Women religious virtuosae from the middle ages: a case pattern and analytic model of types

Sociology of Religion, Spring, 2002 by Barbara R. Walters

Most important to the analysis of women virtuosae was Papal recognition of new monastic orders with the result of organizational and theological pluralism within the unum Corpus Christi. Here Bynum (1991) takes on Weber (1978) -- especially his assumption that medieval heresies attracted women in disproportionate numbers by enabling greater religious equality. Bynum (1991), Grundmann (1955) and others have noted that as a consequence of wars and primogeniture, unmarried women were overrepresented in the population and therefore overrepresented in both orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Scholars continue to debate actual numbers, but most concur that women made their most significant contributions to orthodoxy, and especially the new flowering mysticism of the late thirteenth century (cf. McGinn 1998).

A focus on women as oppressed or as outsiders obscures the extent to which women -- particularly in the late Middle Ages -- were the actual creators of some of the distinctive features of mainstream Christian piety.... Herbert Grundman in the thirties... pointed out that, if women were overrepresented in heterodox movements, they were overrepresented in orthodox ones as well, and that the women (like the men) often came from the privileged classes ... the most creative and thoughtful scholarship on women in religion is based more on Grundmann's sense that women's piety was at the center of late medieval developments than on Weber's... sense of women as outsiders or disprivileged. (Bynum 1991:57).

PLURALISM WITHIN THE ECCLESIA

In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council took a decisive stand against heresy and the proliferation of associations, orders, and congregations. It became unlawful to create new orders or, more accurately, to invent new forms of association. Persons wishing to embrace the apostolic life as monks had to do so under one of the approved rules and new houses had to be incorporated by charter with one of the existing orders (Grundmann 1955). Moreover, there were only two sets of approved rules, the Rule of Saint Augustine and the Rule of Saint Benedict.

The Rule of Saint Benedict originated with writings of Saint Benedict of Nursia in sixth-century Italy during the disintegration of the Roman Empire (Fry 1982). Saint Benedict established a monastery southeast of Rome at Monte Cassino where he reformed monasticism and wrote a set of rules for common life. The rules require a withdrawal from secular attachments, complete obedience to an elected abbot, and poverty. The principal engagement of the monk consists of opus dei, or the work of God, meaning reading, prayer and contemplation. The Rule mandates a strict regime and a daily round of liturgy in the form of Office Hours. The Office Hours organize daily readings and prayer at specified hours: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Sext, None, Terce, Vespers, and Compline. The Cluniacs or "black monks," whom Weber (1978:1172-73) regarded as "the first professionals," restored the Rule of Saint Benedict in the tenth century. The reforming Cistercians or "white monks" embraced the Rule of Saint Benedict in the eleventh century and added manual labor to the regular daily requirements.