Double monasteries

I've written before on male monasteries, where monks lived, and on nunneries for women (often now called convents).  But in the early Middle Ages, it was not uncommon to have double monasteries, houses for both men and women.  Such houses were normally headed by a woman, an abbess, although she would need to have a priest on hand to say mass.

One of the more famous of these double monasteries was Nivelles, located in what is now Belgium, near the French border.  It was founded in the seventh century, and its most important abbess was Gertrude, now considered a saint.  It was founded for her by her widowed mother, who joined the house herself.  Gertrude is actually in the Carolingian family tree, a great-great (etc.) aunt of Charlemagne, though those creating a glorious image of him on either side of the year 800 tended to emphasize the family members who were warriors and rulers, not female saints.

A century or two after its foundation, Nivelles had its monks and nuns replaced by canons and canonesses.  The difference is that while monks and nuns are supposed to be completely cloistered, away from the world, canons are supposed to help bring the Christian message to the lay population--though canonesses were still pretty well cloistered.  Their life was not as strict as that of monks and nuns, a little more privacy, for example, a little better diet, a few more blankets on the bed.  But the canons and canonesses of Nivelles continued to follow the liturgy Saint Gertrude had laid down, taking turns in the chanting and singing of the psalms, so that male and female voices were both heard.

The image above is the church of Nivelles, as it would have looked in the eleventh century.  It was bombed by the Germans in WW II but rebuilt.

Nivelles is one of the best known examples of a double monastery in the early Middle Ages, but there were plenty of others.  However, during the ninth through eleventh centuries, monasteries all tended to be single-sex.  A noble couple might found two separate houses, one for men and one for women, but they were clearly distinguished (and a certain distance apart).  Examples include the houses of Vézelay and Pouthières in Burgundy, founded in the ninth century, or the two houses that William the Conqueror and his wife founded in Caen after the 1066 Conquest of England, one for men and one for women (the picture is the female one).

One of the few double monasteries of the High Middle Ages was Fontevraud (in the Loire region), founded at the beginning of the twelfth century.  It was very successful, serving as the burial spot for Henry II of England, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Richard the Lionheart.  That's Richard's tomb below (constructed a couple generations after his death).

Fontevraud continued down to the French Revolution, and was always run by an abbess, although there were separate places for male monks and female nuns within its walls.  It also had a so-called lazar-house by the thirteenth century, sort of a hospice for lepers.  The lazar-house was made into a luxury hotel in the twentieth century.  I bet they were a little vague with the guests on who used to sleep in those rooms.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on monks, nuns, and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see the ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon.