SOURCE: Lifshitz, Felice. “Is Mother Superior? Towards a History of Feminine Amtscharisma.” In Medieval Mothering, edited by John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler, pp. 117-38. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996.

[In the following essay, Lifshitz explores the nature of the authority exercised by abbesses.]

No studies have yet explored the authority and office of female monastic superiors, nor have the latter been taken into account in studies of male monastic authority. Various sources, particularly monastic rules and conciliar legislation, are used to open the issue.

AMTSCHARISMA: IS MOTHER SUPERIOR?

Many studies have explored the authority and office of male superiors of male monastic communities, particularly within the framework of Benedictine monasticism,¹ that form of communal regular life that was founded by Benedict of Monte Cassino (480-c. 560), and whose generalized enforcement—through the reformations of Boniface, then of Benedict of Aniane—became a central feature of Carolingian policy from the mid-eighth century.² Monasticism could never have become a mass institution had it not been possible to set up monasteries wherever there was a market for the regulated lifestyle, irrespective of the presence of a charismatic leader. The rule of St. Benedict very much facilitated the institutionalization of masculine religious lordship. Indeed, the widespread acceptance of a monastic rule in and of itself, as a constitutional principle, enabled male individuals not personally possessed of spiritual charisma to control male religious communities by virtue of their occupation of an office. It was the office of the Benedictine abbot itself that came, legally, to possess Amtscharisma, that is, the charisma necessary for rulership. Amtscharisma was also a necessary prerequisite for religious communities to acquire permanence.

Benedict of Nursia was able to articulate traditional monastic formulae in ways that were concrete and clear without sacrificing flexibility. Central to his rule was the authority of the male abbot to command, paired with the obligation of the male monks to obey.³ The authority of the Benedictine male abbot was bolstered both by his position as vicar of Christ, and by the associative resonances between the paternal figure of the male abbas, “father,” and the male pater-familias. However, Benedict also insisted on the paternal(istic) care the abbot must feel for his sons; such solicitude tempered the patriarchal aspects of the abbatial figure.

No studies have been made of the authority and office of female superiors of female monastic communities, nor have female superiors been taken into account in any of the hundreds of studies of male monastic authority. Female monastic authority and feminine Amtscharisma cannot be assumed to be identical to male monastic authority and masculine Amtscharisma;⁴ certainly there is no shortage of material through which to open the matter for discussion.

Penelope Johnson's observation that “cultural blinders have created an entire corpus of literature about monasticism that defines the institution as male” is even more apt when applied to studies of superiors of female monastic communities than when applied to members of those communities.⁵ The issue of gender specificity in monastic governance is by no means simple and clear-cut. Sometimes the very developments which have fostered the tendency to define the institution of monasticism as male are themselves evidence of a noteworthy degree of egalitarian gender blindness on the part of monastic legislators. Benedict of Nursia's rule was never intended by him to have any application to women.⁶ Whereas Augustine of Hippo, Caesarius of Arles, Aurelian of Arles, and other monastic legislators had written for or at least tacitly permitted their work to be used by both male and female communities, Benedict produced only one version of his rule, a version whose gender pronouns, titles, etc., were exclusively masculine.⁷ Therefore, despite the availability in the eighth century of feminine rules, it was a rule intended solely for masculine use that was selected by reformers for universal genderblind application. A similar gender fluidity marks the major text which was responsible for spreading the Benedictine observance in the Frankish world. Benedict of Aniane's florilegium, the Concordia regularum, arranged extracts from other rules around related chapters of the Benedictine rule itself in order to demonstrate that the entire monastic tradition was in accord concerning the observances which he wished to make universal.⁸ Not only did Benedict adopt as his universal model a rule gendered as male, but he also gendered as male all extracts from other rules, even those which were drawn from rules for female religious.⁹ Thus, while Benedict effectively demonstrated that the entire monastic tradition harmoniously defined monasticism itself as a male experience, his procedure seems to indicate that he considered female monastic experience the equivalent of male monastic experience.¹⁰ The various ninth-century commentaries on the Benedictine rule and on Benedictine monastic life, which were designed to facilitate the real-life introduction of Benedictinism into Francia, also resolutely defined the monastic experience as male, without a single reference to female religious.¹¹

The Carolingian tradition of gendering even female monasticism as masculine has reinforced the tendency of scholars to ignore women by facilitating the fantasy that, having discussed the role of the male religious superior, one has effectively also discussed the role of the female religious superior. Yet, the moment one poses the specific question of how females governed religious communities in the era of institutionalized—as opposed to charismatic—monasticism, one has to wonder how similar feminine Amtscharisma can have been to masculine Amtscharisma. The source of the authority of the abbatial office in Benedict's rule is made absolutely clear: the abbot is called a father because he is the representative of the Father of all, Jesus Christ, and therefore partakes in Christ's paternal authority.¹² The office of the abbot, abbatia, was defined as paternity.¹³ If women could not legally be priestly representatives of Christ in the hierarchical, official church, if women could not be fathers, how did they exercise institutionalized authority in religious communities?

To assert that female religious superiors based their authority instead on maternality would be problematic. Although many scholars have considered mothers to have been responsible, during the period covered by the present essay, for the moral and religious upbringing of their children, even the strongest scholarly statement of the maternal responsibility to nurture does not assert any maternal authority to command.¹⁴ When scholars have discerned in some cultural value system during this same period, the fifth through the eleventh centuries, something which they see fit to call a maternal office, officium matris, they have described that office in terms of “maternal cares” and “maternal piety”: duties and obligations towards the poor, the weak, the sick, etc., with no reference to power or authority, only to burdens.¹⁵ Meanwhile, specialists in later periods have read the use of feminized language and particularly of maternal imagery in connection with normatively male authority figures—abbots, for instance—as signs of ambivalence, even anxiety, over rulership and of a desire to soften that masculine authority. Gendered stereotypes of power, at least in the twelfth century, held that Father Jesus rules with authority, while Mother Jesus loves and nurtures.¹⁶

I make no attempt in the present essay to provide a universal or theoretical model of feminine Amstscharisma or to generalize about the “nature” of women, or authority, or women and authority. Instead, I raise some preliminary points concerning abbesses based on a series of monastic rules—Benedictine and otherwise—the obvious starting point for a study of the authority of female religious superiors. However, it is not possible simply to extrapolate from theoretical models of power, as embodied in constitutions, to the actual exercise of authority over people. The reading of printed “editions” of texts can be a starting point for historians, but ought never to constitute the entire evidentiary base of any study, although it too often does. Monastic rules therefore represent only a starting point for the study of how authority was in fact constituted and exercised by women over women in religious communities. In the final section of the essay, I try to understand the actual workings of authority in a particular community, Niedermünster of Regensburg, based on some relevant manuscript remains of that house.

HONORARY PATERNITY: WITHIN THE ENCLOSURE, WITHOUT THE HIERARCHY

Early in the fifth century, Bishop Augustine of Hippo was faced with a rebellion of the female religious in an unnamed monastery over which his sister ruled as praeposita. The gendered nature of the north African rebellion is particularly striking: while the female religious addressed by Augustine seem willing, even eager, to be ruled by their male praepositus, they consider it acceptable to throw off the authority of their female praeposita.¹⁷ The terms in which Augustine urges the community to retain its praeposita are likewise significant. Augustine appeals to a certain filial piety for the woman under whom, like a spiritual mother, the members of the community had been educated and veiled. The gratitude and loyalty which the female religious are urged to feel as a result are never, however, couched in terms of obedience.

Spiritual maternity was not a sufficient guarantor of authority over a female monastic community in the fifth century. Where in Roman or barbarian or canon law were the superiority and authority of the mater-familias, as opposed to those of the father of the family, assured?¹⁸ Of course, broad social forces encouraged the rejection of all parental authority in late antiquity. Until the seventh century, a monastic lifestyle could often be achieved by both men and women only by rebellion against the wishes of biological or socioconventional parents.¹⁹ How was it possible to encourage individuals, who had already rebelled against a social institution as crucial and powerful as the family, to become obedient? Theoretically, the issues facing proponents of male and female monasticism should have been identical in this regard; yet it seems clear from the very small number of female houses that were established before 600 a.d. compared with the number of male houses in operation, that the female stream of monasticism suffered more from the problematics of authority during the heroic age of monasticism than did the male stream.

The strong anti-parental-authority current in late ancient and early medieval culture was more corrosive of potential maternal claims to authority than it was to paternal ones, in that the former were not upheld by explicit legal codes and a whole series of semi-conscious social expectations. Instead of reinforcing maternal authority, popular culture celebrated the rebelliousness of daughters against their mothers. One of the most famous romances of the late ancient world, well-known and influential in both Greek and Latin monastic circles by the fourth century, was the Acts of Paul and Thecla.²⁰ The dramatic centerpiece of Thekla's life was the scene in which her own mother, shrilly but ultimately without success, sought to have her daughter killed for refusing to marry.²¹

The biological and civil-legal family was replaced, for those in the monastic movement, by an eschatological family.²² All the earliest known uses of the word abba—“father”—in the context of an eschatological family connote a charismatic pater pneumatikos; likewise, charismatic women such as Makrina were described by their biographers and followers as amma—“mother”—as a function of their pneumatic, personal leadership.²³ Yet, when a noncharismatic figure such as Augustine's sister sought to control a group of female religious, Augustine's rhetoric of her maternity may have tended more to invite rebellion against her than to encourage obedience to her. Indeed, matern(al)ity was so far from being considered a source of authority that most female claims to status and power on the level of men in late Roman and early medieval culture are understood by scholars to have been based precisely on the repudiation of wife- and motherhood, and the embracing, instead, of virginal asceticism.²⁴

Under the circumstances, a maternal strategy was not particularly suited to the development of a feminine Amtscharisma. It is against such a cultural background that the work of Caesarius of Arles should be understood. Bishop Caesarius of Arles (470-542) was the first person to compose a rule of communal life intended specifically for female religious, namely for the virgins of his sister Caesaria's monastery of Saint-Jean of Arles.²⁵ The series of writings which Caesarius produced for and about female religious throughout the first half of the sixth century are striking for two divergent rhetorical tendencies. On the one hand, Caesarius never was able to decide what to call a female religious. He vacillated among soror (sister), virgo (virgin), and filia (daughter) for nearly half a century. He was certain only that a female religious was not the precise equivalent of a male religious, and he never once used the term monacha (monk). On the other hand, he did become increasingly convinced about what to call the head of a community of female religious. In the course of time the title abbatissa edged out prior, senior and mater (mother) until it became the only word ever used by Caesarius to describe the leader of the community.²⁶

An abbatissa, or abbess, is not a mother; an abbatissa is a female father. The etymology of the title is the masculine title of paternal authority abba (father); there is not even the slightest resonance either of amma or of mater. Caesarius stood absolutely on the cutting edge of monastic history: the earliest dateable evidence for the use of the word abbatissa comes from the gravestone of Abbess Serena, buried in Rome in 514.²⁷ Therefore, one aspect of the first specific solution proposed for the problem of feminine Amtscharisma was honorary fatherhood. But there was more that Caesarius considered specific to the governance of female religious.

A striking and original feature of Caesarius' rule was to assure the abbatissa formal independence from her bishop.²⁸ Unfortunately, this Caesarian sheltering of female abbesses from the ecclesiastical hierarchy ultimately prevented the establishment of a feminine Amtscharisma by weakening the position of the Caesarian abbess. Here is the great paradox of abbatial authority: one of the best ways to guarantee to a noncharismatic superior the ability to control religious subordinates is to enmesh that superior within a broader chain of command which will reinforce his or her position; in other words, to subject him or her to a superior. The fundamental piece of canonical legislation governing male monasteries in Merovingian Gaul, as formulated at the first national council of Orléans in 511 and thereafter cited in all chronological and systematic canonical collections for the next four centuries, betrays the complex dynamics of authority structures; a single canon, canon nineteen, asserted both that abbots should be under the power of the bishops (and be corrected by their bishops in case of error) and that monks should be subjected to their abbots. Abbatial subjection to bishops and abbatial authority over monks were often two sides of the same coin.

The section of the Caesarian rule which most clearly betrays the fragility of the office of an abbess who is not subjected to/reinforced by episcopal authority is the following: the abbess was not allowed to alienate by sale or gift any property of the monastery or to institute anything contrary to the rule; were she to attempt any such thing, the Caesarian rule explicitly urged the sisters of the monastery to prevent her from carrying out her intentions.²⁹ In other words, rebellion, disobedience and the taking of the law into their own hands was permitted to the female inhabitants of Saint-Jean of Arles. Without the judicial superiority of the bishop, what other recourse could there be? In contrast, the Rhône valley Council of Epaon had long since required abbots to keep records of their sales and bequests so that the local bishop could watch over the temporalities of the monastery.³⁰

The Caesarian abbess was not only weakened by the loss of episcopal or hierarchical reinforcement to her office, she was also diminished in stature by means of the feature intended by Caesarius to compensate, from his episcopal perspective, for the loss of hierarchical control over the head of the religious community of Saint-Jean. The exemption of the Caesarian abbess from episcopal authority necessitated her strict subjection, instead, to perpetual claustration. Claustration of the members of the community, as a disciplinary technique in support of the superior's Amtscharisma—enclosure itself being an innovative feature of the Caesarian rule—would not have been a surprising suggestion in and of itself. It is only in terms of force, acrimony, and even violence that Wemple characterizes relations between mothers and daughters in sixth- and seventh-century Gaul.³¹ The harshness of strict, life-long claustration was not at all out of keeping with the Merovingian mother-daughter relationship.³² But Caesarius imposed enclosure on the superior as well, thereby robbing her of one aspect of official superiority over her flock.³³ The Abbatissa Caesaria's decades of success at Saint-Jean of Arles probably resulted from the force of her own erudite doctrina³⁴ and not from any Amtscharisma inherent in the Caesarian abbess.

At least one other charismatic woman is known to have used the Caesarian rule with success. St Radegund (c. 518-587) seems to have chosen the Caesarian rule for her foundation at Poitiers³⁵ precisely because of that rule's guarantee of exemption from episcopal control. According to Gregory of Tours, she reformed her own monastery through changing the dedication of the house—from the Virgin Mary to the Holy Cross—and by introducing the Caesarian rule, both while in the very midst of an altercation with, and against the wishes of, the bishop of Poitiers.³⁶ After the charismatic saint's own death, however, that very lack of episcopal control over the abbess of Holy Cross resulted in a rebellion of the puellae of the monastery against their abbatissa.

Within two years of Radegund's death, Bishop Gregory of Tours received an unexpected visit from forty of the puellae of Holy Cross. The members of the rebellious group had bound themselves by an oath to have their new Abbatissa Leubovera ejected from the monastery, on the grounds that she humiliated them and now wished to enlist Bishop Gregory's help for their cause.³⁷ Bishop Gregory's presentation of the scandal at Holy Cross of Poitiers minimizes the importance of how the abbess treated her subordinates—it was immaterial to him as long as she did not act contrary to the rule of the monastery³⁸—and foregrounds instead the fact of historical nonalliance between the abbatissa and the bishop of Poitiers as the material cause of the rebellion. The rebel puellae continued for almost two years to reject the authority of Leubovera, accusing her of a number of crimes and, on one occasion, causing her to be physically attacked.³⁹ Abbess Leubovera herself, recognizing the weakness of her position and unwilling to trust in any Caesarian Amtscharisma, put herself under the power of the bishop of Poitiers.⁴⁰

The spectre of the rebellious puella who had scorned her family's wishes only to join a religious community haunted the eschatological family in the heroic age of monasticism; in 589 and 590, at Holy Cross of Poitiers, that spectre took on flesh. The Caesarian solution to feminine Amtscharisma, namely a female father independent of the male hierarchy but subjected to the physical cloister, was a failure.

THE EFFLORESCENCE OF FEMALE MONASTICISM IN THE SEVENTH AND EIGHTH CENTURIES: CHARISMA OR AMTSCHARISMA?

From the end of the sixth century, the conventional family was rehabilitated in male monastic circles. Prospective monks tended less often to be men who had begun their professional lives through an act of individualistic rebellion against the wishes of their parents.⁴¹ Indeed, parents were increasingly likely themselves to place their young sons in monasteries, assuring for those boys a completely monastic formation and strong ties of loyalty with the eschatological family.⁴² Yet, in an era when fewer males had to rebel against the authority of their parents in order to take up a monastic vocation, a significant proportion of female religious still began their professional lives through an act of disobedience to parental authority.⁴³ The female monasteries of Gaul were therefore filled, almost by definition, by self-willed individualists when, in the seventh and early eighth centuries, large numbers of female monasteries were founded.⁴⁴

Does the transformation of female monasticism into a mass movement mean that a successful solution to the problem of feminine Amtscharisma had been developed? Not necessarily. The majority of the many female houses founded in Gaul and Italy during the period of expansion were ephemeral, implying that their existence was dependent on the presence of charismatic leaders; the office of the superior itself could not guarantee institutional continuity. The throngs of enthusiastic, rebellious puellae of Gaul had little difficulty finding charismatic leaders. Although only 8 percent of sixth-century saints had been female, by the early eighth century, 23.5 percent of saints were female, the highest percentage ever attained by women.⁴⁵

Several attempts were made during the late Merovingian period to provide a constitution for female monastic communities. Despite Benedict of Nursia's framing of his rule with only males in mind, these late Merovingian feminine rules are all primarily drawn from the Benedictine rule (albeit as part of an eclectic mix of monastic traditions) and indeed provide the very earliest evidence of the influence of benedictinism anywhere in the Frankish world!⁴⁶ Two late-Merovingian female rules survive in their entirety. The earlier of the two establishes a religious superior who is officially so weak that only a charismatic saint could hope to succeed in the position; the later rule, on the other hand, seems to provide a fullfledged example of practicable feminine Amtscharisma and may indeed stem from a milieu in which such a thing was in fact a reality during the period in question. The rule composed c. 650 by Bishop Donatus of Besançon for Jussa Moutier in Besançon combines with extracts from the Benedictine rule numerous excerpts from the rule of Caesarius and a number of original features, with a few citations from a penal code attributed to Columbanus.⁴⁷ The Benedictine rule is likewise the primary source of an anonymous rule written in Gaul during the late seventh or early eighth century, again along with excerpts from the Caesarian rule and a few citations to the “Columbanian” penal code but also making liberal use of the rule of Donatus itself.⁴⁸ The latter rule is called in its only manuscript source—Benedict of Aniane's Codex regularum—and by its editor, the Regula cuiusdam patris ad virgines; however, in view of the likelihood of female authorship of works preserved anonymously but known to have come from a female monastic milieu,⁴⁹ I would suggest a designator that is more descriptive of the text and gender neutral concerning authorship, such as “the rule of the abbess.”

The rule of Donatus and the “rule of the abbess” are similar in length, subject matter and sources and yet completely opposed to each other in spirit. The “rule of the abbess” hardly ever refers to the leader of the community by any title other than abbatissa, and that title itself appears most of the time in combination with words of authority, judgment, or command; on the other hand, Donatus uses mater almost as frequently as he does abbatissa.⁵⁰ The abbatissa of Donatus' rule⁵¹ is the cloistered Caesarian abbess; indeed, Donatus elaborated on Caesarius' rules for the enclosure of female religious, while retaining the Caesarian permission for the community to resist, even rebel against, its abbess. Even in comparison with the Caesarian rule, the role of the abbess in the regula Donati is so attenuated that she is almost effaced. She is overshadowed, instead, by a mater modelled upon the loving Benedictine male abbot of Chapter 64 of the Benedictine rule, the parent who bears the heavy burden of caring for children; yet Donatus' mater possesses little of the authoritarian patriarchal qualities of the Benedictine male superior. Donatus replaces the Benedictine obligation to obey the community's father with the exhortation to love its mother. In order to compensate for the Donatian mater's constitutional incapacity to discipline her subordinates—the Benedictine penal code, in which the abbot's decisions are paramount, having been severely truncated—Donatus inserts a series of specific corporal punishments which take discipline out of the purview of the mater and builds it into the rule itself.

Bishop Donatus evidently believed that the monastic experience and monastic governance were completely gender specific; he avoids translating Benedict's abbas as abbatissa, preferring mater, and he never calls the female religious monachae but rather ancillae Christi (nursemaids of Christ) or sorores. But the most distinct feature of Donatus' rule for female religious is the complete lack of Amtscharisma it offered to any potential religious ruler. Nothing could be farther from the institutional utility possessed by the “rule of the abbess,” whose practical applicability and consonance with the authoritarian Benedictine rule was recognized by no less a person than Benedict of Aniane, who used almost the entire rule for his Concordia regularum.⁵² There is little in the “rule of the abbess” to indicate that its author considered the female monastic experience to differ in any way from that of men. This monastic legislator's abbess is the authoritarian Benedictine abbot reinforced by anything in the traditions of Caesarius, Donatus, or Columbanus that could increase her power over her subordinates, such as the requirement that the monachae confess to the abbess or her deputies.⁵³

The “rule of the abbess” establishes the complete authority of the abbess in Chapter 1, then proceeds down a hierarchy of monastic offices, all strictly subordinated to the abbess, in Chapters 2 through 4; a long chapter—22—later establishes that the hierarchical principle must rule all relations in the community. Biblical citations are used to analogize the abbess with paternal and pastoral figures; when the abbess is “mater,” it is in the guise of a mother who rules and coerces. Normally, however, she is abbatissa, and the disciplinary life of the community officially depends entirely on her judgment. There is no sign of any attempt at cloistering the abbess or even the monachae, as the female religious are consistently called.

Although the “rule of the abbess” has always been connected with Gallic—or Frankish—monasticism, and seems to have been written down on the continent, its spirit hardly matches what is known of early medieval female communities in what is now France. Instead, its provisions, particularly those concerning the Amtscharisma of the female monastic superior, seem very much in keeping with the venerable female monastic superior who has been discerned in the writings and attitudes of eighth- and ninth-century Anglo-Saxons, both in the British Isles and in continental Saxony. Schneider and Atkinson both cite repeatedly, and exclusively, Bede, Boniface, Rudolf of Fulda, and Alcuin to demonstrate that there existed in early medieval Europe an officium abbatissae and a respect for spiritual maternity.⁵⁴ The “rule of the abbess,” which survives only through Benedict of Aniane's Codex regularum, could well have originated in Anglo-Saxon monastic circles on the continent, particularly given that Benedict found the female rules that he included in his collection in a now-lost manuscript of Fulda.⁵⁵

Although we do not now know whether the rules of Donatus or “of the abbess” were actually used during the seventh- and eighth-century effloresence of female monasticism, we can see in the two rules attestations to the diversity of the possible solutions which were advocated during that era in order to provide a constitution for female religious.

A CASE STUDY IN DISTORTED BENEDICTINISM: THE ABBESS OF NIEDERMüNSTER HAS NO STAFF

From the middle of the eighth century, the Benedictine rule was imposed from above on female monasteries just as it was on male monasteries. However, supplementary Frankish conciliar and capitular legislation attempted to distort the Benedictinism practiced in female communities by imposing obligations of cloister drawn from the Caesarian tradition.⁵⁶ The legal terminology surrounding the office of abbess also differed from that surrounding the office of abbot.⁵⁷ Even under the full-fledged Benedictine regime which came to dominate Latin Europe during the tenth and eleventh centuries, the problematics of authority were never fully resolved in female communities. It is perhaps significant that the most important female saint of the Benedictine order, Benedict's sister Scholastica, has been celebrated since the twelfth century at the earliest as a paradigm of disobedience, a characteristic antithetical to everything Benedictinism seeks to inculcate in its communities.⁵⁸

Other practices and institutions that grew up around the Benedictine rule likewise worked so as to distort the Benedictinism of female communities, particularly where the authority of the abbess was concerned. The Benedictine rule did not itself provide any guidance for the ceremonial installation of the head of the community. The liturgies which were developed in order to fulfill this perceived void were themselves gendered in such a way as to withhold the full force of Benedictine Amtscharisma from female occupants of the abbatial office. The so-called Romano-Germanic Pontifical, compiled c. 950, was in common use throughout the Holy Roman Empire by the end of the tenth century.⁵⁹ The ordines which were used for the ordinations of abbots and abbesses, respectively, differed in significant ways. When a bishop ordained a male abbot, he invested that abbot with a baculum pastoralitatis, a pastoral staff, the symbol of ruling power carried by bishops and by kings as well as by abbots and gave the new abbot a copy of the monastic rule.⁶⁰ The female abbess, on the other hand, received no baculum and therefore was never invested with personal authority in connection with her office, although she did benefit—unlike the Caesarian abbess—from a broad institutional backing to her position through her hierarchical relationship with the bishop; instead of a staff, the Benedictine abbess received, ceremoniously, only a copy of the monastic rule which she was supposed to enforce.⁶¹

We are fortunate in possessing, for at least one female monastic community, specific manuscript evidence of how the abbesses of the house sought to compensate for the relative weakness of their office compared with that of their male abbatial colleagues. One strategy, so elegant in its simplicity as to be almost breathtaking, was to draw on the Carolingian tradition of gender fluidity in monastic legislation, and to appropriate, to the fullest possible extent, the resonances of paternal authority implicit in the feminized male title abbatissa. Two abbesses of Niedermünster of Regensburg, first Abbess Uota in the late tenth century, then Abbess Eilika in the mid-eleventh century, had copies made of the Benedictine rule in which they claimed the plenitude of abbatial-paternal authority through changing nothing from Benedict's original besides abbas to abbatissa, monachus to monacha, and so forth.⁶² The abbatissae of Niedermünster claimed to be fathers, pastors, and vicars of Christ, just as was any male superior of a religious community. Abbates and abbatissae are fathers who must be obeyed.

In the case of the eleventh-century codex, produced c. 1040-1044 under Abbess Eilika, it is much more than the Benedictine rule itself that bolsters the authority of the abbess.⁶³ The eleventh-century copy of the rule is part of a larger, formerly independent libellus—comprising folios 51r-119v of Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Preußischer Kulturbesitz MS theol. lat. qu. 199—whose overall structure and artistic program make brilliant use of every possible means to reinforce the authority of the abbess. On fols. 51r-54r, there is a computus. However, the computus runs almost imperceptibly into a text of the liturgy for the ordination of an abbess and then for the consecration of a virgin, both according to the Romano-Germanic Pontifical (fols. 54v-57v and fols. 57v-66r, respectively). The computus is encased within an architectural framework and arranged on the page first according to the multilobed form of canon tables, then according to the two-lobed conventional iconography of the Ten Commandments of Sinai; both the architectural framework and the layout of text as though it were on the two tablets of the Mosaic Law continue to be used for the two ordines. The official positions of the abbess and of her virgin subordinates are shown to be a solid part of the very architecture of the church, as important as the computus through which one calculates the date of Easter.

The Benedictine abbess had what the Caesarian abbess did not: a dramatic liturgical moment which put her in relation to the ecclesiastical hierarchy; the artistic program of the Niedermünster libellus is specifically designed to milk every possible drop of authoritative resonance out of that particular ceremonial moment and to enmesh the abbess within a cosmic scheme of sacred history and sacred typology. Moreover, the artistic program of the codex works to reinforce the centrality of the abbess in ways that defy any simplistic, monolithic attempt to understand the authority of the abbatissa exclusively as honorary masculine paternity. When, during the abbess' ordination ceremony, the bishop gives her a copy of the Benedictine rule, he says to the abbess-elect:

Suppliant, we beseech you, Lord God omnipotent,
who caused Mary, sister of Moses, to go out ahead
joyfully among the watery waves, with tympana and
choruses, with the rest of the women, to the shore
of the sea, for the sake of your faithful servant
N. who is today established in the maternal throne
as abbess over all those women subjected to her.(64)

Under an architectural framework of the tablets of the law as given by God to Moses on Sinai, the bishop gives the law to the new abbess, who is assimilated to Moses' sister Mary, said to be the leader of the women of Israel. Through this ordination ceremony, the abbesselect is installed materna in cathedra (in the maternal throne). There soon follows a visual depiction of the maternal throne: an illumination of Mary, mother of God, enthroned on her maternal seat, with Jesus—a miniature adult—on her lap.⁶⁵ On the reverse of that folio, an enthroned St. Benedict pater et pastor, holding a pastoral staff and giving a copy of his rule to an abbess, replays once again the law-giving moment.⁶⁶ The law may be given by fathers, by Moses, by the bishop of Regensburg, by St. Benedict, but women are led by mothers: by Moses' sister Mary, by Jesus' Mother Mary, who was the patron saint of Niedermünster, by the abbess of the house.

The gender of the Benedictine abbot is a simple thing: he is male and, when he parents his flock in the monastery, he is a father. But what can one say that is simple about the gender of the Benedictine abbess, or rather about the gender of the office of the Benedictine abbess and about the guise in which she parents her female flock? By virtue of the etymology of her title, she is a female father; by virtue of the stipulations of the rule itself she is a female father who stands in the stead of Christ; by virtue of her ordination ceremony she is a castrated father, or at least a deformed one, for she bears no staff; finally, also by virtue of her ordination ceremony, she occupies a maternal throne. How female abbesses actually managed to impose their authority on the women subordinated to them and how they were perceived by those women, whether as mothers or as fathers or as a combination of both, would be worth investigating farther. If the situation at Niedermünster in the eleventh century is at all representative of female religious communities, “Mother Superior” is a singularly incomplete and misleading translation of the title abbatissa.

Notes

1. All future studies must begin with the comprehensive study of masculine monastic Amtscharisma by Franz Felten, “Herrschaft des Abtes,” in Herrschaft und Kirche: Beiträge zur Entstehung und Wirkungsweise episkopaler und monastischer Organisationsformen ed. Friedrich Prinz, Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 33 (Stuttgart, 1988), pp. 147-296. Also see Karl Blume, Abbatia. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der kirchlichen Rechtssprache, Kirchenrechtliche Abhandlungen 83 (Stuttgart, 1914; reprt. Amsterdam, 1965); Adalbert de Vogüé, La communauté et l'abbé dans la règle de saint Benoît (Bruges, 1961), pp. 121-40; Karl Bosl, “Die Familia als Grundstruktur der mittelalterlichen Gesellschaft,” Zeitschrift für Bayerische Landesgeschichte 38 (1975), 403-24; Giles Constable, “The Authority of Superiors in Religious Communities,” in La notion d'autorité au moyen âge. Islam, Byzance, Occident (Colloques internationaux de La Napoule Organisés par George Makdisi, Dominique Sourdel and Janine Sourdel-Thomine, 1978; Paris, 1982), pp. 189-210.

2. Rosamond McKitterick, The Frankish Church and the Carolingian Reforms (Cambridge, England, 1975); Josef Semmler, “Benedictus II: Una regula-una consuetudo,” in Benedictine Culture, 750-1050, eds. W. Loudaux and D. Verhelst, Mediaevalia Lovaniensia-Studia 1. 11 (Leuven, 1983), pp. 1-49; Réginald Grégoire, “Il Monachesimo Carolingia dopo Benedicto d'Aniane (†821)” Studia monastica s. 3, 24 (1982), 349-88.

3. Benedict of Nursia, Benedicti regula (editio altera emendata), ed. Rudolf Hanslik, CSEL 75, 2nd ed. (Vienna, 1977). Chapter 2 of Benedict's regula, the treatise on abbatial directorship, was one of the two most often cited extracts from the text. See Réginald Grégoire, “Enquête sur les citations de la règle de saint Benoît dans l'hagiographie latine mediévale,” Studia monastica s. 3, 16 (1975), 747-62.

4. There is little warrant for making such assumptions concerning any historical phenomena since Joan Kelly posed her famous question “Did Women Have a Renaissance?,” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, eds. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koontz (Boston, 1977), pp. 137-64; reprinted in Joan Kelly, Women, History and Theory. The Essays of Joan Kelly, Women in Culture and Society (Chicago, 1987).

5. Penelope Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France (Chicago, 1991), p. 3. Only a single entry appeared under the category “abbesses” in Oliver Leonard Kapsner, A Benedictine Bibliography (Collegeville, Minnesota, 1982), and that was a seventeenth-century controversial tract: Ascanio Tamburini de Marradio, De iure abbatissarum et monialium; sive Praxis gubernandi moniales (Lyons, 1668). For an example of the continued tendency to ignore female religious, see Ludo J. R. Milis, Angelic Monks and Earthly Men. Monasticism and Its Meaning to Medieval Society (Woodbridge, 1992), p. xii; against Milis' misguided rationale, see Stephanus Hilpisch, Geschichte der Benediktinerinnen, Benediktinisches Geistesleben. Zeugnisse und Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiet des Askese und Mystik 3 (St. Ottilien, 1951), pp. 55-58.

6. Hilpisch, Benediktinerinnen, p. 17; Philibert Schmitz, Histoire de l'ordre de Saint Benoît, 7 vols. (Maredsous, 1956), 7:9-11.

7. The vast majority of the extant manuscript copies of Benedict's rule and all of the earliest copies are gendered throughout as masculine (Benedict, Regula, ed. Hanslik, pp. xxii-xlvii).

8. Benedict of Aniane, Concordia regularum, PL 103: 717-1380; Adalbert de Vogüé, Les règles monastiques anciennes (400-700), Typologie des sources du moyen âge Occidental 46 (Turnhout, 1985), pp. 42, 44-45; Semmler, “Benedictus II,” pp. 27-28.

9. Hope Mayo, “Three Merovingian Rules for Nuns,” 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1974), 1:55, 60-62 catalogues those excerpts.

10. Although Benedict also preserved earlier feminine rules in the female gender in his Codex regularum (Mayo, 1: 44-46, 62), it was the Concordia regularum which was frequently copied and which became an influential text; in any case, Benedict of Aniane's life work turned all rules besides that of Benedict of Nursia into museum pieces.

11. Smaragdus, Diadema monachorum, PL 102:593-690; Smaragdus, Commentaria in regulam sancti Benedicti, PL 102:689-932; Mayke de Jong, “Growing up in a Carolingian Monastery: Magister Hildemar and His Oblates,” Journal of Medieval History 9 (1983), 99-128.

12. Benedict, Regula 2, lines 1-3, ed. Hanslik.

13. “… abbatia, quae paternitas latino nomine dicitur” (Council of Meaux-Paris (845-846) canon 10 in MGH Leges Sectio 2: Capitularia Regum Francorum, 2.2, ed. A. Werminghoff (Hannover, 1893), p. 400.

14. Clarissa W. Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1991), pp. 90-99; Suzanne Fonay Wemple, Women in Frankish Society. Marriage and the Cloister, 500-900 (Philadelphia, 1981), pp. 59-60.

15. Maria Stoeckle, “Studien über Ideale in Frauenviten des 7. bis 10. Jahrhunderts” (Ph.D. dissertation, Munich, 1957), pp. 64-74; Dagmar Beate Schneider, “Anglo-Saxon Women in the Religious Life. A Study of the Status and Position of Women in an Early Medieval Society” (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1985), pp. 109-29; Atkinson, Oldest Vocation, pp. 67-95. Schneider does sometimes depart from the stereotype of burdened, sacrificial maternity; see above, p. 12.

16. Caroline Walker Bynum, “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother: Some Themes in Twelfth-Century Cistercian Writing,” in Jesus as Mother. Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, Publications of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies 16 (Berkeley, 1982), pp. 110-69.

17. Augustine of Hippo, Obiurgatio, in La règle de saint Augustin, ed. Luc Verheijen, 2 vols. (Paris, 1967), 1:105-7.

18. David Herlihy, Medieval Households, Studies in Cultural History (Cambridge, MA, 1985), pp. 2-50 summarizes the relevant patriarchal legislation. However, for evidence of matrilineal/matriarchal practices and maternal “heads of household,” see Wemple, pp. 31, 49, 59-61, 64-65, 232 note 61; M.-P. Deroux, “Les origines de l'oblature bénédictine,” Revue Mabillon 17 (1927), 1-16, 81-113, 193-217, 305-51 at pp. 92-94; Atkinson, pp. 90-91; and Carl I. Hammer Jr., “Family and Familia in Early-Medieval Bavaria,” in Family Forms in Historic Europe, eds. Richard Wall, Jean Robin and others (Cambridge, England, 1983), pp. 217-48 (to which, compare Wemple, pp. 70-74 and Herlihy, pp. 57-67). Nevertheless, the thrust of most legislation is clearly patriarchal.

19. Alessandro Barbero, Un santo in famiglia. Vocazione religiosa e resistenze sociali nell'agiografia latina medievale (Turin, 1991), pp. 7-40; Atkinson, pp. 16-22; Wemple, pp. 149-58; Frantisek Graus, Volk, Herrscher und Heiliger im Reich der Merowinger. Studien zur Hagiographie der Merowingerzeit (Prague, 1965), pp. 468-76; Katharina Weber, “Kulturgeschichtliche Probleme der Merowingerzeit im Spiegel frühmittelalterlicher Heiligenleben,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des benediktiner Ordens und seiner Zweige 48 (1930), 349-403.

20. Ruth Albrecht, Das Leben der heiligen Makrina auf dem Hintergrund der Thekla-Traditionen. Studien zu den Ursprüngen des weiblichen Mönchtums im 4. Jahrhundert in Kleinasien, Forschungen zur Kirchen-und Dogmengeschichte 38 (Göttingen, 1986), pp. 239-320.

21. Albrecht, Makrina, p. 250.

22. Atkinson, Oldest Vocation, pp. 14-16.

23. Albrecht, Makrina, pp. 138-41.

24. Rosemary Radford Reuther, “Mothers of the Church: Ascetic Women in the Late Patristic Age,” in Female Leadership, eds. R. Reuther and E. McLaughlin (New York, 1979), pp. 71-98; Jo Ann McNamara, A New Song: Celibate Women in the First Three Christian Centuries, Women and History 6/7 (New York, 1983); Susanna Elm, Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 1994).

25. Caesarius of Arles, Regula ad virgines, ed. and trans. Adalbert de Vogüé and Joël Courreau, Oeuvres monastiques, vol. 1, Oeuvres pour les moniales, Sources Chrétiennes 345 (Paris, 1988). Caesarius' rule was composed in stages between 512 and 534. The first known written rule, composed by Pachomius (286-346), had applied both to male and female communities (Albrecht, Makrina, pp. 111-21). Augustine of Hippo was content to see his praeceptum, originally written for the brothers of his entourage, be transposed into the feminine gender by members of a female community (Verheijen, Règle de Saint Augustin, 2:197-203). The only other early feminine rule, that by Bishop Aurelian of Arles, was almost identical to that same bishop's rule for male religious from which it was adapted; both Aurelian rules were composed c. 550 (Mayo, 1:68-119, 2:3-69).

26. De Vogüé and Courreau in Caesarius, Oeuvres monastiques, 1:88-92.

27. Albrecht, Makrina, p. 143; Schmitz, Ordre de Saint Benoît, 7:213.

28. De Vogüé and Courreau in Caesarius, Oeuvres monastiques, 1:50; Caesarius, Regula ad uirgines 64, 1-3, ed. de Vogüé and Courreau; Mayo, 1:22-23. It may be that the Caesarian rule positively guaranteed something which was already de facto true in any case. The canons of the various early fifth-century Gallic councils which worked for the subjection of male abbots to bishops never mentioned female houses, and the widespread assumption that the canons applied to female religious superiors may not be warranted. For the conciliar legislation, see Concilia Galliae anno 511-anno 695, ed. Charles de Clercq, CCSL 148A (Turnhout, 1963), or Les canons des conciles mérovingiens (VIe-VIIe siècles) ed., notes and trans. Jean Gaudemet and Bernard Basdevant, Sources Chrétiennes 353/354 (Paris, 1989): Orléans I (511) canons 19, 22; Epaon (517) canons 8, 9, 10, 19; Orléans II (533) canon 21. For attempts to control (male) monasteries, see Leo Ueding, Geschichte der Klostergründungen der frühen Merowingerzeit, Historische Studien 261 (Berlin, 1935), pp. 32-46.

29. Caesarius, Oeuvres monastiques, 1 ed., de Vogüé and Courreau, chapter 64.

30. Canon 8, Council of Epaon (517).

31. Wemple, Women in Frankish Society, pp. 60-63.

32. However, before putting too much weight on the harshness of the rule of life-long claustration for female religious, we should also pause to consider the fact that large numbers of women—professed virgins or avowed widows—lived as lay conversae either in their own homes or in very small, nonregulated communities (Jean-Marie Guillaume, “Les abbayes de femmes en pays franc, des origines à la fin du VIIe siècle,” in Remiremont. L'Abbaye et la ville, ed. Michel Parisse (Actes des journées d'études vosgiennes, Remiremont, avril 1980; Nancy, 1980), pp. 29-46; Wemple, pp. 155-57; Henry Neff Waldron, “Expressions of Religious Conversion among Laymen Remaining within Secular Society in Gaul: 400-800 a.d.” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1976). Perhaps women who actually chose to join a community, rather than just changing their vestments and lifestyle, were actively seeking such a level of segregation from the world.

33. Jane Tibbetts Schulenberg, “Strict Active Enclosure and Its Effects on the Female Monastic Experience (c. 500-1100),” Medieval Religious Women 1: Distant Echoes, Cistercian Studies 71 (Kalamazoo, 1984), pp. 51-86 discusses the potentially detrimental effects of Caesarius' theories of enclosure of the abbess on female monasticism in general.

34. In a long letter to two Frankish women who wished to adopt her rule, Caesaria II (Caesarius' niece) made almost no reference to the rule itself as a support or even guide for her leadership strategies; instead, she repeatedly recommended practices inspired directly by scriptural injunctions, and encouraged the constant study of scripture itself by all the women religious (Caesaria of Saint-Jean, Epistle to Richild and Radegund, ed. de Vogüé and Courreau in Caesarius, Oeuvres monastiques, 1:476-95).

35. Wemple, pp. 154-58; Guillaume, “Les abbayes de femmes,” pp. 34-37.

36. Gregory of Tours, Libri decem historiarum 9. 40, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SRM 1.1, 2nd ed. (Hannover, 1951), pp. 464-65. Radegund was not, of course, herself abbess of Holy Cross, but her charisma would have reinforced the authority of the Abbess Agnes, the saint's protegée.

37. Gregory, Libri decem historiarum 9. 39, ed. Krusch, p. 460.

38. Throughout his account of the rather drawn-out rebellion, Gregory grounds all legal proceedings on the notion of enforcement of the Caesarian rule, a technicality which provides further evidence of the fact that monasteries under the rule of Caesarius were independent of episcopal control per se. Gregory includes in his narrative a copy of a letter sent by the Council of Tours (567) to St. Radegund, through which letter the bishops of the region gave the saint permission to gather under the rule of Caesarius women from their various dioceses; the bishops then went on to emphasize how, according to the Caesarian rule, women who voluntarily entered the monastery would then be subject to excommunication for the breaking of cloister (Gregory 9. 59, ed. Krusch, pp. 460-63). The same bishops legislated as part of the canons of the council of Tours for excommunication of males who either took vows in monasteries or declared their intention to do so and then broke cloister or married a woman (canon 16 [15]). Three other canons of the council of Tours also legislated explicitly for the inhabitants and abbots of male monastic houses (canons 7, 17 [16] and 18 [17]). All this is also in keeping with the implications of the distinction which had been drawn at the provincial council of Arles in 554 concerning the monastic houses of the region. According to canons 2 and 3, the discipline of male monasteries, male monks, and male abbots pertained to the bishop in whose diocese the houses were located; in contrast, canon 5 gave bishops the limited role of assuring that abbesses of female monasteries did not contravene the rule but put the bishops in no direct relation with the puellae or the abbatissa except as mediated by the rule. For references, see above note 28.

39. Gregory's extended account can be found in Libri decem historiarum 9. 39-43 and 10. 15-17, 20, ed. Krusch, pp. 460-75, 501-9, 513.

40. Gregory 9. 40, p. 465.

41. Barbero, Un Santo in famiglia, pp. 41-52, 59-76.

42. De Jong, “Growing Up”; Deroux, “Oblature,” pp. 81-91.

43. Barbero, Un Santo in famiglia, pp. 53-55, 77, 89-124; Stoeckle, pp. 35-41.

44. Lina Eckenstein, Woman Under Monasticism. Chapters on Saint-lore and Convent Life Between AD 500 and AD 1500 (Cambridge, England, 1896), pp. 51-78; also see Guillaume, “Abbayes de femmes” pp. 38-42; Wemple, pp. 158-65; Dorothy de Ferranti Abrahamse, “Byzantine Asceticism and Women's Monasteries in Early Medieval Italy,” in Distant Echoes, eds. Nichols and Shank, pp. 31-49.

45. Jane Tibbetts Schulenberg, “Sexism and the Celestial Gynaeceum,” Journal of Medieval History 4 (1978), 117-34.

46. Grégoire, “Citations de la Règle,” p. 747; de Vogüé, Règles monastiques, p. 59; Francois Masai, “Fragment en onciale d'une règle monastique inconnue démarquant celle de saint Benoît (Bruxelles II 7538),” Scriptorium 2 (1948), 215-20, plates 26-7; Schmitz, Ordre de Saint Benoît 7:12; Benedicti Regula, ed. Hanslik, p. xlvii (for Gaul) and p. xlviii (for the Iberian peninsula); Lazare de Seilhac, “La règle de saint Benoît dans la tradition au féminin” in Regula Benedicti studia. Annuarium internationale, ed. Makarios Hebler (Sechster International Regula-Benedicti-Kongreß, Bruges, 1986; St. Ottilien, 1989), pp. 57-68.

47. Adalbert de Vogüé, “La Règle de Donat pour l'Abbesse Gauthstrude” in Benedictina 25 (1978), 219-313.

48. Mayo, “Three Merovingian Rules for Nuns,” pp. 189, 214-17.

49. Rosamund McKitterick, “Frauen und Schriftlichkeit in Frühen Mittelalter,” in Weibliche Lebensgestaltung im frühen Mittelalter, ed. Hans-Werner Goetz (Cologne, 1991), pp. 65-118, especially p. 107.

50. See J.-M. Clément, Lexique des anciennes règles monastiques Occidentales, Instrumenta Patristica 7A, 2 vols. (Steenbrugis, 1978), 1:6-8 and 705-6.

51. I summarize below the relevant findings of de Vogüé's detailed analysis of the rule in Règle de Donat, especially pp. 231-32.

52. Mayo, “Three Merovingian Rules for Nuns,” 1:184.

53. For the text of the rule, see Mayo, “Three Merovingian Rules for Nuns,” 2:142-213.

54. Schneider,“Anglo-Saxon Women,” pp. 109-29; Atkinson, Oldest Vocation, pp. 67-95.

55. De Vogüé and Courreau in Caesarius, Oeuvres monastiques 1:137.

56. Suzanne Fonay Wemple, “Les traditions Romaine, Germanique et Chrétienne,” in Histoire des femmes en Occident, dir. Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot, vol. 2, Le Moyen age, dir. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (no place of publication, 1991), pp. 185-216, especially pp. 205-07; Schulenberg, “Enclosure,” pp. 56-62, 70-78, which should be read in conjunction with Grégoire, “Monachesimo Carolingio.”

57. When Benedictine monasticism was institutionalized, the use of the title abbas was legally restricted to male heads of regular abbeys and forbidden to those who headed communities of canons; on the other hand, all female monastic superiors held the title abbatissa (Blume, Abbatia, p. 60; Schmitz, Ordre de Saint Benoît, 7:40).

58. Jane Morrissey, “Scholastica and Benedict: A Picnic, A Paradigm” and Gerard Farrell, “Saints Benedict and Scholastica: The Liturgical Music,” in Equally in God's Image: Women in the Middle Ages, eds. Julia Bolton Holloway, Constance S. Wright, and Joan Bechtold (New York, 1990), pp. 251-57 and 258-59; also see the comments of the editors on p. 217.

59. Cyrille Vogel and Reinhard Elze, Le pontifical romano-germanique du xe siècle, 3 vols., Studi e Testi 226/227/269 (Vatican City, 1963-1972).

60. Pontifical, ed. Vogel and Elze, 1:62-69.

61. Pontifical, ed. Vogel and Elze, 1:76-82. Other potentially significant differences between the male and female ordines include the bishop's address concerning paternity (which begins the male ordo only and which precedes the Pater noster, evoking divine parallelism) and the failure of the bishop to prostrate himself along with the abbess-elect (although he does do so along with the abbot-elect).

62. Bamberg, MS Lit. 142 (tenth century, Niedermünster), fols. 6r-57v; Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-Preußischer Kulturbesitz MS theol. lat. qu. 199 (eleventh century, Niedermünster), fols. 68r-119r. The only change in these feminized versions of the Benedictine rule compared with the original is that the chapters dealing with priests resident in the monastery are moved to the end of the rule, almost as an appendix, because of their obvious inappropriateness; it is worth emphasizing that regulations concerning guests, religious who are artisans, religious on pilgrimage, and the like are neither shifted nor excised. For the place of the Niedermünster versions in the typology of Benedictine rule copies, see the section on the rule entitled “de vulgo recepto” in Hanslik, ed. Benedicti regula, pp. lv-lxiv. A copy of the rule of Caesarius was appended to the Benedictine rule in Bamberg, MS Lit. 142, fols. 62r-83v, a copy which significantly altered Caesarius' rule, often so as to increase the power of the abbess (de Vogüé and Courreau in Caesarius, Oeuvres monastiques 1:129-34).

63. That the abbess of Niedermünster felt particular concern about issues of authority may be indicated by the marginal notes—all reading proba—made, by a hand contemporary with the rest of the libellus, throughout the text of the Benedictine rule, next to every section of the rule specifically relevant to the officium of the superior of the community.

64. “Domine Deus omnipotens qui sororem Moysi Mariam preeuntem cum ceteris mulieribus inter aequoreas undas cum tympanis et choris laetam adlitus maris venire fecisti, te supplices deprecamur pro fideli famula N. que hodie materna in cathedra super universas subditas sibi abbatissa constituitur.” (I cite the ordo from Berlin MS theol. lat. qu. 199 fol. 56v).

65. Berlin MS theol. lat. qu., fol. 67r.

66. For the illuminations see Regensburger Buchmalerei. Von frühkarolingischer Zeit bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters, Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek München/Ausstellungkataloge 39 (Munich, 1987), catalogue #21, pp. 35-36, plates 17, 101.

This essay is dedicated to Suzanne Fonay Wemple and Robert Somerville, the dominant figures in my undergraduate education; the essay represents a synthesis of their training in the study of female religious and of legislative sources, respectively.