Intercessors

Chapter 5 spotlights Benedictine nuns as intercessors, focusing especially on how they served those who were not members of their communities through offering prayers. This role—both in its idealized forms and in its lived realities—is reconstructed through the conventual and personal seals, charters, letters, mortuary rolls, prayer books, and psalters that women’s communities received, produced, and used. This chapter challenges the persistent scholarly assumption that nuns’ intercessory prayers depreciated in value over the central Middle Ages because, unlike their male counterparts, they could not offer the individualized forms of commemoration increasingly desired by prospective patrons—namely Masses—without the assistance of resident chaplains or visiting priests. Comparative analysis of the extant documentary sources from religious communities in Oxfordshire reveals that the nuns of Godstow Abbey rivaled neighboring monks, canons, and Templars in attracting lay donations in return for certain spiritual benefits, particularly prayers for the remission of sins and salvation.

Confessors

The chief aim of Chapter 4 is to reassess the impact of both local and more universal reform efforts to clericalize the practice of penance in communities of Benedictine nuns during the central Middle Ages. According to the prevailing historiography, various reform efforts over the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries effectively charged priests with hearing nuns’ confessions. Yet, as this chapter shows, study of the extant prayer books and psalters, produced by or altered for nuns’ use, demonstrates that they served as confessors not only for their consorors but also for visiting pilgrims and laity affiliated with their communities. Several of these prayers are adaptations of mass-texts traditionally said by priests within the context of the Mass and would have cast the women who recited them in markedly sacerdotal roles and even recognized their performance of ministries around the altars of their churches, including handling the eucharistic vessels and consecrated elements.

Evangelists

The liturgical proclamation of the gospel serves as the focus of Chapter 3. The evidence examined in this chapter shows that Benedictine nuns in England—like their male counterparts, but contrary to the prescriptive sources ostensibly regulating their practices—read the gospels in a variety of liturgical and communal contexts during the central Middle Ages: Matins on Sundays and on feast days, chapter, and refectory. This chapter also demonstrates that many nuns possessed the requisite literacies to read and comprehend the scriptures for their personal edification and to copy and adapt these texts for their communities’ use. Paleographical, codicological, and textual analyses of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 155, an early eleventh-century gospel book from Barking Abbey, are especially revealing of how nuns could copy and adapt a book for liturgical proclamation. These women were capable of evangelizing the Word through their textual productions, verbal instructions, and ministerial actions.

Pastors

Chapter 2 serves as a companion piece to its predecessor. It examines the pastoral and liturgical roles and responsibilities assumed by abbesses and prioresses, underscoring the authority they exercised in and outside of their communities. Identifying the nuns known to have held these offices and detailing how they fulfilled them set the stage for the following three chapters because abbesses and prioresses were most often charged with reading the gospel liturgically, hearing confessions, and leading their consorors in offering intercessory prayers. This chapter contextualizes these ministries by associating them with some of the other acts abbesses and prioresses performed as pastors: raising spiritual daughters, grooming successors, and instructing those entrusted to their care, including affiliated and visiting laity. To gain access to these officers’ lived experiences, this chapter gives special consideration to sources addressing how they, their consorors, their admirers, and even their detractors viewed their roles and responsibilities.

Memory-Keepers

Chapter 1 details the roles and responsibilities incumbent on two monastic officers—cantors and sacristans—who, though indispensable to the production and direction of their communities’ liturgies, have been neglected in histories of medieval monasticism. This chapter identifies nuns known to have held these offices and examines the different ways they created, preserved, and passed on their communities’ memoria through copying books, circulating mortuary rolls after the death of a consoror, composing saints’ lives and miracle collections to honor their foremothers, translating and guarding their relics, decorating sacred spaces, maintaining the proper observance of the liturgical calendar, and orchestrating the hours of prayer and Masses, even preparing the eucharistic offering. Highlighting the various roles and responsibilities that cantors and sacristans assumed is essential because they, along with their abbesses and prioresses, are the stars of the history this study seeks to relate.

Conclusion

The Conclusion offers a final assessment of the use of the term “ministry” in the preceding chapters to comprehend the variety of liturgical and pastoral roles and responsibilities—both in their idealized forms and in their actual practices—that Benedictine nuns in England assumed during the central Middle Ages according to the sources that preserve their lives. It also stresses the need for future scholarship to pursue the threads of continuity in Benedictine nuns’ ministries across the central and later Middle Ages. Close studies of the extant documents of practice and other material remains from women’s communities in late medieval England may yet unveil more ministers of Christ, charged with the spiritual care of fellow sisters, laity, vowed religious, and clerics who sought their hospitality, counsel, instruction, healing, absolution, and intercession.

Introduction

The Introduction challenges previous interpretations of the term cura monialium in the historiography of medieval nuns that have restricted its use to the material and spiritual care that these religious women, both as individuals and as communities, received from resident chaplains, visiting priests, and diocesan bishops. Such interpretations too often neglect the other meaning that this term could and did convey: the care that nuns extended to themselves and to those who sought their hospitality, counsel, instruction, healing, absolution, and intercession. Such care was no less vital to nuns’ practices and identities. Indeed, it is the contention of the Introduction and the chapters that follow that examining this meaning of cura monialium gets to the very heart of what it was to be a Benedictine nun in England during the central Middle Ages.