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

The Rule of Saint Benedict contrasts sharply with the Rule of Saint Augustine, which covers only a few pages and "from the eleventh century on spread like fire among the stubble" (Van Bavel 1996:5). Augustine developed this less obsequious guide to religious life in c. 397; the fundamental ideas are constituted around community, love and the human heart rather than detailed rules for prayer cycles and ascetic renunciation. The Rule emphasizes the way of interiorization such that obedience to regulations is merely a symbol of inward transformation. The early Victorine canons embraced the rule in 1113, as did the later Dominicans in 1216 and the Franciscans in 1226 when their respective orders received papal recognition. The Rule of Saint Augustine enabled these orders to move more freely among congregations and thereby fulfill teaching and preaching vocations.

The variation in Rule touches only the surface of dimensions that distinguished the organizational structure of one recognized group from another. Constable (1996:47) summarizes a remarkable treatise written in the second quarter of the twelfth century on the diversity in forms of religious life. The anonymous author of the Libellus classified monks and canons into three groups based on whether they lived far from men, like the Cistercians, or close to men, like the Victorines, or as hermits. The classification touches upon categories later analyzed by Stark (1967:281) in his commentary on the old medieval adage: "Bernard loved valleys and Benedict mountain-tops, but Francis townships." Indeed, as Stark notes, the Cistercian-Benedictine reforms occurred within feudal society on landed property. The background for the Franciscans, by contrast, was the small town, and for the Dominicans, the emerging city.

Each of the preceding orders maintained relationships with daughter houses during the thirteenth century. The empirical variation between thirteenth century orders in terms of organizational structure and in contextual setting therefore legitimizes a critique of the Weberian categories and their reformulation for the analysis of religious virtuosae. Organizational structure and context were linked to organizational mission, e.g., teaching, preaching, and prayer as well as the new hospital and caring roles taken on by women. The variants therefore suggest skeletal contours for "ideal types" in the vast array of religious beliefs and practices of thirteenth-century individuals, groups, and congregations -- Cistercians, Dominicans, and Franciscans as well as the laity, tertiaries, beguines/ begards, and other recognized orders.

THE WEBERIAN CATEGORIES: ASCETICISM, MYSTICISM, INNER-WORDLY, WORLD-REJECTING

Weber (1978) introduced two polar dichotomies well known to sociologists of religion: "asceticism" versus "mysticism" and "inner-worldly" versus "world-rejecting." The former dichotomy distinguishes activity, or systematic self-control from passivity and emotional inwardness, the latter, withdrawal from the world versus participation in the world, albeit in opposition. In the instance of asceticism "ethical behavior [is] performed in the awareness that god directs this behavior, i.e., that the actor is an instrument of god" (Weber 1978:541). Mysticism, by contrast, refers to a "subjective condition of a distinctivekind, the most notable of which is mystic illumination" (Weber 1978:544).