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Woman under Monasticism
Foiled in his first attempt to gain control over Sonnenburg, Cusanus now devoted his attention to other religious communities. He took under his protection a number of recluses, called sylvan sisters, ‘Waldschwestern’ (p. 63), and having secured further powers from Rome, attempted to interfere with the convent of Minoresses or Poor Clares at Brixen (p. 87). But these nuns, though they were low-born and uneducated, were as stubborn as their high-born and learned sisters on the Sonnenburg; Verena’s conduct may have given them the courage to oppose the Cardinal. Their lady superior was forcibly removed at his instigation, but they appealed against him at Rome, and though their opposition was censured, Cusanus was directed to place the matter in the hands of the Franciscans at Nürnberg, who declared themselves willing to institute the desired reforms. Nuns from the convent of St Clare at Nürnberg were despatched to Brixen, and the tone of the house was raised without its privileges being forfeited.
On the strength of his increased visitatorial powers Cusanus (1453) returned to the charge at Sonnenburg, but its inmates would give no official declaration of their intentions (p. 90). Accordingly the bishop of Eichstätt was summoned to hold a visitation there, but he was refused admission by the nuns. However a second deputation came which could not be warded off, and the convent gave the desired information; the result of which was that injunctions were forwarded confining the authority of the abbess to the control of the nuns, and practically despoiling her of her property. Strict seclusion was to be observed, and the house was to be furnished with a key, which was to be given to a person appointed by Cusanus. The management of the monastic property was to be in the hands of a bailiff who was to render account to the bishop direct, not to the abbess. Scant wonder that the abbess Verena, indignant at the order and despairing of help from without, offered to resign. Her offer delighted the legate, who forthwith despatched Afra von Velseck to undertake the management of affairs at the convent, with the command that she was to take no step without previously consulting him (p. 94). It seems that Cusanus entertained the idea of appropriating the temporalities of the nunnery altogether, and transferring them to the use of monks, who were to be subject to his friend and ally, the abbot of Tegernsee (p. 95). He afterwards gave up the plan, ‘since the nobility,’ as he wrote (p. 127), ‘look upon this house as a home for their daughters and are opposed to my plan.’
At this juncture things took an unexpected turn. Verena consulted with her friends in the matter of the pension on which she was to retire (p. 109); and Cusanus was angered by the objections they raised to his proposals. There was a stormy interchange of letters between him and the abbess (p. 124), which ended in Verena’s resuming her authority, and in Afra’s deposition. Cusanus sent an armed escort to fetch away his protégée and threatened excommunication to the convent. In vain was a complaint against him sent by the nuns to Rome; Cusanus had anticipated them. The Pope censured the nuns’ conduct, affirmed Cusanus’ authority, and cast imputations on the character of the abbess, which were indignantly resented in a second letter forwarded to the Pope by the nuns.
The archduke Sigmund now tried to interfere in the interest of peace. A second visitation was undertaken, and a list of injunctions was drawn up for the nuns (p. 133). Among these we note that nuns from a reformed convent were to come and live as teachers at Sonnenburg; the abbess was henceforth to have no separate household, she was forbidden to go out without asking leave from the diocesan, she was not to go on pilgrimages or visit health resorts, and she was not to be present at weddings.
But the abbess and the convent refused to accept these injunctions, and they were accordingly placed under an interdict. The hospital belonging to the house and its property were confiscated, the chaplains were forbidden to celebrate mass, and the ban of excommunication was pronounced against the nuns and was reiterated by the priest of the nearest church on feast days and on Sundays. This was a great humiliation to the nuns and helped to lower them in general estimation.
Sigmund was absent at the time. Soon after his return Pope Nicolas V, the patron of Cusanus, died (1455), and his successor Calixtus III warned the Cardinal against pushing things to extremes (p. 161). Sigmund also pleaded in favour of the nuns that they were staying within precincts, and that Verena was an estimable woman. Cusanus in answer contended that what he had done, he had done with the sanction of Rome, and that he had excommunicated and deposed Verena solely on account of her disobedience; and he then acknowledged that she was a thoroughly honest and excellent manager. In his letters to the abbot of Tegernsee, written about the same time, he speaks of Verena as a very Jezebel who is full of wiles against him (p. 153). ‘Maybe she will pretend obedience to deceive me,’ he wrote among other things, ‘but the devil of pride has her soul in his possession and will prevent her from really humbling herself.’ But the relations between Sigmund and his bishop were becoming strained in other respects. The first breach of the peace occurred when the abbess came to Innsbruck to seek support. Cusanus despatched a deacon to prevent her being received, and Sigmund had the deacon cast into prison.
The nuns on the Sonnenburg were in a sorry plight. They dared not leave the house, the usual tithes were not brought to them and there had been no ingathering of the produce of their own harvest, for Cusanus threatened excommunication to anyone having intercourse with them or looking after their interests. They were nigh upon starvation (p. 277), and had recourse to an unlawful step. They took a band of armed men into their service and directed them to gather the tribute due to them. But the soldiers sent by the archbishop put these men to flight and then stormed the cloister. The nuns fled into the adjoining woods and found refuge in a house. ‘But we were betrayed and had to fly again,’ they wrote in their chronicle; ‘during three days we were pursued and sought by the troops, repeatedly we were so near to them that we saw them and they saw us. But the Virgin Mary helped us to escape from them.’ Afra von Velseck had been put in possession of their empty house, but Cusanus could not support her; fearful of Sigmund he had fled from his bishopric and repaired to Rome. The archduke conducted the nuns back and begged Verena to resign, offering her a house near Innsbruck (p. 309). An envoy was accordingly despatched to Rome to proffer terms of submission to Cusanus if only he would take the ban of excommunication from the nuns. The bishop at last yielded to the Pope’s command, though with a sufficiently bad grace. ‘I send you a copy of Verena’s letter to me,’ he wrote to the envoy Natz, ‘she tells lies as usual.’ And on the margin of her letter, as a comment on her declaration that she had repeatedly sought absolution, he added the words, ‘this is a lie.’
Penance in its extreme form was undergone by the convent (p. 311), but as Cusanus persistently denied to Sigmund the right of appointing a new abbess, many letters passed before the conditions of peace were settled and ratified. The correspondence, as Jäger remarks (p. 315), throws an interesting light on the character of the women concerned. Verena, who throughout maintained a proud dignity, retired from the convent on a pension; Afra, who had resorted to various intrigues, finally renounced all claims, and Barbara Schöndorfer came over from Brixen and was installed as abbess.
Thus ended the quarrel about the privileges of Sonnenburg, which lasted six years and led to the curtailment of many of its rights. The story proves the inability of convents to preserve their independence, and shows how their weakness was made the excuse for interference from without to the detriment of the abbess in her position as landowner.
It remains to enquire how far the improvements effected in monastic life by peaceful and by forcible means were lasting, and in what position the nunnery stood at the beginning of the 16th century.
Some valuable information is given on the general state of monasticism by a number of addresses delivered by Tritheim, abbot of Sponheim († 1516), before the assembled chapter of Benedictine abbots between 1490 and 14921035. Tritheim takes high rank among the older humanists; he was an enlightened man according to the notions of his age, and collected a wonderful and comprehensive library of books in many languages at Sponheim. His interest in necromancy afterwards brought reproach on him and he left his convent, but at the time when he pleaded before the assembled abbots he was full of enthusiasm for his order and full of regrets concerning it. In his address ‘on the ruin of the Benedictine order,’ he pointed out how effectually the Bursfeld and other congregations had worked in the past, but the beneficial results they effected had passed away and little of their influence remained. If only those who are vowed to religion, says Tritheim, would care more for learning, which has been made so much more accessible by the invention of printing, the outlook would not be so utterly hopeless.
In these addresses Tritheim takes no account of nunneries, but we can discover his attitude towards nuns in an address to a convent1036, the keynote of which is that the women assembled there should cultivate love, lowliness and patience under tribulation. The address is gentle and dignified, but it shows that Tritheim, in common with other men of the time, attached importance to nunneries chiefly for the piety they cultivated. His belief in this respect is shared by the zealous reformer Geiler von Kaisersberg († 1500), who preached many sermons before the nuns of the convents of St Mary Magdalen (Reuerinnen), and of St Stephan at Strasburg, and who likewise saw the beauty of a nun’s vocation only in her devotional and contemplative attitude. We gather from his sermons, many of which are preserved in the form in which they were written out by nuns1037, that a clear line of demarcation existed in his mind between reformed and unreformed convents, and that while emphatic in denouncing the ungodly ways of the inmates of unreformed houses, life in a reformed house was comparable in his eyes to Paradise. Geiler’s efforts as a reformer were so far crowned by success that the convent of St Mary Magdalen to which he had devoted his efforts, outlived the attacks to which it was exposed at the time of the Reformation.
The fact that Tritheim insists only on the devotional attitude of nuns is the more noticeable as he visited at the convent of Seebach, the abbess of which, Richmondis van der Horst, was equally praised for her own abilities and the superior tone she maintained in her convent. For instances were not wanting which show that intellectual tastes were still strong in some nunneries and that women living the convent life were themselves authors and took a certain amount of interest in the revival of classical learning, as we shall see later.
Thus Butzbach (called Premontanus, † 1526), a pupil of Hegius, who became a monk at Laach and was an admirer of Tritheim, was in correspondence with Aleydis Ruyskop († 1507), a nun at Rolandswerth, who had written seven homilies on St Paul in Latin and translated a German treatise on the mass into Latin. He dedicated to her his work on ‘Distinguished learned women,’ which he took from the work of the Italian Benedictine Jacopo of Bergamo, but from delicacy of feeling he omitted what Jacopo had inserted in praise of women’s influence as wives and mothers1038. In this work Butzbach compares Aleydis to Hrotsvith, to Hildegard and to Elisabeth of Schönau. He also wrote to Gertrud von Büchel, a nun who practised the art of painting at Rolandswerth, and he refers to Barbara Dalberg, niece of the bishop of Worms, who was a nun at Marienberg, and to Ursula Cantor, who, he declares, was without equal in her knowledge of theology.
But in spite of these instances and others, a growing indifference is apparent, both among the advocates of the new culture and in the outer world generally, to the intellectual occupation of women, and the training of girls. In their far-reaching plans for an improved system of education the humanists leave girls out of count, and dwell on their qualities of heart rather than on their qualities of mind. That the training of the mental faculties must be profitable in all cases for women does not occur to them, though the idea is advanced with regard to men.
At the close of the 15th century Wimpheling († 1528) wrote a work on matters of education entitled Germania. It is a conception of ideal citizenship, and in it he insists that the burghers of Strasburg must let their sons receive a higher education and learn Latin in the ‘gymnasium,’ of which he gives his plan, regardless of the vocation they intend to embrace. Only a short chapter1039 of the book refers to the training of girls. Their parents are cautioned against placing them in nunneries, which in the writer’s mind are little better than brothels. He advises their being trained at home for domestic life and made to spin and weave like the daughters of Augustus.
Similar tendencies are reflected in the works of Erasmus († 1536). His Colloquies or Conversations introduce us to a number of women under various aspects; and the want of purpose in convent life, the danger of masterfulness in wives, the anomalous position of loose women, and the general need there was of cultivating domestic qualities, are all in turn discussed.
Two Colloquies turn on the convent life of women. In the first1040 a girl of seventeen declares herself averse to matrimony, and expresses her intention of becoming a nun. The man who argues with her represents to her that if she be resolved to keep her maidenhood, she can do so by remaining with her parents and need not make herself from a free woman into a slave. ‘If you have a mind to read, pray or sing,’ he says, ‘you can go into your chamber as much and as often as you please. When you have enough of retirement, you can go to church, hear anthems, prayers, and sermons, and if you see any matron or virgin remarkable for piety in whose company you may get good, or any man who is endowed with singular probity from whom you can gain for your bettering, you can have their conversation, and choose the preacher who preaches Christ most purely. When once you are in the cloister, all these things, which are of great assistance in promoting true piety, you lose at once.’ And he enlarges on the formalities of convent life, ‘which of themselves signify nothing to the advancement of piety and make no one more acceptable in the eyes of Christ, who only looks to purity of mind.’ The girl asks him if he be against the institution of monastic life. He replies, ‘By no means. But as I will not persuade anyone against it who is already in it, so I would undoubtedly caution all young women, especially those of a generous temper, not to precipitate themselves unadvisedly into that state from which there is no getting out afterwards, and the more so because their chastity is more in danger in the cloister than out of it, and you may do whatever is done there as well at home.’
His arguments however are in vain; the girl goes into a convent. But the next Colloquy, called the ‘Penitent Virgin1041,’ describes how she changed her mind and came out again. She was intimidated by the nuns through feigned apparitions, and when she had been in the house six days she sent for her parents and declared that she would sooner die than remain there.
Another Colloquy1042 shows how masterfulness in a wife destroyed all possibility of domestic peace and happiness; yet another1043 how a woman of loose life was persuaded to adopt other ways on purely reasonable grounds. Again we have a young mother who is persuaded to tend her child herself, since the promotion of its bodily welfare does much towards saving its soul1044. The most striking illustration however of the fact that in the eyes of Erasmus the position of woman was changing is afforded by the ‘Parliament of Women1045,’ in which a great deal of talk leads to no result. Cornelia opens and closes the sitting, and urges that it is advisable that women should reconsider their position, for men, she says, are excluding women from all honourable employments and making them ‘into their laundresses and cooks, while they manage everything according to their own pleasure.’ But the assembled women dwell on irrelevant detail and harp on the distributions of class in a manner which shows that those qualities which made their participation in public affairs possible or advisable were utterly wanting among them. Erasmus passes no remarks derogatory to women as such, and yet he leaves us to infer that they cannot do better than devote their attention exclusively to domestic concerns.
Judging by his writings and those of others who were active in the cause of progress, there was a growing feeling that the domestic virtues needed cultivation. A change in the position of women was not only imminent but was felt to be desirable, and probably it was in conformity with what women themselves wished. Both in England and on the Continent the idea that virginity was in itself pleasing to God was no longer in the foreground of the moral consciousness of the age; it was felt that the duties of a mother took higher rank, and that the truest vocation of woman was to be found in the circle of home. This view, as we shall see presently, tallied with the views taken by the Protestant reformers and prepared the way for the dissolution of nunneries.
CHAPTER XII
THE DISSOLUTION
§ 1. The Dissolution in England
The movement of the 16th century commonly spoken of as the Reformation was the forcible manifestation of a revolution in thought which had long been preparing. This period may fitly be likened to a watershed between the socialistic tendencies of the Middle Ages and the individualistic tendencies which have mainly prevailed since. It forms the height which limits average modern conceptions, but which can be made the standpoint from which a more comprehensive view of things past and present becomes possible. Like other great epochs in history it is characterised by a sense of assurance, aspiration, and optimism, – and by wasted possibilities which give its study an ever renewed interest. The political, social, and intellectual changes which accompanied the Reformation are especially interesting nowadays when the standards which were then formulated are felt to be no longer final. The progressive thought of to-day, heretical though the assertion may sound to some, has become markedly insensible to the tenets which the reformers of the 16th century propounded and in which Protestantism found its strength and its safeguard. While paying due deference to the courage of the men who heralded what was advance if measured by such needs as they realised, the thinker of to-day dwells not so much on the factors of civilisation which those men turned to account as on those which they disregarded; – he is attracted by Erasmus, not by Luther, and looks more to him who worked in the interest of reform than to him who worked in the interest of the Reformation.
Among the important social changes effected by the Reformation the dissolution of the monasteries forms a small but a significant feature, a feature pregnant with meaning if considered in the light of the changing standards of family and sex morality. For those who attacked the Church of Rome in her fundamentals, while differing in points of doctrine, were at one in the belief that the state of morality needed amendment, and that marriage supplied the means of effecting the desired change. In open antagonism to principles which formed the groundwork of monasticism, they declared celibacy odious and the vow of chastity contradictory to scriptural teaching and in itself foolish and presumptuous.
The language in which Luther, Bullinger and Becon inculcated these principles is often offensive to modern ears. Their views are wanting in good taste, but consistency cannot be denied them. For these men were logical in condemning the unmarried state at every point, attacking it equally in the priest, the monk, the nun and the professed wanton. The changed attitude towards loose women has repeatedly been referred to in the course of this work, and it has been pointed out how such women, at one time not without power, had been steadily sinking in general estimation. Society, bent on having a clear line drawn between them and other women, had interfered with them in many ways, and had succeeded in stamping them as a class, to its own profit and to their disadvantage. But even at the close of the Middle Ages these women retained certain rights, such as that of having free quarters in the town, which the advocates of the new faith openly attacked and summarily swept away. Zealous if somewhat brutal in the cause of an improved morality, they maintained that marriage was the most acceptable state before God and that a woman had no claim to consideration except in her capacity as wife and mother.
The calling of the nun was doomed to fall a sacrifice to this teaching. Her vocation was in antagonism to the doctrines of the party of progress, and where not directly attacked was regarded with a scarcely less fatal indifference. It has been shown that great efforts were made before the Reformation to reform life in nunneries, but various obstacles, and among them a growing indifference to the intellectual training and interests of women, were in the way of their permanent improvement. The nun was chiefly estimated by her devotional pursuits, and when the rupture came with Rome and these devotional pursuits were declared meaningless, individuals who were driven from their homes might be pitied, and voices here and there might be raised deploring the loss of the possibilities secured by the convent, but no active efforts were made to preserve the system, nothing was attempted to save an institution, the raison d’être of which had vanished.
Previous to the Reformation the efforts of churchmen on the Continent to reform convent life had led in several instances to the disbanding of a convent. In England like results ensued from the conduct of churchmen, who in their efforts to regenerate society by raising the tone of religion, rank with the older humanists abroad. These men had no intention of interfering with the institution of monasticism as such, but were bent on removing certain abuses. Among them were John Alcock, bishop of Ely, Fisher, bishop of Rochester, and Cardinal Wolsey; they appropriated a number of decayed convents on the plea of promoting religious education, and their action may be said to have paved the way towards a general dissolution.
Among the monasteries dissolved by them were several belonging to nuns, and the fact is noteworthy that wherever the property of women was appropriated, it was appropriated to the use of men. Considering that the revenues of these houses had been granted for women and had been administered by women for centuries, this fact appears somewhat regrettable from the woman’s point of view. But no blame attaches on this account to the men, for their attitude was in keeping with progressive thought generally and was shared by women themselves. Thus Margaret Beaufort († 1509) the mother of Henry VII, whose college foundations have given her lasting fame, seems never to have been struck by the thought that advantages might accrue from promoting education among women also. She founded Christ’s College at Cambridge, planned the foundation there of St John’s, and instituted divinity professorships both at Oxford and at Cambridge. But her efforts, in which she was supported by Fisher, bishop of Rochester, were entirely devoted to securing an improved education for the clergy.
