Siblings and the sexes within the medieval religious life

Church History, March, 2008 by Fiona J. Griffiths

The example of St. Benedict of Nursia is a case in point. Associated with a sister, Scholastica, from the late sixth century, Benedict nonetheless provides an ambiguous example of a brother-sister relationship. The evidence for Scholastica's life is thin--she appears only in Gregory the Great's Life of Benedict, and then only in two of its chapters. Nevertheless, her presence in the Life launched Scholastica to sainthood and provided the basis for the belief, current by the ninth century, that she and Benedict had been twins. (40)

According to Gregory's short account, Scholastica had been given to the religious life as a child, yet she maintained contact with her famous brother, visiting him once a year at a house not far from Monte Cassino. On the particular occasion that Gregory records, Scholastica and Benedict had spent the day together in worship when dusk began to fall. Realizing that her brother would soon leave her, Scholastica begged him to stay the night and, when he refused, she began to pray, unleashing a torrential rain. When Benedict chastised her, Scholastica responded, invoking God as her advocate (and thereby implying his support for sibling intimacy): "When I appealed to you, you would not listen to me. So I turned to my God and He heard my prayer. Leave now if you can. Leave me here and go back to your monastery." Resigning himself to the delay, Benedict spent the night in a holy vigil with his sister. Three days later Scholastica died, and Benedict sent for her body, which he then put in his own tomb at Monte Cassino. As Gregory concludes, "The bodies of these two were now to share a common resting place, just as in life their souls had always been one in God." (41)

The formulaic nature of Gregory's account--the brother momentarily rejecting the sister (Pachomius) and the burial in a shared tomb (Caesarius and Leander, as well as hints of Pachomius)--raises questions concerning the story's authenticity. To be sure, medieval hagiography was a formulaic enterprise, one in which past exemplars were routinely raided for present purposes. However, the possibility that Benedict did not have a sister or, more to the point, that Scholastica (if she existed) was not his biological sister, (42) raises some important questions. First, if Benedict did not have a blood sister, and there was no historical person named Scholastica, why did Gregory see the need to invent her? (43) Second, if Scholastica did exist, as a companion, or spiritual "sister," but not a biological sister to Benedict, why did Gregory imply that she was his blood sister--and why was she later revered as his twin?

Answers to these questions point to the centrality of the sibling bond as a privileged form of engagement between men and women within the medieval religious life. The second question is straightforward enough: as we have already seen, relationships between brothers and sisters who were blood relatives were permissible within Christianity, while relationships between unrelated men and women were typically suspect. If Benedict had maintained a close friendship with a holy but unrelated woman, Gregory may have chosen to describe her as his sister in order to emphasize the closeness, and yet the blamelessness, of their bond. "Sisterhood" may be functioning here as a trope--a way for Gregory to talk about Benedict's holy relationship with one particular woman while warding off inevitable accusations of wrongdoing.