Conclusion

Claiming Care: Nuns and the Bridal Metaphor

The most direct witness to women’s interactions with priests regarding provision of pastoral care during the twelfth century comes from the writings of Heloise, whose dialogue with Abelard about the religious life for women inspired much of Abelard’s writing on the subject.⁴ Two of Abelard’s most important works for women, his Rule and his letter On the Origin of Nuns, were written at Heloise’s express request and according to guidelines that she proposed. But Heloise did not simply ask Abelard to write for her and for the nuns of the Paraclete; she also argued that he ought to do so, offering evidence that women saw the provision of care for women as a duty for men and that they took an active role in urging men to provide it. In letter 6, Heloise reminded Abelard of his various obligations to support the Paraclete, peppering her text with the language of duty and commitment. If he worried that he was wasting his time in the wilds of Brittany amongst murderous and immoral monks, she offered the nuns of the Paraclete as willing alternatives: “While you spend so much on the stubborn, consider what you owe to the obedient; you are so generous to your enemies but should reflect on what you owe to your daughters.”⁵ If he was anxious for the future of the Paraclete as a place of worship, and for his own reputation as its founder, she reminded him of the special obligation that bound him to the Paraclete community as its creator: “It is for you then, my lord, while you live, to establish for us what we are to adhere to for all time, for after God you are the founder of this place, through God you are the planter of our community, with God you should be the instructor of our religious life.”⁶

Above all, however, Heloise reminded Abelard of the biblical command that men should support holy women, transcending the language of personal and even corporate obligation that most clearly bound him to both Heloise and the Paraclete in order to focus on what men, as a group, owed religious women. Turning to the question of material care, Heloise noted that “apostolic authority” had granted devout women the “special concession … of being supported by services provided by others rather than by their own labor.” Invoking Paul’s remarks concerning church support for widows (1 Tim. 5:16), she concluded that, “It is right and proper that [nuns] should be supported from the funds of the Church as if from the personal resources of their husbands.”⁷ In the context of Heloise’s other writings, this might seem an unusual claim, since she generally avoided the language of spiritual marriage that Abelard repeatedly and enthusiastically encouraged for her: Heloise never embraced the exalted status that he promised she would enjoy as a bride of Christ, maintaining instead her marital claims on Abelard as her husband.⁸ Her claim to church support, while it might seem to imply a willingness to acknowledge nuns as brides whose husband (Christ) had died, more likely reflects Heloise’s desire to dignify professed women as “widows” in an early Christian sense, that is, as an “order” for women within the church.⁹

In this book, I have argued that the characterization of nuns as brides of Christ significantly motivated men’s willingness to provide spiritual care for them. Given the importance of the bridal motif, it is striking how little evidence there is for bridal language in negotiations of pastoral care by women in the period before 1200. To be sure, the sources that typically governed the practice of pastoral care, and that do sometimes include women’s communal claims on men, were generally legal texts, which tend to be functional, rather than justificatory or explanatory. Charters detailing the practical arrangements between nuns and the local male communities that often provided priests shed light on women’s networks and connections, demonstrating, for instance, that nuns sought out and successfully maintained several sets of relationships at one time, receiving pastoral care from priests at various houses in a series of overlapping and carefully choreographed relationships. At Hohenbourg, for example, care was provided during the last quarter of the twelfth century by priests drawn from at least three male communities, two of which were founded by the abbess specifically to ensure a steady stream of priests. These charters showcase the active role that women took in securing and negotiating pastoral care, giving lie to the notion that they were passive recipients of men’s care. Yet, bridal language does not figure into the documented, legal arrangements of these women with religious men (nor, as I have shown elsewhere, did bridal motifs play a particular role in the women’s spiritual formation at Hohenbourg).¹⁰

A second series of charters governing arrangements between monks and nuns survives from Rupertsberg, the monastery founded by Hildegard of Bingen at the mid-twelfth century. Like the Hohenbourg materials, these show women claiming care, although in circumstances that were hotly contested: Disibodenberg (the “male” monastery to which Hildegard had been given as a child, but from which she had separated when she founded Rupertsberg) had repeatedly failed to provide Rupertsberg with priests. The Rupertsberg charters insist on the men’s obligation to provide care, marking a stark contrast to the persuasive approach that Heloise had adopted in her letters to Abelard. Where Heloise had sought to encourage Abelard’s care, invoking the same saintly and apostolic examples that he (and other men) would also reference in their own writings, Hildegard’s tack was less conciliatory: first, she chastised the monks of Disibodenberg for threatening to disrupt the spiritual life at Rupertsberg (writing sternly in the voice of “I who am”),¹¹ and then she turned to legal measures, securing a charter from Archbishop Arnold of Mainz requiring Disibodenberg’s provision of priests.¹² As at Hohenbourg, bridal language had no place in letters or charters relating to priestly care at Rupertsberg.

The absence of bridal language from Hildegard’s legal wranglings with the monks of Disibodenberg is consistent with her other writings: Hildegard generally shied away from the insistent bridal language that many men used to describe the piety of women, and which Hildegard’s own biographer, Theoderic of Echternach, applied to her.¹³ For Hildegard, it was not a human figure, but rather Ecclesia, the Church, who was the archetypal bride of Christ.¹⁴ Nevertheless, she celebrated “woman” in her visionary texts and viewed religious women (especially virgins) as spiritually distinctive and exalted, even going so far as to allow virgins at Rupertsberg to dress in white garments and to ornament themselves with crowns and rings on feast days. Word of these unusual practices spread, prompting a disapproving letter from the magistra Tenxwind of Andernach. As Tenxwind wrote to Hildegard:

They say that on feast days your virgins stand in the church with unbound hair when singing the psalms and that as part of their dress they wear white, silk veils, so long that they touch the floor. Moreover, it is said that they wear crowns of gold filigree, into which are inserted crosses on both sides and the back, with a figure of the Lamb on the front, and that they adorn their fingers with golden rings.¹⁵

In her response, Hildegard explained that nuns—because of their virginal status—were exempt from the limitations placed on other women. The female virgin, Hildegard declared, “stands in the unsullied purity of paradise, lovely and unwithering,” an idea that she expressed, too, in her antiphon for virgins.¹⁶ In Hildegard’s view, the virgins at Rupertsberg claimed a prelapsarian femininity that justified their sumptuous ornamentation on feast days.¹⁷ Bridal symbolism featured in this context, although as a seemingly secondary matter: the virgin’s “white vestment,” Hildegard claimed, was a “lucent symbol of her betrothal to Christ.”¹⁸

Beyond Texts: Women and Liturgical Textiles

Tenxwind’s elaborate descriptions of the women’s clothing at Rupertsberg, and Hildegard’s explanation, offer an important viewpoint from which to consider the self-image of medieval nuns, hinting at the women’s perception of themselves first and foremost as virgins, and only secondarily as brides.¹⁹ Hildegard’s writings confirm such a view: her virgins had more in common with the one hundred and forty-four thousand virgins of the Apocalypse (Apoc. 14:1–5) than with the veiled virgins of Tertullian’s anxious imagination, whose spiritual nuptials left them perpetually in danger of cuckolding Christ (or, in fact, with the would-be “brides” whose purported desire for legal marriage to Christ prompted men to produce affective scripts for them, as McNamer argued).²⁰ As Hildegard explained to Tenxwind, the nuns’ crowns were a means for the women to have the Lamb’s name “written on their foreheads” (Apoc. 14:1)—a “shocking claim for the eschatological quality of the liturgical celebration in her church at Rupertsberg,” as Felix Heinzer has commented.²¹ The contrast between virginal nuns and religious men (whether monks or priests) is clear in Hildegard’s writing, which consistently locates virginity in the female body, relegating men—even virginal men—to the category of the merely chaste.²²

Hildegard’s elitist views on virginity and her elaborate, even theatrical, celebration of the nuns’ prelapsarian claims within the church itself could not have gone unnoticed by the priests at Rupertsberg. The effect on these men of the Rupertsberg nuns, gloriously attired in silks and gold, with long flowing robes and unbound hair, must have been quite striking. Unfortunately, no textual account reports their reactions, although Guibert of Gembloux—like Hildegard—repeatedly acknowledged the special spiritual status of virgins, commenting that “holy virgins are the temple of God the father, the spouses of his son Jesus Christ, and the sanctuary of the holy Spirit.”²³ Still, the spectacle that Tenxwind’s letter describes raises the question of how nuns and priests interacted in the physical space of the church, and how nuns responded to the authority of their priests and the exclusive access of these men not only to the altar, but to the very body and blood of Christ through the Mass. At Rupertsberg, priests who celebrated the Mass would have been confronted by a dramatic performance of the nuns’ gendered spiritual priority as “virgins”—a status that (at least according to Hildegard) was exclusive to women. Only women could be virgins, as Hildegard taught. Moreover, as virgins, the Rupertsberg nuns escaped the spiritual limitations—stemming from the fall—that were typically invoked to justify women’s exclusion from the altar and the priesthood.

Liturgical textiles offer a further perspective on women’s sense of their role in the liturgy and their relationship with Christ and, by implication, also with their priests.²⁴ Women were barred from consecrating the Mass, as we know, but they were also prohibited from touching (or even approaching) the altar—a fact that most historians have assumed rendered them passive observers rather than participants in the Mass. Women were equally prohibited from touching liturgical textiles except when laundering them, a point that church councils reiterated and that Abelard incorporated into his Rule for the Paraclete.²⁵ Even so, it was often the case that women had made these same liturgical textiles, or that they had commissioned and given them as patrons.²⁶ Indeed, more than any other type of liturgical gift (except perhaps candles), textiles were likely to have been made by women. Not only was textile work seen as uniquely appropriate for women,²⁷ but—possibly in keeping with the apocryphal story of Mary spinning thread for the production of the temple curtain—the production of ecclesiastical linens was especially encouraged for them.²⁸ Like Christina of Markyate, who sent slippers and three miters she had embroidered as a gift for Pope Adrian IV, monastic women made and gave textile gifts to ordained men for them to wear as they served at the altar.²⁹

In Chapter 2, we saw how Edith of Wilton was famed for having embroidered an alb on which she depicted herself as Mary Magdalene kissing the footprints of Jesus. According to Goscelin of St. Bertin’s biography of Edith, the alb was “made out of the whitest linen (ex bisso candidissimo)” and was “a symbol of her innocence.” Embellished with “gold, gems, pearls, and little English pearls, woven around the yoke” it featured a depiction of the apostles gathered around Christ on its lower border. As Goscelin reported, Edith embroidered “around the feet, the golden images of the Apostles surrounding the Lord, the Lord sitting in the midst, and Edith herself prostrated in the place of Mary the supplicant, kissing the Lord’s footprints.”³⁰

Edith’s decoration of the alb was significant not only for the evidence it provides for her spiritual identification with Mary Magdalene, but also for its implications concerning liturgical display and priestly authority at Wilton. A white linen, fitted tunic that reached to the ankles, the alb was the basic vestment worn by all clerics before the twelfth century.³¹ Decoration of albs was not uncommon: decorative borders could be embroidered along the lower edge of the alb, or around the wrist or neck opening. In the context of female monastic life, however, the iconographic program of Edith’s alb was spiritually assertive, to say the least: by depicting herself on an alb as Mary Magdalene—the “most blessed lover of Christ”—Edith not only placed herself directly at the altar (assuming that the alb was worn by the officiating priest at Wilton), but also pictured herself within salvation history and even implied that she outranked the priest spiritually, associating herself with the one woman who had displaced the male apostles at the moment of Christ’s death and resurrection. Like the priests at Rupertsberg, who ministered to nuns whose virginal priority was announced through their extravagant feast-day attire, the Wilton priest could hardly have escaped the implications of Edith’s alb, which not only invoked women’s historical priority at the cross and tomb, but also claimed the gendered spiritual superiority of monastic women and their privileged intimacy with Christ.

Edith’s alb survives only in the written record—through Goscelin’s description of it. Yet extant liturgical textiles produced by women confirm that women did, indeed, picture themselves at the altar, or in a special relationship with Christ (or with Mary)—despite their exclusion from the priesthood. A set of priestly vestments produced during the mid-thirteenth century by nuns at the Benedictine monastery of Göß featured female figures, chiefly the Virgin Mary, but also Abbess Chunegunde II (before 1239-after 1269), who had commissioned the vestments, and Adala, a patron of the monastery.³² The Göß vestments constitute one of the most remarkable and intact ensembles of medieval liturgical textiles; they include a cope, a chasuble, a dalmatic, a tunic, and an antependium, now in Vienna, as well as further items in Cologne and London.³³ Though designed for use by some of the men who ministered to the Göß community and its parish,³⁴ the vestments were conceived of as gifts to the Virgin Mary.³⁵ The Virgin figures prominently on several of the pieces, notably on the cope (Figure 24), where she appears in a central medallion, nursing the infant Christ child, and on the antependium (Figure 25).

While emphasizing the Virgin as patron of the women’s church, the Göß vestments also highlighted the role of contemporary women as patrons of the church, reminding the priests who wore the cope and chasuble of women’s place in salvation history. The inscription around the central medallion on the cope identifies Chunegunde as its donor.³⁶ Below the medallion, Chunegunde appears with a nun, who is identified by a partial inscription (Figure 26).³⁷ A further image of the abbess appears on the antependium, the textile hanging designed to ornament the front of the main altar at Göß. Here, Chunegunde is depicted to the lower left of the Virgin, who is shown in a central medallion, enthroned and holding the Christ child. Two additional medallions flank this central one, depicting the Annunciation and the Three Magi respectively. Chunegunde, shown outside the medallions, to the lower left of the Virgin, is paralleled to the lower right of the Virgin by an image of Adala, who, with her son Aribo (later bishop of Mainz), had founded the monastery in the early eleventh century.³⁸ The central focus of the antependium—a cover for the altar that women were normally forbidden even to touch—is thus comprised exclusively of female figures: the Virgin, Chunegunde, and Adala. In total, Chunegunde is named five times on the Göß pieces.

A second antependium, dating from the early thirteenth century, also features contemporary women, locating them at the altar even more powerfully than the Göß vestments would (Figure 27).³⁹ Produced at Rupertsberg some fifty years after Hildegard’s death, the antependium is an impressive piece of work, with embroidery in various colors, and gold and silver thread on purple silk, possibly from Byzantium; pearls may once have adorned the scene, but are now lost.⁴⁰ Christ appears at the center of the antependium in a mandorla, surrounded by the four evangelist symbols; around this central image are a series of further figures, among them Martin of Tours and Rupert (two patron saints of the monastery), Hildegard (holding a model of the church), Adelheid (possibly the second abbess of monastery, 1179–1210), Agnes, Duchess of Nancy and Lothringia (patroness of the monastery), Conrad (possibly Conrad of Münster), and Godefridus (presumably the procurator of the monastery).⁴¹ However, the most remarkable aspect of this scene is the series of ten nuns shown along the lower border of the antependium. These women, with their hands and faces raised in adoration to Christ, were members of the Rupertsberg community and likely had a role in making the altar hanging. They are identified on the piece by name: Guda, Sophia, Ida, Agnes, D(omi)na Elis(b) (abbess from 1210–1235), Ida, Sophia, Mehtild, Adelhedis, and Gerdrudis.⁴² The decision to feature these women on the antependium—women who were living and named members of the community—intensifies the association of women with the altar, in this case the high altar of the convent church at Rupertsberg.⁴³ By depicting themselves on a hanging designed for the high altar, the women suggested not just their participation in the Mass, but also their special access to Christ—unmediated by a priest.

A final antependium, produced during the later Middle Ages (and thus well beyond the period that has occupied me here), confirms women’s sense of their special access to Christ, and their public claims—through liturgical textiles—to spiritual priority. The antependium, known as the Wichmannsburger antependium, was produced at the Cistercian monastery of Medingen, one of the Heideklöster, a group of five female houses near Lüneburg, not far from Hamburg.⁴⁴ During the late fifteenth century, these communities formed the center of a monastic reform movement that ushered in new forms of artistic expression, principally manuscript production and textile work. The Wichmannsburger antependium offers a rich example of the incorporation of liturgical texts within a textile piece: it is ornamented with no fewer than 89 figures and 55 inscriptions, in both German and Latin (Figure 28).⁴⁵ Although designed and produced at Medingen, the antependium was displayed in the parish church of Wichmannsburg, a church that had belonged to the women’s house since 1339.⁴⁶ As Henrike Lähnemann shows, the inscriptions, taken largely from Medingen manuscripts, provide the key to understanding the iconographic program of the piece, which—as she argues—was intended to provide spiritual instruction to a lay population.⁴⁷

Most interesting, in light of the concerns of this book, is the centrality to the antependium of the moment of transubstantiation, the moment when the bread and wine become—in the hands of the priest—the body and blood of Christ. This moment is highlighted through the organization of the antependium around the central image of Christ crucified, a towering depiction that bisects the cloth and easily overshadows two other half-size scenes from the life of Christ: the nativity and the resurrection. From the cross, Christ’s nailed hands drip blood, which sustains the grapevines on which various biblical, apostolic, and holy figures are represented as half-figures. The eucharistic emphasis of the whole is underscored through depictions of a woman gathering roses beneath the cross, one of Joshua’s scouts carrying grapes from the Promised Land, and a man praying on bended knee. Among these figures, the viewer’s eye is drawn to the image of a single woman ascending the ladder leading to the pierced side of the dying Lord. A demon below aims an arrow at her, in a bid to prevent her from reaching her goal. In her hands, the woman holds a text band with the inscription: “An desse(n) bom wil ik stighe(n). un(d) de vruch” (Auf diesen Baum werde ich steigen und die Fruch[t nehmen]”, a paraphrase of Song of Songs 7:8: “I will climb the palm tree and gather its fruit”).⁴⁸ The centrality of the female figure underscores the confidence that nuns had in their gendered access to the crucified Christ, despite their official prohibition from the priesthood. It is a woman (not a priest) who ascends the ladder, approaching the dying Christ.

Further instances could be adduced in which women’s liturgical textiles implied their participation at the altar or their spiritual priority at the cross and tomb. Nuns—like the monks and priests discussed in Chapter 2—were well aware of the historical priority of women in the gospel accounts of the passion and resurrection. They identified themselves, at times, with Jesus’s female followers and supporters, women whose faith had so manifestly eclipsed that of the male disciples at the first Easter. Through their patronage and textile production, professed women put these ideas into action, claiming a place at the contemporary altar—the most potent physical symbol of their exclusion from the priesthood and their reliance on ordained men. Viewing women’s textile gifts in this way has profound implications for how we understand the ministrations of priests in female monastic communities, since both the altar and the priest himself were often quite literally “dressed” in textiles that had been commissioned, given, and often even designed and produced by women. These textiles provided a visual context for the performance of the Mass, sometimes asserting women’s spiritual primacy, as the feast-day dress of nuns at Rupertsberg evidently did. It is certainly worth considering the effect of women’s decoration of their altars (at Göß, Rupertsberg, or Wichmannsburg) and their clothing of the priest himself (at Göß and also Wilton, if it was a priest who wore Edith’s alb): did women’s textiles curb or mitigate the authority of the priest? Assuming, as I do, that women intended to speak through their textile gifts, what significance can we attach to the visual programs of the textiles they made for the ornamentation of their churches, and their priests?

Letters from churchmen to secular women suggest that women’s liturgical gifts did serve to “place” women at the altar, allowing them a liturgical role that church councils explicitly and repeatedly refused. In a letter to Queen Matilda of England (d. 1118), Ivo of Chartres (d. 1115/1116), for instance, thanked the queen for a gift of bells to his church and assured her that the sound of the bells would prompt thoughts of her at the altar as the priests consecrated the host. Ivo promised that, through her gift, Matilda would be a participant with the priest in “these [spiritual] goods.”⁴⁹ Hildebert of Lavardin was even more explicit in claiming the spiritual significance of a liturgical gift that Matilda had given, a precious candelabrum. Noting the queen’s disqualification from the priesthood, based on her sex, Hildebert argued that Matilda had become like the holy women of the gospels through her gift. Just as those women had ministered to Christ’s lifeless body through the spices they brought to the tomb, Hildebert wrote that Matilda took an active role in the ritual of the Mass by means of the candelabrum she gave. This gift, he told her, served as a proxy for her presence at the altar: “You also are present when Christ is sacrificed and when he is delivered to the grave; neither is celebrated without your services, since you prepare the lights in that place, where we believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths that the author of light is present.”⁵⁰

Claims that women could participate in the Mass through their liturgical gifts are less explicit in the monastic setting than they are in relation to noble patrons like Matilda. However, it is clear from secular texts that women knew and shared ideas concerning the spiritual implications of their church patronage. Sending a chasuble to the dean of Amiens, the displaced French queen Ingeborg of Denmark (d. c. 1237) expressed her desire to participate in the Mass, commenting: “we have sent a chasuble, asking that you include us in your prayers, and … that you should make us participants in the offices and benefices that are held [in your church].”⁵¹ While less direct, the monastic evidence indicates that nuns, too, saw spiritual meaning in their textile gifts, and, like Ingeborg, sought to participate by their gifts in the liturgical offices celebrated by their priests. According to Goscelin of St. Bertin, the spiritual significance of women’s production and ornamentation of liturgical textiles extended beyond their proxy participation at the altar, allowing them even to shape clerical virtue. In describing Edith’s needlework, Goscelin adopted language from Exodus 28, directly associating her with the sisters of Old Testament priests. As he wrote,

Like the sister of Aaron and the sister of the priests of God, she embroidered with flowers the pontifical vestments of Christ with all her skill and capacity to make splendid. Here purple, dyed with Punic red, with murex and Sidonian shellfish, and twice-dipped scarlet were interwoven with gold; chrysolite, topaz, onyx, and beryl and precious stones were intertwined with gold; union pearls, the shells’ treasure, which only India produces in the east and Britain, the land of the English, in the west, were set like stars in gold; the golden insignia of the cross, the golden images of the saints were outlined with a surround of pearls.⁵²

Allegorical interpretations of Exodus 28 had traditionally emphasized the components of priestly vestments as markers of virtue, ideas that are reflected in medieval vesting prayers.⁵³ Goscelin’s implied claim—that Edith contributed to clerical virtue through her needlework—indicates that churchmen could view religious women as having an influence on the spiritual authority of the priesthood through their production and donation of liturgical textiles.

Women were not fully excluded from the liturgy, even though they were not ordained to the priesthood. Secular women were lavish patrons of the church, whose gifts underscored the historical centrality of women to the unfolding of salvation history. Religious women, too, frequently featured themselves on the liturgical textiles that they made and gave, suggesting their sense that the possibilities for women’s sacramental participation had not been foreclosed.⁵⁴ Like the sisters of Aaron, the Old Testament High Priest, women made and produced the cloths that priests used at the altar. For Abelard, writing to Heloise, the “daughters of Aaron” shared equally with their brothers in the Levite inheritance⁵⁵—a claim that may have inspired more than a few female monastic needle-workers as they imagined an altar that, although officially off limits to women, they might nevertheless approach through their embroidered images.

Women and Priests: “Less Readily Heard”

Attending to women’s liturgical textiles, made to clothe both the altar and the body of their priest, allows us insight into an implicit dialogue between women and their priests that is rarely explicit in textual records. Through nuns’ liturgical textiles, we can glimpse women’s perceptions of themselves as spiritual actors vis à vis Christ, the altar, and their priests. The prevalence of women’s liturgical gifts, their tendency to focus on the altar, and their iconographic programs (which often highlighted themselves or other women), together suggest women’s deep devotion to the Mass and their sense of themselves as centrally involved in the liturgy—regardless of ecclesiastical prohibitions.⁵⁶ Women’s textiles hint, moreover, at their claims to a gendered spiritual priority, even over and above their priests.

A fifteenth-century textile strip, now at Gandersheim, confirms that liturgical textiles could be used by women to assert themselves spiritually, making an argument about female sanctity to their own priests, much as Edith’s alb may have done.⁵⁷ The Gandersheim strip probably served originally as the border for a cope, or pluvial, the outermost vestment worn by a cantor, by priests under certain circumstances, and by clergy during liturgical processions or synods.⁵⁸ In its present state, the strip features five figures, all of them female. Mary is at its center, receiving news of the incarnation from the angel Gabriel. To her left and right a further four women are shown, three of them early Christian virgin martyrs: saints Barbara, Catharine, and Apollonia. In emphasizing these women—first, the mother of Christ, and then other saintly women who had suffered violently for their faith—the makers of the textile may have wished to remind the priests who would ultimately wear it of the central role played by female saints and martyrs in Christian history. Yet, like Edith depicting herself as Mary Magdalene on the alb she embroidered, the women who likely produced this textile also included a contemporary image: the fifth figure featured on the textile is an unidentified canoness (Figure 29). By including this woman among the identifiable saints depicted on the border, the makers suggested the ongoing potential for female sanctity among the women to whom the intended recipient—a priest—presumably ministered. Although this priest held spiritual authority over the women in his care, the visual program of the strip seemingly claimed for women the potential for spiritual superiority: these women could join in the blessed congregation of female saints and virgin martyrs, and so transcend priestly oversight.

The Gandersheim strip postdates the period addressed in this book by several centuries, and yet it is worth considering that eleventh- and twelfth-century women might also have cautioned their priests against wielding their power indiscriminately—even as they relied on them for the sacraments. Once again, Heloise offers an apposite example. As abbess, she knew that male support was necessary to the survival of the Paraclete, and she knew how to induce Abelard to provide it. She was familiar with the biblical examples of John the Evangelist and of the seven deacons chosen to minister to devout women in the early church, both of which she cited in writing to him. She knew, too, of Jerome’s devoted care for the women of Rome, and urged Abelard to adopt Jerome as a model, reminding him of Jerome’s saintly care and concern for Paula, Eustochium, and Marcella (whose example of questioning engagement she adopted for herself). However, Heloise also recognized that not every priest would share Abelard’s ideas concerning the spiritual value of service among women, and she worried that a future priest might be less motivated to support the women, or less able to do so. Underscoring the very real possibility that the Paraclete nuns might have difficulty securing a sympathetic and competent priest after Abelard’s death, Heloise confessed to him her concern that “After you we may perhaps have another to guide us, one who will build something upon another’s foundation, and so, we fear, he may be less likely to feel concern for us, or be less readily heard by us (a nobis minus audiendus); or indeed, he may be no less willing, but less able.”⁵⁹

Heloise’s comment that a future priest might be “less readily heard” by the Paraclete women is telling, hinting at the complex dynamics that governed relations between nuns and their priests: evidently not all priests were “heard” by the nuns under their spiritual supervision, just as Heloise chose not always to “hear” Abelard, departing from his advice on several points. As Heloise herself reveals, religious women were not unquestioning and passive recipients of male pastoral care, but were engaged and sometimes critical in assessing the morality, theological training, and even the ability of their priests. That women could be critical of their priests is equally clear from the Hortus deliciarum, in which priests and monks are regularly depicted in scenes of sin, judgment, and hell: a monk clutching his moneybag is shown being led into hell, a priest tempts a nun with coins as she seeks to climb the ladder of virtue, and avarice is identified as a uniquely priestly sin.⁶⁰ Notably, it is religious men—and not women—who feature as sources of sin and temptation in these images. Religious women were clearly capable of criticizing their priests, whom they might sometimes choose not to “hear.”

Almost two decades ago, Joan Ferrante cautioned against an overly negative interpretation of the possibilities available to medieval women, commenting that “to concentrate too much on the negative is to play into the hands of the patriarchal view that women were able to do little, therefore they did nothing valuable, therefore we do not need to include them in our studies.”⁶¹ Much has changed since Ferrante’s plea for greater attention to “what medieval women could and did do”—a subject whose richness and depth she explored in her work on women’s participation in medieval textual production. Recent work on queenship, power, militancy, holiness, authorship, artistry, patronage, gender and sexuality—as well as a host of other topics—has dramatically expanded our sense of women’s spheres of activity and influence. But a further aspect of Ferrante’s study has attracted less attention. Commenting on the collaboration of men with women in the production of medieval texts, Ferrante noted that it was often clerics who worked together with individual women (generally secular women) to produce histories that not infrequently featured women as subjects of praise. “There is no small irony,” she observed, “in the fact that the same institution that produced such virulent misogyny, the church, also produced some very strong propaganda for women’s claims.”⁶²

In this book, I have tried to heed Ferrante’s call to balance theory and practice—positive and negative—as I focused on medieval priests and their relations with women. Like Ferrante, I acknowledge misogyny, but I have been cautious not to let the presumption that misogyny was dominant and universal obscure the productive ways in which women and men nevertheless interacted, and the positive views of “woman” that some religious men held.⁶³ Instead of focusing on “virulent misogyny,” I have emphasized the “strong propaganda for women’s claims” that emerged from the pens of individual religious men, whether monks or secular priests. In so doing, I have drawn on the work of such scholars as Alcuin Blamires, John Coakley, Julie Hotchin, Mary Martin McLaughlin, Constant Mews, Barbara Newman, Bruce Venarde, and of course Joan Ferrante herself—all of whom have explored the productive possibilities of women’s relations with religious men, and vice versa.

For the most part, however, I have let the medieval sources guide me—drawing me into a world of spiritual symbolism, ambivalence, enthusiasm, and sometimes gender inversion. Women were subject to their priests, but they also warned the men that they might not always be “heard.” Men ministered the sacraments to nuns, controlling a central spiritual symbol and experience, but they also imagined women at the cross and tomb, touching Christ’s body, anointing his head and washing his feet, and witnessing his resurrection. Medieval nuns stood at a distance from the altar (sometimes behind a screen or in a segregated nuns’ choir), yet they placed themselves on it figuratively through their textile gifts, often richly embroidered with images of female saints, of women at the cross, and of themselves, as named individuals, adoring Christ. Men imagined nuns as brides of Christ, attributing a spiritually intimate role to women, while picturing themselves as mere servants and nuns as their dominae. These ideas may never have become dominant in medieval religion, but they were consistently present and consistently known—both to women and to the men whose spiritual services supported and enabled female religious life. My account of these men and of their spiritual and intellectual networks offers a counter to narratives of decline for women and mounting misogyny, while proposing a new way of considering male spirituality—one that recognizes men’s confidence in religious women, who, as brides and “wise virgins”, might guide them, at the last, to the heavenly wedding feast.