H-France Review Vol. 2 (June 2002), No. 44
Julie Ann Smith, Ordering Women's Lives. Penitentials and Nunnery Rules in the Early Medieval West. Burlington, Vt. and Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. 246 pp. Bibliography and index. ISBN 1-8592-8238-5.
Review by Constance H. Berman, University of Iowa.
Smith has brought together the major published sources and studies on
early medieval nunnery rules and references to women in penitentials
for the early middle ages. In an introduction, conclusion and six
chapters, she treats women in the penitentials (Ch.1, "History", Ch.
2, "Sexuality", Ch.3, "Work") and women in the rules for nuns
(Ch.4, "History", Ch. 5, "Enclosure", Ch. 6, "Work and Abstinence").
The most impressive segment is Ch. 6, on work and abstinence as
described in the nunnery rules, which provides a summary of what each
rule says on work-related topics: prayer, textile production, duties
of abbess or prioress. Smith's analysis suggests that nunnery rules,
much more than those for monks, emphasized means of support.
Smith asserts that hers is a book about norms, not practice.
Explicitly excluding any speculation on the actual lives of women and
instead limiting herself to what churchmen wrote in penitentials, rules
for nuns and, to a certain extent, in the legislation of church
councils or secular law, she provides a compendium of facts about how
male compilers of penitentials and male authors of rules for nuns
thought nuns and other women should behave. The reason to tie them
together, as Smith says in her concluding paragraph, is that "the texts
were not simply designed to condition and constrain the behaviour of
audiences but were also part of a more comprehensive project of
Christianisation and imposition of clerical views of how the world
should be" (p. 226).
But whereas monastic rules would have been widely read by and to
communities of women (and their composition would have been affected by
the conditions of life in monastic communities, as Smith implies with
regard to the rule of Donatus of Besançon), there is little evidence
that penitentials were ever read or listened to by women at all, except
perhaps as excerpts quoted to penitents concerning their particular
sins. Moreover, can we assert the importance of the penitential texts
on the basis of existing editions without discussing who preserved such
texts in manuscripts, the manuscript context in which they survive, and
the numbers which did in fact survive? Certainly, the assertion that
penitentials were widely used in the parish confessional needs
discussion of when confession began to be common in the early middle
ages.
In limiting her gaze to what is available in the prescriptive documents
of the early middle ages about women and their religious lives, Smith
takes little account of a considerable development in the literature on
women's monasticism and the church more generally, albeit much of it
concerns a slightly later period. Many of us working on medieval
religious women would now reject the single-gendered approach which we
applauded in the publication of Suzanne Wemple's, Women in Frankish
Society: Marriage and the Cloister, 500-900 (Philadelphia, 1981). For
how can we evaluate what we are told about women, if we do not know how
men were treated, as is done by Penelope Johnson, Equal in Monastic
Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France (Chicago, 1991), a work
not cited in Smith's bibliography? While Smith does not hesitate to
slide backwards in time from the early middle ages to invoke the most
misogynist statements of Jerome or the Apocrypha and to treat
Augustine's rule as an early medieval one, most evidence and studies
considered concern the earliest rules for nuns up to the eleventh-
century penitentials of Burchard of Worms and go no further forward in
time than that. While Smith cites Bruce Venarde, Women's Monasticism
and Medieval Society: Nunneries in France and England, 890-1215
(Cornell University Press, 1997), presumably because it treats the
tenth-century Regularis Concordia, she does not seem to have looked at
Venarde's conclusions about how many more houses of nuns there were in
the central middle ages than we thought when Wemple published the study
cited above. Indeed, there is much recent literature on medieval nuns
(some of it appearing since Smith completed her work) that would have
aided in her understanding. I would add to the bibliography several
important books and articles by American, British and other European
scholars published between 1989 and 2001.[1] Reading those works would
have allowed Smith to progress beyond assumptions about the value of
women's prayers that have disappeared in the new feminist analysis of
religious women in the middle ages.
Sometimes there are statements that just don't make sense. Smith cites
Elizabeth Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and its
Commentators, 1298-1545 (Washington, D.C., 1997) to document the
following statement: "Indeed, the strict claustration which was
insisted upon in the rules for the new orders which emerged from the
Cluniac reforms of the tenth-century onwards could not completely
stifle the desire for non-monastic life among women religious, and even
Benedict VIII's publication of the bull Periculoso (1298) could not
hinder the formation of non-monastic communities such as those of the
Beguines or inhibit women's embracing of alternative religious
movements such as the Cathars or the Humiliati" (p. 176). As even non-
specialist readers may know, the rules for new orders did not emerge
from Cluniac reforms, but in reaction to them, while we have clear
documentation for the Beguines from the early thirteenth century, for
the Cathars from at least the mid twelfth century, and the Humiliati
from about the same time. Moreover, as I argue in The Cistercian
Evolution. The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-Century
Europe (Philadelphia, 2000), those new orders turn out not to have
emerged until late in the twelfth century.
A few minor misstatements need correction. What might be considered by
some a double-house at Molesme is not a daughter of Cluny, as is stated
on p. 145; indeed, most literature describes Marcigny as the sole
daughter-house for women of the abbey Cluny under the control of a
prioress answering to Cluny's abbot-and perhaps this is a place where
the author simply misspeaks. Similarly, it is not clear that
Benedict's rule is "[t]he first known Western rule to specify the
requirements for the daily practice of the members of a religious
community," for Benedict drew on other known sources. If Smith is
arguing that those earlier sources did not specify any of the daily
routine, that point should have been clarified. There is conflation in
Smith's treatment of the Benedictine Rule's call for monastic stability
as equivalent to the "encloistering" of nuns for the protection of
their chastity; I think it important to keep these two concepts
separated, for having a single monastic compound or enclosure in which
everything could be done without having to be dependent on the outside
world should not be equated with "encloistering."
Despite the limited scope, there are interesting materials to be
gleaned from this study. If one wants to know about the regulation of
work in women's religious communities in the early middle ages, it is
here in great detail. If one is interested in knowing what Augustine,
Caesarius, or Burchard of Worms had to say about women, it is found
here. The study is especially interesting when Smith does occasionally
slip beyond her self-imposed boundaries, for instance in her discussion
of the recent literature on excavations at early medieval nunnery and
double-monastery sites. Although it could have been informed by a wider
reading of recent publications on medieval women's monasticism, this is
a contribution of great value for what it has made available for
teaching purposes, for students writing essays and for scholars.
NOTES
[1] Brian Golding, Gilbert of Sempringham and the Gilbertine Order,
c. 1130-c.1300 (Oxford, 1995); Berenice Kerr, Religious Life for
Women, c. 1100- c. 1350: Fontevraud in England (Oxford, 1999);
Paulette L'Hermite-LeClercq, Le monachisme féminin dans la société de
son temps: Le monastère de La Celle (XIe-début du XVIe siècle) (Paris,
1989); Maureen Miller, The Formation of a Medieval Church:
Ecclesiastical Change in Verona, 950-1150 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993);
Marilyn Oliva, The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England
Female Monasteries in the Diocese of Norwich 1350-1450 (Woodbridge,
1998); Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies, Beguine Communities in the
Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565 (Philadelphia, 2001); Sally
Thompson, Women Religious: the Founding of English Nunneries after the
Norman Conquest (Oxford, 1991); and articles by Constance H.
Berman, "Cistercian Women and Tithes," Cîteaux 49 (1998): 95-128; "Were
There Twelfth-Century Cistercian Nuns?" Church History 68 (1999): 438-68; or "The Labors of Hercules, the Cartulary, Church and Abbey for
Nuns of La Cour-Notre-Dame-de-Michery," The Journal of Medieval History
26 (2000): 33-70; and "Cistercian Nuns and the Development of the
Order: The Abbey of Saint-Antoine-des-Champs outside Paris," in The
Joy of Learning and the Love of God. Essays in Honor of Jean Leclercq,
OSB, ed. E. Rozanne Elder, pp. 121-56 (Kalamazoo, 1995).
Constance H. Berman,
University of Iowa,
constance-berman@uiowa.edu
Copyright © 2002 by the Society for French Historical Studies, all rights reserved. The Society for French Historical Studies permits the electronic distribution for nonprofit educational purposes, provided that full and accurate credit is given to the author, the date of publication, and its location on the H-France website. No republication or distribution by print media will be permitted without permission. For any other proposed uses, contact the Editor-in-Chief of H-France.
H-France Review Vol. 2 (June 2002), No. 44
ISSN 1553-9172
