Female Monasticism to 1100

By 500 ce, Christian women monastics lived in almost all the corners of the former western Empire and beyond, in places like Frisia and Ireland. These religious communities were not guided by the same rules. They differed in size, number and sex of inhabitants, wealth, architecture, and many other ways. However, all women’s religious communities faced gender-specific difficulties. Women were disenfranchised and unlikely to inherit property upon which to build monasteries, so they typically depended upon gifts from family and donors to maintain their communities. Hence, some small communities might last only as long as their foundresses’ lifetimes. Like male monastics, vowed women battled with both kin and local bishops for control of their monasteries. Unlike monks, they needed bishops and priests to perform the principal rituals of their religion. They also required male laborers to help till their fields and shepherd their animals, maintain their buildings, and protect them against violence. Women’s communities were always under the cura monialum—churchmen’s care or oversight of nuns. Despite the disadvantages, the documentary record suggests that women found satisfying ways to practice Christian monasticism, whether living in large communities, in family homes, or dwelling in isolation. Letters, religious treatises, saints’ vitae, and monastic rules, among many other documents, reveal the astonishing variety of women’s monastic practices and spiritualities across medieval Europe and Byzantium. Annals and chronicles, as well as charters and individual wills, attest to the wealth of some women’s monasteries. Archaeological evidence supports the documentary picture of monastic women and their communities. However, most of the written evidence for women’s monasticism comes from men’s pens, as monastic women were less likely to be literate and their communities were often too poor to support a scriptorium. Male authors typically wrote about women monastics in selected genres of texts, such as saints’ vitae; or in particular situations, as when advising vowed women on monastic rules or imposing canonical or conciliar decrees. These writers emphasized what religious women should do or did not do, rather what they did every day as vowed monastics. Critical re-revaluation of the documents, along with recent archival discoveries of women-authored books, has helped scholars sketch a positive and more authentic counter-narrative of women’s monastic history.