Virgin: The Untouched History

by Hanne Blank

  As the Catholic Church matured, its influence spread wherever the Roman Empire's roads preceded it. With the northward and westward migration of Roman Catholicism went its singular philosophy of sexual renunciation, asceticism, and sacrifice. To the farmers, hunters, and craftsmen of early medieval northern Europe, the idea that their sons, daughters, and perhaps even wives might try to secede from the household in the name of God must have seemed radical and unsettling. In the subsistence economies of premodern Europe, a childless woman was a tragic figure, more often mocked and reviled than pitied. Spinsters and bachelors were as rare as hen's teeth. Remaining unmarried was not an option many would, or could, choose. Economic survival meant participation in the economy of the larger household and community, both in terms of labor and of the reproduction of human beings who would labor in turn.

  In any case, the majority of people, living as vassals, serfs, villeins, and in other various forms of tenancy on lands owned by feudal aristocrats, did not have the right (or for that matter the financial resources) to remove themselves or their labor contribution from their lord's holdings if they had wanted to. Given these issues, it comes as no surprise that throughout most of the Middle Ages the bulk of those who assumed the profession of consecrated virgin were daughters of the aristocracy.

  The Origins of a Vocation

  Within Christianity, the elite already had a long tradition of being first in line to step into the rarefied space between earth and heaven. A great deal of the operating capital behind the first several centuries of Christian development had come directly from wealthy women. As Christianity became officially recognized within the Roman Empire, bishops and other churchmen with the ability to pull strings within the secular power structure helped these women and their virgin heiress daughters to remain free agents who were legally able to dispose of their property at will. Thus money and power flowed in mutually beneficial currents between unmarried (or no longer married) women and the Church. Wealthy women in early Christianity not only had the ear of powerful bishops and archbishops, but they could sometimes also wield limited ecclesiastical power themselves. Women deacons called diaconissae catechized converts, meditated on religious principles and shared the benefit of their insights, led prayers, taught, and were central in providing aid to the sick and poor.

  The first religious vows made available to women represented an effort to formalize these relationships with the Church. In the first century an informal division of three orders of widows became customary, with two groups devoted to meditative prayer and teaching and the third devoted to the care of the needy. The establishment of institutional roles for women took a decisive step forward in the third century with the new role of the sponsa Chrisd, the spouse of Christ. There was not yet a distinct category of religious called "nuns" or a system of monastic rule under which they could live. But the sponsa Chrisd role gave shape to what would become the iconic role of the virgin within the Christianity. The lives of these "spouses of Christ" revolved around a nucleus made up of devotion, service, the renunciation of sexuality, and the dedication of their worldly goods to their heavenly spouse. It was not exactly like an earthly marriage, but it was recognizably similar.

  Standing apart not only from the families they had left behind but also from the hierarchy of a Church headed primarily by married men, the early religious virgins provided a bold contrast indeed. The sponsa Chrisd's life was lived at a more stringent level of sanctity than that of most priests. Priestly celibacy, although encouraged from the earliest days of Christianity, did not become doctrine until the Lateran Councils of the early twelfth century. Long before then, however, virgins and virginity were central to the Christian mission. Representing the New Covenant in their bodies by physically symbolizing the superiority of spiritual kinship over worldly family, virgins also provided the Church with critical capital, skill, labor, and, of course, their spiritual and mystical gifts. Perceived as being closer both to God and to God's design for ideal human existence, Christian virgins possessed a unique form of holiness that, like the sacred virginity of their forerunners in the pre-Christian world, was believed to provide a dedicated and uncompromised conduit between heaven and earth.

  Daughters of Jerusalem

  The spread of European monasticism, and that of female monasteries in particular, was due almost exclusively to the combination of heavenly devotion and earthly wealth. Wealthy women who dedicated their lives to the Church were the vehicles by which the earliest women's monasteries were formed. One of the earliest female monasteries in Europe, Saint-Croix at Poitiers, France, was established by the sixth-century queen Radegund, daughter of Thuringian king Berthaire, who walked out on her husband and used the income from various lands that had been given to her as part of her wedding gifts to found her abbey. Populated almost exclusively by other women of rank and wealth who brought additional endowments to the abbey, Sainte-Croix was notable in that Radegund required that all the sisters be able to read and write. The abbey's scriptorium, just like the ones in the male monasteries, produced many skilled copies of religious books and manuscripts.

  Women like Radegund were behind the foundation of most of Europe's convents, and those in the British Isles as well. The great dual monastery of Ely, for example, was founded by Queen Aethelthrith, who left her second husband, the King of Northumbria, in order to found Ely on land left to her by her first husband. In founding or merely joining religious communities, even married aristocratic women were able to choose their own path at a level and with a degree of control to which they otherwise could not aspire. Remarkably, the Church welcomed these wealthy wayward wives with open arms. The entrance of a marriage partner into a monastery was considered legitimate grounds for annulment of the marriage by the Church, even if the partner had not consented to his or her spouse's actions.

  This did not mean, however, that husbands and families just stood there waving good-bye when their womenfolk wandered off to found convents. On the contrary, women's efforts to devote themselves to a religious life were often thwarted at every step. But for the women who either had familial support or managed to shame, outwit, or just outrun their opposition, consecration was the one respectable ticket out of the various miseries of a married woman's life. Women who freely entered the monastic life as never-married virgins, like the aristocratic Ethelburga, who, courtesy of her brother (the Bishop of London), went from being a member of the family of the King of Wessex to being foundress of Barking Abbey, knew very well how fortunate and unusual they were.

  This is an important concept. To most people today, the life of a nun, with its vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience; regular obligations of the monastic rule; and restrictions on personal liberties, seems shockingly limiting. We often assume that such a lifestyle must represent an enormous personal sacrifice. But limitation is not necessarily synonymous with loss.

  For medieval women, the regulations of the monastic life were often very welcome, not only because of the opportunity they offered for real religious devotion but because despite their strictness, they still offered more freedom and opportunity than the married state. Destined to act as the human glue that cemented dynastic relationships between aristocratic clans by producing offspring of august and verifiable paternity, women who did not successfully lobby for the religious life could expect their lives to be quite literally ruled by marriage. Elite marriages might take place as early as a girl's twelfth birthday, and betrothals even earlier.* These women's lives were so thoroughly oriented toward expedient marriages that*sometimes they were sent away as little girls to be raised in the households of the courts over which they would later preside. A case in point is Matilda, daughter of King Henry I of England, sent at the age of seven to be reared in the court of Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich V so that upon her marriage to the emperor five years later when she was twelve (and he was twenty-eight), she was already conversant with the language, customs, and politics of his court into which she married and able to immediately tak
e up her duties.

  Women without religious vocations existed quite literally in the service of men. Used as bargaining chips in the politically and socially vital marriage market by their fathers or guardians, elite women almost inevitably wed. Often they were married off to men who were decades older, and it was more the exception than the rule for a woman to actually know her husband socially when she found herself standing beside him at the altar. Sexual submission to one's husband was both socially and legally mandated, and the difficult, dangerous, and frequently fatal prospect of childbearing was all but inescapable.

  All this was absolutely normal and expected, but it was also quite understandably distasteful to many. Choosing to take Christ as a spouse was not merely an emblem of devotion, it was perhaps the only means a woman had of exercising any choice whatsoever in the matter of what would form the core of her adult life. In the texts left to us by some of the great literary nuns of the High Middle Ages, like Hildegard of Bingen and Elisabeth of Schonau, marriage is described in terms nearly identical with slavery. It was partially the daunting physical demands of married life—submitting to men's sexual demands, bearing children, wiping bottoms, running a household—that women found undesirable. Marriage simply used women up. By contrast, in the words of the thirteenth-century Hali Mei&had, "Virginity is the blossom which, if it is once completely cut off, will never grow again, but though it may wither sometimes through indecent thoughts it can grow green again nevertheless." Virgins not only got to escape the perils and inconveniences of earthly marital life, but additionally they would always (at least metaphorically) remain in the eternal blossom of youth.

  These were not the only benefits awaiting those who chose the monastery. The monastic life also promised the opportunity to devote time to charity (convents often included poorhouses, hospitals, and leprosaria), to live in a community of like-minded people, and to be genuinely useful. Nuns also enjoyed spiritual communion and the joys of being in a position to help others through intercessory prayer: nuns' prayers could, among other things, help to free souls trapped in Purgatory.

  Virginity also held the promise of education. Monasteries were renowned as places where women became literate. Years of singing or listening to a relatively limited collection of familiar texts while looking at books like psalters and missals would eventually result in women figuring out how to match what they heard to what they saw. But that was not the way most nuns who became literate this way understood their experience of ."spontaneous" literacy. To them, it was a miracle bestowed upon the deserving, pure-hearted virgin by God: when the gift of literacy bloomed in the mind of Hedwig von Regensburg, the entire choir of sisters saw her heart shine through her body and habit "like the sun through glass."

  As for the sexual continence expected of nuns, it seems that relatively few among those who voluntarily entered orders seem to have found it a particular difficulty, although there is evidence that a few nuns were troubled by lust in a manner similar to the way it so often tormented male monastics. Allegorical stories of the period allude to the difficulties some nuns may have had in successfully obeying the rules. One describes how a nun and a monk, in love with one another, arrange a nighttime rendezvous, but when the nun tries to sneak out of her convent to meet her monk, she finds the way barred by thickets of crucifixes. In one version of the story, the nun fetches an ax to chop the crosses down, only to find that when she hoists the ax it miraculously becomes stuck to her shoulder, which jolts her into realizing the error of her ways. In another version of the same story, the nun prays to the Virgin Mary to remove the crosses instead, which makes the Virgin so angry that she slaps the errant nun across the face, knocking her unconscious. Unsurprisingly, she is mightily repentant when she comes to.

  Many women, however, not least the numerous widows who only had a chance to take the veil after their husbands' deaths, were relieved to enter the convent. But neither women nor men would have entered the monastic life under the misapprehension that they were giving up some nonexistent no-holds-barred carnal cornucopia. Regular required abstinence from sex was a way of life for virtually all medieval married, couples. Many followed a (originally Jewish) custom of abstaining from sex during a woman's menses. Sex might similarly be avoided during pregnancy or while a woman was still nursing an infant. It was also a common teaching that couples were to abstain from sex during the penitential season of Lent, during Pentecost, and for the four weeks of Advent, as well as refraining on Wednesdays (in memory of Christ's arrest), Fridays (in memory of Christ's death), and-Saturdays (in memory of Mary). Significant sexual restraint was an unremarkable commonplace for those on the outside of the monastery walls as well as for those within them.

  Such a constant and deep relationship between sexuality and religion helps, in some ways, to explain some of the mystical eroticism we find in writings by medieval nuns. Mystical meditation was the mode of choice through which medieval women interacted with religious subjects. The mystical writings and teachings of women like Hildegard of Bingen, Elisabeth of Schonau, Catherine of Siena, Margery Kempe, and Birgitta of Sweden were not only well known during their own time—Hildegard's visions were so famous and highly regarded that she received dispensation to make four separate tours as a preacher during a period when women's preaching was technically outlawed by the Church—but have endured, coming down to us across the ages as important documents of women's literature and Christian thought.

  Looking at these women's writings, as well as at the stories of other medieval women saints, we often find them describing intensely bodily and intimate interactions with the Divine. Saint Ita, an eighth-century Irish saint, was one of many women who had visions of "heaven's King who every night / Is infant Jesus at my breast." Women rejoiced passionately in visions of being embraced by their heavenly spouse, or in touching their lips to his wounds. Famous English mystic Margery Kempe sometimes fell to the ground crying out and writhing in bodily ecstasies when she meditated on the sufferings of Christ on the cross, and described a vision of Jesus in which he gave Margery permission to "boldly take me in the arms of thy soul and kiss my mouth, my head, and my feet as sweetly as thou wilt."

  As tempting as it may be to think of these kinds of things as nothing more than the neurotic projections of erotically deprived virgins, this would be both inaccurate and unfair. A more accurate way to think about it is in terms of the overall dynamic that made sexuality an important aspect of Christian spirituality in the first place: the relationship between heaven and earth. If controlling one's bodily sexuality could help to engage the spiritual self and transform it into a zone of joyous communion with God, it only makes sense that communion with God might engage the earthly body, too, transforming the experience of the physical and even the erotic into something quite transcendent.

  This is certainly the impression one gets from the writings of Hildegard of Bingen. As abbess, she sometimes dressed her well-born nuns in beautiful crowns and elegant silk veils, put golden rings on their fingers, and permitted them to sing in church with their hair unbound because of her belief that the requirements of modesty "do not apply to the virgin, for she stands forth beautiful in the simplicity and integrity of paradise." For Hildegard, there could be no shame for a nun in being beautifully female, because virginity transformed flawed femaleness into embodied spiritual perfection.

  To the medieval mind, virginity was by no means just a state of not having had sex. It was a state of mind, a form of spiritual practice, a key with which to gain access to the divine and its mysteries, and an assurance of sanctity. Additionally, it was a means of transcending rigid gender roles and a scaffolding that allowed women to ascend to heights of intellect and earthly power that they were otherwise rarely permitted to contemplate. Virginity permitted some abbesses to enjoy power and wealth on a level with bishops and kings.

  In some cases virgins simultaneously held enormous ecclesiastical and secular power. Tenth-century abbess Mathilda of Quedlinburg, daughter of Saxon empe
ror Henry I, not only wielded bishop-level power in nonsacramental matters, but acted for a time as empress regent. Other abbesses, like those of Shaftesbury, Barking, and Nunnaminster in England, controlled sufficient territory that they were summoned to serve in parliaments. Only queens regularly exercised similar levels of power, and for them to do so usually required extenuating circumstances that removed their husbands or fathers from the picture. To be sure, abbesses were almost always of aristocratic stock, but where their married sisters only rarely had the chance to take the reins of power, virgins might well become old hands in the saddle.

  Sex and the Sacred Virgin

  Women entered convents to escape from the demands of the world, only to discover that the world followed them in, willy-nilly. The most personal, and in some ways the most insidious, of the ways that the world entered the convent was through sex.

  Consecrated virgins have always had to defend their right to their own sexual decisions. If a family had pinned its hopes on good marriages for its daughters, having a daughter devote herself to virginity could seem disastrous. Family resistance could be substantial. Some vowed virgins, like Christina of Markyate, had to contend with their families actually instructing men to seduce or rape them (she escaped), or were forced into unwanted marriages (she convinced her husband to accept a celibate marriage).