusual during the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. As Sharon Elkins has shown, a significant number of houses that were founded ostensibly for women during this period actually housed both women and men.⁴² Her findings were confirmed by Sally Thompson, whose detailed study of individual women’s monasteries revealed a significant number of men.⁴³ Both studies focused on England, but similar patterns can be seen elsewhere. Indeed, some men actually made their professions at so-called “women’s” houses—at communities like Fontevraud in the Loire Valley, which contemporaries consistently viewed as a female house despite its sizeable male community (but which historians now often characterize as a “double” community);⁴⁴ Sigena, the Aragonese community founded by Sancha of Léon-Castile (d. 1208), where a significant men’s community was subordinated to the prioress’s authority; and, until the Premonstratensian General Chapter ruled against the practice in the early thirteenth century, the women’s community of Füssenich in the archdiocese of Cologne, where the brothers had their own dormitory.⁴⁵ A good number of these men would have served the material needs of the women’s community, but those who were ordained would have taken turns ministering to the women’s spiritual needs as well.

For the women of these communities, a single-sex life was neither practical nor desirable: without the regular ministrations of a priest, the spiritual life of any female monastery (or, indeed, any grouping of religious women) could be thrown into jeopardy.⁴⁶ Modern scholars, like medieval observers, have therefore tended to accept women’s interactions with ordained men as necessary and “normal,” the consequence of women’s exclusion from ordination and dependence on priests for sacramental services. Yet—and here is the crux of the puzzle that this chapter addresses—men’s contact with women within the religious life appears in both medieval and modern accounts as dangerous, controversial, suspect, and fraught. Restrictions on the types of men who could theoretically be chosen to care for women (old men, and of good repute) and on their access to the female cloister (limited, and in the company of witnesses) suggest a medieval climate of suspicion and anxiety concerning contact between the sexes within the religious life. As Jerome had written to the priest Nepotian in the late fourth century, cautioning him against contact even with “Christ’s virgins,” danger lay not just in the sexual temptation posed by women, but also in women’s presumed likeness to Eve and their connection to sin. It was Eve who “caused the tiller of paradise to be expelled from his home,” Jerome reminded Nepotian, a warning that the twelfth-century bishop Marbode of Rennes (d. 1123) reprised in his disapproving letter to the wandering preacher Robert of Arbrissel (d. 1116): “the beginning of sin was caused by a woman and through her we all die, so if we want to avoid sin, we must cut the cause of sin away from us.”⁴⁷ Modern scholars have taken exhortations like these as evidence that religious men preferred to avoid contact with women, whom they viewed, with Marbode, as “the cause of sin.” So while scholars have accepted and even normalized the presence of men as necessary figures of ecclesiastical authority in women’s houses, they nevertheless assume that the ideal religious life for men was one from which women were absent—literally, as Marbode advised, “cut away.”

The tendency to assume a single-sex religious ideal for monastic men (and for all priests), but not for professed women (who were, in any case, always “married” to Christ), has left nuns’ priests in a curious position: the pastoral care they provided for nuns is thought to have been necessary and even critical to female religious life, yet at the same time to have been a distraction and potential danger to their own male spirituality.⁴⁸ According to Herbert Grundmann, whose 1935 study of medieval religious movements remains enormously influential, the obligation for ordained men to provide for women’s spiritual and material care was a “trouble and responsibility,” which prompted several of the new religious orders of the central Middle Ages to reject women altogether.⁴⁹ More recent scholars have largely agreed with Grundmann, assuming that the relationship between nuns and priests (whether these men were ordained monks or, later, friars) was defined by a fundamental, gendered imbalance: nuns needed priests and could not manage without them, while priests, who did not need nuns, avoided them as much as possible—with the exception of holy women, who were celebrated for being “unlike” other women.⁵⁰ The assumption of imbalance pervades even the language used to describe the range of services provided by men for religious women: cura monialium, or care of nuns. Unlike the gender neutral cura animarum, or care of souls, the term cura monialium tends to imply, as Brian Patrick McGuire has observed, that “women are a burden, the weaker sex, the dependents who need to be cared for.”⁵¹ For Jo Ann McNamara, the cura mulierum was the “clergyman’s burden”—an unwelcome obligation that priests sought to avoid, and from which they derived no tangible benefit.⁵²

The idea that involvement with women was unnecessary and even detrimental to religious men has shaped perceptions of nuns’ priests, casting them as fundamentally problematic and even implausible figures: men whose practical circumstances and spiritual vocation (providing sacramental care for women) directly compromised a supposedly fundamental precondition for male spirituality (separation from women). The characterization of nuns’ priests as odd and contradictory has meant that they remain largely absent from studies of the monastic “mainstream.” Obscured both by medieval rhetoric warning against men’s contact with women and by modern assumptions concerning male religious life and spirituality, the men who provided nuns with care, and who thus helped to make possible the dramatic expansion of female monasticism during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, disappear from view. Their near invisibility is exacerbated by the fact that few of these men left any written account of their experiences; even their names are often unknown.

Rhetorical Contests and the Nuns’ Priest

A central purpose of this book is to restore these men to view, and to explore the meaning of their spiritual work among women, as they understood and valued it, within the context of eleventh- and twelfth-century male, primarily monastic, spirituality. In so doing, the book offers an expanded understanding of male spirituality, one that moves beyond the presumption of sex segregation in order to accept the sacramental services of nuns’ priests as legitimate and spiritually valuable. Historians of masculinity (whether medieval or modern) have typically focused on how masculinity was forged in all-male environments, depicting it as a contest that was waged, first and foremost, between men.⁵³ Within medieval scholarship, clerical celibacy has served as a primary focal point for the examination of masculinity, with scholars exploring the competing claims to manliness of clerics and laymen.⁵⁴ My purpose is rather to show how male spirituality could be forged through men’s contact with pious women—that is to say, how priests evolved spiritually through their service to nuns. The involvement of ordained men with religious women was a regular and spiritually significant part of the medieval monastic life—for women, to be sure, but also for a considerable number of men.⁵⁵ Throughout the central Middle Ages, growing numbers of religious men (some who are known, but many more who are not) chose to involve themselves with religious women, despite a prevailing climate in which contact between religious men and women was strongly discouraged. These men engaged with women as bishops, priests, provosts, priors, and lay brothers. They founded monasteries for women, and even governed them, as in the case of Bishop Gundulf of Rochester (d. 1108), who ruled Malling for some sixteen years before appointing an abbess, Avice, on his deathbed.⁵⁶ If they were monks themselves, they might welcome women into their own religious communities (sometimes warmly, and sometimes temporarily); some, like the Gilbertines, placed their material resources in women’s hands, subordinating the men’s material needs to female authority.⁵⁷ Certain men lived in close quarters with women, testing the limits of chastity and propriety. Establishing spiritual friendships with women whom they embraced as “sisters,” “mothers,” and dominae (a term that could be translated as “ladies” or “female lords,” but that specifically invoked the privileged position of the religious woman as a bride of Christ),⁵⁸ they sought to explore a version of the religious life in which sexual difference was not so much transcended as it was put to a new, spiritual purpose. As certain medieval sources suggest, these men viewed contact with women as a spiritual opportunity, and not—as many scholars have assumed—as a distraction: according to the vita of Abbot Theoger of Saint-Georgen (d. 1120), it was among women that “the highest perfection” was to be found.⁵⁹

These men were, admittedly, swimming against a rhetorical tide. Many medieval monastic texts from the period present the renunciation of sexuality, and therefore the avoidance of women, as a male monastic virtue. Like Benedict of Nursia, who had reputedly plunged himself naked into nettles and briars when tempted by the mere recollection of a woman “he had once seen,”⁶⁰ the twelfth-century hermit Godric of Finchale (d. 1170) was celebrated for having thrown “his naked body among the prickly spurs of thorns and brambles” to extinguish carnal desire; his biographer commented that the “old enemy” made images of women appear to him (which he rejected “manfully”).⁶¹ Godric’s near contemporary, the monk-turned-hermit Aybert of Crépin (d. 1141), reportedly avoided women so completely that when the Virgin Mary appeared in his cell “in the form of a beautiful woman,” he recoiled at first and rebuked her.⁶² Whereas these men were viewed as saints, the close involvement of men with women within a religious life was often seen as a marker of heresy.⁶³ At best, it was foolish and spiritually pointless, as several critics warned. Geoffrey of Vendôme (d. 1132) scoffed that Robert of Arbrissel had “discovered a new and unheard of but fruitless kind of martyrdom,” through his close involvement with women and the sexual temptations to which he exposed himself.⁶⁴ The cautionary tale of Enoc, a Welsh abbot who had reputedly “gathered together … a group of virgins for the service of Christ” served as a salutary warning against men’s too close spiritual engagement with women. As Gerald of Wales (d. c. 1223) reported, Enoc’s spiritual community ended dramatically and in failure: “at length [Enoc] succumbed to temptations and made many of the virgins in the convent pregnant. Finally, he ran around in a comical manner, throwing off the religious habit, and fled with one of the nuns.”⁶⁵

The story of Enoc’s brief yet disastrous career as a spiritual guide for women appears in the Gemma ecclesiastica, a work that Gerald composed as a guide for the clergy of his archdeaconry.⁶⁶ Gerald’s decision to include Enoc in the text reflects his skepticism concerning men’s purportedly spiritual involvement with women.⁶⁷ But it can serve equally as an indication that men were engaging spiritually with women during the period; this engagement is precisely what Gerald sought to prevent. Viewed in this way (and not as an account of the dangers of involvement with women and Enoc’s alleged inability to resist them), Enoc’s story confirms what is known from other, scattered, sources: during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, certain monks and priests across Europe were turning their attention to the spiritual lives of women, founding communities for women (and men) that were probably very much like his, or variations on it.⁶⁸ These men attracted criticism and suspicions. Goscelin of St. Bertin (d. c. 1107) acknowledged that his “pure encounter” with Eve of Wilton would draw vulgar speculation from critics whom he disparaged as “lecherous” and “dirty”; he defended his relationship with her against “the whisperer of scandal, the lecherous eye, the pointing finger, the spewer of hot air and the dirty snickerer.”⁶⁹ The Norman abbot of Saint Albans, Geoffrey de Gorron (d. 1146), was “slandered as a seducer” as a result of his spiritual friendship with Christina of Markyate (while she was maligned as “a whore”).⁷⁰ Attacks like these did not stop men from engaging spiritually with women, and may even have fueled their sense that service to nuns (and the persecution that often followed) was a central part of the male religious life. Most important, such attacks prompted men to develop a defensive vocabulary—which I explore in subsequent chapters—that drew on the examples of Christ, the apostles, and the church fathers: men who had also involved themselves spiritually, and blamelessly, with pious women.

Some of the men who engaged spiritually with women during the eleventh and twelfth centuries are well known: Robert of Arbrissel, a wandering preacher who attracted a motley following of women and men and who promoted chaste, spiritually inspired cohabitation before settling his mixed group of disciples at Fontevraud in 1101;⁷¹ Norbert of Xanten (d. 1134), the radical hermit preacher and later archbishop of Magdeburg, who had accepted both women and men at his foundation at Prémontré;⁷² and Gilbert, the priest of Sempringham (d. 1189), who established a community for seven women alongside his parish church, which later grew into “a kind of double monastery” (a “monasteria duplicia,” in Gerald of Wales’s words) that included both women and men.⁷³ Others are less well known: figures like Gaucher of Aureil (d. 1140), who, “seeking to build the heavenly Jerusalem with walls of both sexes, built a dwelling for women a stone’s throw from his own cell”;⁷⁴ Godwyn (d. c. 1130), an English hermit who provided pastoral care to three women—Emma, Gunilda, and Christina—at his hermitage in Kilburn, which later developed into a monastery for women;⁷⁵ Ekkehard of Halberstadt (d. 1084), who served as spiritual father for the recluse Bia from Quedlinburg (“lest the divine service should be lacking”), attracting other monks and female recluses to a small community that formed the basis for the mixed monastery of Huysburg;⁷⁶ Betto, a canon from Hildesheim whose “true love of holy virgins and widows” prompted his sponsorship of religious women at Lippoldsberg at the turn of the twelfth century;⁷⁷ Theoger of Saint-Georgen, who served as spiritual father for women at the priory of Amtenhausen;⁷⁸ Robert, who lived together with a group of women, possibly near the male monastery of Bury St. Edmunds, bestowing “care and love … on these handmaidens of God for God’s sake,” as Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) wrote approvingly to him;⁷⁹ Richard of Springiersbach (d. 1158), who founded Andernach for his sister Tenxwind and provided a priest, Conrad, for her spiritual guidance;⁸⁰ and others, including many whose names and activities either have not survived or were never recorded. Several of these men founded monastic communities in which women and men lived side by side (although often physically separated, as many sources were quick to note), establishing what scholars and some contemporaries recognized as “double” houses.⁸¹ Such communities were common among groups professing a reformed religious life, as Stephanie Haarländer has shown.⁸² Monasteries affiliated with the Black Forest reform community of Hirsau, or reformed according to Hirsau customs, almost invariably included women together with men, as at Zwiefalten, where the chronicler Ortlieb commented on the “irreprehensible life” of the nun Hadewic, which he presented as an example “not only for women, but also for men.”⁸³

The emergence in reforming circles of “double” monasteries demonstrates that the single-sex religious life was not necessarily a spiritual goal for monks, any more than it was a practical option for nuns. Indeed, even before the resurgence of double houses, many men’s monasteries had included devout women in their spiritual circles, just as men had lived in and alongside women’s houses.⁸⁴ The presence of women was often welcomed, as at Bury St. Edmunds, where, according to the Domesday Book, some twenty-eight nonnae lived in the late eleventh century, praying “daily for the King and for all Christian people.”⁸⁵ One of these women, Seitha, met often for spiritual conversation with the sacrist, Toli, and was a regular presence within the monastic church, to which she was sometimes allowed special access.⁸⁶ At the Norman monastery of Bec during the late eleventh century, resident women were hailed as “mothers” of the monks.⁸⁷ Among them was the founder’s mother, Heloise, on whose dower lands Bec had been established.⁸⁸ Kinship ties played a role in facilitating women’s acceptance at men’s communities elsewhere, too. At Cantimpré in the late twelfth century, Abbot John welcomed his widowed mother into the monastery, sparking the growth of a women’s community, which later moved to Prémy (where John died and was buried).⁸⁹ In the early twelfth century, Guibert of Nogent (d. c. 1124) reported that his mother became a recluse in a cell attached to the abbey church of Saint-Germer-de-Fly, joining “an old woman dressed in monastic habit,” who was the sister of the prior, Suger.⁹⁰ At Cluny, too, women were received, together with their male relatives, long before the foundation of Marcigny.⁹¹ The presence at “men’s” monasteries of these women—and others, like Jutta (d. 1136) and Hildegard at Disibodenberg,⁹² Diemut (d. c. 1130–1150) the famous scribe and recluse at Wessobrunn,⁹³ or Herluca of Epfach (d. 1127/8) who spent the last years of her life at the male Augustinian community of Bernried⁹⁴—significantly blurs the line between “male” and “female” houses, indicating that total segregation by sex may have been less important in practice than it was in theory—and, certainly, less important than it appears in monastic rhetoric.⁹⁵

Monks and priests who welcomed devout women into their communities believed that the ideal religious life could include both sexes. When Gaucher of Aureil’s biographer characterized the presence of women in the saint’s monastic vision as part of his attempt to build the “heavenly Jerusalem” with “walls of both sexes,” his language was intentional and significant: the “heavenly Jerusalem” was a model for the monastic life and a metaphor for the monastery itself.⁹⁶ Gaucher’s sense that the heavenly Jerusalem comprised women as well as men is echoed in the early thirteenth-century description of the Gilbertine order as “Peter’s vessel let down from heaven on four ropes,” or as a “chariot of Aminadab,” with men constituting the wheels on one side and women the wheels on the other.⁹⁷ According to Habakkuk 3:8, the chariot (quadriga) represented salvation; it was consequently often invoked as a symbol of the church. At St. Denis at the mid-twelfth century, the Chariot of Aminadab was shown together with the crucified Christ; the four wheels of the chariot represented the four gospels.⁹⁸ At Sempringham, the same image was invoked to underscore the salvation shared by both sexes. The biography of Hugh of Cluny likewise employed biblical language in order to present the foundation of the women’s house at Marcigny as central to the Cluniac mission: Hugh’s biographer, Gilo, likened his inclusion of women in the “ship of Saint Peter” to Noah’s work in selecting two of each kind of animal to enter into the ark.⁹⁹ Hugh himself commented directly on the spiritual implications of supporting women in the religious life, noting in a letter to his successors that the foundation of Marcigny seemed not to “displease” God, but rather to obey him.¹⁰⁰

The appearance of biblical language in accounts of the mixed-sex religious life suggests that women’s presence was perceived as legitimate and spiritually meaningful in some cases. Biblical examples offered further inspiration for men’s spiritual interactions with women. The mid-twelfth-century chronicle of Petershausen, a monastery in Switzerland that included both women and men, explained the presence of women as a function of the monks’ larger attempt to emulate the life of apostles (an attempt that included their asceticism and renunciation of material possessions). As the chronicler wrote, invoking the presence of women alongside Jesus’s disciples,

It must be noted that pious women served God together with the holy disciples; according to this example, it is not blameworthy, but greatly worthy of praise, if women are received in monasteries as nuns in the service of God, so that each sex, although separated one from the other, may be saved in one place.¹⁰¹

Monks at the Swiss double monastery of Muri claimed the “life of the holy fathers” (vita sanctorum patrum) as a model for the substantial presence of women there; the Acta Murensia (c. 1160) noted that the fathers had “also gathered women to themselves for love of God.”¹⁰² At Rolduc (Klosterrath), too, the abbot Erpo turned to the apostolic example in order to claim the legitimacy of women’s presence among religious men. Since the apostles had had women among them to provide for their material needs (a topic discussed in Chapter 2), Erpo found cause to allow eight women to serve in a domestic capacity at the monastery, despite local opposition.¹⁰³ Other sources hint at the idea that the mixed religious life had a spiritual purpose. The Little Book on the Various Orders and Callings that Exist in the Church, a mid-twelfth-century polemical text advocating for reform, mentions women’s spiritual involvement alongside men, promising a section (now lost) on women who “sweetly take up Christ’s yoke with holy men or under their guidance.”¹⁰⁴ According to Anselm of Canterbury, female recluses living chastely under male guidance approximated not just the vita apostolica, the apostolic life, but the vita angelica, the life of the angels living with God.¹⁰⁵

Certain male monastic reformers viewed the presence of women in the religious life—and men’s care for them—as an occasion for spiritual advancement. The early thirteenth-century Book of St Gilbert—although not effusive about Gilbert of Sempringham’s care for women—nevertheless presented concern for devout women as serving a spiritual purpose.¹⁰⁶ In the first instance, the Book’s author argued that care for women was necessary, since women need men’s help and the “fathers” required that men provide it: “it is essential that communities of maidens be controlled through the support and administration of monks and clerks,” he observed.¹⁰⁷ But it was also “natural,” given women’s innate weakness, as he explained: the “natural law of pity instructs us, and divine counsel urges us, to do good without stinting to weaker folk.” For this, the author observed, “a richer reward is to be expected.” In Gilbert’s case, the reward was explicitly gendered: “Because the fruit of virgins is one hundredfold, when he [Gilbert] abandoned his own possessions in order to preserve their virgin status he received a hundredfold and possesses eternal life.”¹⁰⁸

Clues that religious men expected a spiritual reward from their spiritual attention to professed women appear elsewhere, as in Anselm of Canterbury’s letter to Robert, thanking him for his attention to women and promising him that “a great reward from God awaits you for this holy zeal.”¹⁰⁹ Idung of Prüfening, too, observed that a “not insignificant spiritual profit can be produced” through the spiritual direction of nuns.¹¹⁰ The late twelfth-century foundation charter for the Cistercian monastery of Las Huelgas explained that “especially great merit is obtained from God by establishing monastic communities for women.”¹¹¹ A similar assumption may have inspired the comments of Herman of Tournai (d. c. 1147) regarding Norbert of Xanten’s mixed-sex foundation at Prémontré. Presenting Norbert’s ministry to women as especially virtuous, Herman asked: “if … Norbert had done nothing else … but attract so many women to God’s service by his exhortation, would he not have been worthy of the greatest praise?” Tying Norbert’s ministry to the example of the apostles, Herman went on to comment that “there has been no one since the time of the apostles who in such a brief space of time has acquired for Christ so many imitators of the perfect life.”¹¹²

The idea that men would be divinely rewarded for their spiritual care of women cuts against the grain of much medieval monastic and clerical polemic concerning the dangers that were supposedly inherent in men’s involvement with women. The examples offered here, of men like Gaucher, Gilbert, Hugh, and Norbert (as well as monks at such communities as Muri, Rolduc, and Petershausen), hint at a rich and vibrant male monastic culture in which spiritual service to nuns was accepted and valued—a culture that existed alongside the more widely known context of male monastic reluctance to engage with women. Still, this was not a culture that exalted women unreservedly, or that made arguments we might now recognize as feminist. The male-authored sources give little sense in most cases of the women’s own spiritual lives, or of their claims to self-governance or autonomy (even as women’s own writings reveal them to have been curious and engaged interlocutors on spiritual matters, often challenging their male advisors, both intellectually and spiritually). Nuns and even holy women are typically depicted as reliant on the help of men, as the Book of St Gilbert commented dismissively, “women’s efforts achieve little without help from men.”¹¹³ Moreover, men serving the needs of religious women sometimes conceived of their service as a form of spiritually inspired submission: an act of voluntary humility that would be rewarded in heaven and that was predicated on the assumption of women’s “natural” inferiority.¹¹⁴ Peter Abelard (d. 1142) commented more than once on this aspect of men’s service to women, promising in his monastic Rule for women that “the more a man has humbled himself before God, the higher he will certainly be exalted.”¹¹⁵ These men did not argue for structural changes to the gendered hierarchy of the medieval church. However, they did engage voluntarily in service to religious women, dignifying female religious life and often presenting that service as part of the larger quest to achieve a spiritually authentic vita apostolica. Religious women needed men’s pastoral care, as both women and men assumed. The sources I have presented here, and those that I explore in the following chapters, suggest that some men felt that they would do very well, spiritually, to provide it.

Sources and Interpretations

This book is concerned primarily with ideas and rhetoric relating to men’s spiritual care for women, and less with the provision of care itself. For the most part, ordained men provided religious women with spiritual care, free from either scandal or hostility—even though it is primarily in the context of scandal and hostility that these men come into view. Of course, there were instances in which men refused women spiritual care, or mistreated them.¹¹⁶ Some priests stole from female monasteries; others usurped women’s properties.¹¹⁷ Some were negligent and failed to provide adequate spiritual service.¹¹⁸ Some preyed on the women, abusing their privileged access to the female monastery to force themselves sexually on the nuns—realizing the worst fears of churchmen. The male author of the Speculum virginum warned his female audience against false pastors, men who he claimed were “wolves rapacious for souls, slaying with the swords of incontinence those whom they feed with the word of truth.”¹¹⁹ Writing in the thirteenth century, the Dominican Thomas of Cantimpré (d. c. 1270) advocated a firm response to predatory men (including clerics), advising religious women that “if anyone wishes to solicit you as it were to a holy kiss, if anyone tries to put his hand on your breast, your bosom, or any other part of your body, give him spittle instead of a kiss and let your fist meet his groping hand.”¹²⁰ These are vivid warnings, to be sure, but there are few indications that they reflect common or recurrent dangers. The general silence of monastic charters and other documents of practice concerning exploitation or scandal reflects the likelihood that, in most cases, the provision of care was routine and, if not always perfect, at least relatively trouble-free.

The puzzle at the heart of this chapter is not that priests failed to provide pastoral care, but that medieval observers generally failed to discuss it in a positive way, even as most acknowledged its necessity: it is a puzzle of language and representation, rather than reality. As I have shown, references to nuns’ priests, or to men who served as confessors or spiritual friends to women (and who were usually also ordained), are mired in anxiety, suspicion, and ambivalence. The prevalence and rhetorical force of these sources maligning nuns’ priests have led historians to imagine danger, sexual scandal, and hostility in the relationship of priests to nuns—a relationship that is consequently depicted as one of male volition, control, and sometimes even resentment or outright antagonism.¹²¹ The one-sidedness of the sources is exacerbated by the fact that even men who did engage spiritually with women, and who recorded that engagement in writing, tended to deny or downplay the extent of their interaction, further obscuring what was in most cases likely an innocent and even humdrum reality.

Irimbert of Admont (d. 1176) offers a case in point. Admont in Styria is distinct as one of the most long-lasting of the double monasteries founded during the reform period, and also one with the richest extant resources: Admont’s medieval library, replete with twelfth-century manuscripts, has survived largely intact.¹²² Irimbert was abbot of Admont for several years before his death in 1176. However, before becoming abbot, he had served as spiritual tutor to the nuns of the community, and to nuns at Admont’s daughter house, Sankt Georgen am Längsee in Carinthia.¹²³ As spiritual tutor, Irimbert reported that he had preached to the nuns, although not—as he was careful to point out—face-to-face. Instead, he preached through a window, a circumstance that made it possible, so he claimed, for certain nuns to record his sermons in writing, without his knowledge.¹²⁴ Irimbert’s emphasis on the strict physical separation of the Admont nuns is confirmed by his now famous account of the 1152 fire that almost destroyed the women’s community.¹²⁵ As Irimbert reported, when fire swept the monastic compound, the nuns were locked in the women’s cloister. As disaster loomed, none of the monks could find the keys to the single door that led to the women’s part of the monastery. If Irimbert is to be believed, the keys were difficult to find because they were rarely used: the door between the two parts of the community was opened only for a nun to enter at the moment of her profession or to exit when her body was carried out for burial, or for a priest to give last rites to the dying.¹²⁶ Apart from this door, only a single small window in the women’s chapter house provided a means for communication with the world beyond the women’s cloister. As Irimbert presumably wished to show, the separation of the sexes at Admont was so strict that access to the female community was practically impossible, even in cases of imminent danger.¹²⁷

Evidence from other monastic communities indicates that direct contact between women and men in the religious life was more common than Irimbert’s carefully crafted and clearly polemical account implies, suggesting the need to deal carefully with medieval sources that deny or downplay the interaction of the sexes. Some of this evidence is fragmentary, preserved by chance rather than intention. Yet it reflects the practical reality of interaction between monastic men and women more than defensive reports of windows, curtains, grilles, doors, and keys, which often appear in texts intended for a public audience (as, for instance, the life of Stephen of Obazine, which detailed elaborate safeguards against contact between the men and women at Obazine/Coyroux).¹²⁸ The Guta-Sintram Codex (c. 1154), a manuscript produced through the collaboration of a female scribe and a male artist, reveals, for instance, the interchange of scribal hands on a single line, suggesting the close working conditions of the two, likely within a single monastic scriptorium.¹²⁹ The collaboration of Guta and Sintram is commemorated in an image showing them both before the Virgin Mary (Figure 2). Likewise, Herman of Tournai’s account of the monastery of Saint Martin reports in passing the conversation of a monk with a nun, as he brought linen to the women’s convent to be spun—an indication that monks and nuns could speak together during the course of the monastic day.¹³⁰

Other evidence is more fulsome. Goscelin of St. Bertin, who may have been chaplain at Wilton for some time,¹³¹ recalled a feast that he had attended with Eve of Wilton—his spiritual friend and domina.¹³² Goscelin’s memory of the feast suggests that he was sitting beside her: he recalled passing her the roast fish while commenting on its spiritual significance: the roast fish symbolized the suffering of Christ crucified, “Piscis assus, Christus passus.”¹³³ In a letter regretting Eve’s subsequent departure from Wilton (to live as a hermit in Angers, in a chaste relationship with the male hermit Hervé), Goscelin invoked the power of the written word to restore his presence to her, reminding her of happy times at Wilton: “you will believe me with you at Wilton, before our holy Lady Edith, sitting chastely by your side, speaking with you, admonishing you, consoling you.”¹³⁴ Eve and Goscelin had evidently shared in many direct conversations. “Do you remember when you told me your dream?” Goscelin asked her. They exchanged gifts (a “common custom” among male and female religious, as Aelred observed, disapprovingly),¹³⁵ and attended the dedications of two churches together.¹³⁶ At Rupertsberg, the priest Guibert of Gembloux (d. 1213/14) also enjoyed happy relations with the nuns, writing that he was “refreshed” by daily conversation with Hildegard. He reports having exchanged gifts with at least one nun, Gertrude, with whom he was particularly close.¹³⁷ Of course, different communities had different practices governing women’s enclosure, and so it is not surprising to find variations, even significant ones. Nevertheless, the expectation that women and men could meet within the context of spiritual instruction was foundational to medieval religious life, despite the rhetorical posturing of defensive sources. The Speculum virginum assumed that virgins would “see and converse with the male sex,” even as it warned against the exchange of “glances, conversations, and little gifts.”¹³⁸ The text itself was intended for the use of priests who assumed the spiritual care of nuns, and was designed as a model dialogue to guide discussions between a male pastor and his female disciple.¹³⁹

Despite evidence for routine, quotidian interactions between certain monastic men and religious women, defensive accounts like Irimbert’s (and, more sensationally, stories of sexual misadventures such as the infamous “nun of Watton”¹⁴⁰) have attracted disproportionate attention among scholars, contributing to the sense that the separation of men from women must have been the default position for medieval religious life, and that communities like Fontevraud, Prémontré, and a host of other houses that included women alongside men were “experiments” that would inevitably come to an end: the men would withdraw from the women, and both parts would establish primarily single-sex communities, significantly compromising women’s ability to secure pastoral care.¹⁴¹ Accordingly, accounts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries often acknowledge the mixing of the sexes within some monasteries and the flourishing of spiritual friendships between individual men and women (“chaste rhetorical romances,” as Jo Ann McNamara termed them, or “heteroasceticism” in Dyan Elliott’s terminology), yet depict both as temporary, contingent, and exceptional.¹⁴² For McNamara, the efforts of men like Robert of Arbrissel to forge a new gender order at the turn of the twelfth century were quickly blocked by a clerical hierarchy dominated by celibate men, who vigorously, and even violently, opposed contact with women. As she wrote, “There was a moment in the early twelfth century when they might have led the way to a new and more equitable partnership that narrowed the social effects of biological differences and favored a wider development of the ungendered aspects of the individual personality.”¹⁴³ However, the “gender crisis” that McNamara argued was prompted by the celibacy movement, and that briefly allowed syneisaktic experiments, was short-lived.¹⁴⁴ Within a short time, as McNamara observed, monastic men were once again firmly separated from women, who were consigned to “fanatic claustration,” while a celibate clergy regained its grip on ecclesiastical authority.¹⁴⁵

Beyond the Single-Sex Model: Symbiosis and Male Spirituality

While recognizing the force and pervasiveness of medieval clerical misogyny, my purpose in this book is to take seriously an alternate possibility: that the symbiosis of male and female within the religious life could be a spiritually meaningful and long term phenomenon, as Kaspar Elm suggested—and not merely a temporary curiosity.¹⁴⁶ Men did not uniformly reject contact with women within the religious life. Many double communities outlasted the spiritual enthusiasm and so-called “experimentation” of the early twelfth century, thriving even after the Second Lateran Council (1139) prohibited the co-celebration of the liturgy, forbidding nuns to “come together with canons or monks in choir for the singing of the office.”¹⁴⁷ Some continued into the fifteenth century and beyond, calling into question the assumption that such forms of organization were intrinsically temporary and problematic: the women’s communities of Engelberg and Interlaken, for instance, reached their height in the first half of the fourteenth century.¹⁴⁸ An image from the Registerbook of Abbot Otto II (1375–1414) from the Petersfrauen at Salzburg shows Benedict instructing monks and nuns together, reflecting the continued dual sex organization of the house in the early fifteenth century.¹⁴⁹ At Schönau, the women’s community survived until the early seventeenth century. Meanwhile, in England, only the Dissolution put an end to the involvement of both sexes in the religious life at Sempringham.¹⁵⁰ The establishment of new double houses, like those associated with the Brigittine order, even centuries after the supposed “gender crisis” of the eleventh century, confirms that symbiosis was neither a temporary nor an experimental stage of monastic life, but rather that it held real spiritual meaning for women and men.¹⁵¹

Although many mixed communities did physically separate after some period of time, separation was neither inevitable nor was it always the result of men’s rejection of women.¹⁵² At the monastery of Saint Martin of Tournai, for instance, separation occurred when the women’s community grew too large to be housed together with the men: it was a sign that women’s religious life at Saint Martin was thriving.¹⁵³ At Disibodenberg, the women chose to separate from the men, despite the men’s resistance. The prior Adelbert later admitted to Hildegard that “God took you away from us against our will.… We cannot fathom why God did this.… For we had hoped that the salvation of our monastery rested with you.”¹⁵⁴ When physical separation did occur, for practical or other reasons, the spiritual bond between the women and men often remained in place: after the relocation of the women from Muri to Hermetschwil in 1200, to give one example, a shared necrology continued to report the deaths of both monks and nuns, indicating that the community continued to function as a single, spiritual unit.¹⁵⁵ At Obazine/Coyroux, physical separation had no effect on the men’s spiritual and material care for the women. According to the vita of Stephen of Obazine, the women continued to be “served each day by the monks, under the direction of the abbot, in divine offices, in holding chapter meetings, in hearing confessions and enjoining penances, in carrying out and burying the dead, or in providing other spiritual benefits.”¹⁵⁶ In several instances, physical separation was minimal, as at Rommersdorf/Wülfersberg, where the women moved a mere 800 meters away from the previous double house.¹⁵⁷

These examples highlight the need to deal carefully with medieval sources, which have often been read to reinforce scholarly presumptions, rather than to challenge them. Like nuns’ priests, who have been defined as odd and irregular, double houses are typically characterized as exceptional, experimental, and temporary. The presumption that such houses could not last, because men could not want to share in a religious life with women, mirrors the consensus that priests largely avoided the “burdens” of the cura monialium because they had no reason to engage spiritually with nuns. And yet, as the expansion of female monasticism implies and as many sources confirm, priests continued to care for and support religious women, even in the face of a reforming rhetoric that denigrated marriage and women.

Narratives of gender crisis and temporary experimentation cannot account for the structural fact of men’s continued care for women. Instead, studies of women and men within the medieval religious life have tended to focus on individual relationships and circumstances, and above all on the appeal of female saints to their male admirers. That men could admire and even idealize individual women is clear from the secular literature of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. As C. Stephen Jaeger and Gerald Bond have shown, Latin poems and verse epistles from elite cathedral and court circles increasingly featured praise and admiration of women at this time.¹⁵⁸ Bishops and schoolmen celebrated individual nuns and noblewomen, giving rise to what Bond terms “dominism”—the ritual praise of the lady as superior in virtue.¹⁵⁹ According to Jaeger, women began to be seen as a potentially “positive moral force” and “tutor in ethics” for men—marking a new and unprecedented development in his view.¹⁶⁰ Within the religious life, too, men often held individual women in high regard, as John Coakley has shown in a series of important studies focusing on monastic and mendicant men. These men were drawn to individual holy women, viewing them as spiritual superiors and serving them as scribes, confessors, and often biographers.¹⁶¹ Since these holy women were extraordinary, by definition, the attraction of their male admirers has also been viewed as extraordinary.¹⁶² Like the relationships explored by Bond and Jaeger, which were playful and rhetorical, but had no practical effect on attitudes toward women, there has been little sense that the admiration of religious men for holy women extended beyond the specific circumstances of the individual male-female relationship, or, indeed, beyond the exceptionality of the female saint.

Women in monastic communities were not, as a group, extraordinary. Occasionally a nun was recognized for her saintliness, but most religious women were not: they were ordinary figures, neither charismatic nor visionary. Even so, scores of equally ordinary ordained men ministered to them, subjecting themselves to gossip and accusations of wrong-doing. Studying these men presents significant challenges, since—unlike the men discussed by Coakley—most monks and priests did not leave written accounts of their involvement with women or explain their motivations for serving them.¹⁶³ Other sources are not more forthcoming. Few vitae were produced within the context of the pastoral relationship as it developed within the monastery, and narrative sources seldom mention either the men or the care that they provided.¹⁶⁴ These gaps and silences make it all the more difficult to identify and understand nuns’ priests. Although they existed, and were vital to female religious life, nuns’ priests rarely left a mark on the historic record, appearing primarily as caricatures in the insinuations and accusations of their critics. Bringing these men into view thus requires a new approach to existing sources and a willingness to expand and even redefine the category of nuns’ priest to include men who have more typically been viewed as exceptional or unusual—emblematic of medieval monastic “experimentation,” but not of the mainstream.

Peter Abelard and Robert of Arbrissel: Exceptionalism and Nuns’ Priests

Despite the prevailing silence of the sources, some monks and priests did address the question of pastoral care for women in their lives and writings. One figure who was particularly vocal in acknowledging and defending men’s provision of pastoral care to women is the controversial monk-priest Peter Abelard.¹⁶⁵ A philosopher, theologian, and monastic reformer, Abelard was also the most prolific author of guidance literature for religious women during the twelfth century, producing sermons, hymns, letters, exegesis, theological commentary, and advice—including, notably, his Rule for nuns and treatise On the Origin of Nuns.¹⁶⁶ Abelard was co-founder of the Paraclete, a monastery for women in Champagne, and sometime priest there as well, despite being abbot for several years at St. Gildas in Brittany, some 350 miles away. He was evidently present at the Paraclete enough to attract unpleasant insinuations, including the suggestion that he was sexually enthralled with the Paraclete’s abbess, his former wife, Heloise (d. 1164).¹⁶⁷

Abelard was, without question, an unusual figure with a complicated personal history. He was arrogant at times and intellectually combative: his conflicts with Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) fairly leap off the pages of medieval textbooks. His affair with Heloise, their marriage, and its dramatic conclusion are the stuff of legend. But Abelard was equally a monastic reformer, a man who—like Robert of Arbrissel, whom he admired—devoted many years to the religious life, to preaching, and to the care and support of professed women.¹⁶⁸ In his Rule for nuns, Abelard advanced a model of the professed religious life that embraced both women and men—a model founded on his belief in the spiritual complementarity of the sexes. As he argued, female monasteries should not be separate from male ones, but should be paired spiritually and geographically and bound by an “affection of charity” that could be strengthened by bonds of kinship between individual monks and nuns (as, indeed, he was bound to Heloise).¹⁶⁹

Most striking about Abelard’s monastic plan is the fact that women were at its center; men appear in his Rule chiefly in order to meet the women’s material and spiritual needs (although Abelard envisioned ultimate authority as resting in the hands of an abbot, who was to oversee both the male and the female house).¹⁷⁰ As Abelard wrote, highlighting men’s obligation to support religious women, “it is always men’s duty to provide for women’s needs.”¹⁷¹ In itself, this is not a radical claim: churchmen from the earliest centuries of monasticism had recognized women’s reliance on male spiritual support and had assumed that men had some obligation to provide it—even as they worried about potential dangers. What Abelard explored more extensively than any previous writer was the idea that men’s service to religious women, even ordinary nuns, had inherent spiritual value: that men could benefit spiritually from it. In Abelard’s view, men’s ministry to religious women, whom he increasingly came to understand as brides of Christ and therefore men’s dominae, was an opportunity to be embraced, and not a danger to be avoided.

Abelard’s attention to the spiritual care of women, his arguments in favor of their spiritual “dignity” (a topic first explored by Mary Martin McLaughlin in a trailblazing article), and his engagement with women in the face of often vicious criticism, mark him as similar in several ways to Robert of Arbrissel (to whom he may have been connected through Robert’s spiritual friend, Hersende—who may have been Heloise’s mother).¹⁷² However, one similarity is particularly salient here: both men have been depicted in scholarship on the medieval religious life as “exceptional” and therefore unrepresentative either of medieval monasticism or of medieval religious men. Robert has been viewed as “strange” or “idiosyncratic” (albeit “delightfully so,” as Bruce Venarde has observed), and his foundation at Fontevraud as an anomaly—an experiment that attracted more critics than imitators.¹⁷³ In the same way, Abelard’s personal and intellectual history has traditionally marked him as exceptional and even avant garde. To be sure, the circumstances under which Abelard entered the religious life and his admittedly complicated relationship with Heloise make him unusual among nuns’ priests, as do his status as a foremost theologian and philosopher and his self-conscious presentation of himself as an outsider and a rebel.¹⁷⁴ Yet the opinion that Abelard was unusual is based not only on his personal circumstances, but also on his voluminous writings for women and his claims regarding women’s place in religious life. Like Robert, who is viewed as odd precisely because of his involvement with women, Abelard’s writings concerning women’s place within the religious life have been deemed extraordinary and radical—“the period’s most exciting revisionist raids on dominant gender assumptions,” as Alcuin Blamires observed in his discussion of Abelard’s letter On the Origin of Nuns.¹⁷⁵ Abelard’s belief in the “supreme importance of women in religious history” was nevertheless exceptional for the twelfth century, as Blamires concluded: Abelard was “ahead of his time,” with Christine de Pizan, some three centuries later, as his “closest successor.”¹⁷⁶ The assumption that Abelard’s ideas about women and men within the religious life had no contemporary impact or resonance has seemed to justify his exclusion from scholarly discussions of men’s pastoral care of women, confirming his status as an ultimately atypical figure. Although we now know that men in certain double communities read Abelard’s writings about women and implemented some of his ideas (notably at the Augustinian community of Marbach, as I have shown elsewhere),¹⁷⁷ the monastic model he outlined in his Rule was never put into practice—not even at the Paraclete, where Heloise had specifically commissioned the work.¹⁷⁸ On this basis, some historians have dismissed the entire project as a half-hearted attempt on Abelard’s part to ingratiate himself with Heloise—the fruit of “much dreary toil,” as Sir Richard Southern judged Abelard’s monastic letters in 1970.¹⁷⁹

A central argument of this book is that Abelard (like Robert of Arbrissel) was more representative than scholars have typically allowed—perhaps not of medieval monasticism as a whole, but certainly of a subset of ordained men who included women in their vision of the apostolic life and who saw spiritual advantages in their sacramental service to them. While most of these men are unknown, some left writings in which they advanced arguments similar to those made by Abelard, suggesting the contours of a clerical culture in which ordained men engaged willingly in the spiritual care of women. Abelard made his case for men’s spiritual support of women with unusual force and clarity. Even so, his ideas were hardly unique.¹⁸⁰

Abelard’s stance on religious women is most closely approximated in the writings of Guibert of Gembloux, the Flemish monk who served as Hildegard of Bingen’s secretary from 1177 and then also as priest for the nuns at Rupertsberg.¹⁸¹ Like Abelard, Guibert enjoyed his service to women and found comfort in the female monastery. As he wrote, life at Rupertsberg was more orderly, more congenial, and more spiritually rewarding than at his home monastery of Gembloux. He described his move to the women’s community in terms of Jacob’s two marriages: having been delivered from what he characterized as “servitude of bleary-eyed Leah” at Gembloux, he luxuriated at Rupertsberg in the “delightful embraces of comely Rachel.”¹⁸² Guibert’s long sojourn among the nuns at Rupertsberg was resented by his fellow monks at Gembloux, who demanded his return (implying, as Guibert reported, that he spent his time at Rupertsberg, “lusting with girls in the recesses of the cloister”).¹⁸³ In response, Guibert defended his work among women in several long letters, which invoke many of the ideas that had appeared in Abelard’s writings about men’s spiritual care for women: Jesus’s care for his female disciples, the example of John the Evangelist’s care for Mary at the cross, the “sister women” of the apostles, and Jerome’s devotion to Paula and Eustochium (themes I explore in the following chapters).¹⁸⁴ Exalting professed women and presenting their special status as brides of Christ, Guibert effused that “holy virgins are the temple of God the father, the spouses of his son Jesus Christ, [and] the sanctuary of the holy Spirit.”¹⁸⁵

The similarities between Guibert’s defense and Abelard’s writings are striking. Yet more striking still is the fact that Guibert seems not to have read, or indeed even to have known of Abelard, who died a generation before Guibert began his stint as a nuns’ priest. Nevertheless, both men produced parallel and often overlapping arguments in favor of men’s involvement with religious women. The similarities between them suggest that by the middle of the twelfth century, if not before, a culture of support for the involvement of men with religious women had developed, a culture that had a distinctive vocabulary and rhetoric.

Abelard did not create this rhetoric, although he might be considered the foremost practitioner of it. Indeed, arguments concerning men’s obligation to care for women had circulated in male monastic circles already in the early Middle Ages. During the seventh century, an unnamed abbot composed a rule for the guidance of monks under his authority in which he reasoned that monks should provide religious women with material and spiritual care, since “they are members of Christ, and mothers of the Lord, and through a virgin Christ redeemed us.”¹⁸⁶ In the early eleventh century, before the so-called experiments in syneisaktism that McNamara identified as a temporary component of reform, certain churchmen had defended close friendships with religious women, drawing on ideas that Abelard and others would later also adopt. In a letter to an unidentified nun, Bishop Azecho of Worms (d. 1044) admitted that “there are … those who say that close friendships and conversations with women must be avoided.” Contesting this view, Azecho turned to biblical and early Christian models of male-female spiritual involvement, invoking John’s care for the Virgin Mary, as well as Jerome’s care for the Roman matron Paula and her daughter Eustochium, as evidence that spiritual friendships with women could be blameless and, in the case of the Virgin, even divinely ordained. Azecho concluded his discussion with a daring modification of Psalm 132:1: “Boldly therefore I say: Behold, how good and how pleasant it is that brothers dwell, and also the sisters dwell, in unity.”¹⁸⁷ Not everyone agreed with Azecho, of course, and some used Psalm 132 to argue against the spiritual involvement of women with men. During the thirteenth century, Thomas of Cantimpré invoked Psalm 132:1 to explain Abbot John’s decision to move women away from the men’s monastery at Cantimpré. As Thomas noted, “the prophet says ‘it is good and pleasing for brothers’—not brothers and sisters—to dwell together in unity.’ ”¹⁸⁸

Thomas’s invocation of Psalm 132 stands as a reminder that there were two consistently divergent rhetorical positions available to medieval churchmen on the question of spiritual engagement with women, just as there were on “woman” generally.¹⁸⁹ On the one hand, men like Marbode of Rennes and Bernard of Clairvaux sometimes opposed what they saw as the dangerous mixing of the sexes, drawing on a shared vocabulary invoking Eve, Delilah, and other infamous women of the Old Testament to warn monks and priests against contact with women.¹⁹⁰ On the other hand, men like Abelard and Guibert defended the legitimacy of men’s involvement with religious women, citing Jesus’s care for women, the constancy of the women at the tomb, the apostles’ care for widows, Jerome’s friendship with Eustochium, and the examples of early medieval men, like Saint Equitius, whose care for women was pure.¹⁹¹ The more generally positive positions adopted by these men, and others like them (including Marbode, who could also praise women when he wished),¹⁹² have until now been characterized as personal, contingent, exceptional, and sometimes insincere. They have rarely found a place in mainstream monastic or medieval histories.¹⁹³

Viewed in isolation, men in this latter group might well seem exceptional. To be fair, they were often charismatic figures. Whether as monastic founders, itinerant preachers, spiritual gurus, or intellectuals and writers, these men were on a spiritual quest that necessarily involved behaviors beyond the “ordinary.” However, they also formed part of a tangible and legitimate religious context, and must be viewed—as Bruce Venarde has rightfully argued for Robert of Arbrissel—within “the contemporary mainstream, in which new opportunities for women’s religious life were a significant feature.”¹⁹⁴ It is this vision of a “contemporary mainstream” with its new opportunities for women that the following chapters seek to chart, tracing ideas about men’s service to women that circulated during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Men like Abelard and Guibert (as well as Robert, Norbert, Gilbert, and others) were active in supporting the religious life for women, to various degrees and with differing intentionality and success. The biographies of these men are well known. But they shared something in common that has until now escaped scholarly attention: a sophisticated vocabulary drawn from early Christian and patristic sources to defend and explain their spiritual care of women. This vocabulary was broadly known and used by religious men who ministered to pious women, even by those whose names are not known to us. In tracing this vocabulary, the following chapters turn away from a primary emphasis on individual men, focusing rather on the ideas that they held in common, and above all the motifs that they adopted in defending and discussing their pastoral care of women. Drawing evidence from a range of sources—including letters, chronicles, vitae, monastic rules, advice literature, and sermons, as well as manuscript illuminations, liturgical drama, and wall paintings—these chapters reveal the contours of a medieval clerical culture in which spiritual service to women was carefully theorized and vigorously defended.