The Lady Abbess

Set a price on thy love. Thou canst not name so much but I will give thee for thy love much more. — ANCREN RIWLE.

I

THE economic paradox that confronts women in general is especially uncompromising for the lady. In defiance of the axiom that he who works, eats, the lady who works has less to eat than the lady who does not. There is no profession open to her that is nearly as lucrative as marriage, and the more lucrative the marriage the less work it involves. The economic prizes are therefore awarded in such a way as directly to discourage productive activity on the part of the lady. If a brother and sister are equally qualified for, let us say, the practice of medicine, the brother has, besides the scientific motive, the economic motive. The ardent pursuit of his profession will, if successful, make him a rich man. His sister, on the other hand, will never earn absolutely as much money as he, and relatively her earnings will be negligible in comparison with her income if she should marry a millionaire. But if she be known to have committed herself to the study of medicine her chance of marrying a millionaire is practically eliminated.

Apart from the crude economic question, the things that most women mean when they speak of ‘happiness,’ that is, love and children and the little republic of the home, depend upon the favor of men, and the qualities that win this favor are not in general those that are most useful for other purposes. A girl should not be too intelligent or too good or too highly differentiated in any direction. Like a ready-made garment she should be designed to fit the average man. She should have ‘just about as much religion as my William likes.’

The age-long operation of this rule, by which the least strongly individualized women are the most likely to have a chance to transmit their qualities, has given it the air of a natural law. Though the lady has generally yielded it unquestioning obedience, she often dreams of a land like that of the Amazons, where she might be judged on her merits instead of on her charms. Seeing that in the world a woman’s social position, her daily food, and her chance of children, depend on her exerting sufficient charm to induce some man to assume the responsibility and expense of maintaining her for life, and that the qualities on which this charm depends are sometimes altogether unattainable by a given woman, it is not surprising that exceptional women are willing to eliminate from their lives the whole question of marriage and of motherhood, for the sake of a free development, irrespective of its bearing on the other sex.

No institution in Europe has ever won for the lady the freedom of development that she enjoyed in the convent in the early days. The modern college for women only feebly reproduces it, since the college for women has arisen at a time when colleges in general are under a cloud. The lady abbess, on the other hand, was part of the two great social forces of her time, feudalism and the Church. Great spiritual rewards and great worldly prizes were alike within her grasp. She was treated as an equal by the men of her class, as is witnessed by letters we still have from popes and emperors to abbesses. She had the stimulus of competition with men, in executive capacity, in scholarship, and in artistic production, since her work was freely set before the general public; but she was relieved by the circumstances of her environment from the ceaseless competition in common life of woman with woman for the favor of the individual man. In the cloister of the great days, as on a small scale in the college for women to-day, women were judged by one another, as men are everywhere judged by one another, for sterling qualities of head and heart and character.

The strongest argument against the co-educational college is that the presence of the male brings in the factor of sexual selection, and the girl who is elected to the class-office is not necessarily the ablest or the wisest, or the kindest, — but the possessor of the longest eyelashes. The lady does not often rise to the point of deciding against sex. The choice is a cruel one, and in the individual case the rewards of the ascetic course are too small and too uncertain. At no other time than the aristocratic period of the cloister have the rewards so preponderated as to carry her over in numbers.

In studying this interesting phenomenon we must divest our minds of the conventional picture of the nun. The Little Sister of the Poor is the product of a number of social motives that had not begun to operate when the lady abbess came into being. In fact, her day is almost over when the Poor Clares appear. Her roots lie in a society that, is pre-feudal, though feudalism played into her hand; and in a psychology that is pre-Christian, though she ruled in the name of Christ.

The worship of Demeter the mothergoddess, which was one of the central facts of Greek religious life, spread and flourished in the west. Sicily, the granary of the ancient world, became naturally in legend the scene of the rape of Persephone and of the wanderings of her mother, the giver of grain to men. The Romans adopted the worship of this ancient hypostasis of woman’s share in primitive culture, ranging it beside the cult of their own Bona Dea, and indeed sometimes confusing the two.

Catania was one of the places where the great festivals of the Lesser and the Greater Eleusinia were celebrated in spring and autumn with high devotion and with all the pomp of the rubric. The main features of the festivals were everywhere the same; the carrying, on a cart through the streets, of the symbolic pomegranate and poppy-seed, the great procession walking with torches far into the night to typify the search of the goddess for her child, the mumming, the ringing of bells, the exhibition of the sacred veil, the mystic meal of bread for the initiate, and the mystic pouring out of wine. At Catania, as Ovid tells us, these customary elements of the feast were supplemented by a horse-race.

Miss Eckenstein calls attention to the description, given early in the last century by the English traveler Blunt, of the festival of Saint Agatha as he saw it in Catania, — and, I may add, as it is celebrated there to this day. It begins with a horse-race, and its chief event, next to the mass, is a great procession, lasting into the night, in which the participants carry torches and ring bells as they follow a wagon which bears the relics of the saint, among them her veil and her breasts, torn off by her persecutors. The saint has two festivals yearly, one in the autumn and one in the spring. It remains to point out that though it is disputed whether the breasts were or were not part of the ancient ritual, they are a likely enough symbol of exuberance. Also, ‘Agatha’ is the Greek word for ‘Bona,’ and does not occur as a proper name before the appearance of the saint. But the Acta Sanctorum knows all about Saint Agatha, a Christian virgin and martyr of Catania in the third century, and is able to give full details of her parentage and history, adding that her fame spread at an early date into Italy and Greece.

The process here visible went on everywhere as Christianity spread in Europe. The places, the persons, and the ritual of heathen worship were taken in bodily by the new religion, with a more or less successful effort at assimilation. Not only the classic cults of Greece and Rome, but the cruder religions of the barbarians of the north, were to be conciliated. And in all of these, classic and crude alike, the old status of woman was abundantly reflected. A purely patriarchal religion would not serve; the Virgin and the female saints became more and more necessary to bridge the chasm. It is not by accident that the festivals of the Virgin so often coincide with those of heathen deities, for in the seventh century Pope Sergius ordered that this should be so, as a matter of policy.

In the long centuries needed for the Christianizing of Europe, heathendom reacted powerfully on the new faith. Local saints everywhere are its work. In the early days a saint needed not to be canonized by Rome; it was necessary only that he should be entered in a local calendar, and the local calendar was in the hands of local dignitaries of the Church. Under pressure of popular demand, every sacred place in heathendom bade fair to have its saint, and many of these improvised saints were gradually fitted out with legends and historical relations. It was not until the twelfth century that Rome felt that the process had gone far enough and withdrew the power of canonization into her own hands.

Although the German tribes were already patriarchal in organization when they came in contact with the Romans, they carried abundant evidence in their traditions, their customs, and their cults, of an earlier social system. The queen of saga and of history, the tribal mother with her occult powers and her status of priestess to goddesses who were also tribal, the recognized existence of certain bodies of women outside the family, are all survivals of the motherage, with its primitive culture and social organization.

With these various phenomena the Church dealt in various ways: roughly we may say that the tribal goddess she used as a saint, the priestess she banned as a witch, the unattached woman she segregated under a somewhat summary classification as either nun or castaway. There seems to be no doubt that we must regard the immense popularity of the convent in Europe in early times as largely due to the uneasiness of women under a patriarchal régime. We think to-day of the cloister as a refuge from the distracting liberty of secular life; it seems paradoxical, and yet it is apparently true, that the women of early Christendom fled from the constraint of home to the expansion of the cloister. Under patriarehalism the problem of the unassigned woman becomes one of considerable perplexity to herself and to society. A stigma is attached to her, which acts as a deterrent to rebels in the ranks. The ‘loose,’ that is, the unattached, woman is sharply marked off from the lady, so that the choice lies between the constraints of social and economic dependence on the one hand, and social outlawry on the other. These considerations account for the fact that the nun of early northern Christianity was by no means a type of self-effacement, but was often a spirited and sometimes a lawless person; and that the abbess was more generally than not a woman of good birth, strong character, and independent ways. Sometimes she had tried marriage, sometimes she had condemned it without a trial. It offered little scope for the free development of women, but there were many women insisting on free development. To such the convent was a godsend, and we may almost say that the lady abbess is the successor of the saga heroine.

Monasticism as the Eastern world practiced it was by no means congenial in general to the Frankish habit of mind. The worn-out races embraced it. as a refuge from the growing difficulties of life with which they had no longer energy to cope. The fresh races on the other hand had an immense amount of the will-to-live to work off before they in their turn should dwindle toward selfeffacement, abnegation, and the meeker virtues. The men among the Franks felt no call to the cloister. There is no record that any Frankish prince entered a convent of his free will. For men the world was too full of opportunity. But maidens, wives, and widows of the royal house joined religious communities, not because they were spiritually unlike their men, but because they were like them. The impulse toward leadership which kept the men in the world sent the women out of it.

Radegund, founder of the convent of Poitiers, was fifth among the seven recognized wives of King Clothair. She was a princess of the untamed Thuringians, whom Clothair captured with her brother on one of his raids into the eastern wilds. She was a person of great spirit, and perfect personal courage. She was the sort of woman (her biographers say) who keeps her husband’s dinner waiting while she visits the sick, and annoys him by her open preference for the society of learned clerks. When finally she made up her mind to leave her husband, she fastened upon an unhappy prelate, Bishop Medardus of Noyon, the dangerous task of sealing her from the world. ‘If you refuse to consecrate me,’ she said grimly, ‘a lamb will be lost to the flock.’ The Bishop quailed before the lamb, and Radegund entered the life at Poitiers that gave play to her great powers of organization, diplomacy, and leadership. Her nuns were her true spiritual children.

After her death, two rival claimants for the office of abbess contended even with violence. Leubover was the regularly appointed successor, but Chrodield, daughter and cousin of kings, heading a faction, attacked and put to flight the clerics who excommunicated her party. Gregory of Tours tells how Chrodield, having collected about her a band of murderers and vagrants of all kinds, dwelt in open revolt and ordered her followers to break into the nunnery at night and forcibly to bear off the abbess. But the abbess, who was suffering from a gouty foot, on hearing the noise of their approach, asked to be carried before the shrine of the Holy Ghost. The rebels rushed in with swords and lances, and mistaking in the dark the prioress for the abbess, carried her off, disheveled and stripped of her cloak. The bishops were afraid to enter Poitiers, and the nuns kept the district terrorized until the king sent troops to reduce them. Only after the soldiers had actually charged them, cutting them down with sword and spear, was the neighborhood at peace. It was not with these ladies in mind that Wordsworth found the sunset-hour as ‘quiet as a nun.'

The women-saints of England are all Anglo-Saxon; after the coming of the Normans there are no more of them. And these early saints were generally ladies of high degree. Hilda, the famous Abbess of Whitby, was grand-niece of Edwin, King of Northumbria. The first religious settlement for women in England was founded by Enswith, daughter of Edbald, King of Kent. This Christian princess was sought in marriage by a heathen King of Northumbria, whom she challenged to prove the power of his gods by inducing them miraculously to lengthen a beam. The suitor failed and withdrew. Enswith herself without difficulty caused a stream to flow up hill. Bede’s statement that the ladies of his day were sent to the Continent to be educated is borne out by what we know of Saint Mildred, Abbess of Upminster in Thanet. She was sent as a girl to Chelles, where, among other adventures, she was cast by the abbess into a burning furnace for contumacy, but escaped unhurt. When she returned to England, she stepped from the vessel upon a flat stone which retained the print of her feet. Nay, more, says her chronicler, ‘ the dust that was scrapen off thence, being drunk, did cure sundry diseases.’ A blood-fine being due her from Egbert, King of Kent, she was promised as much land as her deer could run over in one course, and the animal covered ten thousand acres of the best land in Kent.

We obtain a glimpse of the culture of the Anglo-Saxon nun by consulting the correspondence of St. Boniface, the friend of many cloistered ladies. They write to him in fluent Latin on many different subjects: one sends him some hexameter verses, another sends him fifty gold-pieces and an altar-cloth. One says, ‘I prefer thee almost to all others of the masculine sex in affectionate love’; another ‘salutes her revered lover in Christ’; yet another says, ‘I shall always cling to thy neck with sisterly embraces.’ Like other priests in all ages, the good bishop is greatly comforted in times of discouragement by the affection of his feminine admirers. He begs one of them to finish the copy of the Epistles of Peter which she had begun to write for him in letters of gold. He responds to all their philandering with advice and sentiment and little presents. The noble Edburga, abbess of a house in Devonshire which she freely left to reside in Rome, is ‘his dearest lady, and in Christ’s love to be preferred to all others of the female sex.’ Nevertheless he does not approve of continental travel for Anglo-Saxon nuns, and writes to Cuthbert of Canterbury, ‘I will not withhold from your holiness that it were a good thing if the synod and your princes forbade women, and those who have taken the veil, to travel and stay abroad as they do. For there are very few districts of Lombardy in which there is not some woman of Anglian origin living a loose life among the Franks and the Gauls. This is a scandal and disgrace to your whole church.'

The composite photograph of the correspondents of Boniface shows a lady as important as a man, as well educated and as economically free as a man, thoroughly understanding the politics of her time and taking a hand in them, standing solidly on her own feet and sweetening existence with the harmless sentimentalism so much used by men. She has contrived that love, if not banished from her life, should be a thing apart, not her whole existence.

The foundation of great abbeys like Thanet and Ely, Whitby and Barking, was the result of the Anglo-Saxon social organization, which allowed women in some cases to hold real property; just as the existence of the female saint was due to the Teutonic estimate of the personal value of women. After the social ideas of the Normans became dominant, there were in England no more women-saints, and few more abbeys for women were founded. The new settlements for religious women after the Conquest were generally priories, and the prioress was of very inferior importance to the abbess. But though the abbess owed her existence to an earlier social system, she was rather strengthened than weakened by the application to her case of feudal principles. Being always a landlord and sometimes a very great one, she shared the prestige of the landlord class. She was in some cases of such quality as to hold of the king ‘by an entire barony.’ By right of tenure she had the privilege at one period of being summoned to Parliament. She drew two incomes, spiritualities from the churches in her jurisdiction, and temporalities from her lands. Her manors often lay in several different shires, at a considerable distance from the abbey. It was profanely said that if the Abbot of Glastonbury were to marry the Abbess of Shrewsbury, their heir would own more land than the king. This abbess had in her gift several prebends; in the reign of Henry I she found seven knights for the king’s service, and she held her own courts for pleas of debts and the like. The great capacity for business necessary to conduct the affairs of so complex a position seems to have been possessed by the average abbess, for the property of the old houses at the time of the dissolution was in a very flourishing condition.

Among the Saxons on the Continent the aristocratic tone of the convent was fully as marked. Whole families of royal princesses took the veil, rather gaining the world than losing it by the step. As in England, the abbess was virtually a baron. She was overlord often of an immense property, holding directly from the king. Like a baron, she had the right of ban, she sent her contingent of armed knights into the field, she issued the summons to her own courts, she was summoned to the Reichstag, and in some instances she struck her own coins. The abbess was in close relations with the court and imperial politics. Matilda, Abbess of Quedlinburg, was twice regent for her nephew Otto III, dealt strongly in that capacity with the invading Wends, and summoned a diet on her own authority.

Under the presidency of great ladies of this type, the abbeys everywhere before the twelfth century were centres where the daughters of nobles might live a pleasant life and receive such education as the time afforded. The early nun was not even in form what we commonly think of by that name. She was not always bound by vows, nor distinguished by her habit, nor even required to live in a particular place. Originally she as often as not remained in the world, though dedicated to God. When she was attached to a convent it was difficult to find means to constrain her to stay in it. We have seen how Boniface wrote to Cuthbert on this subject. Eldhelm, in the eighth century, describes thus the dress of the nuns of his time: ‘A vest of fine linen of a violet colour is worn, above it a scarlet tunic with a hood, sleeves striped with silk and trimmed with red fur; the locks on the forehead and temples are curled with a crisping-iron, the dark head-veil is given up for white and coloured head-dresses, which, with bows of ribbon sewn on, reach down to the ground; and the nails, like those of a falcon or sparrowhawk, are pared to resemble talons.’ Bede records of the Abbey of Coldringham that ‘ the virgins who are vowed to God, laying aside all respect for their profession, whenever they have leisure spend all their time in weaving fine garments with which they adorn themselves like brides.’ A twelfth-century document shows that at that time in Bavaria, Benedictine nuns went about as freely as monks, and wore no distinctive dress.

The phenomenon of the ‘double monastery’ formed in early days a deviation from the nunnery as we think of it. From the necessity of having priests at hand to minister spiritually to religious women, it seemed reasonable to make houses for nuns side by side with houses for monks, among whom there were always a certain number in orders. The problem that resulted was one of perpetual difficulty. How were the women to get just what they needed from the men, and no more? Saint Basil in his double monastery in Pontus had already been perplexed by difficult questions. May the head of the monastery (he asks) speak with any virgins other than the head of the sisters? When a sister confesses to a priest, should the mother of the monastery be present?

In Europe the double monastery was very popular; ‘a chorus of athletes of God and of chaste virgins,’ an early writer rapturously calls it. Architectural remains show us the various shifts different communities were put to, that unity and isolation might be harmonized, as in a hospital devoted to both diphtheria and smallpox. Often there were two churches in the monastery, one for the men and one for the women; but sometimes a common church was split by a wall just high enough to prevent the congregation on one side from having sight of the other. The two sets must not be able to talk with each other, — their voices might mingle only in ‘recitation, song, groans or sighs.’ The two houses were often separated by a common cemetery, for in death there is neither male nor female. In Spain it was permitted to certain monks to kiss the hand of certain nuns in greeting, but the occasions for this observance are strictly regulated. By the rule of Saint Fructuosus it is laid down that if a monk fall ill he must not lie in a monastery of nuns, lest his soul grow sick while his body grows well. Monk and nun may not eat together.

An odd form of double monastery was especially common in Spain and England, where a whole family would transform itself into a religious house, father and mother, children and servants, continuing to live together in their old relations with the new ones added. The motive in most cases seems to have been pecuniary: hereditary possessions could in this way be safeguarded by royal charter and the prestige of religion. Sometimes the husband did not himself take the tonsure, but merely had his wife made an ‘abbess.’

In many of the double monasteries an abbess was at the head of all, both men and women. It was not unnatural that she should now and then try to exceed the limits set by the Church to the services of women. Sometimes she heard confession, and occasionally she excommunicated. Sometimes she was ‘weighed down with anxiety for the account she will have to give at the day of judgment for her government of a cloister containing men and women of various ages.’ All the early nunneries in England of which we have any evidence on the point were of this type, and without exception the whole establishment was ruled over by a woman. The most famous example is of course Hilda of Whitby, great lady, administrator, theologian, educator, and saint. We know very little of the personal character of these women; the records are confined, for the most part, to their important acts of policy, their correspondence with princes and bishops, and the miracles they wrought. Every mention of them, however, carries an intimation of the aristocratic character of the profession. When the monk became an object of contempt at court, the nun was still in fashion. Her social position kept pace with that of the secular clergy rather than with that of her brother regulars. Her schools were for the daughters of gentlefolk; to have been bred in a convent was a mark of caste.

The coign of vantage from which the nunnery was able to despise the world was, however, not merely that of aristocratic association. A religious house was generally the home of order and regularity in a world of confusion, and a point of light in a twilit age. If St. Benedict had done nothing more than establish the eight daily canonical hours, he would have been a benefactor of Europe. The great moral value of regular hoursis everywhere admitted to-day, and is built upon in the army, in the ‘rest-cure,’ in ships at sea, as well as in private life. When the prodigal determines to turn over a new leaf, he is pretty sure to have his watch regulated as one of the preliminary steps. The great superiority in social organization among men as compared with women is reflected in the fact that their watches are more apt to be right. The monastery has from the first, with a sure instinct of self-preservation, clung to the observance of the hours as the core of its life; and the rest broken by matins, lauds, and prime, has been made good by the mental repose secured through the twenty-four hours by accurate and minute division of time and frequent change of occupation.

On the productive side, the nun of the centuries before the twelfth is popularly best known by her artistic weaving and needlework. Scanty as are the remains of her art, they bear out to the full the praise lavished upon it by the old writers. In early times the blind walls of the basilica offered space for large hangings; when Gothic architecture removed the motive for these, the nuns concentrated upon vestments and the furniture of the altar. The famous cope of Sion, probably the handiwork of nuns, shows the excellence in design as well as in execution of early English work. Sometimes sentiment would allow an abbess to prepare a windingsheet for a friendly abbot during his lifetime. So little do the fundamental ideas of men concerning life and death vary from age to age and from land to land, that Penelope of Ithaca expressed her respect for her husband’s father by the weaving of the famous web that was to be his shroud, precisely as an abbess of Repton wrought a windingsheet for St. Guthlac, and an abbess of Whitby prepared one for Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. Nor did the good ladies always confine their work to pious aims. One of the charges of the rebellious Chrodield against the Abbess of Poitiers was that she made a robe for her niece out of part of an altar-cloth. A Council of the eighth century decides that ‘time shall be devoted more to reading books and chanting psalms than to weaving and decorating clothes with various colours in unprofitable richness.’

But it would be a mistake to suppose that the life of the cloistered lady was divided between devotion and needlework. As far as the records go, they show that she was free to try her hand at almost anything. Many a famous scribe developed in the nunnery, scholar and artist in one. Emo, abbot of a double Premonstrant house, not only encouraged his clerks to write, acting as their instructor, ‘ but taking account of the diligence of the female sex’ he set women who were clever at writing to the assiduous practice of the art. Famous for centuries were the illuminated transcripts of Diemund of Wessobrunn and of Leukardis of Mallersdorf.

When the Germans bombarded Strasburg in 1870 they destroyed (among other things) the manuscript and the only complete copy of the Garden of Delights, the magnum opus of Herrad, Abbess of Hohenburg. Fortunately, transcripts or copies of parts of it survive and have been piously collected, giving us a very vivid little picture of social life in the twelfth century. Herrad’s nuns, according to her own pictures of them, wore clothes differing but little from those of world’s women. The only uniform article of dress was a white turban, over which the veil was thrown, but the veil itself might be red or purple, while the dress was also various in color and apparently subject to the wearer’s taste. Herrad’s great work was written for the instruction of her nuns, and covers the history of the world, based on the Bible narrative. She digresses frequently into questions of philosophy, ethics, and profane learning. In discussing the decay of faith in connection with the Tower of Babel, she introduces a very respectful graphic presentation of the Seven Liberal Arts. Personified as women in twelfth-century dress, they are ranged around Philosophy, Socrates, and Plato, and there is nothing to warn the nuns against their charms unless it be the head of a howling dog carried by Dialectic.

The interest taken in the nunnery in natural science may be seen by reference to the encyclopædic Physics of Hildegard, Abbess of Rupertsberg, a complete materia medico, of the middle age. Hildegard describes a large number of plants, animal and chemical substances, closing each description with a statement of the object’s therapeutic qualities. We cannot say that her conclusions are always based on direct observation, for she has as much to say about the unicorn as about the pig. But she holds the sound conviction that ‘devils’ can be eliminated from the system by water-drinking, and displays in general so much common sense that it is clear her reputation for wonderful cures rested on a basis of scientific treatment. The care of the sick was always one of the duties of a religious house, where a light diet, regular hours, and a generally pure watersupply furnished better sanitary conditions than were always attainable in the world. Books such as those of Herrad and Hildegard presuppose a tradition of scientific interest, and the coöperation of intelligent pupils, as well as the stimulus of an appreciative public. A good deal of the work in each was probably done, as we should say to-day, in the seminar; and it is fair to infer from them a widespread intellectual interest and freedom among the pupils in the cloister.

Gerberg, Abbess of Gandersheim and daughter of the Duke Lindolf, the progenitor of the royal house of Saxony, was an excellent scholar and encouraged among her nuns the studies she had herself followed under the guidance of learned men. In the scholarly atmosphere of her abbey in the tenth century, the nun Hrotsvith produced the works which make her name memorable, not only among women but in the general history of literature. Her metrical legends and history of her own time have merits of their own, but they can be paralleled among the writings of other authors of the period. Her unique value is as a writer of Latin drama. From the close of classic times to the crude beginnings of the miracle-play, we know of no dramatic composition in Europe save the seven plays of Hrotsvith. The first of the humanists, she has left us a full account of‘her admiration for classical literature, and her determination to make its glories serviceable to the pure in heart. After praising enthusiastically the work of Terence, she says, ‘I have not hesitated to take this poet’s style as a model, and while others honour him by perusing his dramas, I have attempted, in the very way in which he treats of unchaste love among evil women, to celebrate according to my ability the praiseworthy chasteness of godlike maidens. In doing so, I have often hesitated with a blush on my cheeks, because the nature of the work obliged me to concentrate my attention on the wicked passion of illicit love and on the tempting talk of the amorous, against which we at other times close our ears.’

Blush or no blush, this cloistered lady succeeded, like the chaste Richardson eight hundred years later, in causing virtue to undergo adventures of the interesting character that Terence and Fielding supposed to be reserved for vice. She anticipates Anatole France in treating the redemption of Thais by Paphnutius; Christian maidens repulse pagan lovers; the tragedy of martyrdom and the most realistic comedy relieve each other. Three virgins persecuted by Diocletian attract the eye of their gaoler; with the prospect of speedy death before them, they laugh with all their hearts at the spell put upon him, whereby he mistakes the kitchen for their chamber and fondles in his madness the pots and pans. Very thoroughly, and with the wide sweep that we are wont to call virile, did this lady deal with life and letters. Not her cloister, but the polite world of her time, was her public. As evidence of her continued prestige it is interesting to note that four hundred years after her death the Rhenish Celtic Society printed an edition of her dramas, and secured copyright by taking out what is believed to be the first ‘privilege’ issued by the Imperial Council.

II

The many influences that worked together to change men’s views of life during the later middle ages were all reflected in the career of the lady abbess. Feudalism had seen her become a baron, strong individually and with the strength of her class. At times when intellectual interests prevailed, her leisure and resources had enabled her to take a manful part in the literary production and in the queer scientific investigation of her age. Her artistic achievements were, within their range, of a high order. But in her breast, as well as in the hard old social framework that supported her, solvents were at work. Considering under three of its aspects a force which had many more, we may say roughly that these solvents were: in religion, the rediscovery of Christianity which resulted in the foundation of the mendicant orders; in social philosophy, the recognition of the submerged; and in literature, mysticism and romance. All these ideas, which were destined to give a wonderful new value to life, were welcomed and furthered by the lady abbess, who could not foresee that her decadence was to be one of their byproducts.

The profane love against which Herrad’s virgins and martyrs fought was of the simple old pagan type. No emotional element was present in the heroine’s breast to bring these dramas over into the class of the problem-play. But a very different conception of the love of men and women, one of the most profound psychological changes of the middle age, had become the motive of a graceful literature. When every lady in the world had her love-song, it must not be supposed that the abbess would be without one. The mysticism of chivalry used the same vocabulary as the mysticism of religion. The knight’s service to his lady, long, patient, and (theoretically) not too clamorous for reward, was a type of the impassioned service of monk or nun. A ‘maid of Christ’ asked Thomas de Hales to write her a song, and received the ‘Love Rune,’ which, with its lively lilt and gentle gayety, remains one of the glories of Middle-English literature. Its drift can be gathered from an artless translation of two or three stanzas:

But the Lord Christ is introduced as the most desirable of lovers: —

The Ancren Riwle, or Rule for Recluses, describes in courtly allegory the wooing of a maiden by the Lord of Heaven: ‘There was a lady who was besieged by her foes within an earthly castle, and her land was all destroyed and herself quite poor. The love of a powerful king was, however, fixed upon her with such boundless affection that to solicit her love he sent his messengers one after the other, and often many together, and sent her trinkets both many and fair, and supplies of victuals, and help of his high retinue to hold her castle. She received them all as a careless creature with so hard heart that he could never get nearer to her love. What wouldst thou more? He came himself at last and showed her his fair face, since he was of all men the fairest to behold, and spoke so sweetly and with such gentle words that they might have raised the dead from death to life. And he wrought many wonders and did many wondrous deeds before her eyes, and showed her his power and told her of his kingdom, and offered to make her queen of all that he owned. But all availed him naught. Was not this surprising mockery? For she was not worthy to have been his servant. But owing to his goodness, love so mastered him that he said at last: “Lady, thou art attacked, and thy enemies are so strong that thou canst not without my help escape their hands that thou mayest not be put to a shameful death. I am prompted by love of thee to undertake this fight, and rid thee of those that seek thy death. I know well that I shall receive a mortal wound, but I will do it gladly to win thy heart. Now I beseech thee for the love I bear thee that thou love me at least after my death, since thou wouldst not in my lifetime.” Thus did the king. He freed her of her enemies and was himself wounded and slain in the end. Through a miracle he arose from death to life. Would not that same lady be of an evil kind if she did not love him above all things after this?’

The literary nuns of the Abbey of Helfta were themselves minnesingers. Spiritual love in all its aspects was their theme. Ecstasy expressed itself in strains as strongly figurative as the Song of Solomon. Transforming love made the cloister-life to glow. Visions became common among inspired nuns. Purity itself was impassioned. By the laws of chivalry, the knight’s love for his lady was expressed in courtesy and kindness toward all the world. In the cloister also, devotion to the great lover expressed itself in tenderness for men.

The great monastic expansion of the twelfth century took a long step toward democracy in the cloister. The problem of the unattached woman of the lower class had become a menace to society. The great orders of Fontevraud and Prémontré, as well as many less famous, were organized in the interest of the helpless of all classes, and particularly of the lost woman. Of Fontevraud we are told that’ the poor were received, the feeble were not refused, nor women of evil life, nor sinners, neither lepers nor the helpless.’ Thousands of women entered these orders. From a bull of 1344 it is to be inferred that there were at that time about four hundred settlements of Premonstrant nuns. All the women in these settlements were professed, and their lives were spent in constant labor, which ultimately brought worldly as well as moral profit. These orders spread rapidly and widely. They were in harmony with the general tendency of the age, both ideally and practically; for while they gave ease to the rising social conscience of the upper classes, they also helped the growth of skilled labor and trade organization among the lower.

We can best realize the contrast between the old nunnery and the new by noting two specific cases in England. In the middle of the twelfth century Mary of Blois, daughter of King Stephen, was abbess of the ancient foundation of Romsey, associated with many other royal and noble ladies. Upon the death of her brother William she became heiress of the County of Boulogne. Henry II thereupon overrode her vows, brought her from the cloister, and married her to Matthew, son of the Count of Flanders, who thus became Count of Boulogne. Mary’s sister Matilda had a somewhat similar experience, and her convent breeding left her with a taste for letters and the ability to correspond in Latin with learned men. At the very time that these great ladies were exemplifying in Wessex the solidarity of interest between court and cloister, Gilbert of Sempringham was creating from humble beginnings his great settlements for the higher life, and his dwellings for the poor and the infirm, for lepers and for orphans. Gilbert was the son of a Norman baron by an English woman of low degree. He was educated in France and studied the great orders of the continent, with the result that when his growing foundation came to need a rule, he gave it one of wide eclecticism to meet the needs of canons and nuns, lay-brothers and lay-sisters. The simple life was to be lived at Sempringham, and to this art and letters seemed to be inimical. The rule declared pictures and sculpture superfluous, and forbade the use of the Latin tongue unless under special circumstances. A prior ruled the men, three prioresses the women, who were twice as numerous. The women performed the domestic work for the whole body, handing the men’s meals through a hole in the wall with a turn-table.

But the humanitarianism that inspired Gilbert reached Matilda too, in spite of her classical education. A famous anecdote describes her girt with a towel and washing the feet of lepers. Her hospital of St.Giles in the East was for long the most important institution of its kind in England. ‘Leprosy’ was in the middle ages a summary term for many forms of disfiguring skin-disease. Fear of contagion was a comparatively recent motive for its isolation, which originated in its loathsomeness to the eye. The care of the leper became a typical good work. His miserable lot as an outcast formed a special appeal to the new tenderness of heart, while his repulsiveness made his tendance an instrument for the new effort to be like Christ. Great ladies everywhere, generally convent-bred, renounced place and pleasure to serve the sick and the poor. Virchow remarks that the great family of the Counts of Andechs and Meran, famous for its philanthropy, practically extinguished itself by devotion. Its men joined the crusades or the church, its women entered the cloister, and after a few generations this powerful and widespread family perished of its virtues.

The mendicant orders, which realized what Plato had maintained, that he who is to serve society must have nothing of his own, held up an ideal absolutely at variance with the vested interests which the abbess had so ably administered. Side by side with the feudal strongholds of the church, the Poor Clares built their huts, bearing toward them somewhat the relation that the Salvation Army bears to a charitable millionaire. The Poor Clares had no time for culture and the arts. Love for God and man and the passion for service carried into the vow of poverty thousands of women from every class. Asceticism and silence were opposed as methods to comfort and scholarship. The ultimate deterioration of the mendicants did not come until they had induced the general change of ideas that was to be responsible for the Protestant Reformation.

The decay of the aristocratic monastery was doubtless a step in advance in the history of men, but it was a calamity for the lady, who was reduced to the old dilemma of the home or outlawry. Luther had a thoroughly Mohammedan notion of woman’s status, — only as a wife and mother had she a right to exist. Her education became a matter of no importance, and virtually ceased. Even Fuller, the worthy seventeenthcentury divine, who cannot be accused of a bias in favor of convents, said: ‘They were good she schools wherein the girls and maids of the neighborhood were taught to read and work; and sometimes a little Latin was taught them therein. Yea, give me leave to say, if such feminine foundations had still continued, provided no vow were obtruded upon them, (virginity is least kept where it is most constrained,) haply the weaker sex, besides the avoiding modern inconveniences, might be heightened to a higher perfection than hitherto hath been attained.’

Without accepting Fuller’s epigram, we may admit that the ideal of virginity was not always attained in the cloister; neither is justice always attained on the bench, nor valor in the army. Many a prioress besides Chaucer’s may have had for her motto, ‘Amor vincit omnia.’ But the very persistence of the system would be strong evidence, if we had no other, that on the whole the cloister had the esteem of its contemporaries, and that the women who gave it tone were in general true to their calling, and made wholeheartedly the sacrifice in return for which they received freedom.