CHAPTER 5 Speaking to the Bridegroom: Women and the Power of Prayer

“Spare your monks”: Christina of Markyate as Intercessor

An example of female prayerfulness from the middle of the twelfth century confirms this reading of Leander and extends the implications of his confidence in women’s prayer beyond the immediate context of the sibling relationship, and, in fact, beyond the explicit context of either virginity or the religious woman as bride of Christ. In Chapters 2 and 3, we saw how men invoked the examples of John the Evangelist and Jerome in order to defend their involvement with women. One woman who appeared in this context was the twelfth-century English holy woman, Christina of Markyate.⁴ Christina’s friendship with the Benedictine abbot of Saint Albans, Geoffrey de Gorron, exemplifies many of the themes that I explore in this book. Christina and Geoffrey maintained a close spiritual relationship over the course of several years, despite insinuations of wrongdoing and the ever-present threat of scandal. An anonymous vita of Christina composed during the 1130s—possibly by Geoffrey’s nephew, Robert de Gorron (d. 1166), the sacristan and later abbot of Saint Albans—defines their relationship in by-now familiar terms: Christina is depicted as Paula to Geoffrey’s Jerome, their detractors are likened to critics of the apostles’ relations with women, and Christina is reported as having seen herself in a vision, together with Geoffrey, at the foot of the cross, much like Mary and John in the commendation scene.⁵ Most important, like many of the men and women examined here, Christina’s friendship with Geoffrey inverted traditional and gendered ecclesiastical hierarchies: Geoffrey—an abbot and priest—looked to Christina for spiritual guidance and supported her in the religious life, while Christina—a recluse and later nun—provided Geoffrey with advice and intercession.

Evidence for Christina’s prayerful reputation appears in two roughly contemporary sources: first, her vita; and second, the St. Albans Psalter.⁶ This richly illuminated composite manuscript was produced at Saint Albans between about 1125 and 1140 and is now sometimes known as the Psalter of Christina of Markyate, in recognition of her likely ownership of it.⁷ Of the two, Christina’s vita offers the more direct evidence for her spiritual standing, showcasing her role as an adviser to Geoffrey and a spiritual intermediary between him and God. Indeed, according to her biographer, Christina first came to know Geoffrey through a vision in which she learned that he was about to embark on a course of action that was offensive to God. Although Geoffrey refused to listen when she urged him to abandon his plan, he later relented and subsequently obeyed her in everything. Christina’s vita located Geoffrey’s “true” conversion to the religious life in this moment. As her biographer wrote, Geoffrey “promised to give up everything unlawful, to fulfil her commands, and that he would himself be the patron of her hermitage.” In return, Geoffrey earned “her intercession with God.”⁸ Christina’s intercession for Geoffrey subsequently became the thread that drew the vita together: prayer was the currency that bound Geoffrey to Christina, and by which she gained his support and obedience. According to the vita, she prayed “for him with tears almost all the time,” and “in God’s presence she would often put him before herself.”⁹ Twice Christina’s prayers delivered Geoffrey from grave illness, and on more than one occasion she advised him on matters related to his abbatial office, even providing him with financial advice.¹⁰

Like the vita, the Psalter features the intercession of a woman, twice showcasing a praying nun (possibly Christina herself, as I explain below). In the first instance, a nun is shown leading four monks to Christ within a capital “C”, the initial to Psalm 105 (“Confitemini domino”) (Figure 19).¹¹ In the margin above the initial, a rubric records the woman’s intercessory prayer: “Mercifully spare your monks, I beseech you, O Jesus” (Parce tuis queso monachis clementia IHY). In the image, Jesus, standing to the right, stretches out to touch the woman, whose hand crosses the boundary between earth and heaven. Meanwhile, a monk (possibly Geoffrey), stands just behind the woman, seeming to urge her into Christ’s presence.¹² A second initial features a group of nuns in prayer before the Trinity, depicted as two young men together with a dove (Figure 20).¹³ This second initial—a “K” (for Kyrie eleison, “Lord have mercy”)—marks the beginning of the Litany, a subject appropriate to the depiction of prayer. Of the praying nuns, one again appears to cross the boundary between heaven and earth, stretching her hand into the heavenly realm defined by the Trinity. Behind her an oversized monk appears to orchestrate the women’s prayers: he does not pray but rather points to the text of the women’s prayers, inscribed on books that they hold above their heads.¹⁴

These two images are remarkable as indications of the presumed prayerfulness of women: they suggest that women could be viewed as powerful intercessors for men, even for religious men. The circumstances of the manuscript’s production, and the placement of these images in it, extend its clearly gendered presentation of prayer. Most scholars agree that the Psalter was owned by Christina and likely also produced for her.¹⁵ The fact that it was written and illustrated at the male monastery of Saint Albans means that its celebration of women’s intercession was the work of monks, who may have intended the book for the use of a religious woman. The chronology of the Psalter’s production suggests, moreover, that its emphasis on female prayerfulness was not coincidental, but intentional and personally motivated. Production of the Psalter was a long and complex process that involved compilation, adaptation of existing components, and new composition over the course of some fifteen years. According to the scenario proposed by Morgan Powell, this process took place in conjunction with Christina’s evolving devotional practices and as a result of her spiritual discussions with Geoffrey, whom Powell identified not only as the manuscript’s patron, but also as the mastermind behind the project.¹⁶

Production of the Psalter was already underway by the time that the author of the vita began to record his account of Christina’s spiritual life. Given that several elements in the vita echo episodes and spiritual emphases from the Psalter, it seems likely that the Psalter (which Christina may have been using as it was revised and completed) exerted some influence on her spiritual experience.¹⁷ Two exceptions nevertheless suggest that influence could flow in the opposite direction as well—that the Psalter could be used to commemorate Christina’s spiritual life and experiences, as they were reported in the vita. These two exceptions correspond precisely with those places in the Psalter in which women’s prayerfulness is emphasized: the Psalm 105 initial and the Litany initial. Significantly, both images were the result of late revision or addition to the Psalter and were finalized after the main work on the manuscript had been completed. The Litany initial is the more radically revised of the two. The original, a more clearly defined “K,” was expanded to include the woman, the monk, and the praying nuns—an expansion that almost completely obscured the “K” and left no room for the word (Kyrie) that the initial introduced.¹⁸ Modification of the Psalm 105 initial was also dramatic, although instead of expanding an existing image, the manuscript’s makers pasted the “C”, featuring the interceding nun, into the manuscript.¹⁹

The deliberate, and even awkward, nature of these alterations underscores the importance to the Psalter’s makers of their subjects: women and prayer. The fact that the initials seem to have been modified in light of events described in Christina’s vita suggests that the changes were intended specifically to commemorate Christina as an intercessor. In the case of the Psalm 105 initial, the image seems to reflect a vision, reported in the vita, in which Christina saw herself facing Christ with Geoffrey on her right.²⁰ According to her biographer, Christina was initially disturbed: she wished that Geoffrey, and not she, might have the more prominent position. However, she soon came to understand that the “right hand” (which Christ extends to her in the Psalter initial) “was indeed hers.”²¹ This episode was important to Christina: her biographer reports that she discussed it often with Geoffrey. The deliberate placement of this initial in the Psalter implies that the vision was important to Geoffrey as well, and to the monks of Saint Albans. Modifications to the Psalm 105 initial make little sense unless it is Christina who is shown. Female intercession is not relevant to Psalm 105, but seems to have been shown here due to the coincidence that the psalm begins with a “C”—for “Confitemini,” but also for “Christina.”²²

Modifications to the Litany initial seem also to have been inspired by the vita. According to Christina’s biographer, on one occasion as she prayed for Geoffrey’s salvation Christina received a vision in which she saw herself in a room with two handsome men clothed in white, on whose shoulders a dove was resting. In the vision, Geoffrey, whom she saw standing outside, “humbly begged her to introduce him to the people standing in the divine presence at her side.” As Christina’s biographer writes: “with all the energy of which she was capable, with all the love she could pour out, with all of the devotion she knew, she pleaded with the Lord to have mercy on her beloved.”²³ The original Litany initial showed two men in white in the ascender of the “K,” with a dove hovering above them (the Trinity). As with the Psalm 105 initial, modifications to the Litany initial seem to have been designed to bring it more closely into alignment with the description from the vita, strengthening the argument that the vita served as its source. Whereas the original initial “K” had featured only the Trinity, the modifications introduced a nun (probably Christina), a monk (possibly Geoffrey), and a group of praying nuns. Although the resulting initial is not a direct illustration of the episode from the vita (in her vision, Christina saw herself in the presence of the Trinity, with Geoffrey outside, while in the initial, both the nun and the monk appear outside the heavenly realm), it does approximate it. One seemingly minor modification to the initial strengthens the suggestion that the vita was its source. In the original initial, the dove of the Holy Spirit had been depicted with its wings spread above the heads of the Father and Son (as they are still faintly visible); in the revised initial, the spread wings were replaced by the folded wings of the resting dove as it is described in Christina’s vision—a modification that serves little apparent purpose other than to conform to the text.²⁴

These images, and their placement in the Psalter, solidify the connection between women and prayer that had been suggested centuries earlier in Leander’s writing for Florentina, reaffirming his expectation of the spiritual benefits that he might gain through his sister and demonstrating their continued relevance for religious men. Like Florentina (whom Leander imagined praying for him), Christina is depicted both in her vita and in the Psalter as praying for religious men. As we have seen, the vita reported a vision in which Christina saw herself between Christ and Geoffrey, with Christ’s right hand in “her possession.” The vision is revealing. Like monks in many monastic communities during the twelfth century, Geoffrey was ordained.²⁵ And yet it is Christina, a religious woman, rather than an ordained member of the clergy, who is imagined introducing Geoffrey to the Trinity. Given that the role of the priest was to mediate between God and man, to link heaven and earth, the relationship should logically have been reversed, with Christina seeking the divine through Geoffrey, a priest. Of course, the inclusion of this episode in the vita, which was likely composed for a male audience, may have been calculated to deflect criticism of Geoffrey’s relationship with Christina: by emphasizing Christina’s prayerfulness, the author of the vita may have hoped to underscore for the Saint Albans monks the tangible spiritual benefits that could be gained through men’s support of religious women.²⁶ It is possible, too, that the men involved in making the Psalter may have seen themselves as more closely connected to Christ (as his “friends”) through their support of Christina, who is consistently described as Christ’s bride in the vita.

Yet the emphasis on Christina’s intercession in the Psalter—a book that was likely kept at Markyate and used by the women there—suggests that the manuscript’s patron (Geoffrey) and its makers (the scribes and artists at Saint Albans) had a further goal in mind. The intentional inclusion in the Psalter of initials commemorating Christina’s exemplary intercession suggests that their purpose was not simply to record Christina’s prayerfulness (which had, in any case, already been reported in the vita), but to encourage intercessory prayer as a spiritual vocation among the Markyate women.²⁷ Nowhere is this more clear than in the Litany initial, with its depiction of women praying as a group. In modifying the initial, the manuscript’s makers expanded the depiction of prayer beyond the specific context of Christina’s special relationship with Geoffrey (which had been the focus of the vision in the vita), in order to present religious women in general as intercessors. While the Psalm 105 initial had celebrated Christina alone, the Litany initial transcended the individual. In it, prayer is not depicted as the particular preserve of the saint, something that only Christina could do (as only Hildegard of Bingen could receive visions, for instance), but as an activity in which all of the women of her community were encouraged to join. As such, the Litany initial was not merely commemorative, but may even have been prescriptive, providing a model for the spiritual practice of intercessory prayer among the women at Markyate.²⁸ If the Psalter was kept at Markyate, then the nuns who turned to the Litany to script their prayer would have found in the initial a powerful reminder of the prayerfulness of their local saint, Christina, and of her spiritual friendship with Geoffrey. But they would also have found a clear case for the importance of their own intercession and, by implication, an indication of the intended beneficiaries of their prayers: the monks of Saint Albans.²⁹

Women, Men, and Prayer: Abelard and Heloise

Together, the vita of Christina of Markyate and the St. Albans Psalter offer compelling evidence for the association of women with prayer during the twelfth century—above all, with prayer for religious men.³⁰ Yet they do not explain how this connection came about, on what foundation it was based, or why it was often advanced by the very men, who—as priests—could legitimately claim privileged access to God themselves. A more complete discussion of the gendered efficacy of women’s prayer appears in the roughly contemporary letters of Abelard and Heloise. Unlike Christina, whose intercessions on Geoffrey’s behalf are described at length in her vita, little is known of Heloise’s piety or devotional experience beyond her own repeated protestations of spiritual inadequacy. As far as we know, Heloise received no visions, had no mystical experiences, and was viewed by her contemporaries neither as a holy woman nor as a saint, although she was widely respected as an abbess. She was not a virgin and, in fact, admitted to vivid and ongoing sexual temptation. Nevertheless, Abelard repeatedly cast Heloise as his intercessor, begging her prayers on his behalf, and offering a fulsome explanation of her qualifications for prayer—both as his wife (a status that she repeatedly claimed, but that he usually worked hard to deny) and, more importantly, as a religious woman and bride of Christ.

Abelard’s first request for women’s prayer appears in his earliest extant letter to Heloise following their entrance into the religious life. Responding to Heloise’s request for “some word of comfort” to strengthen her in her service to God, Abelard countered with a request of his own: that Heloise and the nuns at the Paraclete pray for him.³¹ By his own admission, the Paraclete women were already in the habit of praying for him during his visits to the community. “O God,” they would pray together, “who through thy servant”—meaning, of course, Abelard—“hast been pleased to gather together thy handmaidens in thy name, we beseech thee to grant both to him and to us that we persevere in thy will.” In his letter, Abelard suggested a revised version of this prayer, tailored to his evidently perilous position at St. Gildas, where he served as abbot. According to his suggestion, the leader should pray:

Save thy servant, O my God, whose hope is in thee. Send him help, O Lord, from thy holy place, and watch over him from Zion. Be a tower of strength to him, O Lord, in the face of his enemy.

The women were then to respond:

O God, who through thy servant hast been pleased to gather together thy handmaidens in thy name, we beseech thee to protect him in all adversity and restore him in safety to thy handmaidens.³²

Ever the optimist, Abelard went on to note that should he “enter upon the way of all flesh,” he should be buried at the Paraclete in the women’s burial ground, where his tomb would serve as a visual reminder for them to continue in their prayers for him. Admitting that his choice was deeply gendered, Abelard offered the remarkable explanation that no place is “more fitting for Christian burial among the faithful than one among women dedicated to Christ.”³³

Abelard’s request for the prayers of the Paraclete nuns—in life and in death—appears at the end of a letter in which he made a case for the gendered efficacy of women’s prayer.³⁴ Although he had begun by requesting Heloise’s prayers—specifically reminding her of her obligation, as his wife, to pray for him—he ultimately advanced an argument for the efficacy of her prayers that rested more on Heloise’s sex and religious status than on her relationship to him. Indeed, Abelard argued that Heloise’s prayers were particularly pleasing to God because she was a woman and a nun. As he explained, women’s prayers are effective as a function of their place within the family: women pray for their “dear ones,” and wives for their husbands.³⁵ Biblical miracles in which the dead had been brought back to life were, Abelard reminded Heloise, performed largely for women in their roles as mothers and sisters: Lazarus was raised because of the prayers of his sisters Mary and Martha; the widow of Nain received her son from the dead; and mothers saw their children raised from the dead through the Old Testament prophets Elisha and Elijah.³⁶ Given that the prayers of these laywomen found favor with God, Abelard reasoned that the prayers of nuns would be all the more effective, since, as he observed, they are “bound to God by the profession of holy devotion.”³⁷ Women’s chastity was integral to the efficacy of their prayers. Carefully sidestepping the question of virginity, he observed that “The more God is pleased by the abstinence and continence which women have dedicated to him, the more willing he will be to grant their prayers.”³⁸ Finally, he allowed that, as his wife, Heloise’s prayers should be especially effective on his behalf. To drive this point home, he offered the example of Queen Clothilda, whose prayers had reputedly brought about the conversion of her husband Clovis, the first Christian king of France.³⁹

Drawing on late antique and medieval traditions that associated women with the conversion of their male kin, Abelard presented all women as natural intercessors, whose prayer on behalf of their families was particularly efficacious. Although he mentioned only Clovis’s wife Clothilda, he could well have included the early seventh-century queens Bertha, wife of Æthelberht, king of Kent, and Æthelburh, wife of Edwin, king of Northumbria—both of whom were remembered by medieval audiences as having influenced the conversion of their husbands (in Æthelburh’s case, the obligation to aid in her husband’s conversion had been underscored by Pope Boniface, who urged her to “kindle a spark of the true religion in your husband”).⁴⁰ Abelard might also have mentioned the late antique saints Thecla, who was sought by Tryphaena to pray for her dead daughter Falconilla; Perpetua, whose prayers from prison reportedly delivered her dead brother Dinocrates from torment; and Monica, who by her prayers secured the conversion of both her husband and her saintly son—Augustine of Hippo.⁴¹

Abelard’s arguments for women’s prayerfulness provide a useful parallel to Christina’s vita and the Psalter. In Abelard’s view, prayer was the spiritual work of women as a group, and not the exclusive purview of holy women as individuals. Like the unnamed praying women featured in the Litany initial, the Paraclete nuns to whom he ultimately addressed himself had no particular claim to efficacy in prayer beyond their religious profession, and their dedication as women to lives of chastity. Yet Abelard extended his requests for prayer beyond Heloise to include her entire community, who were to pray on his behalf during his life and to receive his body in death. As in Christina’s vita and Psalter, Abelard assumed that men were the logical beneficiaries of women’s prayer. At no point did he encourage the women of the Paraclete to pray for each other, or to support Heloise, their abbess, in prayer. Rather, he consistently depicted women as intercessors on men’s behalf. He even—somewhat bizarrely—noted the intercession of Abigail with King David (1 Samuel 25:23–33), highlighting Abigail’s success in diverting David from his plan to punish her husband Nabal. Although Abigail went to David without Nabal’s knowledge (actually declaring that her husband was a “wicked man”), and although Nabal was struck dead some days later, freeing Abigail to marry David (which she did), Abelard presented the story to Heloise as an example of “how much your prayers for me may prevail on God, if this woman’s did so much for her husband.”⁴² The key point for Abelard lay in the fact that “the man’s wrongdoing was wiped away by the entreaties of his wife”—an observation that echoed the pious hope of other religious men during the period, that salvation might come to them through a woman’s prayer.

Women, Prayer, and the Bridal Metaphor

The association of women with prayer, and especially prayer for men, had a long history already by the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Late antique and early medieval men had sought women’s prayers, emphasizing prayer and intercession as central spiritual functions for them. Like Monica, whom Augustine mentions chiefly in terms of her prayerfulness (and whose relics, as we saw in the last chapter, prompted a renewal of her cult in the twelfth century), other late antique women were celebrated by male admirers for their faithfulness in prayer. Jerome, whose friendships with women deeply influenced medieval men (not least Abelard himself), wrote time and again of the prayerfulness of the Roman women of his circle—of Lea, who “passed sleepless nights in prayer”; Asella, whose “holy knees hardened like those of a camel from the frequency of her prayers”; Blesilla, whose sincerity in prayer Jerome recalled admiringly (“Who can recall without a sigh the earnestness of her prayers?”); and Paula, whose night-time prayers were interrupted only by the rising sun.⁴³

Within early Christian communities, too, women had been closely associated with prayer. Indeed, prayer itself was often gendered female: catacomb paintings from the second century depict the praying figure of the orans almost exclusively as a woman.⁴⁴ As a spiritual vocation, prayer was primarily associated with a subset of women: virgins and widows, women whose lives were marked by chastity and spiritual devotion. On the one hand, the connection was practical. Prayer was a demanding task, which was often seen as incompatible with the obligations and distractions of marriage. So when Jerome wrote to Laeta on the education of her daughter, Paula, he proposed a rigorous schedule of prayer and psalms appropriate to her unmarried state, advising that she ought to “rise at night to recite prayers and psalms; to sing hymns in the morning; at the third, sixth, and ninth hours to take her place in the line to do battle for Christ; and, lastly, to kindle her lamp and to offer her evening sacrifice.”⁴⁵ On the other hand, the connection was cultic, since marriage (and, more particularly, sexual intercourse) was thought to preclude effective prayer, a fact that shaped Jerome’s insistence on clerical celibacy. As he opined, “A layman, or any believer, cannot pray unless he abstain from sexual intercourse.”⁴⁶

As Jerome’s comment indicates, chastity was valued in both men and women and was typically a prerequisite for prayer in both sexes. However, for women, chastity held particular spiritual meaning. From at least the early third century, female virgins had been characterized as brides of Christ, a motif that Dyan Elliott argues originated as a disciplinary tactic. Fearing that sexual abstinence might produce a form of angelic androgyny in women, the Carthaginian theologian Tertullian (d. c. 220) had promoted the idea that consecrated virginity constituted a form of spiritual marriage—albeit to a heavenly, rather than an earthly, bridegroom. As Elliott notes, the effect was to bind female virgins to their sexed bodies (foreclosing the possibility of virginal androgyny), while also subjecting them to a firmly gendered hierarchy: would-be virgins found themselves paradoxically defined by the very institution they had rejected.⁴⁷

Being a bride of Christ involved practical limitations: churchmen warned that Christ’s brides should keep themselves veiled and secluded, fearing that virgins might even cuckold their heavenly spouse. These fears led, as Elliott shows, to scrutiny, suspicion, and even denunciation of religious women during the later Middle Ages.⁴⁸ Yet despite the potential for danger, bridal status held significant possibilities for religious women, as we saw in Chapters 2 and 3. Religious men were often deeply respectful of women whose spiritual nuptials were presumed to qualify them for special intimacy with the bridegroom. Leander, imagining Florentina with Christ on the “chaste couch,” conjured an intimate and affectionate scene from which he, as a man, expected to be excluded. Male admirers who construed women as “brides of Christ” viewed them (like Jerome) as their dominae, implying women’s superiority and their own spiritually ordained subservience. As Abelard explained more than once, monks and priests were merely servants of Christ, whereas professed women were his brides. Offering spiritual service to the bride thus became—for some men—a way of serving the bridegroom, providing a potent justification for men’s spiritual care of religious women.

The bridal motif provided grounds for a further justification for men’s care, based on the intersection of ideas concerning women’s prayer and their privileged intimacy with the bridegroom. Men hoped that Christ might be pleased at the services they provided for religious women, and that by serving as paranymphus to the bride, they might also draw closer to the bridegroom. At the same time, they hoped that, as brides, religious women might request and receive rewards for them from the bridegroom. Religious men who sought women’s prayers and intercession believed not just that women were well suited to prayer, but that the intercession of a wife with her husband (and, specifically, of a bride with her heavenly bridegroom) was uniquely powerful. In their discussions of women’s prayerfulness, men therefore consistently evoked the connection between the prayers of religious women and their bridal intimacy with Christ: prayer was intimacy, as far as many male observers were concerned. Jerome was most clear in characterizing prayer as the conversation of a chaste woman with her heavenly bridegroom. Of Lea, for instance, he wrote: “To the Bridegroom she spoke constantly in prayer and psalmody.”⁴⁹ In his hugely influential letter 22 to Eustochium, Jerome asked, “Do you pray?,” advising her that in prayer, “You speak to the Bridegroom.”⁵⁰

Jerome’s letter to Eustochium has rightly been characterized as a panegyric on virginity. When Jerome spoke of Eustochium in prayer, he gave his imagination free rein: picturing Eustochium praying in the privacy of her chamber, he described a suggestive scene in which Christ would put “his hand through the hole of the door” wakening her with love.⁵¹ But virginity per se was neither a requirement for prayer, nor—more significantly—for bridal status. Widows as well as virgins could claim bridal status, since the Christian conception of spiritual marriage did not require technical virginity of the religious woman who was to be presented as a spiritual “bride.” Indeed, Tertullian (the “father of the bride,” as Elliott calls him for his role in originating the motif) had explicitly allowed that chaste widows might consider themselves brides of God, writing that widows who had rejected remarriage “prefer[red] to be wedded to God.”⁵²

Jerome, too, specifically encouraged devout widows to consider themselves as brides of Christ, writing to the widow Salvina that she owed her chastity “not to one who is dead but to one with whom she shall reign in heaven.”⁵³ Even Paula—a widow who had been a mother several times over—was depicted as a spiritual bride. In a letter from Bethlehem (likely ghost written by Jerome), Paula and Eustochium urged Marcella to join them, promising her that “we shall weep copiously, we shall pray unceasingly [and] wounded with the Saviour’s shaft, we shall say one to another: ‘I have found Him whom my soul loveth; I will hold Him and will not let Him go.’ ”⁵⁴ The idea that widows were legitimately brides of Christ was reinforced by the developing characterization of Ecclesia as a widow who had refused to take another spouse after the death of Christ. As Caesarius of Arles asked in the sixth century, making the connection explicit: “Why is the church considered as a widow unless it is because her husband, Christ, appears to be absent?”⁵⁵

The Intercession of Wives

Abelard’s expressed confidence in the superiority of women’s prayer must be understood against a late antique background in which chaste women had been associated with prayer and their prayers recognized as the prayers of brides. Like late antique men, Abelard viewed praying women as brides “speaking” to their bridegroom. However, in his hands the bridal motif also became a way to argue for the particular efficacy of nuns’ prayers, since he imagined nuns as having a distinctive and powerful influence on their “husband.” Offering the secular parallel of wives who interceded with noble husbands on behalf of their friends and supplicants, Abelard suggested that nuns were uniquely positioned to pray and to receive answers to their prayer from their heavenly bridegroom. In writing to Heloise, he made this point clear, commenting that “in common law it is accepted that wives are better able than their households to intercede with their husbands, being ladies rather than servants.” “So,” he explained, “you should not be surprised if I commend myself in life as in death to the prayers of your community.”⁵⁶

Abelard’s faith in the intercession of religious women as brides with their heavenly bridegroom was built on a late antique spiritual foundation, but also on long-standing assumptions concerning the ability of secular women to exert a positive influence on their husbands. By the eleventh century, the wives of powerful men had emerged as the most common and most widely recognized secular intercessors.⁵⁷ More than anyone else, a man’s wife was thought to be able exert a positive influence on him. According to Anselm, intervening with her husband was part of a wife’s duties: she “should diligently encourage him [her husband] in well-doing, and calm his spirit with her mildness if he were perchance unjustly stirred up against anyone.”⁵⁸ As Sharon Farmer has noted, a woman’s influence with her husband was thought to exceed even that of his priest. In his early thirteenth-century Manual for Confessors, Thomas of Chobham therefore encouraged priests to approach women as vehicles through which they might shape the behaviors of men. As he advised, “no priest is able to soften the heart of a man the way his wife can.” “Even in the bedroom,” Thomas wrote, “In the midst of their embraces, a wife should speak alluringly to her husband, and if he is hard and unmerciful, and an oppressor of the poor, she should invite him to be merciful; if he is a plunderer, she should denounce plundering; if he is avaricious, she should arouse generosity in him.”⁵⁹

Medieval queens were expected to use their position of influence and intimacy with their royal husbands in order to intercede on behalf of their households, their extended families, and the kingdom generally.⁶⁰ Early medieval churchmen highlighted the intercessory obligations of contemporary queens, offering the Old Testament Queen Esther as a model; Esther had saved the Jewish people from certain death through her intercession with King Ahasuerus.⁶¹ During the ninth century (876), Pope John VIII wrote to Richildis, second wife of Charles the Bald, encouraging her to support the church and likening her to Esther: “you will be for the Church of Christ near [your] pious husband in the way of that holy Esther who was near her husband on behalf of the Israelite people.”⁶² The slightly earlier coronation ordo (856) for Judith, Charles the Bald’s eldest daughter and wife of Æthelwulf, also highlighted Esther’s intercessory role: through Esther, God “inclined the savage heart of the king toward mercy and salvation.”⁶³ Also in the ninth century, Hrabanus Maurus sent a commentary on the Book of Esther to the empress Judith of Bavaria, second wife of Louis the Pious, and then also to Ermengard, the wife of Lothar I.⁶⁴ According to the Anglo-Saxon exegete Aelfric (d. c. 1025), Esther did not stop at intercession, but also brought about the King’s conversion: as he wrote, “the king was corrected through the belief of the queen to worship God who controls all things.”⁶⁵ Esther was equally relevant for nuns, who were not just royal brides, but brides of the “highest king,” as Peter of Blois wrote in a letter to the abbess Matilda of Wherwell. Calling to mind Ahasuerus’s plan to kill the Israelites, and Esther’s prayers and tears, by which she “recalled the king to mercy,” Peter encouraged Matilda to “Be wakeful and pray, bride of the highest king.”⁶⁶

While Esther was a favorite exemplar for medieval queens, queenly intercession was most perfectly demonstrated in the Virgin Mary. As queen of heaven, Mary interceded with her son on behalf of all Christians, offering the ultimate model for women’s prayerful intercession with their heavenly king.⁶⁷ Of course, religious women could not replicate Mary’s influence with Christ. Nevertheless, holy women as intercessors had long been associated with the Virgin through medieval litanies, which from the Carolingian period onward had lumped all women into a single category: “virgo.”⁶⁸ Unlike holy men, who appeared in litanies according to a variety of types—apostles, martyrs, evangelists, prophets, patriarchs, confessors, and monks, for instance—all holy women, whether technically virgins or not, were presented in litanies as virgines, a term that Felice Lifshitz argues represented a spiritual, rather than a corporeal category.⁶⁹ The grouping of female intercessors together as virgines underscored their similarity to Mary, the “holy virgin of virgins.”⁷⁰ It also implied that chaste women in prayer were to be considered as both brides of Christ and liturgical “virgins.”

The appearance of the liturgical “virgo” in Carolingian litanies, and the resulting association of female intercessors as virgines with the Virgin Mary, provided the backdrop to men’s developing sense of women’s gendered qualification for prayer. Medieval supplicants (male and female) assumed as a matter of course that Mary’s prayers would be effective; a prayer to the Virgin in the ninth-century Book of Cerne exemplified this confidence, proclaiming that “we believe and know for certain that everything you wish for you are able to obtain from your son, Our Lord Jesus Christ.”⁷¹ An eleventh-century poem from northern France expressed a comparable sense of Mary’s influence with Christ:

Whatever you wish

Your only son will give you.

For whomever you seek

You will have pardon and glory.⁷²

For Anselm of Canterbury, it was Mary’s physical connection to Christ that undergirded her intercession.

Who can more easily gain pardon for the accused

by her intercession,

than she who gave milk to him

who justly punishes or mercifully pardons all and each one?⁷³

In the same way, men who begged the prayers of religious women emphasized women’s bridal relationship to Christ. If Christ would give his mother “everything” she wished for, men hoped and believed that he would not deny his “bride” her requests on their behalf. Moreover, if men pleaded that Christ would “spare the servant of your mother” (as Anselm did), stressing their relationship to the Virgin as a justification for their claim to Christ’s mercy, they also seem to have imagined that Christ might spare the “servant” of his “bride”—that is to say, that he would look favorably on the prayers of men who had served religious women, and whose petitions were brought by nuns, as brides, before the heavenly throne.⁷⁴ As I argued in Chapter 2, men who served women spiritually often conceived of their service as being that of the paranymphus, the friend of the bridegroom, a role that they construed as bringing them closer to Christ, but that they may also have viewed as strengthening their claims to women’s bridal intercession.

The Gender of Prayer

Accounts of women’s prayerfulness have this in common: they come primarily from the pens of men, and most often from the pens of men who were the admirers, spiritual friends, or disciples of the women they celebrated as “prayerful.”⁷⁵ Whether the women themselves were especially devoted to prayer is largely unknowable, since most women left no account of their spiritual lives. Rather, it was men who imagined a female religious life centered on prayer, which they then advocated in their letters, rules, biographies of holy women, and histories. The early emphasis on prayerfulness for women, evident in the writings of Jerome, for instance, was amplified in early monastic texts, which deepened the association of religious women, as nuns, with prayer. By the sixth century, as Gisela Muschiol has noted, prayer was established as a central spiritual function for nuns.⁷⁶ Subsequent accounts of saintly nuns routinely emphasize their prayerfulness. The biography of the Merovingian holy woman, Monegund (d. 570), reported that she achieved healing for those who visited her through intercessory prayer; the community of women that gathered around her was dedicated to prayer.⁷⁷ Rusticula, abbess of St. Jean in Arles (d. c. 632), is described by her biographer, Florentius, as an advocatrix, whose prayers saved many.⁷⁸ Gertrude of Nivelles’s (d. 659) biographer presented the strength of her prayers as a function of her virtuous life.⁷⁹ Balthild of Chelles (d. c. 680) healed many from illnesses through her “holy intercession.”⁸⁰ The “monacha” queen, Radegund, scorned the royal marriage bed, devoting herself to prayer throughout the night, according to her biographer, Venantius Fortunatus.⁸¹ Radegund’s devotion to prayer is celebrated in an eleventh-century illustrated life, in which she is shown prostrate on the floor in prayer as Clothar sleeps (Figure 21).⁸²

Women’s prayerfulness within the monastic life was considered as a spiritual service to society broadly. According to his biographer, Caesarius of Arles established his monastic foundation for women at St. Jean in order to ensure the defense of the city through prayer: “The man of God formulated the idea by divine inspiration from the ever-reigning Lord that the church of Arles should be adorned and the city protected not only with countless troops of clergy but also by choirs of virgins.”⁸³ Significantly, Caesarius’s rule for women placed a greater emphasis on prayer than did his rule for men, leading Albrecht Diem to conclude that the rise of intercessory prayer was linked to the emergence, specifically, of female monasticism.⁸⁴ Prayer for the good of society was also part of the spiritual service provided by nuns at the community of Sainte-Croix at Poitiers during the sixth century. As Baudonivia remembered, Radegund “taught us also to pray incessantly for their [all the kings’] stability.… She imposed assiduous vigils on her flock tearfully teaching them to pray incessantly for the kings.”⁸⁵ Confirmation that women’s prayer could be viewed as protective of the Christian community is found in the biography of the Merovingian holy woman, Genovefa of Paris (c. 420–509). When Paris was threatened by Attila’s advancing army in 451, the saint roused the “the matrons of the city” to prayer, persuading them to “undertake a series of fasts, prayers, and vigils in order to ward off the threatening disaster, as Esther and Judith had done in the past.” Although the men had been ready to flee the city, the women remained and “gave themselves up to God and labored for days in the baptistery—fasting, praying, and keeping watch as she [Genovefa] directed.”⁸⁶ As a result of their prayers, the city was saved.

Not surprisingly, prayer played a central part in men’s spiritual friendships with women throughout the medieval period. Some men emphasized prayer as an exchange or “counter-gift” to be offered in return for spiritual service.⁸⁷ So, for instance, Donatus of Besançon (d. c. 660) had begged the prayers of the women in return for his Regula ad virgines, first in life (“while I abide in this vile body”) and then also in death (“when at the Lord’s bidding I migrate”).⁸⁸ Aldhelm, likewise, requested women’s prayers in return for his writing for them: “Let the welcome reward for my present little work be the frequently conferred exchange of your prayers, and let the mainstay of my sweat and labour be the support (given by) your intercession.”⁸⁹ Of course, prayer could also be central to men’s relations with religious women even when the men offered nothing by way of exchange. Writing to Abbess Ethelburga of Fladbury, Alcuin simply asked her to “remember my name faithfully in your prayers with all your people.” Just as Abelard later would, Alcuin provided explicit instructions on how he wished Ethelburga to pray: “I have sent you a flask and plate to make offerings to the Lord God with your own hands. When you look at them say: ‘Christ, have mercy on thy poor servant Alcuin.’ ”⁹⁰

Alcuin’s letters offer an opportunity to examine the gendering of prayer in a comparative context. In a letter to Fredegisus, an Anglo-Saxon monk and teacher at Aachen, Alcuin mentioned prayer, but only to ask that Fredegisus secure the prayers of Gisela and Rotrude; he made no mention of the fact that Fredegisus (his previous pupil and eventual successor as abbot of St-Martin, Tours) might also pray for him. Admittedly, Alcuin enjoyed a close friendship with Gisela and Rotrude, and so it may have been natural for him to focus on their prayers, rather than those of Fredegisus. However, there was clearly a gendered element to his request. Advising Fredegisus to “Beg them to remember my old age in their prayers,” Alcuin went on to imagine Gisela and Rotrude as brides of Christ, invoking the Song of Songs as he did: “They should hold fast to him till they are led into the treasuries of the king’s glory, there to rest in love on flowers of eternal joy, with the Bridegroom from his bedchamber putting his left arm of present good beneath their heads and embracing them with the right arm of eternal joy.”⁹¹

The bridal relationship that Alcuin imagined bound Gisela and Rotrude, respectively, to Christ may explain his failure to beg Fredegisus’s prayers: in Alcuin’s view, Fredegisus was not a bride, nor would he ever become one. Although Alcuin wrote some forty-five letters to male religious, he never described a monk or abbot as a “bride” of Christ—reserving such language exclusively for nuns.⁹² By contrast, the women he approached for prayer are repeatedly characterized in his letters as spiritual brides (even if, like Rotrude, they were neither virgins nor widows). Alcuin encouraged Ethelburga, for instance, to view herself as the bride of Christ, writing that she would “sing an everlasting song of praise in the presence of her bridegroom” after her death.⁹³ In another letter to Ethelburga, Alcuin encouraged her to be a “worthy bride” for God.⁹⁴ Gisela, too, he addressed as a “virgin most beloved in Christ” (dilectissimae in Christo virgini) and a “noble handmaid of God” (clarissima Dei famula), declaring himself “lucky to enjoy the protection of your most holy prayer as you promised.”⁹⁵ Almost directly anticipating the language that Abelard would adopt many centuries later in his exhortations to Heloise, Alcuin asked, “What glory could be greater for you or honor more lofty than to be the bride of the king who is above all kings?”⁹⁶

To be sure, religious men also begged the prayers of their monastic confrères and of other holy men; the exchange of prayer was, after all, a mainstay of the religious life for men as well as for women. However, when men wrote to women, their vocabulary typically shifted to reflect a gendered understanding of women’s spiritual standing and of their particular bridal relationship to Christ.⁹⁷ With the exception of the “matrons” who prayed alongside Genovefa, praying women are most frequently approached rhetorically as “virgins” or “brides,” emphasizing their chastity and sexual status. Many of the men who begged women’s prayers invoked their assumed future status in heaven (“when you happily enter the kingdom with the holy and wise virgins,” as Caesarius wrote, invoking the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins; or “when you are granted the blessed palm of virginity in the choir of worshippers and holy virgins,” as Donatus effused), or their priority as brides of the heavenly king (“if you shall lie with Christ upon the chaste couch,” Leander imagined, picturing his sister in Christ’s pure embrace). In these instances, men clearly assumed the gendered superiority of women’s prayers. They implied, too, that women’s prayers would not just be heard by Christ, but also answered by him, as Paschasius Radbertus did in addressing himself to Theodrada and Imma: “you whose prayers our God sometimes appears to obey.”⁹⁸

The appeal of women’s prayers was predicated on a number of related factors, which are nicely expressed in Paschasius’s confidence that God sometimes appears to “obey” the prayers of Theodrada and Imma. Religious men who sought women’s prayers seem to have believed that religious women could achieve through their prayers what men were unable to achieve for themselves. They believed that the prayers of professed women were qualitatively different from the prayers of men (whether the men in question were ordained or not, holy or not). In fact, they seem to have believed that women’s prayers were better than men’s prayers—which is to say, they believed that women’s prayers were both more likely to be heard by Christ and more likely to be answered by him. They believed these things because they imagined that religious women enjoyed a particular relationship with Christ—a relationship based on women’s bridal potential, and one that men across the centuries (like Alcuin, Paschasius, and Abelard, as well as others) believed was not fully available to them. Abelard was explicit on this point, approaching Heloise as Christ’s bride, yet repeatedly styling himself (and all monks) only as Christ’s servant. Although he briefly acknowledged Heloise’s special obligation as his wife to pray for him, Abelard was much more comfortable imagining Heloise in prayer as Christ’s bride. Similarly, in Paschasius’s view, all nuns were betrothed to Christ and could be brides; all monks could not.⁹⁹ During the twelfth century, Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on the Song of Songs encouraged Cistercian monks to imagine themselves as brides, thereby bypassing the religious women who had functioned as intercessors for earlier medieval men and who continued to function in that capacity for contemporary Benedictines, like Abelard.¹⁰⁰ Nevertheless, for many men during the twelfth century and beyond, the prospect of women’s bridal intercession continued to be gender-specific: for such men, only women could be brides, and therefore only women could pray as brides speaking to their husband.

In keeping with the idea that the prayers of women as brides were different, and better, than men’s, early medieval male authors frequently praised women’s power of prayer, while lamenting their own seeming inability to pray effectively. The priest Florentius, biographer of Rusticula, offers one example. Florentius begged the prayers of the women of St. Jean in Arles, stressing their chaste devotion to Christ and implying his own spiritual insufficiency. As he wrote: “I beseech you to pray, virgins of Christ, that while I submit to your authority, I may, by your intercession, deserve the help which I cannot obtain for myself.”¹⁰¹ The women he addressed were not saints—as he believed Rusticula was—but simply nuns who had professed the religious life. A similar contrast between the assumed spiritual power of the women and the helplessness of the man is implied in the writings of Caesarius of Arles, who compared the salvation of the nuns of St. Jean (whom he characterized as “wise” virgins) to his own exile among the ranks of the spiritually “foolish”—the virgins who, according to Jesus’s parable, would be excluded from the celestial marriage feast.¹⁰² Donatus, likewise, stressed his own spiritual inadequacy, begging the women that “you will make holy offerings to the Lord for me so that, when you are granted the blessed palm of virginity in the choir of worshippers and holy virgins, I will at least be granted forgiveness for my sins and offenses.”¹⁰³

Ambivalent Models

The foundational importance of the bridal model to perceptions of women’s prayers may be most clear in its absence, that is to say, when women’s prayerfulness did not involve a bridal element (or, indeed, when it could not). The Old Testament matron Hannah, who prayed for a son and was delivered of a child, Samuel, offers a biblical example of female prayerfulness that did not fit the model presented thus far of bridal, intercessory prayer. Hannah’s prayerfulness is reported twice in the Vulgate: first, when she prayed for a son at Shiloh (1 Samuel 1:10–11); and second, in her song of thanksgiving after she had presented Samuel as an offering to God (1 Samuel 2:1–10). Hannah’s song was incorporated into the liturgy as one of the canticles for Lauds in the Roman breviary and was widely recognized as an important model for the Magnificat, Mary’s canticle of praise at the Visitation (Luke 1:46–55).¹⁰⁴ Nevertheless, as a model for women’s prayerfulness, Hannah posed certain problems. Although she offered an example of answered prayer, many men cautioned that she was no intercessor, since she had not prayed for others, but only for herself. Exegetes worried, moreover, that fertility and motherhood were not appropriate contexts within which to encourage female prayerfulness. Augustine was especially concerned that the objects of Hannah’s prayerfulness (pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood) disqualified her as a model of prayer for devout women, who had vowed themselves to lives of chastity. Writing in response to Proba’s request for advice on prayer, Augustine cautioned against adopting Hannah’s prayer as a model, noting its deviation from the structure provided in the Lord’s Prayer: prayer for a child could hardly be considered “deliverance from evil,” he opined.¹⁰⁵ More worryingly, as a sexually active married woman who had prayed to become pregnant, Hannah was directly at odds with the model of the prayerful woman as chaste that Jerome and Augustine encouraged among their female friends and disciples. So although medieval men praised Hannah as a selfless mother and as a prophetess (based on her perceived role in foretelling the birth of Christ), few offered her as a model of female prayerfulness.

Medieval ambivalence concerning Hannah’s prayerfulness is underscored in a leaf from a late eleventh-century Italian Bible, in which her prayer is subordinated to that of her husband, Elkanah (Figure 22).¹⁰⁶ Although the Vulgate reported that Hannah had prayed alone at Shiloh, and later that she gave Samuel to Eli as an offering to God, the makers of this manuscript inserted Elkanah into both episodes, prioritizing his prayer at Shiloh (with Hannah shown praying behind him), and privileging him holding the baby Samuel at the presentation to Eli. The impulse to insert Elkanah into both scenes suggests an unwillingness to recognize Hannah in prayer as independent of her husband, or to accept that her prayers—the prayers of a married laywoman—could have been effective.¹⁰⁷

Accounts of saintly women’s prayerfulness could also sometimes be minimized, suggesting that some medieval audiences balked at attributing too much power to female prayer. As we saw above, Gregory praised Scholastica as being “mightier than her brother” through prayer, yet subsequent writers nevertheless questioned the efficacy of her prayers.¹⁰⁸ Writing in the ninth century, Bertharius of Monte Cassino shifted attention away from Scholastica: “Surely she did not do this herself?” he asked, attributing the miracle to Benedict: “for if [he] had not refused her, the miracle would not have happened.”¹⁰⁹ Similarly, a sermon by Alberic of Monte Cassino presented Scholastica in terms of eleventh-century asceticism (rather than prayerfulness per se), emphasizing her vigils and her tears (“each night she drenched her bed and flooded the covers with tears”).¹¹⁰ Both texts were included in the eleventh-century Codex Benedictus, in which Scholastica is shown praying, while Benedict is caught, seemingly surprised by the efficacy of her prayers (Figure 18).¹¹¹

Despite certain concerns about Scholastica’s prayerfulness, she was often celebrated in later centuries as a prayerful model for saintly women. Goscelin of St. Bertin adopted Scholastica’s model in his life of Seaxburh, the seventh-century queen and later abbess of Ely. Recounting how Seaxburh had invited Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury to her new monastic foundation on the Isle of Sheppey (which he described as a “private site for prayer”), Goscelin reported that the archbishop was forced to stay with Seaxburh to “exchange words … about the sweetness of eternal life.” According to Goscelin, Theodore had initially refused to remain with Seaxburh (as Benedict had refused to stay with Scholastica), but he was “outdone by her prayers.”¹¹² Illustrating many of the themes discussed in this book, Goscelin’s life of Seaxburh depicts the saint as having close spiritual ties to both Theodore and the abbot Hadrian, religious men to whom she was bound “in the ardor of her faith and in true love of God.”¹¹³ For their part, these men imagined Seaxburh as a bride of Christ. When Theodore arrived at Sheppey, he was prepared—in Goscelin’s words—to “unite a new bride to Him in a new marriage.”¹¹⁴ Goscelin’s familiarity with the story of Scholastica and Benedict, and his willingness to apply it to his account of Seaxburh’s relationship to Theodore of Canterbury, shows—once again—how ideas and motifs justifying men’s involvement with women in the religious life could be deployed by monks and priests who were inclined to support women. Goscelin’s invocation of Scholastica as a model for Seaxburh exonerated Theodore from criticism: like Benedict, Theodore’s prolonged presence at Sheppey was presented as a function of a woman’s prayerfulness and, most important, of divine intervention favoring her request.

Women’s Prayer as Counter-payment for Men’s Support

Monks and priests who valued women’s prayers and believed that women enjoyed enhanced influence with Christ were often also spiritually involved with women. These men praised women’s prayers as special and different from their own, they imagined women praying for themselves and other men, and they assumed that women’s prayer would be the reward for their spiritual service to female monasteries. As Abelard proposed, sending a book of hymns to the Paraclete women, the nuns should offer prayers for him in return: “And so, as you entreat me in this, brides and handmaids of Christ, we too in return entreat you to lift up with the hands of your prayers the burden you have placed on our shoulders.”¹¹⁵

The expectation that women would pray in return for men’s guidance, protection, and support is clear in an early twelfth-century charter recording the relationship between the women of Fontevraud and Bishop Peter of Poitiers. “In exchange for … protection,” the charter reports that “the handmaids of Christ who are or will be in the Church of Fontevraud will pray for you daily while you live, and when one of you dies, they will render the same service to the Lord for the soul of the deceased brother as they would for the soul of a nun of their own congregation who left this world.”¹¹⁶ The emphasis on women’s prayer in this charter reflects the broader organization of the community at Fontevraud; as Robert of Arbrissel’s biographer reported, Robert had separated the men from the women, dedicating the women to prayer in the cloister and the men to the physical labors necessary to support the community. Although the division was described in terms of women’s “weakness” (the vita reports that he “committed the gentler and weaker sex to psalm-singing and contemplation and the stronger sex to the duties of the active life”),¹¹⁷ the women’s prayers were evidently a source of power for the community. When the Fontevraud women faced opposition from the archbishop of Bourges over Robert of Arbrissel’s burial place (with the archbishop wishing to keep Robert’s body at Orsan, where he planned to be buried at Robert’s feet), they threatened to withhold their prayers. As they wrote to the archbishop: “we will no longer be your daughters and we will no longer pray for you and yours until you return our good father to us.”¹¹⁸ The nuns were successful: Robert’s body (minus his heart, which was given to the priory at Berry) was returned to Fontevraud.¹¹⁹

Prayer as a form of exchange was also central to the relationship between Christina of Markyate and Geoffrey de Gorron, abbot of Saint Albans, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter. From the outset, Christina’s biographer presented the relationship between the two as mutually beneficial: Christina prayed for the abbot, while he supported her financially. He was “her beloved friend” (delecti ac familiaris sui); she was his “faithful protectress” (probate patrone).¹²⁰ A passage from the Lives of the Abbots of St. Albans reports that Geoffrey had even “constructed” the house at Markyate, “giving to it rents and tolls from various places for the sustenance of Christina, his beloved, and her congregation of sisters there.” Christina, in turn, served as Geoffrey’s spiritual advocate, pleading with God on his behalf. Yet Geoffrey’s support for the women was evidently resented by many of the Saint Albans monks, who “murmured” over the gifts he gave the women.¹²¹ His intimacy with Christina came under attack too: her biographer mentions the “spiteful gossip” and, more specifically, rumors that Christina was “bound to the abbot by ties of carnal love.”¹²²

The decision to commission a biography of Christina may have been intended to counter these sorts of rumors, defending the spiritual merits of Geoffrey’s special relationship with her, and, in particular, justifying the financial support that the abbot gave the women at Markyate.¹²³ Christina’s biographer emphasizes time and time again the reciprocal element in her relationship with him, commenting on several occasions that what Christina gained in material assistance, Geoffrey gained in spiritual sustenance: “God decided to provide for the needs of his virgin through this man and through her to bring the man back to the fullness of his vocation,” he noted on one occasion.¹²⁴ “In this way, your virgin was relieved of anxiety about material concerns, while the abbot through the virgin was freed from spiritual anguish,” he observed on another.¹²⁵ And again: “While he [Geoffrey] busied himself in supplying the maiden’s needs, she [Christina] strove to enrich the man in virtue.”¹²⁶ These were not incidental comments. Christina emerges from the pages of the vita as a valuable resource, whose intercession for Geoffrey was a form of return on his financial investment in her community. This image of Christina was confirmed in the Psalter, which encouraged her to remember that her role was to pray for the monks of Saint Albans, that prayer was the currency with which she (and all the women at Markyate) was to repay Geoffrey’s support.¹²⁷

The idea that women’s prayer could be a counter-payment for men’s spiritual and material care for them—that women’s intercession could in some sense be “bought” by men—is most clearly expressed in Abelard’s Sermon 30, the fundraising sermon for the Paraclete that he delivered in the early 1130s.¹²⁸ The sermon functioned on two levels, presenting an argument for the spiritual value of donations generally, followed by a gendered case for the particular value of donations to women. In making the first argument, Abelard invoked the parable of the shrewd manager, in which Jesus had taught that men should use their worldly wealth to gain “friends” who would help them when the money was gone (Luke 16:1–13). Men who use worldly wealth to gain friends will be welcomed into “eternal dwellings,” Jesus promised (Luke 16:9). Abelard’s gendered interpretation of the text featured religious women as the archetypal “friends” of the parable—friends who were uniquely positioned as brides of Christ to help men spiritually. In the sermon, Abelard therefore offered his audience a tidy exchange between men’s financial gifts and women’s intercession: “there (in heaven)” he promised his male audience, “you may reap eternal rewards through those women who here receive temporal goods from you.”¹²⁹

The survival of the sermon in Colmar MS 128, and the textual reuse of certain selections in the Guta-Sintram Codex (copied by Sintram with the incipit Beati pauperes), allow some sense of how Abelard’s audience may have responded to his arguments in favor of donations to women. At Marbach, where male members of the community did serve women spiritually (as priests at Schwarzenthann), the spiritual appeal of women’s prayers was evidently strong. The selections from Abelard’s sermon that Sintram chose to copy into the Guta-Sintram Codex showcase Abelard’s confidence in the spiritual value of service to, and support for, women in the religious life. Claiming religious women as the “poor” of the beatitudes, Sintram’s excerpted text encouraged its implied male audience to come to women’s aid: “you should not delay in assisting their poverty, recognizing them as your ladies (dominae) by your actions more than by your words. Acknowledge that you owe more by far to the spouses of your Lord than to his servants and that they have greater influence with their own Spouse than do his servants.” Having presented religious women as brides of Christ (invoking Jerome’s elevation of Eustochium as his domina), the text repeats Abelard’s claim that men should expect to benefit spiritually through women’s bridal intercession: “May those very brides, through their merits and prayers, lead you with them to that fellowship of the celestial marriage feast and to the eternal tabernacles, so that there you may reap eternal rewards through those women who here receive temporal goods from you, by the gift of their bridegroom, the Lord Jesus Christ.”¹³⁰

The textual reuse of Abelard’s Sermon 30 in the Guta-Sintram Codex provides compelling evidence for the appeal of Abelard’s ideas concerning men’s “obligation” to serve women within the religious life, as well as their relatively quick circulation beyond the Paraclete: the sermon, delivered in the early 1130s, was copied into the Guta-Sintram Codex at around the mid-twelfth century. At Marbach and Schwarzenthann, Abelard’s ideas concerning relations between religious men and women were known and adopted in the very way that he might most have hoped: to structure a mutually beneficial relationship between two opposite-sex religious communities. Like Robert of Arbrissel, who encouraged the men at Fontevraud to imagine that they could gain salvation through their service to women, Abelard (and also Sintram) taught that men would be led to the “fellowship of the celestial marriage feast” by women, who, as brides, had a guaranteed spot at the wedding banquet.¹³¹ Charter evidence reveals that the men at Marbach had not only read Abelard and copied him, but that they actually structured their involvement with women on the basis of his promise of a spiritual reward: charters on page 2 of the Guta-Sintram Codex record that the canons provided the women of Schwarzenthann with material support. The women, meanwhile, functioned as intercessors for the two communities, providing in return for the men’s material support prayers by which the men might ultimately be welcomed into “eternal dwellings” as Abelard (and Jesus, through the parable) had promised.¹³²

Wise Virgins at the Judgment

Abelard’s reference to the “celestial marriage feast” in Sermon 30 (and Sintram’s adoption of the motif in the Guta-Sintram Codex) adds a final dimension to discussions of women’s bridal intercession, implying the high spiritual stakes of women’s prayers. Although the parable of the shrewd manager in Luke 16 formed the basis of Abelard’s sermon, providing a generic argument for the benefits of almsgiving, Abelard turned to the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (Matt. 25:1–13) to deepen his argument for the spiritual benefits of giving specifically to religious women, whom he characterized as brides and implicitly also as “wise” virgins. As Abelard wrote, these women were waiting—with lamps at the ready—in the cloister for the arrival of the bridegroom: at his coming they would go together to celebrate the marriage. “Those who were ready entered with him into the nuptials,” he remarked in the sermon, citing Matt. 25:10.

By the twelfth century, when Abelard delivered his sermon and Sintram copied it, the Wise and the Foolish Virgins were often depicted on the west façade of cathedrals, reflecting the understanding of the bridegroom’s arrival as the moment of judgment (Figure 23).¹³³ As in these depictions, which accentuate the dismay of the foolish virgins, the happy prospect of the wise virgins in Abelard’s sermon conjured up an opposing and significantly less rosy image. Lurking just behind the sermon text—with its chaste brides and celestial feasts—was the specter of those women who would never be brides: the foolish women of the parable, whose lamps were not ready when the bridegroom arrived. “I know you not,” the bridegroom declared when they came knocking at the closed door of the marriage celebration, with their oil lamps belatedly filled. These foolish virgins were not the focus of Abelard’s sermon, yet they hover at the margins of his text, a salient reminder of the fate awaiting the spiritually unprepared at the judgment. Hell was hardly the subject of Abelard’s sermon, but it was an important sub-text, and a warning: choosing intercessors was a serious task, Abelard warned, with eternal implications.

In Abelard’s view, the Paraclete nuns were the “wise virgins” whose intercession would be most effective on his (and other men’s) behalf. The identification drew on several metaphors at once: the religious woman as bride of Christ and liturgical virgo, and the consecrated virgin as a “wise virgin” (an identification confirmed in ceremonies for the consecration of virgins, which incorporated elements inspired by the parable).¹³⁴ In texts from the early Middle Ages, praying women were described both as wise virgins and as brides. In the sixth century, Caesarius of Arles had grasped the dual significance of women’s prayers, begging the intercession of the women at St. Jean, “so that when you happily enter the kingdom with the holy and wise virgins, you may, by your suffrages, obtain for me that I remain not outside with the foolish.”¹³⁵ Abelard’s innovation was to unite ideas concerning women’s bridal prayerfulness with those reflecting their spiritual privilege as “wise virgins,” presenting both as inducements to prospective donors. To patrons and supporters of religious women, he offered the chance to be led by Christ’s brides “to that fellowship of the celestial marriage feast and to the eternal tabernacles,” there to “reap eternal rewards.” Sintram’s decision to copy this section of the sermon indicates that Abelard’s message was heard and clearly understood by contemporary religious men. The prayers of nuns were not just desirable; they were spiritually decisive.

Abelard’s emphasis in Sermon 30 on nuns as wise virgins may explain, finally, his decision to be buried at the Paraclete, and his claim that no place was more “fitting” for Christian burial “than one amongst women dedicated to Christ.” Abelard chose burial among nuns since he believed that, as brides, nuns were the most effective as intercessors and that, as wise virgins, they were guaranteed a place at the “celestial marriage feast.” Evidence from the Guta-Sintram Codex suggests that other men found Abelard’s reasoning compelling in this regard, too. The Guta-Sintram Codex included a number of texts that were central to monastic life at Marbach, among them a homiliary, the Rule of Saint Augustine (and a commentary on the rule), and the famous Customs of Marbach.¹³⁶ However, the bulk of the manuscript (almost half of its current 163 folio pages) was given over to the shared necrology of Schwarzenthann and Marbach, which, despite the loss of its last three months, lists in excess of 4000 names. The fact that the necrology was kept at Schwarzenthann indicates that it was the women who were tasked with the job of remembering and praying for the dead. The prayers of the Schwarzenthann canonesses were sought and valued, and may even have augmented the appeal of the Schwarzenthann cemetery as a burial place: entries in the necrology make special mention of those who were buried “here.” Among those mentioned were donors to the community, and, significantly, several priests from Marbach—presumably men who had provided spiritual service to the Schwarzenthann women and who then chose to be buried in the women’s cemetery.¹³⁷ As these men seem to have assumed, women’s prayers were fundamentally, and most powerfully, prayers for the dead—the prayers that would aid their souls in the interim between death and resurrection and, crucially, at the final Judgment.

Conclusion

When Abelard died in 1142, his body was transferred from the Cluniac priory of St. Marcel-sur-Saône to the Paraclete nuns’ cemetery, where, as he hoped, the nuns would offer prayers for him, remembering him regularly and interceding on his behalf.¹³⁸ Abelard’s request for burial among women, and his justification for the excellence of women’s prayers, are, admittedly, unusual: no other monk or priest that we know of made quite such an extensive case for women’s prayers. Yet, as we have seen in this chapter, the constituent elements of Abelard’s case were present in medieval culture, both secular and religious. His arguments for women’s prayerfulness drew on widely held ideas concerning the obligations of wives and queens to intercede with (and for) their husbands, as well as long-standing Christian traditions emphasizing women’s prayerfulness as both brides of Christ and “wise virgins.” Although Abelard presented his case for women’s prayers more explicitly than other men, his confidence in women’s intercession was clearly shared by his contemporaries—most obviously at Marbach, where his ideas were directly embraced through Beati pauperes, and at Saint Albans, where Abbot Geoffrey supported Christina as his own personal intercessor.

Further evidence for men’s confidence in women’s prayerfulness can be found in non-narrative sources, chiefly charters of donation, testaments, and burials. The many donors who supported female religious life as it expanded during the twelfth century hoped for a spiritual reward in return, most likely (as Abelard promised donors to the Paraclete) women’s prayers—in life and in death.¹³⁹ At Rupertsberg, burial emerged as a critical source of income soon after the community’s foundation: the life of Hildegard reports how the monastery’s financial difficulties were alleviated through the favor of “many wealthy families” who “gave their dead an honorable burial with us.”¹⁴⁰ The connection between donors, burial, and women’s prayer that is implicit in this account is explicit elsewhere. Charters of gifts to the monastery of Saint-Antoine-des-Champs, a Parisian house founded in the late twelfth century in response to the preaching of Fulk of Neuilly, show clearly the value to donors of women’s prayers. As Constance Berman observes, charters that record “the establishment of anniversary masses, the erection of chapels and chaplaincies, and gifts for prayers or for burial … make it clear that it was the intercessory function of these religious women which was most important.”¹⁴¹ Evidence that donors favored female houses for burial (and commemorative prayer) is clear among Cistercian abbey churches in the Low Countries, too, according to Thomas Coomans, whose study of princely burials shows a marked preference for female houses: of 86 princely burials in 16 Cistercian abbeys, Coomans finds 18 burials at five men’s houses and 68 burials at 11 women’s houses.¹⁴² These findings corroborate those of Erin Jordan, whose study of patronage of men’s and women’s Cistercian houses in Flanders and Hainaut during the thirteenth century shows that men’s houses did not “outpace” women’s houses in donor preference or requests for prayer.¹⁴³ While many scholars have assumed that donors preferred the Masses of ordained monks to the prayers of nuns, the dramatic growth of Cistercian houses for women in the early thirteenth century suggests that donors were not in short supply—and that women’s prayers were not a debased coin in the later period.

The Cistercian evidence leads beyond the temporal focus of this book, into the thirteenth century, when new devotional and theological trends opened up more opportunities for prayerful women. The emerging concept of purgatory created a “new sphere of influence” for women, as Barbara Newman has argued: women performed what she calls an “apostolate to the dead,” offering prayers and assuming penitential suffering in order to deliver souls from purgatory.¹⁴⁴ The intensity and manifestation of women’s prayers for the dead evolved during the course of the later Middle Ages, but the fundamental association of women as intercessors remained in place, as it had been through the central Middle Ages when communities like Quedlinburg and Gandersheim in the tenth century, Niedermünster and Obermünster in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and Fontevraud and Las Huelgas in the twelfth century, had emerged as dynastic mausoleums.¹⁴⁵ Abelard’s claims that burial among religious women was the ideal goal for Christian death hardly seem unusual in this context. In the first century, Christianity had emerged as a religion centered on the death of one man—Christ—who had been mourned first and foremost by women. The medieval tradition of Christian mourning and intercessory prayer implicitly perpetuated this gendered relationship: women mourned and prayed for men.¹⁴⁶

In the context of this book, what is most interesting is the possibility that priests and monks may have viewed women’s prayers and commemoration as a spiritually decisive reward for their sacramental service. At Marbach, we know that this was so: priests were buried at Schwarzenthann, where they were prayed for by the nuns and their names recorded in the community’s necrology. At the Paraclete, where Abelard was buried in 1142, other men sought burial as well: in 1156, Heloise gained papal permission for lay brothers to be buried in the nuns’ cemetery.¹⁴⁷ Priests were subsequently buried in the Paraclete cemetery, as well as elsewhere in the monastery, including the chapter room, where at least one priest—Hato—was buried. Chrysogonus Waddell notes that twenty-seven priests were buried at the Paraclete in less than ninety years.¹⁴⁸ At Obermünster in Regensburg during the last quarter of the twelfth century the community produced a luxurious illustrated necrology, which included some 1300 names—among them a substantial number of priests, canons, pastors, deacons, and hermits.¹⁴⁹ These men are commemorated across several folio openings: for clerics (fols. 65v-67r) and brothers (fols. 67v-68r). The priest who celebrated Mass for the women may have seen in this necrology an implicit promise of future prayers for his soul; he may even have imagined himself as one of the officiating priests memorialized on fol. 67v (Figure 1).¹⁵⁰ Other pieces of evidence—taken together—add to the presumption that women’s prayers continued to exert spiritual appeal, even after the widespread ordination of monks meant that male monasteries could more easily offer Masses for donors’ souls. As we saw in Chapter 2, Arnold von Wied was buried in a chapel that ultimately became a women’s monastic community (if it was not already one at the time of his death); could it be that the hope of women’s commemoration inspired him in the foundation? The sources do not say. Yet it is clear that men routinely associated women with prayer for the dead. Goscelin of St. Bertin reported how women at Barking had commemorated the dead (especially dead brothers): the abbess Ethelburga (a seventh-century figure) reportedly “held it a very sweet thing after lauds and vigils to lead the choir not to their beds but to the tombs of the brothers and to commend the souls of the dead to God in sacred hymns.”¹⁵¹ Christina of Markyate, too, may have had a particular dedication to prayer for the dead. Her biographer reports that she preferred Saint Albans to other monasteries for her profession, since, among other reasons, Roger’s body was buried there.¹⁵² It is possible that Christina assumed that, in staying, she could intercede more effectively on Roger’s behalf. The St. Albans Psalter suggests that she did: Roger’s obit in the Psalter reminded its owner to remember Roger in prayer.¹⁵³

Men who supported religious women spiritually—serving as their priests, confessors, or spiritual friends—faced accusations and insinuations of wrongdoing, as I have noted throughout this book. These accusations would someday come to an end. However, the spiritual rewards that some religious men believed they might earn through their service to pious women were eternal and would easily outlast earthly criticisms and suspicion. Men who served as nuns’ priests believed that they would thereby secure women’s bridal prayers on their behalf, until—in Abelard’s language—they would be led by Christ’s brides “to that fellowship of the celestial marriage feast and to the eternal tabernacles”—literally to their “eternal rewards.” Salvation was, of course, the reward that these men sought, and that many believed they would achieve through women’s prayerfulness and bridal privilege.