CHAPTER 4 Brothers, Sons, and Uncles: Nuns’ Priests and Family Ties

Saintly Siblings at the Mid-Twelfth Century

Of all the ways in which individual monks and priests engaged with religious women during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the most consistent and widely accepted was as kinsmen providing spiritual care for female family members, especially devout sisters.³ Ordained brothers wrote to their professed sisters, advised them on spiritual matters, devised rules for their religious lives, founded monasteries for them (often paired with their own “male” houses), and sometimes served directly as their priests or confessors.⁴ In some cases, sisters lived with or near their monastic brothers, as the sister of the prior at Saint-Germer-de-Fly evidently did, according to Guibert of Nogent.⁵ Some sisters traveled with brothers as they moved from one house to another: the recluse Mechthild moved with her brother Bernhelm to Sponheim when he was made abbot there, while the sister of Ludolf came with him to St. Lawrence in Oostbroek, where he became abbot.⁶ Even hermits sometimes lived in close proximity to their pious sisters: Burchwine, the sister of Godric of Finchale, lived in a secret cell not far from his own oratory. Godric advised Burchwine on the religious life (albeit “from a distance”), perhaps inspiring Aelred of Rievaulx, who visited Godric at his hermitage and also supported his own sister in her religious life, writing a rule (De institutione inclusarum) for her.⁷ As we saw in Chapter 2, members of the secular clergy, too, could maintain warm ties with professed sisters: the archbishop of Cologne, Arnold von Wied, had several sisters in the religious life whom he may have wished to support through his foundation at Schwarzrheindorf. Indeed, it was through his partnership with his sister Hadwig that the community was established.

The involvement of these, and many other eleventh- and twelfth-century men, with devout sisters occasioned surprisingly little commentary among their contemporaries—and, specifically, little negative commentary. Observers typically report the presence of a man’s sister in his religious life incidentally, without commenting on the propriety or even the spiritual purpose of the relationship. Guibert of Nogent, for instance, registered no surprise that the sister of Suger, the prior at Saint-Germer-de-Fly, could be found “dressed in monastic habit” and living near her brother’s monastery. Even the arrival of a new abbot with his sister in tow seems to have been accepted as unremarkable: no evidence of astonishment, discomfort, or criticism appears in the extant sources that describe such an event. In some cases, the sibling bond was a subject of praise, as with Arnold von Wied: Archbishop Philip I of Cologne marveled that Arnold trusted his sister Hadwig more than anyone else after God.

One effect of this lack of censure is that sibling relations in the religious life can be difficult to trace. Of course, a man’s spiritual involvement with his sister did sometimes result in the production of texts—letters, a rule, or a vita, for instance. Men who produced texts, for or about their sisters, often reflected on the specific spiritual dynamics of the sibling relationship, as we shall see. But in most cases, the sibling bond elicited little explicit or self-conscious commentary. Occasional references to sisters (or, indeed, to brothers) in the religious life allow historians a glimpse of kinship ties, but no clear understanding of how they were perceived by contemporaries, or why they were generally accepted. No descriptive source reports, for instance, that the chastity of a monk, hermit, or priest was deemed to be “safe” in the presence of his female relatives, although medieval observers seem to have accepted that this was the case—that is to say, that a chaste man who avoided “women” was nevertheless safe in the presence of his sister, mother, or aunt (and the corollary: that a chaste woman would remain chaste in the company of a male relative).

Amid this general silence, one work stands out for its reflection on the spiritual role of family ties, as well as their presumptive chastity and legitimacy: the mid-twelfth-century Liber revelationum of Elisabeth of Schönau.⁸ Kin ties were not the subject of Elisabeth’s visions, yet kinship came into focus as she considered a seemingly separate question: the authenticity of a trove of relics that had been discovered outside the Cologne city walls and identified with the legendary virgin martyr Saint Ursula and her eleven thousand female companions. This question of authenticity was critical to the spiritual identity of Cologne in the mid-twelfth century. Virgin martyrs, who had “poured out their blood for Christ,” had been associated with the city of Cologne from at least the early fifth century.⁹ However, the link between these unnamed early medieval women and Ursula, who was celebrated as the Christian daughter of a British king, was tenuous at best. According to legend, Ursula had been returning from a pilgrimage to Rome with a group of female companions when the women were martyred by pagan Huns near Cologne. Until the early twelfth century, only this legendary association linked Ursula to the city. However, in 1106, excavations in a Roman cemetery outside the city walls uncovered a mass of bones, which supporters of Ursula’s cult quickly identified with the band of martyred virgins. Skeptics, meanwhile, questioned the association, doubting the authenticity of the relics.

For Elisabeth, the authenticity question hinged on the spiritual status of opposite-sex relations within the religious life. As she reported, her revelations were prompted by the arrival at the monastery of Schönau of two sets of bones from the Cologne cemetery—one set those of a woman, and the other those of a man. The presence of men’s bones among the relics came as a surprise, Elisabeth admitted, causing her to doubt their connection with Saint Ursula and her troop of female virgins. Confessing her doubts, she wrote that, “like others who read the history of the British virgins, I thought that that blessed society made their pilgrimage without the escort of any men.”¹⁰ Elisabeth’s concerns were soon put to rest in a revelation from the two saints whose bones had arrived at Schönau: Verena and Caesarius. Admitting that men had indeed accompanied the virginal women, Verena and Caesarius explained to Elisabeth that they had done so primarily as members of the women’s families. Caesarius, for instance, was Verena’s cousin. Another male martyr, Saint Adrian, had been martyred alongside four of his sisters: Babila, Juliana, Aurea, and Victoria.¹¹ Others among the men were clerics who had accompanied their virginal nieces, as in the cases of James, the archbishop of Antioch, and the bishops Maurisus and Marculus.¹² The familial connection allayed Elisabeth’s doubts concerning the men’s presence among the virgins, and she acknowledged the relics as authentic.

Spiritual Versus Biological Kinship in Early Christianity

Elisabeth’s revelations are valuable for the light that they shed on male-female interactions within the religious life in the mid-twelfth century, suggesting, more than any other contemporary source, that opposite-sex spiritual relationships could be legitimized through blood ties. The contrast with biblical Christianity, with its ambivalence concerning natural kinship, is remarkable. As we saw above, early Christians had been more likely to reject biological ties than to celebrate them. Accepting Jesus’s directive that a true disciple must “hate” his family, early Christians had fled wives, parents, and children, embracing a new, spiritual “family” in which men and women were bound together as metaphorical “brothers” and “sisters” in Christ.¹³ Although this fictive family was created—in many cases—at the expense of biological kinship, the vision of the early church as a “family” nevertheless provided an important framework within which unrelated men and women could interact on the basis of pure and disinterested familial affection, rather than potentially sexual love. Within the biblical context, fictive kinship promoted an egalitarian spirit in which opposite-sex relations were (initially, at least) exempt from suspicion or concern. The apostle Paul referred consistently to Christian believers in kinship terms, addressing them individually and corporately as “brothers” and “sisters,” and Jesus taught that all believers were joined to him, and thus to each other, by ties of spiritual kinship: as his brother, sister, and mother.¹⁴

Despite its early promise, fictive kinship as a new model for Christian community proved to be relatively short-lived. Spiritual kinship could not guarantee the purity of relations between the sexes, nor could it dispel persistent concerns regarding the conduct of spiritual siblings. Spiritual “brothers” and “sisters” were soon advised to maintain a certain distance from each other, loving each other as family—yet from afar. Even the kiss of peace could be suspect, as the second-century writings of Clement of Alexandria indicate. Sensing the potential for temptation and wrongdoing, Clement urged believers to exercise moderation in their enthusiasm for the ritual kiss, cautioning that it could cause “shameful suspicions and slanders” through “unrestrained use.”¹⁵

Clement did not comment explicitly on the limits of spiritual kinship in guarding purity, even as he argued that men and women should exercise caution in their interactions with each other. However, the roughly contemporary Shepherd of Hermas reflected more directly on the ideal relationship of chaste opposite-sex believers, proposing biological rather than spiritual kinship as the appropriate model for pure and selfless Christian affection. The text reported how an angel had instructed the visionary to treat his wife henceforth as a “sister,” an injunction presumably to refuse sexual relations with her.¹⁶ The implication of the passage is clear: treating one’s wife as a “sister” meant treating her, in sexual terms, as a biological brother treated his blood sister—that is, chastely. The slippage between spiritual and biological models of kinship in this short report is telling. Although the New Testament had taught that spiritual kinship was superior to its biological counterpart, biological kinship nevertheless quickly crept back into Christian usage as a model for the ideal interactions of unrelated men and women. Loving one’s spouse as a “sister” became a byword for chaste marriage, as Gregory the Great implied some centuries later, writing in laudatory terms of a priest who “loved his wife as a brother loves his sister,” although he avoided her.¹⁷ During the fourth century, Jerome had argued a similar point in his life of Malchus, presenting Malchus’s chaste marriage as the equivalent of a sibling relationship. As Malchus’s wife commented of their decision to remain chaste, “Let the masters think you my husband, Christ will know that you are my brother.”¹⁸

In these cases, admittedly, kin relations between biological siblings were not directly celebrated. There is no talk in these texts of actual blood brothers and sisters (or cousins and uncles), as there would be in Elisabeth of Schönau’s revelations many centuries later. Nevertheless, there was a growing sense already in the second century that behaving “like” blood siblings (chiefly, it seems, by refraining from sexual relations) was desirable for opposite-sex Christians. By the early fourth century, the tide of Christian opinion had moved even further away from metaphorical kinship and towards the biological relationship. Spiritual kinship was no longer sufficient to shield opposite-sex ascetics from scrutiny, as the Council of Ancyra (314) ruled: “We prohibit those virgins, who live together with men as if they were their brothers, from doing so” (my italics).¹⁹ By this time, behaving like siblings was not an accepted practice for unrelated women and men, draining spiritual kinship of at least some of its force and meaning. Jerome, notably, presented Malchus’s spiritual cohabitation with his wife as short-lived. As Malchus commented when he placed her in the company of devout virgins, “I handed [her] over to the virgins, loving her as a sister but not entrusting myself to her as to a sister.”²⁰

Meanwhile, early fourth-century texts began to hail blood kinship as legitimate, spiritually inspired, and presumptively chaste. While the Council of Ancyra warned against couples who lived together like siblings, the slightly earlier Synod of Elvira (c. 306) had ruled in favor of churchmen who did, in fact, live with female relatives. Almost anticipating the familial tableau that would enliven Elisabeth of Schönau’s twelfth-century visions, the Synod allowed that bishops and other clerics should permit their daughters and sisters to live with them, provided that these women had vowed themselves to God.²¹ Confirming the openness to family reflected in this ruling, the church leaders at Nicaea (325) declared that, while clerics were to refrain from entertaining unrelated women in their homes, they might continue to welcome their “mother or sister or aunt,” explicitly claiming that these women were above suspicion.²²

Patristic and Early Medieval Churchmen as Brothers

The opening to biological family that began to appear in ecclesiastical legislation during the early fourth century was reflected in the lives and writings of contemporary churchmen. In the city of Rome, where noblewomen were increasingly attracted to the ascetic life, ties between pious women and their male kin were strong. Several men encouraged their sisters in the religious life, modeling a form of male spirituality that was, significantly, entirely without biblical precedent. Pope Damasus I (366–384), for whom Jerome served as secretary upon his arrival in Rome in 382, memorialized his sister Irene, who had adopted the ascetic life in Rome probably around 360. In an epitaph that he composed for her tombstone, Damasus identified Irene as his germana or “blood sister,” writing that “I did not fear her death, since she approached heaven freely / but I confess that I was pained to lose the companionship of her life.”²³ The Liber pontificalis reports that Damasus was reunited with Irene in death: he was buried “close to his mother and sister.”²⁴ Ambrose (d. 397), the future bishop of Milan, also maintained close ties to a sister, Marcellina, who was consecrated as a virgin by Pope Liberius in Rome sometime around 353. Ambrose offered Marcellina advice on the religious life, penning a text On Virgins (De virginibus) for her;²⁵ he also praised her in his funeral oration for their brother, Satyrus.²⁶ When Ambrose died, it was Marcellina who provided information concerning her brother’s life to his biographer, Paulinus of Milan.²⁷ Ambrose was buried in the basilica in Milan; when Marcellina died a year later, she was buried there as well. Augustine of Hippo, Ambrose’s younger contemporary, likewise offered some support for his sister’s religious life, taking an interest in the community of women of which she was head and addressing a letter to the women after her death, a text often hailed as Augustine’s “rule” for the female monastic life.²⁸

The extant sources show that these men engaged spiritually with their pious sisters, yet they do not generally comment on the legitimacy of that engagement. Instead, it was Jerome—a man who had a sister, but was not particularly close to her spiritually—who offered one of the earliest and most extensive validations of family ties between opposite-sex kin.²⁹ Purporting to write to a mother and daughter in Gaul at the urging of the mother’s concerned son, Jerome expressed considerable unease at the women’s living arrangements (Epist. 117).³⁰ As he explained in a prefatory note to his letter, “A certain brother from Gaul has told me that his virgin-sister and widowed mother, though living in the same city, have separate abodes and have taken to themselves clerical protectors either as guests or stewards; and that by thus associating with strangers they have caused more scandal than by living apart.”³¹ In the letter that followed, Jerome urged a reconciliation between the two women, underscoring the importance and spiritual value of kinship and commenting on the “natural ties and reciprocal duties” that should rightfully bind a daughter to her mother. Addressing himself first to the daughter (whose disregard for her mother he deplored), Jerome invoked the Christian obligation to obey parents, an obligation he located in the New Testament and, above all, in the (somewhat equivocal) example of Jesus. As Jerome commented, “The Lord Jesus was subject to His parents.” Noting Jesus’s dying concern for Mary, Jerome reminded the women that “when [Jesus] hung upon the cross He commended to His disciple the mother whom He had never before His passion parted from Himself.”³²

If the daughter’s separation from her mother was troubling to Jerome, even more disturbing were her current living conditions: in the company of a so-called “monk” whom she presented as her partner in the religious life (but who was more likely her paramour, as Jerome hinted broadly). Explaining that kin ties should be the first and most natural context for the pursuit of the religious life, Jerome allowed the rejection of family only when a convert wished to pursue a communal religious life specifically among virgins: in this context alone he invoked Jesus’s command that believers “hate” their families (Luke 14:26). Of course, it was appropriate, Jerome noted, for the daughter to prefer Jesus to her own mother, since “you are bidden to prefer [Him] to your own soul.” But it was not appropriate for her to prefer a cleric to her own biological family. Privileging biological kinship over the implicit claims of “spiritual” brotherhood (and thereby inverting the New Testament model), Jerome fumed against the clerical interloper: “what excuse has a stranger for thrusting himself in where there are both a mother and a brother, the one a widow and the other a monk?”³³ Jerome’s advice to the daughter was emphatic. Her cohabitation with an unrelated man, even if it was chaste and spiritually motivated, was dangerous; she should return to her blood brother and mother, who were better able to support and encourage her in the religious life.³⁴

Brothers and Sisters in the Early Monastic Life

The privileging of familial relations that characterized Jerome’s letter 117 confirms the evidence of brotherly attention to sisters that marked the lives of his contemporaries, churchmen like Damasus, Ambrose, and Augustine. But Jerome’s letter also sheds light on a further aspect of relations between biological brothers and sisters: the shared involvement of opposite-sex family members in the early monastic life, a phenomenon that would become increasingly important in subsequent centuries. The mother and daughter to whom Jerome addressed his letter had—as he reminded them—a spiritual caregiver in their kinsman, a monk: “Your son is a monk,” Jerome wrote to the mother, “if he were to live with you, he would strengthen you in your religious profession and in your vow of widowhood.”³⁵

In writing this letter, Jerome promoted a religious life for women that was based in the family and that had its place in the home where (as he argued) male relatives could provide spiritual support and protection. As Susanna Elm has shown, this sort of familial arrangement was characteristic of late antique monasticism, which had its base in the household.³⁶ Evidence for the structure and organization of household monasticism is most clear in the fourth-century life of Macrina (d. 379), a text written by her brother, Gregory of Nyssa. According to the life, Macrina had adopted the religious life at the age of twelve when, having been bereaved of her fiancé, she claimed the dignity of widowhood and shut herself up in her family’s villa at Annisa.³⁷ Macrina was soon joined by her mother, and then others, until the household had developed into a small religious community. It was in this household community that Macrina raised her youngest brother Peter. As Gregory comments admiringly, she “became everything for the little boy: father, teacher, tutor, mother, counsellor in all that was good.”³⁸

Peter’s presence among the women of Macrina’s household community indicates that there was initially no segregation of the sexes in life at Annisa.³⁹ Although the community was divided into groupings based on age and sex as it grew, in keeping with its domestic roots, both women and men continued to have a place: there was a house for virgins, one for monks, a third for children, and a fourth for guests.⁴⁰ The mixed religious life of Macrina’s community likely inspired a further brother, Basil of Caesarea, in the monastic life that he promoted at his foundation, which was not far from Macrina’s house at Annisa. Basil’s monastic complex also included both men and women, as well as children, in separate houses.⁴¹ A theologian and defender of the Eastern Church against heresy, Basil is typically famed for his role in the development of Eastern monasticism. However, in Gregory’s eyes, it was Macrina who was the spiritual leader in the family.⁴² It was she, he notes, who provided Basil with spiritual encouragement when he returned from his studies “puffed up with pride,” ultimately prompting him to reject “worldly fame.”⁴³

Macrina’s example, in conjunction with Jerome’s advice to the women in Gaul, indicates the importance of the family, and the home, as an accepted mixed-sex environment for the early pursuit of the religious life. A further set of texts dating to the second half of the fourth century indicates that family bonds were not limited to settings that were either home-based or overtly familial. Supportive spiritual bonds between opposite-sex siblings were also evident among the earliest monastic communities in the deserts and valleys of Egypt. Indeed, alongside the well-known male ascetics who withdrew to the wilderness during the early fourth century were their equally devout (although less well known) sisters. The pious aspirations of these women do not typically feature in the vitae of their more celebrated brothers. Still, it is intriguing that hagiographers mentioned them at all. Rather than denying or ignoring the presence of a holy man’s sister, biographers of the desert fathers began specifically to mention such women in the context of the male saint’s pious life, in the process fashioning a new topos of male sanctity: fraternal spiritual care for a pious sister.

The attention of the male saint to the spiritual life of his sister is underscored in the lives of both Antony (d. 356) and Pachomius (d. c. 346), men who are typically hailed as founding fathers of monasticism. Accounts of their involvement with their sisters are brief, yet meaningful in the context of the broader fourth-century opening to family within the religious life. Antony’s biographer, the bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, reported that before Antony adopted the religious life, he ensured his sister’s future, placing her with a group of religious women.⁴⁴ Pachomius’s biographer provides more details concerning the saint’s spiritual concern for his sister, who was identified in the Bohairic Life as Maria. Although Pachomius refused to see Maria when she first visited him in the desert, he later installed her as the head of a female community that was twinned with his male one.⁴⁵ Guaranteeing the viability of the new female community, he sent brothers to build a women’s monastery across the river from the men’s house, selected an old man named Apa Peter to provide for the women’s spiritual needs, and furnished them with a copy of his Rule for monks, providing the earliest evidence of men’s spiritual and material care for women in the monastic life.⁴⁶ Pachomius’s community maintained close ties with Maria’s foundation, although the two were physically separate: according to Palladius, when one of the women died, her body was brought to the male house and buried in the men’s own tombs.⁴⁷

The presence of sisters alongside brothers in these early monastic accounts was not coincidental, but should be seen as intrinsic to the rise of monasticism. Indeed, when monasticism was carried to the West during the early fifth century, the association of brothers and sisters went too. John Cassian (d. 430/435), who introduced monasticism to southern Gaul, devoted attention to both sexes, establishing a monastery for men as well as one for women—reputedly for his sister—near Marseilles.⁴⁸ During the following century, Caesarius of Arles likewise founded communities for both women and men, placing his sister, Caesaria, as abbess over the female house.⁴⁹ Caesarius’s involvement with his sister is well documented, and formed a central part of his own spiritual life. In addition to writing a letter to her on the religious life (Vereor), Caesarius penned a rule for the women of her community (Regula sanctarum virginum).⁵⁰ His connection to the female house was strong, despite the physical separation that he required between men and women.⁵¹ Indeed, Caesarius envisioned himself in death not among the men, but among the women. When he died, he was buried in the women’s basilica, alongside Caesaria.⁵²

Further to the west, in Spain, the brothers Leander and Isidore (d. 636)—both bishops of Seville—maintained similarly warm relations with their sister, Florentina, a woman professed to the religious life in North Africa. Leander, who had been a monk before being elevated to the bishopric, composed a rule to guide Florentina in her religious life (De institutione virginum et contemptu mundi), while Isidore dedicated his De fide catholica contra Judaeos to her.⁵³ A Carolingian manuscript of Isidore’s work, possibly from Corbie, includes a depiction of him presenting the text to Florentina. An inscription records his dedication: “My sister Florentina, accept the codex that I have happily composed for you. Amen.”⁵⁴ An early ninth-century epitaph notes that Isidore was buried with Florentina and Leander, a detail that—although it cannot be confirmed from contemporary sources—conforms to the example of shared burial offered by Caesarius (and many others).⁵⁵

Benedict of Nursia and Scholastica

The presence of sisters alongside holy men within the early monastic life is remarkable, given the early Christian repudiation of family. There was, as we have seen, little biblical precedent for close ties with biological kin within early Christianity, which privileged spiritual over biological kinship.⁵⁶ Admittedly, in many of the instances discussed above, the sister of a holy man was a shadowy figure—present in the sources, yet rarely richly drawn (Macrina, who was a saint in her own right, is a notable exception). But this fact, too, is interesting and suggests that biographers went to considerable efforts to emphasize a male saint’s fraternal care for his sister, mentioning it even when the evidence was thin, or lacking. Unlike other male-female relationships in the religious life, which were consistently problematic for observers, the sibling bond emerges as one that biographers intentionally and repeatedly promoted.⁵⁷ Of course, not all male saints were associated with a sister (even a shadowy one), and some holy men avoided their female relatives, like the novice who refused to touch even his own mother.⁵⁸ Yet the persistence with which sisters appear in the recorded lives of early monastic men is indicative of the role of family in the construction of male spirituality and the evolution of monastic life. The fact that evidence for a sister’s very existence is often thin raises the interesting possibility that she may even have been fabricated.⁵⁹ If that was so, we must ask why men would have invented pious sisters, when medieval sources generally deny the interaction of holy men with women altogether.

The example of St. Benedict of Nursia is instructive in considering these questions. Like many of the male heroes of early monasticism, Benedict was associated with a sister, Scholastica, from the late sixth century. However, evidence for Scholastica’s life is thin: she appears only in Gregory the Great’s life of Benedict, and then in only two of its chapters. Still, her presence in the life launched Scholastica to sainthood and provided the basis for the belief, current by the ninth century, that she and Benedict had been twins.⁶⁰ By the central Middle Ages, Scholastica was celebrated as a saint in her own right and was depicted alongside Benedict, both as his partner in the religious life and as the patron of female monasticism. The Codex Benedictus, produced at Monte Cassino in the eleventh century, commemorated Scholastica (together with Benedict and Maurus) as a saint of the community.⁶¹

According to Gregory’s short account, Scholastica had been dedicated to the religious life as a child, yet maintained contact with her famous brother, visiting him once a year at a house not far from Monte Cassino. On the particular occasion that Gregory reported, Scholastica and Benedict had spent a day together in holy conversation when dusk began to fall. Realizing that Benedict would soon leave her, Scholastica begged him to stay the night. When he refused, Scholastica began to pray, weeping as she did. As though mirroring her tears, the skies burst open with a torrential rain, preventing Benedict from returning to his monastery (a scene depicted in the Codex Benedictus; Figure 18). He chastised her, but Scholastica defended herself, invoking God as her advocate: “When I appealed to you, you would not listen to me. So I turned to my God and He heard my prayer. Leave now if you can. Leave me here and go back to your monastery.” Resigning himself to the delay, Benedict spent the night in a holy vigil with his sister. Three days later, Scholastica died, and Benedict sent for her body, which he put in his own tomb at Monte Cassino. As Gregory concluded, “The bodies of these two were now to share a common resting place, just as in life their souls had always been one in God.”⁶²

The formulaic nature of Gregory’s account—the brother momentarily rejecting the sister (as Pachomius had initially rejected Maria) and the burial in a shared tomb (Damasus and Caesarius, as well as hints of Pachomius and Ambrose)—call into question the story’s authenticity. To be sure, medieval hagiography was a formulaic enterprise, in which past exemplars were routinely repurposed. However, the possibility that Benedict did not have a sister or, more to the point, that Scholastica (if she existed) was not his biological sister,⁶³ raises some important questions. First, if Benedict did not have a blood sister, and there was no historical person named Scholastica, why did Gregory see the need to invent her? Second, if Scholastica did exist, as a companion, or spiritual “sister,” but not as a biological sister to Benedict, why did Gregory imply that she was his blood sister—and why was she later revered as his twin?⁶⁴

Answers to these questions point to the centrality of the sibling bond as an established and clearly privileged form of engagement between men and women within the medieval religious life by the late sixth century. The second question is straightforward enough: as we have already seen, relationships between brothers and sisters who were blood relatives were permissible within the early monastic life, even as relationships between unrelated men and women were typically suspect. In a letter to a local magistrate, Symmachus, Gregory himself advised that priests should not live with women “except of course a mother, sister, or wife, whose chastity should be preserved.”⁶⁵ If Benedict had maintained a close friendship with a pious but unrelated woman, Gregory may have chosen to describe her as his sister (his soror) in order to emphasize the closeness and the blamelessness of their bond.

The answer to the first question is more complex. If Benedict had neither a sister nor a close female spiritual companion, why might Gregory have chosen to depict him with one? One answer may be that by the time Gregory was writing carefully prescribed contact with a holy woman—ideally a sister—had become an important element in the spiritual portfolio of a holy man. By this time, many families were Christianized, and therefore less likely to distract or dissuade believers, as they may have done in the early church. Indeed, promoting biological family in the medieval religious life may have served to strengthen and expand the faith, encouraging family sponsorship of monasteries and churches. As Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg has proposed, the presence of a sister added “gender symmetry” to the male religious life, an idea that underscores the importance of both male and female elements within religion.⁶⁶ Gregory’s emphasis on Scholastica as a spiritual leader may have been inspired by Leander of Seville, whose close relationship with his sister, Florentina, was likely known to Gregory. Leander was Gregory’s direct contemporary and close friend; the two met in Constantinople in around 580, and maintained contact in the years following, exchanging long letters and sometimes gifts.⁶⁷ Gregory certainly knew Leander’s spiritual writings, and he may have adopted from Leander a sense of the spiritual value and legitimacy of brother-sister spiritual relations.

Gregory’s decision to feature Scholastica in his account of Benedict’s life, and to paint her, at least temporarily, as the spiritual superior in the relationship, perpetuated the ideal of the brother-sister bond, mediating the late antique paradigm of sibling intimacy to later medieval audiences. Although Scholastica is only briefly attested in Gregory’s life of Benedict, her fame grew in concert with that of her saintly brother, whose Rule ensured that he was known, and venerated, throughout Western Christendom. Scholastica, too, became widely known in the century after Gregory’s death. Her cult spread, and her relics even became the goal of acquisitive monks. Sometime between 690 and 707, monks from the French monastery of Fleury reportedly traveled to Monte Cassino, uncovered the tomb shared by Benedict and Scholastica, and retrieved the relics of both.⁶⁸ A mid-ninth-century account written by Adrevald of Fleury adds that the Fleury group had been accompanied by monks from Le Mans, whose specific goal was to recover Scholastica’s relics. Although the Fleury monks succeeded in retrieving the relics of both saints, the Le Mans contingent ultimately secured some relics of Scholastica and founded a new monastery in her honor to house them—solidifying her medieval cult.⁶⁹

Gregory’s life of Benedict, with its account of the saint’s close spiritual relationship with Scholastica, was “one of the most widely read and remembered books in monastic culture,” as Mary Carruthers comments.⁷⁰ The model of sibling engagement that Gregory promoted in this work proved enormously influential, expanding upon earlier models of saintly siblings (like Pachomius and Maria, Caesarius and Caesaria, and Leander and Florentina), while also establishing a pattern of brother-sister spiritual care and devotion that placed sibling relations at the heart of the monastic life—a striking achievement, given that Benedict’s Rule made no mention of women.⁷¹ Through Gregory’s life, Scholastica became known and venerated as a saint in her own right, a woman whose loving and tearful prayers were viewed as spiritually decisive, overcoming even the wishes of her pious brother. Writers in the centuries after Gregory—men like Aldhelm, Bede (d. 735), Paul the Deacon (who spent the decade before his death in 799 as a monk at Monte Cassino), Bertharius (abbot of Monte Cassino, d. c. 883), and Alberic of Monte Cassino (fl. 1065–1100)—composed texts celebrating Scholastica.⁷² A further measure of Scholastica’s expanding cult is the adoption of her name by nuns at their profession, as at Barking in the seventh century.⁷³ By the later Middle Ages, Scholastica was venerated in her own right; an independent life appears in the late thirteenth-century South English Legendary.⁷⁴

As paradigmatic saintly siblings, Benedict and Scholastica were celebrated for their close spiritual ties, both in life and in death. Sermons, hymns, and poems presented them together as models of holiness in the monastic life. Given their spiritual prominence, it is surprising how little evidence exists for their exemplarity in later centuries as authorization for other opposite-sex pious siblings. Some pious siblings were likened to Benedict and Scholastica, such as the eighth-century saint Hiltrude, who lived in a cell attached to the monastery where her brother Guntard was abbot. Hiltrude’s biographer described the two as another Scholastica and Benedict—and also, notably, as another Jerome and Eustochium.⁷⁵ However, for the most part, Benedict and Scholastica were not cited as models, whether in a defensive mode or as positive exemplars for pious siblings. The contrast with both John and Mary, and Jerome and Eustochium, pairs who were regularly invoked when questions concerning the propriety of a man’s spiritual relationship with religious women were raised, is notable. Benedict was central to medieval religious life; his absence from the rhetorical arsenal of nuns’ priests demands explanation. It cannot be that his relationship with Scholastica was unknown or irrelevant, but rather the opposite: the model that these two encapsulated—of pious opposite-sex siblings interacting in a chaste, shared religious life—had gained such swift and wide acceptance in the centuries after Gregory’s death that it was not necessary to invoke them explicitly.

The success of the saintly sibling model meant that both criticism and defense were rare. Medieval audiences assumed that Benedict’s relationship with Scholastica had been pure and spiritually motivated as a function of their kinship—an assumption that was tacitly extended to include other brothers and sisters in the religious life. But the effect of Benedict’s model went beyond the presumption that kin relations were pure. Medieval audiences also came to assume that providing spiritual care for pious female kin (and above all, a man’s sister) was a marker of male sanctity: Benedict’s relationship with Scholastica solidified the expectation that fraternal care could (and should) form part of the male religious life. Indeed, Benedict’s care for Scholastica was often embellished beyond the bare bones of what Gregory had reported, broadening the spiritual implications of their relationship. According to Abelard, who cited Benedict and Scholastica as a model for monastic organization (and not, notably, as a defense against critics), Benedict’s fraternal concern for Scholastica shaped relations between their two monasteries, which Abelard then claimed were linked by spiritual care and oversight.⁷⁶ In Abelard’s view, men’s provision of spiritual care for women was one manifestation of the pious sibling relationship, in which not just individuals, but ultimately also male and female houses, could be joined by kinship ties.

Mutual Advantage in the Spiritual Life: The Twelfth Century

By the middle of the twelfth century, when Elisabeth of Schönau recorded her visions concerning St. Ursula and the virgin martyrs, the idea that men in the religious life (both monks and secular priests) could interact blamelessly with female kin was firmly established. In 1123, the First Lateran Council forbad priests to live with wives or concubines, but nevertheless allowed them to live with female kin, explicitly invoking the precedent set at Nicaea.⁷⁷ Elisabeth herself maintained a close relationship with her brother Ekbert, even prompting him to join her in the religious life at the double monastery of Schönau, where he served as her secretary and aide until her death.⁷⁸ Indeed, Ekbert’s arrival at Schönau in 1155 may have had some role in spurring Elisabeth’s interest in the spiritual legitimacy of kinship. Ekbert certainly worked with her on the textual shaping and publication of the Liber revelationum, with its assumption that male-female kinship was a legitimate basis for spiritual companionship.⁷⁹ The larger context of Elisabeth’s visions—Cologne at the mid-twelfth century—suggests a further potential influence on the work. As we saw in Chapter 2, the archbishop of Cologne, Arnold von Wied, maintained close ties with his sisters in the religious life, partnering with Hadwig in the foundation at Schwarzrheindorf. Ekbert had been a canon at Saint Cassius in Bonn—directly across the Rhine from Arnold von Wied’s chapel at Schwarzrheindorf—before joining Elisabeth at Schönau. Arnold’s close ties with his sisters in the religious life, which were showcased at the dedication of Schwarzrheindorf in 1151 and in the fresco of Arnold with Hadwig in the apse of the upper church (Figure 3), may have influenced Ekbert’s decision to support Elisabeth—a decision that meant abandoning an almost certain path to ecclesiastical advancement in the footsteps of his maternal great-uncle Ekbert, bishop of Münster.⁸⁰

The sibling model was forged during the formative centuries of Christianity and of monasticism in the West.⁸¹ It is therefore not surprising that when Elisabeth reflected on the role of kinship in the religious life, she did so in relation to St. Ursula, a woman whose martyrdom was located in the legendary past, before the full Christianization of Germany. In Elisabeth’s imagining, the mixed-sex group that comprised the martyrs of Cologne—brothers and sisters, cousins of both sexes, and uncles with their nieces—was bound together by kinship. Elisabeth may have been inspired by the texts of early monasticism and the prevalence in them of sisters, yet she added significantly to existing motifs, reporting the mutual spiritual advantage that the martyrs derived from their shared religious life.⁸² Many of the male martyrs had been bishops, as Elisabeth’s saintly visitors told her. These men had furnished the virgin martyrs with the sacraments during the course of their travels, providing a central justification for their presence: women needed priests to celebrate the Mass for them.⁸³ Yet, as Elisabeth noted, the women were not alone in profiting from the arrangement: the men, too, benefited from their proximity to holy women, drawing inspiration from their courage and devotion, and ultimately earning sainthood alongside them. As Caesarius explained, Verena “strengthened me to undergo martyrdom and I, seeing her steadfastness in agony, suffered together with her.”⁸⁴ In Elisabeth’s visions, it was Verena and not Caesarius who was the spiritual leader in the relationship.

The presumption that the kin relationship could be mutually advantageous marks an important development in relations between religious women and ordained men. As we saw in previous chapters, some ordained men—inspired by John the Evangelist and Jerome—came to see the provision of spiritual care for women as a legitimate spiritual service, one that could even draw them closer to Christ as his “friends.” Yet the rhetorical models that they adopted—which were centered on Christ as the bridegroom and nuns as his brides—did not acknowledge that the male-female relationship could be intrinsically spiritually beneficial. However, the sibling relationship, as it evolved over the course of the centuries, provided just such a possibility: a model of spiritual engagement from which both a sister and her brother were seen to benefit.

The spiritual advantages of the sibling relationship are, to be sure, most readily apparent from the standpoint of religious women. Ordained brothers contributed to the spiritual lives of their sisters, providing material support, advice, and also priestly services. Indeed, the earliest textual evidence for the provision of pastoral care to monastic women appeared in the context of the sibling relationship: Pachomius’s provision of Apa Peter to care for the women of his sister’s community, to be their “father,” and to “preach frequently to them on the Scriptures for their soul’s salvation.”⁸⁵ As the Bohairic Life reports, Apa Peter took up residence on the women’s side of the river, becoming the earliest known resident male spiritual guide and guardian for nuns. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, religious women found that ordained male relatives were often the most consistent and reliable source for spiritual care. Elisabeth of Schönau’s situation—living in a double monastery alongside a brother who supported her religious life and sometimes celebrated the Mass for her—was not, in fact, unusual.⁸⁶ Elisabeth’s contemporary, Hildegard of Bingen, also relied for a time on ordained kinsmen to provide care in the religious life. When she experienced difficulties in securing priests from Disibodenberg, Hildegard appealed to Pope Alexander III, who assigned her nephew Wezelin (then provost of St. Andrew in Cologne) to resolve the matter.⁸⁷ Some years later, facing renewed difficulties, Hildegard received support from her brother Hugo, a canon from Mainz who came to Rupertsberg to provide care for the nuns (among them another one of his sisters, Clementia).⁸⁸

While women often looked to ordained kinsmen for spiritual support, the benefits of the sibling relationship were not one-sided. Sisters provided brothers with spiritual encouragement, often serving as the spiritual leader in the relationship—as Scholastica had in Gregory the Great’s brief account, or Macrina in Gregory of Nyssa’s life.⁸⁹ Men in turn recognized deep piety in their sisters, often admitting a spiritual imbalance in the relationship from which they felt that they stood to benefit. Leander of Seville, for instance, described himself as spiritually dependent on Florentina. Encouraging her to maintain a life of sexual purity, Leander made clear his expectation that he would receive an eternal reward through her. “Although I do not have within myself what I wish you to achieve,” Leander wrote, praising Florentina’s virginity and hinting at his own unchasteness, “You are my shelter in Christ; you, dearest sister, are my security.” In Leander’s view, Florentina’s power derived from her status as the bride of Christ—a status in which he could not share, except vicariously. Placing his whole confidence in Florentina, Leander urged her to intercede on his behalf with her heavenly bridegroom. As he wrote, laying bare his own hope for salvation through Florentina, Christ would not “allow to perish a brother whose sister He has espoused.”⁹⁰

Even more than their early monastic counterparts, men who provided for their sisters’ material and spiritual needs during the twelfth century expected to benefit from the relationship. This sort of spiritual exchange is clear in Ekbert’s relationship with Elisabeth. Although he was her superior in ecclesiastical matters, having been educated in Paris and ordained to the priesthood, Elisabeth was unquestionably the spiritual leader in the relationship. It was Elisabeth’s visionary gift that prompted Ekbert’s move from Saint Cassius to Schönau, where he served as Elisabeth’s secretary and aide, recording her visions (a task he executed with some editorial license). Ekbert’s oversight may have provided Elisabeth with a degree of protection from potential critics. For Ekbert, however, the advantages of the relationship were equally, if not more, significant. Through Elisabeth, Ekbert believed that he had access to theological truths, which she obtained in visionary dialogues, primarily with the Virgin Mary. Ekbert turned Elisabeth’s visionary experiences to his own advantage, priming her with questions on delicate doctrinal matters, which he then encouraged her to present to her heavenly visitors.⁹¹ Indeed, Ekbert was so fascinated by Elisabeth’s visionary spirituality that he sought similar religious expression himself, asking his sister on her deathbed to intercede on his behalf so that he could inherit her visionary gift.⁹²

In addition to these tangible benefits, Ekbert profited from Elisabeth’s spiritual advice. It was most likely she who had prompted him to enter the religious life and who encouraged him to seek ordination.⁹³ On one occasion, Elisabeth comforted a priest (possibly Ekbert) who had accidentally spilled the consecrated wine at the Eucharist.⁹⁴ After her death, Ekbert (who became abbot of Schönau in 1166) described Elisabeth as “that chosen lamp of heavenly light, that virgin outstanding and honored by the abundant grace of God, that splendid gem of our monastery, the leader of our virginal company.” Reflecting on her spiritual influence on him, Ekbert effused that “She bought me forth into the light of untried newness; she led me to the intimate ministry of Jesus my Lord; with her honeyed mouth she used to offer me divine consolation and instruction from heaven and made my heart taste the first fruits of the sweetness hidden from the saints in heaven.”⁹⁵

Ekbert’s sense of his sister’s spiritual superiority is echoed in the contemporary writings of Aelred of Rievaulx. In the Rule that Aelred penned for his sister’s religious life, he recalled their youth together, bemoaning his past sins and reminding her of her spiritual care for him: “you mourned for me and upbraided me often when we were young and after we had grown up.”⁹⁶ Even though Aelred had attained the abbatial dignity by the time of writing, he nonetheless continued to depict his sister as his spiritual superior. Commenting that “we have run the same course, we were alike in everything: the same father begot us, the same womb bore us and gave us birth,” Aelred contrasted his own life of sin to the holy example of his sister, who had remained continent while he “freely abandoned [himself] to all that is base.”⁹⁷ “O sister,” he wrote: “How much more happy is the man whose ship, full of merchandise and loaded with riches, is brought to a safe homecoming by favorable winds than he who suffers shipwreck and barely escapes death with the loss of all?”⁹⁸

The belief that women had the potential to surpass men in their piety and the intimacy of their relationship to Christ shaped the interactions of ordained men with pious kinswomen, adding to the idea that brothers ought to attend to their sisters’ needs a sense of the real benefits to men in providing care. Leander and Aelred were explicit about their sense of their sisters’ spiritual superiority. For Leander, Florentina was his “safety” and his “security”; for Aelred, his sister was a spiritual support, who remained pure as he wallowed in sin. Peter Damian (who had been orphaned and was raised by his beloved sister, Rodelinda) wrote in a similar vein to his sisters, Rodelinda and Sufficia, expressing his confidence in their spiritual power: “I have every confidence that through your merits … I too will be absolved from my sins and restored to innocence of life.”⁹⁹ In a rare biblical reference to the spiritual potential of the sibling bond, Peter reminded the women that Lazarus had been brought back to life by the prayers of his sisters, suggesting that they, too, should devote themselves to prayer. Men such as these celebrated their sisters as spiritual superiors, despite the fact that these women could never attain the priesthood, as the men themselves, despite their admitted flaws, could. To modern ears, the praises of these men may ring hollow, offering rhetorically what was not possible practically: ecclesiastically sanctioned authority in the religious life. Yet men’s spiritual esteem for their pious sisters is equally evident in the actions of monks and priests who served their sisters spiritually without either reporting their experiences in writing, or lavishing their sisters with praise.

Gregory, an ordained monk at Saint Albans and the brother of Christina of Markyate, is a good example. Like early monastic sisters of pious men, Gregory appears only as a shadowy figure in the life of his more celebrated saintly sibling. Even so, Christina’s relationship with Gregory was close; her biographer comments that she “cherished” him “with extraordinary affection.”¹⁰⁰ Gregory returned her affection; it was his practice to visit Christina at Markyate, to stay with her, and, while he was there, to say Mass for her community. As an ordained monk, Gregory held ecclesiastical authority, yet there is no question that Christina was the spiritual superior in their relationship, interceding for her brother and mediating heavenly messages to him. Christina’s intercession for Gregory, and also for another brother named Simon, who appears as a witness to a Markyate charter, is implied in the St. Albans Psalter, which includes obits for both men.¹⁰¹

Gregory’s cameo appearance in Christina’s life confirms both the potential benefits that a brother in the religious life could derive from his saintly sister and the very real concern of a brother to provide for his sister’s spiritual needs. Though less spiritually mature than Christina, Gregory was nonetheless able to furnish her with a central spiritual benefit: the Mass. As his example suggests, the pastoral care of a woman by a man related to her—here a brother, although elsewhere a nephew or uncle—raised few suspicions of wrongdoing. Christina’s biographer reports Gregory’s involvement with his sister openly and with none of the defensive language that he marshaled elsewhere in connection with Christina’s friendship with Abbot Geoffrey. With permission from his abbot, Gregory even stayed overnight at Markyate, a feat that few monks would have dared (and that even Benedict had resisted initially).

The catalogue of eleventh- and twelfth-century brothers and sisters is lengthy. It includes, among others, Burchard of Worms (d. 1025), who nourished his sister with “brotherly love” and prompted her conversion to the religious life;¹⁰² Hugh of Cluny, who founded Marcigny with his brother Geoffrey II of Semur, no doubt with his mother, Aremburgis, and his sister, Ermengardis, in mind;¹⁰³ the reformer Vital of Savigny (d. 1122), who, with his brother, founded Abbaye Blanche, where their sister Adelina would become abbess;¹⁰⁴ Anselm of Canterbury, who guided and supported his sister Richeza in her marriage and, later, widowhood;¹⁰⁵ Bernard of Clairvaux, who encouraged his sister Humbeline to adopt the religious life as a nun at Jully;¹⁰⁶ Richard of Springiersbach, who founded the Augustinian community at Andernach for his sister Tenxwind;¹⁰⁷ the brother of Abbot Gervase of Arrouaise, who served as prior at his sisters’ community of Harrold in England;¹⁰⁸ and possibly also Peter of Blois, who wrote a letter of spiritual advice to his dilectissima soror (although not germana), Christiana.¹⁰⁹ In each case, the brother provided care for his sister, whether by founding a monastery for her, serving as her priest or as provost of her community, or writing letters or other texts to guide her in the religious life. Often, concern for a sister formed part of a larger phenomenon that included a man’s entire family—as with Bernard of Clairvaux, whose conversion was a family affair involving several of his brothers and kinsmen. The conversion of so many men could have serious implications for their wives; indeed, when Bernard’s kinsmen converted, many of their wives entered the religious life at Jully, alongside his sister Humbeline. The history of Jully confirms the significance of family ties in the religious life: before Jully came into being as a priory associated with the “men’s” house at Molesmes, the Jully women had simply lived at Molesmes. Notable among them was the sister of the reforming abbot, Robert of Molesmes (d. 1111), a woman by the name of Odelina.¹¹⁰

Families in the Religious Life

Thus far, this chapter has focused primarily on sibling relations. Yet spiritual relationships between uncles and nieces, cousins, sons and mothers, fathers and daughters, and even (former) husbands and wives were also common. Indeed, as Bernard of Clairvaux’s example suggests, entire families sometimes converted to the religious life as a group, entering neighboring communities. Women who converted individually might even live alongside kinsmen in communities generally designated as “male.” As we saw in Chapter 1, women could be present near (if not “in”) men’s houses as relatives of the monks. At Bec in the late eleventh century, the founder’s mother, Heloise, lived alongside the men.¹¹¹ During Anselm’s time at Bec, several other women joined the community when their husbands became monks. The monastery’s chronicle reports that “in the time of Abbot Anselm three noble matrons gave themselves in subjection to Bec: Basilia wife of Hugh of Gournay, her niece Amfrida, and Eva wife of William Crispin.”¹¹² These women were venerated as “mothers” within the community. According to Herman of Tournai, a similar situation unfolded at the monastery of Saint Martin in the late eleventh century, where both of his parents and at least one of his brothers made their profession.¹¹³ Nor was Herman’s family unique: he reports that “Henry, an extremely wealthy man, together with his wife, Bertha, his as-yet unweaned son, John, and two daughters, Trasberga and Iulitta, entered the monastic life in almost the same fashion.”¹¹⁴ Ultimately the number of women who converted at Saint Martin meant that they required their own community, which the abbot Odo of Orléans founded and placed under the authority of a woman named Eremburg—his sister.¹¹⁵

Families during the central Middle Ages could embrace the religious life together, entering monasteries either as nuclear families with small children or as kin groupings comprised of adult children, extending the kinship ties that existed between professed siblings to encompass entire kin groups.¹¹⁶ Although saints’ lives from the period sometimes present family ties as an obstacle to the religious life (in keeping with early hagiographic models), the reality was that family became more, and not less, important with the late eleventh- and twelfth-century shift away from child oblation toward adult conversion.¹¹⁷ This shift meant that new recruits to the religious life had lived many years in the world and so brought with them into the monastery not just strong ties to family members, but also related obligations. From the cloister, monks and nuns continued to concern themselves with their families—with their mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, and even children.

Narrative sources provide a number of examples of monks and nuns who maintained close ties to family members, both within the monastery and beyond it. Elisabeth of Schönau was close with several siblings, in addition to Ekbert. When she died, she was surrounded by what may have been the last remaining members of her nuclear family, two of them at least “from afar.”¹¹⁸ Likewise, Christina of Markyate recreated at Markyate and Saint Albans a household in miniature, in which at least two of her siblings shared the religious life she had chosen. When her brother Gregory died, both Christina and her sister Margaret, who was also a nun at Markyate, were present at the burial.¹¹⁹ As we have already seen, Hildegard had at least one sister with her at Rupertsberg; their brother Hugo served for a time as the women’s provost. At Sempringham, Sharon Elkins comments that “three nuns were sisters, their uncle was a member of the monastery, and their parents were affiliated, as part of the ‘fraternity.’ ”¹²⁰ Based on her study of nuns who had relatives within the religious life in the later Middle Ages, Marilyn Oliva similarly notes that several brothers “remembered their sisters in their wills, which indicates at the very least that the male clerics had not forgotten about their monastic sisters.”¹²¹ Far from renouncing family and the purported dangers of the flesh, these examples demonstrate that medieval monastic men and women maintained close ties with blood kin, despite their entrance into the new, spiritualized “family” of the monastery. The blurring of spiritual and biological kin that resulted is most clear in a comment made by Bernard of Clairvaux’s biographer that Humbeline “proved to be a true sister of the holy monks of Clairvaux not only in the flesh but also in the spirit.”¹²² Richard of Springiersbach’s sister Tenxwind of Andernach was similarly described as his sister (germana) both “in the flesh and in the spirit.”¹²³

Elisabeth of Schönau’s Cologne vision, with its abundance of episcopal uncles providing spiritual care for their saintly nieces, underscores the fact that contact between male and female family members in the religious life quite often occurred within the context of pastoral care. Indeed, some of the period’s most interesting literature of spiritual advice for women was composed by male relatives, as in the cases of Peter the Venerable and Osbert of Clare (d. c. 1158), who wrote for their nieces, Margaret and Pontia, and Margaret and Cecilia, respectively.¹²⁴ Peter extended the spiritual reach of kinship beyond the avuncular relationship, encouraging his nieces to remember the “great faith” and “unimaginable fervour of love” of their grandmother (his mother), Raingard, a nun at Marcigny.¹²⁵

One kin relationship did not feature in Elisabeth’s visions: that of husband and wife. For obvious reasons, the nuptial relationship was more complicated than relationships based on biological kinship ties. While ties between blood kin were presumed to be sexually pure, married partners were expected to be (or to have been) sexually active. Although many husbands and wives embraced the religious life late in life and renounced married sex, the relationship remained sexually charged for onlookers, who typically doubted that chastity could so neatly displace desire. When Abelard wrote to Heloise, he therefore addressed her almost exclusively in kinship terms that denied or minimized his marriage to her: in his letters, Heloise appears more often as his “sister” and the “bride” of Christ, than as his former wife. For Heloise, such kinship metaphors lacked force. When she claimed Abelard’s spiritual and material support, she did so on the basis of their earthly marriage bond and the obligation it had created. “Consider the close tie by which you have bound yourself to me,” she wrote, “and repay the debt you owe a whole community of devoted women by discharging it the more devotedly to her who is yours alone.”¹²⁶ In her view, the marriage bond joined her to Abelard, and would continue to join them even from within the cloister.

Of the many reasons for which Abelard has been deemed “unique” and “exceptional” in his writings about religious women, his marriage to Heloise is surely the most significant. The idea that a priest who served women spiritually and was the effective founder of their community could previously have been sexually involved with one of the nuns (let alone the abbess) has struck modern readers as improbable, confirming Abelard’s presumed exceptionality. And yet, the medieval evidence shows that husbands and wives did embrace the religious life together, sometimes entering the same monastery, or houses that were closely associated and geographically proximate. In his Rule, Abelard actively encouraged this sort of pairing of male and female houses. As he wrote, “whoever wishes to be converted along with a mother, sister, daughter, or any other woman for whom he is responsible will be able to find complete consolation there, and the two monasteries should be joined by a greater affection of charity and a concern for each other the more closely their members are united by some kinship or affinity.”¹²⁷

Although Abelard did not directly acknowledge the possibility that husbands and wives might embrace religion together, they often did. Examples like Ralph and Mainsendis, and Henry and Bertha, couples who converted at Tournai, show that husbands and wives could remake themselves as chaste spiritual “brothers” and “sisters.” According to Gilo’s life of Hugh of Cluny, former husbands and wives who entered Cluny/Marcigny played “twin” roles, implying that former spouses could assume the spiritual privileges of blood kinship.¹²⁸ Like Abelard, some husbands were founders of communities for their wives, and some even served as priests—becoming spiritual “fathers” to their former wives. Jerome’s life of Malchus had allowed for this possibility, presenting Malchus as his wife’s guide in the religious life. Reginald’s twelfth-century rewriting of the life highlighted this point, presenting the two explicitly as a “monk” and a “nun.”

To be sure, Malchus was a legendary (and chaste) figure, whose example serves as an indication of what was deemed praiseworthy in the religious life, rather than as evidence of religious practice or experience. Yet there were medieval men who entered the religious life with wives, who subsequently became their spiritual “sisters.” Eckenbert of Worms (d. 1132) offers one example.¹²⁹ Eckenbert was married when he converted to the religious life; he renounced the world together with his wife, Richlindis.¹³⁰ The two began by embracing charity and asceticism, but ultimately left their home in Worms for a place outside the city, where Eckenbert built “a few little houses made of rods and mud.” Most interesting for the purposes of this book is the fact that this early religious community was centered on Richlindis and the women who joined her. According to his biographer, Eckenbert lived nearby, “in a little house set apart from the habitations of the women,” devoting himself to prayer, reading, and contemplation.¹³¹ After some while, Eckenbert secured a place to found a community for men, at Frankenthal. Yet he remained close to Richlindis for some time, delegating the task of building the new male community to trusted helpers.¹³² When the two houses were at last established, the women’s community—which remained linked to the men’s house—became known as “lesser Frankenthal.” Richlindis, who outlived Eckenbert by some years, served as magistra of the women’s community.

Eckenbert’s case was not so very unusual, especially among noble converts who often embraced the religious life as a kin group.¹³³ The foundation of Arnstein, a Premonstratensian community on the Lahn, also had its origins in the joint conversion of a husband and wife.¹³⁴ In 1139, Count Ludwig III of Arnstein transformed his castle into a religious community; his wife Guda became a hermit nearby. Both Ludwig and Guda died at Arnstein. At Cluny/Marcigny, the conversion of Hugh’s family during the latter part of the eleventh century fueled the growth of the community. Following the entrance of Hugh’s mother, Aremburgis, his three sisters, and several of his nieces, Hugh’s brother Geoffrey II of Semur also embraced the religious life. Some years later, Geoffrey III of Semur followed, adopting the religious life at Cluny/Marcigny together with his wife Ermengard and their three daughters: Adelaide, Agnès, and Cécile. While Geoffrey’s son, Renaud, later became abbot of Vézelay, Geoffrey himself was made prior of Marcigny—putting him in a position of leadership over his own former wife and daughters.¹³⁵

Conclusion: The Dangers of Family Life

In this chapter, I have argued that relationships between biologically related women and men were typically exempt from suspicion within the medieval religious life, despite early Christian warnings against biological family and consistent anxieties regarding relations between the sexes. While the evidence points overwhelmingly to the acceptance of kin bonds, a current of suspicion nevertheless remained. Elisabeth of Schönau’s otherworldly visitor Verena was quick to point out that among the 11,000 virgin martyrs of Cologne the men had kept apart from the saintly women, joining them only on Sundays, and then for the sole purpose of providing pastoral care.¹³⁶ The eighth-century Anglo-Saxon saint Guthlac was famed for having refused physical contact with his sister, Pega, explaining on his deathbed that “I have in this life avoided her presence so that in eternity we may see one another in the presence of our Father amid eternal joys.”¹³⁷ The twelfth-century Guthlac Roll shows Pega as being present only after Guthlac’s death, reinforcing his celebrated purity and separation from her in life.¹³⁸ The desire to escape temptation by avoiding even a beloved sister was shared by other men, who chose not to have contact with female family members. Temptation was real, as Jean Gerson (d. 1429) would acknowledge several centuries later. Having composed a series of letters and treatises for his six sisters, in which he encouraged them spiritually and provided guidelines for their religious lives, Gerson nevertheless admitted that he had suffered from carnal thoughts in their presence.¹³⁹

The danger that even relations between brothers and sisters could be tainted by sexual scandal was underlined in the biblical story of Amnon and Thamar, who were half-siblings through their father, King David (2 Samuel 13:7–16). Amnon, burning with illicit desire for his sister Thamar, feigned illness in order to lure her into his bedchamber, where he raped her before throwing her out of his house in disgust. The story of Amnon and Thamar was not lost on medieval audiences, who recognized that any relationship could be polluted with unchastity. Thus although Jerome had encouraged the mother and daughter in Gaul to look to their kinsman for spiritual support, he warned Eustochium that “near relationship is no safeguard,” reminding her that “Amnon burned with illicit passion for his sister Tamar.”¹⁴⁰ The seventh-century Spanish abbot and, later, archbishop, Fructuosus of Braga likewise invoked Amnon and Thamar, warning his monastic audience against contact with women, even those women related to them: “That none may assume that his chastity is safe in the presence of a woman related to him, let him remember how Thamar was corrupted by her brother Amnon when he pretended to be ill.”¹⁴¹ In the ninth century, Pope Nicholas I cited Amnon and Thamar as evidence that the cohabitation of women and men—even those related by blood—could give rise to lechery.¹⁴² In the early thirteenth century, Gerald of Wales reiterated this caution, reminding his clerical audience that, although men vowed to continence were permitted to live with female relatives, they should avoid temptation, since “Thamar was corrupted by her own brother Aman.” As Gerald wrote, “We have even heard of certain priests who, at the instigation of the ancient enemy and because of the occasion and convenience afforded by living together, have indulged in detestable concubinage with their nieces, their sisters, and even with their own mothers!”¹⁴³ Recognizing the danger, several early medieval church councils had warned priests not to welcome female family members in their homes, even though the tradition established at Nicaea explicitly allowed familial cohabitation.¹⁴⁴

Incest fears were evidently real enough, yet interpretations of Amnon and Thamar did not always emphasize sexual temptation between biological siblings. Other interpretations were possible. An early thirteenth-century moralized Bible highlights the contemporary concern with clerical immorality, presenting Amnon not as a lecherous brother intent on the seduction of his sister, but rather as a corrupt churchman violating a female member of his flock.¹⁴⁵ Interpretative texts make clear the threat posed to female congregants by immoral churchmen. “That Moab [sic: Amnon] feigns sickness to deceive his sister signifies the rich clerics who feign sickness to deceive the good virgins,” notes one commentary, while another observes: “That Moab lies with his sister Thamar by force and takes her virginity signifies those bad clerics who take the good virgins and force them and deceive them with gifts and with promises and take their virginity and their goodness.”¹⁴⁶ As these texts indicate, concern with the dangers of biological incest could be eclipsed by concern with the more immediate reality of spiritual incest, defined as intercourse between an unchaste churchman and his spiritual child. As Peter Damian had argued, any ordained minister who had sex with a woman committed incest, since “all the children of the church are undoubtedly your children.”¹⁴⁷ Given the very real dangers of spiritual incest, the manuscript seems to imply that a woman could be secure in her relationship with her priest only if he was, in fact, her biological brother.

The scale of change traced in this chapter from the fourth century (when kin relations first began to be accepted in ascetic circles) to the twelfth century (by which time they were omnipresent) is dramatic. A marker of that change can be seen in legends about St. Augustine. Whereas in his own lifetime Augustine had refused to allow either his sister or any other female relative to stay at his house, by the twelfth century, his relationship with his saintly mother Monica was celebrated as a model of purity.¹⁴⁸ An account of the translation of Monica’s relics dating to about 1162 underscores the presumed purity of Augustine’s relations with his mother, echoing the confidence that appeared in Elisabeth’s visions a decade earlier concerning the purity of opposite-sex kin relations. The account is provided by Walther of Arrouaise, an Augustinian canon who had retrieved the relics from Ostia and brought them to his monastery. Walther reports how Augustine had appeared to the travelers, dressed in episcopal garb and accompanied by a beautiful woman. Recognizing that the presence of his female companion might scandalize his audience, Augustine hastily identified the woman as Monica, claiming his blood ties to her as the reason for his devotion: “Do not be amazed that I love her and honor her, since she is my mother.”¹⁴⁹ For Walther, Augustine’s appearance served to verify the authenticity of the relics associated with him. Yet, for modern readers the account confirms the central place of kin relations in twelfth-century religious life as a blameless venue for male-female interaction. Augustine’s care for Monica was not to amaze or trouble anyone, Walther reported, since (as the saint himself announced), “she is my mother.” Of course, as we saw in Chapter 2, the presumed blamelessness of the mother-son bond was central to medieval understandings of John the Evangelist’s care for Mary—an important legitimizing motif for nuns’ priests. John cared for Mary because Christ had asked him to, but also because both men saw her as their “mother.”