Religious Women

 There were many ways for women to show their religiosity in the Middle Ages. The most obvious of course was by becoming a nun, entering a monastery for women.  Although such nunneries became common in the late Middle Ages, when a large proportion of the nuns had entered the cloister as girls, for much of the Middle Ages such houses were far outnumbered by male monasteries.

In the early and high Middle Ages, most of the nuns did not enter as girls but rather as mature women.  Men too did not always enter as boys; the Cistercian order, for example, was made up primarily of monks who had converted as young men, and many an elderly man decided to improve his chances at heaven by spending his final year or two as a monk.  But there were a whole lot of nuns who had entered the house in middle age, not old age, usually because they were widowed--a common event when women tended to marry much older men.

It was these experienced middle-aged women who tended to become abbess.  At the double-monasteries of the early Middle Ages and of twelfth-century houses like Fontevraud, where a male house and a female house had a single head, the head was always a middle-aged woman.

But how else could a woman be religious?  Nunneries usually followed the same Benedictine Rule as male monasteries, but just as there were houses of male canons, who lived more or less like monks but who also served as priests for their community, there were some houses for canonesses.  Although of course they did not serve as priests, they might take care of people at a hospital.  (Even today, nurses in Britain are called Sister, a reminder of this old function.)

Canonesses lived in a cloistered setting, like nuns, but one could still be a religious woman outside the cloister.  In medieval cities, from the thirteenth century onward, there grew up forms of the religious life for women where the women continued to live in their own houses and do their normal activities but still practice a more contemplative life.  They might have a rule formally endorsed by a bishop and practice chastity as well as meeting regularly for prayer.

But some of these lay sisterhoods did not bother with a formal rule.  They followed a life that combined religiosity in both a public and private setting but took no vows.  From their point of view, they were living like the original apostles as described in the Book of Acts in the Bible.  The Beguines, found primarily in cities of Flanders, sought to help their fellow citizens through good works as well as trying to be fair and honest in their own commercial dealings.  They met regularly to encourage each other and to pray together.

The danger was that, without vows or formal oversight from the church hierarchy, they were considered (at least by the church hierarchy) to be in danger of slipping into heresy.  Some of them did, making up their own versions of religious doctrine--which of course they believed was true Christianity (the bishops disagreed).  Some got into serious trouble and ended up shipped off to real nunneries.  Some were allowed to continue as long as they kept quiet about it.

And then there were the recluses, women who set themselves up in a tiny house build on the outside of a church.  They would of course need the approval of the priest or bishop.  This practice was more frequent before nunneries became common.  The woman in essence was a hermit in her cell, except that she was usually in the middle of town or village, not out in the woods, where everyone agreed (even including the women) females ought not to be by themselves.  Most of these recluses had enough food to live on donated by the pious and regularly attended Mass in the adjoining church.  But in an extreme version the recluse might be walled up in her cell and not leave at all.

These recluses are often referred to as "anchorites" by British historians, although no anchor was involved, and there is no medieval cognate for the term.

Some of ways medieval women showed their religiosity must have been very hard on their bodies.  But as Peter Abelard pointed out in the early twelfth century,  because women's bodies were weaker than men's, their virtue was so much greater in enduring physical privation.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025


For more on medieval religion and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.

Peter Abelard's life & hard times

As noted in the previous post on Peter Abelard, he was one of the great thinkers of the twelfth century, one of the most outstanding examples of the medieval assumption that faith and reason (religion and science, we would probably say) would give you the same answer.  Some people who really ought to know better have seen him as anachronistic, as someone just like us only living in the twelfth century, because he applied rationality to matters of faith.  But he was a totally twelfth-century kind of guy.

He also had a very adventurous life.  He was a teacher in the Paris schools that eventually became the University of Paris.  One of the cathedral priests had a very smart niece named Heloise, who he thought should get a good education, but girls couldn't attend these schools.  So he asked Peter Abelard to come give her private lessons.

The private lessons worked all right.  She learned a whole lot, some of it having to do with Latin and theology, some of it, well…  They named the baby "Astrolabe," after an astronomical device that had just been invented.

They did indeed get married, although Heloise initially didn't want to, afraid marriage would hurt Abelard's career, because it meant he could never be a priest.  Both were hassled by rumor-mongers (think today's paparazzi), so Abelard sent her off to stay in a nunnery, though not as a nun--indeed, they enjoyed "conjugal visits" behind the abbess's back.

Heloise's uncle back in Paris became distraught at hearing his niece was in a nunnery, thinking Abelard had dumped her there so he could pretend he wasn't married.  Deciding to teach Abelard a sharp lesson, he sent some thugs around to Abelard's house, who castrated him.

This pretty much ended Abelard's and Heloise's marriage, as you can imagine.  Now Heloise did become a nun, as abbess at a new house Abelard helped her found.  He called it "The Paraclete."  The paraclete is the Holy Spirit.  Abelard, a wise-ass as ever, said that God the Father and God the Son got all the press, and it was time to do something for the poor neglected God the Holy Spirit.  Young Astrolabe was sent to be trained as a monk.

Abelard went off to be the abbot of a monastery in Brittany, near where he'd come from originally.  It was a terrible monastery, where the monks had no interest in leading a regular, austere life, and who decided it would be fun to poison their strict abbot with his hot-shot Paris ways.  (It didn't work.)

Back in Paris (I wonder why) Abelard returned to teaching.  He got in trouble for a book he wrote on the Trinity.  The difficulty with his "solution" to the "universals" problem, that categories really exist but only in our brains, is that certain abstract nouns like "the Trinity" are really supposed to exist in external reality, and people noticed.  Abelard denied he had ever said anything unorthodox about the Trinity, and quoted Augustine to back him up and told the judges at his trial that they knew no theology or even Latin, but it didn't help.  He was ordered to burn his book on the Trinity, which he did, sobbing and explaining theological points the while.

He wrote up the account of all these adventures.  Heloise, who he hadn't been in touch with in several years, read it and sent him a scathing letter--"You never write!  You never call!  When I think of what I sacrificed for you!"  But after they got past this stage, they started quite an interesting correspondence, in which Abelard argued that because women are weaker physically than men, their privations, fasting, and the like are more pleasing to God.  (So much for the idea that medieval people considered women inferior.)  But they never saw each other again.

Heloise, as is clear in her letters, was certainly just as smart as Abelard, even if neither one had as much common sense as one would prefer.  After a while, still smarting over having to burn his book on the Trinity, he rewrote it and set off to Rome to see if he could get the pope to say it was fine after all.  But he died on the way and has been (since the nineteenth century) buried next to Heloise in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.  (So are Molière and Jim Morrison of the Doors.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

Peter Abelard

"Universals."  Scholastic method.  "No and Yes."  Say what?

These are all related to Peter Abelard, one of the great intellects of the twelfth century and one of the biggest wise-asses of his time.

As I noted in a previous post on medieval universities, the twelfth century was a time when (unlike now) it was assumed that faith and reason were not opposed forces.  Rather, it was assumed that what we would call religion and science should and would give you the same answer.  Peter Abelard is an outstanding example of this.

He started his career at the end of the eleventh century as a wandering teacher; these were relatively common in a time when universities had not yet developed and yet people were interested in intellectual issues.  He lectured on what was then a hot topic, whether "universals" (things like chairs, or abstract nouns like beauty or goodness) really existed as "universals," or whether they were just convenient names or categories we had created ("nominalism").  Abelard out-argued his own teacher (demonstrating his wise-ass characteristics), arguing that universals really were real, but they did not exist in some vague outside-the-world-place (as Plato had had it), but rather only in our brains.  This sort of ended the nominalism-realism debate on universals for about 3 centuries.

But Abelard is best known for his great work, "Sic et Non" ("Yes and No" in Latin), in which he embraced all the contradictions inherent in Christian theology.  The New Testament, the Old Testament, pronouncements of popes, pronouncements of councils, writings of church Fathers all contradict each other.  This is and was undeniable.

But how to resolve these contradictions?  You couldn't reply, "Just do what the Church says," because all these contradictory writings were written by completely orthodox churchmen, and in some cases were in the Bible.  The answer was to use human reasoning powers to figure it out.

Abelard's great work was a series of theological questions, such as, "Could God make black be white?"  He answered them both Yes and No, giving citations to support each side.  He did not then actually attempt to resolve the question, although that was clearly his intent, saying he left it as an exercise to the reader (another sign of being a wise-ass).

(God never changes, therefore He would never make black be white.  But God is omnipotent, so He can make colors be any colors He wants.  See what I mean?)

Abelard never "got into trouble" for this.  Everyone knew about the contradictions.  Now there was a way to deal with them beyond hoping they would go away.  His method, quickly named the "scholastic method" (because used in the schools), was immediately adopted by other intellectuals.  Within a few years, Gratian at the University of Bologna and Peter Lombard at the emerging University of Paris both wrote textbooks, in respectively law and theology, that became the textbooks for studying their fields.  Both used Abelard's method of answering a question two ways, with supporting citations on each side. They differed, however, in giving a final answer.

Peter Abelard is also known for his affair with Heloise (less romantic than you might have thought), but that's a story for another day.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015