SOURCE: Warren, Nancy Bradley. “Pregnancy and Productivity: The Imagery of Female Monasticism within and beyond the Cloister Walls.” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28, no. 3 (fall 1998): 531-52.

[In the following essay, Warren explores the Middle English version of the story of the miracle of the pregnant abbess from the Alphabet of Tales, interpreting it in terms of the association made between women's economic and sexual activities.]

THE MIRACLE OF THE PREGNANT ABBESS: THE PROBLEM OF MATERNITY

In the Middle English version of the miracle of the pregnant abbess, as it appears in the collection of exempla known as the Alphabet of Tales, “Ane abbatiss of a grete place” becomes pregnant when she “þurgh entysing of þe devull … lete hur carvur … hafe at do with hur.”¹ She hides her pregnancy as long as possible, but her condition inevitably becomes obvious. The nuns, realizing that the abbess is with child, are glad of her downfall, because she has been so strict with them. Some of the sisters go to the bishop and disclose the abbess's situation, and he makes plans to visit the house. At a loss for what to do, the abbess retreats to her chapel where she “was want daylie als devoutlie as sho cuthe to say our ladie matyns” (11). The abbess prays to Mary for aid, and Mary appears to her, accompanied by two angels. Mary tells the abbess that she has heard her prayer, and the abbess is immediately delivered of her child, which is spirited away by the angels to be raised by a hermit.

Initially, this text appears as a straightforward portrayal of Mary's aid to a devout and repentant sinner. Like many later medieval texts about spiritual matters, however, this text has an economic valence as well. As Paul Strohm has argued, a woman's body offers “a powerful and irreducible figure for her property.”² Similarly, pregnancy and maternity are powerful figures for women's work. While the labor of childbirth is in itself socially and spiritually important female work, it may also represent other kinds of material and spiritual work performed by women. Considered in this regard, the portrayal of maternity in the miracle might seem to provide a vision of female economic empowerment. When Mary intervenes, the abbess appears to succeed in a bid to control her own body and its productive capabilities. The disappearance from the scene of the “carvur,” the child's biological father, enhances the sense that women are in charge of productive processes.

Mary's aid to the abbess suggests the formation of a network of women which allows them to elude the grasp of male authority and to take independent control of resources. So interpreted, the abbess's pregnancy and Mary's intervention might seem to pose a threat parallel to that posed to husbands and fathers by economically active women in the marketplace. For example, the bishop's shocked confusion when no sign of pregnancy can be found following the abbess's miraculous delivery leads to a profound disruption of hierarchical relations when he kneels before the abbess to beg forgiveness for having, he thinks, accused her falsely. But this latent threat is quickly subjected to further narrative control. Rather than keeping the secret of her productivity and enabling women to elude male control, the abbess quickly explains what has transpired, confessing her pregnancy to the bishop and revealing Mary's aid. In doing so, she voluntarily returns herself and her productivity to the bishop's authority. With this turn of events, the miracle of the pregnant abbess removes itself from any suggestion of women's empowerment. In fact, the miracle colludes in and poses solutions to male anxieties about independent female initiatives.

The miracle reconfigures economic activities as sexual activities in order to make anxiety-producing practices easier to condemn. Such equations are evident in many late medieval texts produced in an environment in which women's entry into market production and their (at least temporary) access to greater independence, social prestige, and control of resources threatened the patriarchal household.³ In this regard, it is significant that the miracle recounts the pregnancy of “ane abbatiss of a grete place” (Alphabet, 11). A woman in this position is the embodiment of two particularly distressing tendencies in the later Middle Ages—female access to authority and to material resources—and the miracle resituates these threats to masculine control under a sign of sexual transgression.

The abbess's sexual activity clearly violates her monastic vow of chastity. In breaking her vow of chastity she has sinned against her divine spouse, and this sin may be aligned with the worldly category of transgression against the husbandly authority so crucial in maintaining masculine privilege.⁴ This aspect of her sin reinforces the miracle's economic implications; the abbess has claimed as her own to bestow according to her choice that which belongs to the spouse—her body and its reproductive capacities. This miracle's tacit linkage of economic and sexual sins is foregrounded when the bishop visits the house and deputes two clerks to examine the abbess. When they inform the bishop that they can find no sign of pregnancy, he believes that “þai had takyn som money of hur” (Alphabet, 12). Thus, not only is the abbess's economic power figured as sexual transgression, but her sexual misconduct also begets suspicion of economic misconduct when the bishop accuses her of bribery.

The fate of the male child completes the devaluation of female labor. Upon learning the location of the abbess's child, the bishop sends his clerks to verify the story. They find the child with the hermit, and, after seven years have passed, the bishop takes the child and puts him in school, where he “encrecid gretelie in vertu & connyng, vnto so mekull þatt when þis bisshop decesid, he was made bisshop after hym nexte succedyng” (Alphabet, 12). The transfer of the child to male hands immediately following birth, the child's adoption by the clerical establishment, and his ultimate succession as bishop illustrate a fantastic patriarchal reprocessing of motherhood, and indeed of all female labor. Even nurturing the infant, the most traditionally and stereotypically female work, becomes a man's work. In the end, it is the celibate male clergy who have reproduced, and women have become unnecessary. The miracle illustrates the “negation of the procreative mother—the consignment of this unknowable source and place to the status of unknown, to what cannot be signified.”⁵ Women's work is finally made insignificant, obliterated in favor of men's labors, and women acquiesce to being replaced firmly under male authority.

Much like the female body itself, the body's productivity is denied to women. The value produced is estranged from the one who produces it. The fact that the male child is placed permanently in male hands moments after birth bears out Jean-Joseph Goux's argument that the relationship between mother and child under patriarchal control is analogous to the relationship between worker and product under capitalist domination.⁶ Just as it is the owner of the means of production and not the worker who benefits from the output of the worker's labor, so it is the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the stand-ins for the divine spouse to whom the abbess's body belongs, who benefit from the child produced by her body. In this respect, the miracle is a protocapitalist anticipation of subsequently visible capitalist formulations.

The miracle of the pregnant abbess resonates with contemporary fears and desires concerning the material economy. So, too, does it echo later medieval crises in the spiritual realm which are themselves connected to women's involvement in the material economy. In both realms, men in positions of power were concerned with protecting specifically masculine privileges. This miracle provides an imaginative and hypothetical space in which clerical and secular interests may be found to coincide in the devaluation of female labor and the reassertion of male control of productivity. The miracle's treatment of maternity as a complex, potentially troublesome issue is relevant to the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when devotional practices emphasizing the humanity of Christ (devotional practices frequently associated with women), the cult of the Virgin Mary, and, especially, the cultural power of the Eucharist and the body of Christ, were all approaching their zenith.⁷ The significance of maternity and the involvement of women in the economy of salvation were ever-present issues, requiring the regulation of women's material and spiritual practices and the construction of a version of maternity consistent with the interests of clerics, husbands, and fathers.

In the later Middle Ages, the body of Christ produced in the Eucharist became an almost limitless source of symbolic capital. As such, it was subject to the “economic calculation” Pierre Bourdieu sees as extending “to all the goods, material and symbolic without distinction, that present themselves as rare and worthy of being sought after in a particular social formation.”⁸ Such economic calculation includes attempts by those who have control over production (in this case the male clergy) to retain their advantage. The sacramental production of the body of Christ, and the resultant symbolic capital, are, however, rooted in the maternal, material production of the Incarnation, a relationship which complicates clerical privilege. Although women are firmly excluded from sacramental production, foundational maternity is always present, always potentially disruptive.⁹ Not surprisingly, anxieties about the involvement of women in the production of the body of Christ, such as fears about the existence of Lollard women priests, surround the Eucharist in the later Middle Ages.¹⁰

In order to reinforce the clergy's status as privileged sacramental producers, the miracle of the pregnant abbess elevates the symbolic and represses the material. The transition of the child as a mark of the abbess's sin to the child as an exemplar of virtue worthy to be bishop, a transition effected through the education provided by the Church, marks the primacy of the symbolic. It serves “to place materiality outside of value and meaning.”¹¹ The miracle constructs a paradigm of double reproduction like that described by Goux. The father is the “agent and the guarantor” of the superior variety of reproduction, which is “social, ideological … transmitted and stored in the symbolic.”¹² Inferior reproduction involves “secondary, material generation” which “is the woman's function.”¹³ The former, though founded on the latter, supersedes and indeed negates it. When the child succeeds the bishop, the masculine and the symbolic definitively triumph over the feminine and the material. Priestly fathers able to engage in sacramental work produce, through initiation, a son who, in turn, takes his place in the lineage. The miracle is finally an account of “birth done better … on a more exalted level than ordinary mothers do it,”¹⁴ that is, “birth done better” symbolically and sacramentally by celibate men.

BOOK TO A MOTHER: IMPOSING THE SOLUTION OF MONASTICISM

The miracle of the pregnant abbess was one of the most famous Marian miracles in the Middle Ages, and it is present in many Latin collections.¹⁵ However, Middle English versions of this miracle did not emerge until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when it appeared in the Northern Homily Cycle (extant in several manuscripts), the Alphabet of Tales (MS BL Add. 25719), and a miscellany of vernacular religious texts (MS BL Add. 39996), a type of collection often used by women in the course of their spiritual instruction.¹⁶ Sermons, exempla, and devotional texts are frequently directed toward regulating women's conduct, and the material in this miracle has a great deal of potential for doing precisely this in a period of rapid socioeconomic change when the group Felicity Riddy has aptly designated “male clerics and city fathers” had “a vested interest” in such regulation.¹⁷

In the miracle of the pregnant abbess, then, female monasticism as embodied in the abbess is a locus of cultural anxieties regarding women's work and women's property; the text also mobilizes female monasticism to provide solutions to these anxieties through the regulation of women's material and spiritual practices. Similarly, the later fourteenth-century Book to a Mother, an instructional, devotional text directed toward women, appropriates elements of female monasticism to shape female subjectivity in its attempts to channel women toward acceptable forms of production.¹⁸ To this end, the three substantial vows of monasticism (poverty, chastity, and obedience) are recommended repeatedly to women throughout the text. As in the miracle of the pregnant abbess, the spiritual instruction provided by the Book has much to do with instruction in proper conduct. For example, even in the section summarizing the six excerpts from Scripture he has translated, the priest is concerned with promulgating a spiritual life lived through closely regulated material practices. He tells the mother, “be a trewe weigoere and aske alle þi conseiles henneforeward of þe weigoers … and principaliche of þes syxe iustices þat I spak of er, for þei waren uerrei weigoers, hauinge no propretees aȝenes here Fadur wille” (198).

The limitations placed on possession of property in the preceding passage sound a theme repeated frequently in the Book to a Mother, which spends a great deal of time addressing the problems stemming from women's desire for property and the benefits of poverty. A broad-based condemnation of sinful love of property begins early in the Book, but proprietary sins become, as the text progresses, by and large the province of women. The priest's condemnations of property, material goods, and worldliness focus heavily on criticism of women's dress. While recounting the story of Christ's nativity the priest does critique men's frivolous fashions as well as women's, saying that in the stable in Bethlehem there were neither proud, elaborately dressed squires nor elegant ladies. However, his attack on women's clothing, a key sign of feminine pride, worldliness, and love of property, is more biting and extended. He goes beyond decrying excess and aligns women's “maumetrie” with Eve's sin. The priest says that at Christ's birth there were no “nyce dameselis wiþ garlondis of gold ne perlis ne filettis ne bonettis, ne suche oþir maumetrie as Eue doutres disgisen hem now bi daie” (48-49). He further condemns all the contemporary “douȝtres” who follow “þis lessoun þe liere tauȝte Eue in Paradis,” saying “þe feirer þei couiten to seme to men, þe foulere þei semen to Godis siȝt” (49).

Feminine maumetrie, which is defined in the Middle English Dictionary as “misdirected worship,” particularly “the worship of worldly goods,” leads, in the eyes of the priestly writer, to “lecherie.”¹⁹ As in the miracle of the pregnant abbess, sexual sins and those involving property are linked. The priest laments “hou monye men and wommen haue be lost and dampned seþ Eue bigan to teche þis lessoun, wiþ suche maumetrie sturinge hem to lecherie” (Book to a Mother, 11). The progression from maumetrie to lecherie reveals that women's desire for property is not only sinful in its own right, but, as in many monastic texts, it endangers chastity, both that of women themselves and that of men whom women tempt with their finery.²⁰ The clerical writer of the Book to a Mother connects women's misuse of their bodies with their desire for property when he tells his mother to “þenk hou bisiliche, hou harde, hou sore þou hast traueiled wastinge awei þi bodi and þi blod wiþ alle þi uertues niȝtes and daies, to winne wordli goodis” (112). The language of travailing “bisiliche,” “harde,” and “sore” both night and day, wasting body, blood, and virtue, has distinctly sexual resonances. The priest implies that women readily trade their body for property and that the desire for material goods makes women into whores.

The Book's persistent association of women's material desires with sexual transgressions echoes topics of heated discussion in the text's larger environment. Internal evidence in this treatise, which exists in three early-fifteenth-century manuscripts,²¹ suggests that it was composed in the later fourteenth century, a period in which concerns about women's participation in the politico-economic sphere were quite pronounced. One passage which Adrian McCarthy, the Book's editor, cites as evidence for the date of composition refers to the “Herods” overcome by Herodias and her daughter and to the “sacrifice of a ‘kingdome’ to ‘false reynynge of wommenliche men.’”²² McCarthy argues that this passage recalls events toward the end of Edward III's reign in the 1370s, in particular Edward III's much decried relationship with Alice Perrers and the influence of John of Gaunt.²³

In addition to being the mistress of Edward III, Alice Perrers was very shrewd in acquiring and managing property, and, not surprisingly, attacks on Perrers were directed at what were characterized as her linked sexual and economic transgressions. In his Historia Anglicana, Thomas Walsingham describes Perrers as a “foemina procacissima” and a “meretricula.”²⁴ Walsingham's description of Perrers as “foemina procacissima,” that is, as a “most shameless” or “most bold” woman, resembles the priestly writer of the Book to a Mother's condemnations of the “daughters of Eve” and the “wickede wommen” who “haue conquered wiþ her maumetrie, bi art of þe deuel, þe moste part of þis world” (195). Walsingham's application of the label “little harlot” (meretricula is a diminutive form that intensifies the term's pejorative quality) replicates the Book's assessment of the sinful women who have “traueiled” both night and day with body and blood “to winne wordli goodis.”²⁵ Significantly, Walsingham's abbey of St. Albans had been embroiled in a property dispute with Alice Perrers over lands at Oxhey, a dispute in which Alice triumphed, shortly before he made these allegations.

In recounting the complaints made against Perrers in the Parliament of 1376, Walsingham continues to condemn Perrers's conduct as improper for a woman, writing:

Illa etenim modum mulierum nimis est supergressa; sui etenim sexus et fragilitatis immemor, nunc justa Justiciarios Regis residendo, nunc in Foro Ecclesiastico justa Doctores se collocando, pro defensione causarum suadere ac etiam contra jura postulare, minime verebatur; unde propter scandalum et grave dedecus quae exinde Regi Edwardo, non solem in hac terra sed in exteris regionibus, nimium resultabant. …²⁶

The Commons' complaints as characterized by Walsingham illuminate the larger sociopolitical importance of the codification and regulation of women's conduct undertaken by the Book to a Mother. Alice Perrers, like the pregnant abbess, like the “daughters of Eve” in the Book, and, as Paul Strohm argues, like Chaucer's later-fourteenth-century creation, the Wife of Bath, “fuses the categories of economic and sexual assertiveness into a single epitome of contemporary male dread.”²⁷

The priestly writer of the Book's condemnation of women's sexual sins and their transgressions involving material goods culminates in an outburst of extreme antifeminism. He claims that desiring, acquisitive women “wiþ here malice and here maumetrie … passen þe deuel, here fadur, and here dame, Dam Eue; for þei coueiteden none suche mametrie, but forte haue be like to God in konninge” (115). In the priest's view, neither Eve, who, according to medieval understanding of Genesis, brought sin into the world, nor the devil himself, is as evil as these contemporary women. Women's desire for property is even more dangerous than desire for divine knowledge. Maumetrie becomes, if not original sin, originary sin. He writes that “wommen … wiþ here maumetrie ben cause of alle malice and synnes þat regnen a-mong monkinde” (119).

The priest's ultimate resolution to the problem of women's desires as such a socially corrosive force lies in an ideal version of female monasticism. This solution is present throughout the text, but it emerges most strongly immediately following this dire vision of women's bent for social destruction. Poverty, chastity, and meekness are key elements of male monasticism as well as female monasticism. The priest makes clear, however, that he has specifically female monasticism, and in fact a particular monastic tradition, in mind as a tool to shape women's identities and regulate women's conduct. Following his antifeminist outburst, he extols the value of claustration, which by the later Middle Ages was associated almost exclusively with female monasticism.

The priest, returning to the theme of female finery, in this case elaborate headdresses, says that “alle suche oules wiþ her heie hornus … schullen se þe time it hadde be bettur þat þei hadden holde Seint Benettis rule, faste iclosed in a cloister of foure stronge wallis, þat ben riȝtfulnes, strengþe, sleiþe and temperaunce” (Book to a Mother, 120-21). Like much of the Book, this passage slides between “bodily” and “ghostly” meanings, recommending at once the physical enclosure of “Seint Benettis rule” and a symbolic, spiritual variety of enclosure for women. The priest reinforces the value of claustration for women when he says to “kepe wel þis cloister” (122) and to “ches þou Crist to þin Abbot” because Christ

wol ȝeue þe no leue to ride ne to go out of þi cloister for recreacioun, and so be worse whanne þou comest hom þanne whanne þou wendest out; ne to haue lustis and likinges and wordli worschupes; to be a good womman in o side of a wal, and in þat oþer side a schrewe; ne to make þi professioun o dai, and sone after haue þou asked leue to breke it in proude aparaile of cloþes, peces, macers and spones and oþere wordli uanites.

(124)

A good woman is, by definition, one on the right side (that is, the inside) of the wall. A woman who ventures outside enclosure must necessarily return worse than she was before she went out. Outside, for the priest, is both a physical place—in particular, the marketplace—and a moral state, the state of being beyond the law of the husband, the father, and the cleric. Bodily and ghostly claustration are therefore vital to keep women under male control and away from material “wordli uanites,” the desire for which and the possession of which, according to the priest, lead to sin and social disorder.

As the miracle of the pregnant abbess and the Book to a Mother reveal, the frequent later medieval association of women's economic activities with improper sexual activities is remarkably supple. Lecherie in the miracle is a figure for economic assertiveness, and suspicions of bribery are an offshoot of sexual misconduct. In the Book, economic desires characterized as “maumetrie” lead to sexual transgression, which is in turn a figure for transgressive use of property. As in the miracle, a woman's body in the Book is a figure for property, and controlling sexual activity is an economic matter pertaining to the use and control of property. When a woman, going “outside,” engages in sexual activity not sanctioned by those to whom her body rightly belongs (that is, her father or her spouse, be he human or divine), she is, like the pregnant abbess, using property improperly, illegitimately, and in a way harmful to the rightful owner.²⁸

The priest emphasizes that women do not control their bodies according to their own will when he advises the mother, “be now sori for al þat þou hast mysused þi soule and hure uertues, þi bodi or oni oþer goodis þat God haþ suffred þe haue, oþer byinge or syllinge, oþer in ony oþer doinge aȝenus Godis wil” (Book to a Mother, 111). In this passage, sins involving the body and sins involving property are fused; misuse of either the property of one's body or the property of one's goods is misuse of that which is given by God and is properly subject to God's will. The female body and material property also coalesce when the priest holds up the example of the virgin martyr St. Lucy. In his account of her life, she describes herself as God's possession and equates her body and material goods when she says, “Þese þre ȝer I offered none oþer offeryng bot myself to herie God: do he with his sacrifice as him likeþ” (22). St. Lucy's use of her body is coextensive with her use of other material resources. In her refusal to make an offering to devils, in her preserved virginity, and in her martyrdom, St. Lucy uses property correctly, in accordance with patriarchal ideology powerfully reinforced through association with “God's will.”

That the mother the text addresses is a widow adds particular urgency to the text's admonitions about women's use of material property and the property of their bodies.²⁹ Widows posed an especially knotty problem for those concerned with women and their access to property in later medieval England. Their ability to dispose of their bodies and resources autonomously, since they were no longer under the control of a father or husband, resembles the privileges afforded to men, although the correspondence is by no means exact.³⁰ In an effort to restrict widows' potential freedoms, the priest presents the monastically influenced model of “holi Anne” from whom he directs his mother to “lerne wel … hou þou schalt be a good widwe” (Book to a Mother, 52). Anna is a “good widwe” worthy of emulation because she remains “inside” both bodily and ghostly. She “wente not for þe temple, seruinge God wiþ fastinges and preyer niȝt and dai” (52).

Anxieties provoked by the possibilities opened to women through widowhood also underpin the prominence of nuptial imagery in the Book. Referring to “þine two hosbondis—Crist and mi fadir” (30), the priest mobilizes the discourse of marriage to subject women perpetually to male authority. Nuptial discourse becomes an additional regulatory mechanism for keeping women “inside.” The priest indicates that even though the mother's earthly spouse is dead, she still must comport herself as a wife who is subject to a husband's authority (i.e., that of the divine spouse and his earthly clerical representatives) in the use of her goods and her body.

Although nuptial imagery works to counteract the freedoms available to women through widowhood, the possibilities of maternity remain disturbing and must be addressed by the priestly writer. In maternity, issues of female power, female productivity, and female disposition of property merge, as in the miracle of the pregnant abbess. The priest draws maternity into his critique when he observes that, according to Holy Writ, “‘þer is no malice a-boue þe malice of wommen,’ for womman is þe deuelis massanger, procu[ra]toure, maister and modir” (Book to a Mother, 119). In calling women the devil's messenger, procurator, master—and mother—the priest adds maternity to women's sexual and economic transgressions; all make women dangerous and disruptive.

Not surprisingly, bodily maternity does not appear in a positive light in the Book to a Mother; the priest implicates it in the entwined sins of lechery and desire for property when he condemns child-bearing as an expedient of those who “coueiten riches and worldly worschupes” (77) and those who “excusen hemself” from living chaste lives “seiynge þat it is bettur to bringe forþ children” (91). He argues for the superiority of spiritual maternity when he tells his mother, “þou maist conceyue þe same Crist and bere him not onlich nine monþes but wipoute ende; and þat is bettur þan to bere him bodiliche as oure Ladi dide, as Crist seiþ in þe gospel” (44). As in the miracle of the pregnant abbess, the best, most valuable kind of reproduction in the Book is nonmaterial. In addition to devaluing bodily maternity, this passage de-genders maternity. When maternity is made spiritual, its female particularity is obliterated; it is no longer solely the province of women. Spiritual maternity—which is “bettur þan” bearing Christ bodily—is no longer uniquely female work.

The chapters of the Book to a Mother which treat the events of the Annunciation, Nativity, and Infancy further devalue the specifically female work of Mary's maternity. In the context of these events to which Mary's maternity is so central, the priest presents the Virgin Mary as a model of ideal meekness and virtue while suppressing her maternity. Referring to the etymology of Mary's name (“a bittur se or a sterre of þe see”), he says that the female reader can be Mary “gostlich” by having “a bittur sorwe” for her sins and by giving “good example to men þat þei mowen se bi þe liuinge hou þei mowen come to þe hauen toun of heuene.”³¹ Significantly, being Mary “gostlich” has nothing to do with bodily, or even spiritual, maternity at all, but rather with repenting and setting an example of good conduct.

In a move which goes to striking lengths to erase and repress the material process of child-bearing and maternal nurturing which is essential to Christ's Incarnation, the author replaces the fetus in the womb with a text at one of the few points when he mentions Mary's pregnancy. The Book's structuring principle is that the text itself, designed to serve as a kind of spiritual manual and conduct book for women, is Christ,³² and the priest writes, “þis Bok was closid nyne monþe in a litel place of a maide” (44). In the Incarnation, specifically female work makes the divine Word flesh; the Book to a Mother, however, makes the divine flesh into a written word. In writing the Book, which claims to be Christ, the priest performs a kind of textual transubstantiation. As the flesh becomes the Book, inscription, a process coded masculine in the later Middle Ages, replaces the Incarnation which took place in a woman's body. Just as the reproduction of Christ's body in the Eucharist excludes women and replaces the maternal process of the Incarnation, so does the production of Christ as text. Mary's role in the Incarnation disappears altogether when the priest says that in the Gospel Christ “clepiþ himself Holi Writ þat his Fadur halewide and sende into þis world” (38). The Incarnation becomes a transaction in which the written word, enfleshed in a male body, is sent into the world by the Father alone; the paternal and the textual replace the maternal and the physical.

The transformation of fetus into text within Mary's body is analogous to the Book's explicitly textual process of constructing women as nondisruptive subjects. The priest describes the text, a “bok” which “is Crist, Godis sone of heuene,” as a monastic rule, calling Christ the “beste rule” (31). He tells the mother to “be write wiþinne and wiþoute wiþ þulke þre [poverty, chastity, and meekness] as Crist was” (31). The woman is not only to read the Book but also to be inscribed with the text of the rule. The priest elaborately sets out the creation of the female reader as a surface for inscription when he tells the mother to examine her life, and, where it is not in accordance with Christ, to “scrape it out.” He further advises, “And þat þat þe lackeþ þat þou most nedis haue to holde Goddis hestis, writ in þi soule. Þy penne to write wiþ schal be þi loue and þi wil ymad scharp wiþ drede of sharp peyne of helle” (38-39). In reading the writing of the Book to a Mother, the reader is written in; the text marks the reader and makes her subject.

Internal inscription represents the process of getting the text inside the reader and so making the reader into a desirable kind of subject. Another way the Book works to get the text into the reader, and thus shape the reader's identity, is through a model of reading as textual incorporation. Images of eating texts abound in the Book to a Mother. For example, in developing the conceit that the Book is Christ, the priest recounts the Old Testament story in which Ezekiel is fed with a book.³³ In explaining to his mother how she should use the Book, the priest tells her:

lerne þis bok, as I seide, raþer; þat is, know þou þe liuinge of Crist and ofte chew hit and defie hit wiþ hot brennynge loue, so þat alle þe uertues of þi soule and of þi bodi be turned fro flescliche liuinge into Cristes liuinge, as bodiliche mete þat is chewed and defied norschiþ alle þe parties of a mannes bodi. And þanne þou etist gostliche Cristes flesh and his blod whereuer þou be.

(32)

The image of eating texts has connections with the monastic tradition of ruminatio, but there is more at stake than simply contemplative, meditative reading.³⁴ Rather, the priest advocates a eucharistic model of reading, a kind of reading appropriate to a work which is created through an act of textual transubstantiation. Just as eating the Host differs from eating ordinary bread, incorporating this text is a special process. In medieval understanding of the Eucharist, the Host is not digested and metabolized to become part of the human body.³⁵ Rather, by ingesting the body and blood of Christ, the recipient becomes part of the body of Christ. Here, the reader does not make something of the text by incorporating it; rather, the incorporated text makes something of the reader. The priest says that God

wol þat we ete him, as Seynt Austyn scheweþ in his Bokes of Confession, þere God spekeþ to him and seiþ: “I am mete of grete folk: be þou gret and þou schalt ete me. And þou schalt not turne me into þe, as þou dost bodily mete, bot þou schalt be turned into me.”³⁶

In the process of being turned into the Christ that the Book itself claims to be, women are turned into the kind of women the pregnant abbess turns out to be—women who do not claim the benefits of their productivity and power but instead willingly put them, and themselves, under the control of husbands, fathers, and clerics.

BRIGITTINE TEXTS: A MONASTIC COUNTERDISCOURSE OF MATERNITY

In the Book to a Mother, monastic vows, enclosure, and nuptial imagery all serve to control women's productivity and regulate women's use of property. It would seem likely, then, that nuns, bound by vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, cloistered, and constructed in services of profession as brides of Christ, would have little productive power and little opportunity to control resources. Brigittine texts, however, provide an example within female monasticism of an alternative to the Benedictine model evoked in the Book to a Mother, an alternative in which maternity affords marked material and spiritual benefits for nuns. At the same time that physical motherhood is emphatically proscribed by monastic rules, imagistic maternity flourishes in Brigittine texts, sanctioning the material and spiritual productivity of women religious, giving women's work high value, and legitimating women's independent use of property.

The Brigittine Order's emphasis on maternity emerges in the profession service, where the abbess and Mary serve as the representatives of the maternal.³⁷ The candidate for profession who has completed the year of proof enters the church behind a red banner on which Christ's body is portrayed on one side and that of the Virgin Mary on the other “so that the newe spowse beholdyng þe signe of the newe spouse sufferying on the crosse lerne paciens and pouerte. And in beholdyng the virgyn modir: lerne chastite & mekenes.”³⁸ Although nupital imagery is present and the candidate is identified as the bride of Christ, she is simultaneously identified with Mary, Christ's mother, as well as with Christ himself. In the ceremony, the bishop may stand in for Christ the spouse and for the candidate's father, but the candidate can align herself not only, as priests do, with Christ, from whom she is to learn, but also with Christ's virgin mother.³⁹ Mary and Christ, represented so frequently in Brigittine texts as co-redemptors, are portrayed on the banner as two sides of the same coin, so to speak, providing equally important structuring forces for the ways in which Brigittine nuns will live spiritual lives in the material world.

The instruction to Brigittine novices to learn chastity and meekness from Mary shows, on the one hand, the dominance of a traditional ideology of female spirituality in Brigittine texts. On the other hand, Brigittine texts also represent Mary's meekness and chastity as empowering qualities, as sources of authority. For example, in the Liber Celestis, Christ compares Mary to “a flowr þat grew in a vale, a-boute which vale were v high mountaynes.”⁴⁰ He then identifies Mary with the vale “for thy mekenes þe which þu haddeste a-fore all oþer,” continuing, “This vale passed v mountaynes” (56). Thus, because of her meekness, Mary is raised above five Old Testament leaders—Moses, Elijah, Samson, David, and Solomon. Christ also declares that Mary's chastity makes her greater than the clergy, his earthly representatives. He tells Mary, “In thyn abstynence þu arte more than any confessore” (58).

The Brigittine consecration service contains at its heart a “complex cluster of ideas—virginity, marriage, intercourse, fertility,”⁴¹ all ideas with especially material ramifications. The language accompanying the procession into the chapter house following the consecration reinforces identities beyond simply that of bride of Christ; in particular it emphasizes the maternal possibilities available to the Brigittine nun. While processing, the community sings the hymn Sponse iungendo filio, which intertwines images of Mary's maternity with nuptial imagery.⁴² For instance, it states, “The wombe of mary is the chambre. her soule is the spousesse.”⁴³ The hymn highlights that “[t]he newly professed is thus truly what the Extrauagantes first called her, a daughter of the Virgin. … She is also … the spouse of the Virgin's son: at the same time, therefore, daughter, wife, and mother to be … herself another Virgin Mary.”⁴⁴

Brigittine profession is constructed as an exchange between women rather than an exchange of women. During the service the candidate makes her promise of obedience to both the bishop (a representative of both father and husband) and the abbess,⁴⁵ but on the eighth day following her consecration the abbess achieves preeminence when the candidate writes her profession in the register. The Syon Additions for the Sisters indicates that at this point the newly consecrated nun makes her promise “to the abbes of thys monastery, and to thy successours,” and specifically to the abbess as mother, inscribing, “I delyuer and betake to ȝour reuerent moderhode, thys wrytyng.”⁴⁶ In the ceremony of writing the vow, maternal authority supplants paternal authority since the abbess, rather than the bishop, is situated as the administrator of spiritual resources.

Representations of maternity as a source of female authority and of maternity as valuable female work appear in many places in Brigittine texts beyond the profession service. For instance, unlike the miracle of the pregnant abbess and the Book to a Mother, Birgitta's Revelations foreground the importance of maternity in the Incarnation, a formation which situates maternal labors as a vital part of human redemption. When Mary teaches Birgitta about Christ's Passion, she tells her that Christ's members were as hers, and his heart was as hers, “for as oþir childir were wonnt to be in þair modirs wombe so was he in mine.”⁴⁷ Mary continues by aligning the process of birth and crucifixion, calling attention to her participation in both. She says, “Forsothe, he was to me as mine awne hert. Þarefore me thoght, when he was born of me, as halfe mi hert was born and passed oute of me, and when he suffird, me thoght þat halfe mi hert suffird.”⁴⁸ In this revelation, maternity is made visible as valuable, salvific work. The centrality of the body also revalues, and indeed sanctifies, the materiality of maternal reproduction which is subordinated to symbolic reproduction in the miracle of the pregnant abbess and the Book to a Mother.

Brigittine texts not only foreground women's productivity in the spiritual realm, but they also speak specifically to women's rights to control material resources. Throughout Birgitta's revelations, Christ and Mary both inform Birgitta that it is acceptable for her to possess and use property. Perhaps even more significantly, though, Birgitta's practices of poverty also receive divine approval, suggesting that women have, in the end, the right to determine their own relationship to the material world. The status accorded to maternity lends legitimacy to women's independent control of money and property, a correlation which can be seen most concretely in the construction of the abbess's role in the Brigittine Rule as divinely revealed to Birgitta. The abbess, aligned with Mary, is the head of both the male and female members of the community, and she has final say in all matters concerning the community's funds and possessions. The Brigittine discourse of maternity does not fully negate other, more constraining material and symbolic consequences of monastic identity in the Brigittine tradition. It does, however, open up some possibilities for empowerment initially suggested in the miracle of the pregnant abbess, possibilities which that text and the Book to a Mother then work so hard to negate.

Just as imagery and practices drawn from Benedictine monasticism move beyond the cloister walls in the Book to a Mother, so also Brigittine monasticism is at work in the secular world of later medieval England. With the entry of more women into literate activity, book production, and manuscript ownership, the male monopolization of literature impacting female conduct was contested in the course of the fifteenth century. Evidence exists of a countertradition more favorable to women's control of their own resources. Texts such as the miracle of the pregnant abbess and the Book to a Mother circulated to serve the interests of “male clerics and city fathers.” Simultaneously, though, women used their own resources to commission production of, and otherwise gain access to, texts which served their own “vested interests,” both material and spiritual. A case in point is the attraction to Brigittine spirituality by wealthy, powerful secular women such as Margaret, duchess of Clarence; Cecily of York; and, on a less grand but still impressive scale, Margery Kempe. For example, Margaret, duchess of Clarence was granted papal permission “to dwell near Syon [the only Brigittine house in England] and to be visited at her invitation by the enclosed brethren. … Moreover, she received permission to enter, with assent of the superiors, monasteries of enclosed nuns.”⁴⁹ Furthermore, Margaret possessed a manuscript (Yale University, Beinecke MS 317) prepared for her by Symon Wynter, a brother at Syon, which included, along with other works, two of St. Birgitta's visions.⁵⁰ Among other bequests of books, Cecily of York left a book containing St. Birgitta's Revelations to her granddaughter, Anne de la Pole, who was prioress of Syon.⁵¹ Cecily's household ordinances indicate that during meals she had religious texts, including St. Birgitta's Revelations, read aloud.⁵² Margery Kempe's Book recounts her hearing “Bridis boke” read to her,⁵³ and the Lord tells Margery in a revelation that he speaks to her just as he spoke to St. Birgitta. In the same revelation, Jesus informs her of the Brigittine text's authenticity, saying, “I telle þe trewly it is trewe euery word þat is wretyn in Brides boke, & be þe it xal be knowyn for very trewth.”⁵⁴ Brigittine texts' portrayal of women's productivity, their legitimation of women's authority, and their support of women's autonomous control of resources were certainly not the only factors behind powerful secular women's interest in them. Undeniably, though, the counterdiscourse of Brigittine monasticism provides a powerful interpretative paradigm through which Margaret, Cecily, and Margery could favorably negotiate their processes and practices of living spiritual lives in the material world.

Notes

1. Mary Macleod Banks, Alphabet of Tales, Early English Text Society [hereafter EETS] o.s. 127 (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus, 1972), 11. Hereafter citations will be given parenthetically in the text.

2. Paul Strohm, Hochon's Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 134-35.

3. Martha Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 19-21.

4. Canon lawyers took the construction of the nun as the bride of Christ as grounds to make a formal distinction between a monk's vow of chastity and a nun's. As G. G. Coulton explains in Five Centuries of Religion, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920-50), 2:154:

   The monk's vow was treated … as a matter mainly personal to himself; if he broke his vow, he risked his own soul. But a nun was bound by more than a personal vow; she was the Bride of Christ and, by canon law, her unchastity was a direct offence against her Spouse.

   Gratian states,

   Quae Christo spiritualiter nubunt, et sacerdote velantur, si publice postea nupserint, non eas admittendas esse ad poenitentiam agendam, nisi hi, quibus se junxerant, a mundo recesserint. Si enim de hominibus haec ratio custoditur, ut quaecumque vivente viro nupserit, adultera habeatur, nec ei agendae poenitentiae licentia concedatur, nisi unus de eis fuerit defunctus, quanto magis de illa tenenda est, quae ante immortali se sponso conjunxerat, et postea ad humanas nuptias transmigravit?

   e

   [Those who marry Christ spiritually and are veiled by a priest, if they should marry publicly afterward, are not to be admitted to do penance unless those with whom they had joined should withdraw from the world. If indeed this rule is preserved by men, that whoever should marry a living man commits adultery, and license for doing penance should not be granted to her, unless one of them should die, how much the more it is to be maintained for that one who previously had united herself with an immortal spouse, and afterward fled to human marriage?]

   Decretals, vol. 1, Patrologia Latina 187 (Paris: Garnier, 1891), pars II, c. xxvii, q.i, c.10, 1377. The translation (somewhat free with verb constructions) is my own. In c.14, gloss, Gratian also says that whoever corrupts a nun commits both incest and adultery, incest because the nun is the bride of God our Father and adultery because she is the spouse of another.

5. Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 227.

6. Ibid., 233.

7. On the rise of the Eucharist as a central symbol in later medieval culture, see Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Sarah Beckwith analyzes the importance of the body of Christ “as a symbol shaping and shaped by the social vision of the religious culture of the late Middle Ages in England,” describing the body of Christ as a symbol “subject to a very minute, material, precise and local form of economic calculation.” Christ's Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London: Routledge, 1993), 2 (her emphasis), 108-9.

8. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology 16, ed. Ernest Gellner et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 178, his emphasis.

9. In Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Nancy Jay writes:

   Opposition between sacrifice and childbirth, or between sacrifice and childbearing women, that is, mothers or potential mothers, is present in countless different sacrificial traditions. This opposition is manifested in a number of different ways; for example, the gender roles of sacrificial practice. It is a common feature of unrelated traditions that only adult males—fathers, real and metaphorical—may perform sacrifice.

   (xxiii)

   She goes on to discuss the Eucharist as one of the practices in which the opposition between sacrifice and childbirth is present. I am grateful to Peggy McCracken for bringing Jay's work to my attention.

10. See M. E. Aston, “Lollard Women Priests?” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31 (1980): 441-61. Recently, however, Shannon McSheffrey has argued that Aston and other scholars have overemphasized the opportunities Lollardy presented to women (especially in regard to literacy) and women's influence within Lollard groups. See Shannon McSheffrey, “Literacy and the Gender Gap in the Late Middle Ages: Women and Reading in Lollard Communities,” Women, the Book, and the Godly: Selected Proceedings of the St. Hilda's Conference, 1993, vol. 1, ed. Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), 157-70; and Gender and Heresy: Women and Men in Lollard Communities, 1420-1530 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). Thanks to Sarah Beckwith for calling my attention to McSheffrey's work.

11. Goux, Symbolic Economies, 228.

12. Ibid., 225.

13. Ibid.

14. Jay, Throughout Your Generations, xxiv.

15. Peter Whiteford, The Myracles of Oure Lady ed. from Wynkyn de Worde's Edition, Middle English Texts 23, ed. M. Gorlach and O. S. Pickering (Heidelberg: Winter, 1990), 26.

16. On the Northern Homily Cycle, see Myracles, 102-4; on MS BL Add. 25719, see Myracles, 121-22; on MS BL Add. 39996, see Myracles, 117-18.

17. Felicity Riddy, “Mother Knows Best: Reading Social Change in a Courtesy Text,” Speculum 71 (1996): 73.

18. In its subject matter and rhetoric the Book is very much directed toward women readers even though the writer opens by saying, “wite ȝe wel þat I desire euerych man and womman and child to be my moder, for Crist seyþ: he þat doþ his Fader wille is his broþer, suster and moder.” Adrian James McCarthy, ed., Book to a Mother: An Edition with Commentary, Studies in the English Mystics 1, Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies 92 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universität Salzburg, 1981), 1. The Book is thought to have been written by a priest. For a summary of textual evidence suggesting this authorship, see Adrian McCarthy's introduction to Book to a Mother, xxv-xxvi. Further citations will be given in the text parenthetically.

19. Lecherie in the Middle Ages itself refers to both excessive desire for sex and for material goods. The first meaning given for lecherie in the Middle English Dictionary is “A lascivious way of life; the habit or practice of adultery, fornication, etc.” Subsequent meanings include the combination of sexual and economic activity in “pimping, pandering,” and the more strictly materialistic “self-indulgence … extravagant or riotous living.” There is also a specific connection with apparel as the phrase “lecherie of clothing” indicates.

20. For example, the fifteenth-century German reformer Johann Busch declared of nuns:

    First, losing the fear of God through the dissolution of their life, they fall into proprietas in small things, then in greater things, and then, descending farther to the personal possession of money and garments, they at last rush into the lusts of the flesh, and the incontinence of outward senses, and so to wickedness of act, not fearing to give themselves up to all filth and uncleanness.

    (Coulton, Five Centuries of Religion, 4:131)

    Other monastic examples of the linkage between possession of property and unchastity include the Dominican Johann Nider's claim that stamping out proprietas was the only way to ensure the integrity of the three substantial vows (3:405) and Catherine of Siena's belief that those who neglected the vow of poverty would “fall into disobedience, and thence gradually, through worldly friendship, into incontinence” (3:407).

21. The Book to a Mother exists in Bodleian MSS Bodley 416 and Laud Misc. 210, and in BL Add. 30897. Bodley 416 is from about 1400; the other two manuscripts are from slightly later in the fifteenth century. Robert R. Raymo assigns the Book to a Mother to the 1370s (“Works of Religious and Philosophical Instruction,” vol. 7 of A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1500, ed. Albert E. Hartung [New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1986], 2267). The fact that the text, which appears primarily orthodox, indicates acceptance of the theory of the dominion of grace suggests, according to McCarthy, composition before 1380, at which point this theory began to be considered heretical and “even Oxford found it necessary to part company with Wyclif” (Book to a Mother, xxxiii). On the orthodoxy of the Book to a Mother, see xlvi-xlvii.

22. Book to a Mother, xxxi. For the passage in question, see 195.

23. Ibid., xxxii-xxxiv. This text is not the only one to associate Edward III with Herod. In Fasciculi Zizaniorum, the Carmelite friar John Keyngham attacks Wyclif “for fawning on royal favor,” and in this attack “the term used by the friar to refer to the royal family was ‘the house of Herod’” (Book to a Mother, xxxii).

24. Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, vol. 1, ed. Henry Thomas Riley, Rolls Series 28, pt. 1, vol. 1 (London, 1863), 320, 328.

25. Book to a Mother, 112. Significantly, the priestly writer of the Book connects the figure of Herod with prostitution as well, saying that Herod “is as muche to seie as ‘ioynge in skinnes,’ or ‘gloriouse skinny’: þerof is seid a comune wommon þat is ioynge in hure skyn, and gloriouse in þingus wiþoute-forth” (194).

26. Historia Anglicana, 320-21. “Also indeed she excessively surpassed the limit of women; forgetful of her sex and fragility, she did not show the least degree of scruple, now by taking up position in close proximity to the king's justices, now by gathering doctors together near the Ecclesiastical Court to urge the defense of her causes and indeed to make demands contrary to the law; whence, because of this, scandal and grave dishonor subsequently resounded about King Edward, not only in this land but also in foreign regions.” The translation is my own.

27. Strohm, Hochon's Arrow, 139.

28. This paradigm, as discussed below, is also applicable to the Book's portrayal of nuptial relations between the female reader and Christ.

29. For references to her widowhood, see Book to a Mother, 52, 89.

30. As Caroline Barron has shown, widows had greater autonomous control than married women in their ability to buy and sell property; widows could bequeath property independently and could run businesses in their own name. See “The ‘Golden Age’ of Women in Medieval London,” Medieval Women in Southern England, Reading Medieval Studies 15, ed. Keith Bate et al. (Reading: University of Reading Press, 1989), 35-58.

31. Book to a Mother, 44-45. The priest refers to these same Marian traits later in the text in another discussion of being Mary “gostlich” (86).

32. The priest says, “Mi leue dere modur, to speke more opunliche to þe of þe bok þat I ches bifore alle oþire, for þe moste nedful, most spedful and most medful: þis bok is Crist, Godis sone of heuene” (Book to a Mother, 31). The conceit of Christ as a written text is not uncommon in the later Middle Ages; for example, it appears in the “charters of Christ.”

33. See Book to a Mother, 26.

34. On ruminatio, see Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982). The image of digesting a text set out in this passage also calls to mind Michel de Certeau's model of reading as productive consumption, as a practice in which the reader makes something of the text. On this interpretation of reading, see de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 165-76. The striking assertion that one eats Christ's flesh and blood “gostliche” by learning the text reveals that the priest is not simply suggesting the reading practices of ruminatio or productive consumption, the latter of which would, in fact, largely undermine much of the work the Book attempts to do. The priest's intentions do not, of course, forestall the possibility that female readers engaged in just such productive consumption. In fact, as Anne Clark Bartlett points out, there are passages in the Book to a Mother which have a great deal of potential appeal for women. For example, the priest writes, “And þus þou maist lerne aftir þi samplerie to write a feir trewe bok and better konne Holi Writ þan ony maister of diuinite þat loueþ not God so wel as þou; for who loueþ best God, can best Holi Writ” (39). Bartlett observes that in this passage the Book “employs the discourse of familiarity, voicing the notion that women are the spiritual and intellectual equals—even potentially the superiors—of men.” See Male Authors, Female Readers: Representing Subjectivity in Middle English Devotional Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 144.

35. On digestion and the Host, see Corpus Christi, 337-38.

36. Book to a Mother, 27. The statement that “þou schalt not turne me into þe, as þou dost bodily mete” may also be evidence for the text's orthodoxy, as it confutes Lollard notions, as expressed, for example, by Margery Baxter, that the Host is subject to digestion and excretion like ordinary food.

37. Roger Ellis, Viderunt Eam Filie Syon: The Spirituality of the English House of a Medieval Contemplative Order from its Beginnings to the Present Day, Analecta Cartusiana 68 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universität Salzburg, 1984), 107.

38. James Hogg, ed., The Rewyll of Seynt Sauioure, vol. 2 of “The Rewyll of Seynt Sauioure” and Other Middle English Brigittine Legislative Texts, Salzburger Studien zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik 6 (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur), fol. 49r. Because this volume is a facsimile of Cambridge University Library MS Ff.6.33 (the Middle English rule) and St. John's College, Cambridge, MS 11 (the Latin rule), I cite it by folio number rather than by page number.

39. Penelope D. Johnson writes that in nuns' profession services, the bishop “[a]s father and head of the family … had questioned her [the candidate's] suitability for the match. As Christ's representative, he had received her vows and accepted her as Christ's bride. The bishop acted symbolically as parent and as spouse for each nun” (Equal in Monastic Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991], 64). Johnson also observes that while nuns were made spouses of Christ through profession, monks, through their profession service with its organizing principle of “renovatio of the whole person … ‘pu[t] on the new Christ’” and “thereby identif[ied] themselves directly with Christ” (63).

40. William Patterson Cummings, The Revelations of Saint Birgitta Edited from the Fifteenth-Century MS in the Garrett Collection in the Library of Princeton University, EETS o.s. 178 (Milwood, N.Y.: Kraus, 1987), 56. Further citations are given in the text.

41. Elias, Viderunt Eam Filie Syon, 107.

42. The complete text of this hymn, which is also sung in the Thursday compline service, is included in the translation of the Brigittine services made for Syon. See John Henry Blunt, ed., Myroure of Oure Ladye, EETS e.s. 19 (London, 1873), 237-39.

43. Ibid., 238.

44. Elias, Viderunt Eam Filie Syon, 107.

45. Rewyll of Seynt Sauiore, fols. 49v-50r.

46. James Hogg, ed., The Syon Additions for the Sisters from the British Library MS Arundel 146, vol. 4 of “The Rewyll of Seynt Sauioure” and Other Middle English Brigittine Legislative Texts, Salzburger Studien zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik 6 (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1980), 98. Because, unlike the Rewyll, this volume is a printed text, I cite it by page number.

47. Roger Ellis, The Liber Celestis of St. Bridget of Sweden, EETS o.s. 291 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 63.

48. Ibid., 63.

49. George R. Keiser, “Patronage and Piety in Fifteenth-Century England: Margaret, Duchess of Clarence, Symon Wynter, and Beinecke MS 317,” Yale University Library Gazette (October 1985): 37.

50. Ibid., 38-39.

51. J. G. Nichols and J. Bruce, eds., Wills from Doctors' Commons, Camden Society o.s. 83 (Camden Society, 1863), 1-8, quoted in Felicity Riddy, “‘Women Talking about the Things of God’: A Late Medieval Sub-Culture,” Women and Literature in Britain, 1150-1500, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 122 n. 41.

52. Riddy, “Women Talking,” 110.

53. Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen, The Book of Margery Kempe, EETS o.s. 212 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 39.

54. Ibid., 47.