BRIDES OF CHRIST, DAUGHTERS OF MEN: Nuremberg Poor Clares in Defense of Their Identity (1524-1529)
1995; Volume: 1; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2615-2282
Autores Tópico(s)Medieval Literature and History
ResumoIt must be due to the grace of God that the poor women are braver than the men. The men's cloisters Were certainly abandoned earlier; they must be more frightened of human beings. (Sabine Pirckheimer, abbess at Bergen) Miseremini imbecillitatis feminae memores, quod a mulieribus geniti estis et illarum ubera suxistis. (From the Schutzschrift of the Poor Clares) Blood Ties and Spiritual Ties(1) In 1518 the Nuremberg humanist Conrad Celtis composed a panegyrical work portraying the topography, customs and institutions of his beloved city. Among other commendable civic establishments, he deemed the religious houses worthy of mention in his Descriptio Urbis Norimbergae. Celtis(1) encomium thus includes a revealing vignette of life in the two convents, St. Catherine and St. Clare, which offered an honorable place of residence to the patriciate's female offspring: There are also two convents of sacred virgins who have devoted themselves to God in perpetual chastity. Thus indeed they are removed from sight and encloistered; neither can they meet with their kin nor with their parents; nor do they enjoy visibility, but rather they live life as if they were dead. Therefore when the priest consecrates a woman the image of death is all around her, prostrated before the altar she is clothed with a white shroud, and as if the tomb were already prepared the priest sprinkles her with holy water, then she is reverenced by incense and other ceremonies for the dead and prayers, which things are performed in the sight of the people. The priest carries a candle in his hand as faras the entrance (through which according to the rule only virgins may enter) and he stands there where the other virgins with song, prayers, and a kiss, receive the one who enters, praising and extolling her for having contemned the delights of luxuries and pride, she has vowed herself to a perpetual yoke and to chastity and the servitude of the saints of God than which no liberty is truer.(2) The strict boundary between life inside the confines of the convent and life outside in the world seems to have struck this contemporary observer as the most remarkable facet of women's cloisters. Just like death, he contends, convent life robs parents and kin of their daughters' presence. Celtis finds confirmation for his assessment in the customary ritual of entry whose core component was patterned after a funeral ceremony. As he describes it, the ritual seems to be an elaboration on the theme of separation from the world. Throughout its course, the virgin undertakes a spatial, spiritual, and social journey. Divorcing herself from the sphere of the civic commune of spectators with its ever-present temptation of urban luxuries, she undergoes an experience of social death. This is encapsulated spatially in her descent into a tomb and spiritually in the performance of funeral rites. After death, the great equalizer, has stripped her of her former self and of her ties to the city's people and pleasures, she is ready to cross the threshold into a new life and be received in the embrace of her new community. At the transformative journey's end stands liberty, Celtis suggests, which supplants the constraints of her worldly existence. These contemporary observations are intriguing. A close look at the virgin's tri-partite journey reveals that it bears resemblance to the rites of passage whose threefold process of separation, liminality and reaggregation has been traced by the folklorist Van Gennep in a cross-cultural context.(3) According to Van Gennep such rites facilitate major transitions from one social place and its implicated roles to another locus in society where different sets of human relationships require different behavioral norms. In the case of the Nuremberg nuns, the reader, through Celtis' eyes, sees them departing from their roles as obedient daughters of wealthy patricians in order to move into a community of virgins dedicated to the service of Christ. …
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