The Practice of Penance in Communities of Benedictine Women Religious in Central Medieval England
2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 92; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/689410
ISSN2040-8072
Autores Tópico(s)Early Modern Women Writers
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeThe Practice of Penance in Communities of Benedictine Women Religious in Central Medieval EnglandKatie Ann-Marie BugyisKatie Ann-Marie BugyisKatie Ann-Marie Bugyis is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Saint Martin's University in Lacey, WA (e-mail: [email protected])PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn the recension of the Life of Edith of Wilton (c. 961–c. 984) that Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (c. 1050–c. 1107) likely wrote for her later consorors around 1080,1 he included a striking passage describing the saint's imitatio apostolorum. This passage is found shortly after his account of the heavenly raptures in which Edith's contemplative praxis climaxed. In her private devotions, he tells us, she chose the apostles as her primary intercessors, particularly the martyr Saint Denis, because his intercession gave her unfettered access to the divine presence, and her experiences of communing with this presence in turn effected a radical transformation of her spiritual powers. Goscelin explains: "Now, having been taken up into the grace of Christ, she enjoys the apostolic power of binding and loosing, and releases the suppliants bound with iron, and restrains the guilty without iron; she stands forth as the alumna of the apostles, their daughter, worshiper, and close imitator."2 Through Christ's grace, Edith was entrusted with the very power that he had bestowed on his apostles: the potentia ligandi atque solvendi.3 Those chained to sin or physical infirmity who came to her in humble contrition, she set free, and those who refused to repent, she bound in judgment. As the "alumna of the apostles," she stood in succession to them; thus, whose sins she forgave were forgiven them, and whose sins she retained were retained.According to the dominant patristic and medieval exegesis of the scriptural passages pertaining to this transfer of potentia,4 and the theological arguments for and canonical legislation on the practice of penance that drew upon it,5 the apostolic empowerment of a woman religious to bind and loose sins would have been highly unusual, if not controversial, as these accounts affirmed that the ministry of bishops and priests, not women religious, preserved this power in the church. The potential for this passage to elicit controversy seems to be confirmed by the fact that Goscelin did not include it in the recension of the vita that he dedicated to Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury (1070–89).6 But if this passage was indeed controversial, why did Goscelin include it in the recension for Wilton? To remind Edith's later consorors of an earlier tradition of women religious hearing the confessions of others? Or to offer saintly sanction of a tradition that was still ongoing at Wilton? Ultimately, both reasons may have motivated Goscelin's inclusion of this account, for, as this article will show, medieval English Benedictine women religious not only heard the confessions of their community members in the more distant reaches of their Anglo-Saxon past,7 but they continued to do so through the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the very time when many scholars claim that women religious were effectively stripped of any kind of agency that was perceived to be sacerdotal in character.8In Sarah Hamilton's study of the varieties of penitential practices cultivated on the Continent during the tenth and eleventh centuries, she observes that, in previous scholarship on this topic, there is a conspicuous lacuna: it rarely says anything about how penance was viewed and practiced within different monastic contexts. She wonders whether this omission "owes something to the monks' own view of their life which saw penance as peculiar to laymen; monks by entering the religious life had undergone a second baptism, similar to that of penance, by swearing to live a life without sin, and thus had foregone the need for penance."9 The distinction, then, between monastic discipline and liturgical forms of penance—if indeed there ever was one during the period Hamilton surveys—is often difficult to discern when studying the extant commentaries on the Benedictine rule and monastic customaries.10 Confession of a monk's sins either privately before his abbot or communally at chapter, and the requisite performance of satisfaction, sufficed to cleanse him of any sin.Only with the increased attempts to clericalize the practice of penance made by conciliar and episcopal legislation, penitentials, and theological treatises—which were copied and circulated to greater effect from the ninth through the twelfth centuries—did the prescriptive sources that ordered the lives of men and women religious try to superadd the practice of confession to a priest to the monastic disciplina. Most male Benedictine communities were equipped to accommodate this change to their practice of penance without external ministerial assistance. Although the Benedictine rule does not envision the monastery as a community of ordained priests, it does admit the possibility that either some priests may choose to become monks, or that some monks may choose to become priests.11 And over the course of the tenth through the twelfth centuries, Benedictine communities, as well as other forms of monastic life, did increasingly become more clerical in cast.12 Consequently, as greater pressure was placed on male monastic communities to conform their practice of penance to the wider church's, most of these communities had abbots and other senior monastic officials who were ordained and, thus, capable of hearing confessions as priests. Not so for female monastic communities. Their lay status would have barred them from performing the ministries that were becoming more clericalized, like confession, and, in consequence, necessitated the intervention of ordained men in their spiritual care. Or so it would seem. The chief aim of this article will be to reassess the impact of both local and more universal attempts to clericalize penance on the practice of Benedictine women religious in central medieval England. But such a reassessment cannot be made on the basis of extant ecclesiastical and monastic prescriptions alone.Seeking to trace the history of English women religious's practice of penance during the central Middle Ages, this article will focus on the prayers of confession that are found in surviving prayer books and psalters that were produced by religious women or altered for their use. Returning to the very books that women religious prayed with offers a closer view of their liturgical lives in action—from how they copied and adapted prayer texts for their own penitential use to how they scripted and likely exercised various confessional roles within their communities. More so than extant prescriptive sources that sought to regulate their liturgical and pastoral ministries, these books preserve their primary documents of practice, revealing how they actually ministered to their own and to those who sought out their spiritual care.To contextualize and to breathe life into these prayers of confession, a variety of other sources—monastic regulae, customaries, ecclesiastical legislation, theological treatises, and saints' lives—will also be drawn upon. As has already been shown by the introductory exemplum from Goscelin's Vita Edithe, hagiographical sources written in the eleventh and twelfth centuries about late Anglo-Saxon women religious provide helpful witnesses to contemporary instances of and attitudes toward the practice of penance in women's monastic houses. Not only were many of these sources commissioned by women's houses, but their very authoring often depended on consulting, even appropriating, records composed and preserved by the women religious themselves. The Vita Edithe offers an excellent case in point: Abbess Godgifu (c. 1067–90) commissioned Goscelin to write it circa 1080, and he clearly incorporated oral and written sources maintained by the saint's consorors at Wilton throughout the late tenth and eleventh centuries.13A majority of the extant hagiographical sources and documents of practice originate from communities of women religious with venerable histories, considerable wealth, and profitable connections to royalty and high-ranking nobility.14 The most significant evidence survives from Wilton, Nunnaminster, Wherwell, and Leominster. According to Domesday Book, Wilton Abbey, located in Wiltshire, was the wealthiest women's monastic house in 1086, with holdings valued at £296 1s 6d.15 Its substantial endowment was owed, in large measure, to the abbey's close connections to the West Saxon royal house, which were maintained throughout the tenth and eleventh centuries. Ælfflæd, the second wife of King Edward the Elder (899–924), along with her two daughters, Eadflæd and Æthelhild, were buried at Wilton, and Wulfthryth (d. c. 1000), the former consort of King Edgar (959–75), entered Wilton circa 964, along with her daughter, Edith, to become the community's abbess. During the late Anglo-Saxon period, Wilton also functioned as "an upper-class boarding school," educating the daughters of royalty and nobility.16 Even after the Conquest, Wilton's dominance among communities of women religious, with respect to both wealth and power, persisted. According to the Valor ecclesiasticus, compiled in 1535 at the behest of King Henry VIII (1509–47) before the dissolution of the monasteries, it was the fourth wealthiest female house, valued at £601.17Nunnaminster, or St. Mary's Abbey, in Hampshire enjoyed similar connections to the West Saxon royal house, though they proved less profitable than Wilton's; its holdings were valued at £79 15s in Domesday.18 It was founded near the very seat of royal power in Winchester at the initiative of Queen Ealhswith (d. 902), the wife of King Alfred (871–99), and its construction was completed by her son, Edward the Elder, in the early years of his reign.19 One of Edward's daughters, Eadburh (921 × 924–951 × 953), also entered the community at the age of three and, upon her death, was buried there and venerated as a saint.20 Nunnaminster continued to house women religious up until its dissolution in 1539, but its holdings remained modest throughout its history. With holdings valued at £179 7s 2d in 1535, it did not rank among the twenty wealthiest communities of women religious in the Valor ecclesiasticus.21For much of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the holdings of Wherwell Abbey in Hampshire amounted to less than Nunnaminster's; they were valued at £41 6s 4d in Domesday.22 Yet the abbey also benefited from close ties to the West Saxon royal house. The founder of Wherwell was almost certainly Queen Ælfthryth (d. 999 × 1001), the wife of King Edgar. A charter of King Æthelred II (978–1013, 1014 –16), dated to 1002, granting lands and privileges to the abbey, credits Ælfthryth with possessing and diligently building up the abbey while she was alive.23 An unnamed daughter of Æthelred also was the abbess of the house in the mid-eleventh century. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in 1051 her brother, Edward the Confessor (1043–66), had his wife, Edith (d. 1075), imprisoned at Wherwell.24 In 1141, the abbey's fortunes were nearly completely devastated when, at the height of the civil war, the troops of Queen Matilda (d. 1152) set fire to the church, where the community had sought refuge.25 It would take nearly fifty years for the abbey to recover fully from this event. Not until the abbacy of Matilda de Bailleul (c. 1174–1212), a young widow and the daughter of a Flemish lord, whose psalter will be analyzed later, did Wherwell begin to prosper again. According to the Valor ecclesiasticus, Wherwell was the ninth wealthiest community of women religious, with holdings valued at £339.26Prior to the eleventh century, there is no evidence for a community of women religious at Leominster in Herefordshire; thus the date and circumstances of its foundation remain unknown.27 Beyond an early eleventh-century prayer book, which will be discussed at length in what follows, the first clear reference to the abbey's existence is found in the C version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which records for the year 1046 the abduction of the community's abbess, Eadgifu, by Swein (d. 1052), son of Earl Godwine of Wessex (d. 1053).28 Eadgifu ultimately was returned to Leominster when King Edward the Confessor denied Swein's proposal of marriage, and the abbey seems to have continued housing women religious until at least 1086. Domesday Book names the abbess of Leominster as the holder of a hide at Fencote in Herefordshire and records the revenue of the manor of Leominster: "£60 besides the provision of the nuns (victus monialium)."29 This manor actually was held by Queen Edith by at least 1066, at which time it then passed to King William I (1066–87), but the record of its revenue in Domesday may still reveal that Leominster's wealth was comparable to that of women's monastic houses founded by the West Saxon royal house, like Wherwell, whose lands were also held for a time by the reigning queen.30 By 1121, Leominster definitely ceased to support a community of women religious because its lands, along with those of two other "destroyed" communities, were used by King Henry I (1100–35) to refound Reading Priory.31Arguably, the extant documents of practice and hagiographical sources, given that they nearly exclusively represent communities with significant wealth, status, and power, offer a limited view of the agency and creativity English women religious exercised in their individual and corporate practice of penance during the central Middle Ages. The ability of the women religious at elite houses to continue serving as confessors for their own consorors and for those outside their communities may be owed chiefly to their privileged socioeconomic positions, which afforded their praxis greater insulation against the effects of various local and more universal reform efforts. In the absence of evidence to the contrary from a more diverse sampling of women's monastic houses, this explanation remains plausible. Nonetheless, the confessional roles that this article will recover for the women religious at Wilton, Nunnaminster, Wherwell, and Leominster are still remarkable not only because they were ostensibly circumscribed by contemporary prescriptive sources but also because they have long been denied in the secondary literature on medieval women religious. Even more importantly, the recovery of these roles may inspire a renewed search for similar evidence from houses of more modest means, thus broadening our view of the practice of penance in communities of women religious in central medieval England.Prescribed PracticeChapters 23 to 30 of the Benedictine rule generally treat the manner and measure of discipline for minor and graver faults by the abbot and other select senior members. But in these chapters, no mention is made of monks making private confessions to their abbot.32 The word confessio only appears once in the rule, in the description of the fifth step of humility in chapter 7: "The fifth step of humility is that if any evil thoughts enter into [the monk's] heart, or if he commits any evil deeds in secret, he should humbly confess them to his abbot, not conceal them."33 The admission of fault and the performance of satisfaction are also mentioned both in chapter 45, on mistakes committed in the liturgy, for which penance is to be undertaken immediately before the entire community,34 and in chapter 46, on faults committed in other forms of work, which, if publicly known, are to be admitted to and repented of before the abbot and the entire community, but, if committed in secret, are to be revealed "only to the abbot or spiritual elders, who know how to cure their own and others' wounds and not disclose or publicize them."35 These three references to the practice of penance in the rule provide few directives on how confession and satisfaction were to be performed, particularly which prayers were to be recited by penitents and confessors. Given the paucity of details, subsequent monastic reforms, inspired by a Benedictine zeal, tried to elaborate on the penitential practice recommended by the rule.One of the oldest and most influential commentaries on the rule written during the Carolingian reforms of the early ninth century was the Expositio in regulam Sancti Benedicti by Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel (fl. 805–26).36 In his exposition of the fifth step of humility, he explains the meaning behind the rule's citation of Psalm 36.5, "Reveal your way to the Lord and hope in him": "That is, reveal your actions, in which there lies hidden an awareness of sin, through confession to the abbot, whom the Lord gave to you as a vicar for himself, and hope in the Lord, that he may mercifully grant you pardon for what you have committed."37 The abbot is God's chosen representative within the community; he mediates God's forgiveness through hearing confessions and administering fitting penance. Confession to the abbot is a necessary part of monastic penitential practice because this act not only engenders within the repentant monk the proper humble disposition that is required for the full forgiveness of sins, but it also admits that the abbot's prayer alone has the power to release the penitent from any negligence, as Smaragdus claims in his commentary on chapter 46 of the rule, citing the authority of John Cassian (c. 360–435).38Smaragdus's exposition of chapter 27, which pertains to the manner in which the abbot should be solicitous for those excommunicated from the common table, prayer, and fellowship of the community, elaborates on the rule's analogy of the abbot as a physician to sin-sick brethren: "The Lord's place is held in the monastery by a good abbot, who must take care of sick souls so that they may be healed from sins and vices, and, having recovered their former health and being once again whole, they may serve their Creator."39 Smaragdus stresses again that the abbot holds the place of Christ in the community and, thus, is specially charged with healing those wounded by sin. The abbot must treat all those under his care as Christ would; like the bonus pastor, he is to make sure that every stray member of his flock is brought back to the right way. The rule's call to the abbot to imitate the good shepherd at the end of chapter 27 is evocative, and Smaragdus comments on it at length because he seeks to make abbots aware of the fact that their pastoral care should entail more than simply maintaining proper discipline through correction according to the rule. Abbots will be held accountable for the salvation of their entire community, and just as Christ was prepared to lay down his life for his sheep, so too must the abbot be willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of his own.40Nowhere in the Expositio's treatment of proper penitential praxis does Smaragdus explicitly mention that the abbot, because he is to hear the confessions of his community members, must be a priest. But this fact is not surprising given that the rule does not stipulate this requirement. Smaragdus only hints at the necessity of the abbot's ordained status in his discussion of confession in his Diadema monachorum, a florilegium of patristic sources covering diverse aspects of monastic life according to topical arrangement.41 In chapter 16, De confessione, he opens with a citation from the epistle of James: "Confess your sins to one another, and pray one for another that you may be saved" (5.16). Then, without explicit citation, he provides the exposition of this passage offered by the venerable Bede (673/4 –735): "We should, one to another, confess daily and light sins to equals, and believe that we are saved by their daily prayer. As for the impurity of more grievous leprosy, according to the law, we should make it known to a priest, and, according to his judgment, we should attend to purifying ourselves in the manner and for the amount of time that he orders."42 Bede makes a clear distinction between venial and mortal sins: the former can be confessed to any faithful Christian, the latter only to a priest. Smaragdus's inclusion of this distinction in his chapter on confession is noteworthy because it suggests that he deemed it applicable to the monastic life. Monks could confess venial sins to any of their monastic brethren, but mortal sins only to a priest. And given the important role that both the Benedictine rule and Smaragdus's Expositio ascribe to the abbot in the monastic practice of penance, especially in disciplining graver faults,43 it is likely right to think that the priest to be sought out for the confession of mortal sins is the abbot.Smaragdus's Expositio and Diadema found a receptive audience among the English Benedictine reformers of the second half of the tenth century.44 Significantly for the history of the practice of penance in communities of women religious, an early twelfth-century copy of the Diadema, now Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 451, was made by a scriptrix at Nunnaminster.45 Smaragdus's chapter on confession appears without alteration; consequently, so does Bede's distinction between the confession of venial and mortal sins.46 Given that the Nunnaminster scriptrix likely copied Smaragdus's Diadema for public reading at evening collation to supplement lections from the Benedictine rule at morning chapter, as Smaragdus himself had suggested,47 pressing questions arise: Did its teachings on the monastic life affect the praxis of the women religious at Nunnaminster? If so, how? Did the women religious believe that they could confess only their venial sins to their abbess, given that she was not ordained to the priesthood, and reserve the confession of their mortal sins to male chaplains or visiting priests? Or, following the Benedictine rule, did they simply confess all their sins, whether of a lighter or graver nature, to their abbess? At this stage, answers to these questions are not easily given. They will only emerge later after analyzing feminized versions of the Benedictine rule and the surviving prayer books from several communities of women religious, some of which are of Nunnaminster provenance. For now, it suffices to say that the confession of mortal sins to priests became a stated ideal in both communities of men and women religious.The English Benedictine reform also sought to provide greater definition to the practice of penance in women's monastic houses. The Regularis concordia, the monastic agreement compiled at a synod held at Winchester circa 970, which regulated all communities of Benedictine religious throughout England, offered multiple occasions during the yearly monastic cursus when a religious could make confession: daily at chapter and at compline, on Sundays at chapter, on Christmas Eve at chapter, on Maundy Thursday at prime, and on the first day of the Easter Octave at chapter.48 Though the prooemium to the Concordia explicitly addresses both men and women religious,49 the predominance of male grammatical forms throughout all the surviving manuscript copies makes it difficult to determine whether the Concordia's framers intended for the practice of penance in male and female monastic houses to be identical. The sole surviving fragment of a feminized Old English Concordia, found in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 201, does not supply any directives to help answer this question, given that it only includes the portion of the Concordia that details the liturgical rites from Palm Sunday through part of Good Friday, and its adaptation of these rites for female monastic participation is not explicitly marked in the text until the performance of the mandatum of the poor on Maundy Thursday.50 Its version of the communal confession that was to take place at prime on Maundy Thursday shows no signs of adaptation for female use.51The Old English translation and adaptation of the Benedictine rule for women religious, made before the Concordia's promulgation by one its chief architects, Æthelwold, bishop of Winchester (963–84), perhaps during his time as a monk at Glastonbury Abbey (c. 939–c. 954), offers a more revealing witness to the practice of penance that at least one of the tenth-century reformers sought to promote among female monastic communities.52 Æthelwold's adaptation does not change the rule's directives regarding the proper performance of confession and satisfaction substantially, save replacing all the masculine grammatical forms with feminine ones, thus naming the abbess as the primary recipient of her community members' confessions.53 However, according to chapter 62 of Æthelwold's adaptation, the abbess potentially does not assume this role unaided. Where the rule addresses the ordination of monks to the priesthood, Æthelwold's adaptation instead discusses how an abbess is to select priests for the ministrations of the Eucharist and penance, and how this male presence is to be negotiated by the community. Concerning the administration of penance, Æthelwold's adaptation states: "If anyone should wish to confess her sins to a priest, if the abbess should permit, let her do it in the church so that she is seen by others, as it is preserved in the sayings of the holy fathers."54 Mechthild Gretsch and Rohini Jayatilaka have noted that the source text for the new version of chapter 62 is chapter 27 of the Institutio sanctimonialium, a guide for canonesses promulgated at the synod at Aachen in 816.55 And the passage in Æthelwold's adaptation quoted above incorporates the corresponding passage in the Institutio nearly verbatim: "If anyone should wish to confess her sins to a priest, let her do it in the church so that she is seen by others, as it is preserved in the sayings of the holy fathers."56 The only departure is the second protasis found in Æthelwold's adaptation: "si permiserit abbatissa." The addition of abbatial permission to the process of sacerdotal confession in Æthelwold's adaptation is a fascinating one, but it accords with the chapter's other departures from the Institutio. Æthelwold's adaptation consistently empowers the abbess in her selection and oversight of visiting priests, and the addition of the second protasis authorizes her essential role in her community's practice of penance, even when a priest is present.Books for PracticeThe scholarship on the practice of penance in communities of women religious in England during the Middle Ages has paid considerable attention to the early Anglo-Saxon period—and with good reason. The exempla offered by Tetta of Wimbourne, Leoba of Bischofsheim (d. 782), and several of the abbesses who appear in the correspondence to and from the missionary Boniface (672 × 675?–754) vividly attest that early Anglo-Saxon women religious, particularly abbesses, could and did exercise primary control over the practice of penance in their communities, including those that were double monasteries. They heard the confessions of fellow sisters and brothers, prescribed suitable penances, and served as mediators of God's judgment and mercy. Stephanie Hollis is likely right to observe that, given the nonsacramental character of confession at this time, "the confessional ministry of an abbess would be scarcely distinguishable from that of a priest," and that, given the shortage of priests, many abbesses offered this ministry not only to members of their own communities but also to lay women and men affiliated with, located nearby, or on pilgrimage at their monasteries.57Hollis's research, as well as Dagmar Schneider's, has been instrumental to the recovery of the confessional roles that women religious assumed during the early Anglo-Saxon period, but they, and those that have furthered their research, maintain that these roles completely disappeared (or were suppressed) during the recurring Danish invasions, the Benedictine reforms of the second half of the tenth century, the Norman Conquest, and the more sweeping, church-wide reforms of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, the so-called Gregorian reforms.58 But such exclusive focus on the ruptures in the history of communities of women religious has concealed the many continuities across the early and central Middle Ages that can be detected through detailed analysis of their surviving documents of practice. This evidence reveals that, in some communities, women religious continued to hear the confessions of their consorors, just as their early Anglo-Saxon forebears had done, and just as the original Benedictine rule had prescribed.The Book of NunnaminsterThe earliest surviving example of a confession form that scripts a woman as both confessor and penitent is an early tenth-century addition to an early ninth-century Mercian prayer book, now London, British Library, MS Harley 2965 (Fig. 1). The so-called Book of Nunnaminster is a collection of texts, chiefly composed of the Passion narratives from the Gospels of Mark, Luke, and John and long meditational prayers.59 Evidence of the prayer book's Nunnaminster provenance is found on fol. 40v, where an early tenth-century hand delineated in Old English the boundaries of the property that Queen Ealhswith "has" at Winchester; these boundaries encompass most of the site where Nunnaminster was located.60 Around the same time that this addition was made, a different hand copied the confession form that appears on the opposite recto. It cannot be determined whether this prayer book was once in Ealhswith's possession and then gifted to Nunnaminster, or given to the community independently of Ealhswith's patronage. It certainly was not produced at Nunnaminster, as Ealhswith did not initiate the founding of the community until the late ninth centur
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