Woman under Monasticism

The letters which Clara wrote to her brother about this time help us to realise the situation. All her letters are undated, but in one she thanks Wilibald for his advice about the supplication, and says that if divine service should really be abolished she means to devote herself more to reading, for ‘the dear beloved old writers surely were no fools1168.’ In another she thanks him for the loan of books and says a work of Erasmus (probably De libero arbitrio) has pleased the sisters by its moderation. As to Charitas ‘she finds great comfort in her beloved old Cyprian, in whose writings she reads day and night. She sends greetings and the message that she prefers Cyprian to all these new evangelists who strut about in cut garments and golden chains1169.’

Though Clara did not lose her cheerfulness, Charitas, who saw further, was full of apprehension. From what her sister says she regretted the severe tone of her letter to Geuder1170. On other occasions also she was led to indignant utterances which she afterwards regretted1171.

A gap occurs at this period in her memoir which she resumed writing in March 1525, after the religious disputation had taken place at Nürnberg. After many stormy scenes, ‘the preachers of the Evangel,’ as they called themselves, decided to carry out their intentions without waiting for the decision of a Church Council. The immediate result of the decision was an attack on all religious houses. But in the convent of St Clara the determined and reckless energy of the reformers was matched by indignant protest and unyielding opposition on the part of the abbess.

Charitas has described in full (p. 33) how a deputation from the town council asked to be admitted into her house, and how they informed her and the assembled nuns that their connection with the Franciscans was at an end; a ‘reformed’ preacher had been appointed to preach in the church of the nuns, and they were left the choice among several men who would act to them as confessors. Much argument followed, but Charitas maintained that her house and the Franciscans had always been closely connected. ‘If we yield it is only to force and we turn to God,’ she said, ‘and before Him we lodge a protest and declare that we are forced against our will, and that we reject and discountenance all your proposals.’ The assembled nuns rose to their feet to shew their approval of her speech, and the deputation in vain tried the effect of persuasion. Charitas scorned the idea of having anything to do with apostate monks; and the deputation retired after blaming the women for behaving in a most ungrateful manner. A second visit led to similar results; Charitas abode by her decision, the nuns wept, and the deputation retired after venting their indignation in threats.

The hopes of the convent now centred in Nützel, their representative in the town council, and Charitas with her brother’s approval wrote to him (p. 41) begging him to come to her. But the first words Nützel spoke dispelled every hope of assistance from that quarter; he blamed the nuns for opposing the council, and urged the advisability of their giving way. Charitas was most indignant and declared she was well aware that it was intended to force them to this new belief, but that they were agreed that neither in life nor in death would they listen to what the Church had not previously countenanced. She called upon the prioress to read out a second petition to the council asking to have their father confessor back or else to be left without one. She wanted Nützel to take charge of this petition, but he was only angered, and taking Charitas aside, represented to her that her opposition was a serious matter; her example was encouraging other women’s convents to opposition, which would relent if she did. He said that by resigning and disbanding the convent bloodshed would be averted, and he spoke in praise of the new preacher. But Charitas remained unmoved. As he was leaving the house his daughter and the other nuns, whose fathers were members of the town council, went down on their knees to him imploring protection. He refused to listen, but was so far impressed that he never slept all the following night, as his wife afterwards told the nuns (p. 54).

The convent’s opposition to their plans was a source not only of annoyance but of apprehension to the town authorities. The peasants’ rising was spreading in the direction of Nürnberg, and as popular feeling was against religious houses the argument that dissolving the house might help to avert a danger was not altogether unfounded. Nützel in a long expostulation (p. 55) shortly afterwards tried to impress this view on the abbess, but Charitas urged (p. 59) that other reasons besides hatred of the friars had roused the peasants to rebellion, and complained that the ill-feeling against her house was largely due to the reformed preachers, who declared they would not rest till they had driven monks and nuns out of the town (p. 62). Rightly or wrongly she held that Poliander, the reformed preacher who was now preaching in the convent church, had been promised a reward if he persuaded her or her nuns to leave the convent (p. 67), and that his want of success aggravated his hatred of them. It was in vain that Nützel wrote in praise of him (p. 67). Charitas now looked upon Nützel as a dangerous enemy, and her sister Clara wrote to Wilibald1172 begging him to advise the convent how to get rid of the man. In another letter1173 she said that Charitas was seriously afraid of him.

In place of the Franciscans a number of reformed preachers now preached before the nuns and the people in the convent church. Among them was Osiander, formerly a Carthusian, whose violence at a later period was censured and resented by his Protestant brethren; and the nuns were obliged to attend and to listen to a torrent of abuse and imprecation by him and others. ‘I cannot and will not detail,’ says Charitas in her memoir (p. 70), ‘how they perverted Holy Writ to a strange meaning, how they cast down the doctrines of the Church and discarded all ceremonies; how they abused and reviled all religious orders and classes, and respected neither Pope nor Emperor, whom they openly called tyrant, devil, and Antichrist; how roughly and in what an unchristian-like spirit and against all brotherly love they abused us and charged us with great wickedness, for the purpose of rousing the people, whom they persuaded that an ungodly set like ourselves should be destroyed, our cloister broken open, ourselves dragged out by force, since we represented a despicable class, heretics, idolatrous and blasphemous people, who were eternally of the devil.’

One might be tempted to look upon this description as an exaggeration were it not for a letter from Wilibald Pirckheimer to Melanchthon, in which he describes the outrages to which the nuns were exposed in similar terms. ‘The preachers scream, swear, and storm, and do everything in their power to rouse the hatred of the masses against the poor nuns; they openly say that as words were of no avail, recourse should be had to force,’ and he wonders the cloister has not yet been attacked1174.

Under the pressure of popular opinion and increasing restlessness the Austin monks gave over their house, and they were followed by the Carmelites, the Benedictines, and the Carthusians. The Dominicans hesitated; the Franciscans refused to go. Charitas expresses wonder that the ‘spiritual poison,’ as she calls it, which the preachers several times a week tried to infuse into the nuns, took no effect, and that none of them expressed a desire to leave the convent (p. 85).

Things had now come to such a pass that convents outside the city disbanded before the peasants’ rising; and nuns from Pillenreuth and Engelthal sought refuge in the town with the nuns of St Clara (p. 86). These lived in daily fear of their house being stormed, for the people shouted and swore at them from below, threw stones into the choir, smashed the church windows, and sang insulting songs in the churchyard outside. But the nuns, nothing daunted, continued to keep the hours and to ring the bells, though they were every moment prepared for the worst. Clara in a letter to Wilibald described her own and her sister’s fears in eloquent terms1175; and the nun Felicitas Grundherrin wrote to her father entreating him to abide by the old faith1176. In these days the nuns seem to have read a good deal of pamphlet literature, but they failed to see anything beyond an encouragement to violence and disorder in the whole Lutheran movement.

A further attempt was made by the council to coerce the convent. A number of injunctions were sent to the abbess which were to be carried out within a month (p. 88). The first of these commanded her to absolve the nuns from their vow that they might enjoy ‘Christian freedom’; another that she should send the young nuns home though they refused, ‘since children should obey their parents.’ The deputies who laid these injunctions before the abbess assured her that the council was prepared to restore to the nuns what they had brought to the convent; that they would give money to those who had brought nothing, and provide a dower for those who married. To these arguments Charitas replied that the nuns had made a vow not before her but before God, that it was not in her power to dispense them from it and that she would not urge them to disobedience. With a touch of bitterness she added that their mothers were continually at the convent grating urging them to go (p. 87). For the matrons of the town especially sided with the reformed preachers and cried shame on convent life. ‘If it were not for the women and the preachers things would not be so bad,’ Clara wrote on one occasion to Wilibald1177, and on another she spoke of the sharp tongues and violent behaviour of the women.

The deputation further claimed that the nuns should take off their convent clothes (p. 93), the sight of which they said gave umbrage. ‘We are continually told,’ Charitas replied, ‘that our vows and our clothes threaten to cause a rising, but it is your preachers, to whom we are forced to listen, who try to provoke one by abusing and condemning us from the pulpit and charging us with vices and impurity to humour the people.’ The command was also given to do away with the convent grating; and it was backed by the threat that if Charitas failed to comply with it the town authorities would throw open the house to all visitors. The heaviness of this blow was such that after the deputation had left Charitas summoned the nuns and asked their intentions severally. In the eyes of the whole convent throwing open the house involved turning it into a public resort of bad character. They felt they must yield or leave the house altogether, but they promised to abide by the decision of Charitas if she would stay and advise them. The intrepid abbess decided to do away with the grating at one window, declaring that they acted against the rule under protest and only temporarily. On the other points she sought the advice of learned men outside, but they advised compromise, for, to give her own words (p. 95), ‘they said all chance was gone of gaining anything by opposition; we must yield if we did not want the house to go to ruin. People now did things by main force regardless of justice or equity, fearful neither of Pope nor Emperor, nor even of God except in word; things were such that these people said, What we will must be done, thus and not otherwise, declaring themselves more powerful than the Pope himself.’

In the meantime the feelings against the nunnery were by no means unanimous. Geuder, the brother-in-law of Charitas, was emphatic at the council meeting in denouncing the throwing open of convents, which in his eyes also meant turning them into disreputable houses1178. But no amount of opposition made by him and others could prevent a scene from being enacted in the convent chapel, which was afterwards looked upon as disgraceful, not only by those who provoked it, but by outsiders whether partisans of the Lutheran movement or not. The repeated attempts to persuade the nuns to leave having failed and Charitas refusing to bid them go, two of the chief councillors, one of them Nützel, the representative of the convent’s interests, and the widow of a councillor who had long clamoured for her daughter’s release, repaired to the convent with a number of other persons, claimed to be admitted, and declared they had come to fetch their daughters away. The three nuns, who were between nineteen and twenty-three years of age, tried to hide, but Charitas bade them come forth, and they then sought refuge with her in the convent chapel. She has described in full how the young women besought her to protect them, how their parents and others abused and reviled them, and how in spite of their protests, their indignation and their tears, their relations at last resorted to violence. Four persons seized each nun and dragged and pushed her out of the chapel, while the women present shouted approval, and once outside their convent clothes were torn off and others substituted in their stead. After a scuffle and a scramble in which one nun was knocked over and her foot injured, they were carried to a chariot waiting outside and conveyed away.

Charitas remained behind in grief and despair. ‘I and all my nuns are so distressed at all this,’ she wrote a few days later1179, ‘that I have almost wept out my eyes… Nothing ever so went to my heart.’ Indignation at the violence of the act became general in the town and spread beyond its confines. ‘I never could have imagined women acting in such a cruel manner,’ Sabina, the abbess of Bergen, wrote to Wilibald; and in another letter, apprehending the destruction of the convent at Nürnberg, she proposed that Charitas and her nuns should seek refuge with her1180.

But Charitas persisted in holding her ground, though with an aching heart. When the men who had fetched away their daughters sent word offering to pay for their maintenance during the time they had lived with her, she refused. Her trials in one direction had reached their climax, – the councillor Nützel, who admitted that things had gone too far, henceforth acted in a conciliatory spirit, and some approximation took place between them. Not that he ever tired of urging Charitas to desert her convent and her cause, but he now confined himself to persuasion and argument, and when one of the young nuns who had been carried off was so far reconciled to the world that she came to the convent window and urged her step-sister to return home, pretending that Nützel had sent her (p. 123), the councillor disclaimed having done so. His correspondence with Charitas, which she has faithfully inserted in her memoir, shows that she patiently listened to every argument in favour of the new doctrines. She had a conversation with the preacher Osiander which lasted four hours (p. 128), she listened to over a hundred sermons preached by the Lutherans, and she read their writings, yet she could find nothing to her taste and it seemed easy to her to confound their arguments. Her letters show that her unhappiness was great, for on one occasion she went so far as to put before Nützel (p. 122) what the result would be if women like themselves, many of whom were over sixty and several over seventy, returned to the world and tried to earn their living, as everyone said they ought to do. She declared she detained no one, the nuns were at liberty to go if they chose; everyone was giving her advice, she said, but she saw no salvation in the new doctrines, which did not appeal to her. Her readiness to listen to argument caused Nützel to set his hopes on a conference between Melanchthon and her (p. 133), and probably at the instigation of Wilibald, who was deeply grieved at the injustice done to his sisters without being able to give them direct help, Melanchthon, who was well known for his uprightness and conciliatory influence, came to Nürnberg towards the close of the year 1525. ‘I am glad to hear Melanchthon is coming,’ Charitas wrote; ‘since I have heard he is an irreproachable, upright and justice-loving man, I do not suppose he can approve of what has been done here.’

Nützel at once (p. 149) brought him to the convent. ‘A few days later our representative came with Philip Melanchthon,’ Charitas wrote, ‘who spoke much about the new faith, but finding that we set our hopes more on the grace of God than on our works, he said we might as well seek our salvation in the cloister as in the world.’ They had a long talk together and agreed on all points except on the subject of vows, for these the reformer declared were not binding, while Charitas maintained that a promise made to God must be kept. She describes Melanchthon as more moderate in his speech than she had ever known a Lutheran to be. Melanchthon, on hearing the various points of the case, blamed the councillors for having forbidden the Franciscans to confer with the convent, and for forcibly taking the nuns out of the cloister. ‘I trust God has sent this Lutheran at the right hour,’ Charitas wrote, ‘for they were discussing whether or not to expel nuns generally, pull down their houses, and put the older inmates of those convents which would not surrender into one house, driving back the younger ones into the world’ (p. 171).

According to her account Melanchthon represented to the council that no convent at Wittenberg had been destroyed by force, and after a great deal of argument it was decreed to make one more effort to persuade the nuns to go, and failing this to leave them alone. No concessions were made with regard to the friars, the nuns remained without a minister to take their confessions and to administer the sacrament, but after all the nuns had been severally asked if they wished to stay or to go, and only one declared herself ready to leave the house, the rest were left in possession till the end of their days.

With the account of the last visitation, which took place in 1528, the memoir of Charitas ends. From other sources we hear that short of annoyances about her income and a tax levied on the convent she remained unmolested, and passed the last few years of her life in peace. At the close of 1528, the fiftieth anniversary of her entering the convent, and the twenty-fifth year of her appointment as abbess, was celebrated with some amount of cheerfulness. Wilibald and others sent presents, and after dinner the nuns danced to the sound of the dulcimer (hackbrett), which the abbess played1181. Wilibald’s interest in the convent continued, and towards the close of his life we find him busy writing a pamphlet in justification of the nuns1182, in which he developed at some length the arguments against those who had oppressed and coerced them. He died in 1530, and within a couple of years was followed by his sister Charitas (1533). Her sister Clara ruled the convent for a few months after her and was succeeded by Wilibald’s daughter Charitas. The number of nuns was slowly but steadily dwindling; before the close of the century the house had fallen into the hands of the town council by default.

The abbess Charitas Pirckheimer worthily represents the monastic life of women at the close of the Middle Ages. Faithful to the system she had embraced, she remained true to her convictions to the last, with a fearlessness, candour, and determination which give her attitude a touch of heroism. She is one among many staunch adherents to the old faith who experienced hardships which simple humanity and feelings of equity and justice alike condemned, but whose steadfastness could not save their cause from being lost.

CONCLUSION

My task has drawn to its close. In a series of chapters, incompletely no doubt but I trust not superficially, the position of woman under monasticism has been brought before the reader, and some account has been given of the various aspects of convent life. In conclusion it seems well to pause and look back over the ground traversed, to take in at a glance what Catholic tradition, convent-life and saint-lore have done for women in the past. The area over which the reader has been taken is a wide one, and the ground in many directions remains unexplored. Still some of the most prominent landmarks have been noted, and some districts carefully examined. Thus while further information might be sought concerning many special points, it still seems legitimate to form a general survey and to draw certain conclusions.

Turning back to the earliest period when Christianity with its new conceptions first came into contact with beliefs dating from a distant heathen era, we have seen how many sentiments and associations of ideas peculiar to pre-Christian times lived on and were absorbed into the new religion. The early representatives of Christianity, with a keen-sighted appreciation of the means by which a change of religion is most successfully effected, treated the older conceptions with tolerance, and by doing so made possible the establishment of new ideas in the old heathen setting. The legends and the cult of the saints contain a mine of wealth as yet little explored by the student of primitive civilization and folk-lore, a mine which has here been tapped at one vein only, – namely for the information it yields on the antiquity of beliefs which attach to certain women who are reckoned among the saints.

Passing from the ground of tradition to that of history we have seen how the convent was looked upon with favour by women of the newly converted barbarian races, and how readily they availed themselves of the protection which the Christian religion held out to them. This development also needed to be studied side by side with previous social conditions in order to stand out in its true light, and it gained a new meaning when considered in connection with the elements of older folk tradition which it absorbed. The representatives of Christianity, profiting by a surviving love of independence among womankind, turned the energies of women into new channels, and giving scope to their activity in new directions, secured their help in the cause of peaceful progress. The outward conditions of life were such that the woman who joined the convent made her decision once for all. But provided she agreed to forego the claims of family and sex, an honourable independence was secured to her, and she was brought into contact with the highest aims of her age. At a period when monasteries, placed in the remote and uncultivated districts, radiated peace and civilization throughout the neighbourhood, many women devoted themselves to managing settlements which in the standard they attained, vied in excellence with the settlements managed by men.

At the outset many married women left their husbands for the purpose of founding and governing convents; sometimes they founded convents the management of which they left to others, and themselves retired to them later in life. The prestige and advantages enjoyed by the heads of religious settlements were such that kings and queens frequently installed their daughters as abbesses in preference to seeking for them matrimonial alliances, and these princesses were joined by many daughters of the most influential families, who gladly availed themselves of the opportunity of embracing the religious vocation. Through their close contact with high-born women, convents maintained a high tone in manners, morals and general behaviour, and grew into important educational centres, the beneficent influence of which was generally recognised.

The career open to the inmates of convents both in England and on the continent was greater than any other ever thrown open to women in the course of modern European history; abilities might raise the nun to the rank of abbess, a position of substantial authority. In the Kentish charter, to which reference has been made, the names of the abbesses as representatives of religion follow those of the bishops. In Saxony it fell to an abbess to act as representative of the emperor during his absence. As independent landowners, who held their property of and from king and emperor, the abbess took rank with the lords temporal and spiritual in the right of jurisdiction which they exercised, and in the right of being represented in Parliament or at the Imperial Diet as the case might be.

While fulfilling the duties which devolved on them in virtue of their station, abbesses did not neglect their opportunities of keeping in touch with culture and of widening their mental horizon. In Anglo-Saxon England men who attained to distinction received their training in settlements governed by women. Histories and a chronicle of unique value were inspired by and drafted under the auspices of Saxon abbesses. For nuns Ealdhelm wrote his most famous treatises, and several valuable contemporary biographies, such as those of Sturmi and of Robert of Fontevraud, were written at the express desire of nuns. And while eager in encouraging productiveness in others, they were not slow in trying to develop their own literary powers. In the 6th century Radegund was writing epistles in verse under the tuition of an exiled Latin poet; to an Anglo-Saxon nun whose name is not recorded we owe one of the earliest and most interesting accounts extant of a journey to Palestine. In the 8th century the nun Lioba was trying her hand at Latin verse in a convent in Thanet; in the 10th century the nun Hrotsvith in Saxony was composing Latin dramas on the model of Terence. The contributions of nuns to literature as well as incidental remarks show that the curriculum of study in the nunnery was as liberal as that accepted by monks, and embraced all available writing, whether by Christian or profane authors. While Scripture and the writings of the Fathers of the Church at all times formed the groundwork of monastic studies, Cicero at this period was read by the side of Boethius, Virgil by the side of Martianus Capella, Terence by the side of Isidor of Sevilla. From remarks made by Hrotsvith we see that the coarseness of the later Latin dramatists made no reason for their being forbidden to nuns, though she would have seen it otherwise; and Herrad was so far impressed by the wisdom of the heathen philosophers of antiquity that she pronounced this wisdom to be the ‘product of the Holy Spirit also.’ Throughout the literary world as represented by convents, the use of Latin was general, and made possible the even spread of culture in districts that were widely remote from each other and practically without intercourse.