The Profession of Widowhood: Widows, Pastoral Care, and Medieval Models of Holiness 978-0813230191

Table of contents :
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction: Pious Widowhood in
the Middle Ages 1
Chapter 1 Creating the Widow in the Early Church 24
Chapter 2 The Widow and the Cloister: Early Medieval
Hagiography 77
Chapter 3 The Veil and the Vow: Professed Widowhood in
Canon Law and Liturgical Manuscripts 123
Chapter 4 Chaste Widows and the Penitential Ethos in
Later Medieval Hagiography 197
Chapter 5 Managing the Matron: Widowhood in Medieval
Sermon Literature 250
Chapter 6 Reading Widows: Grief, Memory, and the Parody of
Chaste Widowhood in Medieval Literature 299
Chapter 7 Like a Picture before the Eyes: Transitions to
the Early Modern World 347
Conclusion 399
Bibliography 407
Index 427

Citation preview

The Profession of

w i dow hood

The Profession of

w i dow hood W i D o W s , Pa s T o r a l C a r e & m e D i e Va l moDels oF Holiness

Katherine Clark Walter

t h e C ath o l I C u n Ive r s I t y o F a m er I Ca press wa s h I n g t o n , d . C .

Copyright © 2018 The Catholic University of America Press All rights reserved The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984. ∞ Image on page iii: Master of the Magdalen Legend, Netherlands, Portrait of Mary of Hungary, ca. 1550, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Walter, Katherine Clark, author. Title: The profession of widowhood : widows, pastoral care, and medieval models of holiness / Katherine Clark Walter. Description: Washington, D.C. : The Catholic University of America Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018018726 | ISBN 9780813230191 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Widows—Religious life—History—To 1500. | Widowhood—Europe—History—To 1500. Classification: LCC BV4528 .W35 2018 | DDC 261.8/35883—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018018726

Contents List of Illustrations  vii Acknowledgments  ix Abbreviations  xi

Introduction: Pious Widowhood in the Middle Ages  1 Chapter 1

Creating the Widow in the Early Church  24

C h a p t e r 2 The Widow and the Cloister: Early Medieval

Hagiography 77 C h a p t e r 3 The Veil and the Vow: Professed Widowhood in

Canon Law and Liturgical Manuscripts  123 C h a p t e r 4 Chaste Widows and the Penitential Ethos in

Later Medieval Hagiography  197 C h a p t e r 5 Managing the Matron: Widowhood in Medieval

Sermon Literature  250 C h a p t e r 6 Reading Widows: Grief, Memory, and the Parody of

Chaste Widowhood in Medieval Literature  299 C h a p t e r 7 Like a Picture before the Eyes: Transitions to

the Early Modern World  347

Conclusion 399 Bibliography  407 Index  427

Illustrations

165 Benediction of a widow, William’s Pontifical, Clm 10073, f. 103v



166 Consecration of an abbess, William’s Pontifical, Clm 10073, f. 83r

167 Consecration of a deaconess, William’s Pontifical, Clm 10073, f. 84v

168 Consecration of virgins, William’s Pontifical, Clm 10073, f. 85r



169 Blessing of the hair shirt, William’s Pontifical, Clm 10073, f. 229r



170 Benediction on the head of those who are fasting, illumination at the beginning of book 3 of William’s Pontifical, Clm 10073, f. 237r



173 Bestiary of Guillaume le Clerc, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Bnf Ms., fr. 14969, f. 49v



174 Bestiary of Guillaume le Clerc, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Bnf Ms., fr. 14969, f. 50r



229 Elizabeth receives the tunica, reliquary, ca. 1236–49, Elizabeth Church, Marburg, detail



230 Elizabeth receives the tunica, east choir window, ca. 1250, Elizabeth Church, Marburg, detail



366 Ivory book cover of the Simeon Codex, ca. 1100, Trier Cathedral treasury



367 Nicolo Pisano, Presentation in the Temple, ca. 1260 (panel detail), Pisa Baptistry

vii

viii Illustr ations

368 Giotto, Presentation in the Temple, 1304–6, fresco, Cappella Scrovegni (Arena Chapel), Padua

372 Guariento, Crucifixion with the Donatrix Bona Maria Bovolini, ca. 1360, Museo Civico, Bassano

373 Guariento, Crucifixion with the Donatrix Bona Maria Bovolini, ca. 1360, Museo Civico, Bassano (detail) 

376 Master of the Magdalen Legend, Netherlands, Portrait of Mary of Hungary, ca. 1550, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest



377 Attributed to Jan Cornelisz, Netherlandish, Mary (1505–1558), Queen of Hungary, Metropolitan Museum of Art



379 Bernardino Licinio, Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1525–35, Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan

381 Leandro Bassano, Portrait of a Widow at Her Devotions, ca. 1590–1600, private collection

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments This book benefited from invaluable help from many colleagues, friends, and family members over the years. At Indiana University, Leah Shopkow, David Brakke, Karma Lochrie, Arthur Field, and Dyan Elliott guided this project at its beginning. A summer stipend from the Newberry Library and fellowships from the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD) and Indiana University assured its completion as a dissertation. I am especially grateful to Konrad Vollman, Gunther Bernt, Christine Foohs, Ulrich Montag, Joachim Wild, Cynthia Hall, Lisa Bessette, and Karola Matschinske for their support while I completed manuscript research at Munich’s Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. Cynthia Hall and Jörg Hettich offered me their incomparable hospitality on many subsequent research trips to Munich. Throughout the process of transforming the dissertation into a book, my colleagues at Fort Lewis College in Colorado and The College at Brockport, State University of New York, offered constructive help in the preparation of the manuscript. Wanda Wakefield was an enthusiastic reader and indexer, while Alison Parker and Doreen Hunter offered excellent guidance and advice. Nancy Cardona provided perennial good sense and moral support. Tim Thibodeau generously answered questions of all kinds about medieval liturgy; I am especially grateful for his unparalleled insights into the work of William Durand of Mende. Grants from The College at Brockport and a Re-Invitation Grant from the DAAD permitted additional research. I owe special thanks for the patience and support of the librarians and interlibrary loan specialists at Fort Lewis and The College at Brockport. I am indebted to Catholic University of America Press editors David McGonagle and Trevor Lipscombe for guiding this book through the publication process. I am also grateful to the manuscript reviewers. Anne Needham patiently edited the entire manuscript; she untangled arcane references, caught potentially embarrassing mistakes, and improved the text through many excellent insights and thoughtful com-

ix

x Acknowledgments ments. It is a much better book for her efforts, and any errors that remain are entirely my own. Words cannot suffice to thank my sister, Susan Clark, for her patience and affection. Patrick Walter joined the book already in progress, but has been a wonderful companion through the latter steps of its journey. Finally, the friendship and mentoring of Dr. Frances Underhill (1929–2017) for nearly thirty years encouraged my love of medieval history and my interest in the role that widows played in it. Without her, this book would not exist. I dedicate it to her, magistra optima, and to my family, with deepest appreciation.

Abbreviations

Abbreviations AASS

Acta Sanctorum. Paris and Rome, 1865–.

ACW Ancient Christian Writers. Westminster, Md., 1946–. CC

Corpus Christianorum. Turnhout. 1866–.

CCCM Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaeualis. Turnhout, 1966–. CCSL Corpus Christianorum Series Latina. Turnhout, 1953–.



Cgm Codices germani monacenses, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.



Clm Codices latini monacenses, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.



CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum. Vienna, 1866–.



EETS Early English Text Society. London, 1864–.



MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Hanover, 1826–.



MGH Conc.



MGH SS



MGH Concilia. Hannover, 1893– MGH Scriptores. Hannover, 1826–1944.

MGH Script. AA MGH Scriptores, Auctores antiquissimi. Berlin, 1881–99.

MGH Script. rer. Merov. MGH Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum. Hannover, 1826–1934.

xi

xii Abbreviations

NPNF Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Church. New York, 1887–1892; Oxford, 1890–1900.



PL Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1844–1864.



PG Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1857–1912.



SC

Sources Chrétiennes. Paris, 1940–.

The Profession of

w i dow hood

Introduction

Introduction Pious Widowhood in the Middle Ages Dear wind that shakes the barley free Blow home my true love’s ship to me, fill her sails. I a-weary wait upon the shore . . . For seven years and seven days, No man has seen my woman’s ways, dear God. I a-weary cry upon the shore. ­— D onovan L e i tch, “ Wid ow wi th a S hawl ( A P ort rai t ) ”

* * * In fiction and in reality, perhaps men should think twice before making widowhood our only path to power. —G l or ia S t ein e m

Lyrics from Donovan’s song “Widow with a Shawl” (1967) may seem an odd place to begin a book about the meaning of widowhood in medieval Christendom, yet the pop singer’s lyrics illustrate brilliantly the assumptions that typify the medieval idealization of the widow: her chastity, faithfulness, and bereavement resonate with us even in modern times. The sparse lyrics provide little narrative but are nevertheless evocative. The initial reference to the song as a portrait echoes the Renaissance use of widow portraiture as a process of memorializing their husbands, but one doesn’t really need to know this background to appreciate the poignancy of the ballad. Lost love, memory, vigilance, and sexual fidelity appear naturally inscribed in the folkloric persona of the widow. Written to entertain a generation of flower children who eschewed hidebound social structures, the ballad in fact reinforced ancient so-

1

2 Introduction cial and religious sensibilities. The widow waited, pined, and mourned, and performed these tasks in chastity, solitude, and most importantly, in perpetuity. In Christian culture, these behaviors marked the grieving spouse as “a widow indeed” (vere vidua, 1 Tm 5:5). The widow who failed to display adequate grief fulfilled the stereotype of the “merry widow,” who forgot her departed spouse and abused her sexual and social freedom. Despite the seemingly benign tenor of Donovan’s lyrics, Gloria Steinem’s stinging observation about the paradox of widowhood is not misplaced: widowhood was a powerful concept in the Middle Ages, and did not always function in predictable ways.1 Stereotypes of widows “good” and “bad” performed highly-charged ideological work in pre-modern culture and have remained durable even in modern times, even though Western secular society now focuses more on a woman’s recovery from grief and possible recoupling than on the expectation that she remain forever widowed. This book explores how the idea of “true” widowhood was central to pre-modern ideas concerning marriage and of female identity more generally. Donovan’s lyric expressed the widow not only as a representation of the powerful bond created by love and marriage, but also as a symbolic figure for whom conventions of grief ordered the response when those bonds were broken by premature death. This notion of the widow as both a passive memorial to her husband and as an active “rememberer” of the dead had ancient roots. Christian authors appropriated traditions of widowhood to describe varieties of female celibacy and to define the social and gender order in early Christian communities. Donovan’s widow is not simply a symbol of grief and loss. Rather, she represents a tradition of widowhood characterized by chastity, solitude, and permanent bereavement that affirmed both the sexual mores and political agenda of the early church. The late medieval noblewoman Elizabeth de Burgh (d. 1360) provides an example of a woman who embodied the church’s ideal of chaste widowhood as a religious vocation, and she used it to her advantage for the greater part of her life. An extremely wealthy member of the English magnate class, Elizabeth was thrice married (twice against her will) and a sur1. Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (New York: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston, 1983), 328.

Introduction

3

vivor of the ravages of Edward II’s tumultuous reign in mid-fourteenthcentury England. She took a vow of chastity after her third marriage, a vow that publicly identified her permanent widowhood. Elizabeth’s personal piety and charitable bequests suggest that she recognized professed chastity in widowhood not only as a valuable strategy for avoiding remarriage and protecting her independence, but as a state with inherent dignity that afforded privileged access to religious institutions even as she remained a layperson. Her donations included such diverse patronage as facilitating the development of Franciscan institutions in England and founding a college at Cambridge.2 She visited convents and monasteries, counted Franciscan nuns and other religious among her friends, and maintained a wide circle of clerical lawyers and advisors. Elizabeth also consorted with other noble widows who had been consecrated to celibacy and pursued charitable works. Her closest friend, Mary de St. Pol, vowed chastity after the death of her husband Aymer de Valence and pursued acts of patronage similar to Elizabeth’s, including support for Franciscan institutions and ongoing associations with Franciscan clerics and nuns; the shared admiration for the piety of these men and women was a staple of these women’s friendship.3 In addition to her monastic foundations, Elizabeth gave alms and went on pilgrimages to English shrines—acts of charity and devotion that conformed to the norms of the “good” widow. Both Elizabeth’s devoted clerical circle and library suggest how Elizabeth learned the conventions of the pious widow: she employed learned clerics in her household and read French and a little Latin herself. Her library contained the typical devotional books many noblewomen owned, such as antiphonals, missals, a Bible, and a book of saints’ lives, but she also possessed more-specialized ecclesias2. Frances A. Underhill, For Her Good Estate: The Life of Elizabeth de Burgh (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 44–59. 3. Ibid., 103–7. Elizabeth owned a russet gown symbolizing her vow of perpetual chastity, which she bequeathed in her will to a house of Franciscan nuns (Minoresses). Her accounts show that she purchased two of these gowns, the second a gift for Mary, who asked in her will to be buried in the habit of the Minoresses; see Frances Underhill, “By Their Works Shall Ye Know Them,” in The Worlds of Medieval Women: Creativity, Influence, Imagination, eds. Constance Berman, Charles Connell, and Judith Rice Rothschild (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 1985), 88; see also Reginald Robinson Sharp, A Calendar of Wills Proved and Enrolled in the Court of Hustings, London, vol. 2 (London: J. C. Francis, 1889–90), 194. Elizabeth’s circle of pious widows also included Edward II’s wife, Isabella, and Joan of Bar. While Elizabeth and Mary owned Third Order costumes, neither woman completely renounced the typical noblewoman’s garb (Underhill, For Her Good Estate, 104).

4 Introduction tical instruction: two collections of decretals, a book of questions, and a book of anti-Pelagian writings.4 Such books addressed both the legal and spiritual dimensions of pious widowhood: canon law explained the church’s position on marriage and remarriage, saints’ lives suggested models of sexual continence and charity, and liturgical books provided prayers to sustain the widow and fill her time. Widows like Elizabeth and Mary occupied a social niche they had sought out and studied, and they approached the state of widowhood with an understanding of its prescribed rituals and conduct. Few widows were well-educated enough to so deliberately fashion a pious identity that would protect their freedom and reputation, but the general contours of this model were well known in medieval society through popular culture and oral tradition. This book explores the genesis and development of the image of the “good widow” and how this ideal shaped public perceptions and social realities in the Middle Ages.

Social History and the Pious Widow In the 1980s and 1990s, feminist and social historians identified widows as an avenue for exploring women’s history, because the public lives of girls and married women often remained obscured by the legal and social identities of their fathers and husbands, whereas widows were much more visible in the historical record.5 Wealthy, noble, and prominent widows have sometimes even been categorized as constituting a “third gender” in medieval society because their station in life was so different from other women’s, yet did not quite render them comparable to men in the social landscape.6 Much of the historical analysis of this type has revolved around the benefits or liabilities that widowhood created: did a woman’s status and freedom of action improve in 4. Underhill, For Her Good Estate, 81, 136, 144. The inventory of Elizabeth’s books was recorded in her will; see Nicholas H. Nicholas, Testamenta Vetusta, vol. 1 (London: Nichols and Son, 1826), 58. 5. See Judith Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Martha C. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 6. Linda E. Mitchell, Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, Marriage and Politics in England, 1225– 1350 (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 133–36; see also Jacqueline Murray, “One Flesh, Two Sexes, Three Genders?” in Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives, ed. Lisa M. Bitel and Felice Lifschitz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 35.

Introduction

5

the widowed state? From this perspective, the history of widowhood engages in an uneasy dance with historical narratives of improvement or decline in women’s status more generally. Closer studies of widows’ social and economic status, however, acknowledge that tracing a single trajectory of empowerment or disenfranchisement of widows over the course of the later Middle Ages and the early modern period is perhaps less useful than pursuing an understanding of the nature of widowed women’s experiences within many different contexts in pre-modern Europe. Wealthy widows in any era were generally better positioned to take advantage of the independence of widowhood, although legal and social customs of a region also influenced one’s choices. For example, English widows in the later Middle Ages had many more legal tools at their disposal that permitted them to hold and manage property than did Italian Florentine widows of the same period, who were constrained by legal structures and social customs that emphasized spousal control. Similarly, as labor practices evolved in early modern Europe, German widows faced increasing restrictions on their participation in artisanal labor, while Parisian guild widows retained their privileges well into the eighteenth century, until the institution of the Napoleonic Code.7 Widowhood could thus occasion advantage and liability simultaneously. Poor women consistently faced extreme economic hardship and often needed to remarry to maintain their households, whereas wealthier women enjoyed the freedom from male supervision that widowhood offered. Even when widows had control over their marital goods after a husband’s death, this situation sometimes posed more problems than it solved, because it burdened the widow with intense financial and legal responsibilities. In such cases, poor or even middle-class women, whatever their personal inclinations toward social independence or widowed chastity, might be forced to remarry in order to provide for themselves and their children.8 In the 1990s, several important anthologies drew attention to the 7. See Merry Wiesner’s study Working Women in Renaissance Germany (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986); and Janine Lanza, From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris: Gender, Economy, and Law (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 229–30. 8. See Martha Howell, The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in the Cities of the Low Countries, 1300–1550 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 24–25; also Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner, eds., Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (London: Longman, 1999), 3.

6 Introduction circumstances of widows as a social group. Louise Mirrer’s anthology of historical and literary studies, Upon My Husband’s Death, published in 1992, surveyed the perceptions and practices of widowhood across a wide geographical span. These essays collectively suggested that widows navigated the ambiguities of their state in the space between the wifely domain of the private sphere and the activities in the public sphere, whether they were paupers possessing only the “widow’s mite” (known as miserabiles personae in canon law), or operated from the more secure position of businesswoman or femme sole. Ambiguity about women who, as heads of their own households, occupied an interstitial space between the public and the private engendered male reflections on the ways respectable widowhood could coexist with negative beliefs about the nature of women. Louise Mirrer articulated how “the proverbially ‘merry’ widow competed with an image of the widow as sadly alienated from her society.”9 Mirrer suggested that the early modern period witnessed a deterioration in widows’ status, but in fact the same hallmarks of “decline”—economic restrictions and social censure—are mentioned in texts from every era of the Middle Ages.10 Throughout both the medieval and early modern periods, the widow embodied the concept of being deprived and bereft of a husband, an elastic metaphor that positioned her as an analogue to the earthly church lacking its heavenly spouse, and as a disadvantaged person in need of pastoral care. Social history research has provided a crucial background to the study of the interfaces between social and religious expressions of widowhood in the Middle Ages. Although medieval European widows were subject to great variation in the legal and customary practices concerning property and inheritance, the religious ideal of Christian widowhood remained relatively stable over time, and widows shared a common identity on the basis of their sexual and marital status. Medieval societies across time and place also recognized and articulated stereotypes of widowhood, both positive and negative, such as the model of Anna in Luke’s Gospel (1:36–38), the “merry” widow of the fabliaux and other bawdy tales, and the poor widow of the two mites. Widowhood could be inscribed with saintly qualities, but was also treated with deep 9. Louise Mirrer, ed., Upon My Husband’s Death: Widows in the Histories and Literature of Medieval Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 13. 10. Ibid., 14.

Introduction

7

suspicion. Pious widows who commanded resources independently of male supervision were prized as founders and patrons, but also became the targets of satirical critique as “false” or “merry” widows. These images functioned as normative and instructive for both widows and the Christian community at large. Transgression against the conventions of pious widowhood signaled a betrayal of the widow’s higher calling asserted in Scripture; profligate widows affirmed broader misogynistic “truths” in medieval eyes about women’s weak nature. This dichotomy is particularly striking because while many women could expect to be widows at some point in their lives, few women were able to fully identify with St. Paul’s image of the vere vidua and live under a formal profession of permanent widowhood. Michel Parisse’s anthology Veuves et veuvage dans le haut Moyen Âge, published in 1993, was the first collection of articles to assess this notion of religious widowhood as a cultural institution.11 The essays describe the widow as representative of a social category or ordo and suggest that a sustained concept of widowhood, unified by the patristic constructions that had defined the vere vidua, developed over time in various medieval contexts. Many of the volume’s contributors approached the concept of holy widowhood semantically, investigating the language of prescriptive and legal texts to assess the functions of widowhood as a social classification. As such, widowhood was similar to other medieval offices and identities that were in flux between the end of antiquity and the emergence of medieval social hierarchies. A major contributor to Parisse’s volume, Bernhard Jussen, specifically situated the widow’s status within the evolution of class structures and ordines in European society. Jussen’s argument, later advanced in his book Der Name der Witwe, asserted that that the idea of “widow” was not a gendered category until the late Middle Ages, when preachers began to use it as a specific address to women in the context of popular preaching.12 Jussen’s argument contested the assertions of French scholar Geneviève Hasenohr, who identified an “ethico-spiritual” tripartite structure (the respective thirtyfold, sixtyfold, and hundredfold fruits received by 11. Michel Parisse, ed., Veuves et veuvage dans le haut Moyen Âge (Paris: Picard, 1993). 12. Bernhard Jussen, “Der ‘Name’ der Witwe. Zur Konstruction eines Standes in Spätantike und Frühmittelalter,” in Parisse, Veuves et veuvage, 137–75; Jussen, Der Name Der Witwe: Erkundungen zur Semantik der mittelalterlichen Bußkultur (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000).

8 Introduction wives, widows, and virgins in heaven) that applied to medieval women from the era of the early church to the High Middle Ages, but that began to fade in the later medieval period. In Hasenohr’s view, the category of “widow” persisted as long as it did because it was part of a “spiritual anthropology,” inherited from patristic authors, that culminated in the pastoral writing of the thirteenth century. This category began to break down as medieval religious authors realigned traditional schematic “orders” for both men and women into new categories according to profession, class, and lay (as opposed to religious) status.13 As I argue throughout this volume, these changes did not, however, dissolve the cultural construct of the widow in popular and religious discourse; the idea of the widow’s professio remained ubiquitous in both literature and practice through the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. It is also significant that “widower” did not appear as parallel to the Christian widow, nor did the discourse on male widowhood constitute a substantial textual tradition, until the very late Middle Ages.14 The vast majority of texts on medieval widowhood do not support Jussen’s assertion that the “name of the widow” represented a genderneutral topos of pastoral care until the later Middle Ages, when it became recognized as a more feminized mode of piety in medieval penitential culture.15 In their anthology Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity, for example, Cindy Carlson and Angela Weisl argue that widowhood was decisively gendered female throughout the Middle Ages. The contributors analyzed diverse examples of literary and historical widows in light of women’s history and gender theory, arguing that the texts that inspired medieval perceptions of widowhood were based on writings to and about women, and addressed the specific problems that arose in clerical circles concerning the maintenance of female chastity. The authors approached virginity and widowhood as interrelated cate13. Genviève Hasenohr, “La vie quotidienne de la femme vue par l’Église: l’enseignement des ‘journées chretiennes’ de la fin du Moyen Âge,” in Frau und Spätmittelalterlicher Alltag, Internationaler Kongress Krems an der Donau 1984 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreicher Akademie der Wissenschaft, 1986), 25–26. 14. Cavallo and Warner argue that the widower had a distinct identity in medieval life but admit that as a phenomenon he is “invisible” in the early sources. A clearer pattern of pastoral care emerges in advice literature relating to marriage and household order in the early modern period (Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, 3.) 15. Jussen, “Der ‘Name’ der Witwe,” in Parisse, Veuves et veuvage, 139.

Introduction

9

gories that originated in the patristic era and persisted throughout the literatures of the Middle Ages. As “modes that define, confine, and invite women to re-create their identities by their own words and action,” both virginity and widowhood extended beyond the individuals comprised in those categories. Representations of virginity and widowhood contributed to the construction of women’s social identities but also freed women from the elision of the female with the carnal, allowing female celibates to “perform” their holiness in a variety of ways.16 Any analysis of the relationship between gender and the social experience of religious women in the Middle Ages is deeply indebted to Caroline Walker Bynum’s work on the somatic nature of women’s spirituality. Bynum’s works Jesus as Mother, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, and Fragmentation and Redemption narrated a rising theme of embodiment and a maternal, female sensibility in religious expression over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Women’s roles as procreators, nurturers, and nourishers inspired male spiritual reflection in monastic circles and created a space for the acceptance of women as mystics and visionaries, particularly through many holy women’s experience of visions in which they interacted directly with Christ by giving and receiving the Eucharist. Bynum’s observations shed light on how paradigms of sanctity shifted in the later Middle Ages to accommodate female saints as role models and to express feminized and humanized interpretations of Jesus in medieval religious practice, a process that admitted widows and even married women into the ranks of mystic-saints. Dyan Elliott’s work on consecrated virginity has demonstrated the darker aspects of this somatic spirituality for women who were considered to be “brides of Christ.” An increasing focus on the embodiment of spiritual ideals created opportunities for women’s piety in monastic and secular life, but also exposed women of the later Middle Ages ever more deeply to misogynistic suspicion about their limited ability to manage a spiritual vocation.17 As the “profession of widowhood” found more concrete and practical expression in lay life in the later Middle Ages, new forms of female 16. Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl, Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 5. 17. See Dyan Elliott, The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women 200–1500 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

10 Introduction spirituality became entwined with the more ancient discourse of widowhood established in early Christianity. Widows’ sanctity was often expressed as domestic and material, particularly concerned with the distribution of food and household goods as indicators of their holiness. The widow’s physical body, however, was rarely presented in the deeply spiritualized fashion that Bynum suggests characterized virginal female saints. The widow’s body was more typically conceptualized instead as a site of social contest. As the widow, unlike the virgin, had already experienced sexual pleasure in marriage, she was perpetually in danger of renouncing chastity for carnality. This mistrust of the widow’s vocation focused the discourse of chaste widowhood overwhelmingly on the disciplining of the widow’s behavior rather than on the spiritualizing of her body. Even in the lives of female widowed saints who experienced dramatic, physical miracles (such as mystical marriages with Christ and spiritual pregnancies), male historiographers more often characterized widowed saints’ spirituality through the widows’ outward conduct and chaste intentions rather than through mystical events relating primarily to their bodies. This is a fine distinction, but an important one, in light of medieval society’s persistent doubt of the widow’s chastity. Feminist historians have suggested that widowhood itself requires attention as an analytical category of female experience, at least within patriarchal societies, because widowhood as a category permits the broad historical analysis of themes such as the supervision of women, the preservation of spousal memory, and the public functions of mourning that can be compared across diverse eras and regions.18 Into the early modern and even modern periods, both positive and negative perceptions about the widow were intimately linked to social constructions of masculinity and femininity. Such a continuity complicates traditional narratives, which explain Europe’s transition to the modern by delineating sharp divisions between “medieval” and “modern” religious attitudes and gender roles. The vere vidua’s chastity, spirituality, nurturing of children and community, memorializing of the dead, and, most importantly, her sexual fidelity to the deceased spouse had 18. See Helen Watanabe-O’Kelley, “Sad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Representation of the Widow in Literature and Art,” Keynote Address, GENCAS (Gender in Culture and Society) Conference: “The Merry Widow: Rethinking Widowhood in History, Culture, and Society,” Swansea University, Wales, July 2007.

Introduction

11

their origins in medieval Christianity, but images of widows—whether as faithful mourners or dangerous temptresses—preoccupied European thinkers from Augustine to Freud.19 Sources relating to the clerical pastoral care of widowed women invite complex considerations of gender relationships, lay-clerical interactions, and the power of prescriptive models over individuals in medieval society. The church did not always speak with one voice about women, and it preached a model of chaste widowhood only to find that model at times difficult to manage. Ecclesiastical sources piously assumed that widows would want to remain chaste, whereas secular sources assumed the opposite: whether by choice or coercion, many widows would remarry. However, it was not a simple dichotomy between piety and worldliness, as Sandra Cavallo and Linda Warner note: “religious and charitable establishments presented widows with a respectable route to escape family pressure to remarry and to overcome the ambiguities created by their unbound marital status.”20 Theological constructions of female chastity and power in widowhood created social practice as they intersected with laypeople’s perceptions of gender, sexuality, and marriage.

The “Profession” of Widowhood From late antiquity through the Middle Ages, Christian clerics created a model of pious widowhood based on chastity and good works. While some clerics clearly viewed widows as inherently in need of male control and supervision, they also recognized that widows amplified the virtues of chastity and obedience for a broader Christian audience. The formation and development of the ideal of the Christian widow was a significant component of the relationships between women and men in the early church. The widow (vidua) was a feminine persona in linguistic and symbolic terms, but widowhood was also recognized as a status specifically shaped by women’s roles and experiences. As generations of clerics revised the concept of widowhood as a social space for wom19. Ibid. Watanabe-O’Kelley asserts that the idea of the “merry” or duplicitous widow emerged with renewed frequency in art, literature, and film in Germany following female emancipation in the late nineteenth century, and notes that the Old Testament widow Judith figured prominently as a sexually provocative and male-castrating figure in the writings of Freud and his followers. 20. Cavallo and Warner, Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, 21.

12 Introduction en, its representation as both an ideal and as a social status provided Christian women the opportunity to perform chaste widowhood to the degree that their worldly constraints permitted. From its origins in late antiquity, this concept of widowhood was a category of female experience that was invested with profound meaning in Christian culture. The development of this ideal and its reception across the Middle Ages thus provides insight into both medieval family history and the history of women’s participation in religious life. The church’s “education” of widows redirected their piety, service, and material resources toward ecclesiastical institutions. At times clerics’ pastoral care of such widows demonstrated the potential for spiritual partnerships between men and women, but it was more strongly characterized by the language of male authority: the supervision of the widow represented the containment and regulation of female sexuality more generally. As a result, clerical prescriptions for ideal widowhood were inherently contradictory: they combined high expectations for the chaste widow’s religious devotion on the one hand, and misogynistic assumptions concerning women’s nature and doubt that women could fulfill such a vocation on the other. Pastoral care in widowhood thus encompassed a network of historical problems concerning ideological control over women and manipulation of their resources. Religious writing on widowhood drew heavily from examples of biblical women and focused on turning women’s attention away from worldly affairs toward spiritual ones. The discourse of widowhood thus tended to be abstract, idealistic, and prescriptive. Yet such examples permitted clerics to imagine how widows in their communities embodied concepts such as chastity, loss, deprivation, and need. The written traditions concerning widowhood were the products of clerical imagination, but, because widowhood was a condition that commonly affected families and daily life, its interpretation was never a pure abstraction. Social histories of widowhood in late antiquity and the Middle Ages abundantly demonstrate that many widows were in fact so absorbed by worldly cares such as negotiation of remarriage, childrearing, and domestic management that the contemplative life of a celibate remained, by necessity, an ideal. Yet it was an ideal that exercised force in social life and popular imagination. Real-life widows’ social identity

Introduction

13

became interwoven with the idealization of chaste widowhood as clerics’ pastoral care of women engaged themes such as the widow’s public identity, the management of her sexuality, and the balance between her secular and spiritual concerns. In Christian culture, the dynamics of late antique clerics’ epistolary friendships with widowed female patrons established a pattern for the medieval understanding of widowhood. Augustine and Jerome wrote about widows because devout Christian women requested instruction about the state of widowhood and its implications for their spirituality. Early medieval monastic writers in turn used these texts, albeit with a certain ambivalence toward women outside the traditional monastery, to illustrate how formerly worldly widows could adjust to the role of nun. In the twelfth century, a new interest in women’s roles in courtly love and sacramental marriage, and in their pastoral care in marriage and widowhood, also shaped the history of the treatment of widows. Even with the rise of the Protestant Reformation and its rejection of lay chastity as a superior way of life, the religious implications of widowhood captured clerics’ attention as part of the appropriate role for women as the head of a pious household. The persona of the widow thus resonated throughout medieval life as a site of physical and social negotiations. Clerics identified widowhood as a “profession” (professio viduitatis), and consecration to permanent celibacy in widowhood was the decisive step that marked a woman’s choice to renounce married life forever and assume a quasi-clerical identity as a confirmed celibate. The anthropological concept of “liminality” (expressed first by Arnold van Gennep and later by Victor Turner) deftly captures the way thinkers of late antiquity and the Middle Ages envisioned this process: widowhood was a liminal state that constituted “a moment of suspension of normal rules and roles, a crossing of boundaries and violating of norms, that enables us to understand those norms, even (or perhaps especially) where they conflict, and move on either to incorporate or reject them.”21 The notion of liminality expresses the medieval Christian sensibility that the widow stood at a crossroads be21. Carolyn Walker Bynum, “Women’s Stories, Women’s Symbols: A Critique of Victor Turner’s Theory of Liminality,” chap. 1 in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion” (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 30.

14 Introduction tween sacred and secular values. The death of a spouse brought a woman to a limus where she elected either to remarry or to remain in permanent chastity after the death of a spouse. Electing perpetual widowhood initiated a transition to a new phase of life that was characterized by both structuring rituals such as mourning, and destabilizing problems such as family pressure to remarry, concerns about inheritance, and the supervision of children. Christian discourse on widowhood evolved as a complement to, and sometimes in competition with, secular traditions of mourning and remembrance. Christian authors positioned the widow’s “liminal” body as a contested space between chastity and worldliness, men and women, and clergy and laypeople. In secular life, widowhood was also a state in which many different interests competed. The concerns of natal versus marital kin pulled the widow in opposite directions. Husbands at times used wills and testaments to coerce their wives from beyond the grave to remain in a permanent state of widowed chastity that honored the deceased husband’s memory and his children’s patrimony, whereas women’s natal families often encouraged widowed daughters to remarry. Clerical and secular ideas of widowhood constituted parallel systems of honor and memory in medieval society. Early Christian theologians developed prescriptions for widows that urged them to remain permanently vowed to widowed chastity as exemplars of Christian virtue, whereas families perceived the value of widowed chastity for a different purpose, as a perpetual memorial in honor of the deceased husband. While families at times opposed a woman’s consecration because they preferred her to remarry, these two different but sometimes overlapping perceptions of the widow’s duties could be well reconciled: the widow remained a perpetual bride to her husband, but she was also a spouse of Christ. Themes of memory and spiritual bereavement resonate across the many documents that describe the widow’s role, from sacred liturgies that emphasized the widow as living in perennial grief for her heavenly spouse to vernacular literatures that expressed husbands’ fears that they would remain in Purgatory, forgotten by fickle wives. Whether as a perpetual memorial to her husband or a newly consecrated spouse of Christ, the widow engendered anxiety in clerics and husbands alike about her ability to maintain the dignity of her state.

Introduction

15

The notion of religious versus secular ideals of widowhood in some ways parallel Georges Duby’s competing models of ecclesiastical and customary marriage, expressed in his 1978 essay “Medieval Marriage: Two Models from Twelfth-Century France.” Duby outlined the rise of an ecclesiastical model of marriage in which elite clergy gradually imposed both canon law and a sacramental sensibility as normative among lay aristocrats, who had previously viewed marriage as a private contract designed to manage patrimony and guarantee heirs. In contrast to Duby’s oppositional categories of lay and ecclesiastical marriage, however, the religious and secular concepts of ideal widowhood, though focused on different types of female honor, were often mutually reinforcing. A good widow could both worship Christ and commemorate her dead husband. When a woman did come into conflict with her secular kin over remarriage, however, the profession of widowhood allied women with clerical supporters to facilitate a modus vivendi that provided them with a welcome respite from secular problems. Despite the supervisory tone of much of medieval pastoral care and the negative images of women the church often projected, the professed widow sometimes found respect, security, and even praise under the cloak of piety that chaste widowhood offered. This process did not reconstruct the chaste widow as a “third gender,” but rather established her as very much gendered female. This is not to say that gender identity and expression in the Middle Ages was inherently limited to a “natural” or organic binary system of male and female; rather, that medieval authorities depended heavily on binary constructions of gender to express and enforce social norms, and that, in this environment, the ideal of chaste widowhood developed overwhelmingly in relation to the experiences of women and their pastoral care, and was indebted to other institutions (marriage, religious celibacy, motherhood) that also relied on and reinforced binary perceptions of gender. As foundress, intercessor, and, especially with the rise of the penitential ethos in the late twelfth century, caretaker with her own hands (suis manibus), a woman “who was truly a widow” committed herself to a life of spiritual bereavement and served God and society through uniquely female roles. The “reintegration” that Turner posed in his theory of liminality, however, remained unstable and incomplete even when a vow of chas-

16 Introduction tity established the widow in her new “profession.” Doubts about women’s capacity for chastity generated persistent anxiety on this subject in medieval texts. The widow’s body and soul were characterized as dangerous territory; her chastity represented a clerical contest for control over the bodies of both women and laypeople more generally. Chaste widowhood reinforced a model of female obedience, but it also implied the circumscription of the male sexuality that would invade the widow’s chastity. Despite the monitory tone of much of their writing, church fathers wrote treatises on widowhood not exclusively to browbeat women into celibacy; treatises on widowhood also encouraged widows to engage as fully as possible in ecclesiastical life as patrons, teachers, and contemplatives. Early Christian authors praised the sanctity and independence of the widowed state as well as warning sternly against dangers that inhered within it, striking a balance between direction and collaboration with their female correspondents. Not surprisingly, this dual sense of opportunity and danger in the “profession” of widowhood persisted in medieval interpretations of patristic texts. Treatises advising widows and hagiography celebrating widowed chastity reiterated general stereotypes of “good” and “bad” widows and made few practical references to local laws and customs concerning the rights and social position of widows. Rather, medieval authors focused on the teachings of the Latin fathers to demonstrate a timeless and universal model of widowed piety that rewarded women with honor on Earth and glory in heaven. Despite the texts’ origins as letters to autonomous, secular women, medieval authors used patristic writings to discourage widows from remaining in a secular environment, especially in the hagiographies of early medieval saints. Not until the age of the Beguines and mendicant tertiary orders would some medieval clerics envision an independent role for widows in the world, although this view did not go entirely unchallenged, as the ongoing argument within the church in the high and later Middle Ages for strict, active enclosure of religious women suggests. Although the formal adoption of the widow’s profession might not have been an especially common practice among medieval women, clerics nevertheless found it useful for articulating appropriate female behavior and eagerly elevated examples of widowed saints and other

Introduction

17

prominent matrons22 as models of female chastity and service for the Christian community at large. While women’s actual feelings, desires, and interests often remained obscure in medieval texts, occluded by the agendas of clerical authors, individual widows sometimes marshaled clerical ideals to define their own widowhoods. Theological prescriptions and social practice thus functioned dynamically to create social expectations for widowed women that were difficult to uphold, but also presented widows with options for creating an independent identity through the profession of chastity and the embodiment of the qualities of the vere vidua. Despite the practical difficulties that chaste widowhood posed for most women, the church was successful in perpetuating an ideal of the widow’s profession that endured throughout the Middle Ages. Widows’ pastoral care thus provides an opportunity to reflect on both gender cooperation and gender conflict. Sometimes widows found allies within their families and among the clergy: couples might arrange their affairs to protect the family against the exigencies that arose through the untimely death of the head of the household, arranging the best possible legal situation for the widow thereafter. Compassionate husbands like the Goodman of Paris used the model of the pious widow to prepare his young wife both for independent leadership within the household and for married life with a new husband after his death.23 Preachers such as Jacques of Vitry and Hugh of Floreffe championed consecrated widows’ spirituality and their useful functions in pastoral care. More often, however, the medieval widow found herself at the center of conflicts between natal and marital family interests, between the memory of the dead spouse and the interests of a new suitor, and 22. Just as the practices that articulated the “profession” of widowhood varied by time and place, so too did the designations used for widowed women. Medieval authors referred to widows using several terms, including vidua (widow), matrona (matron), and relicta (relict, a woman “left behind” by her spouse’s death). These terms conferred a degree of respect in context, whereas the more general term femina (woman) was more general and was more often used to illustrate a negative example of female behavior. 23. See Cavallo and Warner, Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, 12–15; Barbara Hanawalt, “The Widow’s Mite: Provisions for Medieval London Widows,” in Mirrer, Upon My Husband’s Death, 23–25; Mavis Mate, Daughters, Wives, and Widows after the Black Death: Women in Sussex, 1350–1535 (Woodbridge and Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 1999); and Howell, The Marriage Exchange, 206–11. On the Goodman’s advice for his young wife, see Edna Eileen Power, The Goodman of Paris: A Treatise on Moral and Domestic Economy by a Citizen of Paris c. 1393 (London: Routledge, 1928).

18 Introduction between secular and sacred impulses. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, popular reform movements—such as the Beguines and mendicant tertiary orders that had often allowed men and women to work together for a common spiritual purpose—were themselves targets of social criticism, and the widowed “profession” came under attack in a revived way. These attacks were not only a statement about the weaknesses attending women’s unsupervised endeavors but also a manifestation of anticlericalism. In the works of Giovanni Boccaccio, Desiderius Erasmus, and Juan Luis Vives, the profession of widowhood became one of many targets for satirizing clerical institutions and leadership in later medieval religious life. The first part of this book is concerned with the language and traditions that characterized the vere vidua. Chapter 1, “Creating the Widow in the Early Church,” examines early ecclesiastical reflections on chaste widowhood and its pastoral care through the relationships between church fathers such as Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine and their widowed friends and patrons. The church fathers described the rewards of chaste and prayerful widowhood—prophetic insight and spiritual advancement—and emphasized the desirable independence for matrons who avoided remarriage. Their letters to female patrons interpreted biblical references to widowhood from the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul. While widows were mentioned in earlier works (sometimes extensively, such as in the writings of Tertullian), fourth-century theologians added substantially to the scriptural traditions by characterizing widowhood within the tripartite hierarchy of wives, widows, and virgins and by assigning the heavenly reward appropriate to each state: receipt of the thirty-, sixty-, or one-hundredfold “fruit.” This schema conceptualized wifedom and widowhood as progressive stages through which a woman moved closer to the ideal state of virginal chastity, even if she could not regain the physical intactness that characterized a virgin. In addition to the spiritual rewards of chastity that widowhood afforded, the fathers also recognized the nurturing and serving roles that widows performed as mentors to virgins and as the Christian community’s general caretakers. Despite these innovative and autonomous vocations for widows in the early church, however, it was the widow’s association with the biblical figures Anna and Judith, combined with Jerome’s

Introduction

19

mathematical formula for determining female virtue, that were the ubiquitous signifiers of “good” widowhood in medieval thought. “True” widows, then, were chaste, obedient women who nurtured and served the church community as financial patrons and as spiritual mentors. Chaste widows were also living representations of the widowed church on earth; they were both literal and figurative caretakers of the Christian ecclesia. This chapter traces the discursive tradition that “created” this concept of widowhood through the directives of the fourth century’s most significant spiritual teachers and the social practices that became associated with widows in the early church. Chapter 2, “The Widow and the Cloister,” demonstrates the application of the patristic model of widowhood in monastic writings of the early Middle Ages. The association of the true widow with the “sixtyfold fruit” both served as a means of identifying widowed saints and created a language for interpreting the spirituality of matrons within textual traditions that generally privileged virginity as the preferred female path to holiness. Monastic authors adopted the notion of the chaste widow and used it to construct biographies of important female patrons, often using the widow-saint as a category to explicate the sanctity of significant donors who had been married but nonetheless had played an important role in the institution’s history as matrons and widows. Hagiographies of widowed saints identified the loss of one’s husband as an event that permitted a woman to transcend the carnal state of marriage and prepare for monastic life. Ottonian hagiographers, moreover, introduced new elements to the widow’s duties in the eleventh century: preserving public memory of her spouse and his lineage, and intercessory prayers for the dead. Chapter 3, “The Veil and the Vow,” investigates the spaces beyond convents where matrons elected to live as chaste widows and the rituals that confirmed this lifestyle. Ceremonies consecrating widows to chastity appeared in liturgical books dating from the eighth century and continued to be copied and refined throughout the Middle Ages. These ceremonies made the designation of “professed” or “consecrated” widow available to any woman who desired it in consultation with her local bishop and priests. Rooted in the memory of the ancient tradition of deaconesses as well as the nun’s vow, the widow’s chaste profession

20 Introduction identified the consecrated widow with the perpetual mourning of the Christian Ecclesia for her spouse and with Anna’s prophetic recognition of Christ through her devotions in the temple. From the tenth to the twelfth centuries, both monks and secular clerics reiterated the dangers a chaste matron faced if she lived outside of a structured community. However, canon law, narrative sources, and liturgies initiating the “profession” of widowhood suggested that a visible cadre of women engaged in just such a program of chaste widowhood in the world, a program characterized by prayer, distinctive clothing, prophetic utterings, and a particular intercession for the deceased spouse in Purgatory. Ceremonies establishing the professio viduitatis saw a renewed proliferation in the manuscript tradition during the reforms of the twelfth century, especially associated with the libraries of Augustinian and cathedral canons. As Alison Beach and Fiona Griffiths have argued, twelfth-century reformers, particularly in the German-speaking realm, encouraged male pastoral care of nuns and canonesses as an essential element of the reforming enterprise.24 The revived production of liturgies consecrating widows to chastity in the twelfth century suggests that the pastoral care of widows was also the obligation of local clergy. Such associations bespoke a renewed interest in—or perhaps a reiterated obligation to—the pastoral care of women that included a concern among men and women in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to create appropriate spaces for widowed piety. The second half of the book is concerned with the ways that medieval clerics communicated the ideal of chaste widowhood to the laity, and how this message developed over the course of the high and later Middle Ages. Chapter 4, “Chaste Widows and the Penitential Ethos in Later Medieval Hagiography,” and chapter 5, “Managing the Matron,” focus on the interactions between the hagiographies of widowed saints and popular preaching. The zeal of the reforming and mendicant orders in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries engendered lay movements that spiritualized and monasticized popular religious expression. In the thirteenth century, the rise of lay orders for women, such as the Beguines and Franciscan Third Order (societies for dedicated laypeople of 24. Alison Beach, Women as Scribes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 29; Fiona Griffiths, The Garden of Delights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).

Introduction

21

both genders), created a new niche for pious widows. In this context, the profession of widowhood marshaled a long-standing system of images and associations that allowed a widow to transform even a secular household into a sacred space if she undertook a formal vow. The widow’s piety bore witness to the suffering and eventual resurrection of Christ. It also invoked for husbands the comforting image of a wife who never forsook her spouse for a second marriage and who protected her honor—and his—through a religious vocation. The mendicant orders were especially influential in preaching ideals of pious widowhood. The vowed chastity, penitence, and worldly service of widowed saints aligned closely with the mendicant ethos; preachers such as Jacobus of Voragine and Berthold of Regensburg popularized the lives of women such as St. Elizabeth of Thüringia as expressions of this sensibility and instructive examples for real-life widows of the Franciscan Third Order, who often undertook charitable works and vows of chastity as affiliates of this order while living in the world. Within mendicant circles and other popular spiritual movements such as the Beguines, the already-established image of the secular chaste widow developed greater relevance to contemporary society and won the approval of some branches of the clergy, as preachers sympathetic to the mendicant ethos praised independent communities of Beguines and Franciscan tertiaries for their exemplary piety. Even as the traditional model of the secular-dwelling chaste widow developed new relevance for contemporary women, however, this popular phenomenon intensified the anxiety clerics expressed about independent widows. Pastoral texts that praised “good” widowhood simultaneously emphasized the dangers to pious matrons living unsupervised in secular life, and often portrayed them as prone to failure unless their virtue was preserved through both male protection and divine intervention. Sermons increasingly represented a dualistic view of the widow, the vere vidua and her transgressive, false, and sometimes even diabolical sister, who appeared to embody the sanctified status of the widowed profession only to violate its precepts and pursue vain and lustful pleasures. As a counterbalance to this negative view of widowhood, St. Elizabeth emerged as a universally beloved and uncontroversial figure who offered an idealized model for women in all states of life.

22 Introduction Chapter 6, “Reading Widows: Grief, Memory, and the Parody of Chaste Widowhood in Medieval Literature,” examines responses to ecclesiastical images of widowed piety in medieval popular culture and explores the double vision of the good versus diabolical widow that emerged from the intensified efforts at secular pastoral care in the later Middle Ages. Satiric disbelief in the institution of chaste widowhood and the deliberate engagement of pastoral images as social entertainment suggested a view in medieval society that widows’ religiosity was a mere cloak of piety rather than a genuine vocation. Satirists manipulated clerics’ anxieties about the chaste widow in the world through her alter ego, the lusty or “merry” widow who was enabled to engage in sinful acts precisely by credulous popular acceptance of her pious “profession.” Conventions of professed widowhood created opportunities for vernacular authors to criticize the clergy as the widows’ supervisors, as well as to discredit the “profession” itself. Such representations also suggest a social envy of medieval matrons’ position in accepting or rejecting offers of marriage. Countering such cynical claims, Christine di Pisan offered the rare expression of women’s own experiences of religious widowhood. In contrast to the male voices that dominate this study, Christine responded to the burdens of widowhood and to the attacks on widowed chastity and articulated a consciousness of the temporal challenges and spiritual rewards of widowhood. She introduced the novel interpretation that chaste widowhood invited not only consolation from others, but also provided the consolation of one’s own solitary writing and study, as she discovered through her own experience. Chapter 7, “Like a Picture before the Eyes,” focuses on the legacy of the medieval widow for Renaissance and Reformation Europe. Despite dramatic changes in education, visual culture, and religious belief, the discursive function of the widow and her importance in representing female chastity, virtue, and memory remained fixtures in European thought. Authors continued to imitate patristic models by composing treatises on chaste widowhood dedicated to famous noble widows, reiterating ancient messages to widows in new humanistic genres such as letters of consolation. Erasmus’s On The Christian Widow and Juan Luis Vives’s On the Instruction of the Christian Woman perpetuated the tradition of advice treatises to widows, in part because these authors were

Introduction

23

deeply familiar with Augustine and Jerome’s writings to women and wished to imitate these genres, but also because such treatises permitted humanist authors to demonstrate their Latinity and erudition and to advance their careers among noble patrons. For Catholics and Protestants alike, the widow functioned as an expression of female morality, though in the process of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, she lost the spiritual qualities—the powers of prophecy and intercession— that medieval authors had routinely attributed to pious widows. Catholic hagiography of the Counter-Reformation retooled its definitions of female sanctity to privilege virginal saints over holy matrons in formal processes of canonization, but both Catholics and Protestants writing on widowhood displayed a renewed interest the widow’s domestic concerns—the holy household—as an expression of good social order. Throughout this study, we will see that often widowhood itself was not as interesting to the clerical authors who shaped it as its instrumentality in the assertion of church authority on matters such as remarriage, the indissolubility of solemn vows, and even heresy. Despite the marginal social position of many real-life widowed women, clerics gained enormously from a collective cadre of widows whose money and good works flowed toward the church in widowhood rather than away from it toward a dowry and married life.

Creating the Widow in the Early Church

Chapter 1

Creating the Widow in the Early Church Widows and their status in the church posed both theoretical and practical problems for early Christian theologians, who recognized celibate matrons as a distinct group in the ecclesiastical community, but not within the official ranks of the clergy.1 A recognized “order” of chaste widows emerged within the first centuries of Christianity, as church fathers compared widows to virgins, contemplated ways to manage widows’ conduct, and debated the value of marriage in relationship to widowed celibacy as part of a broader discourse concerning chastity and women’s roles in society. This discourse was rather fluid in the early development of Christianity, and varied by location: pious widows were granted financial support and clerical status in the earliest churches and in Eastern liturgical practices. By the late fourth century, the Western theologians Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine articulated the version of Christian widowhood that prevailed in the Middle Ages: the chaste widow was a special kind of layperson who built a life on a vow of permanent celibacy and imitation of biblical women and other holy figures. They situated the widow’s identity not as a counterpart to clerical males, but in comparison to other lay women who lived in various states of carnality or abstinence. This chapter provides a brief introduction to the history of widowhood in the early Christian church and an analysis of how and why the special social niche of pious widowhood developed in the Christian West and remained the consistent interpretation of widowhood throughout the Middle Ages.

1. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 148.

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Creating the Widow in the Early Church

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Widowhood in the Pauline Epistles The letters of Paul formed the basis for all of the later theological reflections on widowhood. Paul outlined the merits of widowhood compared to virginity, the necessity for a sustained dedication to continence as the mark of the vere vidua (“she who is truly a widow”), and the importance of widows’ flawless morality, both in fact and in appearance, so that she might never damage her reputation and, by extension, the image of the church. Paul’s injunction to the married and widows to remain celibate by way of “concession” rather than “command” initiated a persistent discussion about the voluntary but superior nature of chastity; as women who had lost their virginal status but had an opportunity to regain a celibate life in widowhood, widows were central to the extensive considerations of this problem that dominated the clerical discourse concerning women. Paul’s ambiguity toward marriage and remarriage set the pattern for the entire early Christian discussion of widowhood. In his letter to the Romans (7:2–3), Paul declared that a woman was bound to her husband while he lived, but was released from that bond upon his death and could legitimately marry another. Yet he asserted, “to the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion” (1 Cor 7: 8–9).2 Just as Paul preferred celibacy to marriage, he preferred permanent widowhood to remarriage. He inveighed against marriage generally because the partners were distracted by conjugal responsibilities from spiritual ones, and because marriage was a temporal commitment whereas the present world was drawing to a close, and Christians should be concerned with their spiritual life to come (1 Cor 7:32–35).3 Paul’s final judgement remained, however, that people should remain in the state they were in 2. “Dico autem non nuptis et viduis bonum est illis si sic maneant sicut et ego. quod si non se continent, nubant, melius est enim nubere quam uri.” Hereafter, all citations of Scripture are from The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocryphal/Deutocanonical Books, ed Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy, New Revised Standard Version (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), or from the Weber and Gryson edition of the Vulgate—Bibla Sacra iuxta Vulgata versionem, ed. B. Fischer, I. Gribomont, H. F. D. Sparks, W. Thiele; Robertus Weber; H. I. Friede, Roger Gryson (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994), unless otherwise indicated. 3. E. P. Saunders, Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 107.

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Creating the Widow in the Early Church

(1 Cor 7:24).4 Although he advised chastity as the most appropriate state for Christians, he did not insist on continence within marriage, nor did he forbid remarriage: I say this for your own benefit, not to lay any restraint upon you, but to promote good order and to secure your undivided devotion to the Lord. If any one thinks that he is not behaving properly toward his betrothed, if his passions are strong, and it has to be, let him do as he wishes: let them marry, it is no sin. But whoever is firmly established in his heart, being under no necessity but having his desire under control, to keep her as his betrothed, he will do well. So that he who married his betrothed will do well, and he who refrains from marriage will do better. A wife is bound to her husband as long as he lives. If the husband dies, she is free to be married to whom she wishes, only in the Lord. But in my judgment she is happier if she remains as she is. And I think that I have the Spirit of God. (1 Cor 7: 35–40)5

Paul’s preference for celibacy reflected his personal asceticism and self-image as an apostle of Christ; certainly there were adequate examples of continence in the philosophical and moral systems of his age to validate the choice of continence for his congregations. He did not force his preference on members of his churches, however, and considered sexual desire to be a natural phenomenon, allowed for and regulated by marriage between Christian partners.6 Paul’s reluctance to condemn marriage wholeheartedly while still asserting the superiority of the chaste state created a rhetorical dilemma for Christian theologians. Paul’s interpreters obsessively revisited the problem of whether it was better to marry, as a concession to lust, or to attempt sexual abstinence and risk succumbing to lust, weighing the challenges of celibacy against its spiritual benefits. Likewise, marriage presented a scriptural paradox: it was sanctioned in Genesis 1:28 4. Cf. Paul’s puzzling assertion several verses later (1 Cor 7:30) that those who have spouses should behave as if they had none (Saunders, Paul, 107). 5. “Porro hoc ad utilitatem vestram dico non ut laqueam vobis iniciam sed ad id quod honestum est et quod facultatem praebeat sine inpedimento Dominum observandi. Si quis autem turpem se videri existimat super virgine sua quod sit superadulta et ita oportet fieri quod vult faciat non peccat nubat. Nam qui statuit in corde suo firmus non habens necessitatem potestatem autem habet suae voluntatis et hoc iudicavit in corde suo servare virginem suam bene facit. Igitur et qui matrimonio iungit virginem bene facit et qui non iungit melius facit mulier alligata est quanto tempore vir eius vivit quod si dormierit vir ius liberata est cui vult nubat tantum in Domino. Beatior autem erit si sic permanserit secundum meum consilium puto autem quod et ego et Spiritum Dei habeo.” 6. Saunders, Paul, 108.



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(“be fruitful and multiply” and “a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife”) and John 2 (Jesus’ presence at the wedding at Cana), yet was discouraged in Paul’s letters, which occasioned extensive debate on the relative merits of marriage and chastity. The status of widows and their place in a hierarchy of virtue based on sexual continence thus became a central part of the discussion not only regarding marriage and remarriage, but also regarding the nature and power of chastity itself in the early church. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians established the significance of chastity over marriage for both sexes, and of chaste widowhood for women in particular, but did not distinguish a “widowed” way of life. More detailed instructions for how to live out one’s chaste widowhood appeared only much later in 1 Timothy, a epistle that modern theologians do not consider authentically Paul’s, but which exegetes of antiquity and the Middle Ages accepted without question as the Apostle’s own teachings.7 Circulating in the mid-second century, 1 Timothy discussed the selection of bishops, the “enrollment” of widows, and the roles of old and young in the Christian community. Chapter 5: 3–16 set forth guidelines for the pastoral care of widows, establishing a normative procedure for their maintenance and direction: Honor widows who are real widows. If a widow has children or grandchildren, let them first learn their religious duty to their own family and make some return to their parents; for this is acceptable in the sight of God. She who is a real widow, and is left all alone, has set her hope on God and continues in supplications and prayers night and day, whereas she who is self-indulgent is dead even while she lives. Command this, so that they may be without reproach. If any one does not provide for his own relatives, and especially for his own family, he has disowned the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. (1 Tm 5:3–8)8

This passage suggested several possibilities for the widowed state in the first- and second-century churches. Like bishops, widows were to have had only one spouse, which set them apart from other laypeo7. Wayne A. Meeks, The Writings of St. Paul (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 132. 8. “Viduas honora quae vere vidua sunt. Si qua autem vidua filios aut nepotes habet discant primum domum suam regere et mutuam vicem reddere parentibus hoc enim acceptum est coram Deo quae autem vere vidua est et desolata speravit in Deum et instat obsecrationibus et orationibus nocte ac die, nam que in deliciis est vivens mortua est. Et hoc praecipe ut inreprehensibiles sint, si quis autem suorum et maxime domesticorum curam non habet fidem negavit et est infideli.”

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ple and identified them more closely with the clergy. Only those who were vere viduae, “real” or “true” widows and of unassailable character, deserved to be allotted material support as well as admiration for their good works.9 The attention to widows in the Pastoral Epistles suggests that widows were a significant historical group within the Christian community. Scholars suspect that the author of 1 Timothy was responding to widows’ material support within early congregations, rewarding assistance only to the deserving and awarding an official position to eligible widows within the community without explicitly denoting their function as a formal ministry.10 The passages suggest functions for pious widows in the community, even if these were informal good works: Let a widow be enrolled if she is not less than sixty years of age, having been the wife of one husband, and she must be well attested for her good deeds, as one who has brought up children, shown hospitality, washed the feet of saints, relieved the afflicted, and devoted herself to doing good in every way. (1 Tm 5:9–10)11

The First Letter of Timothy determined the maintenance and duties of a widow based on her age, thereby delineating two types of widowhood: “true widows” of mature years, and younger widows, who were excluded from enrollment in the Church: But refuse to enroll younger widows; for when they grow wanton against Christ, they desire to marry, and so they incur condemnation for having violated their first pledge. Besides that, they learn to be idlers, gadding about from house to house, and not only idlers, but gossips and busybodies, saying what they should not. So I would have younger widows marry and bear children, rule their households, and give the enemy no occasion to revile us. For some have already strayed after Satan. If any believing woman has relatives who are widows, let her assist them; let the Church not be burdened, so that it may assist those who are real widows. (1 Tm 5:11–16)12 9. Roger Gryson, The Ministry of Women in the Early Church (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1976), 9. 10. Ibid. See also Jouette M. Bassler, “The Widow’s Tale: A Fresh Look at 1 Tim. 5:3–16,” Journal of Biblical Literature 103, no. 1 (1984): 34; and J. Müller-Bardorff, “Zur Exegese vom. 1. Timotheus 5, 3–16,” in Gott und die Götter. Festgabe für Erich Fascher zum 60. Geburtstag (Berlin: Evangelischer Verlagsanstalt, 1958), 113–33. 11. “Vidua eligatur non minus sexaginta annorum quae fuerit unius viri uxor in operibus bonis testimonium habens, si filios educavit, si hospitio recepit, si sanctorum pedes lavit, si tribulationem patientibus subministravit, si omne opus bonum subsecuta est.” 12. “Adulescentiores autem viduas devita, cum enim luxuriatae fuerint in Christo nubere volunt



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“Enrolled” widows were entitled to support in the church because of their maturity, pious works, and impeccable conduct. Younger widows were better suited by nature and temperament to remain among the ordinary (i.e., married) laity.13 Not only might younger women still have the opportunity to find a husband’s support, they may also have had relatives to assist them, in which case the church need not be unduly burdened with their upkeep. Moreover, young widows’ presumed immaturity and impulsiveness made them poor candidates for a life of service and sexual renunciation. The possibility of their public failure to fulfill the duties of “enrolled” widowhood ultimately detracted from the Christian community as a whole and outweighed the spiritual benefits that individual younger widows might derive from maintaining chastity. Titus 2:2–5 underscored the connection between matrons and service, and characterized older women as role models for younger women: Bid the older men be temperate, serious, sensible, sound in faith, in love, in steadfastness. Bid the aged women likewise to be reverent in behavior, not to be slanderers or slaves to drink; they are to teach the young women to love their husbands and children, to be sensible, chaste, domestic, kind, and submissive to their husbands, that the word of God might not be discredited.14

The letters to Timothy and Titus generally instructed a Christian readership on the orderly functioning of the church community, especially in their articulation of a hierarchy of age and entitlement to ecclesiastical charity. These letters implied quasi-ordinal duties for mature widows and elderly matrons. Taken together with Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, however, the Pastoral Epistles created potential contradictions about who was entitled to the appellation of widow and who should shun remarriage in order to fulfill the duties of this role. Paul habentes damnationem quia primam fidem irritam fecerunt. Simul autem et otiosae discunt circumire domos. Non solum otiosae sed et verbosae et curiosae loquentes quae non oportet volo ergo iuveniores nubere, filios procreare, matres familias esse, nullam occasionem dare adversario maledicti gratia. Iam enim quaedam conversae sunt retro Satanan si qua fidelis habet viduas subministret illis et non gravetur ecclesia ut his quae vere viduae sunt sufficiat.” 13. See Erasmus, De vidua christiana, trans. Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 66, Spiritualia, ed. John W. O’Malley (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1988), 243. 14. “Senes ut sobrii sint pudici prudentes sani fide dilectione patientia. Anus similiter in habitu sancto, non criminatrices, non vino multo servientes, bene docentes, ut prudentiam doceant adulescentulas ut viros suos ament filios diligant. Prudentes castas domus curam habentes beningnas subditas sui viris ut non blasphemetur verbum Dei.”

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asserted that remarriage for widows was advisable in certain situations, but later on, Christian exegetes such as Tertullian and Jerome unequivocally urged chastity for widows in stronger terms than Paul’s “counsel.” Further confusing this issue was the possibility that the definitions of widowhood were not as circumscribed as the prescriptions in 1 Timothy. Early Christian widows, contrary to the strict guidelines established in Timothy, also may have included consecrated virgins and recently converted Christian women who had divorced pagan husbands.15 The early second-century bishop Ignatius of Antioch in his letter to the Smyrneans sent greetings to “those virgins whom you call widows.”16 As late as the fourth century, Augustine’s abandoned mistress, whom he had never officially married, returned to Africa bound by a vow of continence and under the protection of the church as a voluntary widow.17 Such examples present the possibility that the quasi-office of enrolled widowhood encompassed both actual widows and other needy or deserving women otherwise bereft of support. Membership also situated such women in a visible category within the Christian community and freed them from the constraints of normal domestic responsibilities so that they might serve the church.18 The egalitarianism of early Christian doctrines presented practical challenges to traditional social and gender roles in late antiquity. The Pastoral Epistles in particular reflected the tensions between ideal and practice: despite notions of equality expressed elsewhere in the New Testament, the Pastoral Epistles reinforced servants’ subordination to masters and wives’ obedience to husbands. The Epistles’ statements limiting obligations for members’ support and rewarding only those who could be relied upon to be servile and dependable may also have been a response to the financial pressures church communities faced. The privilege of quasi-official chaste widowhood fell to a few, older women who would give “the enemy” (i.e., proponents of contemporary 15. Bassler sees Ignatius’s address to “those virgins who are called widows” as corroboration for this practice (see Bassler, “The Widow’s Tale,” 35); she also marshals J. Müller-Bardorff’s arguments on this point (ibid., 35n43). 16. Ignatius, “Epistle to the Smyrneans,” 13.1, in Maxwell Staniforth, trans., Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers (London: Penguin, 1987), 104. 17. Augustine, Confessions, 6.15; see also Brown, Body and Society, 393. Brown interprets the concubine’s voluntary widowhood based on the Confessions and another letter of Augustine’s (Epistle 20). 18. Bassler, “The Widow’s Tale,” 36–37.



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heresies) no “occasion to revile us,” whereas young, independent widows represented the potential disruption of the traditional domestic order. Writing centuries after Paul, the church fathers interpreted his intentions for widows and marshaled his incontrovertible authority to support their own preferences for widowed chastity and the widow’s place in the organized church. Paul’s letters had established that, while continent widowhood was desirable, it was not appropriate for everyone. Fourth-century theologians addressed Paul’s ambivalent message about widows’ remarriage as they attempted to impose a difficult and strict sexual ethic in large, dispersed, and diverse congregations. Moderates in the field of sexual continence, such as Clement of Alexandria, saw conjugal sexuality as appropriate to mature adulthood in Christian society.19 The most influential voices in shaping Christian doctrine in the Latin West, however—Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine—registered intense discomfort with the Pauline suggestion that young widows should remarry; they invoked as a counterpoint to this argument Paul’s teaching in Corinthians that celibacy was in all cases superior to marriage. Ultimately, both the patristic and medieval discourses on widowhood settled on definitions of the vere vidua established in 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy, punctuated by examples of pious widows drawn from the Old and New Testaments, as appropriate for all widows, regardless of age.

The “Order of Widows”: Institutional and Social Interpretations of Widowhood in the Early Church For women in late antiquity, the Christian ideal of a permanently celibate widowhood dovetailed with the Roman appellation describing a woman as univira, the wife of just one husband. In Roman society, this term denoted a woman’s unusual loyalty to her husband despite the alternatives of divorce or adultery, as well as her refusal to marry another man after his death. If one judges by the ratio of inscriptions 19. Brown, Body and Society, 130–39. See also Bernhard Kötting, Die Bewertung der Wiederverheiratung (der zweiten Ehe) in der Antike und in der Frühen Kirche (Rheinisch-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vorträge G292, Opladen: Westdeutscher, 1988), 21.

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on Roman tombs naming women as univirae to the overall number of tomb inscriptions describing wives, this designation was both rare and extremely laudatory, always appearing with other high praise such as most chaste, most pious, most holy, or most beloved (castissma, piisima, sanctissima, or dilectissima).20 The term could also be applied to living women of outstanding virtue (by both pagan and Christian standards), a special group whose devotion to their husband’s memory precluded a second marriage.21 Christian exegetes recognized the virtuous examples of the pagan univirae and used them to encourage Christian women to remain widows, reasoning that if pagans could practice continence, certainly their superior Christian counterparts should do so as well. While Christian writers generally scorned pagan practices, they used positive examples of pagan morality to demonstrate how much more virtuous Christians ought to be in comparison. Tertullian praised the Vestal Virgins of Rome, the virgins who served the cults of Juno, Diana, and Apollo, and the virgin ravers of Delphi as forerunners of Christian celibates.22 Precedents for pious widowhood included the priestesses of the cult of the African goddess Ceres, who voluntarily dissolved their marriages and assumed a widowed state, the monogamous servants of the Fortuna Muliebris and Mater Matuta, and the literary figures such as Dido, who according to ancient and medieval interpretations of Virgil’s Aeneid preferred death to living with the shame of having violated her vow of monogamy.23 The devotion to only one husband was not only a sign of loyalty and character; it was deeply rooted in the patriarchal family order of late antiquity.24 Marriages were contracted as political and social alliances, and second marriages potentially complicated these by joining 20. Bernhard Kötting, “Univira in Inschriften,” in Romanitas et Christianitas. Studia I. H. Waszink oblata, ed. W. van den Boer (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1973), 195–96. 21. Ibid., 197. For example, matrons involved as priestesses in certain Roman cults were admitted to this service only if they maintained their univira status. 22. Tertullian, Ad uxorem, 1.6, CCSL 1:18–19; see also idem, Tertullian: Treatises on Marriage and Remarriage, trans. William P. Le Saint, Ancient Christian Writers 13 (Westminister, Md.: Newman Press, 1951), 18–19. 23. Tertullian, Ad uxorem, 1.6; see also idem, in Le Saint, ACW 13, De exhortatio castitatis, chap. 13, pp. 62–63; and De monogamia, chap. 17, pp. 107–8; see also Kötting, Die Bewertung der Wiederheiratung, 8–9. 24. Kötting, Die Bewertung der Wiederheiratung, 7.



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a widow—and her dowry—to a new family, a concern that remained equally salient in the medieval period. The deceased husband’s family was disinclined to return a woman’s dowry, particularly if it facilitated a liaison between the widow and a man from a rival family. A second marriage also implied a lack of devotion to the dead husband, whereas the widow’s faithfulness to her husband even in death was a tribute to his memory and a compliment to her husband’s family. Petronius’s faithless “Widow of Ephesus,” who allowed the desecration of her dead husband’s body through her pursuit of a new lover, captured Romans’ cynical view of women as inconstant wives who abandoned the memory and honor of their spouses.25 The widow’s role as the preserver of lineage memory remained an important facet of medieval widowhood, even as Christian authors emphasized widowhood as a new opportunity for widows to establish themselves in a chaste way of life that effectively distanced them from secular concerns. The secular and sacred aspects of the widow’s identity created tensions that characterized her status as precarious: the widow was a liminal figure poised between the carnal life she had abandoned and the spiritual life to which she aspired. In widowhood, she was a living memorial to her deceased husband and thus permanently positioned as an intermediary between the living and the dead. Although early Christian writers tried to adopt the Roman univira as a model for the Christian widow, this status was actually rare in the Roman world, and despite Romans’ fascination with reputation and honor, the social and economic benefits of remarriage usually outweighed the dignity of this designation. Although the Christian emperors discouraged remarriage in favor of continent widowhood, the Roman state had traditionally expected younger widows to remarry and bear children.26 The situation was fraught with legal and familial complications. On the one 25. Petronius Arbitri, Satyricon, ed. Konrad Mueller (Munich: Ernst Heimeran, 1961), 119–20; The Satyricon of Petronius, trans. William Arrowsmith (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), 124. See also Bernhard Jussen, “Dead Men, Oblivion, and the ‘Faithless Widow’ in the Middle Ages,” in Medieval Concepts of the Past, ed. Gerd Althoff, Johannes Fried, and Patrick Geary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 218. 26. Bonnie Bowman Thurston, The Widows: A Women’s Ministry in the Early Church (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1989), 16–17; see also Jan Bremmer, “Why Did Christianity Attract Upper-Class Women?,” in Fructus Centesimus, ed. A. A. R. Bastiensen, A. Hilhorst, and C. H. J. M. Kneepkens, Instrumenta Patristica 19 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 1989), 44.

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hand, a woman who wished remain single after the death of a spouse might encounter resistance from her own family if they desired her remarriage to a prominent or wealthy man as an opportunity to further the family’s interests.27 On the other hand, if women had children from the earlier marriage, remarriage threatened their guardianship privileges over these children, and thus provided a material incentive for a woman to remain a widow.28 Thus a widowed woman stood at the center of potential conflict between her own family and her husband’s, and between loyalty to her husband’s memory and pressure from the state to bear and raise children. In addition to familial concerns, economic need remained, throughout the pre-modern era, a determining factor in whether a widow entered into a second marriage. Poorer women had little opportunity for earned income; they generally lived off their dowries or the sale of dowry properties.29 Widowhood was a viable and perhaps preferable situation for independent women in affluent households, women who had friends and allies who could provide good counsel in business matters. For women with few resources and little influence, however, remarriage usually presented a better social and economic alternative to widowhood. From a Roman legal standpoint, however, remarriage implied other disadvantages. The remarried widow became part of her new husband’s household, where she adopted the cultic observances and political loyalties of her new family.30 The children from the first union remained in the paternal family’s household, not with their mother, and under the codes of Constantine and Theodosius remarried widows were not eligible to be their children’s guardian for fear of the second husband’s encroachment on the children’s inheritance.31 In the late fourth century, additional laws restricted a widow to the usufruct (use of and profits from) of her late husband’s estate; she could 27. In his letter Ad Principiam, Jerome recounts how the widow Marcella refused a financially advantageous second marriage despite pressure from her mother to accept the suitor (Epistle 127.1–2, CSEL 56:145–46); see also Elizabeth A. Clark, Women in the Early Church (Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, 1990), 205. 28. M. Hubert, Le remariage a Rome, Étude d’histoire juridique et sociele (Milan: A. Giuffrè, 1972), 174. 29. Antti Arjava, Women and Law in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 172. 30. Thurston, The Widows, 16. 31. Arjava, Women and Law, 174ff. Under Constantine’s legislation, widowers also were restricted from acting as guardians for their children’s inheritance (see ibid., 173–74).



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not dispose of property she had received from her late husband, either from her dowry or from testamentary bequests, reinforcing the conservative principle in Roman law that property should remain in the possession of an unbroken line of descendants.32 Laws permitted widows only the usufruct of their husband’s property, which could not be alienated or donated to another party. Additionally, widows were also bound by a fideicommissum restitutionis, a clause that required a widowed mother to pass her inherited share of her dowry and usufruct to her children after her death.33 Such laws suggest that the Roman state had less interest in promoting chaste widowhood than it did in preventing widows—remarried or single—from dispensing large portions of family estates to any person or institution outside her marital family. These laws, passed under Christian emperors, undermine the idea that the early church courted widows simply to seize upon their property, though Christian bishops such as Jerome and Augustine were clearly interested in influencing such matrons to use their household resources in service of the church. Exceptionally affluent widows offered the church substantial patronage through the wealth generated from their large dowries, but less prominent women—particularly those with minor children—had less freedom to engage in influential patronage on the scale of famous holy women such as Paula, Melania, or Olympias. Nonetheless, since within these legal and financial constraints a woman was still freer to administer her estate in widowhood than in marriage, the church undoubtedly benefited from cultivating vere viduae, and the corpus of writing directed to this group suggests a concerted attempt to persuade women to choose this path and instruct those who did. In late antiquity, two very different systems of honor—pagan lineage interests and Christian notions of female honor, proved through widowed chastity—converged. Similarly, during the Middle Ages, social and religious interests reinforced the iconic figure of the chaste widow, mutually reinforcing this model of female virtue. At the same time, financial need and family interests limited women’s ability to fulfill this idealized role, even when they desired to do so. From its inception, the idea of chaste, Christian widowhood simultaneously reinforced and 32. Ibid., 173. 33. Ibid., 176–77

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contradicted the social customs and pressures of patriarchal society. When the church fathers advised Christian widows, they stressed the freedoms of widowhood—social independence and religious contemplation—and chastised widows who returned to the marriage bed for their financial or social comfort. Ambrose of Milan observed that widows who claimed to need another marriage because they were “desolate” were in error: the Apostles prayed for widows, and God protected them.34 The official role for widows had been articulated in Timothy: they were rewarded as purveyors of good works and were entitled to support if they did not have families to provide for them. Elderly widows without independent means—those widows who fulfilled the description of “enrolled” in 1 Timothy—received food and clothing from the church. According to Eusebius, the third-century Roman church supported fifteen hundred widows and indigents. African churches led clothing drives consisting mainly of garments for women, and Antioch in the fourth century provided for three thousand widows and virgins.35 Widows thus occupied a recognized and respected niche in society as both givers and receivers of charity and in some cases appear to have received material support from the Church. The suggestions for the maintenance of “enrolled” widows in 1 Timothy clearly functioned with prescriptive force in the earliest congregations.36 Scholars Louis Duchesne and Carl Kaufmann argue that the roles of enrolled widows and deaconesses were similar, if not identical, and identified the tomb of the widow Flavia Arcas as the earliest epigraphical testimony to the practice of enrolling widows: the second-century inscription in Rome bears the particular vocabulary describing her state, Χηρα (“made a widow”).37 Enrollment was sometimes honorary for widows who were committed to an ascetic, celibate life but did not need financial support, as was the case with the fourth- or fifth-century Roman widow Regina, whose tomb inscription read: 34. Ambrose of Milan, De viduis, 10.54–55, PL 16, 264–65. 35. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 6.43.11, and Gesta apud Zenophilium, PL 8:731; and John Chrysostom, Hom. 66 in Matt., 3, PG 57:630, cited in Brown, Body and Society, 148. 36. Kötting, Die Bewertung der Wiederheiratung, 23. 37. Ute E. Eisen, Women Officeholders in Early Christianity, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 2000), 143–44, 153n5. The full inscription reads: “The widow Flavia Arcas, who lived eighty-five years. Flavia Theophila, her daughter, erected (this epitaph) to the sweetest of mothers.”



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For the well-deserving Regina her daughter has placed this stone. The mother Regina, the widow who sat [sedit] as widow for sixty years and was not a burden to the Church, univira, who lived eighty years and five months and twenty-six days.38

The presence of the verb sedit indicates that Regina, though not financially compensated by the church, earned the recognition of being a univira and enrolled member of the ordo viduarum, despite her young age, judged according to the preferences in 1 Timothy, at the time of her widowhood. This verb implied office-holding and was used to designate holders of official ecclesiastical positions, such as bishop.39 The wording used to specially denote pious widows in the inscriptions (such as vidua sedit, vidua Dei, Deo vixit, or in Deo vivens) also occurred in the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus of Rome (ca. 170–236) to describe ecclesiastical enrollment of widows.40 Based on such evidence, scholars of late antiquity concur that “enrolled” widows held an institutionalized position in early Christian communities. In the West, however, there is little concrete evidence that sheds light on the exact nature of this ordo viduarum or that suggests that deaconesses or widows enjoyed a de facto parity with ecclesiastical officeholders such as deacons or priests. Widows nevertheless fulfilled semi-clerical functions such as instructing the laity, serving as special mentors to virgins, and, especially in the Eastern churches, assisting the clergy as deaconesses.41 The fourth-century widow Olympias, friend and confidante of John Chrysostom of Antioch, was ordained as a deaconess in the church of Constantinople at thirty years of age, at which time she used her vast personal wealth to build a women’s monastery adjacent to the church. Together with three of her relatives who were also ordained as deacon38. “Rigine vene merenti filia sua fecit vene. Rigine matri viduae que sedit vidua annos LX et eclesa numqua(m) gravavit, unibyra, que vixit annos LXXX, mesis V, dies XXVI.” Ibid., 145–46. 39. For example: “hic quiescit Romanus pb, qui sedit pb ann XXVII, m X. dep X kal augus Con Severini v c. i[n pace].” Ibid., 146. 40. Ibid., 147. 41. On widows as mentors to virgins, see Brown, Body and Society, 150. The Roman widow Marcella was mentor to Paula’s daughter Eustochium, and Paula, also a widow, encouraged and guided Eustochium in her holy endeavors, according to Jerome, Ad Principiam, Epistle 127.2, CSEL 56, p. 146 (the letter can be found translated in Clark, Women in the Early Church, p. 207). Jerome also suggested that virgins and widows should live together in holy communities to prevent scandal, Jerome, Ad Matrem, Epistle 117. On widows as deaconesses, see Eisen, Women Officeholders, 148–50.

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esses, Olympias dispensed alms and bread to the poor from her palace near the church, sent daily provisions to John Chrysostom, and applied her riches—according to her Life, ten thousand pounds of gold, twenty thousand pounds of silver, and all her real estate—for the advancement of the bishopric of Constantinople and the various causes of John Chrysostom.42 In the West, the office of deaconess was less common, and the role of the “enrolled” widow less distinct than in the Eastern churches. In his Treatise on the Apostolic Tradition, the bishop and martyr Hippolytus distinguished as servants of the church certain widows from among the larger group of widowed women. Hippolytus, however, explicitly declared that although widows were appointed, they were not ordained but rather chosen by name.43 Moreover, in chapter 11 of his Treatise, Hippolytus cautioned that only widows who had remained widows for a long time or had proven their vocation for continence should be trusted, because even older persons could continue (inappropriately) to indulge in physical passion.44 It was not clear in the Apostolic Tradition how the appointment was performed or who administered it, but Hippolytus emphasized that the widows should be clearly distinguished from the clergy, and made no reference to any sort of extraordinary semiclerical function the widow fulfilled; she was appointed for the purpose of prayer, which was a general duty of all Christians.45 This ancient practice is echoed in medieval benediction liturgies that consecrated women to permanent chastity as widows, and in a few cases, as deaconesses as well. Early Church synods had also addressed the practice of widows who undertook vows of chastity and described such women as a serving a chaste “profession” (viduitatis servandae professionem).46 Whereas cer42. Clark, “Life of Olympias,” chap. 6 in Women in the Early Church, 226–27. See also Brown, Body and Society, 282–84. 43. These terms distinguished widows from clerics; widows were “not to receive the imposition of hands” (non imponetur manus super eam) because their official duties were limited to prayer (institutur propter orationem). See Eisen, Women Officeholders, 144. 44. Hippolytus of Rome, The Treatise on the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus of Rome, ed. Gregory Dix, reissued with corrections, preface and bibliography by Henry Chadwick (London: Alban Press, 1992), 20. 45. Ibid., 20–21. 46. First Council of Orange, 441 (cited in Gratian, Decretum, C. 27 q. 1 c. 35), in Joseph Friesen, Geschichte des canonischen Eherechts bis zum Verfall der Glossarlitterature (Tübingen: Verlag und Druck von Franz Fues, 1888), 683. See also Jussen, Der Name der Witwe, 185n104.



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emonial consecration was an established tradition in both the ancient and medieval church, it remains unclear whether in late antiquity these vows demanded a specific way of life. Women might well have carried on in the tasks and situations they had fulfilled prior to their consecration, whether in secular or religious institutions, but enriched in status by the designated of a public profession of confirmed widowhood. Although the official roles for widows were more circumscribed than in the Eastern churches, wealthy women in the Western Empire who enjoyed the financial security of a dowry and family support could nevertheless pursue a continent life as widows in a spirit similar to that of their Eastern counterparts. The late-fourth-century Roman matrons Marcella and Paula figured prominently in the writings of Jerome as independent widows who wished to embrace a life of continence. These women corresponded with Jerome, funded his various projects, and functioned in his writings as women of supreme Christian virtue who could edify Jerome’s wider readership as well as learn from his instructive letters. As consecrated widows, Marcella and Paula transformed their spiritual inclinations into a visible, external discipline of charity and continence. Their examples, however extraordinary because of their exceptional resources and status, illustrated how wealthy matrons could establish a publicly professed chaste life, situated between the married laity and ordained clergy, through personal vows of chastity, dedication to church service, and involvement with proto-monastic communities. In Jerome’s correspondence, these women exercised dual roles: they were Jerome’s protégées, but were also teachers to others, and they were obedient members of the Christian community, but also authoritative leaders in monastic circles. The models that Paula and Marcella provided in the fourth century foreshadowed the relationships that medieval women would later form with monastic communities without necessarily entering religious orders fully as vowed nuns. Marcella (d. 412) was one of Rome’s first female ascetics, and she illustrated the chaste widow’s role as a mentor to virgins and a touchstone for like-minded holy matrons in the community. Upon the death of her spouse she renounced both remarriage and material wealth,47 and studied the monastic profession from Alexandrian priests (including Ath47. Jerome, Ad Principiam, Ep. 127.3.

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enasius of Alexandria) who had fled to Rome during the Arian persecutions. According to Jerome, Marcella “learned the life of the blessed Antony . . . of the Pachomian monasteries . . . and of the discipline for virgins and widows” because she understood how to please Christ.48 Jerome described her engagement with monastic teachings, her learned knowledge of Scripture, her voluntary poverty, and the companionship in her household of a virgin named Principia. Jerome reported that “the venerable Paula delighted in Marcella’s friendship,” and that Marcella instructed Paula’s daughter Eustochium in the vocation of chastity before Paula and Eustochium departed for Bethlehem to join Jerome’s settlement there.49 Like Marcella, Paula (d. 404), the particular confidante of St. Jerome, expressed her piety in widowhood through both ascetic practice and continence. In the epitaph for Paula Jerome sent to Eustochium, consoling her upon her mother’s death, he recalled: From the time that her husband died until the time she fell asleep herself she never sat at meat with a man, even though she might know him to stand upon the pinnacle of the episcopate. She never entered a bath unless when she was dangerously ill. Even in the severest fever she rested not on an ordinary bed but on the hard ground covered only with a mat of goat’s hair; if that can be called rest which made day and night alike a time of almost unbroken prayer. Well did she fulfill the words of the psalter: all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears.50

Paula took on the additional role of monastic founder, using the riches of her deceased husband Toxotius’s estate to build monasteries in the Holy Land.51 When she had exhausted these funds, she borrowed money at interest in order to continue giving alms to the poor.52 Paula lived in a 48. “Uitam beatii Antonii adhuc tunc uiuentis monasteriaque in Thebaide Pachumii et uirginum et uiduarum didicit disciplinam, nec erubuit profiteri, quod Christo placere cognouit.” Ad Principiam, 127.5, CSEL 56:149; trans. Clark, Women in the Early Church, 206. 49. “Huius amicitiis fruita est Paula venerabilis in huius nutrita uirginitatis decus, ut facilis aestimatio sit, qualis magistra, ubi talis discipulae.” Ad Principiam, 127.5, p. 149; trans. Clark, 207. 50. “Numquam post uiri mortem usque ad diem dormitionis suae cum ulo comedit uiro, quauis eum sanctum et in pontificali sciret culmine positum; balneas nisi periclitans non adiit. Mollia etiam in grauissima febri lectuli strata non habuit, sed super durissimam humum stratis ciliciolis quiescebat, si tamen illa quies dicenda est, quae iugibus paene orationibus dies noctesque iungebat illud inplens de Psalteri: lauabo per singulas noctes lectum meum, in lacrimis stratum meum rigabo.” Ad Eustochium (Epitaphium sanctae Paulae), Epistle 108.15, CSEL 55:203–4, trans. Clark, 203. 51. Ep. 108.5. 52. Ep. 108.20.



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monastery consisting of three “companies” of virgins and administered its affairs; she also founded a house for men, but kept the two houses separated in order to avoid any hint of scandal.53 Olympias, Marcella, and Paula possessed a combination of considerable personal wealth, an ardent desire for the spiritual life, and an influential mentor, assets that allowed these matrons to fulfill the duties of continent widowhood based on their spiritual preferences both within and outside of official church ministries—indeed their financial resources created an incentive for the church to concern itself with such women. Their affluence, status, and virtue made them valuable to the church both as benefactors and examples to other Christians. The personal relationships between religious women and their spiritual mentors informed the patristic discourse on widowhood that was concerned with teaching women how to negotiate the space between their experiences as married women and their desired goal, chastity. Pious widows formed a community that both demonstrated Christian values and required spiritual nurturing. Women attracted to the Christian message seemed eager to receive this direction in order to be part of an active community. As Jan Bremmer has argued, the Acts of Peter suggest a dynamic church in which widows were both donors and receivers of charity, and sources from the Traditio Apostolica to Eusebius mention both the problem of impoverished widows and the presence of wealthier women who identified themselves as benefactors of widows and orphans.54 Poor widows deserved the support of the community, and wealthy widows provided it for their fellows. The same qualities, however, that made widows independent, trusted leaders in the early church community also presented problems, which perhaps ultimately detracted from widows’ organization as an ordo: strong-willed women lacking male authority, or young widows whose sexual appetites had not cooled yet, presented the possibility that they would abuse the freedoms the ordo of continent widowhood conferred. While some early theologians like Tertullian emphasized elders of both sexes as religious leaders, continent widows were not paired with a commensurate order of widowers as leading and serving figures in the 53. Ibid. 54. Bremmer, “Why Did Christianity Attract Upper-Class Women?,” in Bastiensen, Hilhorst, and Kneepkens, eds., Fructus Centesimus, 41.

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Christian community. Jerome addressed one letter to a widower, Pammachius, who had been married to one of Paula’s daughters, Paulina, and who as a widower became a monk. Jerome’s letter of consolation for the loss of Pammachius’s wife took a different direction than letters consoling widows. Jerome approached Pammachius’s situation as a widower as parallel to Job’s, an opportunity to live out Christian faith and steadfastness in adversity.55 The place of widowers in Christian society received little treatment in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, and did not revolve around the sexual status of the widower. Jerome’s letter to Pammachius provided consolation on the death of his spouse and an encomium to the deceased. Jerome associated the “fruits” of chastity with the women close to Pammachius: virginity was exemplified through Eustocium, Pammachius’s sister-in-law, widowhood illustrated through Paula, his mother-in-law, and marriage praised through the undefiled bed of Paulina, Pammachius’s deceased wife. Although scholars such as Bernhard Jussen have interpreted Jerome’s framework of the “fruits” of chastity as applying to both sexes, Jerome did not employ this framework in characterizing the widower (perhaps because Pammachius, as a monk, had sources of instruction that would have been somewhat different from those of the women Jerome eulogized in his letters). For Jerome, widowhood was a female and lay expression of Christian devotion, defined in terms of female virginity, and associated with feminine capacities in ministry rather than as an eschatological state pertaining to both sexes. Indeed, assumptions about the fragility of the female sex complicated the early fathers’ concept of widowhood. The lifestyles that authors such as Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine described for their celibate widowed patrons combined a rigorous spirituality with considerable social freedoms, creating a situation in which consecrated widows could easily fail in their chaste endeavors. Because the early fathers understood men to be more naturally spiritual, and women more naturally carnal, the first step in writing about female holiness involved a renunciation of those female aspects of an individual that would impede her in spiritual pursuits—carnality, lust, greed, and the tendency to excess in such things as talking and eating. Women had first to transcend their 55. Ad Pammachium, Epistle 66.2–3, 33, in CSEL 54:648ff.



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gender and become more male in order to be holy: as Joyce Salisbury put it, “since by nature women were lustful temptresses who were open to sexuality, they could not act as women if they were to be spiritual. By choosing a spiritual life, women had to reject or transcend their gender, which was by definition sexual and reproductive.”56 Perhaps because of the assumptions about the female sex and its capacity for spirituality, virgins were the favored prototype for holy women, and theologians such as Jerome and Augustine created their definitions of widowed chastity within a framework that accepted virginity as the gold standard of female spirituality. Especially in the ethos of fourth-century asceticism, chaste women ideally represented a sealed vessel, a useful model for a Christian community that perceived itself as under siege from internal heresies and external pagan influences. Widowhood was connected to the ideal of virginity and yet was a complicating factor in this association. Potentially continent widows, no longer sealed vessels, had known the pleasures of the marriage bed, and yet were prepared to renounce those pleasures through membership in a formal ordo or through a more informal commitment to widowed continence and a life of prayer. They had also achieved the status of grown women, rather than the sheltered daughters of the Roman familia; they could manage their own affairs and, as we have seen, had considerable resources to devote to the church. Many of the qualities that characterized virgins as sealed, inviolable, and “manly” in their spirituality were not applicable to widows, even though widows had certain functions analogous to virgins through their decision to renounce sex and marriage. Though they were at times likened to viragos—“manly” women—the portrayal of widows in Christian theology was closely associated with feminized imagery and activities. Their roles as mothers and grandmothers, in actual families and as spiritual mentors to virgins, service as deaconesses and handmaids to the church and the male clergy, “enrollment” based on the maternal acts of caregiving and hospitality, and symbolic role as the grieving Ecclesia, the personified church as a spouse of Christ, who was left behind in the world after the Crucifixion, drew on paradoxical idealizations of feminine virtue and vulnerability. In short, the univira was not simply a virago 56. Joyce Salisbury, Church Fathers, Independent Virgins (New York: Verso, 1991), 26–27.

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in the early church. Theologians attempting to characterize widowhood for their female correspondents clarified the widow’s spiritual relationship to the virgin, but they also identified her potential for the church community through the widow’s material service and charity. The ordo viduarum as an office of the church did not survive the increasing bureaucratization of the church or the supremacy of the male clergy. Bernard Jussen makes the important observation that the ordo of widowhood in the formal sense of “office” disappeared as church hierarchy grew, remaining only as a genus hominum or category within the laity rather than a ministry with clearly established liturgical functions.57 Church leaders nevertheless continued a tradition of distinguishing pious widows as a special, if unofficial, caste of women who were set apart from ordinary widows by a permanent commitment to chastity and the behaviors prescribed in the Pauline epistles.

Theological Texts as the Basis of the “Profession” of Widowhood In both letters to individual widows and more general treatises on widowhood, Christian theologians built on social expectations to encourage women to adopt continence in widowhood. The textual basis and rhetorical patters they employed remained generally consistent from the exegesis of Tertullian in the early third century through the teachings of Augustine of Hippo in the early fifth century. It is impossible to overstate the influence of these authors and their works on the shaping of medieval perceptions about what widowed continence was and how it should be practiced. The audience for Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine’s reflections on widowhood was a small group of influential and self-directed women whose resources were essential to the support and development of church institutions. Such women sought direction as to how to order their lives in widowhood and how to interpret their chastity as a means of engaging in a pious existence under the direction of men they considered friends and spiritual mentors. The early fathers offered practical guidance, but also used their advisory role with such women to reflect more generally on the function of female 57. Jussen, “Der ‘Name’ der Witwe,” in Parisse, Veuves et veuvage, 138.



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chastity in the institutional church. They offered direct advice on matters such as sexual abstinence, fasting, and prayer, but also ascribed meaning to these activities, defining for their patrons the practices of chaste widowhood and their impact on the women’s religiosity in comparison to the absolute ideal of Christian chastity, virginity. Letters of direction provided practical occasions for church leaders to develop their own understanding of women’s relationship to the sacred, often (as their precedent, Paul, had done) articulating generalized beliefs in response to particular problems and questions in pastoral care. Moreover, as Bernhard Jussen has noted, the early fathers understood the categories they assigned to their virginal and widowed correspondents as connected to a salvific context, the chorus of widows and virgins in heaven among whose ranks widowhood’s chaste practitioners would be counted.58 The early fathers not only articulated a personal religiosity and public persona for the widow but also promised the heavenly merits that would result from her chastity. The foundational texts that defined Christian widowhood arose in the context of the Roman church’s attempt to assert a uniform religious authority. Centered on an exegesis of Paul’s intentions for chastity, they negotiated gender relationships and the implications of gender for pastoral care. The scheme of virgin, widow, and wife, especially as it was articulated in Jerome’s writings, became central to the discussion of religious women in the Middle Ages, and in particular, the “sixtyfold fruit” became the distinctive symbol for the widow’s chastity throughout the Middle Ages. The authors of the fourth-century West normalized a profoundly ascetic strand of ecclesiastical spirituality. Their letters and treatises of direction articulated a strict theology of the body that ultimately prevailed in the Latin West, though not without dissent from rivals who did not privilege bodily chastity as a paramount marker of holiness. An important case in point was Jerome’s treatise Adversus Joviniam, which, in its argumentation against Jovinian’s disregard of bodily chastity as a factor in salvation, became a frequently cited text in the Middle Ages for exhorting widows (as well as other groups of women) to chaste professions. As Elizabeth Clark and others have pointed out, much of Christian doctrine in this period was profoundly shaped by the pressures of heresy on the 58. Bernhard Jussen, Der Name Der Witwe, 49ff., 145.

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church and competing ideals within it, and the discourse on widowhood—directed toward specific women but probably intended for compilation and circulation for a much broader audience—is no exception. The uneasy relationship between the discourse of the texts on widowhood and the degree to which it was intended to counsel actual women was nowhere more evident than in the polemical treatises of the author Tertullian. He was the first church father to write extensively on widowhood, as he saw strict monogamy as essential to the program of the movement in which he was deeply involved, Montanism. Despite his later denunciation as a heretic, Tertullian’s ideas about widowhood remained influential, and although he was not cited as often as Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, he influenced these authors, particularly Augustine, who refuted Tertullian’s claim that the remarriage of widows constituted bigamy in his own reflections on the sacramental nature of Christian marriage. The remainder of this chapter will examine these authors, first, to evaluate how each of them contributed in their particular ways to the formation of a collective understanding of the state of chaste widowhood, and second, to identify important themes in the theology of pious widowhood that recurred in all of the authors’ works and came to form the intellectual basis for readers and scholars of the Middle Ages on the subject of pious widowhood. Te rtullian  Tertullian of Carthage (ca. 160–220) provided the church

with the most extensive treatment on widowhood in its first two centuries. The breadth and volume of his writings on virginity and widowhood greatly influenced later authors, even though Tertullian’s participation in the Montanist movement (also known as the Heresy of the Free Spirit) resulted in some of his assertions being condemned by later theologians. Through his conversion to Montanism, Tertullian became convinced that the Spirit had come to establish a new discipline and that remarriage in this theological system was not permitted: the call to monogamy expressed in 1 Timothy 3:2 that a bishop must be “the husband of one wife” forbade multiple marriages for all Christians.59 59. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600), vol. 1 of The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 99–101.



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For Tertullian, any case of remarriage after the death of a spouse constituted bigamy. Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine strenuously refuted this idea, but, because they also wanted to discourage widows from remarriage, they applied argumentation similar to Tertullian’s regarding the spiritual benefits of widowhood even though they had to concede that remarriage was a valid (but inferior) alternative. Tertullian’s interpretation of marriage and remarriage as a bond that persisted beyond the death of a spouse, although officially refuted as formal doctrine, nevertheless continued to be a difficult sentiment to dislodge, and it reinforced the medieval notion that the marriage tie connected the widow to her deceased husband as he lingered in Purgatory. Tertullian’s writings also demonstrate interesting paths not taken in Christian interpretations of chastity, particularly the implications of chastity for gender roles. Unlike later authors, Tertullian was concerned with the state of widowhood for both sexes, not just women. He offered examples of how widows and widowers alike should strive toward as chaste (and therefore monogamous) an existence as possible. Tertullian compared widowed chastity to the chastity of virgins, but did not place them within a fixed hierarchy of virgins, wives, and widows, the model that characterized Jerome’s position and became most popular in the Middle Ages. The question of remarriage for widows in the patristic corpus revolved around two separate but related ideas: the relationship between remarriage and spiritual purity, and the spiritual nature of marriage itself. The first issue, the struggle to determine the relative virtues of celibacy and remarriage for widows, was prominent in Tertullian’s works. Ad uxorem, De exhortatione castitatis, and De monogamia were written to persuade both specific individuals (in Ad uxorem, his wife, and in De exhortatione, a male friend) and the general Christian audience that remarriage for widows and widowers constituted bigamy. Capitalizing on the ambiguities of Pauline doctrine on marriage and celibacy, Tertullian dissected Paul’s conflicting instructions on celibacy, and established a template for debating the subject in Western Christian exegesis. Tertullian wrote the treatise Ad uxorem around 200 as a guide for his wife’s conduct should he precede her in death. The treatise urged her to avoid a second marriage, though it did not command her to do so.

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This treatise was followed by two others, De exhortatione castitatis (ca. 204–12) and De monogamia (ca. 217). In the former, directed to a newly widowed male friend, Tertullian distinguished himself from later patristic authors by applying his dictates of chaste widowhood to both sexes instead of construing the condition as an as an exclusively female one. In the latter, Tertullian intensified his proscription of remarriage for widows and widowers (in contradiction of Paul), and exhibited his growing identification with the spiritualist doctrines of the Montanist heresy.60 While Tertullian’s positions were largely discredited among orthodox Christian exegetes because of his connection with Montanism, the texts were significant in shaping the development of Christian thought on widowhood, because later theologians, particularly Augustine, were intent on refuting Tertullian’s assertion that remarriage for widows was tantamount to adultery.61 Amid the exegetical debates about marriage and celibacy that abounded in the fourth century, even strict ascetics like Jerome did not adhere to Tertullian’s extreme argument, but grudgingly affirmed remarriage as a valid albeit inferior alternative to continence. Although ultimately unsuccessful, Tertullian’s arguments against remarriage indicated the absence of a definitive verdict on marriage in Paul’s writings, and foreshadowed the continuing problem this would pose for ecclesiastical authors. Tertullian put his finger on the crux of this rhetorical problem in his remarks concerning 1 Corinthians 7:7–9: The Apostle . . . teaches us what is better than this “good,” [marriage] when he says that he permits marriage, but prefers celibacy—the former because of the snares of the flesh, the latter because times are straitened. Hence, if we consider the reasons which he gives for each of these views, we shall have no difficulty in seeing that marriage is conceded to us on the principle that marry we may because marry we must. But what necessity proffers necessity cheapens. Scripture says that it is better to marry than to burn; but what sort of good, I ask you, can that be which is such only when it is compared to what is bad? Marriage, forsooth, is better because burning is worse!62 60. William P. Le Saint, introduction to Ad uxorem, in Tertullian, Treatises on Marriage, 3. The Montanist, or New Prophecy, heresy was a charismatic movement in the early third century; it was associated with the leaders Montanus, Maximilla, and Priscilla and embraced the particular spiritual gifts conferred by the Holy Spirit, or Paraclete. 61. Ibid. 62. “Quid . . . bono isto melius sit accipimus ab apostolo, permittente quidem nubere, sed



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Even while officially hewing to an orthodox position on marriage in the treatise to his wife, Tertullian used Paul’s arguments to show that remarriage was not a good in itself but rather a permissible but flawed alternative. Tertullian also used the Pastoral Epistles to suggest that second marriages were an obstacle to holiness as well as an inferior existence in comparison to celibacy. Since men could enter the episcopacy only if they have had just one wife, and 1 Timothy 5:9 stated that widows may be enrolled only if they had only one husband, Tertullian argued that second marriages hindered the proper spiritual career of a Christian.63 In widowhood, however, all spiritual obstacles could be overcome through service to the Lord and meditation on heaven: “Meditate on the things of Heaven and you will despise the things of earth. The widow whose life is stamped with the seal of God’s approval has need of nothing—except perseverance.”64 Tertullian’s use of the metaphor suggested that a widow was chosen by God to remain celibate through the death of her spouse, and that her chaste widowhood was “sealed” as a special status. Tertullian valued widowhood not only as the logical choice over remarriage, but also for its inherent dignity. God honored and protected widows because they were dependent on his mercy. According to Tertullian, widows should be even more esteemed than virgins, because they led a more difficult life, “since it is easy not to desire that of which you are ignorant and easy to turn your back upon what you have never desired. . . . The condition of the virgin may be regarded as one of greater felicity, but that of the widow is one of greater difficulty.”65 Tertullian praised widows for abandoning the marital and sexual life they had already known, and he focused less on the physical integrity of perfect virginity than on the relative difficulty of the maintenance of chastity for abstinentiam praeangustias temporum. Qua ratione utriusque pronuntiationis inspecta facile dinoscitur necessitate nobis concessam esse nubendi potestatem; quod autem praestat, depretiat ipsa. Quod denique scriptum est melius nubere quam uri, quale hoc bonum est, oro te, quod mali comparatio commendat, ut ideo melius sit nubere, quia deterius est uri?” Tertullian, Ad uxorem, 1.3, CCSL 1:375; in Treatises on Marriage, trans. Le Saint, 12–13. 63. Ad uxorem, 1.7. 64. “Caelestia recogita, et terrena despicies. Nihil uiduitati apud deum subsignatae necessarium est quam perseuerare.” Ibid., 1.4, p. 378; trans. Le Saint, 16. 65. “Vide . . . quia facile est non appetere quod nescias et auersari quod desiderauis numquam. . . . Poterior uirgo felicior haberi, at uidua laboriosior.” Ad uxorem, 1.8, p. 382; trans. Le Saint, 21.

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virgins and widows in day-to-day life. Tertullian established a comparative relationship between widowhood and perpetual virginity that other theologians would continue to address and debate. Unlike later authors who tended to rank virginity above widowhood, Tertullian identified the unique problems and rewards of each state, differentiating the two not by degrees of merit but by assigning them different rewards.66 Tertullian’s involvement in the Montanist heresy eventually led him to reject second marriages for widowed people altogether as adultery.67 His reasoning was not that of the Gnostics, who condemned marriage on the grounds that it was an institution of the flesh, but rather that he believed that the desires of the flesh must be subordinate to the spirit.68 In De monogamia, Tertullian argued that widows who remarried committed adultery, because he had come to believe that the marriage bond was not dissolved by the death of a spouse. A woman who married a second time would have one husband in the flesh and another in the spirit, and the carnal knowledge of the wife shared between the two men, albeit serially, constituted adultery for Tertullian.69 Although he acknowledged that in this regard he might be contradicting the Apostle, Tertullian steadfastly asserted that the legal and spiritual ties of marriage persist after the death of a spouse.70 Remarriage created the literal possibility of multiple spouses meeting in heaven, a disturbing image that resonated with secular concerns about loyalty to one’s husband and his lineage.71 Despite the official rejection of Tertullian’s arguments as heretical, this sentiment intuitively affirmed—and perhaps capitalized upon—the lesson expressed in the story of the widow of Ephesus, that the maintenance of spousal memory was the function of the good widow. In the High Middle Ages, the emerging notion that the widow had a particular responsibility for intercession for the dead spouse in Purgatory likewise suggested that the clergy had never quite shed the sense that a spiritual bond persisted between the living and deceased spouse. 66. “In the former it is grace which is crowned; in the latter, virtue” (in illa, gratia, in ista uirtus coronatur). Ad uxorem, 1.8, p. 382; trans. Le Saint, 21. 67. Kötting, Die Bewertung der Wiederverheirat, 28. 68. Elizabeth Connelley, “Tertullian and Feminism,” Theology 92 (1989): 31–32. 69. De monogamia, chap. 10, ACW 13:93. 70. Ibid., 90. 71. Ibid., 92.



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Tertullian’s expectations for universal chaste widowhood for both genders conformed to his broader vision of church leadership, which Peter Brown has succinctly characterized as a “Spirit-filled gerontocracy.”72 Clerics and elderly widows and widowers occupied a prominent place in church leadership because their age and experience had tempered their worldly impulses and desires. Young virgins, in Tertullian’s estimation, must be proven through experience, not trusted solely on the basis of their chaste intentions. In this context, Tertullian saw widowed chastity as a means of progressing toward perfection for both sexes. His model, however, was overshadowed by a more mechanistic schema that was used to order and classify the sexual roles of women only. While Tertullian accorded widows a shared status with virgins, the fourth-century exegetes, Jerome and Augustine, interpreted women’s relationship to chastity through a stricter, tripartite hierarchy that placed virgins first, chaste widows second, and married women a lawful but distant third in the pursuit of heavenly merits. Ambrose   Like Tertullian, Bishop Ambrose of Milan (339–97) acknowledged widows’ virtue in renouncing sexuality. Moreover, he articulated the widow’s pivotal position between virgins and wives in the opening chapter of his treatise De viduis with a commendation for widows that should not be separated from the praise of virgins, for they provided an example to all of how chastity should be preserved for God.73 Writing over one hundred years later than Tertullian, and in an era in which Christianity was an official state religion, Ambrose took up the questions of monogamy and widowhood under different circumstances, and wrote with different practical and theological objectives in mind. On the practical level, the church needed the lucrative estates and other holdings that could support its existence, and was dependent on the gifts of lay patrons to sustain its institutions and charity. Among these lay patrons, wealthy upper-class Roman matrons exerted an influence that was more significant than their actual numbers imply. As Peter Brown observed, “without the wealth and the tenacity of Melania the Elder and Paula, the monastic and scholarly enterprises of Rufinus 72. Brown, Body and Society, 79. 73. De viduis, 1.1, PL 16:247

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and Jerome in the Holy Land would have been inconceivable.”74 Because the Theodosian Code prohibited widows from willing large inheritances to the church, bishops like Ambrose and Augustine needed to mobilize lay men and women to support the church through voluntary gifts during their lifetimes. Their exhortations to chastity for virgins and widows suggest an effort to persuade the great families of the Western Empire to embrace pious dedication to the church and to devote personal wealth to religious endeavors.75 Ambrose introduced an ascetic discipline when he came to Milan from Rome that emphasized allegiance to Rome as the seat of Christian authority, and that was informed by the teachings of Peter of Alexandria, which were currently fashionable in that city. Ambrose possessed a shrewd understanding of the status and influence Roman women exercised in urban society. As the son of a pious widow and brother of a consecrated virgin who lived chastely in the family home, Ambrose had long been interested in the pastoral care of such women and could speak from experience on the subject. Ambrose had adhered to the Nicene position during the Arian controversy, and Milan had previously been ruled by Arian bishops, so his focus on women’s pastoral care as he ascended to the diocese in 374 might also have been designed to put his personal stamp on the office without reigniting other types of doctrinal controversies.76 Whereas in the past female celibacy had been practiced in northern Italy in personal, domestic arrangements, Ambrose embraced a more public expression of Christian devotion, lauding a new Christian family based on a genealogy of celibate virtue. In Ambrose’s treatises on virginity and widowhood, he expounded at length upon scriptural examples and allegorical understandings of the roles that chaste widows and virgins played within the Christian community. His preaching initially received a mixed reception. While some women embraced this ideal, even some pious widows refused to volunteer their virgin daughters for permanent celibacy instead of marriage.77 Addressing the widows 74. Brown, Body and Society, 345 75. Ibid., 344–45. See also Neil B. McLynn, Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 64. 76. Ambrose’s sister assumed the veil of virginity in 353 (McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, 60–61). 77. Ibid., 62. See also Virginia Burrus, “Equipped for Victory: Ambrose and the Gendering of Orthodoxy,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 4, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 471n37.



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themselves, Ambrose described his admonition against remarriage for widows as a counsel, not a precept. In his treatise De viduis, written after 377, Ambrose nevertheless disparaged a certain widow so vehemently for considering remarriage that he apparently felt obliged to apologize to her in a later treatise, De virginitate, for showing “concern, not cruelty; by the grace of reconciliation, may she hear these words: ‘in the church the widow is justified, in the market she is cheated.’”78 Ambrose garnered a small following of ascetic women in Milan, particularly through his cultivation of festive public veiling ceremonies for virgins that drew girls from other regions of Italy and the Empire to that episcopal city.79 He did not, however, establish a similar ritual for vowing widows, and despite his high praise for widowed continence, never awarded the status of widow with the term bride of Christ, which he commonly used to describe consecrated virgins, suggesting that for Ambrose, virgins occupied a special category within the ranks of his celibate women followers. Ambrose began his treatise on widowhood with the statement that after having composed three books on the state of virginity, it was fitting to write about widows, “for each is reserved her own special grace. An angel is sent to the Virgin, a prophet [Elias] is sent to the widow.”80 Ambrose affirmed Tertullian’s observations on the interrelated nature of various kinds of female celibacy, distinguishing widowhood through its particular benefits and trials. Unlike Jerome and Augustine, Ambrose did not assign levels of virtue among different expressions of chastity, but he did acknowledge that it was expressed in its degrees through marriage, widowhood, and virginity, each represented by three exemplary figures from the Bible, Mary, Anna, and Susanna: “Let us remember where Susanna, and Anna and Mary are found, and observe how each is spoken of with her special commendation, and where each is mentioned, she that is married in the garden, the widow in the temple, and the virgin in her secret chamber.”81 78. Cited in McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, 65; see De viduis, 9:58. 79. David G. Hunter, “The Virgin, the Bride, and the Church: Reading Psalm 45 in Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine,” Church History 69, no. 2 (June 2000): 288–90. See also Elliott, Bride of Christ, 47. 80. “Et vide quemadmodem proprie singulis gratia reservatur: angelus ad Virginem, propheta ad viduam.” De viduis, 1.1, p. 247; in The Treatise of St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, Concerning Widows, in Ambrose: Select Works and Letters, trans. E. De Romestin and H. T. F. Duckworth, NPNF 2nd. ser., vol. 10, 391. 81. “Reminiscamur itaque quemadmodum Maria quemadmodum Anna, quemadmodum Susanna

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Ambrose paired the special distinction of being a “truly” a widow (vere vidua) with a conscientious emulation of the examples of chaste, prophetic, and dutiful widows from the Old and New Testament. Like Paul, Ambrose was concerned with the feasibility of permanent chastity for a young widow, for whom the passions were easily inflamed.82 Ambrose nonetheless concluded that this did not mean that young widows must accept Paul’s advice to forsake chastity and remarry, since Paul offered remarriage as a remedy rather than a mandate. To encourage the widow in her decision to pursue a life of continence, Ambrose presented the state of widowhood as an opportunity for increased liberty and self-determination. Anticipating arguments against widowed chastity, Ambrose asserted that no one was given a burden beyond her endurance. Chastity in widowhood was not a “snare . . . to be set for women, nor a burden of continence beyond their strength,” but rather an individual’s choice that God supported by grace.83 Ambrose also characterized the life of chaste widowhood in the Hexameron (ca. 389), a treatise describing the six days of Creation. Using the turtledove’s devotion to one mate as a typology representing the sentiments of the ideal widow, Ambrose adapted an earlier text, a bestiary collection called the Physiologus.84 Ambrose’s interpretation of the turtledove in the Hexameron linked the notion of the bird’s particular solitude from the Physiologus with his identification of her chaste devotion to a single mate as the perfect symbol of Christian widowhood: It is said that when the turtledove is widowed by the loss of her mate, she holds the name and chamber of marriage in such esteem, that because her first experience of love has deceived her, cheating her with the death of her beloved, since he has become perpetually unfaithful and a bitter memory, causing her laudentur. Sed quoniam non laudes earum tantummodo praedicandae sunt, sed disciplinae etiam sunt sequendae, reminiscamur ubi Susanna, ubi Anna, sint repertae: et advertamus quemadmodum singulae aptis laudibus praedicentur, ut ubinam commemoratur: nupta in paradiso, vidua in templo, virgo in secreto.” De viduis, 4.24, p. 255; trans. De Romestin, 395. Jerome also used biblical women to represent the three states in the heavenly cohorts, associating Sarah with the married, Anna with the widows, and Mary with the virgins (Ad Eustochium, Epistle 22.41, CSEL 54:41). 82. De viduis, 2.12, p. 251 83. “Ita etiam feminis nn laqueus injiciendus non supra vires abstinentiae gravioris vectura subeunda est: sed reliquendum ut unaquaque se pendat.” De viduis, 11.71, p. 269; trans. DeRomestin, 403. 84.“De turture,” ed. Francis J. Carmody, Physiologus latinus versio y in University of California Publications in Classical Philology, ed. W. H. Alexander et al., vol. 12 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944), 131; Michael Curley, trans., Physiologus (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), 56.



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more sorrow by his death than he gave her pleasure from his love, for this reason she refuses to marry again, and will not relax the laws of modesty nor the contract made with the man who pleased her. She reserves her love for her dead mate alone, and for him keeps the name of wife. Learn, women, how great is the grace of widowhood, when it is preached even among the birds.85

Ambrose was the first Western writer to relate the habits of the turtledove as a defining ethos of widowhood. His reflections on the turtledove established an explicitly female tradition of consecrated widowhood that connected the well-known legend of the faithful bird of the Physiologus to the theological canon describing widowhood. Ambrose’s image of the turtledove as the particular representation of the widow was widely adopted by other writers of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, appearing often in bestiaries and floreligia.86 Clerics further developed Ambrose’s understanding of the chastity of the widowed turtledove as a symbol of the church, as an analogue for the soul who waits for Christ, and, significantly, as Christ’s own widow or even spouse.87 Jerome (d. 430) likened the turtledove’s habits to widows’ chastity in his polemic against Jovinian to explicate the Song of Songs: “let us read the works of naturalists and we shall find that it is the nature of the turtle-dove, if it lose its mate, not to take another; and we shall understand that second marriage is repudiated even by dumb birds.”88 Elsewhere, Jerome employed a similar argument to persuade the Christian widow Salvinia that she owed her perpetual widowed chastity specifically to Jesus: “If in deference to a law of nature a Gentile widow can condemn all sensual indulgence, what must we expect from a Christian widow who owes her chastity not to one who is dead but to one with whom she shall reign 85. “Fertur etenim turtur ubi jugalis proprii fuerit amissione viduata, pertaesum thalamos, et nomen habere conjugii; eo quod primus amor fefellerit eam dilecti morte deceptam, quoniam et infidelis ad perpetuitam fuit, et amarus ad gratiam, qui plus doloris ex morte, quam suavitatis ex charitate generaverit. Itaque iterare conjunctionem recusat, nec pudoris jura aut complaciti viri resolvit foedera, illi soli suam charitatem reservat, illi custodit nomen uxoris. Discite, mulieres, quanta sit viduitatis gratia, quae etiam in avibus praedicatur.”Ambrose, Hexameron, 5.19, PL 14:247. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are the author’s. 86. Willene Clark, “Twelfth and Thirteenth-Century Latin Sermons and the Latin Bestiary,” Compar(a)ison 1 (1996): 17. 87. Augustine describes the Christian Church in its entirety as a widow in his commentary on Psalm 131:23, Viduam eius benedicens benedicam (Augustine, Ennaratio in Psalmo 131, PL 37:1726). 88. Adversus Joviniam 1.30, PL 23:263–64; in St. Jerome: Letters and Select Works, trans. W. H. Fremantle, NPNF, 2nd ser., vol. 6, p. 368.

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in heaven?”89 Caesarius, bishop of Arles (470–543) further developed the theme in his sermons, where he identified the widow as Christ’s own spouse, signifying the widow as Ecclesia itself, a representative of the entire Christian body social: “all who live in such a way as to obtain eternal life are blessed like the widow, the poor, and the orphan. Why is the church regarded as a widow except that Christ her husband seems to be absent?”90 Carolingian authors such as Rabanus Maurus perpetuated the connection between the turtledove and the widow, suggesting that the turtledove represented both the body of Christ and the church.91 Although Ambrose’s image of the widowed turtledove in the Hexameron facilitated the idea in later theology that that widow could be Christ’s spouse, Ambrose was himself quite clear that widowhood and virginity were quite different categories, and he veiled only virgins as brides of Christ. Peter Brown has suggested that Ambrose’s theological ideal was the cultivation of a “royal hall of undamaged chastity.”92 Perfect virginity, in both a spiritual and physical sense, was an inviolate and absolute state, and an extreme commitment to demand of the Christo-Roman aristocracy who lost young daughters and their potential heirs to Ambrose’s ranks of consecrated virgins. Yet Ambrose’s attention to widowhood indicates that he also recognized in it another path to holiness, aimed at a different audience within the Christian community, an audience whose support and example was essential to the recruitment of virgins and the maintenance of the church. For women who did not take the drastic step of consecrated virginity in girlhood, widowhood offered an opportunity later in life to serve Christ, even for women who had been married more than once.93 Widows were not the same spiritual entities as virgins, but they proved themselves worthy not through physical intactness but through 89. “Si communi lege naturae damnat omnes gentilis uidua uoluptates, quid expectandum est a uidua Christiana, quae pudicitiam suam non solum ei debet, qui defunctus est, sed ei, cum quo regnatura est?” Ad Salviniam, Epistle 79.7, CSEL 54:96; in Letters and Select Works, trans. Fremantle, 66. 90. “Omnes enim qui ita agunt, ut ad aeternam vitam perveniant, ipsi quasi vidua, quasi pauper ac velut pupillus adsidue benedicuntur. Quare autem ecclesia vidua intelligitur, nisi quia vir eius Christus quasi absens esse videtur?” Caesarius of Arles, Sermon 49.1, SC 243:406–8; Saint Caesarius of Arles, Sermons, Vol. 1, ed. and trans. Mary Magdalene Mueller, Fathers of the Church 31 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1956), 250–51. 91. “Turtur corpus Christi significat, quod ecclesia est.” Rabanus Maurus, De Universo (also referred to as De rerum naturis), book 8, chapter 6, “De Avibus,” PL 111:248.2. 92. Brown, Body and Society, 354. 93. Ambrose, De viduis, 2.10, PL 16:251.



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the manner of their life, especially their mentorship toward virgin girls.94 A widow’s decision to embrace permanent continence reflected the carefully deliberated expression of a mature woman’s will. Ambrose’s praise for the personal vocation of the seasoned widow recognized her accumulated experience and her value to the community. Fortified with examples of numerous Roman matrons who managed their households and affairs with dignity and distinction after the deaths of their spouses, Ambrose promoted an optimistic view of widowhood for such women. Such encouragement recognized the wealth and experience that a pious widow could bring to (or withhold from) the church. “The widow,” Ambrose wrote, “has this excellent recommendation, that while she mourns a husband, she also weeps for the world, and the redeeming tears are ready, which shed for the dead will benefit the living.”95 Like Tertullian, Ambrose saw the widows of his congregation as a special rank of teachers, capable of Christianizing the community through some of the same obligations and motivations as traditional Roman matrons and univirae. Unlike Tertullian, however, whose optimistic expectations were that all members of the community would eventually accede to chastity and service to the church in old age, Ambrose saw his widows as a special subset of Christians within the community, as the trainers of the church’s spiritual athletes: virgins. In the hands of Jerome and Augustine, the valuation of married, widowed, and virginal chastity received still more explicit treatment, as these theologians sharpened their rhetorical skills by pursuing the exact spiritual gains of widowhood as measured against perfect chastity on the one hand, and the problematic and compromised marital state on the other. Je rome  Jerome (347–420) distinguished virginity as the standard

against which all other efforts at holiness were measured. In this calculation, the vocation of widowhood was clearly second best to virginity, and the prime role for widows in the church was a sustaining one: widows could produce virgins and edify others by their example. This role, however, did not protect widows under Jerome’s counsel from 94. Ibid., 4.25, p. 255. 95. “Habet igitur vidua bonam commendationis materiam, ut dum virum luget, fleat saeculum: ac in promptu sine lacrymae redemptrices, dum impenduntur mortuis, viventibus profuturae.” De viduis, 6.36, p. 258; trans. De Romestin, 397.

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strict scrutiny and suspicion of weakness in fulfilling their vocation. At the same time, Jerome, like Ambrose, recognized the importance of cultivating a community of prosperous widows who put themselves and their wealth at the service of the church. He praised the examples of women such as Paula and Marcella, as discussed above, to commend the devotion of holy lay women. Certainly no mortal spouse or heir gained through remarriage, Jerome argued, could compare to the value of a widow dedicated to Christ. He assured the widow Furia that although “your family will grieve, the angels will give you their congratulations.”96 Jerome’s praise of widowhood, however, always involved a warning against the many dangers that plagued widows, including the temptation to backslide and the damaging rumors that arose through ill-considered conduct.97 Jerome established his opinions on chaste widowhood in his treatises and voluminous correspondence with Christian women. In his treatise Adversus Jovinianum (393), Jerome attacked the accused heretic Jovinian’s assertions that marriage was a divine gift and that married women were equal in merit to virgins. Jerome’s epistle to Furia (written in 394, subtitled Ad Furiam de viduitate servanda) was an extensive, practical treatise of direction for a recent widow. His extended correspondence with Paula and her daughters, including a funeral encomium sent to her virgin daughter Eustochium, as well as several other letters of direction to widows (both to actual acquaintances and other, probably hypothetical widows not mentioned by name) suggested a wide circle of female followers for whom widowhood, and its spiritual implications, was a personally relevant issue. These texts established Jerome’s perception of widowhood as a uniquely female calling. Though he wrote several letters of consolation to widowers, the states of perfect virginity, marriage, and widowhood in Jerome’s thought always referred to women; no comparable scheme for male celibate spirituality emerged from Jerome’s correspondence with men. 96. “Lugebit familia, sed angeli gratulabuntur.” Ad Furiam, Epistle 54.4, CSEL 54:469; in Select Letters of St. Jerome, ed. and trans. F. A. Wright, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933), 235. 97. In 384 Jerome’s enemies accused him of improper relations with his widowed friend and patron Paula, against which charges he defended himself in his letter to another virgin confidante, Asella, the sister of Marcella (Epistle 45.1–5).



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In Book I of his treatise against Jovinian, Jerome established an extremely influential expression of a tripartite hierarchy of virgins, widows, and wives as representing three groups of reapers who respectively harvested the centesimus et sexagesimus et tricesimus fructus (the hundred-, sixty-, and thirtyfold fruit). The metaphor was borrowed from a pseudo-Cyprian treatise that originally compared the parable of the sower and the fruitfulness of his scattered seeds to the spiritual merits reaped by martyrs, the sexually continent, and those leading chaste lives within marriage.98 Arguing against Jovinian’s assertion that virgins, widows and married people enjoyed equal merit within the church, Jerome was the first to apply this metaphor to the three states of virginity, widowhood, and marriage. Rejecting Jovinian’s notion that mere chaste intention, rather than behavior, generated spiritual reward, Jerome associated different degrees of Christian chastity with respective merits in heaven. Although Jerome employed many other rhetorical interpretations from the Old and New Testament to illustrate different levels of commitment to the chaste ideal, his model of the three respective rewards was the formulation that appeared most often in discussions of widowhood in late antiquity and the Middle Ages: “Although the hundred-fold, the sixty-fold, and the thirty-fold spring from one earth, and from one sowing, yet there is a great difference in respect of number.”99 Jerome’s categories did not exclude celibate men and widowers from the benefits of chastity, but they focused the theological debate primarily on women, particularly widows and virgins (viduae and virgines), as married people (nuptiae) were by definition a unit represented by a male and a female. Perhaps Jerome felt less pressure to justify the role of male celibacy, already firmly established in the hierarchy of monks, presbyters, and once-married bishops, than to clarify the more fluid, less institutionalized options for celibacy available to Christian women. Like other theologians, Jerome exploited the ambiguities in Paul’s 98. Fidel Rädle, “Einige Bemerkungen zur Bewertung der Witwenschaft in der patristischen und frühmittelalterlichen Theologie. Mit ausgewählten Texten,” in Parisse, Veuves et veuvage, 21. Tertullian’s disciple Cyprian lived ca. 200–258, but the treatise De centesima, sexigesima, tricesima is of uncertain origin, and its date of composition is not known. 99. “Centesimus et sexagesimus et tricesimus fructus quamquam de una terra, et de una semente nascatur, tamen multum differt in numero.” Jerome, Adversus Joviniam, 1.3, PL 23:223–24; in Letters and Select Works, trans. Fremantle, 347.

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teachings on widowhood and virginity to rationalize his hierarchy of merit: if marriage was good, virginity (or widowhood) was better; but anything other than virginity was fundamentally inferior and less deserving in spiritual reward. Jerome’s personal preference for extreme asceticism led him to interpret the lesser, albeit licit choice of marriage as an indication of a weak will: The reason why it is better to marry is that it is worse to burn. Let burning lust be absent, and he will not say it is better to marry. The word better always implies a comparison with something worse, not a thing absolutely good and incapable of comparison.100

Like Tertullian, Jerome considered the pursuit of virginity or the avoidance of remarriage as matters of spiritual discipline: the truly committed Christian would not accept the Pauline concession to marriage (or remarriage) as a mere antidote to lust. Jerome co-opted the Apostle’s own words permitting marriage and remarriage as licit alternatives for devoted Christians, reinterpreting Paul’s message to the Corinthians in a way that confirmed Jerome’s own tendency to rank virginity and widowed celibacy far above married chastity: “What do you say, Apostle? . . . You know the meaning of language, or you would not quote Epimenides, Menander, and Aratus. . . . What I want is not a smaller evil, but a thing absolutely good.”101 Like the heretic Jovinian, who reverted to the “vomit” of his heresy, the widow who reverted to the “vomit” of carnal relations by electing the lesser evil of remarriage could legitimately contract a third, fourth, fifth, even an eighth marriage. Such bombastic rhetoric acknowledged a licit theology of marriage while also asserting its inferior status. The widow, freed from the compromised state of marriage, had the power to double her spiritual reward. Jerome selectively rearranged the Apostle’s teachings to support his preferred spiritual order: If more than one husband be allowed, it makes no difference whether he be a second or a third, because there is no longer a question of a single marriage. 100. “Redditque causam, cur dixerit, Si se non continent, nubant. Melius est enim nubere quam uri. Tolle ardorem libidinis, et non dicet, melius est nubere. Melius enim semper ad comparationem deterioris respicit, non ad simplicitatem incomparabilis per se boni.” Adv. Jov., 1.9, pp. 232–33; trans. Fremantle, 352. 101. “Quid ais, Apostole? . . . Nosti sermonum proprietates, quamobrem et de Epimenide, et de Menandro, et de Arato quaedam sumis testimonia. . . . Ego autem non levius malam, sed simplex per se bonum volo.” Adv. Jov., 1.9, p. 233; trans. Fremantle, 352.



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“All things are lawful, but not all things are expedient.” I do not condemn second, nor third, nor, pardon the expression, eighth marriages: I will go still further and say that I welcome even a penitent whoremonger. Things that are equally lawful must be weighed in an even balance.102

Jerome’s assertion that the superiority of celibacy implied an inherent flaw in marriage was by no means universally well received. His vehement preference for chastity cast doubts on the legitimacy of Christian marriage, doubts that Augustine and others would address as too radical. Furthermore, the treatise’s antagonistic message about marriage offended male clergy who had once been married, but subsequently lived celibately.103 Jerome’s scale of spiritual reward for wives, widows, and virgins based on chastity, however, was widely adopted and reiterated in medieval discussions of widowhood and virginity. Having established widowhood as a spiritual rank, Jerome used his correspondence with individual matrons to develop his preferences for how widows should live out their daily lives. He wrote on various occasions to persuade widows not to remarry, to inform them on their duties as pious widows, and to advise them in their dealings with their children and other affairs. As was often the case in late antiquity, the letters were formal tracts and composed for a wider audience as well as the intended recipients. Jerome even cross-referenced himself, directing female readers both to his circulating treatise against Jovinian and to his other personal letters. When the widow Hedibia consulted Jerome for guidance in living a widowed existence and on interpreting biblical texts, he suggested she read his letters to Furia and Salvina for an exposition on the pious widow’s life.104 This personal correspondence allowed Jerome to enumerate the practices of secular Roman society as a threat to the Christian project of celibacy. Of the newly widowed Geruchia, Jerome wrote: In resolving not to marry again she does but a duty to her family; and that, while she will deserve no praise for fulfilling it, she will be justly blamed if she fails 102. “Omnia licet, sed non omnia expediunt. Non damno digamos, imo nec trigamos, et si dici potest, octogamos: plus aliquid inferam, etiam scortatorem recipio poenitentiam. Quidquid aequaliter licet, aequali lance pensandum est.” Adv. Jov., 1.15, p. 245; trans. Fremantle, 359. 103. Brown, Body and Society, 378 104. “Quomodo autem uidua uiuere debeat, breui sermone apostolus conprehendit dicens: quae in deliciis est, uiuens mortua est et nos in duobus libellis, quos ad Furiam et Saluinam scripsimus, plenius dictum putamus.” Ad Hedybiam, Epistle 120.1, CSEL 56:471.

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to do so. . . . But why do I speak as to one who wavers when I hear that Geruchia seeks the church’s protection against the many suitors whom she meets in the palace? For the devil inflames men to vie with one another in proving the chastity of our beloved widow; and rank and beauty, youth and riches cause her to be sought after by all. But the greater the assaults that are made upon her continence, the greater will be the rewards that will follow her victory.105

By encouraging even young widows to renounce remarriage, Jerome was the most audacious critic among the fourth-century writers on widowhood concerning the Apostle’s unwillingness to command chastity. Jerome’s denigration of marriage echoed Roman satirists’ images of noisy, crying children, adulterous husbands, and other household cares. For Jerome, marriage was useful only for producing virgins for the church.106 Weighing the safer “concession” of marriage against the quest for virginity and its attendant risks of backsliding, Jerome asserted that the proper course of action for young widows was to become the vere vidua typically associated with older matrons. Young widows, however, faced the special dangers of male flirtation and seduction. Rather than succumb to their weakness and accept the concession of marriage, younger widows must work all the harder to ensure that they did not fall into the dangerous trap of fornication.107 Of all the patristic authors, Jerome, in his letters, provided perhaps the most complete set of instructions for widows’ conduct. Liberated from marriage, the widow’s first responsibility was to refrain from excess, in all its potential forms. According to Jerome, the human body itself generated a corrosive, contaminating sexual “heat” that was aggravated by external phenomena such as temptation by the opposite sex, rich foods, and a luxurious and idle life.108 In the pursuit of chastity, the 105. “Haec breui sermone perstrinxi, ut ostendam adulescentulam meam non praestare monogamiam generi suo sed reddere nec tam laudandam esse, si tribuat, quam omnibus exsecrandam, si negare tempauerit. . . . Sed quid ego quasi ad retractantem loquor, cum audiam eam multos palatii procos ecclesiae uitare praesidio, quos certatim diabolus inflammat, ut uiduae nostrae castitatem probet, quam et nobilitas et forma et aetas et opes faciunt cunctis appetibiliem, ut, quanto plura sunt, quae inpugnant pudicitiam, tanto uictricis maiora sint praemia?” Ad Geruchiam, Epistle 123.3, CSEL 56:74; in Letters and Select Works, trans. Fremantle, 230. 106. Elizabeth Clark, “Adam’s Only Companion: Augustine and the Early Christian Debate Over Marriage,” in The Olde Daunce: Love, Friendship, Sex, and Marriage in the Medieval World, ed. Robert R Edwards and Stephen Spector (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 18. 107. Jerome, Ad Geruchiam, 123.3–4. 108. Brown, Body and Society, 376.



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power of the recalcitrant body could be tamed, but not fully overcome. He instructed Furia, “Where there is holiness and chastity, there also is frugality.”109 Frugality in speech, diet, dress, and sexual appetite were all expressions of the self-renunciation and self-discipline that underpinned Jerome’s concept of the Christian celibate. Jerome warned the young widows Furia and Salvina that they must guard themselves vigilantly against sin and the temptations of youth and wealth, reminding them of Paul’s teaching that a widow who was self-indulgent was dead even while she lived. Even the Apostle, Jerome noted, brought his body under subjection lest he be tested, so who should not be afraid of succumbing to sin?110 He instructed Salvina that she should not eat meat, wear fine attire, or sleep in a comfortable bed; her whole aspect must be of one who is dead to the world and its pleasures.111 Jerome’s letters to young widows described in far more detail the regimen a widowed woman should follow with respect to conduct and habits than what the content of her prayer or the nature of her spirituality should be. For Jerome, the two were perhaps indistinguishable, for a widow’s conduct generated and sustained her chastity: A widow who has no husband to please, and in the apostle’s words is a widow in deed, needs nothing but perseverance. She still remembers the pleasures of the past, she knows the delights that she has lost, and she must quench the fire of the devil’s shafts with the cold streams of fast and vigil. Either we speak as we dress, or dress as we speak. Why do we profess one thing and display another? The tongue talks of chastity, but the whole body reveals incontinence.112

The rules Jerome advised for widows’ conduct expressed both an interior and an exterior conversion to the celibate life. Internal spiritual exercises hardened the widow’s self-discipline, much as Tertullian’s athletic metaphor described his ideally chaste Christians who ran the 109. “Ubi pudicitia et sanctitas, ibi frugalitas est.” Ad Furiam, 54.5, CSEL 54:470; in Select Letters, trans. Wright, 234–35. 110. Jerome, Ad Furiam, 54.7–8; idem, Ad Salvinam, Epistle 79.7, CSEL 55:95. 111. Ad Salviniam, 79.7. 112. “Vidua, quae marito placere desivit et iuxta apostolum vere vidua est, nihil habet necessarium nisi perseverantiam. Meminit pristinae voluptatis, scit, quid amiserit, quo delectata sit: ardentes diaboli sagittae ieiuniorum et vigilarium frigore restinguendae sunt. Aut loquendum nobis est, ut vestiti sumus, aut vestiendum, ut loquimur. Quid aliud pollicemur et aliud ostendimus? Lingua personat castitatem et totum corpus praefert inpudicitiam.” Ad Furiam, 54.7, p. 240; in Select Letters, trans. Wright, 241.

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spiritual race in order to win its ultimate heavenly prize. For Jerome, however, this rigorous behavior served the external purpose of protecting the woman from the damaging effects of gossip. In his letter to Furia, Jerome warned her that the very frugality that distinguished a widow created dissatisfaction among servants, who preferred the comforts of a luxurious household, and who would out of spite take advantage of any occasion to defame their mistress.113 Jerome himself was aware of the potential for scandal in rumors that circulated among his many opponents, largely based on his intimate associations with holy women, and was sensitive to any suggestion of misconduct with servants or others associated with their households.114 Jerome was painfully attentive to the many potential scandals a holy woman under his direction could invite by laxness or misconduct. He frequently reassured his correspondents that he did not doubt their steadfastness in their vocation when he issued stern warnings about the dangers of excess and rumor, explaining rather that “it is only a kindness to admonish one whose youth and opulence may lead her into temptation.”115 His letter to “a mother and daughter in Gaul,” occasioned by a plea from an unnamed monk who urged Jerome to advise the monk’s mother and sister, illustrates such concerns. The two women were reputedly professed to chastity, but provoked scandal because they kept separate households, each with resident clerics, generating fears of the practice of syneisaktism (illicit cohabitation with priests). Jerome admonished the two women sharply on several points, urging them to reconcile with each other and merge their households, or at the least, to dismiss the clerics from their respective homes. Jerome reserved his sharpest criticism for the virgin daughter. Whereas the widowed mother’s faults might lie in a taste for luxury, at least she performed the essential task of cultivating her daughter’s virginity; the daughter, Jerome alleged, was doubtless driven by the much more reprehensible desire for a husband.116 Whether the specific pretext of the letter was genuine, or rather a construction designed to address more general criticisms facing 113. Ad Furiam, 54.4. 114. Ad Salvinam, 79.8. 115. “Absit, ut sinistrum quippiam mihi de te suspicari liceat, sed ex abundanti lubricam aetatem monuisse pietatis est.” Ad Salvinam, 79.7, CSEL 54:95; trans. Wright, 166. 116. Ad Matrem et Filiam in Gallis, Epistle 117.3–11, CSEL 55:215–19.



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the ascetic women of Jerome’s circle, his response highlighted the many practical obstacles to female asceticism in a domestic setting. Jerome himself feared criticism as male advisor to a cohort of female followers, which perhaps accounts in part for his stringency toward the women he counseled. In any case Jerome shaped the Christian ideal of widowhood through his pessimism about women’s ability to control their bodies, particularly once those bodies had known carnal pleasures. His articulation of the thirty-, sixty-, and one hundredfold fruits was critically important for shaping medieval thinking about widows, offering a model of Christian society and an identification of widows within it that influenced many other genres of writing about widows, including ad status preaching, hagiography, and liturgy. In contrast to Tertullian’s spiritual “gerontocracy” and Ambrose’s recognition of the mature widow’s experience, Jerome’s view of widowhood was troubled by a pessimism concerning the maintenance of female self-discipline in a secular context. Medieval redactions of Jerome’s advice to widows compressed the nuances of his correspondence, reiterating his hierarchical schema of relative merits, and inscribing his pessimism into reflections on widowhood that likewise articulated doubts concerning the widow’s capabilities for a secular expression of proposed continence. August ine  Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (354–430), was the most influential of patristic authors for the Middle Ages; his treatises on the themes of marriage, widowhood, and virginity, together with Jerome’s letters, were the main sources that medieval authors consulted when writing on pious widowhood. Augustine directed his treatise “On the Good of Widowhood” (De bono viduitatis, composed ca. 414) to the Roman matron Juliana, who had fled to Carthage following the sack of Rome in 410. Upon learning that her husband Olybrius had died, Juliana joined a community of pious women in Carthage, together with her mother-in-law, Proba, and followed Proba’s example in professing a vow of widowed continence. Augustine wrote to Juliana to congratulate her on her daughter Demetrias’s consecration as a perpetual virgin and to answer Juliana’s request for advice on living as a chaste widow.117 117. Sr. M. Clement Eagan, introduction to De bono viduitatis, in Augustine, Saint Augustine: Treatises, Fathers of the Church 14 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1965), 268–71.

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Augustine’s letter engaged the ongoing debates concerning asceticism and celibacy: his treatise addressed the heresies of Tertullian as well as controversies between Jerome and Jovinian on marriage. Augustine was also very interested in discrediting the Pelagian heresy, which he feared might infect Juliana’s household.118 Augustine’s view on marriage was softer than Jerome’s: convinced that marriage was inherently good, he recoiled from Jerome’s hostile, invective-laden denigration of marriage on the one hand, while still asserting the superiority of virginity and continence over other states, in opposition to Jovinian.119 Augustine divided his treatise to Juliana in two parts, “instruction” and “exhortation.” In the instructive mode, Augustine stressed that he wanted to provide direction for both Juliana in her widowhood and for other members of her circle more generally concerning female chastity. Like Jerome, Augustine situated his teachings on widowhood within a discussion of the merits of virginity and marriage (widows were more blessed than wives, and less blessed than virgins). Augustine promoted a formal vow as an important step in distinguishing a woman who was proposing chastity from a woman who was simply unmarried; he commended Juliana on her daughter Demetrias’s vow and urged Juliana to take a similar vow to consecrate her widowhood.120 For Augustine, a discussion of virginity, widowhood, and marriage required a clear understanding of how each state related to the others.121 He dedicated the first part of his letter to a meticulous interpretation of the goods of each state, with the conclusion that continence should be preferred to marriage, and holy virginity to continence in widowhood. . . . No marriage that is a valid marriage and not an adulterous union should be condemned to enhance the merit of our state or that of our friends.122

Augustine’s desire to protect the state of matrimony within contemporary discussions of sexual renunciation made his approach to widow118. Ibid., 272. 119. Clark suggests Augustine was also attempting to distance himself from his own Manichean leanings prior to his conversion (Clark, “Adam’s Only Companion,” in Edwards and Spector, The Olde Daunce, 18–20). 120. De bono viduitatis, 19, PL 40:445–46. 121. Ibid., chap. 4, p. 433; chap. 15, p. 442. 122. “Continentiam conjugio praeponamus, sanctam vero virgini etiam continentiae viduali; et ne aliquas nuptias, quae tamen non adulteria, sed nuptiae sunt, cujuslibet nostrorumve propositi laude damnemus.” De bono viduitatis, chap. 15, p. 442; in Treatises, trans. Eagan, 301–2.



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hood both less dogmatic and more complex than Jerome’s mathematical formula of spiritual merit. Augustine’s vision of female chastity still assumed a triune formulation, perhaps because Jerome’s more mechanistic scheme had gained a firm purchase in the rhetoric on the issue. Because Augustine linked the three states of marriage, widowhood, and virginity in his writing, medieval readers often overlooked the subtle differences between Augustine’s discourse of “blessedness” with respect to the three states and Jerome’s use of the thirty-, sixty-, and one hundredfold fruit paradigm. Even in his efforts to mitigate Jerome’s harsher asceticism and more negative views toward marriage, Augustine still reinforced the comparative assessment of marriage, widowhood, and virginity. While he refrained from using Jerome’s exact wording, Augustine invoked the metaphor of the various merits or “fruits” for all three states to make the point that virgins derive undue pride from their status; humility and obedience marked the virgin who truly deserved the one-hundredfold fruit as her spiritual reward.123 Augustine demonstrated the pedantic nature of the comparative model by complicating the three categories, identifying a hierarchy of martyrs, who earned the hundredfold fruit, continents, who earned sixtyfold, and the married, who earned thirtyfold, then further compounded these by suggesting that these two sets of rankings could be intertwined; for example, there could be married martyrs (who earned the sixtyfold fruit). Augustine then suggested that a simpler principle for understanding spiritual merit was Paul’s advice to “emulate the better gifts” (1 Cor 12:31). While differences among the various states existed, their spiritual merits ultimately were not arranged by God in such a way that humans could presume to name them.124 Whereas Jerome preferred a categorical hierarchy of merits, Augustine downplayed the inherent rivalry among different kinds of celibates within the Ecclesia. In this respect, both Augustine and Ambrose took a more subtle approach; as Ambrose put it, “we do not set forth one as to exclude others.”125 Despite Augustine’s reservations, however, he did engage this formula, and the medieval authors who cited him accepted 123. De virginitate, chap. 46, PL 40:423. 124. Ibid. 125. “Non enim aliam praedicamus ut excludamus alias.” Ambrose, De viduis, 4.23, PL 16:255; in Select Works and Letters, trans. De Romestin, 395.

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this tripartite arrangement as part of his definition of widowhood and other forms of female chastity. Despite Augustine’s attempt to destabilize these categories by identifying a celibate’s personal virtue as an essential component of the merit she earned, medieval readers understood Augustine’s engagement with Jerome’s strict tripartite model as doctrine, and it prevailed in medieval interpretations of Augustine’s views on female chastity.

Resonant Themes from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages: Remarriage, Children, and Vows of Chastity The church fathers’ pious exhortations to widowed chastity consistently addressed the widow in the moment of decision to forsake secular expectations and embrace celibacy through a formal profession. Thus authors catalogued the problems that arose at the moment a woman was widowed, dismissing each in turn as they led the widow to permanently convert from a secular status to a life of consecrated celibacy. They reassured women that professed widowhood freed them from other social worries and obligations, and scolded them for using material concerns as an excuse to remarry.126 Jerome’s typically vitriolic description of the widow’s choice left little to the imagination: The trials of marriage you have learned in the married state: you have been surfeited to nausea as though with the flesh of quails. Your mouth has tasted the bitterest of gall, you have voided the sour unwholesome food, you have relieved a heaving stomach. Why would you put into it again something which has already proved harmful to you? The dog turned to his vomit again and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire.127

Jerome concluded that only weakness and worldly desire would draw a widow back to the marriage bed: he harshly commanded Furia to “confess her vileness,” that her manufactured excuses concerning re126. For example, Tertullian, De exhortatione castitatis, 1.5, Augustine, De bono viduitatis, chap. 19, p. 445, Ambrose, De vidius, 1.1 and 9.35–37. 127. “Quid angustiarum habeant nuptiae, didicisti in ipsis nuptiis et quasi coturnicum carnibus usque ad nausiam saturata es. Amarissam choleram tuae sensere fauces, egessisti ascetentes et morbidos cibos, revelasti aestuantem stomachum: quid vis rursus ingerere, quod tibi noxium fuit? Canis revertens ad vomitum suum et sus ad volutabrum luti.” Ad Furiam, 54.5, pp. 232–33; trans. Wright, 233.



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marriage merely shrouded her desire to have sex again, establishing a duality between widows with genuinely pious intentions and those who used their situation as a cover for sinful ones, a theme that was often repeated in medieval glosses and sermons.128 The procreation and support of children was also, in patristic opinion, an argument in favor of consecrated widowhood. Tertullian claimed that widows need not seek a second marriage in order to procreate, as children will be a handicap to their parents at the Last Day, whereas childless widows “will leap forth lightly, easily able to endure any distress or persecution, with none of the heavy baggage of marriage in their wombs or at their breasts.”129 Ambrose particularly discouraged remarriage for widows with children of a marriageable age, considering it unseemly that parent and child would simultaneously be on the marriage market; Jerome also denounced women who privileged the continuance of the family line over a chaste vocation.130 Patristic authors asserted that chaste widows were in fact the more dutiful mothers for not seeking a new father for their children, because in avoiding remarriage, they protected the children (and their inheritance) from tyrannical stepfathers and greedy new siblings.131 The note of pragmatism in their advice to widows also remained common wisdom in the Middle Ages, and suggests where Christian theological interpretations conveniently overlapped with secular concerns about the preservation of patrimony and male honor. For example, in late medieval Florence, where inheritance patterns were based on Roman law, the widow who remarried was considered a “cruel mother” who was more interested in regaining the marriage bed with her new husband than in protecting the patrimony of her children.132 Paul included raising and educating children as part of the duty of the vere vidua, and based on that command together with the objections to remarriage, patristic authors praised widows for their maternal and 128. Ad Furiam, 54.16, pp. 256–57; trans. Wright, 257. 129. “Ad primam angeli tubam expeditiae prosilient, quamcunque pressuram persecutionemque libere perferent, nulla in utero, nulla in uberibus aestuante sarcina nuptiarum.” Tertullian, De exhortatione castitatis, 1.5, ACW 13:379; in Treatises on Marriage, trans. Le Saint, 17. 130. Ambrose, De viduis, 9.59; Jerome, Ad Furiam, 54.4. 131. Ambrose, De viduis, 15.88; Jerome, Ad Furiam, 54.15. 132. See Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “La mere cruelle: Maternité, veuvage, et dot,” in La maison et le nom: Stratégies et rituels dans l’Italie de la Renaissance (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1990); see also a fuller discussion of this topic in chapter 6, below.

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nurturing roles, even as they exhorted them to focus on spiritual rather than worldly affairs. Ambrose wrote that the widow, through loving her children and taking care of her parents, fulfilled the Apostle’s charge that she educate her children; in Ambrose’s view, such virtue reinforced the woman’s status as a true widow deserving of honor.133 The conduct of the vere vidua was considered a distinctive way of life that included permanent commitment to chastity, fasting, prayer, study of Scripture, meditation, almsgiving, and good works.134 Augustine asked that this way of life be solemnized by a vow, as he urged in his treatise to Juliana: “Unmarried women who make a vow of chastity to God surrender the hope which enkindles love. Concupiscence is more easily held in check when it is enkindled by no expectation.”135 In vowing chastity, a woman confirmed her status as a true widow in perpetuity. Although Augustine did not condemn remarriage for an unconsecrated widow, he was unyielding in his condemnation of widows who broke their vows and remarried.136 Assuming a woman kept her vow, however, she became a special member of the community, marked forever by the proposition of permanent chastity.

Pious Examples: Widows in the Bible Together with Paul’s thoughts about widows’ chastity, examples of biblical widows, figures who embraced perpetual chastity and embodied the qualities of true widowhood, were important touchstones for both late antique and medieval authors writing for and about widowhood. The most important of these figures was the New Testament widow Anna, whose example exerted an influence on the discourse on widowhood quite disproportionate to the brevity of her appearance in Luke’s Gospel (2:36–38). Anna was a prophetess and a widow “of great age, having lived with her husband seven years from her virginity, and as a widow until she was eighty-four,” and “did not depart from the temple, wor133. Ambrose, De viduis, 2.7. 134. Augustine, De bono viduitatis, chap. 16; Ambrose, De viduis, chap. 9. 135. “Quae autem innuptarum castitatem Deo vovent, ipsam spem subtrahunt, quae fomes amoris est. Unde facilius concupiscentia refrenatur, quae nulla exspectatione succenditur.” De bono viduitatis, chap. 20, p. 447, in Treatises, trans. Eagan, 313. 136. De bono viduitatis, chap. 9.



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shipping with fasting and prayer night and day”; her prophetic powers were confirmed when she recognized Christ as the Messiah.137 Exegetes soon recognized this figure’s similarities to the description of the vere vidua in 1 Timothy. Tertullian, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine all identified Anna as an example to chaste widows of their own day.138 In Augustine’s instructional letter to the consecrated widow Proba, he likened his correspondent to both Anna and the vere vidua of 1Timothy through Proba’s prayers, noting that “what could be more fitting for your widowhood than to persevere in prayer day and night, according to the advice of the Apostle?” Later in the same letter, Augustine united the two verses again, emphasizing how Anna’s constant prayer and presence in the temple qualified her as a vere vidua.139 Originally, in Luke’s Gospel, Anna and Simeon’s recognition of the infant Jesus in the Temple represented a general pattern of developing the Messiah’s relationship to long-standing Jewish institutions.140 In the hands of Patristic authors, Anna’s connection to the Temple was also significant, but functioned to define the widow and differentiate consecrated widowhood from other varieties of female chastity: Anna was the loyal spouse who reverted to chaste perseverance and prayer in the Temple upon her husband’s death, and as a result was endowed with the gift of prophecy, particularly the ability to recognize the infant Christ as the Messiah. Jerome praised the chaste widow Marcella as an example to Furia, demonstrating the spiritual gifts of her widowhood through a series of parallels between the biblical prophetess and the Roman matron: just as Anna celebrated the infant Christ, Marcella proclaimed his triumphs with the “nations of the redeemed.”141 137. See Vulgate, Lk 2:36–38: “Et erat Anna prophetissa filia Phanuhel de tribu Aser. Haec processerat in diebus multis et vixerat cum viro suo annis septem a virginitate sua. Et haec vidua usque ad annos octoginta quattuor quae non discedebat de templo ieiuniis et obsecrationis serviens nocte ac die. Et haec ipsa hora superveniens confitebatur Domino et loquebatur de illo omnibus qui expectabant redemptionem Hierusalem.” 138. Tertullian, De monogamia, chap. 86; Ambrose, De vidua, chap. 4, Jerome, Ad Furiam, chap. 16, Augustine, De bono viduitatis, chap. 7. 139. “Quod enim maius oportuit esse negotium uiduitatis tuae quam persistere in orationibus nocte ac die secundum apostoli admonitionem.” Augustine, Ad Probam, Epistle 130.1, Epistulae, CC 44:40; in St. Augustine: Letters, Vol. I, trans. Wilfrid Parsons (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1951), 376. See also Ad Probam, 130.15, p. 74. 140. Ben Witherington, Women and the Genesis of Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 208. 141. “Illa [Anna] vagientem candebat; ista [Marcella] praedicat triumphantem; illa loquebatur

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The fathers, and their medieval interpreters, thus understood Anna as a figure representing the nature and duties of widowhood. Characterized by prayer and asceticism, Anna embodied a middle place between worldly wives and consecrated virgins in the tripartite language of female chastity. Ambrose used Anna to represent the ideal of widowhood in a schema in which Mary represented virginity, and the Old Testament wife Susanna, marriage; Augustine saw the chaste widow Anna as more blessed than the remarried widow Ruth.142 Augustine also connected Mary and Anna as symbols, respectively, of virginity and of widowhood “because [Anna] merited the privilege of being a prophetess of Christ . . . We may believe that the same spirit which enabled her to recognize the Holy Infant also enabled her to see that Christ was to be born of a virgin.”143 He then applied this connection in praise of the vowed widow Juliana: “As a widow consecrated to Christ, you have merited the privilege of seeing your daughter a virgin consecrated to Christ. While you pray after the example of Anna, she follows the example of Mary.”144 Through such associations, Anna came to represent widowhood itself; she was the vidua Christi who hoped in God and fulfilled the Apostle’s commandments.145 She demonstrated how the widowed state yielded spiritual gifts during one’s lifetime and the sixtyfold fruit in heaven. Anna’s constant prayer and fasting in the temple were quoted often in medieval writings and sermons about widows, and the invocation of her example became part of the early medieval liturgy for consecrating widows. Judith (Jdt 8) also figured prominently in the fathers’ examples and in the pastoral texts of the Middle Ages. Judith, a wise and beautiful Hebrew widow, entered the enemy Assyrian camp and claimed de eo omnibus, qui expectabant redemptionem Heirusalem, haec cum redemptis gentibus clamitat.” Ad Furiam, 54.18, p. 262; trans. Wright, 263. 142. Ambrose, De viduis, 4.21; Augustine, De bono viduitatis, chap. 7, p. 436. 143. “Quia et prophetissa Christi esse meruit; quam credendum est . . . eo Spiritu praevidisse Christum ex virgine proxime esse venturum, quo potuit agnoscere et parvulum.” Augustine, De bono viduitatis, chap. 7, p. 436; trans. Eagan, 289. Augustine repeats the phrase in his anti-Pelagian writings; see Elizabeth Ann Clark, Saint Augustine on Marriage and Sexuality (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 80. 144. “Tantumque vidua merereris vidua Christi ut filiam quoque videres virginem Christi: dum enim tu oras sicut Anna, facta est ille quod Maria.” Augustine, De bono viduitatis, chap. 16, p. 442; trans. Eagan, 303. 145. Augustine used this phrase in his letter to Proba, urging her to pray as a widow of Christ (Ad Probam, 130.15).



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that she had defected from her people in order to lead Holofernes, the Assyrian general, to the victorious capture of Jerusalem. Although Judith pretended to desire Holofernes, she had in fact spent the time in Holofernes’s camp in sober preparation for this confrontation. She prayed, fasted, and attired herself modestly. Only when she set out to seduce Holofernes (in order to assassinate him and secure victory for the Israelites) did Judith dress in the luxurious clothing and jewelry she had once worn as a married woman. For patristic authors, Judith was an inspiration to widows because of her bravery and sobriety. She usefully articulated the distinctions between the states of wife and widow through the symbolism of the change of her dress (vestem mutavit) as she moved from wife to widow, and back to pseudo-wife as Holofernes’s seducer.146 As a widow, Judith adopted a mourning dress and a simple life, but her exploits against Holofernes showed that she could utilize married clothing, with its implied connubial sexuality, for a noble purpose and then relinquish it without having violated her widowed chastity. Ambrose admired Judith’s ability to separate her carnal identity from her true, widowed self, for a heroic purpose.147 Judith also embodied Jerome’s celebration of sobriety and self-abnegation in widowhood. In recommending her as an example to Furia, Jerome marveled that “a woman conquers men, chastity beheads lust, and then suddenly changing her dress she returns again to her victorious squalor, a squalor finer than all the pomp of this world.”148 A third widow who was frequently mentioned by patristic and medieval authors was the nameless woman of Sarepta (Zarephath) who succored the prophet Elijah, who, in return for her kindness, raised her son from the dead (1 Kgs 17:8–18). The Sarepta widow’s exemplary value resided in her willingness to give away the last of her grain and oil to feed the prophet, as well as her being chosen to receive Elijah and the miracle of her son’s restoration. Ambrose used this theme to introduce the virtues that distinguished true widowhood, especially prophecy, ex146. Ambrose, De viduis, 7.39–42; cf. Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam, 3.18, PL 15:1596. 147. Ambrose, De viduis, chap. 7. See also Virginia Burrus’s comment on Ambrose’s interpretation of Judith in “Equipped for Victory,” 273–75. 148. “Vincit viros femina et castitas truncat libidem habituque repente mutato ad victrices sordes redit omnibus saeculi cultibus mundiores.” Ad Furiam, 54.16, pp. 260–61; trans. Wright, 261.

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claiming that “an angel is sent to the Virgin, a prophet to the widow,” and he praised, as Jerome also did, the Sarepta widow’s hospitality—one of the important duties of widows, according to Paul.149 In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’ raising of the son of the widow of Nain (Lk 7:11–17) recalled Elijah’s visitation of the widow, and foreshadowed Peter’s resurrection of the widow Tabitha in Acts (9:39), connecting the two New Testament volumes with each other and with the Old Testament legacy. In contrast to the aforementioned examples of specific, named women such as Anna and Judith, these examples represented a collective entity of good and deserving widows in need of protection. The most salient example was the widow of the two mites, who gave those two coins, the sum total of her wealth, to the church, in contrast to the rich scribes who made a show of piety but in truth “devoured the houses of widows” (Luke 20:45, 21:2–4). Widows and orphans were also portrayed as helpless and vulnerable persons (in the discourse of medieval canon law, miserabiles personae) who earned favor and miracles through their humility, such as the widows whose sons were raised from the dead, or who found mercy from the judge as she pled a legal case (Luke 7:12, Luke 18:3–5). Such passages of Scripture, often glossed as a reminder to the clergy to treat widows with charity and mercy, did not necessarily refer to “true widows” in the Pauline sense, but contributed to the image of the widow who was humble, God-fearing, and deserving of church protection, even from its own clerics, as the verse from Luke (which also appeared in the gospel of Mark, 12:40) suggested. In this context, the church itself, and all its members, could be considered “one widow” because, bereft of worldly help, their sole course of spiritual action was to place their hope only in God.150

Conclusion Consecrated widowhood was profoundly affected by controversies concerning sexual asceticism, which created debate about the nature of marriage and sexual renunciation; patristic thinking on widowhood was fundamentally shaped as a response to contemporary theologians’ 149. Ambrose, De viduis, 1.1, p. 247; trans. De Romestin, 391; Jerome, Ad Furiam, 54.16. 150. “Ergo tota ecclesia una vidua est.” Augustine, Ennaratio in Psalmo 131, PL 37:1726.



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assertions about marriage and female celibacy. Unlike Tertullian, who measured the virtue of virgins and widows differently and accorded each differing yet complementary functions, the more directly influential theologians Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine assessed widowed chastity based on its relationship to virginal chastity, the “highest pinnacle of Christian virtue.”151 Virgins attained this peak most perfectly; married people could exercise chastity within marriage, but the married state nevertheless distanced them from the chaste ideal. For women, widowhood presented the opportunity to ascend toward this ideal, yet not necessarily as viragos but as wives, mothers, and helpers within the church. These feminized roles formed the core of the fathers’ exhortations to widows to remain single and dedicate the remainder of their lives to chastity, and were repeated throughout the medieval centuries. Caught between an extremely ascetic opponent such as Jerome, who thought that marriage existed only to produce virgins for the church, and a more “permissive” one such as Jovinian, who argued that marriage was a divine gift, scholars such as Augustine struggled to defend marriage as a good against its detractors, without lessening the endorsement of Christian virginity.152 Widowhood, as the middle ground between these two states, was pulled along into the discussion. Institutional memory perhaps contributed to the history of widowhood from late antiquity into the Middle Ages. Widowhood retained traces of its antique roots as an ordo of women who were neither virginal nor clerical but nevertheless had a prescribed role among church leaders. Such women were depicted as maintaining a close physical association with the church, a portrayal that lingered in medieval texts through the often-repeated invocation of Anna, the widow who never left the temple, but that perhaps faded from official practice. The prolific writings that ensued from debates on marriage and celibacy, however, formed new textual traditions that replaced older practices. The corpus of patristic writings on widows anchored widowhood solidly to the institutions of consecrated virginity and marriage; these three states defined not only religious but also social roles for women through the Middle Ages. 151. Brown, Body and Society, 361. 152. Clark, “Adam’s Only Companion,” in Edwards and Spector, The Olde Daunce, 18–19.

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The church fathers urged the widow to find consolation in Christ after her earthly spouse had died, and they enumerated the blessings of widowhood compared to the duties of marriage and childbearing. Whether a widowed woman should remarry was not only a crucial question that determined the future status of a particular woman, but also an issue that set the mood and tone that characterized literature addressed to widows in general. While the perpetual widow Anna and the saintly Paula were the ideal typologies, it was not the longtime widow, but rather the recently widowed woman, standing at the crossroads between a life of celibacy and a return to married life, that generated the greatest interest of patristic authors. It is this crossroads or limus that will be the focus the next chapter, as we examine pious widowhood in early medieval hagiography.

Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy

Chapter 2

The Widow and the Cloister Early Medieval Hagiography In the early Middle Ages, monastic writers incorporated the ideal of the Christian widow into hagiography. They refined and standardized the definitions of widowhood inherited from the patristic period and used images of the vere vidua to demonstrate female involvement in the history of their foundations. Monastic scholars echoed patristic themes concerning widowhood as a transition between marriage and professed celibacy to characterize laywomen’s transition from the secular to the monastic life. Caesarius, Bishop of Arles (470–543) offered an early example of how monastic writers adapted Jerome’s metaphor of the spiritual fruits to describe the various “professions” of the Christian ecclesia on the cusp of the Middle Ages: Now, there are three professions in the holy Catholic Church: there are virgins, widows, and the married. Virgins produce the hundred-fold, widows the sixtyfold, and the married thirty-fold. One bears more, another less, but they are all kept in the heavenly barn and happily enjoy marital bliss.1

Like Ambrose, Caesarius identified Mary as an object of meditation for virgins, Anna for widows, and Susanna for the married.2 Caesarius 1. “Tres enim professiones sunt in sancta ecclesia catholica: sunt virgines, sunt viduae, sunt etiam coniugati. Virgines exhibent centesimum, viduae sexigesimum, coniugati vero trigesimum. Alius quidem exhibet amplius, alius minus; sed omnes in caelesti horreo reconduntur, et aeterna beatitudine feliciter perfruuntur.” Caesarius of Arles, Sermon 6.7, in Sermons au peuple 1–20, ed. Marie-José Delage, SC 175:331–32; in Saint Caesarius of Arles, Sermons, vol. 1, trans. Mary Magdalene Mueller, Fathers of the Church 31 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1956), 43. I follow Caesarius’s editors as accepting this sermon as authentically his, but it shares language with a sermon attributed to St. Augustine (Sermon 303, PL 39:2327). It is possible that Caesarius borrowed this language from Augustine; it is also possible that later readers assumed the sermon to be Augustine’s. Many of Caesarius’s sermons were attributed to Augustine in the Middle Ages, creating confusion about the authorship. Mark Vessey suggests that sometimes Caesarius’s work even replaced authentic Augustinian sermons in the medieval process of textual transmission, because Caesarius’s sermons were shorter and the language simpler. Vessey, A Companion to Augustine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), 435. 2. Cf. Ambrose, De viduis, 4.21.

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78 Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy here borrowed the language of Jerome’s ascetic vision for the church, expressed in the treatise against Jovinian, to describe an ecclesiology according to the merits of celibacy, emphasizing to a lay audience the value of continence. Some scholars have interpreted Caesarius’s interest in addressing the married laity of both sexes (indicated by the term coniugati) to mean that the terms virgines and viduae should also be understood to represent both men and women. Caesarius’s aspirations for a continent laity of both sexes, however, did not mean that his examples to encourage it were devoid of associations relating to gender.3 In the next passage of the sermon, Caesarius explicitly applied these categories to women and described the choice widows faced between emulating the pious widowhood of Anna or lapsing into its opposite: The virgins think of Mary, the widows consider [Anna], and married women reflect on Susanna. . . . Good widows, not voluptuous, loquacious, inquisitive, envious, haughty ones, serve God as blessed [Anna] did by fasting, almsgiving, and prayers, and together with [Anna] are united with the many thousands of widows.4

Caesarius’s use of Jerome’s tripartite categories of virgin, widow, and wife as models of pastoral care suggests the durability of this patristic topos in medieval writing. The language of widowhood also allowed monastic authors to examine expressions of female celibacy within and without the claustral environment, and to incorporate the patronage of significant women into monastic histories. The profession of chaste widowhood effaced widows’ secular pasts, through the holy associations the fathers ascribed to chaste widowhood, and facilitated their transitions into monastic communities. The lives of early medieval widow saints illustrate the process by which hagiographical authors implemented the theological expressions of widowhood expressed in patristic texts to construct saint3. Lisa Bailey, “These Are Not Men: Sex and Drink in the Sermons of Caesarius of Arles,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 15, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 31n33. 4. “Virgines ergo cogitantes Mariam, viduae considerantes Annam, maritatae vero Susannam. . . . Bonae viduae, non deliciosae, non linguosae, non curiosae, non invidae, non superbae, quae ieiuniis eleemosynis et orationibus, sicut beata Anna faciebat, serviunt Deo, cum ipsa sancta Anna sociuntur multis milibus viduarum.” Caesarius, Sermon 6.7, pp. 332–34; trans. Mueller, 43–44. I have altered Mueller’s translation from “St. Anne” to “Anna,” as I believe “Anne” is a mistranslation. There is no indication in the Latin text that Caesarius is referring to Mary’s mother, St. Anne; rather, Caesarius borrows Ambrose’s triad of biblical exemplars for women.

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hood for women who had been married, and whose biographies often retained a reminder of their married state through the presence of their children. In Merovingian saints’ lives, consecrated widowhood demonstrated the saint’s chastity and facilitated her conversion to the monastic life. Merovingian hagiographers depicted their subjects at a remove from their spouse and secular families and closely associated with their monastic ones. Carolingian and Ottonian hagiography, in contrast, incorporated rather than excised the secular pressures of dynastic relationships and family ties, even when authors were writing about Merovingian figures. Relationships between the widow and her external family, the problems inherent in the widow’s secular past, and the widow’s position in her new spiritual community all created tensions that the authors of sacred biographies attempted to resolve. The outcome of these efforts was an increasingly sophisticated articulation of the qualities of the vere vidua, which glorified the saint and highlighted her virtue through an opposition to remarriage and an affirmation of chastity and a monastic vocation. A central anxiety in early medieval hagiographies involved the proper exercise of widowed chastity. Jerome had made clear to medieval readers that widows in charge of their own affairs and lacking the supervision of a husband were a destabilizing force, prone to misbehavior, and vulnerable to scandal, whether through their own weakness or through the malicious gossip of others. In the case of very wealthy or royal widows, the women’s wealth and noble lineage presented further problems, as the political power of these women further contradicted the holy and submissive models that hagiographers desired. Hagiographers, therefore, were challenged to confront these perceived dangers to widows’ sanctity in their writings, while at the same time promoting the virtue and accomplishments of their subjects. Early medieval hagiographers incorporated a language to describe widowed holiness into a tradition that was governed by essentially male monastic ascetic traditions and virginal models of sanctity. The triune arrangement of women’s chastity according to different levels of spiritual reward fostered a “spatial” understanding of widowhood as existing in between virginity and marriage, both literally and figuratively. Widowhood came to be seen as a limus between the world (marriage) and the

80 Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy cloister (virginity). This is evident in the expanding textual role widowhood came to play in the vitae; discussions of the saint’s widowhood came to take up more space in the narrative; hagiographers engaged theological expressions such as the paradigm of the thirty-, sixty-, and hundredfold fruits, and drew comparisons between saintly widows and the biblical exemplars enumerated in patristic writings on widowhood. While textual evidence suggests that hagiographers were establishing for a monastic readership the relationship between the widows in the vitae and patristic interpretations of pious widowhood, it is difficult to assess, especially for the early Middle Ages, the circulation of these texts and their influence on the broader pastoral care of widows in the general lay population. To the extent that hagiography set a popular example, the benefits of chaste widowhood provided important moral lessons for all Christians. Chaste widowhood provided women with an idealized position in the church community second only to consecrated virginity. Though this model conferred a degree of power on women through the dignity and spiritual prowess of chaste widowhood, widowhood had a preferred trajectory: to secure the chaste widow within the walls of the cloister. The monastic orientation of early medieval authors, and perhaps a desire to remove influential women from the political arena of dynastic conflict, resulted in hagiographical models of widows that expressed profound discomfort with the prospect of women preserving their chaste widowhood in the secular world. From the eighth century to the early eleventh century, hagiography and other didactic texts discouraged forms of pious widowhood outside of a monastic environment. Instead, widowed chastity, characterized by charitable works and communal service, provided laywomen an appropriate transition to monastic life, which served as a widow’s retreat and source of protection that freed her from distraction and scandal.

Widowhood, Power, and Vulnerability In religious imagery, the symbolism of the widow as both powerful and vulnerable paralleled a social reality in which the widow’s potential freedom from male control was counterbalanced by the loss of the protection that a spouse could offer. For a wealthy noblewoman who

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controlled her own lands and dowry, widowhood could mean significant personal and political independence and the opportunity to act at her own discretion.5 She could be active as the guardian of her minor children, choose another spouse, or pursue a religious vocation. Especially in the dynastic strife of the early Middle Ages, a widowed queen was a prize for an ambitious warrior, and such women who could be active political players in their own right. So coveted, in fact, was the widowed queen as a marriage partner that in the ninth and tenth centuries, church reformers championed the cause of consecrated widowhood against those who would try to maneuver royal widows into marriage against their will.6 In contrast, widows outside the upper nobility with few independent sources of revenue faced extreme poverty for themselves and their children. Even wealthy noble widows were not always safeguarded by their material advantages and status. For example, Theudechild, the widow of the sixth-century Merovingian king Charibert, offered herself as wife to her brother-in-law, King Guntram. Guntram accepted, but upon her arrival at his court, he stole her treasure and then repudiated her, confining her to a nunnery.7 The absence of a spouse could expose the widowed woman to internecine aggression, plunder of her lands, and the threat to her reputation through rumor. Early medieval sermons and hagiography illuminated both the powerful and vulnerable aspects of the widow to both individual widows and to a broader Christian audience. Like the church fathers, early medieval authors drew on scriptural traditions that stressed the vulnerability of the widowed state. Caesarius of Arles, in his sermons, established the comparison between the Christian widow and the church.8 Thus, in 5. For example, under Burgundian and Alemannic law, a widow was entitled to retain full control of her dowry and morgengabe (bridal gift). As long as she did not remarry, she enjoyed the use of a portion (conventionally a third) of her husband’s land; she also found other sources of wealth in her trousseau and inheritances and in bequests from family members, and she could alienate such wealth at her own will. Merovingian kings also gave Germanic widows legal rights that were equivalent to their Gallo-Roman counterparts, such as recognition of an independent legal identity after the death of a spouse. Suzanne Fonay Wemple, Women in Frankish Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 48–49. 6. Pauline Stafford, Queens, Concubines, and Dowagers: The King’s Wife in the Early Middle Ages (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 49–50. 7. Gregory of Tours, Libri Historiarum X, ed Bruno Krusch, MGH Script. rer. Merov. 1/1:4.26. 8. Caesarius, Sermon 49.1. See also Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 10–13.

82 Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy Caesarius’s view, the vulnerability of a widowed woman represented the community’s relationship to Christ and the abject humility that made all Christians equals before God.9 Bishops’ representations of widows and orphans as needy persons served as a reminder to the Christian laity to be charitable, and to the clergy to be equitable in their dealings with the poor women in their congregations.10 Caesarius characterized widows, along with other disadvantaged figures such as orphans and the poor, as a resonant symbol for the duties of Christian charity. The humility and helplessness of the widow, Caesarius preached, taught Christians to understand humility and goodness and to reject pride.11 The widow’s weakness was, paradoxically, also a source of power. By fulfilling her role humbly and obediently, the widow earned not only protection and respect but also spiritual gifts, such as Anna’s gift of prophecy. Most importantly, the widow, armed with both worldly experience and often with material possessions as well, turned these toward the service of chastity. As exemplified by Judith, who used her sobriety, wit, and chastity to slay the Assyrian general and enemy of the Israelites, Holofernes, the widow’s strongest weapon was her virtue. In part, the need to control widowed women arose from general suspicions about the female nature, suspicions inherent in the legacy of Jerome and other patristic writers, a corpus of works laden with a pessimistic view of women’s ability to control their own sexuality. There were also material powers that women possessed in widowhood, such as wealth and political influence, that challenged male authority. An extreme, monitory example of female power was the story of Fredegund (d. 597), a sixth-century queen of the Franks. Gregory of Tours (d. 594) discussed the history of the colorful queen in his History of the Franks, and his view—admittedly sympathetic to the position of her enemies— was reproduced in numerous subsequent histories.12 Gregory’s depiction of Fredegund, however biased, provided an alarming example of 9. See also Benoît Michel Tuck, “L’image des veuves dans la litterature mediolatine belge,” in Parisse, Veuves et veuvage, 37–56. 10. James Brundage uses the term miserabiles personae to describe the position of widows as disadvantaged persons in medieval canon law; see idem, “Widows as Disadvantaged Persons in Medieval Canon Law” in Mirrer, Upon My Husband’s Death, 193–206. 11. Caesarius, Sermon 49.1–2. 12. For example, Fredegund reappears in Fredegar’s Chronicle, Paul the Deacon’s History of the Langobards, and the chronicles of Regino of Prüm and Sigebert of Gembloux.

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a seemingly pious widow’s potential for social disruption. Fredegund had been a willing accomplice in political murders with her husband Chilperic, and was even suspected of ordering his murder in 584.13 As a widow, she sought protection from her enemies at the Paris cathedral, under the protection of Bishop Ragnemod, and invited her brother-inlaw Guntram to rule in her husband’s place. Gregory commented that despite Fredegund’s turning to the church in a time of crisis, she nevertheless “had no fear of God, in whose house she had sought sanctuary, and she was the prime mover in many outrages.”14 Fredegund was relegated to quasi-exile at her estate of Reuil near Rouen, but her “outrages” were not so easily stalled. Among these were two (unsuccessful) assassination attempts on the life of her widowed sister-in-law and rival Brunhild; when the first of these failed, she tortured the assassin by cutting off his hands and feet. She also ordered the murder of the Bishop of Rouen, Praetextatus, with whom she had quarreled bitterly. The next day, she turned up in Rouen to watch him die.15 Fredegund was an extreme example, and her criminal actions must be understood in the context of the violent struggle for control of the Frankish kingdom. Her transgressions, however, illustrated how female power could go wrong; even the biblical widow Judith’s virtues took a frightening direction when one recalled that her virtue in slaying Holofernes involved a woman fatally turning the tables on male authority.16 For the most part, however, the widow’s autonomy was problematic because of perceptions of female weakness and ignorance. Gregory of Tours, for example, was frustrated by the widow Ingitrude’s attempts to dissolve her daughter’s marriage and persuade her to enter the religious life. Ingitrude’s pious work in maintaining the tomb of St. Martin of Tours and her observation of a miracle at the shrine when she ran out of water to wash the tomb (through the saint’s help she turned jugs of wine 13. Gregory of Tours, Libri Historiarum X, 6.46, pp. 319–20; 7.7, p. 329; see also Stafford, Queens, Concubines, and Dowagers, 96. 14. “Multa quidem ibi vana exercens, non metuebat Deum, in cuius ecclesia petebat subegit.” Libri Historiarum X, 7.15, p. 425; in Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, trans. Lewis Thorpe (London: Penguin, 1974), 399. 15. Libri Historiarum X, 8.20, 8.29, 8.31. 16. See also Mark Griffith, ed., Judith (Exeter: Exeter Medieval Text and Studies, 1997), 80–81; and Margarita Stocker’s monograph, Judith: Sexual Warrior: Women and Power in Western Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998).

84 Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy into water when she added a drop of holy water to the vessels), earned the praise of Gregory of Tours,17 but he criticized her repeated efforts to coerce her married daughter Berthegund to enter the religious life at a convent she had founded near St. Martin’s shrine.18 Gregory’s anecdotes about powerful but misguided widowed matrons illustrate cases in which Ambrose and Jerome’s ideal of pious widowed mothers fostering chastity in their daughters had gone badly wrong.19 Like Augustine’s correspondent Ecdicia, Berthegund had donned the widow’s garb while her husband was still living. Worse, both mother and daughter had exploited the help of a bishop to rebel against a husband’s authority.20 Ingitrude’s liberal interpretation of her own authority as a pious widow elicited concerns about the stability of widows’ vows and the authority of bishops in supervising them. In the hagiography of widowed saints, the bishop’s help facilitated the desires of the holy widow to pursue chastity, but also introduced a strong measure of control. Ingitrude’s excessive willfulness, doctrinal error, and ruthlessness in depriving a legitimately married man of his wife surely reinforced the idea that bishops must carefully oversee wealthy and powerful widows as well as assist the ones in need of protection.

Putting on the Garment of Widowhood: Merovingian Hagiography and the Life of St. Radegund Merovingian theology and hagiography treated widowhood as a flexible symbolic category. In this early period, the social institutions surrounding widowhood were still fluid, and the expression of widowed sanctity had more than one venue. Widowed women could enter a convent, but they could also swear a private vow of chastity and assume a manner of dress that indicated a chaste status.21 Scholars disagree as to the exact 17. Historia Francorum, 5.21. 18. Ibid., 9.33. 19. See Wemple, Women in Frankish Society, 63. 20. See Dyan Elliott, “Dress as Mediator between the Inner and Outer Self: The Pious Matron of the High and Later Middle Ages,” Medieval Studies 53 (1991): 283–84; and Augustine’s letter to Ecdicia (Ad Ecdiciam, Epistle 262), CSEL 57:621–31; see also Historia Francorum, 9.33. 21. See Wemple, Women in Frankish Society, 105. Wemple argues that the term Deo devota refers to a quasi-monastic, extra-conventual status in which women who were vowed to a religious order were nonetheless not required to dwell within the convent. Bernhard Jussen disagrees with this view, arguing that Deo devota was a terminology reserved for nuns; Jussen maintains that the “change of dress”

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nature of the extra-regular practices for widowed continence in the fifth and sixth centuries, but it is clear that, at least in the synodal decrees, the church recognized an avenue for pious expression outside the cloister. The continued circulation of patristic texts and the mention of consecrated widowhood in church synods suggest that widowhood was seen as a legitimate spiritual vocation—perhaps related to the older quasi-clerical office of deaconess—in which the widow adopted not only the exterior habit of mourning, but also affirmed her intentions to spend the rest of her life maintaining chastity. In such cases, widows lived in their own homes, or with family members, and performed the works of mercy appropriate to their state as directed in Paul’s definition of the vere vidua.22 By the ninth century, when widows living in the world were regarded with increasing suspicion and synodal decrees expressed the preference that women serve their vocations in convents, the option to fulfill a widowed vocation in their own homes nevertheless still seemed possible; such women were placed under the protection of the bishop.23 Widows who remained in their homes as chaste widows distinguished themselves specifically by their dress and their status as special persons under royal and episcopal protection.24 Although widows had the option of remaining in the world, many looked to convents as a desirable place to exercise their widowed piety, and employed a combination of secular and conventual ways of life. The vita of St. Radegund (ca. 525–87), Merovingian queen and founder of the convent of Poitiers, demonstrates early hagiographical efforts to interpret pious widowhood. Radegund’s example proved that although a woman sacrificed her virginity through marriage, she could redeem her spiritual status through harsh asceticism, charity, and leadership in monastic foundations. Her biographer and spiritu(veste mutata) was a key indicator of a quasi-institutional expression of early medieval widowhood (“Der ‘Name’ der Witwe,” in Parisse, Veuves et veuvage, 152–54, 152n60). 22. Jussen, “Der ‘Name’ der Witwe,” in Parisse, Veuves et veuvage, 154. 23. In the History of the Franks (Libri Historiarum X), Gregory of Tours referred to a woman who fit the description, “quae sub specie religionis erat veste mutata” (2.1, MGH Script. rer. Merov. 1/1:37); the tradition he described is also addressed in the Synods of Saint-Jean-de-Losne (673) and Rheims (813): “ut viduae non sint in delitiis sed secundum apostolum sub potestate episcopi vivant, sicuti decet” (c. 34, MGH Conc. 2.1:256; cited in Jussen, “Der ‘Name’ der Witwe,” in Parisse, Veuves et veuvage, 152n60, 154n64, 154). 24. Donald Hochstetler, A Conflict of Traditions: Women in Religion in the Early Middle Ages, 500–840 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1992), 67ff.; see also Wemple, Women in Frankish Society, 105.

86 Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy al advisor, Venantius Fortunatus (540–600), Bishop of Poitiers, traced Radegund’s progress toward the cloister through a series of transformations. Her personal piety emerged as increasingly important during her married life, and her pious inclinations and estrangement from her husband rendered her a symbolic widow even before his death. While religious leaders were generally reluctant to condone a wife’s outright insubordination to her husband, Fortunatus construes Radegund’s alienation from her carnal marriage as a sign of an emerging chaste vocation that marriage had interrupted, and was careful not to suggest that Radegund’s behavior challenged her husband’s authority. Radegund withdrew into a convent while her husband was still alive, aligning herself with the convent’s holy virgins through her devotion to a strictly cloistered life as a nun at Poitiers. Radegund’s vita also depicted several key aspects of female sanctity that would reappear in the hagiography of married and widowed saints of the later Middle Ages and prove to be essential qualities for holiness: impulses for chastity and asceticism within marriage, severe physical self-punishment, a humility that belied her aristocratic class, and generous charity and service to even the lowliest members of her community. Representations of Radegund’s pre-monastic life indicated her inherent vocation for chastity (despite a temporary excursion into married life) and her inclinations toward sanctity that preceded her career as a nun. Even while she was married, At night, when she lay with her prince she would ask leave to rise and leave the chamber to relieve nature. Then she would prostrate herself in prayer under a hair cloak by the privy so long that the cold pierced her through and through and only her spirit was warm. Her whole flesh prematurely dead, indifferent to her body’s torment, she kept her mind intent on Paradise and counted her suffering trivial, if only she might avoid becoming cheap in Christ’s eyes. . . . Because of this, people said that the King had yoked himself to a monacha rather than a queen.25 25. “Item nocturno tempore cum reclinaret cum principe, rogans se pro humana necessitate consurgere, levans egressa cubiculo, tam diu ante secretum orationi incumbebat iactato cilicio, ut solo calens spiritu iaceret gelu penetrata, tota carne praemortua, non curans corporis tormenta mens intenta paradiso, leve reputans quod ferret, tantum ne Christo vilesceret. . . . De qua regi dicebatur habere se potius iugalem monacham quam reginam.” Fortunatus, Vita Radegundis, chap. 5, PL 72:654 (also in MGH Script. rer. Merov. 2:366); in Jo Ann McNamara, ed. and trans., Sainted Women of the Dark Ages (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992), 73.

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In addition to Radegund’s incipient monastic vocation, implied in the passage, the choice of language anticipated Radegund’s future widowhood. Even in marriage, Radegund attempted to be prematurely dead to worldly pleasures, so that she might not be, as the Apostle cautioned, dead even as she lived. Instead, like the widow who was steadfast and trusted in God, Radegund maintained an ascetic vigil of prayer: “though she was married to a terrestrial prince, she was not separated from the celestial one, and the more power was bestowed on her, the more humbly she bent her will.”26 Radegund’s marriage was no love match: Clothar had married her as a captive of war, and the vita’s unflattering portrayal of Radegund’s marriage was thus not surprising. The pair appeared to live in an unhappy stasis, however, until Clothar murdered Radegund’s brother, spurring Radegund to flee her marriage under the protection of Médard, bishop of Noyon and Tournai.27 She appealed to the bishop to effect a voluntary separation from Clothar through episcopal consecration. Radegund begged Médard to allow her to “change her garments” (mutata veste) and to “consecrate her to the Lord.”28 The term mutata veste was closely associated with the profession of widowhood, and Médard was uncomfortable with this proposition, as Radegund had a living spouse. Hesitating to clothe Radegund outright in “monastic clothes” (monachica veste), Médard consecrated her as a deaconess (diacona). Such a vow was a compromise that did not necessarily imply compulsory chastity but nevertheless brought Radegund closer to a religious profession.29 26. “Nubit ergo terreno principi nec tamen separata caelesti, ac dum sibi accessisset saecularis potestas, magis quam permitteret dignitas se plus inclinauit voluntas.” Fortunatus, Vita Radegundis, chap. 3, PL 72:653 (MGH Script. rer. Merov. 2:366); trans. McNamara, Sainted Women, 73. Clothar (d. 560) had captured Radegund as a child during a siege on the ruling Thüringian family’s stronghold. The union lasted ten years, until Radegund fled her husband following Clothar’s murder of her brother; Jo Ann McNamara, introduction to Vita Radegundis, in McNamara, Sainted Women, 61. 27. “Et quoniam frequenter aliqua occasione divinitate prosperante casus ceditur ad salutem, ut haec religiosa viveret frater interficitur innocenter.” Fortunatus, Vita Radegundis, chap. 12, PL 72:655 (MGH Script. rer. Merov. 2:368). 28. “Directa igitur a rege veniens ad beatum Medardum Noviomago, supplicat instanter, ut ipsam mutata veste Domino conseraret.” Fortunatus, Vita Radegundis, chap. 12, PL 72:656 (MGH Script. rer. Merov. 2:368); in McNamara, Sainted Women, 75. Cf. Gisela Muschiol, who suggests that the change of dress (Kleisderwechsel) functioned as a sort of novitiate preceding the formal consecration of religious women; terminology such as profession, benediction, consecration, velatio and vestem mutare all denoted a publicly declared obligation. Muschiol, Famula Dei: Zur Liturgie in Merowingischen Frauenklöstern (Münster: Ascheffendorf Verlag, 1994), 276–79, 296. 29. Fortunatus, Vita Radegundis, chap. 12 (MGH Script rer. Merov. 2:368).

88 Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy Thereafter, Radegund lived in a form of holy widowhood even while her husband was still alive. The pseudo-widow Radegund publicly assumed a plain style of dress and ostentatiously divested herself of her royal garments and jewels, placing them on the altars of churches and at the hermitages of holy men.30 She lived humbly in her private villa of Saix, abstaining from meat, grinding flour “with her own hands,” and tending to the needy in the area, even those infected with lice and contagious diseases.31 At this point, although Clothar was still alive, Fortunatus referred to Radegund as having been veiled and consecrated by Médard (consecrante velata est), blurring the careful distinction he had made earlier to designate Radegund as a deaconess.32 Radegund’s monastery at Poitiers, which eventually was dedicated to the Holy Cross, was another product of the couple’s separation.33 Clothar agreed to help Radegund found Poitiers as a penance for her brother’s murder. Once established there, Radegund separated herself even more decisively from her husband, discarding her previous identities as his wife and widow. Both Fortunatus and her second hagiographer, the nun Baudonivia, constructed the account of Radegund’s sanctity after her entry into the convent around two basic themes: Radegund’s withdrawal from the world and the refashioning of Radegund’s sexual identity as a virgin saint. Her community at Poitiers followed Caesarius of Arles’s Rule for nuns, which commanded strict claustration, and there is no evidence that Radegund left the convent after she took up permanent residence there.34 Fortunatus articulated Radegund’s progression through the states of wife, virgin, and widow in his panegyric poem On Virginity (composed ca. 567), in which he illuminated Radegund’s progression through the exemplary stages of pious wife and ma30. Vita Radegundis, chap. 13, PL 72:656 (MGH Script. rer. Merov. 2:369). 31. Vita Radegundis, chaps. 15–17, PL 72:657–658. 32. Vita Radegundis, chap. 15, PL 72:675 (MGH Script. rer. Merov. 2:369). The office of deaconess was suppressed officially in the sixth century—see the decree of the Synod of Epaon in 517: “Viduarum consecrationem, quas diaconas uocitant, ab omni regione nostra paenitus abrogamus, sola eis paenitentiae benedictione, si conuerti ambiunt imponenda.” Cited in Jussen, “Der ‘Name’ der Witwe,” in Parisse, Veuves et veuvage, 142n27, 151. 33. This assertion concurs with local tradition, according to McNamara, Sainted Women, 62; Wemple accepts it as essentially accurate, Women in Frankish Society, 61. 34. Caesarius of Arles, Rule: “Si qua relictis parentibus suis saeculo renuntiare et sanctum ouile uoluerit introire, ut spiritalium luporum fauces deo adiuvante possit euadere, usque ad mortem suam de monasterio non egradiatur, nec in basilicam, ubi ostium esse uideretur.” Oevres Monastiques, SC, vol. 345, bk. 2, p. 180; see also McNamara, Sainted Women, 75n53.

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tron through examples culled from Jerome’s letters, the Gospels, and the Acts of the Apostles: Overcoming Eustochium in the sparingness of her food, and Paula in her fasting / She has learned from Fabiola how to cure her moral wounds; / She renews Melania through assiduity, Blesilla through piety, / Equaling Marcella through her prayers; / She renews Martha through her service and Mary through her tears, / Eugenia through her vigils, Thecla through her patience.35

Despite the theological models from Jerome and Caesarius that Radegund’s Merovingian hagiographers had at their disposal, neither Fortunatus nor Baudonivia utilized images of the “true widow” or the “sixtyfold fruit” per se as a descriptive paradigm for Radegund’s sanctity. Her identity as a holy widow created a transitional period between her flight from Clothar to Saix and Poitiers. Her voluntary separation from her husband and change of dress paved the way for her true vocation as a nun. Radegund’s example of widowhood as a transition to the religious life, however, was significant for the histories of other Merovingian matrons. St. Sigolena, a seventh-century widow who had maintained her virginity during her marriage, adopted the antiquated office of deaconess to avoid the remarriage her parents were urging.36 Scholars consider her anonymous late seventh-century vita to be largely derivative of Fortunatus’s life of Radegund, particularly Sigolena’s imitation of Radegund’s public change of garments and consecration as deaconess.37 Sigolena’s life, however, introduced aspects of widowed sanctity not expressed in Radegund’s life. Having maintained her vir35. “Parca cibo Eustochium superans, abstemia Paulam, vulnera quo curet dux Faviola monet; Melaniam studio reparans, pietate Blesillam, Marcellam votis aequipare valens / obsequio Martham renovat lacrimisque Mariam, pervigil Eugeniam vult patiendo Theclam.” Fortunatus, On Virginity, book 8, lines 41–46, MGH Script. AA 4.1:179; translated by Giselle de Nie in “Consciousness Fecund through God,” in Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, ed., Sanctity and Motherhood: Essays on Holy Mothers in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland, 1995), 105. See also de Nie’s comments on this poem on p. 141 of the same essay. The poem, addressed to the abbess Agnes, stressed Caesarius’s influential role in imparting lessons of chastity first to his sister Caesaria, then to Radegund. Brian Brennan, “St. Radegund and the Early Development of her Cult at Poitiers,” Journal of Religious History 13 (1985): 342. 36. Vita Segolenae, 2.9–10, AASS July V (July 24): 632. Wilhelm Levison established that the anonymous author borrowed Fortunatus’s language to describe the consecration: “Eo sub tempore directam legationem ad Pontificem praedictae urbis suis miserunt parentes, ut ipsam, mutata veste, Deo consecraret. Qui eorum agnita voluntate, manu superposita consecravit diaconam” (cited in Wemple, Women in Frankish Society, 274n81). It is also possible, however, that the shared language invoked an actual ceremony for consecrated women. 37. Vita Segolenae, 2.10, p. 632; see Wemple, Women in Frankish Society, 142, 151; and McNamara, Sainted Women, 106n4.

90 Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy ginity in her marriage, Sigolena found her chastity to be threatened once again in widowhood because her parents pressured her to remarry. Despite their wishes, she remained a widow, but this solution was hard-won and problematic. She lived “in her own home with the danger of chastity,” suggesting that her consecration as a deaconess could not serve adequately to protect her religious intention to be a continent widow.38 Sigolena quickly moved to the convent that she persuaded her father to build for her. Once in the convent, Sigolena’s charity to the poor and sick, her vigils, and her intense physical mortifications strongly recalled Fortunatus’s description of Radegund’s austerities.39 Although Sigolena’s hagiographer emulated Fortunatus in many respects, in comparison to Radegund’s secure vocation as a deaconess, the suggestion that Sigolena’s chastity was imperiled by her secular situation introduced the persistent theme that widow-saints could not maintain celibacy in a worldly environment. Another example of Radegund’s influence on widows in Frankish hagiography was the eighth-century life of St. Eustadiola of Bourges. Like Radegund, Eustadiola deliberately shed her secular garments to free herself from worldly concerns and devoted herself to Christ in her widowhood. She founded a convent for vowed women who followed her example, and committed all of her wealth to the institution.40 Although Eustadiola did not live a cloistered life, for she took daily trips to the basilica outside the convent walls, she resided with the sisters and participated in their prayers and charity toward the poor. In particular, her vita reinforced the image of the widow’s function of prayer, as suggested in the typology of the temple-dwelling widow, Anna. So intense were Eustadiola’s prayers in the basilica of St. Paul that she received a message from the Holy Spirit instructing her to teach the sisters to pray for the forgiveness of their sins (and, incidentally, for rain).41 In all the vitae of Merovingian widows, widowhood functioned as a brief threshold between the inferior state of marriage and the much superior lifestyle of the convent, characterizing widowhood as a lim38. “In propria domo vivere cum periculo castitatis” (Vita Segolenae, 2.9, p. 632). 39. On the foundation of the convent, see Vita Segolenae, 2.11–12; on Segolena’s piety and asceticism, ibid., 2.14–15. 40. See Wemple, Women in Frankish Society, 164; cf. McNamara, Sainted Women, 108n11, 109n12. 41. Vita Eustadiolae, AASS June VIII (June 8): 131–33.

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inal time in which a married saint separated herself from the world and progressed spiritually toward convent life. The popularity of Radegund’s cult into the early seventh century made that characterization available to other hagiographers writing about widows.42

Containing the Danger: Widowhood in Carolingian Hagiography The quasi-monastic life for vowed widows in the Merovingian period created far greater anxieties and problems from a pastoral perspective than the enclosure of nuns. Living in the world as a celibate allowed a widow freedom to interpret and fulfill her vocation while she remained officially under the bishop’s supervision. Church synods stipulated that widows could be removed to convents if they transgressed against their vows of celibacy, but it is not clear how systematically such decrees were enforced.43 Images of widowhood in the Carolingian period were influenced by two major trends in Carolingian religiosity: the discouragement of extramonastic consecration of widows, and new developments in female sanctity. A widow’s options for pious expression diminished under Carolingian authority: “to be protected by the church,” Suzanne Wemple argues, “a widow had to join a convent.”44 Perhaps inherent in this view was not only a misogynistic pessimism about widows’ inability to maintain chastity, but also a practical awareness of widows’ vulnerable legal and social position; a vow of chastity alone did not adequately protect a widow or persuade potential suitors that a widow was simply unavailable. Alongside punitive measures for lapsed religious widows, Carolingian legislation protected widows by fining those who harassed them, providing 42. See Magdalena Carrasco, “Sanctity and Pictorial Hagiography: Two Illustrated Lives of Saints from Romanesque France,” in Blumenfeld-Kosinsky and Szell, eds., Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, 63–64. 43. See, for instance, the Synod of Saint-Jean-de-Losne (ca. 673), chap. 12, “But those whom the priests know to live by a religious order, may dwell chaste and pious in their homes; if however they live neglectful of their chastity, they should be impelled to revert to a monastery” (illas uero, quas Domini sacerdotes religioso ordine uiuere cognouerint, liceat eis in domibus earum caste pieque conuersare; ut uero, si neglegentes de castitate earum extiterint, ad eas reuertentes in monasterio trudantur). MGH Conc. 2:316; cited in Jussen, “Der ‘Name’ der Witwe,” in Parisse, Veuves et veuvage, 152n60. 44. Wemple, Women in Frankish Society, 105.

92 Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy advocates for them when they had to appear in the courts, and protecting them against rape and abduction.45 The Synod of Paris (in 829) criticized women who professed consecrated widowhood and lived in private homes rather than cloistered communities: Noble women, who having lost their husbands are veiled and not in monasteries under the rule of a spiritual mother, but rather delight to reside in their own homes because of their affairs or their children, and to abound in pleasures . . . for in this way young widows who have lost their husbands stay in their own homes in the habit of a nun.46

According to Suzanne Wemple, Carolingian accusations that consecrated widows took vows of chastity only to cover up a profligate lifestyle were directly connected with the Carolingian church’s program to promote a new model of the Christian family. Whereas Merovingian rulers had been accustomed to building their lineages through a combination of formal marriages, consorts, and concubines, Christian authorities emphasized monogamy and indissoluble marriage. As the clergy’s efforts in this direction were successful, Wemple argues, the immediate conjugal family became the more acceptable family structure in Carolingian society. This, in turn, led to a decline in the practice of extended families sheltering widows. As wives’ contributions to the Carolingian household and lineage became more important, extraneous relatives— including widows—proved burdensome.47 Wemple also points out that Carolingian women’s lives were short; given the limited information available (five generations of women who appear in the chronicles of the Carolingian dynasty), Wemple deduced that women’s average age at death was thirty-six, with a high mortality rate (48 percent) for women in their childbearing years.48 Such numbers suggest that Carolingian society would treat young and older widows quite differently. Younger 45. Ibid., 257n43. 46. “Nobiles feminae, quae amissis viris velantur et non in monasteriis sub spiritalis matris regimine, sed potius in domibus propriis, occasione liberorum rerumque suarum, residere delitiisque affluere delectantur . . . quoniam huiusmodi adulescentulas, viros amittentes et in sanctimoniali habitu propriis domibus residentes.” Conc. Parisiense (829) 1.44, MGH Conc. 2:638–39, cited in Jussen, “Der ‘Name’ der Witwe,”in Parisse, Veuves et veuvage, 154n73. 47. Wemple, Women in Frankish Society, 105. 48. Ibid., 101.

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widows would experience considerable pressure to remarry and replace wives who died in childbirth, whereas older widows, if they did not enjoy economic independence or hold a firm functional or affective place in a relative’s household, might be encouraged to join a convent. Canon law also discouraged the practice of widows’ creating selfruled religious communities in their own households. Removed from the watchful eye of family and community, and isolated in her own home, the widow could not be trusted to uphold her vowed chastity. Theological literature concurred. Hincmar of Reims, writing around 860 in a treatise on divorce, referred to the transgressions of young widows who commonly took the sacred veil only because it allowed them to pursue licentious interests.49 Compared to the seventh-century Synod of Saint Jean de Losne in 673, where widows were instructed to join a convent only if they neglected their chastity, the 829 synod made a radical statement that extra-clerical female religious’ inability to uphold a vow of chastity was a foregone conclusion. As a remedy, widowhood must be brought into the cloister. Yet in hagiographies contemporary with such decrees, widowed saints such as Clothilde and Rictrude did not rush to a monastery upon their husbands’ deaths. Indeed, Clothilde, though she founded several houses and spent her time in holy places, never made a nun’s profession, though she resided at her monastic foundations and in other holy places. Moreover, the synodal decrees did not completely abolish consecrated widowhood in one’s own home, despite a clear preference for the cloistered life. Hagiography of this period expressed the concerns and contradictions about the practices of widowhood through examples of widowed saints who strugged with chastity in secular life yet ultimately redeemed their worldly experiences of marriage and motherhood by applying their worldly experience in service to their monastic communities. Another important factor that affected the portrayal of women in general and widowed saints in particular was the developing concept of dynastic sanctity. In the Carolingian period, the tendency, common in 49. “Sicut in adulescentulis viduis pervidemus, quae ideo post absolutionem virorem velamen sacrum suscipiunt, ut licentius pluribus abuntantur.” Hincmar of Reims, De divortio Lotharii regis et Theutbergae reginae, Supp. 1, Responsio 2, MGH Conc. 4:129.

94 Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy Merovingian vitae such as Radegund’s, to minimize the femininity and worldly experience of female saints began to change. The position of imperial rulers such as Charlemagne and Louis the Pious as devout Christian leaders, who engaged the bureaucratic and moral support of monasteries and the episcopate in their administration of a sovereign kingdom, created a much different context for Carolingian expressions of sanctity than those of the faction-ridden Merovingian dynasty. Monastic authors of saints’ lives promoted the cult of their saintly subjects as part of the history of their own religious houses, and astute politics required the favorable representation of a saint’s dynastic ties as well as her virtues. Thus, hagiography in the eighth and ninth centuries was extremely concerned with validating the authority and holiness of the dynastic line that provided patronage and protection to the convent or monastery, and this tendency persisted among Ottonian hagiographers as well. Hagiographers emphasized parentage, particularly motherhood, even when the treatment of such material drew attention to the disparities between a married female saint and the more conventional monastic model of virginal sanctity. Rather than being dismissed as details that the hagiographer needed to pass over, the experiences of female saints during their widowhood came to play a structural and symbolic role in the articulation of their sanctity. Authors thus found new uses for references to widowhood from the writings of familiar resources such as Jerome and Augustine. Rabanus Maurus (776–856), for example, commented on the prayer and chastity ascribed to the “order of widows” in the ancient church in his Ennarations on the Letters of Paul, and incorporated the paradigm of the sixtyfold fruit for widows in both his commentary on Matthew and his treatise on numerals in his work De universo.50 The anonymous life of St. Clothild (d. 544), wife of the Merovingian king Clovis, represents Carolingian hagiographers’ interest in representing holy widowhood and the patristic texts that facilitated the articulation of holy widowhood as a social status. Clothild’s vita was written in the late ninth or early tenth century, presumably to preserve the fading communal memory of the saint among the clergy of Tours.51 In 50. Rabanus Maurus, Ennarrationes in epistolas b. Pauli, 23.5, PL 112:616; Commentarium in Mattheum, 5.13, PL 107:495; De universo, 18.3, PL 111:493. 51. Vita Chrothildis, chap. 1, MGH Script. rer. Merov. 2:342. St. Clothild’s cult was limited to the

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the opening lines of the text, Clothild’s hagiographer described the entrance to the heavenly Jerusalem in which the pearls that adorned the gates of Heaven were the “holy apostles, martyrs, confessors, virgins, widows, and spouses.” Christ, the King of Heaven, was invisible, but a choir of holy wives, widows, and virgins represented his presence: Behold! A chorus of virgins, dearest and most pleasing to God, garnished with a fruit of a hundred-fold, gleams in God’s presence in His heavenly palace like stars in the sky. The flock of virgins is followed by an assembly of holy widows and faithful wives who, though they cannot return fruit a hundred fold, harvest sixty and thirty fold and are numbered with all the saints justly rewarded with eternal felicity. The blessed and venerable Queen Chrothilda [Clothild] is of that collegium.52

The immediate introduction of the tripartite schema of wives, widows, and virgins situated Clothild’s sanctity within Caesarius’s “many thousands of widows” who received the sixtyfold fruit. The vision of the choirs of women bore remarkable resemblance to the text of a roughly contemporary sequence composed by Notker the Stammerer (840– 912), for a feast celebrating holy women. Notker depicts the devil’s defeat through Christ’s Resurrection, witnessed by heavenly choirs of virgins, wives, and widows: And so now you see maidens vanquish you, hated one, / and married women bearing sons who please God / And you groaned that widows remain perfectly loyal to their husbands, / you who once persuaded a maiden to abjure the faith she owed to her Creator.53

region surrounding Tours, probably because she never established a convent that endured to foster her sanctified memory. McNamara suggests that the life can be dated to around the turn of the tenth century because of its substantial borrowings from an (assumedly) contemporaneous work, the Life of Remigius, by Hincmar of Reims (McNamara, introduction to Clothild’s vita, in Sainted Women, 38). 52. “Chorus enim virgineus Deo gratus et carissimus centesimo fructu decoratus, sicut stelle in celo, ita ante Deum fulget in celesti palatio. Hoc agmen virgineum sequitur contio sanctarum viduarum et fidelium coniugatarum, quae quamquam centesimum fructum non reportent, tamen sexagesimo fructo et tricesimo fructu gaudent et cum sanctis omnibus cumnumerantur et aeterna felicitate digne remuneretur. De quarum collegio extitit beata et venerabilis regina Chrothildis.” Vita Chrothildis, chap. 1, p. 342; trans. McNamara, Sainted Women, 40–41. This is the earliest example I have found of the threefold harvest paradigm explicitly stated in the vita of a widowed saint. 53. “Nunc ergo temet virgines vincere cernis, invide, / Et maritatas parere filos deo placitos, / Et viduarum maritis fidem nunc ingemis integram, / Qui creatori fidem negare persuaseras virgini.” Notker, “In natale sanctarum feminarum,” in Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, ed. and trans. Peter Godman (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 320–21.

96 Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy From the first chapter of her vita, Clothild was identified as part of a heavenly order of holy widows. Language that had been repeated for centuries in patristic letters of pastoral care now functioned to describe an explicit terrestrial and celestial order. Clothild was revered for her role in converting her pagan husband Clovis to Christianity, and, unlike Radegund, she did not shun the marriage bed. Instead, she used it for the greater good of Christendom as she secured Clovis’s conversion: And when the king in his chamber had initiated her into the ways of the flesh, Blessed Chrothilda said to him: Lord King, hear your handmaid and give me what I ask. . . . I ask that you will believe in almighty god, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and that you will destroy the idols you worship and restore the churches you have burned.54

At first, Clovis refused to convert, until the force of Clothild’s incessant prayers, and the intercession of the bishop, Remigius, convinced him that as a Christian he would be elevated to the status of a “new Constantine.” Clovis was initiated into the church in a baptismal ceremony for which Clothild draped the church in festive banners and ornaments. On the day of the ceremony, the new Constantine came to baptism, Blessed Remigius in the lead and Blessed Chrothilda following. The Holy Spirit ordered these things to show their mystical meaning. For as was fitting in the king’s approach to baptism, St. Remigius took the lead as they entered playing the role of Jesus Christ and the holy Queen Chrothilda followed as the embodiment of God’s church.55

At the time of the baptism, Clothild was clearly still a wife, not a widow, yet the hagiographer began the vita by identifying Clothild as a widow and continued to identify her as one metaphorically by personifying her as the church, which was the widow of Christ. The anonymous 54. “Cumque carnali more eam rex secretius cubiculum introduxisset, beata Chrothildis dixit ei: ‘Domine rex, ancillam tuam audi et quod peto concede mihi.’ Rex ait: ‘Pete quod vis, et ego do tibi’. Regina ait: ‘Peto, ut credas omnipotentem Deum Patrem et Filium et Spiritum sanctum et idola que colis destruas et ecclesias, quas succendisti, restaures.’” Vita Chrothildis, chap. 5, p. 343; trans. McNamara, Sainted Women, 43. 55. “Venit novus Constantinus ad baptismum, precedente beato Remigio, subsequente beata Chrothilde, hec omnia Spiritu sancto tipice operante. Erat enim enim congruum, ut veniente rege pagano ad baptismum, precederet sanctus Remigius vice Christi Iesu, et subsequenter sancta regina Chrothildis vice ecclesia Deum interpellantis.” Vita Chrothildis, chap. 7, p. 344; trans. McNamara, Sainted Women, 44.

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author likewise identified Clothild with the order of widows by relating how she urged Clovis to give generous alms on behalf of indigent widows and orphans.56 Unlike Radegund, whose sanctity was established through conflict with her husband, Clothild was memorialized for her beneficial effect on her husband and her progression through the married state to chastity. In widowhood, Clothild went often to the basilica of Tours and pursued “good works in God’s service,” demonstrating the perfect exercise of widowed piety: chastity, humility, and almsgiving.57 Her biographer apologized that she did not suffer martyrdom like the early Christian saints, but asserted that she nonetheless endured the hardships of familial strife and “mortified herself with abstinence, fasting, vigils, prayers, and bodily penances.”58 She distributed alms out of the royal treasury and dressed in humble garments. She neither took a vow of chastity nor made a nun’s profession at a particular institution, but she resided at the monastery she built at Les Andelys, and she established other churches in Reims and Laon. She “much loved and honored” the church at Reims because it had been the site of her husband’s baptism.59 Like the widow Anna, she went often to the church to perform vigils and prayers, and although she was not a nun she was closely involved as a founder of religious institutions. The Carolingian version of Clothild’s life reinterpreted her role as a widow and presented a new model of widowed sanctity.60 Clothild was a figure that medieval women (at least those from the aristocratic classes) could emulate. Unlike Radegund’s shockingly harsh self-inflicted punishment, Clothild’s personal asceticism was carried out under circumstances similar enough to everyday women’s lives that they could aspire to imitatio as well as admiratio of Clothild’s virtues. She demonstrated holiness within her roles as wife and widow rather than through intact virginity or extreme self-mortification. Finally, though Clothild was not 56. Vita Chrothildis, chap. 7. 57. Vita Chrothildis, chaps. 9, 11; trans. McNamara, Sainted Women, 46, 48. 58. “Quandi inedia, quibusve ieiuniis, vigiliis et orationibus et contritione corporis se ipsam mactavit” (Vita Chrothildis, chap. 11, p. 346; trans. McNamara, Sainted Women, 48). 59. “Multum dilexit et excoluit” (Vita Chrothildis, chap. 13, p. 347; trans. McNamara, Sainted Women, 48–49). 60. Cf. Gregory of Tour’s depiction of Clothild, which praised her chastity and virtue but made no reference to her widowed piety (Historia Francorum, 3.18).

98 Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy forced to enter a monastery, she willingly placed herself in the claustral environment, illustrating the church’s preference for women’s enclosure in convents. Clothild also submitted readily to the will of Bishop Remigius, who attained a Christ-like authority in the vita’s imagery. Clothild’s power as missionary to her husband and patron of the church presented her in non-threatening roles, well situated in the established order of gender and authority, and a testament to the virtues of the Carolingian imperial church (Reichskirche). The life of St. Rictrude (614–88), composed by the monk Hucbald of Saint-Amand (840–ca. 930), further developed the themes of widowhood in Carolingian hagiography. Hucbald wrote St. Rictrude’s life around 907 for the clerics and nuns of Rictrude’s convent, Marchiennes, who had requested a vita to commemorate the deeds of their sainted ruler.61 Accounts of her life had once been written down, but apparently had been lost. Hucbald’s vita was probably written with the intention of reviving the cults of the sainted founders and redressing accusations that the current nuns were lax in their duties.62 Hucbald emphasized the holy heritage of the Marchiennes foundation, especially Rictrude’s marriage, motherhood, and role as the matriarch of a family of saints.63 While this rhetorical strategy was common in the hagiographical writing on married women saints, Hucbald focused particularly on the saint’s profession of widowhood to characterize the sacred lineage she fostered at the convent of Marchiennes. Hucbald provided extensive theological reflections on the widowed state, making it an integral part of Rictrude’s progression towards sanctity and a hallmark of her monastic life. He recognized widows’ spiritual powers, yet at the same time invoked a discouraging pessimism about widows’ ability to develop these fully in the secular world, which echoed the ninth-century synodal decrees concerning widows. Rictrude’s vita expressed the Carolingian church’s view that pious widowhood be61. McNamara, Sainted Women, 195. 62. Ineke van’t Spijker, “Family Ties: Mothers and Virgins in the Ninth Century,” in Mulder-Bakker, Sanctity and Motherhood, 176. 63. Rictrude’s husband, Adalbald, was venerated as a saint after his death; Adalbald himself was an important noble, the brother of Erchinoald, who became the mayor of the palace under Clovis II. In her widowhood, Rictrude went to the convent, and her daughters went with her. One of her daughters became an abbess, and her son became an abbot at a nearby monastery. McNamara, Sainted Women, 195–96; Hucbald of Saint-Amand, Vita Rictrudis, 1.1, AASS May III (May 12): 81.

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longed within the confines of monastic life. Rictrude first chose a vow of chastity in the world but turned quickly to the cloister as an escape from worldly trials and as the locus for her holy career. Although Hucbald described Rictrude as possessing powerful spiritual gifts, such as the spirit of prophecy, she always exercised these within church institutions, either within the convent of Marchiennes or under the supervision of her bishop, Amand. Like Clothild, Rictrude’s marriage was harmonious and consonant with the Christian view of married chastity: her husband Adalbald joined himself to her “not for concupiscence but for love of progeny.”64 Their union was a reminder to all Christians that married people should faithfully render the conjugal debt and keep the marriage bed unsullied, as the letters of Paul instructed.65 Their marriage produced four children, all of whom entered the religious life. Their three daughters, Clotsendis, Eusebia, and Adalsendis entered the convent of Marchiennes with their mother, and Clotsendis later became abbess. Their son, Maurontus, became a priest.66 When Rictrude’s husband was killed by relatives, she miraculously experienced foreknowledge of this event before the news reached her.67 She mourned him together with the “tearful tears” of her household, but understood immediately, thanks to the wise counsel of her bishop, Amand, that she must remain a widow, according to the teachings of the Apostle.68 Though she was fully committed to her vow of chastity, Rictrude’s profession, expressed by a solemn vow and the garments of widowhood, was tested by worldly forces. In Hucbald’s narrative, both earthly suitors and diabolical temptation led Rictrude to leave the world for the convent.69 The first challenge to Rictrude’s secular widowed chastity arose when King Dagobert attempted to force Rictrude to marry him. Dagob64. “Causa vero uxoris ducendae non fuit incontinentiae, sed carae sobolis habendae” (Vita Rictrudis 1.9, p. 82; trans. McNamara, Sainted Women, 203). 65. “Et ne multis immoremur secundum Apostolus erat illis honorabile connubium et thoris immaculatus” (Vita Rictrudis, 1.9, p. 83). 66. Ibid., 1.10. 67. Ibid., 1.11. 68. “Luctu lugentium” (ibid., 1.11, p. 83; trans. McNamara, Sainted Women, 205). See also Vita Rictrudis, 1.12, p. 83; trans. McNamara, Sainted Women, 205. 69. “Propositum voti” (Vita Rictrudis, 1.13, p. 84); “vestibus viduitatis” (ibid., 2.15).

100 Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy ert, motivated by “the envy of the devil,” attempted “by stealth to thwart the healthful advice of the Prelate and the pious vows of the holy matron.”70 Hucbald’s lurid depiction of the incident paralleled the triumph of the widow Judith, as well as tropes from earlier hagiography, to show the saint’s dedication to widowed chastity:71 [Rictrude] encouraged the king to imagine that she was ready to yield to his will and arranged a convivial gathering of splendid magnificence worthy of a king at her estate in the villa called Baireius. She invited the king and his optimates, and with the salty seasoning of the banquet, they all enjoyed the sweetness of her talk. “Afterward, when hunger was repelled and love increased by eating, and they were convivial with Bacchus’ bright exhilaration,” she rose. Not haltingly but steadily, not coolly but warmly, not sluggishly but sharply, not womanlike but manlike, she perfectly carried out the plan she had made. First, she entreated the king to allow her to do what she liked in her own house and to use that power freely in his presence. And he agreed promptly, her raised cup suggesting that she would command him to drink, as is the custom with many. He supposed that she sought to please him and his company. Following the salubrious advice of her renowned counsellor, the Prelate Amand, she invoked help from the terrible name of God and, to the stupefaction of the king and all the others, she covered her head with a veil blessed by that holy bishop which she drew from her bosom. The king was stirred to wrath and left the banquet, abandoning the unwelcome food. And she, pinning her thoughts truly on the Lord, committed herself and hers totally to His will that they might be nourished by Him and always comforted in the solace of His mercy.72 70. “Sed ecce, et salubri Praesulis consulto, et pio sanctae Matronae voto invida diaboli nititur obviare subreptio” (ibid., l.13, p. 84; trans. McNamara, Sainted Women, 205). 71. Karine Ugé asserts that Hucbald borrowed this scene from the seventy-century life of the virgin saint Gertrude of Nivelles. Ugé, Creating the Monastic Past in Medieval Flanders (York: York Medieval Press, 2005), 126. See also McNamara, Sainted Women, 197. It is likely that Hucbald had seen this vita, but the two incidents bear neither narrative nor linguistic resemblance to each other, and the essential issue in Rictrude’s narrative—the veil—is Hucbald’s innovation and does not occur at all in Gertrude’s life. Hucbald was familiar with the Carolingian history Gesta Dagoberti and the Vita Amandi, which also contained details about Dagobert’s courtship, and this familiarity may account for the king’s prominent role in Rictrude’s life. Dagobert (r. 629–638) was also a typically invoked villain in many Carolingian narratives. See Julia H. M. Smith, “A Hagiographer at Work: Hucbald and the Library of SaintAmand,” Révue Bénédictine 106 (1996), 164; and idem, “The Hagiography of Hucbald of Saint-Amand,” Studi Medievali 36 (1994), 537. Cf. McNamara’s translation of the “Life of Gertrude,” Sainted Women, 223, and Gertrude’s Latin vita, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH Script. rer. Merov. 2:447–74. 72. “Cum ita regem suspectum reddidisset, veluti ejus voluntati parere vellet; in praedio suo, hoc est in villa a Baireio, opiparum et regiae condignum magnificente instruit convivium. Invitat cum optimatibus regem, et inter prandendum sale conditorum omnes laetificat suavitate sermonum. Postquam exempta fames et amor compressus edendi, Tum multo clara exhilarans convivio Baccho, Surgit, et non trepide sed constanter, non tepide sed ferventer, non segniter sed sagiciter, non muliebriter sed viriliter, quod

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Just like Judith, who defeated her enemy, Holofernes, in the luxurious and sensual setting of a meal, Rictrude defeated the king’s plan to pressure her into marriage.73 The same themes resonated through both stories: armed with chastity and sobriety, the widow led the enemy to believe that his was an easy victory. Judith pretended to seduce Holofernes but did not compromise her virtue; her chastity served as the weapon that protected her and allowed her to liberate her people.74 For Hucbald, Rictrude’s weapon was the veil of widowhood. In the Middle Ages, the Judith story illustrated female valor, but also represented female power over men, as Judith’s sexuality lured the enemy into danger. Medieval exegesis of the tale in both poetry and prose downplayed Judith’s sensuous and murderous power, emphasizing her as the mere instrument of God’s plan, but the tale retained an undercurrent of anxiety about Judith’s darker potential. Rictrude’s self-veiling presented a similar ambiguity, as Rictrude consecrated herself informally and by her own volition, relying only on the bishop’s counsel rather than his ceremonial authority. Bishop Amand’s approval, however, appeared to be sufficient: he had counseled Rictrude’s actions in advance and had consecrated the veil that sealed Rictrude’s profession of widowhood with his own blessing, emphasizing the discretion of bishops to manage loconceperat mente, perficit opere. Primoque sciscitatur a rege, si concederat sibi in domo sua quod vellet agere, libera coram eo uti potestate. Ille autem annuit propere, reputans quod sumpto poculo, ut moris est pluribus in cogendo bibere; se vel convivias suos deberet aetificare. At illa, secundum salubre sui consiliatoris Amandi incliti Praesulis consilium ex suo sino prolatum, invocato terribilis Dei nomine et auxilio, capiti superponit, ipso rege et cunctis stupendibus, jam benedictum ab eodem pontifice velum. Illa vero jactans cogitatum suum in Domino, totam se suosque ejus commisit arbitrio, ut ab eo enutrirentur et solatiarentur misericordi semper solatio.” Vita Rictrudis, 1.14, p. 84; trans. McNamara, Sainted Women, 206; cf. Vulgate, Judith 12. 73. Rictrude came from Gascony, a Gallo-Roman region that was not under the political control of the Frankish kings and that experienced incursions from Visigothic leaders. Dagobert might have had a political interest in marrying Rictrude in 636, to manufacture a link to the Gasgoine nobility and to combat Basque raiding in the countryside. McNamara, Sainted Women, 195–96. 74. Griffith, Judith, 67. Griffith considers the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon poem on the feats of Judith to be “an amalgam of Christian saint’s life and vernacular heroic form, exemplary in purpose” (ibid., 81). While there is no textual evidence connecting Hucbald’s Vita Rictrudis and the Anglo-Saxon text, both probably drew on Jerome’s introduction to the Book of Judith in the Vulgate, which referred to Judith as an example of chastity for both sexes. Another text that exploited Judith’s heroic example, for both spiritual and political ends, was Aelfric’s prose adaptation of the Judith story, written around 1000. Aelfric wrote the text for a female monastic audience, as a lesson in female chastity, but also sent a copy of it to a secular nobleman, Sigeweard, as a model for the idealized Christian warrior; see Stacy S. Klein, “Ælfric’s Sources and His Gendered Audiences,” in Essays in Medieval Studies: Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association, vol. 13, ed. Thomas Bestul and Thomas N. Hall (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 1996), 111–19.

102 Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy cal affairs. Rictrude shared her triumph with the church; in confounding Dagobert, Rictrude preserved not only her own widowed chastity, but upheld the “honorable and unsullied” nature of church-sanctioned vows over the designs of worldly men. Following the confrontation at the banquet, Rictrude distributed her remaining wealth and “put on the garments of widowhood” so that “what she had borne three-fold in the conjugal life” might be doubled, “for in widowhood her seed yielded fruit sixty-fold.”75 Hucbald’s description of Rictrude’s self-veiling and declaration of her widowed profession invites comparsion with contemporary liturgy and canon law, which forbade such vows by a woman’s personal volition alone and required clerical approval. According to canon law, only bishops were supposed to veil virgins, whereas the widow’s consecration was overseen by a priest, and the widow imposed the veil on herself.76 Rictrude’s veiling, though somewhat unorthodox because it was not overseen by the bishop, established a strong connection between Rictrude and St. Amand, the namesake of Hucbald’s own institution. Amand’s guidance and patronage as a well-known bishop saint supported the case for Rictrude’s sanctity.77 Rictrude’s assumption of the garments of widowhood marked her mourning as a deeper sort of spiritual bereavement, “veiled with sor75. “Induitur viduitas vestibus. . . . Ac primum facultatibus et possessionibus sibi relictis, ordinatione prudenti distributis, et spinosis hujus seculi curis a terra cordis sui penitus extirpatis; quae antea in conjugali vita ferebat trigesimum, postmodum, duplicato germine, fructum coepit in viduitate ferre sexagesimum.” Hucbald, Vita Rictrudis, 1.15, p. 84; trans. McNamara, Sainted Women, 207. Hucbald was a music theorist and wrote treatises on harmonics and psalmody; he might have become familiar with the “orders” of women through the lyrics of Notker on this subject. Rabanus Maurus, who wrote a commentary on the Book of Judith, was also interested Judith’s change of clothing and the contrast between the dress she adopted for her seduction of Holoferenes and her clothing in private life as a widow; his terms contrasted the former “vestimentum laetitiae” with her latter “vestimentum viduitatis” (Expositio in librum Judith X, PL 109:584). Hucbald also had some knowledge of Anglo-Saxon literature and may have consulted a copy of Aldhelm’s treatise De Virginitate in Saint-Amand’s library (Smith, “Hagiographer at Work,” 166–68). He certainly knew Jerome’s and Augustine’s writings on widowhood, but Smith notes that Hucbald seems to have prefered to cite Carolingian florilegia and exegesis rather than works of the Church Fathers in the original (Smith, “Hagiographer at Work,” 168, 170). 76. Hucbald was familiar with Isidore’s De Ecclesiasticis Officiis and the Liber Ecclesialis of Amalarius of Metz, both of which were extant in the Saint-Amand library, and which might have lent insight into the ecclesiastical boundaries of this act (Smith, “Hagiographer at Work,” 161). Although bishops were not supposed to veil widows, the frequent iteration of this point in canon law and liturgy suggests that in fact they often did preside over such ceremonies; in the later Middle Ages William Durand of Mende commented that he had witnessed a bishop in Ostia blessing two widows; see Guillelmi Duranti Rationale Divinorum Officiorum I–IV, 2.45–46, in CCCM 140:243; see also chapter 3, below. 77. See Ugé, Creating the Monastic Past, 123ff.

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row and penitent mourning.”78 The widow’s weeds were an outward expression of her interior transition from pleasing a husband to pleasing Christ: She changed the habit of her mind as she put a new habit on her body. She threw off the elaborate clothes which adorned her in marriage when she thought of worldly things, how she might please her husband. But one who as stripped away all the burdens of the world, though she appears as a widow divided from a husband, is not divided in mind but is always solicitous for the things of the Lord only, how she might please God. She put on garments of widowhood which expressed her contempt of this world through her appearance.79

Hucbald’s description of the process was suggestive of the liturgy for the consecration of widows in the later tenth-century compilation of the Romano-German Pontifical, in which the celebrant blessed the widow’s clothing and emphasized the change of the woman’s identity and her commitment to continence through the donning of the widow’s clothes: Lord, open your eyes of majesty for the blessing of this garment of widowhood, so that she who pleased her husband and the world by the wearing of ornate garments might be worthy to gain your grace in sacred benediction. . . . Lord God eternal, giver of celestial virtues, we humble petitioners pour out our prayers to you, that you might find this your servant worthy to consecrate, whom you have caused to be converted from her earlier way of life, putting off the old man and putting on the new, having been converted, just as Anna the prophetess abandoned [her old life] for a long time in fasting and prayer, clothed in the garments of widowhood to your glory in the temple, so too may this your daughter devote herself to you alone, God, in your church, with devoted mind.80 78. “Ut principale animae id est mens, velanda signetur moeroris et poenitentiae luctu” (Vita Rictrudis, 2.15, p. 84; trans. McNamara, Sainted Women, 207). 79. “Sicut mutaverit habitum mentis, sic mutat et corporis. Pomposas projicit vestes, quibus ornabatur nupta, cogitans aliquando ea quae sunt mundi, quomodo placeret viro: etuna cum eis exuitur omni seculi hujus impedimento, ut quamvis videretur vidua, id est, divisa a viro, jam non esset divisa animo; sed solicita semper quae Domini sunt solummodo, quomodo placeret Deo. Induitur viduitas vestibus, quae ipsa sui specie monstrarent contemptum mundi istius.” Vita Rictrudis, 2.15, p. 84; trans. McNamara, Sainted Women, 207. Hucbald’s text underscores the liturgical language with a paraphrase of Paul’s exhortation that the widow might concentrate on pleasing God rather than a husband (1 Cor 7:34). 80. “Aperi quaesumus Domine oculos maiestatis tuae ad benedicendam hanc viduitatis vestem, ut quae in vestibus ordinatis [sic] viri sui usibus aut seculo placuit, in sacris vero benedictionis tuae gratiam consequi mereatur. . . . Domine Deus uirtutum celestium eterne donator tibi supplices effundimus preces, ut hanc famulam tuam consecrare digneris, quam de pristine conuersatione ad nouitatem uite expolians veterem hominem, et induens novum conuerti fecisti, ut sicut Anna prophetissa multis

104 Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy Having abandoned the “elaborate clothes” of marriage for the “garments of widowhood,” Rictrude also adopted the monastic practices of strenuous vigils, constant prayers, fasting, and the wearing of a hair shirt. As a widow living in the world, Hucbald noted, she turned consciously from the worldly activities of Martha to the contemplative life and spiritual bereavement of Mary.81 Despite Rictrude’s perfect conduct in her chaste widowhood, ultimately, she could not completely fulfill the duties of her state until she entered a convent. Rictrude’s temptations did not end with Dagobert. A literary contemporary of Hucbald’s, Haimo of Auxerre, underscored the sexual trials widows were destined to endure: “widows and continents earn the sixty-fold fruits, for they sustain the tribulation of having known the pleasures of the flesh”82 Haimo’s rather backhanded praise suggested that the source of the widow’s reward was also the source of her most pernicious challenge. In Rictrude’s case, demonic pressures tested her commitment as long as she remained in the world. Although she fulfilled all of the requirements of widowed piety, none of these measures was powerful enough to counteract the ill effects of the libidinous “demonic suggestions” that persistently troubled her.83 Hucbald declined to mention the demons’ suggestions, perhaps to discourage such thoughts in his readers. As the synodal decrees suggested, Rictrude’s solution was to turn to the monastic life and enter the convent at Marchiennes, contributing to the institution both as a patron and as a ruler of the women who lived there, though it is not clear whether she was officially ordained as abtemporibus vestibus uiduitatis induta in templo gloriae tuae ieiuniis et orationibus fideliter deseruiut, sic et haec filia tua tibi soli Deo in ecclesia tua deuota mente deseruiat.” Cyrille Vogel, ed., Le Pontificale Romano-Germanique du dixième siècle (Vatican City, Vatican: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1963), vol. 1, ordo 25, pp. 60–61 (hereafter cited in the notes as RGP); see also chapter 3, below. 81. Vita Rictrudis, 2.15; trans. McNamara, Sainted Women, 207. For the benediction in the RomanoGerman Pontifical, see also Benedictiones, consecrationes, et ordinationes variae, PL 138:1099. 82. “Sexagesimum vero fructum viduae et continentiae proferunt, dum voluptatem carnis experite longiorem tribulationem sustinent.” Haimo of Auxerre, Homiliae de tempore, hom. 22.170. Cited in Katrine Heene, The Legacy of Paradise: Marriage Motherhood and Woman in Carolingian Edifying Literature (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997), 126. Hucbald had ties to the Auxerre school and may have been directly familiar with Haimo’s work. 83. “Et ut quondam expertas corporis voluptates, et molestas evinceret daemonum suggestiones, cum nimiis vigiliis et orationibus continuis, crebra ducens jejunia, esophorio amicitur cilicino; cuius assiduis punctionibus edomaret libidinis punctiones.” Vita Rictrudis, 1.16, p. 84; trans. McNamara, Sainted Women, 207.

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bess of the convent.84 Hucbald urgently exhorted his female audience to follow Rictrude’s example: Oh, hear these most truthful things, I pray! Let your ears receive them all—you who have ears to hear, to whom it has been given to rise to chastity, the privilege of angels, and thus to acquire the society of the most famous companion to sound out the sweet melody of the new song. Hurry! Hasten! Run! Remember Lot’s wife and never seek to look back.85

Rictrude’s entry into the convent where she made her religious profession as a nun was preceded, much as described in Radegund’s vita, by a less structured, more liminal phase of consecrated piety and chastity. Widowhood remained inferior to a virginal hagiographic ideal. As Dyan Elliott has argued, the “privileged position of Christ’s bride” ascribed to virgins guaranteed a sustained tension between virginal chastity and other forms of female piety.86 But the phenomenon of pious widowhood also had other uses in hagiography, functioning for Carolingian authors such as Hucbald as a pivotal position between the widow’s life in the world and life in the convent. Widowhood invited a discussion of the problems monastic authors recognized for women who maintained religious routines in the secular world, and allowed a comparison between such women and the widowed Ecclesia, who was left to sojourn on earth in the absence of Christ, her husband, after his crucifixion. The institution of consecrated widowhood, marked by a change of dress, consecrated veil, and vow of continence, emphasized the widow’s personal vocation of chastity and her triumph over her worldly persecutors. Rictrude nevertheless suffered inner torments concerning the maintenance of her chastity in secular life; she perfected her widow84. According to McNamara, Rictrude built a convent there on allodial lands of Adalbald’s (Sainted Women, 196). Karine Ugé argues that both Marchiennes and Hamage were probably founded on lands donated by Adalbald’s family. In Hucbald’s vita, the connection is vague; in later histories of Marchiennes, monastic authors explicitly identified Rictrude (based on tradition or wishful thinking) as the convent’s foundress, often contrary to fact and evidence (Ugé, Creating the Monastic Past in Medieval Flanders, 97, 131). Dyan Elliott suggests that Hucbald’s statement that Rictrude lived at Marchiennes “serving others as a servant” indicates she held no official position there (Bride of Christ, 105). 85. “Haec cum verissime ita sint, audite, obsecro, et auribus percipite omnes qui habetis audiendi aures, quibus adhuc fas est ad angelicae privilegia castitatis assurgere, et tam praeclari contubernii societatem aquirere, atque cum eis tam dulcem novi cantici melodiam personare. Properate, currite, festinate, ac memores uxoris Loth, retro respicere nolite.” Vita Rictrudis, 1.18, p. 85; trans. McNamara, Sainted Women, 208–9. 86. Elliott, Bride of Christ, 105.

106 Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy hood upon her entry into a convent. There, the spiritual trials of her widowhood had a salutary rather than destructive effect. He likened the convent to a “monastic gymnasium” where Rictrude would struggle with the devil in a profoundly literal way: in the convent, “she would run, competing in the arena of this present life, struggling in contention against the Devil. She was anointed with the oil of celestial grace lest the wicked adversary get a hold to restrain her.”87 Implicit throughout Hucbald’s text was the assumption that the institution of consecrated widowhood in the world would not make one sufficiently agile to elude the devil’s grasp in a spiritual wrestling match. It was so prone to failure that even a praiseworthy woman could not persevere successfully. Hucbald illustrated this notion deliberately through Rictrude’s initial intention to stay in the world and her subsequent abandonment of that plan in favor of a convent, a spiritual gymnasium that was better suited to religious exercise. At the same time, she espoused her three daughters to monastic life: “besides contending in the contest, as the Apostle said, she abstained from all things and taught her daughters to live by her example.”88 As well as perfecting her widowed chastity in the convent, Rictrude was seen as a key patron to the foundation and the mother of a chaste dynasty of abbesses. In the vita, Hucbald expressed the potential spiritual as well as physical motherhood in Rictrude’s widowhood, both toward her children and toward the nuns in her convent. The natural pairing of widows and virgins likened to mothers and daughters occurred in the writings of Jerome and was echoed elsewhere in Carolingian theology.89 Paschasius Radbertus in his treatise De assumptione wrote that widows were the appropriate role models for virgins in the convent. Like Haimo, he argued that widows, in their chaste marriage to Christ, which they vowed even after having known worldly pleasures, and through their discipline in shunning those pleasures they had once 87. “Gymnasium monasteriale”; “ubi stadium vitae praesentis, agonizando percurreret, et contra diabolum luctando decertaret, palaestricorum more sic nuda, ne in aliquo ab adversario maligno teneri posset, et oleo peruncta gratiae coelestis ingreditur.” Vita Rictrudis, 1.19, p. 85; trans. McNamara, Sainted Women, 209. 88. “Et juxta quod ait Apostolus in agone contendens, ab omnibus se abstinet, suoque exemplo filias vivere edocet.” Vita Rictrudis, 1.19, p. 85; trans. McNamara, Sainted Women, 209. Cf. van’t Spijker, “Family Ties,” in Mulder-Bakker, Sanctity and Motherhood, 165–91. 89. See Jerome’s letter Ad Eustochium (Epitaphium sanctae Paulae), Ep. 108.20, CSEL 55.

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known, provided encouragement to virgins, who were sheltered from knowledge of fleshly pleasures.90 Just as Jerome identified a spiritual as well as a physical nurturing between Paula and her virgin daughters, Hucbald emphasized the mentoring role that bound Rictrude to her daughters and nuns. Although she lost the potential autonomy of consecrated widowhood in domo suis, through conventual life Rictrude gained the companionship of her own children and the nuns who were the “fruits” of her chaste widowhood. Hucbald’s hagiographical emplotment of Rictrude’s chaste widowhood resulted in a text that gathered and expanded upon Carolingian interpretations of widowed spirituality as part of the larger project of recovering the obscure history of Marchiennes and its patron saint. The associations of pious widowhood also functioned in Rictrude’s hagiography to obscure some of the questionable facets of Rictrude’s past, which local history did recall: Eusebia asked to go to the neighboring monastery of Hamay (Hamage), which Rictrude’s grandmother Gertrude had founded. Rictrude forbade her, but Eusebia went anyway. Rictrude ordered her son Maurontus to administer a severe whipping as punishment. The action was ineffective as well as violent: Eusebia suffered from the effects of her brother’s beating for the rest of her life, and, according to Hucbald, returned to Hamay anyway and died soon thereafter.91 Hucbald anticipated criticism of the incident in Rictrude’s vita: Look who they are calling saints: a mother who attacks her innocent daughter from wanting to serve God; a daughter who detested her own mother and fled her as an enemy; a son who, with his mother’s consent . . . like a condemned thief whipped [his sister] so viciously that she nearly died.92

Reminding his readers of the ills of gossip, false witness, and judgment, Hucbald presented and then refuted a negative interpretation of this episode. He framed his relation of the incident within two statements affirming Rictrude’s maternal experience. He introduced the incident by 90. Paschasius, De assumptione, CCCM 56, chap. 17, pp. 113–14. 91. Vita Rictrudis, 3.25–27. McNamara notes that there were conflicting reports of Eusebia’s age at the time of her death; a tenth-century life claimed she lived to be thirty-three; Sainted Women, 215n71. 92. “Eu, quales isti dicuntur esse Sancti, Mater innoxiam insequitur filiam, Deo militare volentem; Filia sicut hostem, sic propriam execrator et refugit matrem: Filius matre consentanea . . . dirissimis vault furti ream afficit verberibus pene usque ad mortem.” Vita Rictudis 3.28, p. 87; trans. McNamara, Sainted Women, 215.

108 Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy invoking Rictrude’s matronly and motherly counsel to her inexperienced daughter: “A true servant of Christ, her mother Rictrude was guided by a deeper counsel and prudence, well knowing that the malign enemy, by his cunning, seduces even more mature folk with much training in virtue.” He concluded the story by returning to Rictrude’s superior wisdom and experience as the correct interpretation of her actions: “The holy mother Rictrude did not persecute her innocent daughter. Rather, she considered her immature age, knowing that everything has its time and there is a time for every business.”93 Hucbald’s use of the tropes of holy motherhood and pious widowhood was typical of the general trend in Carolingian hagiography to integrate theological and pastoral messages into saintly narratives, but it also functioned in this particular instance to rehabilitate the memory of Rictrude’s family cult. Hucbald synthesized images from patristic treatises and Carolingian liturgy on widows and virgins in novel and comprehensive ways to characterize the sanctity of Rictrude and her daughters. From the ashes of the widowed mother’s spiritual bereavement arose many hagiographical rewards: Rictrude’s physical children were conceived in a chaste and honorable marriage bed. Her spiritual protégées—the monastic virgins whom the widow protected and taught—were the fruits of her widowhood that preceded her heavenly reward. Hucbald praised Rictrude’s entry into the monastic life, her spiritual leadership, and the establishment of a pious legacy through her children. In the Vita Rictrudis, Hucbald rewrote the family’s contentious history, establishing the convent of Marchiennes as the perfect setting for the jewel of Rictrude’s widowed chastity. By the tenth century, then, hagiographers had produced a matronly counterpart to the virgin saint rather than only articulating widows as either viragos or incomplete virgins. The hagiographical discourse could not close the gap between perfect, intact virginity and chaste widowhood, but early medieval monks and bishops nevertheless included widows in their emplotments of sanctity, expanding the patristic tra93. “Mater vero ejus Rictrudis, vere Christicola, profundiori usa consilio atque prudential, bene sciens quod multos multis exercitatos virtutibus maligni hostis seducat astutia in aetate quoque jam matura.” Vita Rictrudis, 3.25, p. 86; trans. McNamara, Sainted Women, 214. “Rictrudis mater sancta, non filam persequitur innocuam; sed ejus immaturam considerat aetatem: sciens quia omnia tempus habent, et quod omni netotio tempus fit.” Vita Rictrudis, 3.30, p. 87; trans. McNamara, Sainted Women, 217.

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ditions on widowhood and suggesting applications for widowed piety in secular life and, increasingly, in the convent. As examples of chaste asceticism, as advisors and protectors of virgins, and as dynastic mothers who raised pious children, holy widows facilitated the inclusion of married women and matrons in the early medieval cult of saints.

Ottonian Widowed Saints: Anomaly and Continuity in the Eleventh Century While the hagiographies of widows in the eleventh century shared some significant characteristics with the cloistered Carolingian examples of Rictrude and Clothild, they also continued to expand the widow’s secular role. Scholars of Ottonian culture have suggested that widows as a demographic group were markedly influential in Imperial piety. Women were prominent actors in Ottonian histories, and, because many of them survived their husbands, their identity as widows was correspondingly significant. Karl Leyser has argued that the maintenance of family piety and preservation of family memory were considered female obligations and were part of Ottonian women’s cura domestica, which included custodianship of male family member’s souls.94 Leyser has also suggested that the demographics of widowhood changed in the tenth and eleventh centuries as women started outliving men. This shift in mortality created in the aristocratic classes a larger subgroup of wealthy widows, who could apply their wealth toward religious enterprises, and whose preferences in charitable giving helped to shape overall donation patterns for the period.95 Like Hucbald’s life of Rictrude, the vitae of Ottonian widows Mathilda (895–968), wife of Henry the Fowler, and Adelheid of Burgundy (931–99), wife of Otto I, arose in a context where the interests of dynastic and institutional memory combined. Like the hagiographies of the later Carolingian period, too, Ottonian hagiography further articulated theological views of widowhood and expanded widows’ outlets for worldly piety. They also identified chastity, prayers, and good works as the business of the vere vidua. 94. Karl Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 72. 95. Ibid., 49–62.

110 Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy The vitae of the widowed empresses introduced new elements as well. The responsibility of the widow for intercessory prayers for the soul of her husband correlated closely with the religious rhetoric in monastic records, in which widows expressed the desire to memorialize their husbands through their piety. Although the lives of Ottonian widows were created in a monastic milieu and iterated the values of the regular clergy, the widows themselves showed a striking independence of action. Widows were associated with the cloister—Mathilda became a nun, and Adelheid cherished her monastic friendships with Cluniac monks—but extra-regular widowed piety was also presented as a viable option for widowed holiness. Given the range of independent action Ottonian noblewomen exercised, it is therefore not surprising that their widowhoods were, in comparison to Carolingian women, characterized less by episcopal supervision than by a combination of monastic influence and personal initiative. While later medieval hagiographers did not adopt these models of sanctity wholesale to depict the saintliness of their widowed subjects, Ottonian hagiographical innovation had lasting implications for medieval perceptions of widowhood in genres and contexts that were beyond the cult of the saints, especially in the creation of models for spousal memory and a deepening of the widow’s association with prophecy. In the remainder of this chapter, we will examine these texts and their effects on the development of widowed sanctity. According to the Vita antiquior (ca. 974), Mathilda was raised as a maiden in the convent of Hereford by her grandmother, who was elected abbess of the convent because of her piety and good works in her widowhood. Mathilda’s introduction to her future husband emphasized her virginal purity and goodness. Henry’s first sight of his bride indicated her inner goodness: her blushing cheeks in a snow-white face were like a mixture of roses and lilies (the flowers of virgins and martyrs).96 During her marriage, Mathilda was both a loyal wife and a pious matron, rising from the marriage bed at night to pray. Her hagiographer in the Vita antiquior echoed Fortunatus’s description of Radegund’s similar ac96. Vita antiquior, chap. 2, in Die Lebensbeschreibungen der Königin Mathilde, ed. Bernd Schütte, MGH SS 66:115, 117. See also Sean Gilsdorf’s discussion concerning authorship, Queenship and Sanctity: The Lives of Mathida and The Epitaph of Adelheid (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 15–18.

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tivities, saying that, while Mathilda was married to an earthly husband, she (following the instruction of the clergy) behaved as if she were in fact married to Christ.97 She also urged her husband to secure his own spiritual well-being by donating generously to monastic foundations.98 Mathilda’s hagiographers emphasized her probity and her efforts to foster the sacred memory and dynastic significance of her husband through her chastity and good works.99 The Vita antiquior characterized Mathilda’s widowhood as so virtuous that few of either sex could imitate her.100 The second life of Mathilda, the Vita posterior, which was probably written circa 1002 by a fellow nun at Quedlinburg,101 extended the earlier hagiographer’s description of Mathilda’s nightly prayer vigils, which the author claims she carried out both during her marriage and in her widowhood. Both authors remarked that Mathilda’s virtues would nearly have earned her the “palm of virginity,” but they position this remark at different places in the text. The Vita antiquior author located this observation within a critique of women’s worldly vanity; the empress would have earned this distinction through her benefactions, were it not for the abundance of worldly ornaments she wore.102 This criticism, a kind of damning with faint praise, was situated within the period Mathilda’s of widowhood, whereas the author of the Vita posterior astutely reworked 97. “Nupta, ergo felicem Machthildam terreno principi, cum sibi secularis accessisset potestas, plus dei ad obsequium eam inclinavit voluntas quam mundi gloria ad elationem. Subdita semper deo, monita sectans sacerdotum, plus participata Christo quam sociata coniugio, nocturno autem tempore regi subripiens ecclesiam orationibus instando magis sponsi diligebat thalamo.” Vita antiquior, chap. 3, p. 118. Cf. Fortunatus’s life of Radegund: “Nubit ergo terreno principi nec tamen separata caelesti, ac dum sibi accessisset saecularis potestis, magis quam permitteret dignitas se plus inclinavit voluntas. Subdita semper deo, sectans monita saecerdotum, plus participata Christo quam sociata coniugio.” Fortunatus, Vita Radegundis, chap. 3, PL 72:653 (MGH Script. rer. Merov. 2:366). The Vita posterior records this activity, but reworks the language to describe Mathilda as a famula Christi, rather than employing the term sponsa Christi. 98. Vita antiquior, chap. 4, p. 120. 99. Vita antiquior, chap. 5, pp. 122–23; Vita posterior (also edited in Schütte, Lebensbeschreibung), chap. 10, MGH SS 66:163–164; see also Corbet, “La pastorale ottonienne du veuvage,” in Parisse, Veuves et veuvage, 236ff. For Mathilda’s personal memorial prayer with Adelheid’s more traditional engagement of monastic institutions loyal to the dynastic house, such as Cluny, for intercession, see Patrick Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millenium (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 61. 100. Vita antiquior, chap. 5, p. 122 101. Geary, Phantoms, 61. 102. “Virginalem propemodum benefactis illius promerentibus adquisierat palmam, nisi tantum saecularibus vestium floresceret ornamentum.” Vita antiquior, chap. 9, p. 129.

112 Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy this same comment to apply to her conduct in marriage instead; in the latter reading, while Mathilda lost the palm of virginity, she still earned glory through her humility and her married chastity, and was the illustrious sancta mater of the imperial family.103 The Vita posterior author revisited the themes of worldly vanity from the earlier text in the context of the widow’s dress. In the Vita posterior, Mathilda assumed the vestimentum vidutatis soon after her husband’s death through her habit of nightly prayers and her works of mercy, clothing and feeding the poor.104 Mathilda’s change of dress was thus realigned with the beginning of her actual widowhood. The author suggested that there were degrees of spiritual bereavement: later in the text, on the occasion of the death of Mathilda’s son Henry, Mathilda deepened her state of mourning to include gestures of bereavement for him as well: On that day she laid aside all princely clothing with which she had adorned herself in widowhood. For after the death of the always-to-be-remembered King Henry she had assiduously worn a scarlet robe of only one color, but not in public, rather under a vestment of linen, and had worn as ornament over it a bit of gold. She put all this aside and afterwards appeared clothed in mourning dress. Thereafter she wanted to hear no one singing secular songs, nor see a play performed, but indeed always heard selected holy songs concerning the Gospels or other Scriptures, and also sedulously desired for herself that the life and passion of the saints be sung.105

While the articulation of Mathilda’s widowhood through signifiers such as dress underwent development from the first redaction of her life to the second, her time spent living as a chaste widow in a secular context was relatively brief in both vitae. She took the holy veil, prompted to re103. “Cum igitur regalis solii ascendisset gradum venerabilis regina illustris maritali potentia et illustrior religione divina, in coniugii federe manebat pudica et tamen nichilominus caruit palma virginitatis proxima humilitate sic tendens ad gloriam, ut dono dei postmodum meretur fieri allecta in celesti patria.” Vita posterior, chap. 5, pp. 153–54 104. Ibid., chap. 10, pp. 164–65. 105. “In hac etiam die herilia deposuit vestimenta, que in viduitate pro ornamento habuit. Post obitum enim memorandi regis Henrici assidue induit coccinum unius coloris, non in publico, sed sub lineo vestimento, et pro decore ornamenti ante se gessit parum auri. Hoc totum tunc deposuit et postmodum lugubri veste indute processit. Posthac neminem voluit audire carmina secularia cantatem nec quemquam videre ludo exercentem, sed tantum audivit sancta carmina de evangeliis vel aliis scripturis sumpta, necnon in hoc sedulo delectabatur, ut de vita vel passione sanctorum sibi cantaretur.” Vita posterior, chap. 16, p. 178.

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treat from public life because of financial quarrels with her son Otto I, which, according to her hagiographers, were diabolically instigated.106 She spent time at her foundations of Nordhausen and Quedlinburg, where she died, and she continued her ascetic practices in the convent.107 The model of Mathilda’s sanctity established in her hagiographies was in some respects highly original. The text did not rely on the typical catenae of passages about widowhood and virginity from patristic sources.108 Instead, her hagiographers subtly worked the themes of Mathilda’s ideal conduct in virginity, marriage, and widowhood into her role as a dynastic mother and wife. Mathilda’s formal widowhood was signified by her memory of and bereavement for her husband and son, specifically by the clothing and demeanor that invoked not only the social conventions of mourning but also the liturgical rituals of consecrated widowhood. Patrick Corbet has examined the representation of marriage and motherhood in the vitae of imperial women, arguing that Mathilda’s hagiographical example in the Vita posterior was not only innovative but normative. Corbet contrasted Mathilda’s positive relationship with her husband with earlier Germanic hagiographies that expressed a neutral or even antagonistic attitude toward marriage. Merovingian and Carolingian authors had articulated some of the same elements featured in the Ottonian lives, but the conjoining of dynastic with monastic interests in Mathilda’s later vita generated a model of sanctity for married and lay people that gave greater emphasis and cohesion to the spiritual possibilities for widowed sanctity, and advocated a favorable view of marriage in Ottonian pastoral care.109 The commemorative practices 106. Vita antiquior, chap. 5, p. 123; Vita posterior, chap. 11, p. 167. The quarrels in the vitae were attributed to factions that opposed Mathilda’s use of crown funds (her wedding portion, or dotales regiones) for religious purposes. She may have lost command over these funds to Otto I in 936 by intervening too enthusiastically in his affairs of state. A tradition around the turn of the millennium suggested that this conflict arose from Mathilda’s supporting her younger son, Henry, rather than Otto as the successor to Henry the Fowler; see Heinrich Fichtenau, Living in the Tenth Century, trans. Patrick Geary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 178. 107. Vita antiquior, chaps. 8 and 9. 108. Ottó Gecser has suggested that the life of Radegund was also a significant source for the Vita posterior (“Aspects of the Cult of St. Elizabeth of Hungary with a Special Emphasis on Preaching, 1230– c. 1500” [PhD diss, Central European University, 2007], 12n13). 109. Patrick Corbet, Les saintes ottoniens: Sainteté dynastique, sainteté royale, et sainteté féminine autour de l’an mil (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1986), 184–200.

114 Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy of Ottonian noble widows admitted the long-standing secular concern of spousal remembrance to hagiography, and, as Corbet has suggested, informed the language of charters and donations as well. The formulation pro remedia anime mariti sui (“for the benefit of her husband’s soul”) became common in the charters of widowed donors in this period, echoing the economy of piety expressed in Imperial hagiography, in which widows not only secured the prayers of the filial generation, but were themselves accountable for their husbands’ spiritual progress toward heaven.110 Corbet emphasized four aspects of the representation of Mathilda’s widowhood in the Vita posterior: the distinctiveness of widowhood as a state separate from marriage, the association of notions of seriousness and dignity with the widowed state, the exercise of piety, which consisted of Mathilda’s chastity and assiduity, and—most importantly—the introduction of a new field of activity for widowed saints, intercession for the souls of their departed spouses.111 While the first three aspects were already well represented in the hagiography of earlier widowed saints, the latter responsibility for the care of the husband’s soul added a significant new development to earlier medieval hagiography. Through Mathilda’s example, the ideal widowed saint could mourn her earthly spouse and still be a pious widow in the sense of Paul’s vere vidua. While Mathilda’s vita incorporated secular perspectives about marriage into her hagiography, other Ottonian texts, such as the Epitaphium Adelheidis, explored how the widow related to male monastic institutions. Odilo, abbot of Cluny (994–1049), constructed his life of Adelheid of Burgundy in the genre of the conduct treatise, or “mirror of princes,” generally associated with men, but adapted it to demonstrate the potential for female spirituality in the life of a worldly queen. Adelheid’s sanctity, however, was cut from distinctly Cluniac monastic cloth. Her primary hagiographer, Odilo, downplayed conjugal relations and infused the vita with what Leyser has termed the “cardinal Cluniac virtues—discretio and caritas.”112 Odilo had scant interest in the nature of 110. Corbet, “La pastorale ottoniene,” in Parisse, Veuves et veuvage, 245–46. Corbet noted that while this sensibility became normalized into the practices of remembrance, it did not dissuade widows from remarriage. 111. Ibid., 243, also 239–40. 112. Geary, Phantoms, 61.

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the conjugal relationship between Adelheid and Otto I. He did not represent the saint through personal qualities such as the ministering to the poor, intercession for her husband, or ascetic suffering, elements which would indeed characterize female sanctity in the later Middle Ages.113 Abbot Odilo was, however, keenly interested in the ideal of the vere vidua as he structured Adelheid’s biography. As Hucbald of Amand did in his treatment of Rictrude, Odilo drew from the patristic past to define the very worldly empress as a holy widow and fashioned a hagiography of spiritual friendship between himself and the widow Adelheid that paralleled Jerome’s mentorship to the widow Paula. Though their approaches were different, both Mathilda’s and Adelheid’s hagiographers recognized the status of chaste widowhood as a means of sanctifying women who had spent much of their lives deeply involved in secular Imperial rule. Odilo’s Epitaphium Adelheidis (written ca. 1000) incorporated the widowed saint’s relationship to her family and to a larger spiritual community, as did Mathilda’s vitae, but the former work relied much more heavily on Jerome’s descriptions of female virtue and chaste widowhood. Odilo celebrated Adelheid as the wife and mother of emperors, an example of the “good wife” of Proverbs 31, and recommended her vigilance in family matters as a mirror for other empresses and queens and as the appropriate expression of female political power.114 While Odilo’s material was traditional, his genre of hagiography was not. The literary form of epitaphium that Odilo employed was typical of the classicizing influences of the Ottonian Renaissance.115 Odilo’s Epitaphium imitated Jerome’s writings concerning holy women of late antiquity and situated Odilo and Adelheid in a parallel relationship to Jerome and his female patrons, suggesting that if Jerome had lived in Adelheid’s time, he would certainly have counted her among the worthy consecrated virgins and widows of his correspondence, but in Jerome’s absence, Odilo himself must take up the task of commemorating Adelheid’s life: “if he [Jerome] undertook to grace Paula and Eustochium, 113. Leyser, Rule and Conflict, 49. 114. Odilo of Cluny, Die Lebensbeschreibung der Kaiserin Adelheid von Abt Odilo von Cluny, ed. Herbert Paulhart (Cologne: Herman Böhlaus Nachf., 1962), 27. 115. See Paulhart, introduction to Lebensbeschreibung, 10.

116 Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy Marcella and Melania, Fabiola and Blesilla, Leta and Demetrias . . . he would certainly remember [Adelheid] in by no means a few volumes. If, however, there is no such man as Jerome . . . then let us, uneducated, go on to the best of our ability, with the help of God.”116 Odilo’s choice of Jerome as model was significant. He situated himself in the literary tradition of Christian men writing to holy women in the context of chaste Christian friendship, and he established Adelheid’s position among the exemplary widows of famous early Christian texts. Odilo culled thematic material and structure from Jerome’s epitaph on Paula. The major points of intersection between the two works are the themes of pilgrimage (Paula traveled to the Holy Land, Adelheid to the shrines of Gallic saints and martyrs), charity toward the poor and toward monks, and the veneration of St. Maurice and the Agaunum martyrs.117 Paula also shared other characteristics with the Ottonian empress: noble birth, widowhood, and patronage of monastic institutions.118 Adelheid was the wife of King Berengar of Italy; his defeat and Adelheid’s subsequent marriage to Otto I brought Italy under the rule of the Germanic Holy Roman Emperor. As empress, Adelheid fostered the careers not only of her husband but also of her son Otto II and grandson Otto III. Odilo characterized Adelheid’s work in service of her husband’s and sons’ careers as analogous to the biblical Martha. At the end of Adelheid’s life she, like her saintly predecessors Radegund and Rictrude, endeavored to set aside the worldly cares of Martha, and turned instead to pilgrimage and the contemplative life of Mary: “if someone concerning worldly business interrupted her, she did not respond to this but, lamenting, turned that word of the Apostle in her heart: ‘Miserable man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death?’ 116. “Si Paulam et Eustocium, Marcellam quoque et Melaniam, Fabiolam quoque et Blessillam, Letam et Demitriadem . . . libris et epistolis commendaret utique istam haud voluminibus paucis. Si enim deest talis, ut Hieronimus, . . . aggrediamur nos indocti Deo iuvante pro posse.” Lebensbeschreibung, 28–29. 117. Corbet, Les saintes ottoniens, 85. 118. Adelheid founded the monasteries San Salvatore at Pavia and Selz in Alsace, and together with her daughter Mathilda made extensive donations to the convent of St. Andreas in Magdeburg. She was associated with the foundation of Peterlingen, which was actually founded by her mother Bertha, who was buried there. According to Odilo, Adelheid entrusted the foundations at Peterlingen, Pavia, and Selz to the care of Abbot Maiolus, which indicates that they were brought within the Cluniac community (Odilo, Lebensbeschreibung, 27, 36–37).

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[Rom 7:24] And secure in the hope of divine reward she responded: ‘The grace of God, through Jesus Christ.’”119 At this turning point Adelheid’s life, she rejected the secular world in favor of meditation and prayer.120 Adelheid’s withdrawal from the world and conversion to the contemplative life represented the last stage of her widowhood, in which she developed the spirit of prophecy and a Christocentric proto-mysticism. To contrast the image of the heroic, virginal female saint who militantly withdrew from her own family to make her home in a monastery, Odilo illustrated Adelheid’s virtues through her familial relationships and peregrinations among the many institutions she patronized.121 Despite the different hagiographical traditions that the vitae of Mathilda and Adelheid represented, both texts expressed an Ottonian preoccupation with history and memory. Patrick Geary’s interpretation of these sources lends insight into the kinds of remembering that such women could accomplish. The monastic vitae of the two empresses represented different kinds of memorializing: whereas Mathilda’s Quedlinburg hagiographer depicted her intercessory prayers as personal and direct, Adelheid’s Cluniac biographer Odilo illustrated Adelheid’s duty to lineage memory through her patronage of monastic foundations, enlisting monks as professional rememberers on her behalf.122 The differences in the widows’ vitae were the products of the disparate literary cultures of Quedlinburg and Cluny, and of these houses’ different relationships with each empress. Other Ottonian texts, however, represented Adelheid performing acts of conjugal remembrance. For example, Thietmar of Merseberg (975–1018) emphasized Adelheid’s interest in honoring her husband’s memory. Thietmar remarked in his chronicle of the Ottonians’ rule “how much the empress was intent upon securing in words and deeds the liberation of the soul of her lord to the end of her days cannot be described.”123 Likewise, Theitmar 119. “Et si aliquis eam de secularibus negotiis interpellaret, non ad hoc responsum dabat, sed apostolicum illud lugens in corde volvebat: ‘Misera ego homo, quis me liberabit de corpore mortis huius? Et secura de spe divine retributionis aiebat: Gratia Dei per Iesum Christum.’” Odilo, Lebensbeschreibung, 42–43. 120. Odilo, Lebensbeschreibung, 42. 121. For a discussion of the image of female militancy in sanctity, see Thomas Heffernan, Sacred Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 292–94. 122. Geary, Phantoms, 60–61. 123. “Quantum vero pro liberatione animae senioris suimet Aetheheidis inperatrix invigilaverit

118 Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy recommended Mathilda as a model to all believers because of her efforts, through almsgiving and monastic foundations, to intercede for her husband’s soul.124 The two widows’ composite hagiographical traditions, though emerging from different spiritual milieux, articulated a prevailing interest in the role that imperial widows played in memorializing the founders and rulers of the Ottonian dynasty.125 As moral examples, moreover, the Ottonian empresses both perpetuated and elaborated upon earlier medieval ideals associated with widowhood. The vitae continued the Carolingian trend to associate widowed piety with conventual life, but with subtle differences. Monks and nuns, not bishops, were the spiritual companions to the women in Ottonian imperial hagiography. Monastic authors (whether Cluniac or other representatives of Imperial family monasteries (Eigenkloster) asserted their autonomy from local episcopal control and oversaw the spiritual development of widows through friendship and veneration rather than through overt authority. Neither Adelheid nor Mathilda functioned under the direct control of an episcopal protector. Rather, monastic friendship and spirituality figured prominently in the development of their widowed sanctity: Mathilda retired to a convent, and Adelheid was a generous supporter of Cluny. Adelheid also provided the unusual example in the central Middle Ages of an unconsecrated yet authentically pious widow who did not seek episcopal consecration, become a nun, or formally dwell in a monastic house in her widowhood, but rather followed the model offered by holy matrons of antiquity, such as Paula. Ottonian hagiography admitted a degree of female empowerment in widowhood that was absent from the vitae of the early Middle Ages and did not reappear in the lives of later medieval widowed saints. Ottonian authors did, however, criticize widows’ failure to conform to pious expectations. The worst example was the case of the empress Theophanu, Adelheid’s daughter-in-law and wife of Otto II. She was a convenient scapegoat for this purpose, as her characterization in Western Eurousque in finem, dictis non valet conprehendi nec factis.” Chronik, book 2.44 (28), in Thietmar, Die Chronik des Bischofs Thietmar von Merseburg und ihre Korveier Überarbeitung, ed. Robert Holzmann (Berlin: Wiemannsche Buchhandlung, 1935), 92; trans. Geary, Phantoms, 62. 124. Thietmar, Chronik, book 1.21, p. 27. 125. Geary, Phantoms, 61–63.

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pean historical sources typically channeled the West’s worst perceptions of Byzantine arrogance and excess. Theophanu frequently found herself in conflict with her powerful mother-in-law, Adelheid, during their co-regency for Otto III. Odilo’s Epitaphium contrasted Adelheid, a mirror for queenly wives and widows, with Theophanu’s cautionary tale. When a conflict arose between Adelheid and her son and daughter-in-law because they followed the misguided counsel of certain courtiers, Odilo related that Adelheid mildly withdrew from the situation rather than participate in the conflict, and eventually Otto realized the error of his ways. Theophanu’s remained unrepentant, however. Influenced to quarrel with the dowager empress by a “certain Greek” and other “flatterers,” Theophanu declared that “should I live a year, Adelheid will rule over no more than what can be circled in the palm of one hand.” This incautious malediction rebounded on Theophanu, who died a few weeks later, while the saintly Adelheid lived on “happy and surviving.”126 Theophanu’s untimely death was a punishment for her arrogance and foolishness in accepting the counsel of flatterers, whereas Adelheid’s reward was longevity and abundant good fortune. Theophanu’s Greek heritage associated her with images of Eastern decadence and love of luxury; the Greek empress became a lightning rod for misogynistic criticism and apprehensions concerning female rule.127 In reality, both women’s careers, particularly during their widowhoods, required political shrewdness in matters of court intrigue and family solidarity in times of crisis. Thietmar of Merseberg noted in his chronicle that the two women worked together to protect Otto III’s regency, and Bruno of Querfurt offered high praise of Theophanu’s charitable intercession on behalf of Otto II’s soul in her widowhood.128 126. “Licet illa imperatrix Greca sibi et aliis fuisset satis utilis et optima, socrui tamen auguste fuit ex parte contraria. Ad postremum vero cuiusdam Greci aliorumque adulantium consilio fruens minabatur ei, quasi manu dicens: ‘Si annum integrum supervixo, non dominabatur Adelheida in tot mundo, quod non possit circumdari palmo uno.’ Quam sententiam inconsulte prolatam divina censura fecit esse veracem. ante quatuor ebdomadas Greca imperatrix ab hac luce discessit, augusta Adelheida superstes felixque remansit.” Odilo, Lebensbeschriebung, 35. 127. Theophanu’s representation as a stock villain in the works of many Ottonian authors obscures her much more complex identity as a Byzantine expatriate at the Ottonian court; see Götting, Das Bistum Hildesheim, vol. 1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1973), 88; Katharina Wilson, Medieval Women Writers (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 43n12; and Wilson, Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: A Florilegium of Her Works (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), 8–9. 128. See, for example, Thietmar, Chronik, 4.1; and Bruno of Querfort, Brunonis vita S. Adalberti, chap. 12, MGH SS 4:600–601.

120 Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy Theophanu’s failure to embrace the piety of her Imperial predecessors was reiterated in another monastic text, the Liber Visionum of Otloh of St. Emmeram, written around 1062. In that vision, which Otloh claimed he did not experience himself but rather heard from a source whose name he could not remember, Theophanu appeared to a “venerable virgin consecrated to God” and begged her intercession.129 When the virgin asked why Theophanu needed her prayers, Theophanu replied: “because, you see, much excess and luxurious ornament of women, which the Greeks are accustomed to use, but which in the provinces of Germany and France had hitherto been unknown, I myself first brought to that place. . . . I went around with this injurious habit inciting other women to similar appetites.”130 Through divine intercession, Theophanu received permission to beg for the prayers of the living to spare her from eternal damnation, but Otloh concluded the vision by noting that he did not know whether the virgin actually heeded the request. Rather, he hoped that his readers would pray for the empress and, more importantly, learn from her example and seek to improve their own lives. Even blameless widows encountered clerical suspicion, especially if they were not living within the security of the cloister. Thietmar of Merseberg recalled how the pious widow of Henry of Bavaria, Judith, maintained her chastity in widowhood but was subjected to rumor and scandal because of her innocent friendship with Abraham, the bishop of Freising. Abraham’s favor had encouraged rumors of unchastity, and when she died, the bishop responded to aspersions cast on Judith’s holiness by declaring at her funeral Mass that if she had ever committed the deeds she had been accused of, his own soul should be eternally damned by the body and blood of the Eucharist, but her soul should be restored to eternal salvation. Apparently this daring statement convinced the congregation that their gossip had been unjust, 129. “Dictum namque est mihi, quia prefata Theophanu cuidam venerabili Deoque dicate virgini in habitu miserabili apperuit per visionem eamque, ut pro se oraret, suppliciter petierit.” Liber Visionium of Otloh of St. Emmeram, ed. Paul Gerhard Schmidt, Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 13 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1989), 91–92. 130. “Quia videlicet multa superflua et luxuriosa mulierum ornamenta, quibus Greci uti solent, sed eatenus in Germaniae Francieque provinciis erant incognita, huc primo detuli, memeque eisdem plus humane nature conveniret, circumdans et in huiusmodi habitu nocivo incedens alias mulieres similia appetentes peccare feci.” Ibid., 91.

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and the people’s slander ended up enhancing the widow Judith’s chaste reputation rather than inflicting harm.131 In this episode, the criticisms of the congregation of Freising, however misplaced, gave voice to the fears expressed from Jerome to medieval canon law that the profession of consecrated widowhood in the world was freighted with the potential for scandal. The relationship between Judith and Abraham represented a positive collaboration between continent widows and bishop-protectors in the tradition of Radegund, Clothild, and Rictrude. In the later Middle Ages, as we shall see in chapters 3 and 4, bishops increasingly represented an obstacle to the saint’s chaste intentions, urging remarriage (often for selfish personal reasons) rather than continent widowhood. Similarly, a preoccupation with female pride and vanity, as expressed in Otloh’s vision of Theophanu and even in the life of Mathilda, suggested that as hagiography throughout the first millennium integrated positive theological interpretations of chaste widowhood into its topoi, anxiety and pessimism concerning the prospects for widowed chastity also found their way into the hagiographical genre. Monastic authors of the Carolingian and Ottonian Renaissances engaged the theme of holy widowhood with increasing refinement. The Ottonian vitae represent a continuation and culmination of this process, but the particulars of the widowed empresses’ biographies and the bias of their authors contributed in large measure to the construction of their sanctity. Mathilda’s efforts to intercede for her husband’s soul through her own prayer and the prayers of others remained unusual in the Ottonian era. In later medieval lives of widowed saints, however, the widow’s intercessory power and even atonement for her husband’s sins reappeared as a common attribute of widowhood, as we will see in the following two chapters. Perhaps more significantly for understanding the relationship between texts and lived experience, the practice of widows’ intercession for their spouses’ souls entered the “economy of piety” around the turn of the first millennium and remained a common practice for the rest of the Middle Ages. The Ottonian vitae also showed a range of action for widowed saints that was absent from both earlier and later traditions. Radegund, 131. Thietmar, Chronik, 2.41.

122 Early Medieval Hagiogr aphy Clothild, and Rictrude all relied on the sanction and support of a powerful bishop to legitimate their widowhoods, whereas Adelheid and Mathilda acted unilaterally to decide the course of their widowed stage of life, and relied on monastic friendships and patronage, in which they clearly had the upper hand. In later medieval hagiography, bishops once again entered the picture as authority figures over widows, sometimes as their helpers and promoters, but more often in an antagonistic role to their chaste ambitions.

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Chapter 3

The Veil and the Vow Professed Widowhood in Canon Law and Liturgical Manuscripts Widowhood formalized the period of mourning and organized the chaos of spousal loss into a cogent state with consistent expectations and rules. Early medieval hagiography demonstrated the ideological work that widowhood performed in articulating women’s transitions between marriage and the convent, yet there is also evidence that this interstitial phase also represented an actual niche in secular society. Until the High Middle Ages, the practice of professed widowhood was mainly tied to monastic spaces. Yet the tradition of consecrated widowhood, established in the early and High Middle Ages, ultimately found a visible, secular presence in new thirteenth-century settings, such as in the Beguine movement and the formation of the Franciscan Third Order. Pious widows swelled the ranks of these quasi-monastic orders, which offered structured devotion and proximity to religious community while still allowing engagement with secular life. This chapter traces that development in liturgy and in other sources that described the institution of chaste widowhood. Canon law, liturgy, and monastic records of the High Middle Ages describe consecrated widows living in their own homes or in dwellings associated with religious institutions, often prior to full entry into a convent as a nun. Even as a nun, a woman’s former status as wife and widow was not effaced as she merged with her new community. Not only did widows bring practical, worldly experience with them to the convent, the liturgical texts treated them differently from young novices, suggesting that the hierarchies of virgin and widow persisted even within the supposed equality of the monastic community. Ann Mather has suggested that widowhood colored a religious woman’s vocation regardless

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of whether she was a proper nun or a vowess, suggesting that “a widow, whether or not her husband was dead, offered herself to religious life in the church within the contract that bound her to her husband.”1 The distinction between virginal and vidual piety is made explicit in Irish monasticism, according to the Collectio Canonorum Hibernensis, which identified two grades of female religious: virgin, and widow or penitent. The Celtic designation for “widow” (fedb) was derived from the Latin vidua but also corresponded to a status in Celtic secular law that identified a woman who was a sworn celibate, whether or not her husband was still alive. From at least the eighth century in Ireland, the idea of women living in religious widowhood, whether within or without a convent’s walls, was synonymous with penitence and sexual renunciation. As Irish marriage law permitted various kinds of unions that were looser in nature than the Roman church’s conception of monogamous and permanent marriage, the strong association between widowhood and penitence in Ireland perhaps signified a situation in which a woman set aside a life that had involved multiple sexual partnerships, albeit licit ones in Irish law, in favor of perpetual celibacy.2 Eric Palazzo has suggested that, similarly, for continental Europe, the liturgies designated specifically for widows indicated that the church understood the widows’ spiritual role and vocation differently from other nuns’ (at least symbolically), even after the widows became members of religious communities, and thus the liturgies compressed the more diverse roles for women available in early church congregations into monastic ones. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) included two hymns, one for virgins and one for widows, in her Symphonia. Probably intended for performance by the virgins and widows in her nunnery, the hymns explicate the character of each group’s spiritual vocations. Hildegard designated both virgins and widows as married to Christ, but celebrated the virgins’ relationship with Christ as lover and bridegroom (sponsum), while expressing the widow’s union as a more distant, formal, and penitent relationship to a father or ruler: 1. Ann E. Matter, “A Twelfth-Century Ordo for the Veiling of Widows,” paper read at the Third Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, June, 1976, cited in Wemple, Women in Frankish Society, 285n58. 2. Christina Harrington, Women in a Celtic Church: Ireland c. 450–1150 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 145, 154, 159–61.



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Father of all and king and emperor above all kings, In Adam’s rib, first of mothers, you formed us: but she carved an abyss of woe—and we raced after her, embraced her exile made her pain our own. O first of fathers! Now we race after you with our final effort, delighting in penance (so lovely and so longed-for) As we sigh for your love: after our pain we devoutly embrace you. . . . For you we left marriage, Turned from fertility. . . . Oh child of the virgin: When you wed us in the spirit You divorced us from our flesh.3

Unlike Hildegard’s other compositions, which were associated with the Mass or with specific feasts in the liturgical calendar, the symphoniae for virgins and widows were stand-alone pieces that may have celebrated a nun’s entry into the convent or the anniversary of her vows. Widows thus shared a symbolic and corporate identity that persisted even within the cloister walls and that illustrated the fluidity of boundaries between the structures of the monastic community and those of the social world outside it. 3. “O pater omnium / or rex et imperator gentium / qui constituisti nos in cost prime matris / que construxit nobis magnum casum erumpne / et nos secute sumus illam / in propria causa in exilio, / sociantes nos illius dolori. . . . O tu noblissime genitor / per summum stadium currimus ad te, / et per dilectissimam / atque per dulcissimam penitentiam / que nobis per te venit, / ahhelamus ad te. . . . Nos reliquimus propter te / fertile amatorem coniunctionis, et comprehendimus te / in superna caritate / et in virginea vice copulate sumus tibi / quam prius essemus secundum carnem.” Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia : A Critical Edition of the Symphonia Armonie Celestium Revelationum, trans. Barbara Newman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 221–25, 305–7. In Hildegard’s hierarchical organization of the Symphoniae and her revelation of the celestial hierarchies of the Scivias, widows occupied a lowly ranking in comparison to the prophets, saints, martyrs, and virgins (ibid., 282). Similarly, in Hildegard’s personal catalogue of her “secret language,” she situates widows toward the end of her list of “God’s human servants,” after virgins and before penitents; see Sarah Lynn Higley, Hildegard of Bingen’s Unknown Language (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 162.

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The “enrolled widows” of late antiquity perhaps established an institutional precedent for the professio undertaken by medieval widows, though this designation lost its quasi-clerical status over time.4 The Eastern offices of consecrated deaconesses and subsidized church widows had originally denoted separate duties (deaconesses were associated with baptismal duties, widows with prayer and care of the sick), but in the West the distinctions between the two offices blurred.5 As the official status of women in both these roles waned, their practices remained as a pattern for medieval women to follow. Crucial to this tradition were the garments that indicated a widow’s observance of a period of formal mourning; the permanent assumption of these garments became closely identified with the state of perpetual celibacy that optimally followed the loss of a spouse.6 The connection between mourning and chastity had been well established already in antiquity—from Ovid’s literary representations of appropriate mourning dress as a sign of bereavement to the ten- to twelve-month period during which widows in antiquity were supposed to refrain from courtship or remarriage. In the case of Roman women past childbearing age, for whom remarriage was considered inappropriate, the mourning state was supposed to be permanent.7 Christian authors described mourning less as a state of personal bereavement than an external expression of chaste intention: both Jerome and Gregory of Tours referred to the change in dress (vestis mutata), expected of widows, and Augustine wrote explicitly about it in his famous rebuke of Ecdicia, who assumed the widow’s mourning dress while her husband was still alive.8 Sixth- and seventh-century synods already referred to the change of dress as an “ancient custom” in which women were 4. Jussen, Der Name der Witwe, 158–83. 5. William Smith and Samuel Cheetham, A Dictionary of Christian Antiquities (Hartford: J. B. Burr, 1880), 2035–36; see also Gary Macy, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 67–68. 6. James Brundage, “The Merry Widow’s Serious Sister: Remarriage in Classical Canon Law,” in Matrons and Marginal Women, ed. Robert R. Edwards and Vickie Ziegler (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 1995), 37. 7. Brundage, “The Merry Widow’s Serious Sister,” in Edwards and Ziegler, Matrons and Marginal Women, 37. Jussen cites Ovid’s ideas about mourning from the Fastorum, Liber 1.35–36: “per totidem menses a funere coniungis uxor sustinet in vidua tristia signa domo” (Jussen, “Der ‘Name’ der Witwe,” in Parisse, Veuves et veuvage, 158n84). 8. Jussen, “Der ‘Name’ der Witwe,” in Parisse, Veuves et veuvage, 158; Augustine, Ad Ecdiciam, Epistle 262, CSEL 57:621–31.



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“clothed in dark vestments, the sign of continence, like a nun.”9 By the ninth century, however, synods no longer referenced formal mourning as a mandatory practice for all widowed women.10 While early medieval hagiographers took pains to order women’s life stages into the neat designation of the thirty-, sixty- and hundredfold fruits, legal and liturgical texts were not as clear about the distinctions between the widow’s profession of chastity, the veste mutate, and the nun’s vow and habit. Some scholars, such as Jussen (for early medieval continental widows and widowers) and Mary Erler (for English widows from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries), see the widow’s chaste profession and veiling as creating a secular order (viduae velatae) that endured, albeit under changing historical circumstances, from patristic times through the Middle Ages. They distinguished such widows from nuns (who were sometimes also called velatae, but were more commonly referred to as religiosae, moniales, and sanctimonales in the sources).11 Other scholars, such as Suzanne Wemple (for the fifth to the ninth centuries) and Penelope Johnson (for the High Middle Ages), argue that “veiling” generally referred only to a monastic vow.12 According to Wemple, the practice of veiling widows ended in the ninth century when reforming synods such as the Synod of Paris (829) criticized widows living in the world as doing so only to misuse the greater freedom such an arrangement offered.13 Together with these ninth-century impulses toward strict enclosure of religious women, however, Carolingian clerics still recognized the validity of consecrated widowhood in a secular environment: a decree from the Council of Aachen in the first decade of the ninth century refers to the institution of “veiled women” living in their own homes.14 Even more significantly, formularies of benedictions from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries 9. Paulinus of Aquileia, Concilium Forjuliense, chap. 11, PL 99:299–300. 10. Jussen, “Der ‘Name’ Der Witwe,” in Parisse, Veuves et veuvage, 158–59. 11. Ibid.; see also Mary Erler, “English Vowed Women at the End of the Middle Ages,” Medieval Studies 57 (1995): 156–58; see also Erler, “Three Fifteenth-Century Vowesses,” in Medieval London Widows,” ed. Caroline M. Barron and Anne F. Sutton (London: Hambledon Press, 1994), 158–83. 12. Wemple, Women in Frankish Society, 105; Penelope D. Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 32–33. 13. Wemple, Women in Frankish Society, 103–5, 259n45. 14. Burchard of Worms, Libri Decretorum, Liber 8.37, PL 140:798–99: “(Ex Concil. Arausic., capite 6.): De nobilis feminis quae amissis viris repente velantur, et in propriis domibus diversas necessitates opponentes residere delectantur.”

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contained blessings of widows that elaborated on the early Gallic rite of consecration. Canon law continued to cite decrees concerning the widow’s veiling, which suggests that the practice did not disappear under the pressure of Carolingian reforms.15 Hagiography likewise suggested a pattern in which a holy widow first established her perpetual chastity by profession and veiling before she lived in a convent, and sometimes she later lived within the cloister without any further initiation into the community as a nun. The veiling and vowing of widowed women, then, remained a distinctive ritual in medieval liturgy, and not identical with the nun’s profession. Widows’ liturgies of consecration were also specifically directed toward women; no corollary existed for men, monastic or otherwise. The discourse of widowhood had always involved comparisons to female virginity, and its treatment in liturgy likewise situated the widow in relation to other professions of female religious vocation, such as nun, abbess, and deaconess. Widowhood was connected to these roles through a shared liturgical language, which was related to, but not identical with, the monastic professions available to women.16 Mary Skinner, reflecting on Wemple’s assessment that all veiled women were essentially nuns, deliberately complicates the categorization of monastic and lay arrangements, describing a number of “religious possibilities” for women in the early medieval period, and distinguishes the private religious observation that widows could follow in their own homes from the nun’s vocation.17 Widows who “changed their garments” permanently assumed the mourning clothes common to all widows—even those for whom mourning was temporary because they intended to remarry—in rituals that were distinct from a monastic profession.18 Church synods from the 15. Hugh of St. Victor commented on the ambiguous decrees governing the veiling and vowing of widows that while veiling is a conclusive commitment to chastity, he was unsure of what rules should govern widows who initiated a vow but were not veiled, and who then remarried: “de viduis autem non velatis non habemus certam auctoritatem quae illas in conjugio post votum initio remanere prohibeat vel permittat” (Summa Sententiarum, PL 176:163). 16. For example, widows very likely were among the conversae who tended to form loosely organized communities in proximity to houses of Augustinian canons. 17. Mary Skinner, “Benedictine Life for Women in Central France, 850–1100: A Feminist Revival,” in Medieval Religious Women, vol. 1, Distant Echoes, ed. John A. Nichols and Lillian Shank (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications), 87; Eric Palazzo, “Les formules de bénédiction et de consecration des veuves,” in Parisse, Veuves and veuvage, 34–35. 18. Erler, “English Vowed Women,” 153, 162.



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ninth century discussed the “change of dress” through two different practices: of veiling widows, which clerics were reluctant to do, perhaps because the image of the veil was thought more appropriate for virgins alone, and vowing widows, which appeared to be less problematic in canon law, as any Christian could make a personal vow. The church fathers provided many positive examples of holy widows, such as Marcella and Juliana, who lived in the world successfully as laywomen despite perennial concerns about their supervision. Medieval liturgy, canon law, and historical narratives present evidence that consecrated widowhood also existed outside the cloister walls despite medieval clerics’ preference for strict claustration. Private vows and informal relationships with religious houses allowed widowed women to establish a celibate, religious way of life without actually becoming nuns. While many widows certainly entered convents, secular responsibilities such as child-raising and supervision of familial property prohibited some women from taking the nun’s veil immediately after the death of a spouse. Others may have been unwilling to give up control over their household and possessions, which formal entry into monastic life required. Such women recognized that, as vowed women living in the world, they occupied a distinctive moral and cultural space derived from patristic teaching and ecclesiastical tradition.19

The Widow’s Profession according to Canon Law The practice of consecrating widows testified to the durability and antiquity of church institutions.20 Despite the many centuries that had passed since the era of the early church fathers and the diversity of communities comprised in medieval Europe, images of widowhood in law and liturgy changed little from their antique foundations. Doctors of canon law collated synodal decrees on widows, which drew heavily 19. James Brundage, “Widows as Disadvantaged Persons,” in Mirrer, Upon My Husband’s Death, 193ff. 20. For example, in his letter to Heloise on the origins of nuns, Peter Abelard celebrated Anna as an example of one who “consecrated her widowhood to him, the Nazarene Lord” (“quae jam quasi Nazareae Domini suam ei viduitatem consecraverunt, beatam illam Annam pertinere non ambigo”), and considered the enrolled “true” widows of 1 Timothy to have described those chosen to fulfill a diaconal ministry (“Ex quibus etiam quales ad diaconatus ministerium sint eligendae diligenter describit”). Epistola 7, PL 178:225–26.

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on the sacred authority of St. Paul’s letter to Timothy (1 Tm 5:3–16) and Jerome and Augustine’s letters of counsel to their widowed friends. The canonists Burchard of Worms (ca. 950–1025), Gratian (fl. ca. 1140), and Peter Lombard (1100–1160) compiled the ancient canons with concern for the legal and pastoral issues surrounding the vowing of continent widowhood. They explored the contemporary implications of those issues in matters such as the distinction between clerics and lay people, the nature and legitimacy of marital consent, and monastic reforms that limited monks’ and nuns’ contact with the outside world. The repetition of the earliest church councils’ decrees about professed widowhood suggests that the legal position of the consecrated widow and her volition in certain cases of non-consensual remarriage represented persistent concerns over time, but provided little context for professed widows’ lifestyle or how clerics were involved with their pastoral care at various moments in medieval history. Early canons described but did not clearly distinguish between laywomen who entered convents and others who took solemn vows while remaining in the world. Eleventh- and twelfth-century canonists, revisiting older decrees in the new context of monastic and papal reforms that more strictly defined the differences between clerical institutions and lay society, elaborated on the discussion. They took the widow’s profession as an occasion to discuss two main points: the binding nature of vows and the vulnerability of consecrated women living in a secular environment, issues that were central to the contemporary Gregorian reform movement and its developing ethos of the sacerdotal priesthood. Canonists were perhaps less interested in care of vowed widows themselves than in the theoretical problems their status created for clerical oversight of religious women and laypeople. The consecration to perpetual chastity was considered a solemn vow, but widows who undertook it separately from a monastic vocation had only limited direction for their conduct once the vow was made, especially in the early Middle Ages, when public preaching and pastoral care of the laity paled in comparison to the clerical efforts of the later Middle Ages.21 The textual tradition prescribed a chaste and modest lifestyle characterized by specific duties such as almsgiving, care for 21. Hasenohr, “La vie quotidienne,” 29, 36.



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strangers and the poor, and devotion “to doing good in every way” in the ancient tradition of enrolled widows. Unlike nuns or anchoresses living under a rule, however, widows had no established daily or hourly office or concrete liturgical responsibilities. Liturgy and canon law in the twelfth century elaborated on earlier texts: liturgical texts described the enactment of the vow itself in increasing detail, and canon law explored the ways the vow could be broken and clerics’ role in both protecting the widow and punishing transgressions against her sworn chastity. Since late antiquity, the widow’s consecration established her identity as something more than a laywoman but less than a nun. At the same time that ecclesiastical authorities recognized the widow’s profession, they were inconsistent about its meaning. It was unclear, for example, whether the widow’s benediction should consist of merely the vow, or should include the ancient practice of veiling that was more appropriately associated with the consecration of virgins. Pope Gelasius I suggested that widows should not be sworn to chastity by veiling, both because Paul’s teachings permitted them to change their minds and choose remarriage, and because of the instability of the female sex more generally: For concerning widows under no benediction of veiling, we led earlier Latin law to be discussed. Those who, by their own will, tread on their chaste profession of their first marriage by the mutability of mind, it is a matter of great importance—to their danger—with what satisfaction they might please God. Likewise, according to the Apostle, if they were not able to hold themselves back, nothing whatsoever prohibited them from marrying; thus by deliberation in this way of life they should keep the oath of modesty they promised to God. We however ought to put no noose before such ones, but only to place before them the exhortations of the eternal prize, and the penalties of divine justice, that our conscience might be pure, and that their intention should give an accounting of themselves to God. Surely we should beware what, concerning their deeds and morals, the blessed apostle Paul attests, which we plainly neglected to explain, lest the unstable sex seems not to be so deterred as much as they are encouraged.22 22. “(Ex decr. Gelasii papæ, capite 21.) Nam de viduis sub nulla benedictione velandis, superius latius duximus disserendum. Quae si propria voluntate professam pristini conjugii castitatem mutabili mente calcaverunt, periculi earum intererit, quali Deum debeant satisfactione placere. Sicut enim se forsitan continere non poterant secundum Apostolum, nullatenus nubere vetebantur, sic habita secum deliberatione, promissam Deo pudicitiae fidem debuerunt custodire. Nos autem nullum talibus

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Medieval legal texts frequently reiterated Gelasius’s text to cite the dangers of the widow’s chaste profession.23 Medieval canonists took Gelasius as their touchstone for discussing the veiling of widows, but most, including Burchard and Gratian, interpreted Pope Gelasius’s decree as an argument against the specific act of veiling a widow rather than an outright prohibition against a formal vow of chastity. Burchard of Worms, citing a decree from the Council of Orléans (538), noted that both Gelasius and the bishops at the Council of Chalcedon (451) ordered widows who entered into sexual unions after their consecration to atone with serious and humiliating punishments such as excommunication and public penance.24 Likewise, Gratian, who compiled his Decretum between 1140 and 1165, appealed to the authority of the Council of Carthage to establish that consecrated widows were damned if they transgressed and returned to marriage, reasoning that such “adultery” against Christ constituted an even greater offense than adultery against a mortal husband. He also noted widows were forbidden to remain in such illicit marriages even if they came about by rape or abduction, though he gave no indication of how a woman might extricate herself from such a forced union.25 Burchard of Worms affirmed the ancient sources that verified the episcopal blessing and the widow’s dress as the defining marks of a chaste profession. Citing a decree from the fourth-century Council of Carthage, Burchard chiefly discussed the widow’s dress as a warning that none were to violate the widow’s “first pledge” of continence (1 Tm 5:12): “just as the prize of chastity is good, likewise is it the observation of many and by precept a custom to be kept, that if those widows laqueum debemus injicere, sed solas adhortationes praemii sempiterni, poenasque proponere divini judicii, ut nostra sit absoluta conscientia, et illarum pro se rationem Deo reddat intentio. Cavendum quippe est quod de earum moribus actibusque beatus Paulus testatur apostolus, quod planius exponere praeterimus, ne sexus instabilis non tam deterreri quam admoneri videatur.” Cited in Burchard, Libri Decretorum, Liber 8.34, p. 798. The same canon is cited by Peter Damian, Epistolae (Opusculo Decimum Sextum. Rhetoricae Declamationis Invectio in Episcopum Monachos ad Seculum Revocantem. Ad Gislerium Episcopum Ausimanum), chap. 7, PL 144:374, and Gratian, Decretum, Pars 2, C. 27 q.1 c. 42, PL 187:1390. 23. “Quod nec auctoritas divina, nec canonum forma praestitit. Quae si propria fuerit voluntate continentiam professa, ut in ejusdem Gelasii capitulo XXI legitur, ejus intentio pro se reddat rationem Deo: quia sicut secundum Apostolum, si se continere non poterat, nullatenus nubere vetabatur.” Ivo of Chartres, Decretum, PL 161:541. 24. Burchard, Libri Decretorum, Liber 8.39, p. 799. 25. This attitude suggests perhaps that women were suspected of colluding with their abductors in order to escape their vows (Gratian, Decretum, Pars 2, C. 27 q. 1 c. 1, PL 187:1371–72).



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left bereft of a husband, whether of young years or in mature age, vow themselves to God, and reject the clothing of the laity, under the witness of the bishop and of the Church, and dress in religious habit, after which however should they go over to a worldly marriage, according to the Apostle they shall be damned: for they have violated their first pledge.”26 Burchard’s and Gratian’s attempts to reconcile the references to widows in canon law captured the ambivalence about what constituted the widow’s consecration by either a veil or a vow. Despite efforts to distinguish taking the veil from making vows, Burchard nevertheless referred to the veil when describing the conditions under which a widow might make a chaste profession to her bishop or his representative: “Concerning women who have lost their husbands, it pleases not that they take the veil indiscriminately, as they have done in the past, but that they wait thirty days after the death of their husband. And after the thirtieth day they should choose that which they ought to choose through the counsel of the bishop, or, if the bishop is absent, by the counsel of other religious and their friends.”27 Medieval jurists accepted the ancient precedent of the widow’s consecration as a valid practice but also reinforced the perception of widowhood as an inherently fragile state. External forces such as the social conventions of courtship and remarriage as well woman’s own “unstable” nature undermined clerical confidence in women’s ability to succeed in professed widowhood, and jurists took pains to differentiate the status from consecrated virginity and from other more official orders within the ecclesiastical hierarchy. This concern was evident in the personnel associated with the widow’s ritual: only priests, and no bishop or member of the higher clergy (pontificum nullus), should veil widows.28 Gratian, writing about a century after Burchard, implied that the widow’s profession ought to be made in writing before a priest (a sacerdote vel ministro), rather than a bishop, and that the occasion was to be marked by both the widow’s 26. Burchard, Libri Decretorum, Liber 8.39, p. 799. 27. “De feminis quae viros amittunt, placet ne se sicut hactenus indescrete velent, sed triginta dies post decessum viri sui exspectent. Et post tricesimum diem per consilium episcopi sui, vel, si episcopus absens fuerit, consilio aliorum religiosorum suorumque amicorum id quod eligere debent eligant.” Burchard, Libri Decretorum, Liber 8.42, p. 799–800. 28. “Viduas autem uelare pontificum nullus.” Gratian, Decretum, Pars 2, C. 20 q. 1 c. 11, PL 187:1102; also C. 27 q. 1 c. 7.

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garments and written intention of her profession: “A widow who wants to fulfill to the proposal of holy religion should make a profession in writing signed by her or noted by her subscription, and to the priest or minister to whom either she herself came, or, were it to happen, to the one who came to her, containing the statement that she wants to preserve the intention and do this perennially and inviolably.”29 Tradition associated mourning dress with the widow and the veil with the virgin; widows who wore the veil confused this symbolism and also potentially took advantage of its social meaning as a garment of distinction and protection if they donned the veil without the proper permission and ceremony.30 Writing at the end of the thirteenth century, William (or Guillaume) Durand, bishop of Mende (1230–96), affirmed the differences in the meaning of the veil for consecrated widows and for virgins in his commentary on the liturgy, the Rationale Divinorum Officiorum: The veil of profession is taken up by a virgin when she has publicly confessed her continence. . . . This veil is given at the same time as the solemn blessing and the litanies. A bishop must not give this veil to a widow, but she herself takes it from the altar, as some authors say. Fittingly, a virgin and not a widow is veiled by a bishop, since in this betrothal, the virgin serves as a type of the Church, which being pure and a virgin, married one man, that is Christ. And as a sign of this relationship, she is veiled by the bishop since she is received in marriage by Christ, in whose person is said: “The Lord has betrothed me with this ring.” But a widow does not in the same circumstances serve as a type of the Church as does the virgin because her mind and body are not pure as hers are. Thus the widow cannot be said to marry Christ so that she can represent Christ’s marriage to the Church, and this is why she is not veiled.31 29. “Vidua, quae sanctae religionis obtinere propositum voluerit, sacerdoti vel ministro, ad quem aut ipsa venerit, aut quem ad se venire contigerit, scriptis professionem faciat a se aut signo, aut subscriptione notatam, continentem, se et religionis propositum velle, et hoc perenniter inviolate servare.” Gratian, Decretum, Pars 2, C. 20 q. 2 c. 16, PL 187:1103. Gratian’s reference to the written record of the chaste profession is intriguing, because it suggests the maintenance of records containing specific names and vows for this period in European continental history, similar to the extant ones Mary Erler has investigated for medieval England. 30. Some canonists doubted the wisdom of veiling even virgins with a solemn vow in the event they broke it, and all of the canonists mentioned here asserted that no virgin should be veiled before the age of twenty-five (Gratian, Decretum, Pars 2, C. 20 q. 1 c. 15, PL 187:1103). 31. “Velum autem professionis suscipitur a uirgine quando continentiam profitetur. . . . Et datur uelum huiusmodi cum benedictione sollempni et cum letania. Hoc uelum nullus episcopus dat uiduis, sed ipsamet de altari ut dicunt quidam, assumit. Sane uirgo et non uidua ideo ab episcopo uelatur, quia uirgo in hac desponsatione typum gerit Ecclesie que pura et uirgo uni nupsit uiro, id est Christo. Et



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Here, as in the earlier canons, the veil remained a part of the widow’s distinctive habit, but the way in which the widow received it demonstrated that a widow’s profession of chastity was inherently inferior to the virgin’s vow. Perhaps the greatest difficulty the gesture of veiling presented was that widows could don the veil to appear as if they had made a chaste profession without having actually completed the ritual, whereas a widow usually made a vow in the presence of another person. A decree from the Synod of Orange implied that the liturgy might have at one time occurred privately (in secretario), rather than publicly at Mass. Burchard, as we have seen, preferred that the widow’s solemn vow be made known to a wider circle of friends and advisors to ensure compliance, and Gratian wanted the action affirmed in writing.32 The medieval liturgies of benediction addressed an audience, fratres karissimi, and often indicated that others besides the celebrant and the vowess were present at the ceremony and thus likely to monitor the widow’s behavior thereafter.33 Medieval canonists and theologians unanimously upheld the judgment of the ancient and early medieval councils that condemned women who took the vow without clerical permission. Only a bishop or priest could legitimately perform the ritual of the widow’s benediction, and the canons reiterated the punishments for widows who attempted to veil themselves. Although an unauthorized veiling violated church law, a widow, even if improperly veiled, could not renounce the action once she assumed the garment. Burchard cited a decree of Pope Gelasius, quoted in its turn from the ninth-century Council of Mainz, to in signum huius rei uelatur ab episcopo quia a Christo recipitur in coniugium. In cuius persona dictum est: ‘Anulo suo subarrhauit me Dominus.’ Sed uidua non gerit in tali facto typum Ecclesie sicut uirgo, cum non sit integra mente et corpore sicut illa. Vnde non sic coniugitur Christ ut representet Ecclesie coniunctionem, quare non uelatur.” Guillaume Durand, Guillelmi Duranti rationale Divinorum Officiorum I-IV, ed. A. Davril and T. M. Thibodeau, CCCM 140:2.45–46, p. 242–43; in On the Clergy and their Vestments: A New Translation of Books 2–3 of the Rationale Divinorum Officiorum A New Translation of the Prologue and Book One, trans. Timothy Thibodeau (Scranton, Penn.: University of Scranton Press, 2009), 81–82. 32. “(Ex Concil. Arausic., capite 6.) Viduitatis servandae professionem coram episcopo in secretario habitam, imposita coram episcopo veste viduali, non esse violandam, ipsam talis professionis desertricem merito esse damnandam decernimus.” Cited in Burchard, Libri Decretorum, Liber 8.39, p. 799; cf. ibid., 8.42, pp. 799–800; see also Dyan Elliott’s remarks on solemn vows, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 159. 33. “Fratres karissimi” appears, for example, in the tenth-century formulary, the RomanoGerman Pontifical, and manuscripts based upon this rite.

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argue against the veiling of widows, because to break the promise was a mortal sin and an act of infidelity to Christ, the true spouse. Canonists agreed with Gelasius’s decree that “if a widow willingly imposes the veil on herself albeit not a holy [veil], and in the Church among veiled women gives oblation to God, whether she is willing or unwilling, she should have further the habit of a nun.”34 Such decrees suggest fears about how widows might misuse the chaste vow: concerns that women could assume the appearance of a nun while enjoying secular pursuits, or reside casually in convents without committing to a monastic profession. Burchard noted these problems when he quoted and commented upon Nicholas’s decree concerning a woman who had “imposed the veil on her own head, pretended she was a nun under that same veil,” and then remarried: it seems good to me that since through hypocrisy she wanted to confound the church rule and she did not remain legitimately in her vow, that she should do penance regarding this unmentionable deceit, and be returned to that which she solemnly promised, and to the sacred ministry she began. For if we consent that each person may undertake all ecclesiastical sacraments of the church as she wishes and not really do them, the whole ecclesiastical order shall be thrown into disorder, and neither shall the law of the catholic faith hold firm nor the canons of the sacred rite be observed.35

Canonist’s warnings against the widow’s unauthorized consecration expressed less concern for her pastoral care than for the power of her actions to undermine the very nature of a holy vow. Should the consecrated widow renounce her profession, she became a negative influence on others, an influence that could throw the church itself into chaos. It is difficult to assess how local clergy actually dealt with the misbehavior of vowed widows in a given town or parish, or how strongly bishops and priests associated infractions of widows’ vows with an erosion of 34. “Si [vidua] sibi imposuerit, et in ecclesia inter velatas oblationem Deo obtulerit, velit, nolit, sanctimoniale habitum ulterius habere debet.” Burchard, Libri Decretorum, Liber 8.36, p. 798. 35. “Quod autem interrogasti de femina quae post obitum mariti sui velamen sacrum super caput suum imposuit, et finxit se sub eodem velamine sanctimonialem esse, postea vero ad nuptias rediit, bonum mihi videtur quia per hypocrisim ecclesiasticam regulam conturbare voluit, et non legitime in voto suo permansit, ut poenitentiam agat de illusione nefanda, et revertatur ad id quod spopondit, et in sacro ministerio inchoavit. Nam si consenserimus quod omnia sacramenta ecclesiastica quisque, prout vult, fingat et non vere faciat, omnis ordo ecclesiasticus conturbatur, nec catholicae fidei jura consistunt, nec canones sacri rite observantur.” Ibid., Liber 8.47, p. 802. The original text is from the letter of Pope Nicholas to Adalwine, bishop of Mainz, (867), Epistolae et Decreta XXVI, PL 119:811.



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their own authority or ecclesiastical credibility. Legal discourse, however, identified the inherent instability of the widowed state with broad implications for the maintenance of Christian obedience. Perhaps for this reason, passages concerning widows’ broken vows of chastity received consistent attention from medieval jurists and theologians. The tenth-century bishop Regino of Prüm referred to the problem of broken vows in his work On Ecclesiastical Discipline [De disciplina ecclesia], and canonists and theologians after Burchard, including Ivo of Chartres, Gratian, Peter Damian, and Peter Abelard, likewise reiterated the ninth-century decree.36 Peter Lombard addressed the problem from a slightly different perspective in his Sentences. He used the case of the consecrated widow as an occasion to talk about the distinction between the private, or singular, vow, and the solemn, public vow. A private vow, he argued, was binding, despite its informality. Hence, whoever made a private vow of continence was not allowed to marry, and sinned mortally if she did so.37 If she did marry after a private vow, however, the marriage could not be dissolved, because no one could prove whether a secret vow precluding a second union had actually been made.38 If she publicly committed to chastity, the vow would be manifest to all. Its public nature, and the scandal arising from its violation, would obviate the possibility that the vowess would attempt to marry afterward, for, as Peter Lombard admonished, in such a case, “not only to marry, but to want to marry, is damnable.”39 The vehement repetition of decrees forbidding veiling is suggestive. Despite the persistent assertion that widows should not be veiled at all, canonists nevertheless filled their collections with citations concerning the regulation of veiled widows without ever addressing the obvious inconsistency that they should never have been veiled in the first place. 36. Regino of Prüm, De ecclesiasticus disciplinis, chap. 42, PL 132:379; Ivo of Chartres, Decretum (Pars Septima) chaps. 65 and 152, PL 161:560, 582; Gratian, Decretum, Pars 1, D. 27 c. 6, PL 187:154. Peter Abelard also included it in his rule for Heloise (Epistle 8, PL 178:318–20). 37. “Idem singulare votum, aliud est privatum, aliud solemne. Privatum est, in abscondito factum; solemne vero, in conspectu Ecclesiae factum. Item privatum votum si violentur, peccatum est mortale; solemne vero violare, peccatum et scandalum est.” Peter Lombard, Sententiarum liber quatuor, 4.38.2, PL 192:931–32. 38. “Qui privatum faciunt votum continentiae, Matrimonium contrahere non debent; quia contrahendo mortaliter peccant. Si tamen contraxerint, non separentur, quia probari non potest quod occulte factum est.” Ibid. 39. “Qui vero solemniter vovent, nullatenus coniugium inire queunt; quibus non solum nubere, sed et velle, damnabile est.” Ibid.

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Gelasius’s venerable canon against veiling, though frequently contradicted by later practice, remained central to the discussion, perhaps out of respect for its antiquity, but also because the canon articulated the inherent instability that later clerics also saw in the widow’s status.40 Medieval authors’ treatment of the subject perpetuated early Christian ambiguity about how to define and categorize religious women. A lay widow could take a vow, but her supervision thereafter underscored the challenges in ensuring lay obedience and observance of church doctrine. Even within monastic life, subtle distinctions between widowed and virginal chastity colored perceptions of women’s religious roles. Despite ambiguities about whether the veil should be reserved only for virgins, medieval authorities nevertheless recognized the veil as an important symbol of widowhood. Both the sixth-century widow St. Radegund and her ninth-century counterpart St. Rictrude received the veil of widowhood prior to becoming nuns, and Rictrude’s hagiographer Hucbald praised Rictrude’s self-veiling under Amand’s guidance, even though her actions did not conform to canon law or liturgical conventions. Although the imagery and language describing widowhood remained consistent over time, the practices associated with the widow’s consecration may have varied widely across time and place. The repeated discussions of the widow’s veil suggests that different understandings of the practice persisted throughout the centuries and required frequent iteration in subsequent councils to clarify its meaning in changing contexts. Ironically, even while clerics fretted about the dangers of breaking a formal vow of continent widowhood, the venerable behavior of the idealized vere vidua itself had a normative function for women: canon law stipulated that all women while in mourning, even if they intended to remarry, should behave as if they were vowed to continence.41 Canon law penalized widows who courted or married within the prescribed time period, usually a year after the husband’s death. The Synod of Paris in 829, for example, argued that widows delighting in pleasures in their own homes ought rather to spend their 40. See Bernard M. Levinson, Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 41. Brundage, “The Merry Widow’s Serious Sister,” in Edwards and Ziegler, Matrons and Marginal Women, 44–45. Brundage notes that no such period was enforced for widowers, as this measure was primarily a means to determine the patrimony of a child born after the spouse’s death.



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widowhood in a convent, though the decree gave no indication of how such an accusation could be substantiated.42 The tensions inherent in the late antique precedents on widows created pastoral dilemmas for medieval clerics. Communities often had different needs than the legal and theological scholars who debated fine points of canon law on paper, causing wide gaps between canonical theory and pastoral practice.43 The blessing of second unions for widows and widowers provides an example of this conflict between official doctrine and popular demand. Second marriages were considered licit but inferior, and thus undeserving of a formal blessing. Pope Alexander III (1159– 81) prohibited that second unions be blessed as first marriages were, and declared that priests who did so should be punished.44 By the late thirteenth century, William Durand deliberately identified the symmetry between the practices of the widow’s consecration and the priest’s blessing of second nuptials to explain why the latter was considered problematic: “a priest is prohibited from presiding over a second marriage or from giving a blessing for a second marriage. . . . and it is as if the widow who takes vows is being married for a second time: first to a man, and second in her profession to Christ. Therefore, the veil of consecration or profession is not offered to her, since it is as if she is celebrating a second wedding; but she herself takes it from the altar.”45 William’s characterization of the inferiority of the widow in liturgical practice, whether as a consecrated celibate or a twice-married wife, distanced lay women with worldly experience from the clerical ideal of the consecrated virgin. William’s view—a rather old-fashioned one for the thirteenth century, which had witnessed the church’s encouragement of a more positive model of conjugality for laypeople—emphasized remarriage as a concession to lust, and thus undeserving of the same recognition as first marriages.46 The 42. Wemple, Women in Frankish Society, 103–5, 259n45. 43. Brundage, “The Merry Widow’s Serious Sister,” in Edwards and Ziegler, Matrons and Marginal Women, 42–43. 44. Ibid., 39. Brundage cites, among others, Alexander’s decrees, compiled in 1234 into a collection called the Liber Extra, 10, 4.21.1, and 10, 4.21.3. 45. “Preterea sacerdos prohibietur secundis nuptiis interesse et super second nubentes infundere benedictionem. . . . Sed hec uidua quasi secundo nubit: primo homini, postea in professione Christo, ideoque ei, qausi celebranti secundas nuptias, non porrigitur uelum consecrationis nec etima professionis, sed ipsa illud suscipit de altari.” Guillelmi Duranti Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, 2.47, p. 142; trans. Thibodeau, p. 47. 46. On the origins and development of sacramental marriage as a model for laypeople, see Dyan

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prohibition against priests presiding over and blessing second marriages elides such unions with bigamous marriages perpetrated while a first spouse was still living. It seems unlikely, given the church’s interest in overseeing sacramental marriage in the high and later Middle Ages, that the church would have wanted to completely relinquish oversight of such unions, and William Durand does not resolve this contradiction. Canon law thus leaves both the medieval priest and the modern medievalist with some confusion as to the liturgical context for second unions in the cases of widows and widowers. The tensions between theory and practice in the case of nuptial blessings are nevertheless instructive for investigation into the practice of vowing and veiling widows. Parish priests persisted in blessing marriages, sometimes constituting new rituals to distinguish second or subsequent marriages from first-time unions, at the request of parishioners who did not consider themselves properly married without the performance of the ritual blessing.47 Canonists faced a similar situation when discussing the practices for consecrating widows as they did when discussing remarriage and the nuptial blessing: the meaning of the act for the individuals concerned was somewhat different from the far-reaching implications of a solemn vow and the precedents set by such a vow, and local clergy did not always adhere to the practices stipulated in the canons. Despite the concerns about veiling that arose from the clergy’s association of the veil with virginity and the enclosure of the cloister, widowed women routinely assumed the veil as a visible symbol of consecrated widowhood that affirmed a permanent vocation beyond the mourning period. Just as married couples themselves desired their marriages blessed, so too might widows have demanded the proper recognition and protection of their vowed chastity through the symbol of the veil. One indication of such widows’ vulnerability in this respect is the ecclesiastical recognition of their role as “disadvantaged persons” (miserabiles personae) in canon law.48 As such, like orphans and the deservElliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitorial Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 11; and André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 385–86. 47. Brundage, “The Merry Widow’s Serious Sister,” in Edwards and Ziegler, Matrons and Marginal Women, 41–42. 48. Brundage, “Widows as Disadvantaged Persons,” in Mirrer, Upon My Husband’s Death, 193–201.



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ing poor, all widows were entitled to special protection. Clerics defined the deserving widow as a woman who emulated the vere vidua of 1 Timothy 5:3–16, and warned that fraudulent widows who used their protected status as a cover for lustful or gossipy behavior should be punished.49 At the same time, the church protected women who were recognized as chaste widows. Clerics condemned forced remarriage, even when canon law clashed with local law on this issue.50 Canon and civil law also discouraged violations of widows’ persons, such as rape and abduction. The capitularies of Louis the Pious stipulated that a triply compounded fine of sixty solidi should be imposed on anyone who raped a widow within thirty days of her losing her husband (interestingly, the same amount of time that she must wait to take any sort of vow),51 and medieval canonists in their decretals likewise repeated the ancient protections for widows.52 Echoing civil law codes, the decrees of the councils and synods pronounced anathema against abductors, but with the ironic turn that the widows themselves were said to be at least partially complicit in their abduction and thus were also required to do penance. Chapter 67 of the Council of Meaux (845) emphasized that marriage to a consecrated woman through her abduction was impossible because her prior vow rendered her ineligible for legitimate marriage.53 Therefore, whatev49. For example, both Burchard and Gratian cite the Council of Seine-et-Marne to assert that “[t]hose who seem to live as nuns under the veil of religion, but rather live in pleasure are considered dead in divine sight, running through the neighborhood, gossips and busybodies . . . let them dwell in a monastery, coerced by episcopal decree and royal potestate.” ([Ex concilio Meldensi, capite 2.]: Ut illae quae quasi sanctimoniales sub velamine religionis degere videntur, sed potius in deliciis viventes, mortuae in divinis oculis computantur, per provincias discurrentes, curiosae et verbosae . . . et ut religiosius de caetero vivant, et in monasteriis conversentur, episcopali decreto et regia potestate coerceantur.) Burchard, Libri Decretorum, Liber 8.50, p. 803; Gratian, Decretum, Pars I, D. 27 c. 68, PL 187:562. 50. Brundage, “The Merry Widow’s Serious Sister,” in Edwards and Ziegler, Matrons and Marginal Women, 45ff. Brundage notes, for example, that in the kingdom of Jerusalem, widows under the age of sixty were required to remarry after the end of their mourning period—though he adds that such practice was not typical. 51. Capitularia (anno 816) 28.4, PL 97:403. 52. Articulated in 314 at the Council of Arles, chap. 6, this canon was repeated in numerous collections including Burchard, Libri Decretorum, Liber 8.52, p. 803, and Gratian, Decretum, Pars 1, D. 27 c. 69, PL 187:562. 53. “[Those] who carry off nuns, virgins or widows, and even presume marriage in furthering of the offence, should be subjected to public penance. But those very women should be removed to a fitting place of penance, and should be compelled to return to the religious habit. So let that incestuous man remain without hope of joining to a wife forever, unless he were able to be excused censure because he

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er consent might have passed between the two parties, the prior vows prevailed and rendered any such agreement void. An eleventh-century English law code voiced similar fears that a widow might contrive an abduction as an excuse to escape the prescribed mourning period in which remarriage was forbidden. If a widow was abducted during the mourning period and forced into marriage by the perpetrator, her inheritance was forfeit unless she returned home and forsook the second husband. The law was certainly intended to protect widows, but punished the victim as well as the perpetrator. Whether or not the widow colluded with her abductor (as sometimes happened), canon and civil law implied culpability and ensured punishment for the widow who lapsed in her prescribed celibacy.54 Hemmed in by clerical suspicion and practical vulnerabilities, consecrated widows required external validation of their status. Peter Lombard insisted on a public rather than a private vow, for the public vow broadcast the widow’s unavailability to future suitors. In this context the veil was an ancient and important recognition of professed widowhood, despite clerical ambiguity about its use. The veil was a symbol of the boundary between the vere vidua, consecrated to perpetual chastity, and other, “available” women. If mourning dress were not sufficient to distinguish vowed widows from others, the veil signaled the intentions of the widow’s profession, protecting her from forced marriages and from other sorts of scandal as well. Widows thus might well have wanted to follow Rictrude’s example and “invoked help from the terrible name of God”55 by emphasizing veiling as part of the ritual, even when living in the world. did not know her to be a veiled person: God forbid that this be true! If they presume to repeat marriages, they shall be subjected to bitter punishment, and shall amply be cast out. If by chance they may be noticed to obey with salutary warnings, let them be excommunicated.” ([Ex concilio Meldensi, capite 8.] Qui sanctimoniales virgines vel viduas rapiunt, et progressu etiam criminis in conjugium sumunt, publicae poenitentiae subiugantur. Ipsae vero feminae locis congruis poenitentiae retrudantur, et ad habitum religionis redire cogantur. Ipse autem incestuous sine spe uxoriae copulationis perenniter maneat, nisi nescisse se velatam expurgare potuerit. Si vero, quod absit! Coniugia iterare praesumpserint, acriori subdantur vindictae, et amplius propellantur. Qui si forte obedire monitis salutaribus noluerint, anathemitazentur.) Cited in Burchard, Libri Decretorum, Liber 8.51, p. 803, and in Gratian, Decretum, Pars 1, D. 27 c. 70, PL 187:562. 54. Mary P. Richards and B. Jane Stanfield, “Concepts of Anglo-Saxon Women in the Laws,” in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, ed. Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 96. 55. Hucbald of Saint-Amand, Vita Rictrudis, 1.14, AASS May III (May 12): 84.



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Benedictions: Widows in Medieval Liturgy The vowing ceremony dramatized the attributes of holy widowhood established in hagiographic and theological discourse. The vow and the dress that symbolized it marked the widow as a chaste and spiritual person, a famula Dei who carried that religious distinction when she returned to secular society, where she wore her potential for the sixtyfold fruits of chaste widowhood as a protective garment. If the widow chose to associate herself with a church, monastery, or convent, or if she decided to live near such, her vow and dress legitimized her presence among the holy men and women whose company she sought. The ceremony described the experience as a conversion, highlighting the widow’s pivotal position between the cloister and the world and between the spiritual merits of virginity and the lesser ones of married life. The liturgy drew deeply on the example of the widow Anna—who lived for years in the temple, fasting and praying day and night—to characterize the consecrated woman in her new life as a vowess. Mary Erler’s research on vowed women in England suggests that the profession of widowhood was a continuous practice from late antiquity through the Middle Ages. Though by no means a large population— perhaps one or two per year—vowed widows constituted a steady presence that the church acknowledged and encouraged.56 The institution of vowed widowhood in England is described as early as the seventh century in the Latin Penitential of Theodore, in the Anglo-Saxon Confessional of Egbert, bishop of York, and in at least five eleventh-century pontificals.57 For the later Middle Ages, manuscripts from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries contain benedictions and ordines consecrating widows to chastity. The liturgies, while essentially similar to each other and to continental rites, were not standardized; the manuscripts varied according to the personal usage of the bishops who owned and used the books.58 By the later Middle Ages, English bishops maintained records of the names of vowed widows in their registers. The widow’s 56. Erler, “English Vowed Women,” 157. Erler has counted about 251 widows in episcopal records covering a period of 300 years; see also Susan Steuer’s PhD dissertation, “Widows and Religious Vocation: Options and Decisions in the Medieval Province of New York” (University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, 2001). 57. Erler, “English Vowed Women,” 159. 58. Ibid., 160–61.

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pledge was performed orally and then noted with the time and location of the vow in the bishop’s register, sometimes with a transcription of the pledge and a copy of the vowess’s signature.59 Registers of vowed widows appear at present to be unique to England; continental records of this kind, if they were ever kept, have not been found, despite Gratian’s expectation that widows should indicate their intention of chaste vows in writing. The earliest rituals appear in European manuscripts dating from the eighth century, though the liturgies might well have originated earlier.60 Like other rites of ordination and benediction, the rituals for widow’s profession were probably composed separately in small books (libelli) before they were eventually compiled into collections of benedictionals, and sometimes included with other rites in pontificals and sacramentaries.61 The ceremonies for vowed widowhood in these documents were brief, and emphasized the profession of chastity, the blessing of the widow and her clothing, and her commitment to a devotional life. The Gelasian Sacramentary (compiled in the eighth century but attributed to the fifth-century Pope Gelasius) contained a simple blessing for widows that extolled their permanent chastity, and noted consolation and the sixtyfold fruits of heavenly merit as its reward: Comfort lord this your servant bound in widowed labors just as you found it worthy to console the widow of Sarepta through the prophet Elias, and give her the fruit of modesty, that she may not remember former pleasures, and know by desire no incentives of vice, so that to you alone she might submit her neck, in which she may in the labors of the sixty-fold degree take up the most delectable reward of sanctity.62

This blessing was later incorporated into more extensive liturgies, such as the rite found in the tenth-century Romano-German Pontifical, which 59. Ibid., 161–62. 60. Michel Andrieu’s monumental 4-volume collection of significant benedictional manuscripts established editions of the liturgies of the major pontifical books. Le Pontifical Romain au Moyen-Âge, vol. 1, Le Pontificale Romanum Saeculi XII, Studi e Testi 86 (Vatican: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1972). 61. Cyrille Vogel, Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction to the Sources (Portland, Ore.: Pastoral Press, 1981), 227; Eric Palazzo, A History of Liturgical Books (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1998), 200. 62. “Consolare domine hanc famulam tuam viduatis laboribus constrictam sicut consolari dignatus es sareptam viduam per Heliam prophetam, et concede ei pudicicie fructum ut antiquarum meminerit voluptatum, nesciat etiam incentiva vitiorum desideria, ut soli tibi propria subdat colla, quo possit pro laboribus tantis sexagesimum granum [sic; corr. gradum] percipere munus delectabile sanctitatis.” Gelasian Sacramentary, ed. H. A. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), ordo 55, p. 271.



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dedicated separate prayers to the blessing of the widow’s consecration to perpetual chastity, her person, and her clothes.63 Another early blessing celebrating the widow’s consecration appears in a manuscript dating from the mid-eighth century, which Mabillion designated as the Gallican Sacramentary, but which was actually preserved in northern Italy, and probably had its origins in Burgundy: Holy Lord, almighty Father, eternal God, who is so greatly near in your merciful care for your human children, we ask that just as you embrace the devotion of virginity, may you likewise mercifully accept the profession of widowhood. Lord, imploring with prayers, we humble petitioners pray that you protect and defend with your aid this your servant who, out of fear of your name, with chaste timidity is taking heed for herself, with your help, against the impurities of the flesh and the snares of the enemy. She desired to take up through our humble hands the clothing of widowhood, so that this, your ready servant, may be like Anna the daughter of Fanuhel in vigils, in abstinence, in prayers, and in almsgiving.64

This liturgy invoked not only the consolations of chaste widowhood but also, through the association with the widowed prophetess Anna, the spiritual gifts accorded to the woman who practiced it. The blessing also mentioned the distinctive dress that marked the widow’s physical existence as sacred through her permanent state of asceticism and spiritual bereavement. 63. E.g., the blessing of “the widow herself” in the Romano-German Pontifical, vol. 1, ordo 25, p. 60 (hereafter RGP). The prayer also appeared in the Pontifical of Archbishop Robert, which was probably designed for use in England but ended up in Normandy by the eleventh century; The Benedictional of Archbishop Robert, ed. H. A. Wilson (Henry Bradshaw Society: London, 1903), xvi, 138ff. Vogel considers The Pontifical of Archbishop Robert (Rouen Biblio. Municip. Codex 369, also known as the Pontifical of Winchester) to be earlier than the Romano-German Pontifical, perhaps originating in the ninth century (Medieval Liturgy, 228). See also Palazzo, A History of Liturgical Books, 200, 211. 64. “Domine Sancte, Pater omnipotens, aeterne Deus, qui in tantum humano generi miserationis tuae curam inpendis, et ita virginitatis devotionem amplecteris, ut viduitatis professionem clementer acceptes, te, quaesumus, Domine, precibus inplorans, te supplices deprecamur, ut famolam tuam ill quae ob timorem tui nominis casto timore sibi prospiciens, viduitatis indumentum per nostrae humilitatis manus percipere postulavit, tuo auxilio contra inlecebras carnis atque insidias inimici munias praesidio ac defendas, ut sit famola tua ill Anna filiae Fanuhelis similis in vigiliis, in abstentia, in orationibus atque eleemosynis prompta, ‘Benedictio super viduam veste mutandam.’” Sacramentarium Gallicanum, PL 72:570. Mabillion thought this text described sixth-century Gallic practice, but printed it in the PL from an eighth-century manuscript found at Bobbio, Italy (now Bnf lat. 13246, known as the Bobbio Missal). A complex manuscript that contained traditions from Francia and that underwent many additions and changes, it probably was a Gallican sacramentary written in Burgundy and influenced by Irish tradition; see Vogel, Medieval Liturgy, 108; and Yitzhak Hen, The Bobbio Missal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–4.

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In the latter half of the tenth century, scholars of the Ottonian Renaissance, particularly under the influence of the diocese of Mainz, began compiling books of episcopal rites intended specifically for the bishop’s use; these books contained the essential texts he needed “to celebrate in cathedral and diocese, with a special insistence on the texts that were exclusively his.”65 This formulary, known as the Romano-German Pontifical, integrated earlier blessings into a more standard ritual of a variety of holy offices apart from the Eucharistic and sacramental liturgies, which were compiled in separate books. The benediction of widows was situated within a group of rituals for consecrating male and female clergy. The books provided liturgies for priests and deacons, virgins, deaconesses, widows, abbots and abbesses, monks, and nuns—in that order. Both the content and organization of the Romano-German Pontifical proved influential in liturgical books of the later Middle Ages. The ritual for the consecration of a widow in the Romano-German Pontifical included explicit directions for its performance: the widow’s consecration was celebrated as part of the Mass, after the reading of the gospel. The rubric explained that the widow’s consecration was licit when a marriage had been legitimately dissolved through a husband’s death, invoking the sense that the widow’s consecration was like a second marriage. The text also reiterated the directives from early church synods that the bishop was not to veil widows: a priest performed the veiling, or, rather, the veil could be consecrated by the bishop, and the widow assumed the veil at the altar.66 The liturgical language underscored the anxieties expressed in the earlier canons, which emphasized the bishop’s remove from the process and the widow’s own responsibility in assuming the veil. The first part of the ceremony blessed the “garment of widowhood” and indicated the widow’s new identity and commitment to continence through the donning of the widow’s clothes: Lord, open your eyes of majesty for the blessing of this garment of widowhood, so that she who pleased her husband and the world by the wearing of ornate garments might be worthy to gain your grace in sacred benediction.67 65. Palazzo, A History of Liturgical Books, 203; see also Vogel, Medieval Liturgy, 233. 66. RGP vol. 1, ordo 25, p. 59. Virgins, in contrast, should be veiled by the bishop, and before the reading of the Gospel. 67. “Aperi quaesumus Domine oculos maiestatis tuae ad benedicendam hanc viduitatis vestem, ut quae in vestibus ordinatis [sic] viri sui usibus aut seculo placuit, in sacris vero benedictionis tuae



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The widow then withdrew, changed her clothes, and performed the litany prostrate at the altar, and vowed to serve the Lord “with perfect continence and modesty of body and mind,” so that he who is the “judge of widows” might grant her perfect continence.68 Then the widow herself was blessed with the prayer “Comfort, Lord, this your servant” (“Consolare Domine”) from the Gelasian Sacramentary. The celebrant prayed for the widow, that she might be worthy to remain in the hope of eternal reward, in full faith and spirit of her chaste proposal, and asked that God give her humility, chastity, obedience, love, and an abundance of good works.69 The widow then placed the veil on her head, an act followed by more prayers that affirmed her as a new person who, like Anna, in widow’s clothes served God in the temple: Lord God eternal, giver of celestial virtues, we humble petitioners pour out our prayers to you, that you might find this your servant worthy to consecrate, whom you have caused to be converted from her earlier way of life, putting off the old man and putting on the new, having been converted, just as Anna the prophetess abandoned [her old life] for a long time in fasting and prayer, clothed in the garments of widowhood to your glory in the temple, so too may this your daughter devote herself to you alone, God, in your church, with devoted mind.70 gratiam consequi mereatur.” Ibid., 60. In the edition of the twelfth century Roman pontifical, the editor of both the latter and the RGP replaces the word ordinatis with ornatis, and ornatis appears in all the twelfth-century and later manuscripts I have examined (cf. codices Clm 3809, from the diocese of Augsburg, fol. 194; Clm 100, from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, fol. 50; and Hs. 21, Augsburg Ordinariatsbibliothek, fol. 142r). 68. “Quae corpore ac mente perfectae continentiae et pudicitiae se servituram . . . ipse qui est iudex viduarum perfectam tribuat continentiam.” RGP vol. 1, ordo 25, p. 60. 69. “Da, quaesumus omnipotens Deus, ut haec famula tua N. que pro spe retributionis aeternae se tibi domino deisderat consecrari, plena fide animoque in sancto proposito permaneat. Tu eam, omnipotens, sanctificare and benedicere et in perpetuum conservare digneris. Tribue ei humilitatem, castitatem, obedientiam, caritatem, et omnium bonorum operum quantitatem.” Ibid., 60–61. 70. “Domine Deus uirtutum celestium eterne donator tibi supplices effundimus preces, ut hanc famulam tuam consecrare digneris, quam de pristine conuersatione ad nouitatem uite expolians veterem hominem, et induens novum conuerti fecisti, ut sicut Anna prophetissa multis temporibus vestibus uiduitatis induta in templo gloriae tuae ieiuniis et orationibus fideliter deseruiut, sic et haec filia tua tibi soli Deo in ecclesia tua deuota mente deseruiat.” Ibid., 61. There is a grammatical parallelism between “in templo” and “in ecclesia.” The former alludes to the specific physical space associated with Anna’s story, the temple where she received Jesus and remained constantly praying night and day. It would be helpful for contextualizing the widow’s social role to be able to read into the Latin here that widows were (or weren’t) expected to have a formal association with a specific church (in similar fashion to Anna in the temple) as well as a metaphorical role in the Church as a chaste woman. It is questionable, however, whether the liturgical language can be pressed for this level of specificity, and there was clearly a variety of interpretations and expressions of vowed widowhood throughout the Middle

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The liturgy of the Romano-German Pontifical emphasized the widow’s clothing as the manifest sign of her chaste profession. This version of the vowing ritual joined together several long-standing images of the vere vidua into a coherent whole. The widow’s garments sealed her identification with the typology of the widowed church as well as with the figure of Anna, who awaited Christ in a state of devotion and bereavement. The consecrated widow embodied these sacred associations as she proceeded through the liturgy and put them into practice through a regimen of prayer and good works thereafter. The ceremonies for virgins and widows in the Romano-German Pontifical and in later Roman formularies suggest that there were different rites in use and different possible circumstances for their application. The rite for consecrating a woman to virginity, for example, contained a curious passage in which the celebrant prayed that the recipient receive the “gift of the sixtyfold fruit if she is a continent, or if she is a virgin the hundredfold reward,” 71 suggesting that this ceremony could be applied to women who were sexually experienced but intended to maintain perpetual continence in the future. That this specific rite was maintained separately from other rituals for the consecration of widows suggests diverse traditions that were perhaps appropriate to different situations. It is possible that the virgin’s ritual functioned principally as a nun’s consecration and could apply to different types of women, especially as the rubrics in this Pontifical did not contain a rite specifically designated for nuns (though for men the designation of the monk’s ritual was unambiguous). This ritual of virginal consecration was also distinct from a briefer ceremony (Ordo 23) intended for virgins “who, turning from the world, wish to observe the taking up of the habit of chastity privately in their homes.” In both the rite consecrating virgins in their Ages and early modern period. It is likely that this rite could apply to a variety of arrangements (some monastic, some quasi-monastic but formalized through some agreement with the monastery and its clergy, and some informal, such as when the widow remained in her own home). As this ritual could have been used to initiate a widowed woman into a convent as a nun, “ecclesia” in this sense could also function as a synonym for the convent, similar to the way that Hrotsvit associated the temple and the convent in her poem on the origins of Gandersheim. 71. “Si continens est, sexagemsimi fructus dona accipiate et, si virgo, cenesimi mueris opulentia, in utraque parte perseverante continentia, ditetur.” Ibid., ordo 20, p. 40. Cf. the twelfth-century pontifical from the Augsburg Ordinariatsbibliothek, Hs. 21, “Rituale seu Pontificale,” fol. 136v, based on the RGP, in which the same language is retained in the rite for the consecration of virgins, but the rubric does not indicate the consecration of the virgin specifically for residence in her own home.



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homes and the rite consecrating widows, the women being consecrated would, after their consecration, complete the offertory and communion “among the veiled women,” and would be dismissed with a sign from the bishop: the widow received the sign of peace as dismissal, and the virgin consecrated to chastity in her home received some other sign from the bishop, after which she and “all of hers” returned to her home.72 While manuscript rubrics were often arbitrary and thus provide only a tenuous indication of how the rituals were used in practice, it is clear that the church recognized a number of different situations in which widows desired to formally establish their identity as celibates, and that some of these situations involved living a life of chastity while still in the world. It is also likely that the practices varied according to community and region and according to local clerics’ preferences and willingness to engage in the pastoral care of women. The rituals for widows, though related to other ceremonies for female consecration, consistently retained a distinct sensibility and imagery for the widowed state. Unlike the ceremonies for virgins, the rituals for widows in the Romano-German Pontifical did not contain language that wed the widow to Christ as a bride.73 Rather, the chaste widow assumed the duties and rewards associated with the scriptural traditions of Anna and the widow of Sarepta: prayer and prophecy. The liturgy for widows also shared language with the ancient ordo of deaconess, as indicated in the ritual for the “making of a deaconess,” which followed the widow’s blessing in both the tenth-century Romano-German Pontifical and the twelfth-century Roman Pontifical. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, the deaconess appears to have been a special kind of symbolic widow, whether or not she was a literal one: the prayers for the 72. Or, more literally, “all those she possessed.” See the ritual for widows, RGP vol. 1, ordo 25, p. 62: “Postea episcopus auctoritate pastorali denuntiet ei pacem et omnibus quae illa possidet; et illa ad missam inter velatas offerat et communicet.” Concerning the consecration of virgins in their homes, see RGP vol. 1, ordo 23, pp. 51ff.: “Consecratio virginum quae a seculo conversae in domibus suis susceptum habitum privatim observare voluerint,” and especially the virgins’ dismissal, ordo 23, p. 54: “Prephata ancilla Dei inter alias velatas ad manus episcopi offerat et ad missam communicet et post peracta mysteria episcoppalis banni signaculo cum omnibus suis insignita regrediatur ad sua.” 73. Cf. “Consecratio sacrae virginis,” RGP vol. 1, ordo 20, p. 39, in which the parents of the consecrated woman offer her to the bishop before the altar, with the antiphon “Ipsi sum desponsata cui angeli seruiunt, cuius pulchritudinem sol et luna mirantur.” See also the comparisons between carnal marriage and virginity (p. 43); the biblical topos the liturgy invoked for virgins to imitate was the wise virgins who awaited the bridegroom (Mt 25:1–13) (pp. 41, 43).

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deaconess’s consecration signified her as seeking the sixtyfold fruit of chastity and the devotions of Anna in the temple after having known the conjugal life, but also bestowed upon her the honors that decorated the virgin, such as the ring and the crown. The deaconess maintained her devotional vigilance die ac nocte, like the widow Anna, and thereby attained the spirit of prophecy as well as the “thirtyfold fruit if she is among the married, sixtyfold fruit if among the widowed.” 74 While no longer a formal office in the West, the designation of deaconess had retained some currency in Western European liturgy as a spiritual widowhood open to virgins, widows, and chaste wives. As Gary Macy has argued, through the twelfth century the office of deaconess functioned as a form of ordination for women to various female ministries of the church, but was discouraged by Gregorian reformers because the church’s emphasis on sacerdotal purity and ordination as an exclusively male privilege called into question the appropriateness of such a formal office for women. Prior to its decline in the twelfth century, however, the designation “deaconess” encompassed many different kinds of female service in churches and monasteries, including women who dispensed communion and tended the altar, nuns and abbesses who abided in religious communities, and priests’ or bishops’ wives who undertook vows of chastity along with their spouses. Macy argues persuasively that such diverse roles for women in various stages of life expressed a model of the church as “an extended family in the world,” a family that admitted female activity as an integral part of ceremonial life. In this context, the formal consecration of a woman’s widowhood could have encompassed a variety of practices, such as undertaking a program of abstinence and devotion in her own home, assuming the duties of a deaconess through interactions with local churches or monasteries, entrance to a convent, or a combination of these. As Gregorian reformers and legalist popes reinterpreted the clergy as “a monastery over against the world,” however, they emphasized masculine authority and the ritual purity of a sacral priesthood that 74. “Da ergo, domine ad petitionem nostrum huic famulae tuae inter coniugatas tricesimum, cum viduis sezagesimum fructum. . . . Opus tuum die ac nocte meditetur, ut in die vocationis suae talis esse meratur quales per spiritum prophetiae esse voluisti presta.” RGP vol. 1, ordo 24, p. 55–57. Cf. Andrieu, Le Pontifical Romain au Moyen-Âge vol. 1, ordo 14: 168–69, which also asks that the petitioner maintain her office in accordance with the perfect proposal of widowhood (“a perfecta viduitate propositum”).



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separated women from the rituals of the altar.75 Liturgical reforms of the twelfth century reflect papal ambitions for a universal church ruled by a sacerdotal priesthood.76 The twelfth-century manuscripts of the Roman Pontifical reflect efforts to prune the liturgies for use in this new context of reform. The office of deaconess was frequently omitted from the liturgy, and the widow’s consecration received more explicit and extensive treatment. Whereas the Romano-German Pontifical merely indicated the celebration of the Eucharist at the end of the rites of consecration, the Roman rituals provided a more extensive liturgy for the Mass that reiterated the imagery of the proposal of widowhood and reflected on the ritual’s powers of transformation through readings from 2 Corinthians 3:17–4: 2 and John 16:20–23, both of which addressed the rewards of a secular person’s embracing the spirit and renouncing the world. The verse from the Gospel of John compared the woman whose pains of childbirth are transformed into joy in the creation of children to the joy of Christ’s followers at his second coming.77 Gratian’s roughly contemporary Decretum provided some additional directions for the ritual, such as the widow’s receipt of her distinctive clothing and the posture she assumed during the ceremony. Gratian’s comments that the priest could come to the widow, or vice versa, suggests that in some cases benedictions might have been performed at the widow’s place of residence, but the text remains tantalizingly vague about whether that residence might be private or communal, or for what reasons the widow might not be able to go to the priest at a church (or whether it would be a cathedral, parish, or monastic church).78 Some, but not all, of the extant manuscripts of the twelfth century added to the rubric of the ceremony for the widow “who wished to make a chaste profession” the phrase “and under the monastic habit want to live by the rule in a monastery of holy virgins,” which clearly suggested the cloister as the appropriate 75. Macy, The Hidden Ordination of Women, 80; see also 63, 73–74. 76. Palazzo, A History of Liturgical Books, 207–8. 77. Andrieu, Le Pontifical Romain au Moyen-Âge vol. 1, ordo 14, p. 167. 78. “Then, having accepted from the priest or minister the clothing appropriate to the profession of religion, whether in bed or standing, in whatever place, let her use that clothing constantly. And let the garment be recognizable, not varying in color or size, but rather religious and not suspect.” (Tunc accepta a sacerdote vel ministro apta religionis professioni veste, seu in lectulo quiescens sive in quocunque loco consistens constanter ea utatur, nec diversi coloris aut diversae partis eadem sit notabilis vestis, sed religiosa et non suspecta.) Gratian, Decretum, Pars 2, C. 20 q. 2 c. 16, PL 187:1103.

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locus for consecrated women in the twelfth century, and corresponded to the Gregorian reform’s efforts toward more energetic reforms of both nuns and laypeople in this period.79 Despite global ecclesiastical attempts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to develop a standardized liturgy and strict female enclosure in monasteries, both liturgical and narrative texts from this era nevertheless suggest that that widows continued to pursue the “profession of widowhood” as laywomen, whether in their own homes or in personalized quasi-monastic dwellings loosely affiliated with neighboring clerical institutions. Many benedictionals extant in manuscript form are not faithful reproductions of standard books but rather unique compendia, often inconsistent with the versions produced in Rome. In medieval Bavaria, for example, variations on the Romano-German Pontifical persisted well into the twelfth century, suggesting a preference for local and traditional liturgies and a resistance to Roman standardization. These manuscripts most often followed the format and content of the Romano-German Pontifical rather than the newer collections promoted by the papacy in the twelfth century, but nevertheless appear to have been copied and compiled for the same purposes—the provision of local clergy with practical books for their ceremonial use—that prompted the Roman initiative to revise the older pontificals. The formularies for the widows’ vowing ceremony extant in the collections of Bavarian monastic libraries usually follow the general contours of the Romano-German Pontifical, but very few surviving manuscripts contain its entire ceremony, and some include prayers that did not appear in the original pontifical. Most preserve only some of the prayers for the widow’s benediction, and rarely contain explanatory rubrics identical to those that appeared in the Roman rites. One such manuscript, Clm 17027, from the Bavarian monastery of Schäftlarn, dates from the tenth century (though it probably did not come into Schäftlarn’s library until the twelfth). The manuscript contains an abbreviated version of the rite of the widow’s consecration from the Romano-German Pontifical, with the ceremony separated into two sections, a benediction 79. “Benedictio viduae quae fuerit castitatem professa .” Andrieu, Le Pontifical Romain au Moyen-Âge vol. 1, Le Pontificale Romanum Saeculi XII, ordo 13, p. 165.



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of a widow making a chaste profession, and a benediction of the garments of a widow or virgin.80 The rite in this manuscript engaged the prayer from the Gelasian Sacramentary, “Consolare Domine,” for the benediction of the widow (“comfort your servant bound in the labors of widowhood . . . just as you found it worthy to console the prophetess widow of Sarepta through Helias,”)81 to remind her to forget past pleasures; the subsequent prayer blessing the garments suggested the use of the widow’s benediction rite for widows or virgins, with the words adjusted so that any woman might, through her chaste profession, gain the sixtyfold fruit of widowhood, or the hundredfold fruit if she were a virgin, thus conflating two ceremonies that were listed separately in the standard Roman pontifical.82 A twelfth-century codex from the Bavarian State Library (Clm 100) and the nearly contemporary MS Augsburg Hs. 21 from the Augsburg diocesan library contain more complete versions of the Romano-German Pontifical’s rituals, and illustrate both the twelfth-century tendency to reorganize liturgical books for practical use and the persistence of local preferences and variations. Clm 100 contains blessings for widows in two different sections of the manuscript. A compilation of various rites from both the Romano-German Pontifical and Roman Pontifical, the codex does not follow the exact order of either of those books. Rather, the benediction of the widow and her clothing in this manuscript retain the basic text and format of the Romano-German Pontifical, although it abbreviates some of the prayers. The widow’s blessing appears on pages that were 80. Clm 17027, from the library of the Premonstratensian canons of Schäftlarn. According to Norbert Backmund, historian of the Premonstratensian order, the Schäftlarn house did not produce this codex but rather acquired it after the refounding of the house as a Premonstratensian double monastery in the twelfth century. Originally a Benedictine community that was destroyed in the ninth century, Schäftlarn’s male and female religious communities were among the most productive in Bavaria in the centuries following the house’s refounding. The formulary was probably acquired from elsewhere during this period. See Monasticon Praemonstratense I, ed. P. Norberto Backmund (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1983), 20–23. 81. “Sicut consolare dignatus es Sareptenam viduam per Heliam prophetessam. Concede ei pudicitia et fructum ut antiquarum non memineat voluptatum; Nesciat etiam incentiua desideria, ut soli ubi subdat propria colla quo possit pro laboribus, tantis sexagesimum gradum praecipere et munus delectablile sanctitatis per dominum.” Clm 17027, fol. 113r. 82. “Et sicut benedixisti vestes omnium religiosorum tibi per omnia placentium, ita eam benedicere dignare, ac praesta clementissime pater ut supradictae famulae tuae illis hec initium sanctitatis, haec cognitio religionis, haec contra omnia tela inimici robusta defensio ut si continentis erit, sexagesimum fructum donum. Et si virgo centesimi muneris opulenti in utraque parte per seruata continentia dicetur.” Clm 17027, fol. 113r.

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added to the manuscript, and follows a number of other rituals that were not normally proximate to it in the Roman Pontifical. The manuscript also contains additional prayers for the widow’s benediction in a later section. The first section, pasted into the original binding on matchingsized folia, contains a somewhat corrupted version of the rite from the Romano-German Pontifical. Additional prayers inserted into the binding of the book on half-sheets suggest that this book was a working compendium of various rites and rituals, used and updated based on the owner’s practice. For example, in one place where the book was heavily damaged, an additional half-folio repeated a section of the prayer over the widow’s person, “Lord, giver of eternal virtues” (Domine Deus uirtutum celestium donator), replacing an illegible portion of the original folio. Another half-folio supplied an additional prayer for the blessing of the “vidual veil.” This addition to the manuscript—a prayer unique to this benedictional—reworked what had originally been a prayer for a virgin’s veiling in the Romano-German Pontifical and made it a text more suitable to the ethos of widowhood. The inserted prayer excised the original prayer’s passages that referred to Mary and the bridal imagery of the wise virgins (Mt 25:1–13), and replaced them with the more traditional and appropriate reference for the widow, Anna (Lk 2:36–38). The text, however, retained from the tenth-century rite for virgins an expression of the veil as the mystical seal of the woman’s chastity, but instead applied it to the widow’s consecration: God, head of all the faithful and savior of the whole body, bless with your right hand this covering of the veil which shall be placed upon the head of your servant for your love and out of contempt of the world, that through this [veil], which may be mystically understood as your protection, she be equally uncontaminated in body and soul, so that when she comes to the perpetual reward of the saints, she shall be worthy to take up the fruits of her labors with Anna the prophetess and with the holy widows.83

The appropriation of this text for widows underscored the continued relationship between the rites for widows and those for other conse83. “Benedictio velaminis vidualis: Caput omnium fidelium Deus, et totius corporis saluator hoc operimentum velaminis quod famula tua ob amorem tuum et contemptum saeculi capiti suo est impositura, dextera tua sanctifica, et hoc quod per illud mystice datur intelligi tua semper custodia corpore pariter et anima incontaminato conseruet, ut quando ad perpetua sanctorum remunerationem uenerit, cum sanctis viduis et cum Anna prophetissa fructum sui laboris percipere mereatur.” Clm 100, fol. 51r (verso is blank). Cf. RGP vol. 1, ordo 20, p. 40.



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crated women. Whether the ceremony was intended for widows who became nuns or widows who lived in their own homes in the world, a coherent sensibility concerning the widow’s spiritual attributes persisted in the liturgy and provided a recognizable vocabulary for her piety, even when the liturgy was modified for local use. Another brief set of prayers for the widow’s benediction appears later in Clm 100, further demonstrating the scribe’s (or scribes’) liberties with the liturgy. The second group of prayers in the manuscript, under the rubric of blessing the widows’ garments, contained the prayers “Lord, open your eyes of majesty” (Apere quesemus domine) and “Comfort, Lord, this your servant” (“Consolare Domine”), both of which appeared in the standard pontificals as blessings of the widow herself, following her assumption of the new clothing.84 This group also introduced a different prayer as the final benediction in the series, a version of one normally offered at the beginning of the Romano-German rite: “God, creator of all things, come at our invocation and with your grace pouring out from above, find this your servant, her form in appearance having been clothed in the garments of chastity, worthy to be blessed and sanctified.”85 The alterations in this codex imply an active use of the manuscript rather than a dutiful preservation of an unused or irrelevant text, maintained solely on the merit of its antiquity. The codex Clm 100 came into the collections of the Bavarian state library from the library of the Augustinian canons in Polling Abbey, in Bavaria. The association of the rituals in a book like Clm 100 with a house of canons, who were specifically charged with ministry to the lay people in their environs, is interesting because it suggests that the canons took an active interest in compiling liturgies relating to consecrated virginity and widowhood and administering such rites to women under their pastoral care. It is unfortunately not clear whether Clm 100 originated at Polling as part of its collection in the High Middle Ages or was acquired much later from elsewhere. Because of a fire in the fifteenth century that destroyed 84. “Aperi quesumus Domine oculos tue maiestatis ad benedictandum hanc viduitatis vestem, ut que in vestibus ornatis viri sui usibus aut seculo placuit, in sacris vero benedictionis tuae gratiam consequi mereatur.” Clm 100 fol. 82r–v. A similar prayer appears in Clm 3908 (from the diocese of Augsburg); cf. the Roman Pontifical rite, ordo 25, p. 60. 85. “Creator omnium rerum Deus adesto inuocationibus nostris et hanc famulam tuam cum indumentis castitatis effigiem pretendentia desuper gratia tua irrigante benedicere et sanctificare.” Clm 100, fols. 82v–83r.

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many manuscripts in Polling’s library, books with earlier origins may have been acquired from other monastic houses, as Polling vigorously rebuilt its decimated library. There appears to be some continuity of interest in widows’ benedictions at this house of Augustinian canons, as various parts of the Romano-German rite continued to be copied into much later manuscripts in this monastery’s collection.86 Polling was initially an eighth-century Benedictine foundation, but was refounded in 1010 as a canonry by the bishop of Augsburg with the intention of maintaining pastoral care in the area.87 The supervision of widows was considered an official episcopal duty, and the foundation of Polling, which housed a community of nuns as well as the Augustinian canons, seems to have responded to this need.88 In addition to the twelfthcentury benedictional, Polling also owned a later formulary compiled in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that included a brief benediction simply for consecrating a “woman having renounced the world,” which was clearly intended for consecrating widowed women:89 God, lover of chastity and conserver of continence, benign as you hear our plea, look upon this servant who vowed that she would with your help preserve the modesty of continence she vowed for your love, so that she may gain in generosity the sixtyfold fruit and begin eternal life.90

This prayer blessed the garments and affirmed the woman’s desire to turn her attention to spiritual things, after which the celebrant invoked the traditional reward of widowed chastity, the sixtyfold fruit. 86. It appears, for example, in the benedictional manuscript Clm 1899, from as late as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Clm 11730, a fourteenth- and fifteeth-century miscellany containing a benediction of a “woman renouncing the world” together with an assortment of texts including selections from the writings of Albert the Great, various sermons and pastoral guides, a martyrology, and astrological tables. 87. Friedrich Helmer, ed., Die Traditionen des Stiftes Polling, Quellen und Erörterungen (Munich: C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1993), 66. 88. One episcopal responsibility was to provide for care of widows. The earliest synods emphasize this duty, especially the Council of Aachen (812): “(Ex. decr. Zepherini papae, capite 4.) Ut viduae non sint in deliciis, sed, secundum Apostolum, sub potestate episcopi vivant.” Cited in Burchard, Libri Decretorum, Liber 8.40, p. 800; and in Gratian, Decretum, Pars 1, D. 27 c. 59, PL 187:558–59. 89. A complete reconstruction of the library’s inventory is impossible, but the liturgical materials relating to women are intriguing, suggesting a sustained interest and use. 90. “Deus, castitatis amator et continentie conseruator, supplicationem nostram benignus exaudi, et hanc famulam propitius intuere que pro amore tuo continentie pudiciciam uouit tuo auxilio conseruetur, ut sexsigesimum fructum perficiat et uitam eternam et largitate percipiat.” Clm 11730, “Benedictiones,” 212ff.



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Another late eleventh- or early twelfth-century manuscript, now housed in the diocesan library of Augsburg, likewise echoes these regional preferences of southern German clergy in the course of twelfth-century liturgical reform.91 Hs. 21 from the Augsburg episcopal library contains a liturgy for widows that is similar to the one in Clm 100, and likewise adopted the text of the Romano-German Pontifical. The manuscript followed the order of that standard work more faithfully than Clm 100, containing rituals for the benediction of virgins, deaconesses, and widows in the same succession as the much older pontifical, and it contained no ad-hoc additional pages. This manuscript’s version of the ceremony consecrating sacred virgins included musical notation and choral responses, indicating a significant number of participants and an elaborate musical liturgy. Oversight of widows was formally the duty of their bishop, and the concentration of twelfth-century formularies in canons’ libraries also points to twelfth-century reforms that encouraged canons, in particular, to be more vigilant in the pastoral care of lay men and women.92 The ethos of reform in the twelfth century included not only greater outreach to the laity, but also increased responsibility for the education of female religious by their male counterparts.93 In this climate, the combination of reforming ideals and more vigorous scribal production may have encouraged the creation and acquisition of liturgical books for active use, which local clergy modified to suit their own needs and preferences. Both Hs. 21 and Clm 100 appear to be products of the twelfth-century reforms of Augustinian canons in the diocese of Augsburg, in which the copyists consolidated the rituals and practices of their diocese into liturgical handbooks derived from the old RomanoGerman Pontifical rather than from more recent revisions to the Roman rite.94 As Alison Beach has shown, reforming directives, in addition 91. Benedikt Kraft, Die Handschriften des Bischöflichen Ordinariatsbibliothek in Augsburg (Augsburg: Literarisches Institut von Haas & Grabherr, 1934), 33. 92. Karl Bosl, Regularkanoniker (Augustinerchorherren) und Seelsorge in Kirche und Gesellschaft des europäischen 12. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1979), 6, 17–18. 93. Beach, Women as Scribes, 29–30. 94. Polling had been refounded in 1010 as an imperial monastery with the support of Henry II and the bishop of Freising. By 1065 the house had become an Eigenstift (family foundation) of the bishop of Augsburg, but it was given to the bishop of Brixen in exchange for his support of the election of Henry IV. Stefan Weinfurter suggests that the Polling house, conveniently situated between Augsburg and the Brenner Pass, remained under the influence of Augsburg and Salzburg and participated in the

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to stimulating literary production, encouraged increased attention to the supervision of both lay and religious women. Donation charters to Polling in this period also suggest that the house maintained a foundation for women, which might have generated interest in creating and maintaining liturgical books to ordain widows and virgins as secular canonesses.95 In any case, the books displayed a scribal preference for the more ancient rites of the Romano-German Pontifical rather than the reorganized and updated Roman pontificals concerning the liturgies of female consecration. Such preferences might have arisen from a number of factors. Perhaps these houses were simply slower to adopt Roman directives, or maybe they actively harbored a preference for the ancient liturgies of the Mainz bishops. It is also possible that the rituals of the Romano-German Pontifical were suited to familiar, local practices for consecrating women and thus suited clerics’ needs. In any case, the widespread acceptance of the Romano-German Pontifical identified consecrated widowhood through an ethos of vidual piety centered on the model of Anna, a sentiment that continued to guide the liturgies of consecrated widowhood, even when widows were bound for the supposed uniformity of convent life under monastic rule.

Later Medieval Liturgical Developments In the late thirteenth century, William Durand, bishop of Mende, compiled a pontifical that consolidated older liturgies into a practical text that quickly became an authoritative text throughout Western Christendom. Highly educated in canon law and experienced in papal affairs, William’s presentation and interpretation of the liturgy sought to clarify the signs and symbols of salvation history in the church’s ceremonial life, and synthesized his understanding of ancient practice with the customs of his own time.96 William included the widow’s consecration Salzburg reforms under Walter of Augsburg between 1136 and 1152, which might explain the relationship between Hs. 21 and Clm 100 and the rituals they documented; see Helmer, Quellen und Erörterungen, 41, 65–76, 80–88; and Stephan Weinfurter, Salzburger Bistumsreform und Bischofspolitik im 12. Jahrhundert (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 1975), 90–91. 95. Beach, Women as Scribes, 28–30. 96. Timothy M. Thibodeau, introduction to The Rationale Divinorum Officiorum of William Durand of Mende: A New Translation of the Prologue and Book One (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), xviii.



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(together with abbesses, deaconesses, virgins, and the coronation of queens) in his Pontifical, and commented on its meaning and history in his subsequent work, the Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, a monumental commentary on ecclesiastical liturgy and practice. William’s interpretation of the consecrated widow in the Rationale affirmed the canon law tradition against veiling widows. He associated the veil with virginity and asserted that only virgins could be brides of Christ. He acknowledged the practice of widows’ consecration, however, and identified the widow’s ritual as a form of consolation, just as the Lord consoled the widow of Sarepta through the prophet Elijah.97 Having registered his disapproval on the subject, William nevertheless mentioned that “some say” that the widow could be veiled and vested in a religious habit by a priest or minister, and that the Roman rite recognized both a widow professing continence and the blessing of her veil. William himself claimed that he had even witnessed the bishop in the city of Ostia “bless two widows who were religious among the virgins being blessed,” suggesting clerics sometimes ignored the finer points of canon law.98 William did not mention whether the Ostia widows were laywomen or nuns, but he did describe in the Rationale other examples of widows who were clearly not in orders, such as women who once were called deaconesses, who in the ancient church were ordained at the age of forty years or older to read the gospel during the night offices. In the Greek tradition, William noted, such women were called “presbyterae” but in the Western tradition they were called widows, “or elderly women, or those who had known only one man, or wise women.” Although such women were once given the veil of ordination, William was careful to underline the point that in modern times, such women “must not be counted among those who have received orders in the Church.”99 William’s own Pontifical, completed circa 1295, prior to the Rationale, 97. “Nam et Dominus sareptenam viduam per Heliam prophetam consolatus est.” Guillelmi Duranti Rationale, 2.47, p. 143. 98. “Aiunt tamen quidam quod licet non ab episcopo, potest tamen a sacerdote uelo professionis, uel conuersionis, uelari a quo, seu a cuius ministro, habitum seu uestem religiosam assumit. In libro tamen pontificali secundum ordinem romanum, habetur benediction uidue continentiam profitentis et ueli eius. . . . Et uidimus in Vrbe episcopum hostiensem inter uirgines benedicere duas uiduas moniales.” Ibid., 2.47, p. 143; in On the Clergy and Their Vestments, trans. Thibodeau, 83. 99. “Apud grecos presbytere appellantur, apud nos autem uidue, aut seniors uniuirae, aut matricurie appellantur, in Ecclesia tanquam ordinatas constitui non debere.” Guillelmi Duranti Rationale, 2.48, p. 143; in On the Clergy and Their Vestments, trans. Thibodeau, 83.

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was intended for use in his diocese of Mende, but it gradually came to occupy a wider and more normative role in Latin liturgy over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.100 The benediction for widows in William’s pontifical introduced the ceremony with a different rubric from that of the earlier Roman rituals, omitting the discussion of the appropriate celebrant and the traditional explanation that a widow was released from the bonds of marriage. Instead, William directly explained that the benediction of the widow by the priest proceeded as follows: Between the Epistle and the Gospel, she bends her knee in his presence before the altar holding a lighted candle. Then she is asked if she wishes to be joined to Christ as spouse having put fleshly enticements aside. For that one professes herself publicly to serve perpetual continence.101

Then the widow sang, or someone (male or female) sang for her, the antiphon I am the handmaid of Christ three times, and the choir (schola) responded with Glory be to the Father . . . and As it was in the beginning . . .102 Thereafter, William’s pontifical followed a condensed version of the Romano-German rite: the widow prostrated herself before the right-hand side of the altar to receive the prayer “Consolare Domine” and the blessing over her clothes. The Mass was celebrated, and the final prayers blessed the woman’s proposed continence in widowhood. The widow then declared her willingness to be joined to Christ, her spouse (sponso Christo). This language ran quite contrary to William’s opinion of the distinctions between the superiority of virginal chastity to vidual chastity, and 100. Vogel, Medieval Liturgy, 253. At least sixteen manuscripts of William’s Pontifical, composed from 1373 to the end of the fifteenth century, survive among the monastic library collections of Bavaria: Clm 5461 from the episcopal library of Chiemsee, written 1373; Clm 18452 from Tegernsee, fifteenth century; Clm 11474 from Polling, fifteenth century; Clm 10073 written ca. 1339, Avignon, from the Mannheimer Hofsbibliothek. By the end of the fifteenth century William’s Rationale Divinorum had also become widely disseminated, and was translated into Middle French and Late Middle-High German (Thibodeau, introduction to The Rationale Divinorum Officiorum of William Durand of Mende: A New Translation of the Prologue and Book One, xxii). 101. “In benedictione vidue per sacerdotem, proceditur hoc modo. Inter epistolam enim et evangelium, illa coram eo [some manuscripts have episcopo here] ante altare genua flectit, cereum accensum in minibus tenens. Tunc interrogatur si sponso Christo, postpositis carnalibus illecebris, optat se iungi. Ipsa vero publice se perpetuam continentiam servaturam profitetur.” Andrieu, La Pontifical Romain au Moyen-Âge, vol. 3, Le Pontifical de Guillaume Durand, ordo 24, p. 425. 102. Ibid. The rite refers the reader back to the full antiphon in the benediction of virgins: “Ancilla Christi sum, ideo me ostendo servilem personam” (ibid., ordo 23, p. 417). The widow’s ritual cross-references prayers from the ordo for virgins: the Collect and the post-Communion text “Purificet nos, quaesumus, domine” (ibid., ordo 23, p. 427).



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perhaps reflected the extent to which William, as a compiler, was subject to his sources. He followed the opinion of the decretists in the Rationale, but inscribed in the Pontifical the language of contemporary liturgy that identified widows and virgins alike as Christ’s brides. William’s acknowledgement of the different understandings of consecrated widowhood attest to the challenges he encountered as a compiler in reconciling ancient theory with practices that often deviated from or complicated those norms. William’s careful distinction between the elderly women who once received orders and the widow who was properly veiled and vested expressed a tacit disapproval of women who—sometimes with the assistance and encouragement of male clerics—created extra-claustral roles for themselves based on a vow of chaste widowhood; his opinion corresponded to the papal impulse toward strict claustration that was gaining ground in the thirteenth century. Closely affiliated with Rome as a papal lawyer, advisor, and regent, William must have been aware of a formal preference for the enclosure of female religious, and his works predated by only a few years Pope Boniface VIII’s 1298 bull, Periculoso, which not only advocated strict enclosure but attempted to enforce it universally in the practice of all monastic orders.103 William’s monumental effort to compile and interpret ecclesiastical traditions was widely recognized and used throughout the later Middle Ages. Several manuscript editions of his Pontifical were designed with miniature illuminations illustrating each ceremony. The images accompanying each text served the practical purpose of demonstrating the proper procedures for the celebrant, but also interpreted the historical and symbolic meaning associated with the rituals through their visual representation. Although earlier pontificals sometimes boasted images on their initial pages depicting bishops or other icons of clerical authority, versions of William’s Pontifical with illustrations of the performance of each liturgy appeared first in the fourteenth century. Twelve extant manuscripts demonstrating the widow’s rite variously depicted the widow kneeling, holding a candle, or receiving the consecrated veil from the bishop. The manuscript Clm 10073, originally of Avignese provenance but now preserved in the Bavarian State Library, 103. Elizabeth Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and Its Commentators, 1298– 1545 (Washington, D.C: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 10–11.

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contains a miniature of a widow receiving consecration before the altar in a ceremony officiated by a priest.104 The miniatures in this manuscript retained the distinctions between widows and virgins articulated in William’s text: the miniature celebrating the consecration of virgins conveyed the festive bridal imagery inherent in the celebration of the liturgy for nuns as they approached the altar two by two (as designated in the Pontifical). The widow was depicted alone, in simple dress and humble posture, representing the more somber nature of the widow’s benediction (p. 165). The images illustrating the blessings for widows and for deaconesses were also quite distinct from each other; although William himself had asserted that in the ancient church the deaconess and widow had shared duties, the miniature in Clm 10073 showed the deaconess receiving the blessed stole from the bishop in the company of other religious women (almost certainly nuns) (p. 167). The deaconess miniature bore little relationship to the traditional typology of the widow, but was very like the miniature denoting the ritual consecration of an abbess, with the addition of the characteristic stole as the symbol of the deaconess’s position (p. 166). As Peter Abelard and others had suggested since the mid-twelfth century, the ritual for the blessing of a deaconess was an ancient office that had become associated with the consecration of abbesses. Reforming clerics in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were adamant that the office of deaconess, however venerable, represented only the abbess’s liturgical functions rather than any official sacramental powers that granted her standing among the male clergy, or the authority to perform their roles (such as hearing confessions) among nuns.105 104. V. Leroquais, Les pontificaux manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France, vol. 1 (Paris: published by author, 1937), 152. Leroquais describes the twelve examples of miniatures illuminating the widow’s rite. Illustration of pontificals was uncommon prior to the thirteenth century, and generally underscored the powerful nature of the bishop’s office (Palazzo, A History of Liturgical Books, 207– 12). From Andrieu’s description of the manuscripts he studied for completing the edition of William of Durand’s Pontifical, the group that resembles Clm 10073 most closely is the one Andrieu designated as “le groupe arlésien”: Paris, St. Genevieve 143 (G); Carpentras 97 (K); Paris, Bnf Lat. 733 (P), Rome, Vat. Reg 1930 (V), Toulouse 118 (T), and Chartres 508 (A); see La Pontifical Romain au Moyen-Âge, vol. 3, Le Pontifical de Guillaume Durand, 292–98. The representations of female religious in Clm 10073 are fairly typical of this manuscript group, except for the intriguing presence of female acolytes assisting the celebrant in some of the miniatures. 105. Macy, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination, 95–96, 103–4. Macy argued that Peter Abelard and a handful of other twelfth-century commentators were the last great defenders of the deaconess’s office; the retention of this rite in William’s Pontifical resulted, in Macy’s view, from William’s



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The texts that governed the “profession” of religious widowhood changed little in comparison to ordinal designations such as presbytera and diaconissa, which fell out of favor and were excluded from thirteenth-century Roman pontificals and subsumed into monastic vows. The prayers associated with the widow’s consecration continued to be copied from the Romano-German Pontifical throughout the Middle Ages. The consecration of widows and the perception of their ecclesiastical function retained much of the character and liturgical interpretation from the earlier period as a rite that encompassed women of different statuses, linked by the duties of chastity, prayer, and devotion. Although church authorities preferred its use as a designation for widows who were to be consecrated as nuns, the widow’s benediction elicited no open attack comparable to the twelfth-century reevaluation of the role of the deaconess.106 Perhaps because the ritual had always been constituted by service and private devotion rather than office-holding, and did not have a male counterpart in the liturgy, the widow’s blessing remained a less threatening and more durable model of female participation in religion. Although managing widows’ behavior was sometimes a source of anxiety for clerics, men were expected to supervise women, whether in domestic or religious arrangements. In the wake of Gregorian reform, clerics were increasingly charged with the active oversight of laypeople of both sexes, and widows represented an opportunity to demonstrate clerical leadership. Images associated with the vere vidua—the disadvantaged woman who possessed only the “widow’s mite” and Anna perpetually praying in the temple—represented the widow as a stable, compliant figure that presented no threat to male clerical authority. Unlike deaconesses, whose role had a male counterpart and elevated them to the status of minor clergy, widows presented no overt challenge to the ecclesiastical structure, and often required its protection. Moreover, the religious widow’s devotions reinforced social expectations of the good wife, who remained faithful to her husband and cultivated his antiquarianism. Leroquais describes the extant illuminations for the office of deaconess (Les Pontificaux Manuscrits, 142). 106. Peter Abelard indicated that Anna was a precursor to the profession of nun, but he did not suggest that the widow had a direct male counterpart in the medieval Church; see Betty Radice, ed., The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (London: Penguin, 2003), 112, 116–17.

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memory, and so served both the gender order in secular society and clerical ambitions to supervise the piety of women. The miniatures that decorated rituals of female consecration in William’s Pontifical offer interesting contemporary reflection on the ancient texts. Although all the images depicting female consecration show the rite performed before an altar—corresponding to the text—the solitary widow was not shown in a specific context, such as a group of nuns, as appears in the representation of other types of religious women. Such an omission seems a tacit permitting of both a secular and claustral interpretation and expression of the vow. The solitary figure of the widow, especially her distinctive dress and posture, also associated her with rituals of penance in the Pontifical. Two other miniatures engaged an image of a widow-like figure in conjunction with the visualization of a rite: the miniatures representing the ritual blessing of a hair shirt and the blessing upon the head of a fasting person. Both of these images depicted activities that could be performed by both clergy and laypeople, but that were also closely associated with the widow’s spiritual bereavement articulated in the text of the widow’s rite, expressed especially through the fasting and prayers of the widow Anna (pp. 169–70). In the miniature for the blessing of the hair shirt, the priest offered the blessing to a solitary female dressed like the widow. The recipient bore the hair shirt in her hands in similar fashion to the way the widow brought her garments to the priest at the beginning of the widows’ ceremony, but in this case the rite was depicted in an unidentified space rather than in front of the altar. The selection of the widow-like figure to represent this penitential act is consistent with the long-standing sensibility that the widow existed in a permanent state of mourning and expectation of Christ. A second image from Clm 10073 related the figures of the widow and the penitent (p. 170). The miniature accompanying the blessing for those who were fasting portrayed a kneeling woman, this time at the front of a group of laypeople but dressed in the same light veil and dark clothes as the widow. The widow emulated Anna’s fasting in the temple, demonstrating the relationship the early fathers saw between the maintenance of chastity and the curbing of other physical appetites. The miniatures in Clm 10073 thus affirmed the associations between

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the widow’s consecration and the duties of abstinence and penitence that characterized her status, an idea that inhered in both hagiography and liturgy, but emerged in clearer focus over the course of the High Middle Ages. For example, the twelfth-century author Guillaume le Clerc drew on the ancient image of the chaste widow in the text of his Bestiaire moralisée to describe the turtledove who, according to bestiaries of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, limited herself to only one mate: Many people who are of the world do not hold with this; when they come from burying the other, they want to have another in their arms before a meal or two! The turtledove does not so: always she holds on to her friend, always she waits for his return, that she may keep his company. The turtledove, as is well seen, guards her chastity well. She signifies the holy Church, and I will tell you, through this separation, How when the Church saw bound, beaten, punished, crucified Jesus Christ, her faithful spouse, Much was she distressed in her heart.107

The association of the widow with the turtledove was well established by the time of Guillaume’s bestiary, and Guillaume applied this imagery not only to the timeless attributes of the turtledove but also as a rebuke to the pitiful state of the English church in particular at the moment of the poem’s composition. A century later, an illumination accompanying his text in one manuscript (ca. 1260–70, preserved in Bnf Ms. fr. 14969), however, made the leap from the abstract typology of the turtledove as an analogy for the widowed church to its pastoral implications for widowed women (p. 174). Most manuscript miniatures of the turtledove depicted the bird in her nest or on the bare branch, the appropriate habitat after the death of her mate. Bnf Ms. fr. 14969, however, 107. “Plusors genz, qui au siecle sunt / Que ja a un ne se tentront / Espose ne espose, a son per. Quant l’un vient de l’autre enterrer / Einz qu’il menjuce deu repaz / Veut autre aveir entre ses braz! / La tuertre ne fet pas issi: / Toz jorz se tient a son ami; / Toz jorz atent que il revienge / Et que conpaignie li tienge. / La tuertre, qui bien i esgarde / Qui si bien sa chastee garde / Sie senesie sainte yglise; / Et vos dirai par quel devise / Quant sainte iglise vit lier Batre, pener, crucifier / Jhesu, Crist, son leal espouse / Moult en out le coer angoisous.” C. Hippeau, ed., Le bestiare divin de guillaume clerc de Normandie (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970), 275–76.

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depicted a kneeling widow (possibly the patron for whom the book was commissioned) in modest but apparently secular dress (a dark robe and light veil) surrounded by a group of matrons praying before two images of Christ: his scourging prior to his crucifixion and his suffering on the cross. This image reinterpreted the turtledove’s nesting tree as the cross, and the widow as the turtledove, as she demonstrated the empathetic and penitential nature of her prayers in meditation upon Christ’s passion. Other illuminations in the manuscript—the only known copy of Guillaume le Clerc’s text to include interpretive, moralizing images as well as drawings of the animals described in the text—depict Franciscans and Dominicans in various acts of preaching, worship, and devotion, suggesting the patron’s strong interest in mendicant and penitential spirituality.108 The idea of the secular chaste matron as an example of successful pastoral care arose alongside the church’s directive toward strict female claustration in the writings of twelfth- and thirteenth-century clerics. The rise of lay orders for women in the thirteenth century, such as the Beguines and mendicant tertiary associations, created a new niche for pious widows that distinguished them from both ordinary lay women and cloistered nuns; the mendicant ethos of penitent religiosity was perfectly suited to the much older notion of the consecrated widow’s perpetual spiritual bereavement, and provided a recognizable niche for her to enact it in medieval society. The widowed figures in thirteenthand fourteenth-century illuminations of William’s Pontifical illustrate significant developments in medieval society’s interpretation of the pious widow from the high to the later Middle Ages: the illuminations retain ancient sensibilities concerning the widow’s “profession” and duties and identify these older traditions with the new penitential ethos of the mendicant orders. Already in the hagiography and liturgy of the earlier Middle Ages we have seen indications that widows sought and perhaps achieved the recognition of this status that had been available in the liturgies of the earlier medieval centuries. The liturgies for a widow’s consecration described an institution that could be practiced in the world but was 108. Nigel Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, vol. 2, 1250–1285 (London: Harvey Miller, 1988), 110–11.

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related to the cloister, and perhaps signaled a woman’s intention to eventually become a canoness, nun, or even abbess; this was certainly the trajectory established in early medieval hagiographical depictions of widowed saints. At the same time, the liturgy underscored the particular character of the widow’s piety that resonated with a more general and secular understanding of the faithful wife who vigilantly guarded her secular husband’s memory even as she served Christ, her heavenly spouse. Poised between these secular and religious notions of remembrance and bereavement, the widow was distinguished from virginal nuns not only in age and experience but in character. Likewise, the pious widow living in the world potentially marshaled a long-standing system of images and associations to articulate her status and transform even a secular household into a sacred space if she undertook a formal profession. The widow’s piety, associated with prayer and prophecy, bore witness to the suffering and eventual resurrection of Christ, who by the thirteenth century was called her spouse with increasing frequency. Her piety also evoked a socially comforting image of the wife who never forsook her husband, an idea that would take on greater meaning after twelfth-century efforts to emphasize the importance of sacramental marriage focused clerical attention on the nature of the marital bond and its extension beyond the grave. Many widows who lived as consecrated celibates in the world eventually did make their way to the cloister, especially in response to stronger ecclesiastical insistence on strict enclosure in the twelfth and thirteenth century. Formal consecration of widows who remained on their own in the world, therefore, was probably not a common procedure for women in these centuries, but benedictionals identify the widow’s chaste profession regularly enough to suggest that the practice was, if not common, also not unheard of. The extant evidence, while regrettably incomplete, gives us a sense of how benedictionals both preserved and promoted ancient ideas about religious widowhood and translated them into contemporary practice. Although a standard liturgy for the widow’s consecration was available from the tenth century, the surviving benedictionals often contained only fragments of the entire ritual. Even in high and later medieval England, where Erler found well-documented records, the practice of secular consecration was relatively rare, involv-

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ing perhaps two hundred and fifty vowesses within a time span of three hundred years. Living in a consecrated state outside a monastic environment, therefore, was probably limited to those widows who could afford to renounce the economic support of a second husband and provide for their own safety and practical needs independently, or who developed personal relationships with religious institutions without formally joining them. Such independence was difficult even for wealthy women, and the security of the convent offered respite from many of these worldly concerns. The vow, however, gave a widow the opportunity to remain in control of her worldly economic resources and maintain her social ties, and thus was a means to a holy life that did not force her to make a complete break with her past.109 It may also have served as a designation of intention to enter a monastic community, a kind of novitiate that mature women underwent as they arranged their affairs to facilitate their transition into a monastery.

In the Shadow of the Cloister Early medieval synodal decrees refer to veiled women both in monasteries and in their own homes (aut in monasteriis aut in domibus propriis), suggesting that widows serving a pious vocation had some options for and control over the expression of their vow. Within a religious community, widows’ piety found expression in convent leadership, the foundation and charitable support of socially and politically significant monastic houses, and in the spiritual motherhood the widow provided as mentor to younger women.110 Recognition of the special capabilities of widows to act as spiritual mentors is evident in foundation documents of the twelfth-century convent Fontevrault. According to Robert of Arbrissel, the matron’s experience was an essential asset in the convent’s abbess. He stipulated in his rule that abbesses should be matrons, not virgins; the institution’s first two abbesses had been married women, and many widows crowded to fill the convent’s ranks.111 109. Erler, “English Vowed Women,” 157. 110. Michel Parisse, “Des veuves au monastere,” in Parisse, Veuves et veuvage, 255–74. 111. Penny Schein Gold, “Male/Female Cooperation: The Example of Fontevrault,” in Nichols and Shank, Distant Echoes, 152–53.



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Fontevrault, however, appears to have been an exceptional case for female monastic spirituality around the turn of the twelfth century. Scholars who have focused on the history of female monasteries have observed that the High Middle Ages was a period in which the door on women’s institutions’ flexibility and opportunity was slowly closing.112 In the period between 800 and 1100, monastic institutions for both men and women suffered from the chaos of invasion and economic hardship, and many disappeared. Women’s institutions in particular lost economic ground and autonomy in comparison to their male counterparts.113 Even in the eleventh century, when monastic innovation and reform stimulated the foundation of new houses and orders, women did not benefit equally from these opportunities, but often suffered under them: new foundations for women in the eleventh and twelfth centuries tended to be priories or secondary houses dependent on a male abbey.114 The lack of convents with rigorous spiritual discipline was the ostensible reason for eleventh-century abbot Hugh of Cluny’s foundation of Cluny’s first female daughter house, Marcigny. The convent was founded in 1055 after repeated requests that the Cluniacs accommodate women who wished to share in the reforming order’s observance with a foundation of their own. Many of Marcigny’s first members were widows, including the mother and sister of its founder, Hugh, and the mother of Peter the Venerable.115 When they were in a position to do so, wealthy widows founded their own convents in order to create an environment in which they could turn from worldly to religious affairs in their later years. Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (ca. 937–ca. 1002) wrote at length about the feminine spiritual legacy of her convent’s foundress, Oda. Oda, co-founder with her husband Liudolf of Brunhausen, supervised the completion of the foundation after her husband’s death. She withdrew into the convent, acting as the moral compass of the foundation, and lived to see three of her daughters serve as abbess: 112. Ibid., 253. 113. Jane Tibbets Schulenburg, “Women’s Monastic Communities, 500–1100: Patterns of Expansion and Decline,” in Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages, ed. Judith M. Bennett et. al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 208. 114. Ibid., 217. 115. Else-Maria Wischermann, Marcigny-sur-Loire: Gründung und Frühgeschichte des ersten Cluniacensischen Priorats (Munich: Wilhelm-Fink Verlag, 1986), 302. Abbot Hugh took pains in his foundation charter to stipulate strict claustration of Marcigny’s nuns as an element of monastic reform.

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Canon Law and Liturgical Manuscr ipts When she withdrew into the walls of the convent, She so often scrutinized with vigorous care The actions and devotion of the kindred sisters, Their manners and their way of life, Lest any woman contemptuous of following the law of the ancestors Should presume to live unreproved under her rule Or lest there be any place for carrying out an illicit act, And by her example she showed how things were to be done. And, just as the sweet love of a prudent mother, Now prohibiting, through fear, her daughters from error, Now persuading to will the good through friendly counsel, So this holy woman instructed her dear pupils, Now with the commanding law of a powerful lady, Now with the soothing manner of a sweet mother, So that in one similar life they all together Might serve the king, whom the stars of the sky celebrate.116

Oda served the convent as a sort of arch-abbess; though not a virgin or even a consecrated nun herself, she lived in widowed chastity among the nuns and retained an organizational and spiritual seniority even when her daughters officially ruled as abbesses of the convent. Her widowhood was spent in the convent, but in a broader sense it suffused Hrotsvit’s characterization of Oda’s spiritual lineage and legacy: Oda and her three daughters and her mother, Aeda, all contributed to the convent’s history, through a series of miracles that arose from their prayers and devotions, which they offered at various stages of the monastery’s construction. Their pious interventions contributed to the completion of the foundation church, which Hrotsvit frequently calls a templum. Hrotsvit might well have known of Ambrose’s description of the templum as the widow’s special province: “Let us remember where Susanna and Anna and Mary are found, and observe how each is spoken of with her special commendation, and where each is mentioned: she 116. “Oda . . . Intra claustra monasterii cura vigilanti / Scrutatur coniunctarum persaepe sororum / Actus et studium, mores, vitae quoque cursum, / Ne vel contempta maiorum lege sequenda / Vivere lege sua reprobe praesumeret ulla, / Vel locus illiciti foret ullius peragendi, / Exemploque suo praemonstravit facienda. / Et, ceu prudentis dulcis dilectio matris / Nunc terrore suas prohibet delinquere natas, / Nunc etiam monitis bona velle suadet amicis, / Sic haec sancta suas caras instruxit alumnas, / Nunc dominatricis mandando iure potentis, / Nunc etiam matris mucendo more suavis, / Quo vita simili cunctae communiter uni / Servirent regi, iubilant cui sidera caeli.” Primordia Coenobii Gandershemensis, in Walter Berschin, ed., Hrotsvit Opera Omnia (Munich and Leipzig: K. G. Saur, 2001), 322.



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that is married in the garden, the widow in the temple, and the virgin in her secret chamber.”117 In subtle ways, Hrotsvit used the imagery of Anna’s perpetual devotion in the temple (noctedieque) to commemorate the chaste heroines of her convent’s history, and the vocabulary of the templum itself to denote its most divine and significant moments. Pope Sergius first granted Gandersheim’s founders, Odo and Liudolf, the right to erect a religious house with the understanding that they “will be perpetually venerated in a chapel of the aforesaid monastery [templo] built through your munificences with the chanting of sacred hymns there night and day with the constant illumination of a bright lighted taper.”118 Here, Hrotsvit invoked the image of the new monastery as a sacred space wholly under the supervision of the Pope in the same language that Luke’s Gospel described the long vigils of Anna. The designation of the Ganderheim cloister’s chapel as a templum—that is, as a place of duty, chastity, and vigilance—construed Oda as a second Anna, a powerful widow whose chaste virtue and prophetic understanding was essential to the foundation’s origins. This language also emphasized the contemporary spirit of monastic renovatio that looked to the pristine origins of the church—identified here by Sergius’s approval of the Gandersheim templum under ancient apostolic authority—to sustain and renew its institutions. Hrotsvit continued the parallels between the image of the biblical widow Anna and the founding women’s vigilant devotion in the Gandersheim “temple” to chart the convent’s spiritual history. The place where the church (Hrotsvit again used the term templum) was to be established was determined by a miracle that evoked both vigils and beginnings: like the shepherds in Luke’s Gospel who on Christmas Eve received an angelic sign from the heavens, some of Liudolf’s swineherds keeping watch over their animals saw miraculous lights in the 117. “Reminiscamur itaque quemadmodum Maria quemadmodum Anna, quemadmodum Susanna laudentur. Sed quoniam non laudes earum tantummodo praedicandae sunt, sed disciplinae etiam sunt sequendae, reminiscamur ubi Susanna, ubi Anna, sint repertae: et advertamus quemadmodum singulae aptis laudibus praedicentur, ut ubinam commemoratur: nupta in paradiso, vidua in templo, virgo in secreto.” Ambrose, De viduis, 4.24, PL 16:255; in Select Works and Letters, trans. De Romestin, 395. 118. “Haec in coenobii venerare iam memorati / Finetenus templo vestri munimine facto / Noctedieque sacris illic resonantibus hymnis necnon accesno praeclare lumine semper.” Primordia, in Berschin, Hrotsvit Opera Omnia, 313; trans. Thomas Head, “Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, The Establishment of the Monastery at Gandersheim,” in Medieval Hagiography (London: Routledge, 2001), 245.

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sky.119 After summoning Liudolf and reporting the miracle, the swineherds saw the lights again the next day, after which Oda urged her husband to clear the land and begin construction of the monastery.120 Oda’s recognition of the miracle echoed Anna’s recognition of Christ as the Messiah through her vigil in the temple. Likewise, Hrotsvit invoked the language associated with Anna in the temple to describe the fasting and vigilance of Oda’s daughter, Hathumoda, the convent’s first abbess. Dedicated to fasting and prayer at the church’s altar, Hathumoda received a miracle that allowed her to discover a miraculous source of stone to complete the monastery’s stalled construction.121 Throughout the narrative, Hrotsvit fashioned an unbroken female spiritual lineage around the contributions (both material and spiritual) of the widow Oda, her mother Aeda, and her daughter Hathumoda, continuing with Oda’s two other daughters who served as abbesses, down to the present inhabitants of the house. Other notable widows such as Adelheid of Burgundy also founded convents. Adelheid spent her widowhood balancing affairs of state with her inclination toward pious works and monastic devotion. According to her biographer Odilo of Cluny, only when her grandson, for whom she had been regent, attained maturity was Adelheid able to relinquish her secular responsibilities: Odilo wrote that she had “worthily completed the work of the active Leah and Martha; she wished to strive for the desirable repose of Rachel and Mary.”122 Adelheid did not join a convent herself, but rather lavished her monastic foundations of Peterlingen, San Salvatore, and Selz with riches, and spent her last years visiting them and meditating and praying at their shrines. Because there were not enough female monastic houses to accommodate all the women who wanted to join a convent, more informal arrangements with religious institutions arose and often served women’s 119. Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (d. 203) to Marguerite Porete (d. 1310) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 81. 120. “In qua fundandum fuerat praenobile templum / Ordine dispositio cernuntur lumina plura . . . coenobia sub honore dei constructio nostri.” Primordia, in Berschin, Hrotsvit Opera Omnia, 314–15. 121. “Unde moram templi partitur perfectio coepti / Abatissa sed a domino sperans Hathumoda / Impetraro fide credentes omnia posse / Frangebat sese nimio persaepe labores / Noctedieque deo sacris studiis famulando. . . . Nam ieiundando sacris precibusque vacando / Cum prostrato die quadam iacuit secus aram. . . . Perrexit citius, quo duxit spiritus almus / Donec ad coeptum pervenit nobile templum.” Primordia, in Berschin, Hrotsvit Opera Omnia, 315–16; trans. Head, Medieval Hagiography, 247. 122. Odilo of Cluny, Lebensbeschreibung, 42–43.



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spiritual needs without creating the complete break from society that enclosed conventual life required. What kinds of arrangements were available to pious and consecrated widows in this monastic landscape? For wealthy women, especially those who had “changed their dress” to the mourning garb of widowhood, and perhaps also had formally vowed chastity, informal relationships with monasteries and convents provided a venue for widowed continence; such arrangements could include sustained affective bonds with the members of a religious house, as well as periods of residence there, structured by routines that we might consider “quasi-regular” (imitating the patterns of monastic rules while allowing the individual more flexibility than she would have if she joined the community outright). Just as canons did not speak with one voice on the propriety of veiling widows, so too were clerics ambivalent about whether the vowed widow should remain in her own residence rather than live in a community, or in a small dwelling nearby, without being a vowed member. Bishops, cathedral canons, and “other religious friends”123 were ordered to advise the pious widow concerning her consecration, but this injunction created a situation in which lay, albeit vowed, women imposed pastoral demands on communities of male monastics, and sometimes lived in close proximity to monks. Perhaps the most vivid example of this type of widowed piety emerges from the pages (1055–1124) of the memoirs of the early-twelfthcentury abbot Guibert of Nogent. Guibert’s memoirs, the Monodiae, describe in detail his (unnamed) mother’s pious widowhood, which she spent outside of a convent and without monastic vows.124 Guibert’s rich narrative of his mother’s piety and interior life (albeit filtered through Guibert’s perspectives and motives) illuminates the choices available to an eleventh-century noblewoman. Yet it is a problematic text, as it would be naïve to understand Guibert’s representation of his mother as anything other than a highly stylized portrait. The influence that 123. “si episcopus absens fuerit, consilio aliorum religiosorum suorumque amicorum id quod eligere debent eligant” (Burchard, Libri Decretorum, Liber 8.42, p. 799–800). 124. Georges Duby has characterized Guibert’s mother as an exemplar of the ordo of widowhood; see The Knight, The Lady and The Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, trans. Barbara Bray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 144. Penelope Johnson, to the contrary, sees Guibert’s mother essentially as a nun, although she never lived in a conventual setting, nor did Guibert ever refer to her as a nun (Equal in Monastic Profession, 32–33).

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his mother’s spiritual progression bore on Guibert’s own is an integral part of the narrative’s structure and recalls Augustine’s relationship to his widowed mother, Monica; and Guibert’s description of his mother follows some of the conventions of medieval hagiography as well, as God’s divine plan unfolds through the mother’s spiritual journey and the visions and miracles that confirm her holiness. Guibert’s descriptions of his mother, however, are most revealing of contemporary attitudes toward the profession of widowhood, because Guibert shaped his mother’s spirituality to fit theological conventions of widowhood that reflected contemporary problems in canon law and liturgy as well as the ideas about widowhood in hagiography and the Augustinian tradition. The text reveals the process by which a twelfth-century cleric fashioned his mother’s expression of consecrated widowhood into a spiritual ideal. Guibert’s mother is a somewhat singular example for her era, not only because few mothers had their religious choices documented in this way, but also because her choices defied many of the conventional social pressures on widows. As families tended to propel them toward remarriage, and clerics were becoming more adamant over the course of the twelfth century that piety in widowhood belonged most appropriately to monastic life, Guibert’s work reads as a defense of his mother’s unorthodox choices. He describes his mother’s independent devotional life and her longstanding informal relationship with the monks of Fly, although the church had long discouraged the practice of syneisaktism.125 Guibert characterized his mother as destined for a holy widowhood. For the first seven years of her marriage, she remained a virgin because a curse of impotence, placed on his father by a contentious relative, prevented the consummation of his parents’ marriage.126 In describing his 125. The third chapter of the Council of Nicea (325) specifically forbade any cleric, whether bishop, presbyter, or any other, to shelter any woman besides his mother, sister, or aunt. John Chrysostom and Jerome wrote treatises against the dangers of cohabitation. See Chrysostom, Instruction and Refutation Directed against Men Cohabitating with Virgins and On the Necessity of Guarding Virginity, translated in Elizabeth Clark, in Jerome, Chrysostom and Friends, 164–208, 209–48; Jerome addressed the subject in Epistle 117, To a Mother and Daughter in Gaul. Peter Damian vehemently argued against the cohabitation of males and females (incidentally as a corollary to arguments against veiling widows), discouraging virgins and widows from living among monks because it provoked illicit sexual unions (Epistolae, Caput 7, “An viduae velare possint,” PL 145: 347). 126. Guibert reported that the curse was the revenge of a frustrated stepmother in the extended family, who had wanted Guibert’s father to marry one of her nieces rather than Guibert’s mother. The



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mother’s life, Guibert presented a progression from worldly to spiritual concerns similar to those described in the vitae of married and widowed saints: the period of abstention in her marriage strengthened his mother’s “inner chastity” and “inspired in her a modesty that neither her nature nor her youth could have maintained.”127 By honoring the marriage despite vicious attempts on the part of her husband’s family to drive her away, Guibert’s mother demonstrated the correct devotion to and understanding of her marriage vow according to canon law, even if, as Guibert confessed, she acted “not out of a pious inclination toward God, but solely to maintain appearances or to avoid dishonor.”128 Eventually the curse was lifted, and his mother bore four children, of whom Guibert was the youngest. As she matured, Guibert’s mother learned to reject mere appearances and “divert all her desires to [God] alone.”129 Despite her natural beauty and noble status, she lived a life of austerity. The first indication that such piety would transform her life as a laywoman arose when she learned that her husband was taken hostage in the battle of Mortemer (1054). Beset by anxiety, she took to her bed, where a demon came to her and lay upon her chest, smothering her breath and muting her speech. She was saved from this peril by a good spirit, who invoked the Virgin Mary’s help, attacked the devil, and expelled him from the house. As members of the household, awakened by the calamity, came running, the good spirit slipped away, admonishing her, “see to it that you are a good woman!”130 This event had a profound impact on the already dutiful and sober woman. According to Guibert, the demon’s warning helped to encourage his mother to chastity in her eventual widowhood: “Those parting words of her deliverer, who was in fact your messenger, O Lord God, she kept engraved forever in her memory; and she stood ready to use them for the sake of a greater love, if ever you were later to curse of impotence was meant to prevent the consummation of Guibert’s parents’ marriage and thus render it invalid; see Guibert de Nogent, Autobiographie, ed. Edmond-René Labande (Paris: Société d’Edition “Les Belles Lettres”, 1981), 1.12, p. 34; see also A Monk’s Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert of Nogent, ed. and trans. Paul J. Archambault, (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1996), 34–35. 127. “Castitas internae fundator, tu ei sanctimoniam, tu ei sanctimoniam inspiraveras, quam non patiebatur natura nec aetas.” Autobiographie, 1.12, p. 78; in A Monk’s Confession, trans. Archambault, 35. 128. Autobiographie, 1.12; trans. Archambault, 37. 129. Autobiographie, 1.12; trans. Archambault, 37. 130. “ ‘Vide,’ inquit, ‘ut sis bona femina!’” Guibert, Autobiographie, 1.13, p. 90; trans. Archambault, 40–41.

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give her the opportunity. Thus when my father passed away, my mother decided to remain a continent widow, however beautiful her face and complexion continued to be; and I, hardly six months old, became the sole object of her concern.”131 Guibert expressed relief rather than grief at his father’s death; the event initiated his mother’s chaste widowhood and left Guibert free to pursue the religious life—to which he had been vowed in infancy—rather than the secular vocations of his elder siblings.132 Guibert’s mother attended assiduously to his education, enlisting a private tutor in order to further his career.133 First deprived of her husband sexually, then separated from him physically when he was taken hostage, Guibert’s mother’s final, literal widowhood was presented, as in many vitae of later medieval widowed saints, as a natural progression in her holiness rather than as an occasion for grief. All three forms of being “widowed” furthered the unfolding narrative, and the secular setting for her chaste profession was compatible with her maternal obligations. Guibert, however, presented this profession as an ongoing contest against secular concerns. First, his mother faced extreme familial pressure to remarry. Her husband’s relatives, greedy to gain the entirety of her late husband’s holdings, tried to arrange for another match, and even threatened to sue her in court. She shamed the relatives (and articulated the nature of her widowed profession) by referring to Christ as “the only legal counsel I shall submit my case to,” and further stalled schemes for her remarriage by insisting that she would not marry anyone of lower rank than herself (a tactic that she knew ruled out most suitors, given her age and position as a mother of four).134 131. “Ultima ergo sui liberatoris verba, imo per tuum nuncium tua, Domine Deus, mulier illa retinens, perpetua condidit memoria, et in plurimum affectum, si facultas suppeteret, Deo in posterum praestante, ducenda servavit. Obita igitur morte parent, cum multo adhuc carmis et vultus splendore niteret, ut ego, annum ferme natus dimidium, solus ei solicitudinis causas darem, de viduitate continenda proposuit.” Guibert, Autobiographie, 1.13, p. 90; trans. Archambault, 40–41. 132. Guibert feared that his increasing robustness in his later childhood might have encouraged his father to break the vow and prepare him for a worldly career (Autobiographie, 1.4, p. 24; trans. Archambault, 13–14). 133. Autobiographie, 1.4; trans. Archambault, 15. Georges Duby suggested the tutor also acted as Guibert’s mother’s confessor and the interpreter of her dreams; to the contrary, although the widowed mother sought the tutor’s counsel on Guibert’s education, it was she who explained the meaning of dreams to him, and acted in accordance with her dream visions even in defiance of the tutor’s counsel (Duby, The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest, 145). 134. Autobiographie, 1.13; trans. Archambault, 41–42.



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Despite the obstacles to establishing herself as an independent, chaste woman, Guibert’s mother embraced the activities that defined her elected state: she honored her deceased husband’s memory and attended Mass for the good of his soul, succored the poor, and gave alms. Although she maintained the outward appearance of secular dress, and her frail constitution resisted fasting, she attended the nocturnal office celebrated by her household priests nightly, and wore a hairshirt under her clothes to atone for her youthful sins.135 When Guibert reached the age of twelve, his mother entered a period of increased dedication to the spiritual life and announced her intention to withdraw from the world.136 Once again this decision was confirmed by a vision, a dream related by the household’s steward, in which Guibert’s mother had celebrated a marriage to a second husband. According to Guibert, his mother needed no interpreter to comprehend the dream’s message, but rather knew it to be a portent of her long-cherished desire—often discussed with her mentor, Guibert’s tutor—to “be joined to God as a spouse.” Increasingly impatient to begin her conversion, she hastened the preparations.137 From this period until a few years before the end of her life, when she took the holy veil (sacrum velum), Guibert’s mother lived as a recluse, first at the episcopal estate of the bishop Guy of Beauvais, and afterwards in a small house on the property of the monastery of Fly.138 While living adjacent to the monastery, Guibert’s mother established a quasi-monastic routine with a holy companion, an elderly woman who 135. Autobiographie, 1.13; trans. Archambault, 42–43. 136. Autobiographie, 1.14, p. 98; trans. Archambault, 43–44. Guibert related a curious story in connection with this announcement. Upon hearing the mother’s decision, “some fellow” in the household was apparently possessed by a demon and commenced shouting obscenities about Guibert’s mother, including, “‘the priests have put a cross in her loins!’” (“Crucem,” inquit, “posuerunt presbyteri in renibus ejus!”) This translation is consistent with a running theme in Guibert’s work that appears to refute local gossip or criticism about his mother (in this case, criticism of the influence the household clerics exerted over her, and perhaps rumors, of sexual impropriety with Guibert’s tutor). Interestingly, Duby’s translation of this passage, “‘The priests have nailed a cross to this woman’s back,’” offers a much more innocuous reading of “renibus ejus” that suggests a demonic opposition to priests and their influence over pious women, voiced through the rantings of the possessed man, rather than any actual impropriety (Duby, The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest, 145). 137. “Nec mater, in talibus virtutissima, interprete eguit, sed ad magistrum illum respiciens, quod ea quae inter eos de Dei, cui conjugi desiderabat, amore tractabantur, visa illa portenderent, silenter innotuit. Accelerans ergo quot coeperat, et interni sui aestus impatiens, oppidi, in quo moratur, conversationem deseruit.” Autobiographie, 1.14, p. 98; trans. Archambault, 44. 138. Autobiographie, 1.14; trans. Archambault, 44–45.

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dressed in the habit of a nun and provided her with a role model for ascetic living. Under the woman’s tutelage, she ate and lived frugally, cut her long hair, and dressed in a dark cloak, undyed coat, and worn shoes.139 The two women practiced a private liturgy of daily confession and penance. The widowed mother engaged in constant self-examination of her life’s deeds “whether as a young girl, as a married woman, or as a widow with a wider possibility of action.”140 She prayed constantly, and meditated on and chanted the seven penitential psalms.141 The widowhood that Guibert described for his mother resembled the instructions contained in the Romano-German Pontifical and other benedictionals concerning widows and their dress, such as the distinctive dark clothing, the rejection of worldly luxuries, and generous almsgiving. Some aspects of her piety even exceeded the expectations set forth in the widow’s blessing; her reclusive way of life and the penitential nature of her liturgy were similar to the anchoritic practices that would become widespread in England within a few decades of Guibert’s composition of the Monodiae.142 Guibert emphasized that his mother understood her widowhood as a distinct way of life, which she cultivated “as if she had always borne the duties of the marriage bed with horror.”143 During the time she lived as a recluse, Guibert’s mother received the gift of prophecy, in the tradition of other famous widows such as Anna and St. Monica.144 In one lengthy dream and its interpretation, which 139. “Ad coenobium ergo illud veniens, anum quandam in sanctimoniali habitu reperit quam, quia plurimam religionis speciem prae se ferebat, ad sibi cohabitandum, discipulari quadam exhibita ei subjectione coegit; inquam, cum ipsa ambientissime, expertis ejus moribus, sodalitium tale collegerit. Coepit itaque pedetentim antiquioris illius feminae rigorem imitari, victus parsimoniam sequi, pauperrima obsonia amplecti, consuetudinarii stratus mollia fulcra rejicere, linteolo et stramine frumentario contenta dormire. Et cum multa adhuc niteret specie, nullumque praetenderet vetustatis indicium, ad hoc ipsa contendere, ut rugis anilibus ad cernuos defluxisse putaretur annos. Defluentia ergo crinium, quae foemineis potissimum solent ornatibus inservire, crebro forcipe succiduntur, pulla vestis et amplitudine insolita displicans, innumeris resarcitionibus segmentata, prodebat, cum nativi coloris palliolo, et sultulari pertusuris incorrigibilius terebrato, quoniam interius erat, cui sub tam inglorio apparatu placere gestibat.” Autobiographie, 1.14, p. 102–4. 140. “Quid virgo ineunte sub aevo, quid virita, quid vidua studio jam possibiliore peregerit, cogitaverit.” Autobiographie, 1.14, p. 104; trans. Archambault, 46. 141. Autobiographie, 1.14. 142. Ibid. On anchoritic liturgy, see especially Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 143. “Ita viduitatem coluit, acsi maritalia semper debiti cubilis impatiens horruisset.” Autobiographie, 1.18, p. 146; trans. Archambault, 64. 144. Archambault comments on the similar roles that the dreams of Monica and Guibert’s mother play in the moral influencing and edifying of their respective sons (A Monk’s Confession, 57n93).



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Guibert recounted in the first book of the Monodiae, his mother’s visions both revealed the secret sins of Guibert’s kin and disclosed their punishments in purgatory for those sins. Guibert’s mother also witnessed an apparition of her dead husband in a dream. She thus discovered that he had fathered an illegitimate child during a period of abstinence in their marriage, and she hoped to mitigate his sin by adopting an infant to live with her, and the infant’s incessant crying, resulting from the presence of the devil, she endured as a form of penance for her dead husband’s sins as well as for her own.145 Guibert’s father also used this connection with his wife to further acquire prayers on behalf of his soul, and asked his wife to engage a certain Liutgard, a local woman “poor in spirit,” with a reputation for living a simple, pious life, to intercede for him in addition to his wife’s own prayers and almsgiving.146 In the same dream, Guibert’s mother foresaw the death of a knight and the gruesome punishments purgatory would hold for one of her sons, who was, according to Guibert, a notable blasphemer.147 She also learned that the pious woman with whom she had lived at the beginning of her conversion, and who had since died, was not all that she had seemed to be. Despite her outward appearance of holiness, the woman had been “less intent on avoiding the appetite for vainglory” than she had seemed in her external manifestations of piety, and Guibert’s mother saw the woman being borne away from her deathbed by two black demons.148 The two 145. The curious episode with the child supports the theme of the mother’s prophetic gifts in widowhood on the one hand, but on the other hand, the story interrupts (or, rather, emphasizes the impediments his mother experienced in) Guibert’s narrative of his mother’s retreat from the domestic world. Guibert related that the mother and her servants were consumed each night with trying (unsuccessfully) to comfort the child with a toy, or perhaps an amulet (crepundia). The demands of the infant, as well as the real-life illegitimate child that precipitated the adoption of this unfortunate infant, highlight the seemingly endless worldly entanglements the mother endured through her marriage and her difficulty in escaping these, even in her well-intentioned resolve to pursue chaste widowhood. Guibert emphasizes that his mother nevertheless overcame such challenges: despite her fatigue, the mother was assiduous in attending the nightly monastic offices. The anecdote also evokes the well-worn classical trope that domestic inconveniences such as crying children interfere with more serious intellectual and spiritual pursuits. Autobiographie, 1.18, p. 156. 146. “Sed inter vos quaedam habitat Leodegardis quam mater mea ea intentione illum nominasse intellexit, quatinus ipsa ab ea peteret, quod sui memoriam haberet. Erat autem praefata Leodegardis foemina spiritu pauperirima et quae sine moribus saeculi Deo simpliciter victitaret.” Autobiographie, 1.18, p. 152. 147. Ibid., 1.18. 148. “Vidit et in eadem serie visionis anum illam, quam in suae initio conversionis supra diximus cum ea conversatam, mulierem plane multis crucibus in superficie suo corpori semper infestam, at vero contra appetitum inanis, ut dicebatur, gloriae minus cautam; hanc inquam vidit a duobus ferri nigerrimus spiritubus, speciemque ejus umbraticam.” Ibid., p. 152–54; trans. Archambault, 68.

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women had pledged that whoever died first would attempt to contact the other—with God’s permission—in order to inform the other about the state of her salvation. Frightened by the inadequacy of her companion’s efforts to protect herself from sin, Guibert’s mother renewed her ascetic efforts.149 Scholars have noted Guibert’s relation of his mother’s dream as an especially significant expression of the developing theology of purgatory as both a literal space and a focus for penitential intercession in the twelfth century. His widowed mother’s persistent connection to her deceased husband situated her in a special position within this emerging theology, as Guibert interwove scriptural and liturgical expressions of widowhood, such as the widow’s prophetic gifts and spiritual bereavement, together with a contemporary understanding of marriage as a sacrament, established through indissoluble vows and persisting after the death of a spouse.150 In this context, the profession of widowhood was an antidote to the tribulations of marriage, but also invested the widow with a responsibility to secure her husband’s spiritual well-being: the mother “knew her pains helped diminish her husband’s, which she had seen in her dream, so she graciously put up with her own.”151 Guibert’s narrative was filled with women who often lacked the ability to effect their will politically and socially, but who marshaled various kinds of divine and supernatural powers to impose their will on events. His narrative of his mother’s pious widowhood allowed him to order these events into a theological framework; the wicked relatives who used illicit magic to curse his mother’s marriage and sought to steal back her dowry ultimately functioned in the narrative as aids to his mother’s spirituality, for their actions propelled her toward chaste widowhood. The false piety of his mother’s companion was revealed through his mother’s growing gift of prophetic discernment, and her 149. Autobiographie, 1.18; trans. Archambault, 69. The elderly woman who turned out to be a falsely pious widow has a literary counterpart in the “merry widow,” who pretends to be pious only in order to delight covertly in sin; see below, chapter 6. 150. See Jacques LeGoff, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 181–86; Barbara Newman, “On the Threshold of the Dead: Purgatory, Hell, and Religious Women,” in From Virile Woman to WomanChrist (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 108–36; and Katherine Clark, “Purgatory, Punishment, and the Discourse of Widowhood in the High and Later Middle Ages,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 16, no. 2 (May 2007): 169–203. 151. “Quoniam ergo molestias istas molestiarum hominis, quas in visione viderat, cognoverat purgatrices, libenter tolerabat.” Autobiographie, 1.18, p. 156; trans. Archambault, 69.



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dreams established her as a member of the ranks of local holy women— like a “certain Liutgard”—who were known for their piety and intercession. Guibert transformed his mother’s personal experiences, even her sins and failures, into a positive example of matronly piety that was deeply rooted in his local milieu. Guibert’s story of his mother’s widowhood reworked her experiences into a theologically correct example, sanctioning a tradition that invested widows and matrons with a particular responsibility and efficacy for penitential devotion, through which they earned special insight into salvation. Yet Guibert’s mother’s ability to mediate between this life and the next did not give her any peace of mind: her consciousness of her own sinful nature committed her to an ongoing eschatological battle whose outcome was by no means certain. Unlike the widowed saints of Carolingian and Ottonian hagiography, whose sanctity was expressed within a community of women, Guibert’s mother struggled to maintain the interior and exterior challenges of widowed piety alone, adjacent to a monastery but not part of it. Even at the very end of her life, when she accepted the holy veil (as a separate sign of her status beyond the dark dress and old shoes that constituted her widow’s weeds), she did not join a convent. Rather, her veiling sealed her life’s attempts at widowed piety through a formal religious blessing. Guibert discouraged her from taking the veil, directly citing Gelasius’s often-repeated decree against veiling, and insisted that “she could live a perfectly chaste life without any external robes.”152 Once again, however, Guibert’s mother’s dreams and the intervention of the Virgin Mary superseded the advice of her son and her clerical advisors. Guibert’s mother dreamed that she had seen a vision of a very beautiful, imposing lady, magnificently dressed, who presented my mother with a very precious cloak. She seemed to be entrusting the cloak to my mother for safekeeping until the time came for her to give it back. We all agreed immediately with what she was saying, especially as we were convinced that her pious initiative had been encouraged with signs from heaven. For nearly three years my mother kept her holy veil as conscientiously as she could; and on the anniversary of the day when that most gracious Lady received the happy An152. “Ante paucos autem quam decederet annos, nimie coeperat affectare sacrum suscipere velum. Quod cum ego auctoritate proposita distulissem ubi dicitur: ‘Viduas velare pontificum nullus attentet,’ sufficere sibi posse continentissimam sine exteriori habitu vitam.” Autobiographie, 2.4, p. 244; trans. Archambault, 109–10.

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nunciation that would bring us salvation she gave it back to the Lady who had confided it to her keeping.153

Throughout the narrative, Guibert had positioned himself as the skeptic who mistrusted his mother’s spiritual directives until they were confirmed by her visions. He concluded, however, by asking the reader to intercede for his mother’s soul as she had done for others: “I commend my mother’s soul to all the faithful who will read these lines, as she never forgot any of the faithful in her frequent prayers. What I have said of her I have said in God’s presence, and as my heart is my witness I have invented nothing.”154 Guibert may have protested too much that he “invented” nothing, as his narrative conformed closely to the canonists’ deliberations on marriage and the conventions surrounding the widow’s consecration in contemporary liturgical books. Indeed, in his mother’s case, the Virgin herself performed the ceremony in the vision, confirming the actual consecration that his mother received in the presence of the abbot of Fly.155 Guibert’s mother’s prayers for “all the faithful” also echoed the petitions in monastic liturgy begging the intercession of “all the holy widows and virgins.”156 The Monodiae is not a chronicle or continuous narrative; it is rather in the confessional genre—a highly selective and literary presentation of the author’s life. Guibert employed elements of hagiography to construct his mother’s life and forms of piety; his characterization of her widowhood bore a strong resemblance to the near-contemporary life of St. Ida of Boulogne (d. 1113), the widow of Count Eustace II.157 Though Ida’s marriage was not fraught with conflict as Guibert’s mother’s was, 153. “Dixit ergo se in visione vidisse multae pulchritudinis et auctoritatis dominam, cui ornatus inerat circumstantia copiosi, quae preciossimum sibi offerens peplum quasi ad custodiendam idem ei commendebat, oportuno videlicet tempore in morem depositi restitutendum. Cui verbo omnes incuntanter assedimus, praesertim cum ejus devotionem divinis provocari significationibus sentiremus. Quod sacrum velamen, annis ferme tribus integre ut poterat conservatum, illa die ei, quae sibi illud commiserat, Dominae reportavit, qua ipsa salutiferae adnunciationis auspicium jocundissima felici aure suscepit.” Autobiographie, 2.4, p. 244–46; trans. Archambault, 110. 154. “Ipsam cunctis commendo, qui legerint ista fidelibus, quam constat neminem a crebris suis orationibus exclusisse fidelem. Haec de ea coram Deo dixerim, cordis mei verax testimonium habens nihil omnimodis confinxisse.” Autobiographie, 2.4, p. 246; trans. Archambault, 110. 155. Autobiographie, 2.4. 156. For example, Clm 6427 (eleventh century), fol. 128r: “omnes sancte virgines et viduae orate pro nobis.” See also Clm 4757, Clm 5543, Clm 5544, Clm 23645. 157. Vita Sancta Idae, AASS April I (April 13): 141–50. See also George Duby’s discussion of Ida in The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest, 135–38.



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she maintained chastity in her marriage, engaging in sexual intercourse only to beget children. After Eustace’s death, she committed herself to Christ: “though she seemed the widow of a mortal spouse, on account of a chaste and celibate life filled with pious acts and good works, was believed to be married to the immortal spouse.”158 Like Guibert’s mother, she did not enter a convent in her widowhood; instead, she retired with a small band of female attendants under the supervision of the abbot of the monastery of La-Chapelle-Sainte-Marie, and took part to some extent in the observances of the monastery.159 Whether or not he was a particular advocate of a widowed chastity lived outside the convent, Guibert sought a context for his mother’s spiritual choices and found them in long-standing liturgical, theological, and hagiographical expressions of widowhood. His attempt to render her exploration of the “wider possibility of action” made his mother’s making a widowed profession while living in the world an exemplary model for his readers and also a touchstone for his own spiritual progress as he reconciled himself to the monastic life and his ultimate appointment as abbot of Nogent. While such “wider possibilities” were permitted, according to the decretals of the early and High Middle Ages, the church’s twelfth-century councils (documents roughly contemporary with Guibert’s composition of the Monodiae) began to draw sharper lines between the convent and the world. In 1139 a decree of the Second Lateran Council addressed the “pernicious and detestable custom” of women who, “although they live neither according to the rule of the blessed Benedict, nor Basil nor Augustine, yet wish to be thought of by everyone as nuns.”160 The decree spoke to the ambiguities of definition surrounding consecrated women, which over time also become more clearly denoted in the rubrics of the liturgies of benediction. The Second Lateran Council mandated that the term sanctimoniales properly referred only to women living in 158. “Et quamvis beatissima Ida, mortali viduata viro videretur; immortali sponso, per castam et coelibem vitam, piisque actibus bonisque operibus repletam, nupsisse credebatur.” Vita Idae, 2.9, p. 143. 159. Ibid. 160. “Ad haec perniciosam et detestabilem consuetudinem quarundam mulierum, quae licet necque secundum regulam beati Benedicti neque Basilii aut Augustini vivant, sanctimoniales tamen vulgo censeri desiderant.” Canon 26, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, Nicea I to Lateran V, ed. Norman P. Tanner (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 203–4.

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an established convent, where “they ought to be in church or in the refectory or dormitory in common,” rather than to those who “build their own retreats and private dwelling places where, under the guise of hospitality, indiscriminately and without any shame, they receive guests and secular persons—contrary to the sacred canons and good morals. Because everyone who does evil hates the light, these women think that, hidden in the tabernacle of the just, they can conceal themselves from the eyes of the Judge who sees everything; so we prohibit in every way this unrighteous, hateful, and disgraceful conduct and forbid it to continue under pain of anathema.”161 Such measures do not seem to have penetrated uniformly at the level of common practice. As Penelope Johnson has noted, male monastics were sometimes willing to accept nuns or lay sisters in informal relationships to their houses. Her research on twelfth-century French monastic institutions reveals that it was common practice for houses of regular Augustinian canons to have in residence several sorores conversae, lay sisters—small, ad hoc communities of women.162 Widows, sealed with a vow of chastity and marked by the veste vidualis may well have joined (or mingled within) the ranks of these lay sisters as Hrotsvit’s foundress, Oda, had done in Ottonian times. Moreover, Augustinian canons especially had cause to consider themselves patrons of widows, as they were attached to the community of the bishop who would be the one to perform the vowing ceremonies and who held the nominal responsibility for the widows’ pastoral care. The ties between a group of widows and a house of regular canons at Ranshofen in the diocese of Passau around the year 1296 suggest how complicated the status of women attached to a male house could be, as well as the ineffectiveness of the Second Lateran Council’s decree at establishing consistent norms for female religious. The Ranshofen monastery, founded in 1125, comprised separate houses of canons, lay 161. “Cum enim, iuxta regulam degentes in coenobiis, tam in ecclesia quam in refectorio atque dormitorio communiter esse debeant, propria sibi aedificant receptacula et privata domicilia, in quibus sub hospitalitatis velamine passim hospites et minus religiosos contra sacros canones et bonos mores suscipere nullatenus erubescunt. Quia ergo omnis qui male agit odit lucem, ac per hoc ipsae, absconditae in iustorum tabernaculo, opinantur se posse latere oculos Iudicis cuncta cernentis, hoc tam inhonestum detestandumque flagitium, ne ulterius fiat, omnimodis prohibemus et sub poena anathematis interdicimus.” Ibid., 203. 162. Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession, 29–30



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brothers, and regular canonesses.163 The house of canonesses was damaged by fire but continued until at least the third quarter of the thirteenth century, according to records noting that canonesses continued to receive benefices. After this time, the women’s house seems to have foundered, and was replaced by a small enclave of women numbering no fewer than three and no more than six, which was to be a cloister for “ladies” (dominae) and whose rule was to be indicated by their dark dress and pallium, whether they were widows or virgins. Secular dress was strictly prohibited. The women were to “observe claustration according to the holy rule” under the guidance of a magistra, and busy themselves with handiwork and prayer.164 A small community, characterized by the widow’s dress and warned repeatedly against secular behavior on the part of the nuns, was certainly not consonant with the well-ordered and strictly cloistered Benedictine model of Marcigny, nor with the Second Lateran Council’s view of strict seclusion of male and female religious. Indeed, by those strict parameters for female monasticism, the tiny community of women attached to a male house could be viewed with suspicion. Here again, possible charges of syneisaktism arose as the presence of a few lone widows living within or nearby monasteries presented opportunities for temptation and scandal. Under this arrangement ad hoc, these sorores—who were perhaps not so unlike Guibert’s community of two residing at Fly—enjoyed the 163. Hubert Schopf, “Die Geschichte des Augustiner Chorherrenstiftes Ranshofen im Mittelalter,” (doctoral diss, Leopold-Franzens Universität, Innsbruck, 1985), 86–87. 164. “Claustrum dominarum proprie monasterium de nouo duximus erigendum et obseruationem regularem abolitam in eodem ad uigorem pristinum reducere cupientes. Statuimus, ut in ipso claustro perpetuo sex sorores et non plures inter quas una per loci prepositum ceteris prefici debeat in magistram. Debeant militare, quarum quidem sororum numerus nisi ex maxima et legitima necessitate non minatur ex nulla causa intra ternarium reducentes. Ipse eciam sorores abitum deferent regularem: uidelicet nigra subpellicia et nigra pallia adorso eminencia ultra caput et subsequenti clausura obseruationes salubres iuxta tradicionem sancte regule obseruabant. Statuimus etiam ut nulla sororum predictarum per preces potentum assumatur, set tantum per nos eligatur et detur talis quam nostra consideracio utilem reputauerit et honestam. Statuimus eciam ut in ipso claustro nulla femina domicella vel uidua residere permittatur in habitu seculari, admittentes ut famule domus et uirgines que manualia opera uel psaltium desciuit vestibus laicalibus licete uti possint. Obligamus etiam nos et successores nostros ad dandum ipsis sororibus prebendam solitam qua mediante in diuinis possint laudibus continue perseruare. In cuius rei testimonium preferentes dedunt litteras nostrorum sigillorum munimine roboratas. Datum et actum Ranshouen anno domini millesimi c˚c Nonagesimo sexto, in die sancte Katherine [25 November].” KL Ranshofen 1, fol. 146rb (cartulary from ca. 1303); also printed in Monumenta Boica III, Num. 45: 358. Schopf suggests that the “holy rule” refers to the Rule of St. Augustine.

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benefits of a monastic environment, masculine protection, and pastoral care, while still maintaining some freedom to determine the daily fabric of their religious observance. The community as described in the document was fully consonant with the patristic and liturgical traditions of pious widowhood, incorporating a mourning habit, a renunciation of secular life, and a perpetual commitment to devotional activity like Anna’s in the temple. A small community such as the Ranshofen dominae in fact fulfilled all the essentials of the vows presented in the liturgical tradition of blessing widows. The community, however—perhaps because of its small and personal nature—was short-lived. Despite the cartulary’s stipulation that the foundation be perpetual and its guarantee of benefices, its last records date from 1307.165 Scholars of female monasticism see the trend toward strict claustration as culminating in Pope Boniface VIII’s bull, Periculoso, in 1298. This decree not only advocated strict enclosure, but also attempted to enforce it universally throughout the various monastic orders.166 The language of the document is unequivocal; unlike the Ranshofen widows and virgins who were to “observe claustration,” Periculoso required that nuns collectively or individually, both at present and in future, of whatsoever community or order, in whatever part of the world they may be, ought henceforth to remain perpetually cloistered in their monasteries, so that none of them, tacitly or expressly professed, shall or may for whatever reason or cause (unless by chance any be found to be manifestly suffering from a disease of such a type and kind that it is not possible to remain with the others without grave danger or scandal), have permission to leave their monasteries; and that no persons, in any way disreputable, or even respectable, shall be allowed to enter or leave the same . . . so that [the nuns] may be able to serve God more freely, wholly separated from the public and worldly gaze, and, occasions for lasciviousness having been removed, may most diligently safeguard their hearts and bodies in complete chastity.167

165. Schopf, “Geschichte des Augustiner,” 69–70. 166. Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women, 10–11. 167. “. . . universas et singulas moniales, praesentes atque futuras, cuiuscunque religionis sint vel ordinis, in quibuslibet mundi partibus existentes, sub perpetua in suis monasteriis debere de cetero permanare clausura ita, quod nulli earum, religionem tacite vel expresse professae, sit vel esse valeat quacunque ratione vel causa . . . monasteria ipsa deinceps egrediendi facultas; nullique aliquatenus



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These measures were primarily concerned with keeping nuns in the cloister, and with strengthening the distinctiveness of their state and vows from the status of women who had not undertaken a religious profession. The corollary to these concerns involved the worldly contamination that occurred when the nuns’ cloister was penetrated by family, friends, and strangers, whether out of the pious desire to be close to the practitioners of holiness or the less-admirable desire of using the convent as yet another venue for family, social, or political activity. Elizabeth Makowski has noted that in formulating Periculoso, Boniface VIII displayed “a marked antipathy to unorthodox religious activity by women,” which underpinned his desire for “uniformity of observance and a clear distinction between nuns and all other quasireligious groups.”168 The result of this sort of antipathy—the sharper delineation of the cloistered life from other forms of religiosity between the tenth and thirteenth centuries—narrowed the liminal space between the world and the convent, a space that widows had historically occupied, as characterized by patristic, hagiographical, and liturgical traditions concerning widowed chastity, as well as by a general sense of her special mourning status in lay society. It is not surprising that, in an era in which the identity of nuns was becoming more sharply defined as cloistered virgins, these traditions of widowhood reemerged in close association with those widows involved in the Beguine and Third Order movements in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Distinguished by the liturgies of chaste profession and veiling, religious widowhood could be a prelude to an orthodox conventual life, or could initiate other possibilities. The ambiguous status of vowed widows, whose state was sometimes sufficient by itself to constitute a institutionally sanctioned religious life, but which more often required some degree of association with a religious community, suggests that boundaries between convents and communities from the tenth to the twelfth centuries were fluid rather than strict, despite attempts at active inhonestae personae nec etiam honestae (nisi forte tanto et tali morbo evidenter earum aliquam laborare constaret, quod non posset cum aliis absque gravi periculo seu scandalo commorari) ingressus vel accessus pateat ad easdem, ut sic a publicis et mundanis conspectibus separatae omnino servire Deo valeant liberius, et, lasciviendi opportunitate sublata eidem corda sua et corpora in omni sanctimonia diligentiaius custodire.” Ibid., 133–35. 168. Ibid., 123.

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enclosure. Paradoxically, the later medieval tendency toward a more severe demarcation between enclosed nuns and other types of religious women created a new trajectory for female widowed piety in the world. The efforts of widows to create and occupy this liminal space are instructive, as they anticipate many aspects of lay spirituality as it flourished in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Widespread popular movements that emphasized a spiritual life outside of the cloister articulated, on a larger scale, medieval widows’ ongoing efforts to reconcile religious devotion with secular life. Not surprisingly, therefore, it was often widows who were most active in lay institutions such as beguinages and the Franciscans’ and Dominicans’ Third Orders. As we shall see in the following chapters, the spiritual opportunities that arose in the high and later Middle Ages permitted the expression of the ancient institution of consecrated widowhood in new forms. These opportunities in turn gave rise to a steady increase in materials available for pastoral care, such as popular saints’ lives and energetic preaching, and removed the pious widow from the shadow of the cloister and made her far more visible, both to the Christian community’s gaze and to the historian’s eye.

Later Medieval Hagiogr aphy

Chapter 4

Chaste Widows and the Penitential Ethos in Later Medieval Hagiography Oh, my reader, pay attention and behold how under the cloak of piety and the title of necessity the ancient serpent defeated the simplicity of a simple woman. — H ug h de Fl or e ff e , The Life of Yvette of Huy

In the high and later Middle Ages, as the church placed greater emphasis on pastoral care of the laity and defined new roles for women within this process, chaste widowhood increasingly became a vocation that women lived out under a “cloak of piety” in the world in informal communities or enclosures.1 The mother of Guibert of Nogent and the “dominae” who lived adjacent to the community of Ranshofen provided some examples of women’s attempts to create modes of religious devotion in widowhood that facilitated worldly contact and permitted interactions with their communities. As a quasi-hagiography, Guibert’s narrative of his mother’s widowhood was a very different sort from those of the early medieval period, which tended to follow a trajectory from worldly marriage to the protection of the convent, in which widowhood occupied a liminal position between marriage and the cloister. A desire for permanent widowed chastity confirmed a matron’s commitment to the spiritual life before she undertook a monastic profession, and vows of continence that resembled a religious profession insured that the professio and status of widowed continence retained close associations with a monastic devotion. In the course of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, hagiography absorbed 1. “sub pallio pietatis”; see epigraph above: “Scrutare meus o lector, et vide quomodo sub pallio pietatis, et necessitatis titulo circumvenerit simplicitatem feminae simplicis serpens antiquus.” De B. Juetta sive Jutta, chap. 9, AASS January II (January 13): 150; in The Life of Yvette of Huy by Hugh de Floreffe, ed. and trans. Jo Ann McNamara (Toronto: Peregrina Publishing, 2000), 56.

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and interpreted the “profession” of chaste widowhood as an institution that not only could be lived out in a secular context, but also offered to the Christian laity a useful model of chastity, obedience, and asceticism. The Gregorian movement touched on the lives of pious widows as reform initiatives encouraged renewed attention to liturgies of consecration and to women’s strict enclosure. The vitae of widowed saints from this period, correspondingly, reflect the church’s changing ideals and expectations concerning the activities of widowed laywomen. Most importantly, the penitential movement of the high and later Middle Ages that grew out of popular responses to the Gregorian reforms exercised enormous influence in the lives of many widowed saints from this period, especially those of northern European beguinages and the mendicant tertiary orders. Hagiographers continued to invoke many of the venerable traditions associated with widowhood as they narrated the lives of widowed saints and developed arguments proving their sanctity. Elements from early medieval hagiography, such as the protection of the widow’s chastity, her particular association with the twin duties of prayer and fasting, her prophetic abilities, and her capacity for spiritual mothering persisted in the biographies of later medieval widowed saints. Hagiographers combined these traditions with new aspects of female sanctity such as penitential spirituality, Franciscan piety in southern Europe, and the mulieres sanctae of northern European cities. Hagiographers also emphasized Marian devotion, identifying a special relationship between widows and the Virgin, who served, among her many beneficent roles toward the faithful, as their helper and protector.2 Even as widowed saints adopted new roles and attributes, their ancient identification as an “order” remained a useful trope in hagiography for explaining and categorizing their saintly activities, particularly when those activities were carried out in the world rather than in a convent.3 This is not to say that representations of the widowed state remained unchanged over the course of the later Middle Ages, or that widowhood was always central to the construction of a matron’s sancti2. For example, Mary explicitly presented herself to Bridget as the “helper of widows”; see Julia Bolton Holloway, ed. and trans., The Life of St. Birgitta by Birger Gregerssen and Thomas Gasgoine (Toronto: Peregrina Press, 1991), 26. 3. Hasenohr, “La vie quotidienne,” 25–26.



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ty. In high and later medieval hagiography, however, the life of the vere vidua itself facilitated sanctity rather than serving as a conduit for the woman to enter the convent and take up a nun’s life. In the wake of popular movements such as the beguines and mendicant friars, the holy widow in hagiography was situated ever more frequently in a secular context, often within a community of matrons whose spirituality she influenced and directed.4 Hagiographical widowhood both informed and was enhanced by expanding definitions of and settings for female piety in general in this period. Though most female saints continued to be drawn from the noble classes, urbanization and the expansion of the middle class were extremely important factors in the spiritual currents that influenced noble and middle-class women alike.5 The growth of towns introduced profound changes into medieval society, and medieval authors responded self-consciously to such socioeconomic change. Often, clerics’ assessment of the new money economy was negative, and the urban, moneyminded class was seen as evidence of dangerous moral decay rather than as a welcome innovation.6 At the same time, religious leadership responded to the times: the cult of St. Francis and his numerous urban followers (many of them women) served as the consummate example of the urban middle-class saint who marshaled financial resources for spiritual ends.7 Hugh of Floreffe, the Premonstratensian canon and biographer of the widowed Yvette of Huy (1158–1228), apparently saw nothing amiss about describing her dedication to serving Christ in terms of “a businesswoman profitably multiplying the accumulated talents credited to her, caring only to please Him whose judgment she feared. . . . For each one is paid according to her labors.”8 Saintly widows, therefore, legiti4. André Vauchez, “Female Sanctity in the Franciscan Movement,” in The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices, ed. Daniel E. Borstein, trans. Margery J. Schneider (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 58. 5. Ernest McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture (New York: Octagon Books, 1969), 7. 6. See B. H. Rosenwein and L. K. Little, “Social Meaning in Monastic and Mendicant Spiritualities,” Past and Present 63 (May 1974): 4–32. 7. See Elliott, Spiritual Marriage, 196 ff. 8. “Ut negotiatrix industria, sibi creditum talentum lucro multiplici cumulare semper sategit: placere soli curans, a quo se judicandam timebat, et sperabat remunderadam, juxta illud: Unusquisque propriam mercedem accipiet, secundum suum laborem.” Vita Juetta, Praefatio, pp. 145–46; trans. McNamara, The Life of Yvette, 35.

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mately used their financial resources admirably and allowed hagiographers to demonstrate the proper use of money: it was to be directed toward the poor, rather than spent on selfish pursuits such as fine clothes and personal luxuries. Such examples also indicated how pious matrons could avoid the sin of vanity, a theme that increasingly preoccupied preachers and moralists from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Urbanity, popular reforming movements, and the mendicant ethos all afforded lay women new means of demonstrating holiness, and hagiography and other religious writing expanded the definition of female piety accordingly. Moreover, increasing rates of literacy and the institutional church’s innovations in pastoral care popularized the images of women’s religious activities that had, in the earlier Middle Ages, been reserved for a smaller audience of regular clergy and a few educated elites. Particularly because widows in the later Middle Ages remained within a secular context for the majority of their widowhood, or never joined a convent at all, the garments and activities of the vere vidua became an ever-more-important focus in widowhood’s representation in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century hagiography. The long-standing traditions and rhetorical associations that chaste widowhood offered served as the widow’s best line of defense against temptation and scandal. As the opening quotation from the vita of Yvette of Huy suggests, however, the garments of widowhood could also be interpreted with some anxiety as the pallium pietatis, or feigned cloak of piety, of the “ancient serpent.”9 Clerics still articulated anxiety that secular chaste widowhood rendered women vulnerable to diabolical influences, or even permitted them to use the “cloak of piety” themselves to profess a holy life while living a dissolute one. This chapter, on widows in hagiography, and the following one, on sermon literature to and about widows, investigate the models of pious widowhood that clerical authors produced and disseminated to the laity in the high and later Middle Ages. The hagiographies of widowed saints from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries expanded the dimensions of the institution of chaste widowhood while also retaining many of its older traditions. 9. See note 1, above.



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Convents In hagiography and liturgy, widowed women were characterized differently within monastic communities than young, virginal nuns. Wealthy and aristocratic widows often lived unofficially within the convent, despite clerical directives to the contrary. The widowed saint Hedwig of Silesia (1174–1243, canonized 1267), followed this pattern. The daughter of Berthold XI of Andechs and Agnes of Groitzsch, Hedwig was raised in the Benedictine monastery of Kitzingen and betrothed to Henry of Silesia (d. 1238) in the late 1180s. Among the couple’s many monastic foundations was the Cistercian convent of Trebnitz, to which Hedwig would retire in her widowhood.10 Although Hedwig spent her widowhood in a convent, her hagiographer explained a different rationale for doing so than was given in the lives of earlier medieval widowed saints. Hedwig refused to make a monastic profession precisely because the vow would restrict her almsgiving and other pious activities in the world.11 Like the earlier medieval queen St. Radegund, and Hedwig’s near-contemporary Mary of Oignies (d. 1213), Hedwig first became a widow in spirit rather than in fact, retiring while her husband was still alive to the Cistercian nunnery of Trebnitz that they had founded together circa 1202. Unlike Radegund, Hedwig did not end a hostile union by de facto retreat into a convent, but rather modeled marital chastity: after she had borne six children and 10. Henry’s father, Boleslaus, formed relationships with the Cistercian order as part of his efforts to settle the eastern frontier; Henry followed his example with continued close ties to the order, as the Trebnitz foundation suggests, and also to the Teutonic Knights. Hedwig herself brought Dominican houses to Bunzlau and Breslau, and Franciscan foundations to Goldberg and Krossen. Despite his memorial in Hedwig’s vitae as a pious donor, however, Henry died embroiled in a dispute with the papacy concerning his rights to the use of properties he had donated to the Church. Under Polish land laws, he should have been able to enjoy the service of those inhabiting the donated lands, but the bishop of Breslau rejected Henry’s demands for hospitality and provisions of the houses under his patronage. The matter had attracted papal attention by 1237, at which time it is possible (but not clear) that Henry was excommunicated because of this quarrel. Whether or not Henry died in a state of excommunication, he was nevertheless buried in the consecrated ground of the Trebnitz cloister; see Josef Kirmeier, Evamaria Brockhoff, and Alois Schütz, Herzöge und Heilige: Das Geschlecht der Andechs-Meranier im europäischen Hochmittelalter. Katalog zur Landesausstellung im Kloster Andechs, 13. Juli-24. Oktober 1993 (Munich: Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte, 1993), 147–50. 11. Many widowed saints did make monastic professions while still engaging in the humility and penitential qualities of the mendicant and reforming movements, for example Clare Gambacorta (AASS April II [April 17]: 503–16) and Antonia of Florence (P. Ciro Cannarozzi, “Due vite della B. Antonia da Firenze,” Studi Francescani, 57 [1960]: 319–42).

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lived a continent marriage with Henry for twenty-eight years, the pair took mutual vow of continence.12 Hedwig’s retreat into a nunnery of a well-established order may have been typical for a noble widow, but her continent marriage, her life of active service in and around the convent, and her extraordinary acts of humility combined new penitential practices with conventual life. When her husband died, her daughter Gertrude, the abbess of the convent, pressed Hedwig as to whether she would enter orders formally, since although Hedwig “wore the habit of the sisters, she was neither obligated to the order by a vow nor bound through the obedience of profession.”13 Hedwig rejected this possibility, asking her daughter if she had forgotten the merits of attending to the needs of Christ’s poor in the world.14 She retained her freedom of movement outside and within the convent. Her extramural activities, as the papal bull confirming her canonization noted, were centered on fulfilling the duties Christ specified to his apostles, following his dictum that those who succor the hungry and thirsty, clothe the naked, house the homeless, and visit the sick and imprisoned will receive eternal life.15 Within the convent, Hedwig demonstrated the most distinctive marks of her widowed sanctity: humility and profound reverence for the nuns. In her vita, Hedwig appeared at times a full participant in the life of the monastic community (for example, Hedwig often listened to a sister read during meals). More often, however, her biographer depicted Hedwig acting independently of the sisters within the convent and showed her private devotions to be quite separate from the observances that regulated the sisters’ monastic day. Hedwig prayed constantly, often in private. To demonstrate her humility, she slipped into the emp12. Their married continence consisted of abstention during Lent, Advent, and other Churchappointed days; the vow of continence was “as in one spirit and of mutual consent with episcopal benediction” (ut uno animo parique consensu cum episcopali benedictione). Legenda maior, 2.5, AASS October VIII (October 17): 225–26; see also Elliott’s discussion of Hedwig’s chaste marriage, Spiritual Marriage, 225ff. 13. “Dum autem Beata Hedwigis moraretur in claustro Trebnicensi, sororum quidem illarum induit habitum, sed Ordini se non obligavit per votum, ne ligata per professionis obedientiam, a pietatis operibus et a consolandis pauperibus ipsam existere.” Legenda Maior, 2.12, p. 227. 14. Ibid. 15. Joseph Gottschalk, ed., “Von der heyligennennung sant Hedwigen,” Konrad Baumgarten 1504 in Die große Legende der heiligen frau Sankt Hedwig (Vol. 1, Facsimileband) (Wiesbanden: Guido Pressler, 1963), f. b ii r. Cf. Legenda maior 1.7, p. 226.



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ty choir stalls to kiss the places where the sisters sat or walked, washed herself with the water left over from their ablutions. She was also known to perform miracles: when a sister spied on her to see what she did while alone, the sister heard Christ speaking audibly to Hedwig through a carved image of himself on a crucifix.16 Hedwig subordinated herself to the Cistercian nuns through acts demonstrating near-worship of their way of life without adopting it herself. At times she even disciplined the sisters, urging them to be stricter in their asceticism and devotion, as when she, dry-eyed (siccis apparens oculis), commanded the weeping sisters to accept that the death of her husband and their founder was God’s will and should not be questioned, thereby exhibiting the saintly virtues of humility and patience. Hedwig’s clothing, constant prayers, extreme humility, and monastic patronage established her holiness in widowhood. Her life in relationship to the nuns’ community enhanced this status, although Hedwig’s hagiographer articulated her widowhood in the convent as a vocation distinct from that of the convent’s nuns, some of whom were virgins and others widows “given over to gathering together for fasting and prayers day and night for the sake of the sixtyfold fruit.”17 Hedwig kept company with other women in the convent, but only with like-minded matrons, such as her daughter-in-law Anna, for whom she was a model of married continence and widowed chastity.18 Hedwig’s hagiographer explicitly portrayed Hedwig as an example to both married and widowed women: through her vows of continence in marriage and widowhood, Hedwig showed how wives not only maintained their own piety but also taught their husbands the merits of conjugal chastity, and thereby improved their husbands’ spiritual condition as well as their own.19 Although Hedwig’s cult seems to have generated enthusiasm in Silesia and Germany around the time of her death, the process of her canonization did not begin until about twenty years later. The delay was due at least in part to turmoil concerning the rule over the conquered Polish 16. Legenda maior, 2.15, p. 228. 17. “Aliquas insuper secum habebat viduas, jejuniis et orationibus die noctuque vacantes pro fructu sexagesimo congregando.” Ibid., 1.8, p. 226. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. Elliott comments on the influence of dynasty and lineage in shaping this model of conjugal chastity in the lives of the interrelated women of the Hungarian and German-speaking ruling families (Spiritual Marriage, 215–16).

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lands. The renewed attention to her cult in the 1260s was also bolstered by a combination of supporters who emerged to champion Hedwig’s canonization: her grandson Ladislaus had been invested as archbishop of Salzburg, and both the archdeacon Salamon of Cracow, and the provost to King Ottokar of Bohemia, Engelbert of Visehrad, were prepared to finance the costly canonization proceedings. Moreover, the reigning pope, Urban IV, had served as a papal legate in Silesia in the late 1240s and was perhaps familiar with and sympathetic to Hedwig’s cult thanks to exposure to it during his time there.20 Few documents concerning Hedwig’s process of canonization have survived; early sermons preaching her cult around the time of her canonization underscore the transitional nature of her saintly model: in three sermons on the subject of St. Hedwig, Odo of Châteauxroux, bishop of Tusculum, emphasized rather generic and traditional qualities that defined saints, such as her chastity and asceticism; in one sermon, he specifically addressed her identity as a blessed widow.21 The major narrative sources of Hedwig’s life (two vitae, the Legenda maior and Legenda minor), were written after 1300, and showed much greater interest in the conjugal and penitential aspects of Hedwig’s sanctity. The anonymous author of the Legenda maior, the most detailed text on Hedwig’s life, probably had ties to Franciscan and mystical circles, and drew on information from Hedwig’s canonization proceedings as well as on local testimony of those who remembered the saint.22 Both the vitae and Hedwig’s iconography in later centuries characterized the saint through maternal imagery: as the mother of the poor, and consoler of widows and orphans.23 Examples of sculpture and painting from the fifteenth 20. Kirmeier et al., Das Geschlecht der Andechs-Meranier, 159. The proceedings began in 1262. Urban died in 1265, but his successor, Clement IV, was also convinced of Hedwig’s sanctity and supported the saint in deference to Ottokar, who was a strong supporter of Clement’s papacy; see Robert Folz, “Sainte Hedwig,” in Les saintes reines du Moyen Âge en Occident, Subsidia Hagiographica 76 (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1992), 137–38. 21. Otfried Krafft, “Drei Predigten des Kardinals Odo von Châteauroux über Hedwig von Schlesien: Wandlungen und Kontinuitäten im Heiligenideal des 13. Jahrhunderts,” Zeitschrift für OstmitteleuropaForschung 55 (2006): 477–509. 22. The Legenda maior was excerpted, probably by the same author, into a briefer text referred to as the Legenda minor, probably used for personal reading and perhaps liturgical purposes (Kirmeier et al., Das Geschlecht der Andechs-Meranier, 160). See also Robert Folz, “Sainte Hedwig,” 129–44. 23. Legenda maior, 5.58, p. 238. Several manuscript copies of Hedwig’s vita contained illuminations depicting her charity, and an important manuscript from 1353, known as the Hedwig-Codex or Schlackenwerther Codex, contained a portrait believed to be influential in Hedwig’s iconography:



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century often showed Hedwig as a patron and protector, holding a miniature church in her hands.24 The move toward official canonization and the influence of the penitential ethos in Hedwig’s vitae were probably prompted at least in part by the popularity of Hedwig’s saintly niece, Elizabeth of Thüringia, whose cult cohered rapidly after Elizabeth’s death in 1231, and whose vitae circulated widely. The success of Elizabeth’s cult and the prestige it brought to both her Hungarian and German relatives encouraged other Central European dynasties to pursue similar recognition for their holy relatives.25 Hedwig’s recognition as a saint conveyed the increasing importance of the penitential ethos in female sanctity, yet situated her widowhood within the traditions of the monastic life that offered the benefits of community and access to sacred traditions in which widows had already established a significant role. Hedwig’s Legenda maior presented perhaps the best possible scenario for a widowed woman: the protection of a convent, affiliation with an established religious order, and the support of a community of like-minded women. Less auspicious for the extra-regular widow residing in monastic institutions were examples from the life of St. Bridget of Sweden (d. 1373). Like Hedwig and Elizabeth, Bridget was a married saint whose hagiography repeatedly addressed her worldly experiences as both a part of her spirituality and an obstacle to it. For periods of Bridget’s widowhood she lived at the Cistercian monastery of Alvestra, and later at the Benedictine house of Farfa; these episodes illustrate a very different context for widows’ cooperation with male monastic institutions in comparison to earlier widowed saints’ lives. Unlike Guibert’s mother, who, in his much earlier account of her refuge near the monastery of Fly, for example, worried about her reputation but did not experience overt tension with monastery’s inhabitants, Bridget enHedwig, adorned in a gray cloak, clutched the Virgin and child to her breast while also holding her shoes—which she never wore but rather carried with her in case she met someone important in whose presence shoes would be required—and the cord with which she bound her body as part of her personal regimen of penance (Kirmeier et al, Das Geschlecht der Andechs-Meranier, 162–63; cf. Legenda maior, 3.28, p. 232). 24. Kirmeier et al., Das Geschlecht der Andechs-Meranier, 149, 158. 25. Legenda maior, 1.3, p. 225; see also Gabór Klaniczay, The Uses of Supernatural Power: The Transformation of Popular Religion in Medieval and Early Modern Germany, trans. Susan Singerman, ed. Karen Margolis (Oxford: Polity Press, 1990), 99–102.

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countered suspicion from the monks themselves.26 At Alvestra, where Bridget began to receive the visions she would record in her Revelations, her conduct was above reproach. She spent all her time in prayer and in pious works such as fashioning decorations for the altar and the priests’ robes. Nevertheless, one of the elder monks complained, “Why does that lady reside in a monastery of monks, introducing a new custom against our rule?” The same monk received visions from the Lord telling him that God had commanded Bridget to stay there, thus overriding the prohibition against women in the monastery.27 Later on, while Bridget was living in Rome, she visited the monastery of Farfa, where she was promised suitable accommodations, but arrived with her entourage to find that she had been assigned to a “vile hut,” because the monks were not used to cohabiting with women.28 She accepted the hut that was prepared for her, as Christ instructed, because it would allow her to experience the humble cave dwellings of the early Christian saints. The monks, in their initial reaction to Bridget, acknowledged longstanding ecclesiastical concerns about syneisaktism and the corruption of regular procedure, and perhaps sought to reassure any potential detractors to Bridget’s sanctity that her presence enhanced the institution’s holiness rather than disrupted the workings of the monastery. Their reaction also implies that the arrangements of the sort Guibert’s mother had enjoyed without any particular opprobrium were, in the later Middle Ages, considered undesirable, especially when the extraregular relationship consisted of a holy female residing in or near a male community. Even within communities of women, as in Hedwig’s example at Trebniz, the hagiographer was careful to create a distinction between Hedwig, as a special case, a saintly widow who resided within 26. Bridget’s modern scholarly biographer Bridget Morris suggests that Bridget disbursed her worldly goods among her children and the poor, but reserved some money to support her religious lifestyle in Sweden and later in Rome. She probably made an endowment to Alvestra in exchange for permission to reside near the monastery and spend time in the portion of the church designated for lay use; see Morris, St. Birgitta of Sweden, Studies in Medieval Mysticism 1 (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1999), 67, 72–73. 27. “Cur ista domina sedet hic in monasterio monachorum contra regulam nostram inducens novam consuetudinam?” Acta et Process Canonizacionis Beate Birgitte., ed. Isak Collijn, Samlingar Svenska Fornskriftsällskapet andra serien Latinska Skrifter Band I (Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksells, 1924–31), 82; trans. Morris, St. Birgitta of Sweden, 73. 28. “Vile tururium” (Acta et Process Canonizacionis Beate Birgitte, ed. Collijn, 491).



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the monastery, and the “regular” widowed nuns who, while instructed by her example, took their place among the congregation. Their widowed status marked them as different from the other nuns, but their religious activities nevertheless demonstrated an appropriate and laudable adherence to the house’s monastic rule.

New Possibilities: Beguine Communities, Tertiary Orders, and Recluses In the thirteenth century, the sort of informal communities that widows throughout earlier centuries had attempted to establish in the shadow of monasteries and cathedrals became more widely possible in secular contexts. Communities in which women congregated, but did not live permanently, offered matrons the freedom to engage in a religious way of life without completely severing ties to their worldly affairs. Extra-regular communities of beguinages, or “religious women who are called beguines,” began to form on a large scale and with official ecclesiastical permission, particularly in the Low Countries and the German Rhineland.29 Anneke Mulder-Baaker has characterized this new role for women in the thirteenth-century urban landscape as arising from a nexus of new and old social beliefs. An ancient ethos recognized the value of mature female wisdom in the family and in society (a woman was considered mature when she reached the “age of discretion” at about forty); this ethos found new outlets in the urban piety movements that entrusted women with active and instructive roles.30 In this context, widowhood resonated with other positive perceptions of mature women’s social contributions, such as their experience, memory, and wisdom. Such appreciation of women’s virtue and abilities counterbalanced the more misogynistic voices that mistrusted women’s public activities. Another option for widowed women in the world arose first in Italy and soon spread throughout Europe: the cult of St. Francis (1182–1226) 29. “Mulieres sanctae quae dicuntur beghinae dicuntur.” The terms mulieres santae and mulieres religiosae cover many types of extra-regular life, including recluses and monastic conversae (McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture, 170, also 4–5). 30. Anneke Mulder-Bakker, The Lives of the Anchoresses (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 11, 45.

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and the development of the Franciscan Third Order. Lay men and women who joined the Franciscan Third Order took a vow and followed a modified Franciscan rule that involved fasting, continence (meaning chastity for widows and widowers, and sexual abstinence during church holidays for married couples), penance, and daily prayer. Through membership in the Third Order, laypeople benefited from the proximity and spiritual counsel of the Franciscan brothers of the First and Second Orders. Tertiary rules offered a pious distinction for both lay men and women who wanted to remain in the world while participating, to the degree to which they were able, in the ascetic rigor of the monastic life. Tertiaries were also in their turn valuable to the mendicant orders through their charity toward the poor and needy and their patronage of the orders themselves. In the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, tertiary order membership grew rapidly among middle- and upperclass women all over Western Europe.31 Widows wore the habit of a penitent and, as members of the Franciscan Third Order, often emulated widowed saints’ deeds in the “real world,” undertaking charitable works and vows of chastity while living in the world. In saints’ lives, sermons, and treatises, clerics actively championed the cults of widowed saints, because such saints could serve as exemplars for the piety of ordinary people—specifically, they provided models for laywomen, but they also demonstrated virtues such as obedience, humility, and chastity for all Christians. In the tertiary orders and other quasi-monastic lay movements, the already-established image of the “professed” widow developed greater relevance and application to contemporary society. A proponent of the beguine movement, Jacques of Vitry (1160– 1240), an Augustinian canon and popular preacher, was impressed with the ardent feminine spirituality among both the beguines and the Franciscans, and he was a strong defender of this form of female religiosity to the ecclesiastical establishment. He wrote a vita of the matron Mary of Oignies, a beguine in the diocese of Liège, two years after her death in 1213, as a model for beguine women. Mary of Oignies experienced an early religious vocation, but as the daughter of noble parents, she was expected to marry rather than pursue the religious life. In marriage, 31. Carol Lansing, The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 119–20. The Franciscan Third Order began in 1221.



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however, Mary dedicated herself to God, and her husband, encouraged by Christ, willingly accepted Mary’s desire for a chaste marriage. The couple engaged in a mutual life of poverty and service among the poor of a leper colony near their home; eventually, they voluntarily separated, and Mary resided at the priory of Oignies, where she inhabited a modest cell and lived under semi-enclosure.32 The rich and complex hagiography describing her life and works reveals not only her hagiographers’ genuine veneration of her holiness, but also the ways they found her example instructive for a variety of issues concerning pastoral care and clerical reform. Jacques’s support of the beguine movement was motivated in large part by its potential as an orthodox alternative for lay female piety. The beguine model might appeal to townswomen who might otherwise be lured into various heretical communities, particularly the Cathars, who were active in southern France and northern Italy.33 Although Mary was not a widow, Jacques’s letter to the bishop of Toulouse, which prefaced Mary’s vita, praised lay widows (together with virgins and wives) for their valuable contributions to the spirituality of the of beguines, especially for the active nature of their piety: Widows serve the Lord in fasts and prayers, in vigils and in manual labor, in tears and entreaties. Just as they had previously tried to please their husbands in the flesh, so now the more did they attempt to please their heavenly Bridegroom in the spirit. Frequently they recalled to memory the words of the Apostle that the widow “that lives in pleasure is dead” (1 Tim. 5:6) and because holy widows “share with any of the saints who are in need” (Rom. 12:13) they washed the feet of the poor, “made hospitality their special care” (ibid.), applied themselves to works of mercy, [are] promised to bear fruit sixty-fold (Matt. 13:18).34 32. Jacques de Vitry, The Life of Marie d’Oignies, trans. Margot King (Toronto: Peregrina Publishing, 1993), 48–49. See also Jennifer N. Brown, “The Chaste Erotics of Marie d’Oignies and Jacques de Vitry,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 19, vol. 1 (January 2010): 81–82. 33. Carol Neel, “Origins of the Beguines,” in Bennet et al., ed., Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages, 246. Like Jo Ann McNamara, Neel counters the argument that beguine spirituality appeared spontaneously and without precedent, arguing that earlier women monastics, especially the Cistercian sisters, had developed a piety that informed the beguine movement (248–49). 34. “Ipsae viduae in jejuniis et orationibus, in vigiliis et labore manuum, in lacrymis et obsecrationibus, Domino servientes, sicut maritis suis prius placere nitebantur in carne, imo ita amplius Sponso coelesti placere studebant in spiritu; frequenter ad memoriam revocantes illud Apostoli: Vidua, quae in deliciis vivit, mortua est: et quod sanctae viduae, quae Sanctorum necessitatibus communicant, quae pedes pauperum lavant, quae hospitalitatem sectantur, quae operibus misericordiae insistunt, fructum sexagesimum promerentur.” Vita Mariae Oigniacensis, Prologus, 3, AASS June V (June 23): 547; in Jacques de Vitry, The Life of Marie of Oignies, trans. Margot H. King, 37.

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Jacques related the widows’ example in the context of groups of holy virgins and chaste wives, but did not use the traditional “fruits” metaphor to describe the latter groups. The “sixtyfold fruits” by this time was closely enough identified with chaste widowhood that the term could stand alone and still be intelligible. Moreover, in an unconventional favoring of married women in the hierarchy of spiritual merit, Jacques lauded devout matrons in particular, considering them “more worthy of the crown since they did not burn when put in the fire.”35 Jacques wrote enthusiastically about the chastity of virgins and the continence of wives but portrayed the former two groups as essentially static, earning merit through their attitudes of continence and humility. Widows, however, actively performed works of mercy and were characterized by service as well as chastity. For Jacques, the vere vidua of the Pauline epistles and patristic exegesis found new purchase in the ethos of vigorous piety and the active life taking hold among the mulieres sanctae. Yvette (1158–1228), a widow and recluse of Huy in Liège, embodied Jacques of Vitry’s ideal of holy widowhood. Yvette’s cult did not flourish for very long after her death, so it is difficult to assess how directly influential her vita was in later hagiography. Hugh of Floreffe’s detailed account of her life, however, illustrated how hagiographers marshaled the traditional depictions of the pious widow in the context of the thirteenth century’s celebration of the vita activa in lay spirituality. As JoAnn McNamara, translator of Yvette’s life, suggests: [Yvette] lived under the bishop’s care and supervision but as a recluse rather than a community member in a house her father built against the church wall. As such she should be viewed as one of a long line of women who attached themselves to the churches of Christendom, neither clergy nor regular but distinct from the common laity as well. They shadow the letters of Gregory the Great and the conciliar legislation of the Carolingian Emperors. They lived in the aureoles of monasteries like Cluny in France and Saint Albans in England. They served the great hospice at Nivelles and held prayer and study sessions together in the town of Provence. Yet to Jacques and Hugh and their contemporaries they represented a new model of sanctity and they drew them into the limelight of hagiography.36 35. “Tanto majori corona dignae sunt, quanto in igne positae non arserunt.” Vita Mariae Oigniacensis, Prologus 3, p. 548; trans. King, 38. 36. McNamara, introduction to Life of Yvette, 16.



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Yvette’s chaste widowhood, which she spent caring for the sick in a leprosarium and then living as a recluse within a beguine-like community of women, illustrated the long-standing practices of widows who formally vowed continence and established extra-regular communities in proximity to churches or other religious institutions. Yvette’s life illuminated the continuities between the spirituality of women such the residents of the Ranshofen community and those surrounding the mother of Guibert of Nogent at her hermitage at Fly, and the new spiritual currents of the beguinages and tertiary orders represented by enormously popular saints such as Mary of Oignies and Elizabeth of Thüringia. Yvette’s longing for chastity and devotion to Christ in her widowhood drove her first to create a sacred space in her home, then to be a servant and nurse at a leprosarium, and finally to become a recluse, although her retreat from the world hardly discouraged contact with a variety of individuals.37 Corresponding to these three locations are the manifestations of the three major aspects of her sanctity: continence, charity, and devotion. Widowed at the age of eighteen, she insisted on living a chaste life in her own home immediately after her husband’s death (and in fact had been repulsed by sex and the responsibilities of marriage even as a girl).38 Although she “appeared to be changed to another state of life” in her marriage, she remained internally unchanged and even wished her husband dead, a sin for which she later demonstrated profound repentance.39 In widowhood, she “behaved so religiously and prudently in each thing that she drew many people to admire her example.”40 She signaled her commitment to chastity by rejecting ornate dress and castigating her flesh with chains, lead tablets worn on her chest and back, and a hair shirt.41 Yvette’s father, however, wanted her to remarry and, as cellarer 37. McNamara notes that Yvette was “the very sort of recluse who drew the anger and scorn of the English monk, Aelred of Rievaulx” because of her worldly contact (ibid., 19). 38. De B. Juetta sive Jutta, 2.9, p. 147. 39. Ibid., 2.10–11, p. 147. 40. “Nuptiarum igitur elapso tempore, cum mutata esse videretur in statum vitae alterius, a rigore tamen voluntatis praehibitae et desiderio pristinae libertatis eius animus permutari non potuit.” Ibid., 2.10, p. 147; trans. McNamara, Life of Yvette, 41. 41. Hugh’s language clearly identified Yvette’s conversion to humble dress as an indication her profession of chaste widowhood: “Statim ab initio suae conversionis post mortem mariti, mores ut mentem mutavit: longe faciens a se quae pretiosa et copiosa in vestibus, annulis, ac monilibus habuerat ornamenta; eo ipso dans videntibus intellegi, secundas eam nuptias non affectare. Accinxit ferro

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to the bishop Radulph of Liège, enlisted the bishop’s help to dissuade the young widow from her “immutable plan to persevere in widowhood.”42 This conflict echoed the trials of virgin saints before their persecutors and also recalled St. Rictrude’s public declaration of widowhood. To resolve their dispute, Yvette and her father appeared before the bishop and an assembly of magnates, which included some of Yvette’s potential suitors, and Yvette declared that she had vowed herself to widowhood and lifelong devotion to Christ. Although initially aligned with Yvette’s father, “Divine clemency” changed the bishop’s heart and he suddenly began to argue against the men present, advising continence for widows. He required Yvette to profess her vow of chastity formally before the assembly and promised to protect Yvette’s viduitatis propositum against all future opposition.43 After her profession, Yvette’s life centered on the church, where she prayed constantly and confessed her sins each night at Matins unless illness or emergency prevented her attendance.44 Yvette offered hospitality to guests and pilgrims and charity to the poor: she gave so many alms that her father took her children away, fearing they were living in poverty, but returned them because “their mother loved them tenderly and did not wish to be without them.”45 Despite her profession of chaste widowhood, Yvette was still plagued with unwelcome male attention. A certain youth pursued her relentlessly despite all efforts to dissuade him, and her encounter with sexual temptation only confirmed her commitment to chastity.46 Hugh of Floreffe demonstrated that Yvette’s propositum was difficult to maintain not because of the widow’s weakness, but because of threats from the carnal world. Pursued by suitors and finding it too difficult “to live among the worldly and not be worldly,” and attracted by the humble prospect of serving the lepers, Yvette moved to a dilapidated chapel at the leprosarium outside the city walls on the river Meuse.47 The leprocarnem, tabulis plumbeis a pectore et dorso dependentibus, cilicio, staminea, vel sacco pro camisia utens.” De B. Juetta sive Jutta, Praefatio 2, p. 146. 42. “Ejus immutabile propositum in perseverantia viduitatis” (ibid., 6.15, p. 148; trans. McNamara, Life of Yvette, 44–45). 43. De B. Juetta sive Jutta, 6.16, p. 148; trans. McNamara, Life of Yvette, 45–46. 44. De B. Juetta sive Jutta, 6.17, p. 148. 45. Ibid., 9.25, p. 150; 9.31, p. 151. 46. Ibid., 8.20–24; trans. McNamara, Life of Yvette, 149–50. 47. “Difficile, imo quasi impossibile est inter seculares seculariter non vivere.” De B. Juetta sive Jutta, 9.32, pp. 151–52; 10.33–34, p. 152; trans. McNamara, Life of Yvette, 60–61.



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sarium was an intermediate step between secular living and total seclusion. Her retreat to the hospital both protected her from the men who wanted to pursue her and revealed the depths of her commitment to penitence, humility, and charity. Hugh emphasized Yvette’s visibility in her interactions with the lepers, and her self-abnegation: her lifestyle imitated that of the leprosarium’s inmates, and she became an example to “venerable persons of both sexes” who visited her to witness her reverence for Christ through humble service to the sick: And seeing it, many were washed with compunction and many sought to imitate her and her virtues kindled love in them to do as she did. And many grew better in the world because of her and others embraced the effort to leave the world because of her holy conversion. Many who could not imitate her publicised her success and perseverance in all this. Her appearance and speech edified all for the better although not all equally but each one in his own order as God has set them.48

After Yvette’s children were self-sufficient and her father died, she retreated to a cell at the side of a church under the protection of the Abbot of Orval, who was present at her enclosure.49 Life as a recluse gave Yvette more opportunity to concentrate on her interior devotions. Immediately upon moving to her cell, she began to receive visions of Mary and Christ, as well as an ability to discern hidden truths concerning the sins of those around her. Her contact with the world, however, scarcely diminished. Yvette’s prophetic gifts were often directed toward the detection of the sexual sins of the clerics around her, especially when the clerics preyed on pious virgins and matrons who lived in Yvette’s proximity. In one case, Yvette foretold a priest’s attempt to seduce a young virgin she was training; although the priest persuaded the girl to run away with him, Yvette’s faith sustained the young woman, who 48. “Personae venerabilis utriusque sexus. . . . Multi ejus exempla imitari gestiebant, multi virtutis ejus amore accendebantur ad faciendum simile: quidam etiam ex iis qui videbant, aut in seculo efficiebantur meliores, aut sanctae conversationis studium relicto seculo amplexabatur: plures quoque, qui quod videbant imitari non poterant, precabantur ei prospera, et perseverantiam in iis omnibus, omnes tamen aedificabantur in melius in ejus aspecta et alloquio, licet non aequaliter omnes, sed unusquisque in suo ordine, prout Deus unicuique divisit.” De B. Juetta sive Jutta, 10.35, p. 152; trans. McNamara, Life of Yvette, 62. 49. De B. Juetta sive Jutta, 14.42, p. 153. Yvette’s father had become a Cistercian monk; Yvette’s elder son became a monk, and later abbot, of the Cistercian house of Orval. Her younger, “prodigal” son squandered his inheritance but later underwent a moral and spiritual conversion thanks to her influence.

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preserved her virginity (partly because of the priest’s poor sense of direction, as he got lost during their flight from Huy). Ultimately, the girl returned to Yvette’s community and remained there for the rest of her life. In another case, Yvette “knew by the spirit” that a certain priest of Huy had seduced a matron, and when the matron fell ill and was on her deathbed, the priest discouraged the woman from a full confession of her sins to spare his own reputation. Yvette confronted the priest, who denied the accusation until Yvette demonstrated that through the spirit of prophecy she was indeed aware of his sins. Despite his promises to repent to the Virgin and become a Cistercian monk, the priest never repented, and died himself soon thereafter.50 The principal difference between this phase of her life and her former one was that Yvette no longer perceived herself as threatened by sin and temptation; rather, she corrected moral wrongdoing in others, in particular using the insights she gained through the contemplative life to bring to light the sexual offenses and hypocrisy of the local clergy. Hugh of Floreffe described Yvette’s good works in the world as the “ministry of Martha,” and her enclosure to the “higher part,” the ministry of Mary.51 The Mary-Martha commonplace in the vitae of widowed saints marked a woman’s conversion from primarily exterior acts of piety to greater attention to her interior life, which usually occurred in the period that immediately preceded her death. For many holy widows such as the mother of Guibert of Nogent, Ida of Boulogne, and Yvette of Huy, the recluse’s cell was the locus for those more interior devotions. Similarly, the blessed widow Humiliana of Cerchi (1219–46) moved from almsgiving and care from the poor while living in her deceased husband’s household to enclosure in the tower of her father’s house. According to Humiliana’s vita, written in 1248 by the Franciscan friar Vito of Cortona as a model for other Franciscan tertiaries, she was the daughter of a prominent Florentine banker and married a man from 50. “Revelatum quippe sibi dicebat in spirtu” (ibid., chap. 24.75, p. 158); “cognoverat enim per spiritum cuncta quae acciderant, personas, tempus, locum, et horam” (chap. 26.81, p. 161). See also Anneke Mulder-Bakker’s discussion of Yvette’s prophecies in “Ivetta of Huy: Mater et Magistra,” in Sanctity and Motherhood: Essays on Holy Mothers in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland, 1995), 240–42. 51. “Omissoque ministerio Martha, in partem Mariae, quae optima est, totam se contulit atque in cellula, quam patri secus ecclesiam construxuerat, permanum venerabilis viri Abbatis Aureaevallis, qui praesens tunc erat, se fecit includi.” De B. Juetta sive Jutta, chap. 14.42, p. 153; trans. McNamara, Life of Yvette, 67.



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the same social class. A month after her marriage, Humiliana experienced a religious conversion and began to pursue a life of asceticism and poverty in married life. She rejected elaborate dresses and jewelry and put them on only to please her husband. She attended Mass daily, spent much time in prayer and confession, and engaged in an energetic program of almsgiving in the city of Florence. She purloined household articles such as towels and bedding to give to the needy, hoping these items would not be missed by the others in her household. On one occasion she took feathers from a featherbed to make a smaller one for the poor; on another, she trimmed cloth from a scarlet tunic given to her by her husband and sold it, giving away the proceeds.52 Vito of Cortona portrayed Humiliana as vigorously performing the proper duties of a housewife and also extending these efforts, and her financial resources (including some that were not technically hers), toward a sort of spiritual housekeeping among poor and needy Florentines. Vito emphasized Humiliana’s connection with a circle of pious people interested in Franciscan spiritual values and indicated that she visited “places of the holy, as was the custom in Florence”; she especially visited the sisters of the convent of Monticelli and the Hospitallers of St. Gall, and other religious institutions associated with penitence and good works.53 She attended confession often and tended to the sick and infirm. She developed a pious circle of women friends in the city, from whom she solicited money when, after the death of her husband and her adamant refusal to remarry, her father withdrew her dowry and she no longer had independent means to distribute money to the poor.54 After the death of her husband in 1241, Humiliana became even more liberal in her charity and more devoted in her piety, carrying on pious works in her deceased husband’s household. After a year, leaving her children behind with her husband’s kin, she returned to her parents’ home, where she was pressured by her kinsmen and kinswomen to remarry. Defending her decision to remain a chaste widow, she told her aunt: “may you know for certain that I have a most noble husband, 52. Vita Humilianae, 2.13, AASS May IV (May 19): 389. 53. “Visitabant etiam loca Sanctorum, ut moris est Florentiae, scilicet Dominarum de Monticellis, et Pauperum S. Galli, et alia ubi constitutae sunt Indulgentia pro peccatis, ut omnium bonorum fierent participes et consortes.” Ibid., 1.5, p. 386. 54. Ibid., 1.9, p. 388.

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over whom I will never weep.”55 By shifting the role of the honorable widow’s faithfulness to her deceased husband to a veneration of Christ, Humiliana engaged the respectability of chaste widowhood to facilitate her pious and spiritual activities. At the same time, she argued against remarriage in the language that invoked Florentine expectations for a good woman to remain a chaste widow out of deference to her husband, underscoring the immorality as well as the impiety of her family’s selfish plans to arrange a second, socially advantageous marriage. Vito of Cortona’s depiction of Humiliana’s charity drew on a common theme in Franciscan lives: the saint’s rejection of secular wealth despite vehement opposition from his or her family. According to Vito, after Humiliana returned home, her father tricked her into signing over her dowry, probably to prevent her from dispensing the remainder of it to the various religious of Florence.56 The removal of her dowry demonstrated Humiliana’s separation from lay society and began a new phase in her religious life. She first sought entrance to the convent of Monticelli; this alternative proved unsuccessful because, according to Vito, God intended that Humiliana remain in the world to be a “candle” that would be example and illumination for others. Humiliana instead took a vow as a Franciscan tertiary, a state that she considered no less sacred than a nun’s enclosure. She established herself in the tower of her family’s house to live in seclusion according to a widow’s typically strict regimen of fasting and prayer.57 Left without resources to carry out her good works, Humiliana’s life turned inward. She continued her fasting and prayers in her tower retreat, and began to be both blessed and plagued by visions. She was taunted by demons, who interrupted her prayers with images of corpses and chimeras of Humiliana’s friends. One demon echoed her family’s criticism of her chaste widowhood, asking her why she bothered to associate with religious when she could have married well, had she taken a new husband.58 These visions articulated the fragility of her proposed continence and the inherent conflicts between family interests and religious ideals in thirteenth-century Florence. The Florentine widow 55. “Virum habeo dignissimum, quem numquam flebo.” Ibid., 1.7, p. 387. 56. Ibid., 1.8, p. 387. 57. Ibid., 2.13, p. 389. 58. Ibid., 2.17, p. 390.



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Ravenna Donati, for example, retired to a Dominican convent, San Jacopo a Ripoli, bringing her estate and her three children with her. Despite her preference for conventual life, Ravenna’s brother, Corso, contested her control of the estate and Ravenna’s decision not to remarry. Ultimately, Corso and the nuns divided Ravenna’s estate, and Ravenna’s wishes regarding remarriage prevailed. Corso Donati instead withdrew another sister, Piccarda, from her monastic retreat at Monticelli, forcing her to break the nun’s vow she had taken in order to marry Rosellino della Tosa.59 Humiliana’s entire vita was fraught with the tensions that arose between wealthy families’ political and financial interests in marriage and pious widows’ desire to embrace the penitential ethos through chastity and good works. Even in the relative seclusion of Humiliana’s tower, worldly pressures tested her sanctity, and temptations contaminated the sacred space. The vita did not resolve these conflicts, but suggested that Humiliana was rewarded for her suffering and her steadfastness in prayer. Humiliana received, alongside her demonic visions, the comforting ones such as Christ’s appearance as a small boy happily playing in her room, and the Holy Spirit as a dove, which she tried to catch to give as a gift to one of the children in the household.60 For widows like Yvette and Humiliana, retreat from the world helped to deepen their spiritual lives, but it did not cut them off from their communities or lessen the exemplary nature of their piety. Despite their retreat into contemplation, the women were constantly surrounded by people, and their reputation for spirituality was enhanced by the communities of pious matrons who supported and were mentored by them. Yvette had a maidservant and several other recluses with her in her enclosure, and frequently held conferences with clerics, family members, and other laywomen. Humiliana, though constantly at odds with her male relatives, generated support and veneration among the women of her household; after her retreat to the tower, she met with her confessor, Friar Michael, and other religious men and women.61 59. Lansing, The Florentine Magnates, 126–27. 60. Vita Humilianae, 2.13, pp. 396–97; see also Lansing’s discussion of Humiliana’s visions, Florentine Magnates, 116–19. 61. De B. Juetta sive Jutta, 20.57, p. 157; 21.60, p. 157; Vita Humilianae, 2.13, p. 389; 3.21–25, p. 391. Yvette also counseled her son and heard confessions from her cell. Carol Lansing has suggested the

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The Prussian widow Dorothy of Montau (1347–94), whose vitae were written at the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth centuries by her confessor, John of Marienwerder, also earned the privilege of retreat after many years of striving toward pious perfection, first in married chastity and then in pious widowhood.62 In contrast to Vito’s and Hugh’s characterization of widowed recluses, however, Dorothy’s experiences as a widow and recluse showed marked differences from earlier depictions of widowed saints’ use of retreat and interior piety. These differences stemmed partly from the particular nature of Dorothy’s sanctity and partly from changing models of female holiness, which distinguished Dorothy’s hagiographers’ characterization of her widowhood from the vitae of her thirteenth-century counterparts. For Dorothy, seclusion in a cell was not so much a choice (which it had been for her thirteenth-century predecessors) as it was a privilege granted by Christ, through the guidance of her confessor, John of Marienwerder, and a second adviser, a priest named John Reymann.63 Her life as an anchoress was the culmination of many trying years of married chastity, prayer, fasting, and humility, in which she pursued a life of saintly devotion. Dorothy’s worldly life from childhood (as the daughter of prosperous peasants) to widowhood was marked by her patient suffering, because secular burdens (such as sex and housework) interfered with her full concentration on Christ. She frequently forgot tasks or performed female tertiaries in Humiliana’s circle continued her pious works according to her directions, even when she had retreated to the tower (Florentine Magnates, 118). 62. John of Marienwerder was a prolific reporter on Dorothy’s sanctity. He wrote several Latin versions of Dorothy’s life to promote her cult and canonization, of which the most important are Vita Dorothye Lindana, AASS October XIII (30 October): 400–558 (completed 1396); Vita Dorotheae Montoviensis Magistri Johannis Marienwerder, ed. Hans Westphal (Cologne: Böhlau, 1964) (completed 1398); and the so-called Septilium B. Dorotheae, ed. Franz Hipler, Analecta Bollandiana, vol. 2 (1883): 381–472; vol. 3 (1884): 113–40, 408–48; vol. 4 (1885): 207–51 (completed ca. 1400). John also wrote a German life that was intended to encourage support for Dorothy’s canonization on the popular level, particularly among members of the order of Teutonic knights; it is a condensation and translation of the Vita Lindana, Das Leben der Heiligen Dorothea von Johannes Marienwerder, ed. Max Töppen, Scriptores Rerum Prussicarum, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Minerva, 1965), and was completed ca. 1405. The German life has been translated into English by Ute Stargardt, The Life of Dorothy of Montau, A Fourteenth-Century Recluse, Studies in Women and Religion 39 (Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1997). Dorothy’s process of canonization has been published by Richard Stachnik, ed., Die Akten des Kanosationsprozesses Dorothys von Montau (Cologne: Böhlau, 1978). On John of Marienwerder’s multifaceted role in sculpting Dorothy’s sanctity, see Dyan Elliott, “Authorizing a Life: The Collaboration of Dorothy of Montau and John Marienwerder,” in Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, ed. Catherine Mooney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 168–91, 245–56. 63. John of Marienwerder, Das Leben der Heiligen Dorothea, 3.3.



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them poorly because she was preoccupied by love and longing for Christ, and her inattention to the details and tasks of daily life elicited mockery from those around her, such as the time in the marketplace when she was so distracted she could not recognize an egg.64 She also encountered disbelief in her chastity and was accused of lusting after her servant, apparently drawing such attention to herself because of the youth and beauty that emanated from her as a result of her ardent love for Christ.65 Her hagiographer John transformed these episodes into further evidence of Dorothy’s patience and suffering. Never truly at home in the secular world, Dorothy’s solace in the face of these trials was her delight in the mystical connection to Christ that had begun even during her marriage, when Christ began speaking to her, first wordlessly in “sweet dalliance with her soul,” and later through direct instruction as she matured in her understanding of his presence and of the saintly life.66 Even before the death of her husband, Dorothy had wanted to retreat from her worldly connections and devote herself entirely to religion.67 When she was widowed, Christ instructed Dorothy to leave her home in Gdan´sk and travel to Marienwerder to seek out John, a canon of the town’s cathedral, to be her spiritual director. She made a pilgrimage to Rome to celebrate the Jubilee year of 1390, then traveled to Marienwerder to meet John and swore a vow to remain with him always. 64. Leben, 1.25 and 1.27. Such inattention caused even greater suffering at home. Her husband Adalbert sometimes beat her when her religious inclinations made her neglect her duties (see for example Leben, 2.15, when Adelbert disciplined Dorothy with such violence that their neighbors reported the incident to the couple’s confessors, who intervened and punished Adelbert for the beating). Adelbert’s behavior can, on the one hand, be interpreted as indicative of a later medieval hagiographical topos that depicted men as increasingly violent and intolerant toward wives who pursued lives of suffering and obedience for Christ’s sake. Adalbert’s abuse functioned as yet another proof of Dorothy’s saintly patience (Elliott, Spiritual Marriage, 230–31). On the other hand, Adalbert patiently observed many of Dorothy’s pious wishes, facilitating her travel and accompanying her on her pilgrimages, and agreed to marital continence (Leben, 1.24–28, 1.31, 2.16); see also Ute Stargardt, “Male Clerical Authority in the Spiritual (Auto)Biographies of Medieval Holy Women” in Women as Protagonists and Poets in the German Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1991), 227. 65. Leben, 1.27, 2.10. See also Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 22–33. 66. “Sensit . . . Dominum cum anima sua susurrari” (John of Marienwarder, Vita Lindana 26, p. 513); “Got der Herr hilt ein liblich kosin mit irer selen” (idem, Leben 1.26, p. 224); in The Life of Dorothy, trans. Stargardt, 63. Dorothy began to understand Christ more fully after a miracle in which he extracted her heart and bestowed her with a new, rapturous heart (Vita Lindana, 34, p. 517; Leben, 2.1, pp. 231–32). 67. Dorothy had hoped to remain as a beggar at Finsterwald (Einsiedeln), which she had visited on a pilgrimage trip in 1384 (Vita Lindana, 56.81, p. 530; Leben, 2.12, p. 244).

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John’s discussion of Dorothy’s transition to widowhood is cursory; he reminded the reader of Paul’s teaching (1 Tm 5:6) that the true widow places her hope in God, and that the widow who lives in pleasure is dead even while she is alive, and noted that Dorothy followed this precept. Her widowhood was a continuation of her previous spiritual life, with the exception that, as John wrote in his German version of her life, now she “looked about for a place where she might serve the lord without hindrance from her friends and worldly affairs.”68 After nearly two years of spiritual preparation while waiting for permission to enter her cell, Dorothy was enclosed on the feast of the translation of St. Elizabeth, May 2, 1393.69 During that time Christ had instructed Dorothy in the principles of anchoritic living, emphasizing that she should cut herself off completely from congress with anyone or anything that her confessors had not explicitly permitted.70 While Humiliana of Cerchi’s enclosure in the tower had made her a permanent “candle” for others to see her chaste example, Dorothy’s entrance into her cell was much closer to English anchoritic treatment of the cell as a tomb, and the soul as a widow who waits for Christ, her bridegroom.71 Dorothy’s saintly light burned brightly for those assembled to witness her entry, and then disappeared from their view when she was walled into her cell near the Marienwerder cathedral: 68. “Do sy nu was wordin witwe, sy ubte sich grödlich in der gerechtikeit und suchte eine stat, in der sy dem hern volkomlich möcht dinen ane hindirnis irir frunde und der welt.” Leben, 2.27, p. 269; trans. Stargardt, 125. The texts of the Vita Lindana and Vita Dorothye read: “omnem opportunitatem quarens, qua Deo posset perfectiore charitatis apice famulari” (Vita Lindana, 56.81, p. 530, Vita Dorothye, 3.27, p. 148); concerning her vow to remain with John, see Vita Dorothye 3.28, p. 151. 69. Vita Lindana, 68.95, p. 539; Vita Dorothye, 5.7, p. 222; John tells us that the anchorite tradition was not well known in Prussia. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century hagiographical sources report one enclosed saint, the thirteenth-century widow and anchoress Jutta of Sangershausen, who was originally from Thüringia and reportedly modeled her desire for voluntary poverty on the example of St. Elizabeth; see AASS May VII (May 5): 595; see also Töppen, “Zur Lebensgeschichte der heiligen Jutta und des heilgen Johann Lobedau,” in Scriptores Rerum Prussicarum, vol. 2, 374–91. Jutta might have set a precedent for Dorothy’s enclosure; at Dorothy’s canonization proceedings in 1403, a local priest recalled the local memory, nearly fallen into obscurity, of Jutta’s sanctity: “Sic olim contigit in Culmen de domina Gotta [Jutta], de qua multa loquebantur, et postea omnia evanuerunt.” Die Akten des Kanonisationsprozesses Dorothys von Montau, Protokoll 8.37, p. 28. However, since Dorothy’s vitae do not mention Jutta, it is likely that the authors of Dorothy’s vita made the connections concerning the three women saints after the fact. 70. Vita Lindana, 69.96, p. 540. The Latin version places this instruction after her enclosure; in the German life, Christ’s instructions precede it, cf. Leben, 3.3, p. 286. 71. The Ancrene Riwle instructs the enclosed woman to scrape earth from her cell’s floor to remind her to keep her death always before her eyes. Aelred of Rivaulx, The Ancren Riwle, ed. James Morton (New York: AMS Press, 1968), 117.



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Many people in attendance at the church were moved to tears by her devotion and exemplary piety. They longed to enjoy the blessings of her merit. They wished her well and begged her to pray for them. . . . Finally her two confessors and spiritual sons B and P [John Marienwerder and John Reymann]—one a master of holy writ, the other a master of canon law—came to her. Leading her between them through a multitude of people, they escorted her down a long path to her cell, there to live at last as she wished, removed from human companionship after already having separated herself much earlier from her earthly friends in both body and spirit.72

Dorothy’s spirituality was oriented toward her interior life with Christ from the very beginning, and was realized within her cell. Although Dorothy, by following the precepts of Paul, wore the pious cloak of widowhood in the world before her enclosure, John did not characterize her as a widow in the subsequent years of her life, although he used the rhetoric of the profession of widowhood to describe the piety of Dorothy’s mother, Agatha, who maintained widowed chastity “serving God day and night” and giving generous alms for forty-four years.73 The narratives John composed for Dorothy’s canonization process focused greater attention on her lifelong divine experiences bestowed by Christ, rather than on her widowhood, which was a reminder of her carnal life and marriage. In the theological discourse of the earlier Middle Ages, the term 72. “Worn viel menschin in der kirchen beweget czu weynen von irer innikeyt und guten bilde der heylikeyt. Sy begerten teylhafftig czu werden ires vordinstnisses. Sy wönschten ir heil und befulen sich in ir gebete . . . do nomen sy ir czwene beychtiger und son p. b. [pater, beichtvater], myester der heiligen schrift, der andir in dem geystlichin rechte, und furtin sy czwischen en einen langen weg durch eyne grosse samlung des volkes ken der clause, das sy noch irer begerungen worde apgescheydin von der gemein, dy sich nu lange hatte gescheydin von iren fleichlichen fründen mit lebe und mit gemütte.” Leben, 3.4, p. 288; trans. Stargardt, 152–53. Cf. Vita Lindana, 68.95, p. 539: “Plurimi utriusque sexus, prius eam bene cognoscentes fuisse reclusam omnibus sensibus suis et mundo, et quod jam amplius recludi vellet, ex pietate compassi, tum propter absentiam ejus, tum propter multa sanctitatis exempla quibus eis claruit, flentes eam visitabant, et ut ad Dominum pro eis intercedant, diligenter exorabant. . . . Sed postquam assumpta fuit per duos suos filios spirituales, quorum unus erat sacrae theologiae professor, alter decretorum seu sacrorum canonum doctor, ut reclusorium ingrederetur, surrexit in prioribus dispositionibus, magnifice illuminata; transivit in magna charitate cum eis, magnifice sentiens Dominum, et bene ad magnam seu notabilem distantiam per magnam multitudinem hominum, in qua nullum hominem, uno solo excepto, facie tenus consideravit.” 73. “Mater eius Agatha . . . vidua autem ad annos circiter quadraginta quatuor, serviens Deo die ac nocte, honest valde; pauperibus, quamdiu facultas suppetebat, larga atque pia.” Vita Dorothye, 2.2, p. 67. Agatha was in fact bewildered and distressed by Dorothy’s enclosure, and viewed it as form of punishment rather than a desirable form of spirituality. John reports that upon hearing the news, Agatha wondered what great crime her daughter could have committed to warrant her seclusion (Vita Lindana, 5.8, p. 224).

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“bride” of Christ” was much more closely associated with virgin saints and nuns than with widows. Chaste widows were sometimes termed holy “spouses” because they were analogues for Ecclesia, Christ’s widowed spouse. The lives of widowed saints such as Yvette of Huy and Elizabeth of Thüringia, however, further developed the marital relationship between the widow and Christ by consciously referring to the widow herself as Christ’s spouse, and emphasizing that in choosing widowhood, the widow elected Christ as her true husband. The appellation sponsa Christi appeared often in the hagiography of Dorothy of Montau—as well as in that of St. Bridget of Sweden, who along with Elizabeth was a role model for the Prussian saint—as a recognition of the intimate and mystical relationship these women shared with Christ.74 Although Dorothy’s status as a continent widow protected her public honor after the death of her husband and facilitated her religious devotion and enclosure, John minimized its explicit role in Dorothy’s spirituality and effaced her widowhood completely after she entered her cell, recasting her as a literal as well as symbolic bride of Christ. While Yvette and Humiliana retained their identities as pious widows in their seclusion, Dorothy’s hagiographers abandoned the conventional language of pious widowhood after her retreat into her cell in favor of imagery that emphasized her new, solitary life. The language in Dorothy’s hagiography at this stage of her life suggests a new kind of tension in the construction of Dorothy’s sanctity: no longer poised between an earthly and celestial husband, the enclosed Dorothy was now entrusted to Christ as a bride, but also (and somewhat awkwardly) to her confessors, who were responsible for managing the spiritual autonomy she gained as a recluse.75 For example, Dorothy was wedded to Christ in a mystical marriage celebration and kept company with her new mystical household of Christ, Mary, and the many saints who visited her enclosure.76 74. The use of the term sponsa Christi as applied to widows seems to be rare before the thirteenth century; examples of this appellation for later medieval widows occurs in Vita Juetta, 6.16, p. 148; Theodoric of Apolda, Die Vita der heiligen Elisabeth des Dietrich von Apolda, 5.10, ed. Monika Rener (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1993), 85; Vita b. Brigide, in Acta et Process Canonizacionis Beate Birgitte, ed. Collijn, 618–19. Concerning Elizabeth and Bridget as models for Dorothy, see Stachnik, Kanosationsprozesses Dorothys von Montau, Protokoll 41.103, p. 248; Vita Dorothye, 5.23, p. 186, and 7.19, p. 355; and Leben der Heiligen Dorothy, 1.21, p. 218, and 2.22, p. 257. 75. Dyan Elliott offers a persuasive analysis of this phase of Dorothy’s life as an “eroticized bride” of Christ (Bride of Christ, 221, 227–28). 76. At certain times, her cell was so full of divine visitors that Dorothy worried about how to



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Yet unlike earlier holy women such as Yvette of Huy, who admitted visitors of her own choosing to her cell, Dorothy could speak with no one but her confessors and others whom they designated.

The Hagiographical Widow at Home: St. Elizabeth and St. Bridget Significant exceptions to the pattern of devotional seclusion at the end of a widow’s career are St. Elizabeth of Thüringia (1207–31) and St. Bridget of Sweden (d. 1373), whose hagiographers deliberately emphasized the coexistence of their works of charity in the world and their internal spirituality. According to one of her early hagiographers, Caesarius of Heisterbach, Elizabeth’s pious deeds at the hospital that she founded in Marburg during her widowhood unified the active and the contemplative aspects of female sanctity: “she fulfilled abundantly the interpretation of her name, and drank in Christ in her members, like Martha, and was filled abundantly with the word of divine teaching, like Mary.”77 Similarly, although she spent much of her widowhood active in the world, St. Bridget was a prolific visionary who recorded her divine conversations with Christ and the Virgin Mary in her Revelations. Nevertheless, Bridget’s anxiety about the efficacy of her own piety was evident in repeated reassurances from Christ and Mary that despite her lost virginity, her good life and obedience in widowhood earned her the highest possible spiritual merit.78 Elizabeth’s cult was by far the most influential of any of the widowed saints we have examined in this study.79 The daughter of King Andrew II position herself so that she did not turn her back and therefore show rudeness to anyone (Vita Dorothye, 4.14, p. 232, Leben der Heiligen Dorothea, 3.8, p. 292); concerning her mystical marriage to Christ, see Vita Latina, 6.14, p. 308, and 6.17, p. 312. 77. “Beata Elysabeth secundum interpretacionem sui nominis Christum in suis membris saturavit, ut Martha, et verbo divine predicacionis saturata est, ut Maria.” Caesarius of Heisterbach, Vita Elyzabeth, in Annalen des Historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein 86 (Cologne: J & W Boiserées Buchhandlung, 1908), 38. 78. Sancta Birgitta Revelaciones, Book 4, ed. Hans Aili; Book 6, ed. Birger Bergh (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wikesell International, 1992), 4.71, pp. 214–15; 6.111, p. 272. 79. The hagiographical sources on Elizabeth are well documented in Alfred Huyskens, Quellenstudien zur Geschichte des Hl. Elisabeth Landgräfin von Thüringen (Marburg: N.G Elwert’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1908), 1–109. Early and contemporary sources include a letter, the Epistola Examinorum (1232), from Elizabeth’s confessor, Conrad of Marburg, to Pope Gregory IX, promoting the subject of Elizabeth’s canonization; papal correspondence concerning her canonization (1232–34); her bull of

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of Hungary and Gertrude of Andechs, and the niece of Hedwig of Silesia, Elizabeth married Louis IV of Thüringia in 1221 and made their castle at the Wartburg the center of her charitable activities. Through this marriage Elizabeth, herself a descendent of two powerful lineages, the Arpades of Hungary on her father’s side and the house of Andechs through her mother, was joined to the landgraves of Thüringia and Hesse, making her perhaps the most prominent female ruler in the German-speaking world. The interests of these lineages in promoting a family saint were essential to Elizabeth’s rapid elevation to sanctified status and the flourishing of her cult.80 Additional momentum for the rapid promotion and confirmation of Elizabeth’s sanctity came in the form of support from many different religious orders, including the Cistercians, the Franciscans, the Teutonic knights, and the papacy itself.81 As Gábor Klaniczay has argued, Elizabeth’s canonization was desirable not only as recognition of her cult in its own right, but also as part of “a triumphant revival of the archaic ‘beata stirps’ concept” (“blessed branch”) in the tradition of the Ottonian imperial line. One of several saints representing powerful marriages between the German and Hungarian ruling families, Elizabeth’s sanctity elevated the reputacanonization (1235); and a report of Elizabeth’s miracles (1235). A testimony of witnesses, known as the Libellus de dictis quatuor ancillarum (hereafter abbreviated as Libellus), was composed in 1234 for the purpose of Elizabeth’s canonization; it was fashioned out of the aforementioned materials and provided the testimony of four of Elizabeth’s personal maids. The first hagiographer to write a full-scale vita of the saint at the request of the Marburg knights of the Teutonic Order was the Cistercian monk Caesarius of Heisterbach, in 1236–37. Heisterbach’s vita appears to have had a limited circulation, despite the Order’s commissioning of it in order to promote Elizabeth’s cult. Caesarius also wrote a sermon in honor of the translation of Elizabeth’s remains to her Marburg church (“Ad decus et honorem”), and made mention of Elizabeth in an exemplum in his famous collection of miracle tales, the Dialogus Miraculorum, 7.15, ed. Joseph Strange, Caesarii Heisterbacensis monachi ordinis Cisterciensis Dialogus Miraculorum, vol. 2 (Cologne: H. Lempertz, 1851). The second major vita of Elizabeth was written circa 1289–97 by the Dominican Theodoric of Apolda; it became one of the most popular vitae of the saint and continued to be used throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. See, in addition to Huyskens, a concise discussion of Elizabeth’s hagiographical tradition in Anja Petrakopoulos, “Sanctity and Motherhood: Elizabeth of Thüringia,” in Mulder-Bakker, Sanctity and Motherhood, 264–79, and a more extensive one in Ottó Gecser, “Aspects of the Cult of St. Elizabeth of Hungary with a Special Emphasis on Preaching 1231-c. 1500” (doctoral diss., Central European University, 2007), 9–53. 80. Petrakopoulos, “Sanctity and Motherhood: Elizabeth of Thuringia,” in Mulder-Bakker, Sanctity and Motherhood, 260. As the wife of a landgrave (a count who had the special rank of answering directly to the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor), Elizabeth enjoyed a rather higher status than an ordinary countess. 81. Gregory IX, the pope who presided over Elizabeth’s canonization, was privately devoted to the cult of Mary of Oignies, which might have piqued his interest in Elizabeth’s brand of spirituality. He had corresponded with Elizabeth, and he may have met her personally while traveling in Thüringia (Elliott, Proving Woman, 89–90).



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tion of both dynasties. Moreover, while earlier conceptions of dynastic sanctity emphasized the saint’s extraordinary and supernatural powers, Elizabeth’s life expressed the new religious ethos of penitence and service and located her sanctity in activities that occurred in everyday life, giving her example a normative force that found widespread application in Christian preaching.82 Such broad-based support for Elizabeth’s sanctity ensured not only her recognition in the thirteenth century but also continued and active support for her cult in subsequent centuries. Given the many narratives of her life and the number of manuscripts in which whole vitae or excerpts were copied and preserved, it is clear that her cult also found enthusiastic reception at the popular level.83 Thus it was almost inevitable that many aspects of Elizabeth’s life—as chronicled in her documents of canonization and in subsequent vitae—would become important models for holy women. For widows, and for the clerics who undertook their pastoral care, Elizabeth’s hagiographical tradition was extremely influential, because her sanctity efficiently drew together the two discourses of chaste widowhood and mendicant spirituality. Like all of the widowed saints we have examined, Elizabeth’s pious vocation in childhood, evidenced in her love of chastity and simplicity of lifestyle, preceded her marriage and anticipated her later experiences in widowhood. She was a model of the charity expected of good and noble lady-saints; like her aunt, St. Hedwig of Silesia, Elizabeth made clothes for the poor, spun cloth for local religious, distributed food and alms, and tended the sick with her own hands.84 Beyond this common saintly typology, however, Elizabeth’s hagiographers integrated the long-standing symbolism of the widowed state within her marriage as a designation of spiritual bereavement and penitence. Elizabeth’s thirteenth-century hagiography, particularly the Libellus or “Deposition of the Four Handmaidens,” composed for Elizabeth’s process of canonization, placed great emphasis on the guidance of her confessor, Conrad of Marburg (d. 1233).85 Even during her marriage, 82. Gábor Klaniczay, Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 227–29. 83. See Ortrud Reber, Die Gestaltung des Kultes weiblicher Heiligen in Spätmittelalter (Hersbruck: Karl Pfeiffer’s Buchdruckerei und Verlag, 1963), 5–14, 27–46. 84. Libellus, in Huyskens, Quellenstudien, 118–21. 85. On Elizabeth’s obedience to Conrad, see Elliott, Proving Woman, 107–16. Although Conrad and

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she vowed her obedience to Conrad as her confessor and promised to live in perpetual continence should she outlive her husband.86 Although she usually wore the finery suitable to a married noblewoman out of deference to her husband, in his absence she adopted the dress of a widow: When her husband was absent she would spend many nights in vigils, genuflections, scourgings, and prayer, and having changed her ornate clothing and placed a nun’s veil on her head, dressed herself as widow. She would frequently wear wool or haircloth next to her skin, even when she was outwardly dressed in gold and purple.87

Elizabeth’s hagiographers viewed such conduct as prescriptive for matrons in general. When noble ladies called on Elizabeth, she admonished them to live in married chastity with their husbands (meaning that they should have conjugal relations only for procreation and on church-sanctioned days), criticized their ornate clothing and elaborate hairstyles, and urged them to take vows of continence in the event of their husbands’ deaths.88 When Louis died on Crusade in 1227, Elizabeth’s uncle Ekbert, the bishop of Bamberg, urged the young widow to remarry, but, like the Carolingian example of widowed resolve, St. Rictrude, Elizabeth dramatically refused. Vowed to continence and determined to reclaim her dowry and live a life of charity and service, Elizabeth threatened to disfigure herself by cutting off her nose rather than submit to a second union. According to the testimony of Elizabeth’s handmaids, arrangements for a second marriage were begun, but Elizabeth’s prayers to God to preserve her continent state prevailed.89 After Louis’s death, Elizabeth’s in-laws deprived her of her inheritance, throwing the saint into abject poverty and depriving her of funds Elizabeth’s relationship provided an example of a confessor’s control over a compliant female layperson, a model useful for later medieval hagiographers, Conrad’s personal reputation as an inquisitor in Germany was ambiguous at best. He was murdered by a group of nobles in revenge for his (unsubstantiated) charges of heresy against a powerful local noble, Henry of Seyn (ibid., 97ff.). 86. Ibid., 114–15. 87. “Absente autem marito in vigiliis, genuflexionibus, verberibus et orationibus multas noctes deducebat et ornatu vestium deposito capitisque velamine mutato quasi vidualiter se gessit et religiose. Laneis vel cilicio frequenter ad carnem induta, tunc etiam cum desuper auratis vestibus aut purpura.” Libellus, 117. See also Dyan Elliott, “Dress as Mediator Between the Inner and Outer Self,” Journal of Mediaeval Studies 53 (1991): 297–300. 88. Libellus, 117 89. Ibid., 123–24



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to continue her charitable works. According to the account of the Libellus, Elizabeth eventually reclaimed her rightful inheritance but used it only at her confessor’s discretion.90 The ordeal occasioned Elizabeth’s literal identification with the mendicant ethos: although Conrad of Marburg would not permit her to emulate St. Francis and live by begging as she desired, she undertook a vow of poverty and assumed the habit of a penitent, the grisea tunica vilis, permanently adopting clothing that showed outwardly her role as the widowed bride of Christ, which she had cultivated inwardly during her marriage.91 A panel, part of a sequence of scenes from her life, on Elizabeth’s sarcophagus at her Marburg pilgrimage church, completed between 1236 and 1249, depicts her receiving the tunica grisea, or “grey habit,” of a penitent, and a similar motif appears in the east choir widows of the church (pp. 229–30). The habit is often assumed to be Franciscan, though Elizabeth’s earliest vitae do not specify this. These images recall those of the widow’s formal veiling and consecration and suggest that the architects of her cult noted this moment as important in her development as a saint. Elizabeth is not always depicted as a widow-penitent, but this representation of Elizabeth in penitent’s clothing became one of several themes in her visual tradition, both in Germany and beyond (and perhaps influenced the depictions of other matron saints who followed in Elizabeth’s tradition). Elizabeth’s popularity in both textual and visual traditions in the thirteenth century and throughout the later Middle Ages facilitated a more explicit connection between the widow’s weeds and the penitent’s habit. Widows who wore this habit as members of the Franciscan Third Order or another lay society often emulated widowed saints’ deeds as they undertook charitable works and vows of chastity while living in the world. Elizabeth’s change of dress illustrated how lay women (especially noble women) could assume a special religious role in their everyday lives. Widowed saints associated with the mendicant ethos not only provided models of conduct for laywomen, but connected the saints’ activities to social outlets such as tertiary orders, confraternities, and 90. Elliott, Proving Woman, 92. 91. Libellus, 125. André Vauchez suggests that although Elizabeth wore a penitent’s habit, one of the customs of members of the Franciscan Third Order, she never made a formal vow as a tertiary (The Laity in the Middle Ages, 176). See also Robert Folz, “Sainte Elisabeth de Hongrie,” in Les saintes reines du Moyen Âge en Occident, 110.

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beguinages, providing a space in which the already established image of the “professed” widow developed greater relevance and application to contemporary society.92 Although Elizabeth established herself as a penitent in the mendicant tradition, Elizabeth’s almsgiving in her widowhood, like Humiliana of Cerchi’s, was hampered by family restrictions concerning her dowry. She faced this obstacle with steadfast prayer, for which she was rewarded with a vision of Christ comforting her with the assurance that he would remain with her despite these trials.93 Ultimately Elizabeth received a settlement from her in-laws. She distributed large sums of money and her remaining jewelry to the poor, and used the rest to found a hospital in Marburg, where she spent the remainder of her widowhood. Her small household resembled the group of women under Yvette’s tutelage at the leprosarium: one of Elizabeth’s maids, Irmengard, probably also a widow, had been with Elizabeth for five years and had donned the gray habit along with her mistress.94 Elizabeth’s maids assisted her in dispensing food and caring for the poor, and likewise vowed themselves to God in her company, apparently at Elizabeth’s request.95 In this phase of Elizabeth’s life, Conrad of Marburg tested her will to live as a chaste and humble widow quite severely. Conrad was not obsessed with the sexual threats to Elizabeth’s holiness in the way that earlier clerics Guibert of Nogent or Hugh of Floreffe demonstrated themselves to be in their representations of widowed women. Instead, Conrad feared the effects of worldly luxury on Elizabeth’s piety, and thus he regulated her daily life strictly. He punished Elizabeth for any infraction that contradicted his orders and policed her daily activities to make 92. Gecser, “Aspects of the Cult of St. Elizabeth of Hungary,” 291; cf. Catherine Lawless, “Widowhood Was the Time of Her Greatest Perfection,” in Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Allison Levy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 32–38. 93. Libellus, 122–23. 94. “Irmingardis religiosa habitu griseo induta” (ibid., 122–23). The poet Rutebeuf in his verse life of Elizabeth, written sometime between 1258 and 1270 and dedicated to the widow Isabelle of Navarre, interpreted the appellation as religiosa in the Libellus to imply that Irmengard was also a widow: “Ysentruz, qui fu veve fame / Relegieuse et bone dame / Fu avoec li cinq anz, ce croi / De son consel, de son secroi / Au vivant Loÿs Landegrave.” Oevres Completes de Rutebeuf, vol. 2, ed. Edmond Faral and Julia Bastin (Paris: Picard, 1960), lines 491–95, p. 116. 95. Concerning the Rutebeuf’s dedication of the work to Isabelle, see Brigitte Cazelles, The Lady as Saint (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 152.

Elizabeth receives the tunica

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Elizabeth receives the tunica, east choir window

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sure she was obedient in her fasting. He also separated Elizabeth from her children, and dismissed her longtime handmaids so that she would not learn to be too attached to anything or anyone in her worldly life.96 Elizabeth, up until the separation from her serving women, had been surrounded by a supportive community of women in her household whose interests she shared, and whose loyalty to her seemed unquestioned. In place of her familiar companions, Conrad appointed Elizabeth new servants of his own choosing, as he explained in a letter to Pope Gregory IX in support of Elizabeth’s canonization: I removed her superfluous servants, and ordered her to be content with three persons, a lay brother to see to her business matters, a virgin girl, religious and very unattractive, and a deaf and austere widow, in order that through the girl, she should increase her humility and through the austere widow be trained in patience.97

Conrad was clearly suspicious of a group of women he himself had not chosen for Elizabeth, women who might indulge her, introduce temptation into the household, or detract from Conrad’s own authority over Elizabeth. Elizabeth continued to live the vita activa, caring for the sick in her Marburg foundation, yet, unlike the widowed saints who preceded her in similar extra-claustral activities, she was neither threatened by suitors nor plagued by demons who threatened to render her status scandalous. Elizabeth’s relationship with Conrad functioned in similar fashion to John of Marienwerder’s spiritual guardianship of Dorothy of Montau. In contrast to the hagiographies of Yvette of Huy and Humiliana of Cerchi, Elizabeth’s vitae did not describe threats to her chastity and respectability as part of her saintly trials. Instead, Conrad’s insistence on her absolute obedience and humility dominated stories of the saint and demonstrated her worthiness for papal recognition of her sanctity. The profound self-abnegation of saints like Elizabeth, Bridget, and Dorothy helped to bridge the distance between their piety as widows and the older monastic ideal of virginity as essential to perfect sanctity. 96. Libellus, 126–27. 97. “Ego autem videns eam velle proficere, omnem superfluam ei amputans familiam tribus personis iussi eam esse contentam, quodam converso, qui negocia sua peregit, virgine religiosa valde despectabili et quadam nobili surda et valde austera, ut per ancillam humilitas ei augmentaretur et per viduam austeram ad patientiam excitaretur.” Epistola Examinatorum miraculorum sancte Elyzabet ad dominum papam, in Huyskens, Quellenstudien, 158.

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Medieval hagiographers had long suggested that widows could make up for the intact virginity they had sacrificed through marriage by engaging in chastity and humility.98 Hagiographers of the thirteenth century and later Middle Ages demonstrated how established conventions of widowhood intertwined with a newer sensibility that identified permanent spiritual bereavement closely with the physical suffering of Christ and the commensurate penitence all Christians should feel in response to his sacrifice. In the hagiography of women saints, obedience was an important expression of penitence. The Libellus described how on one occasion Elizabeth of Thüringia missed a sermon of Conrad’s because she was delayed by a visitor, the Marchioness of Misnia. Quick to beg forgiveness, Elizabeth patiently bore the beating that followed for her disobedience.99 The recording of such incidents for the process of canonization suggests that in proving Elizabeth’s sanctity in Rome, it was important to show the dynamic between the confessor and saint as well as the saint’s perfect obedience. Dyan Elliott has shown that Conrad’s earliest hagiography of the saint used marital imagery to characterize their relationship, replacing the presence of a husband with the supervision of a confessor. This model of female saints’ supervision by and obedience to male confessors proved profoundly influential for later hagiographers.100 The report of the handmaids in Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Libellus revealed Conrad’s repeated efforts to remake Elizabeth’s familiar community of widows and matrons into an ascetic regime centered on his own authority, an agenda that Elizabeth appeared at times to have resisted, although such resistance always resulted in her renewed dedication to Conrad’s spiritual guidance.101 Conrad presented Elizabeth’s personal initiatives—chaste vows, special clothing, and residence with other widows and matrons—as evidence of his authority over the saint, characterizing their bond as a quasi-marriage between confessor and penitent. Conrad’s narrative and other documents formative for Elizabeth’s cult 98. Elliott, Spiritual Marriage, 224. 99. Libellus, 118. 100. Elliott suggests that the change of habit illustrated the quasi-marital relationship that Conrad constructed with Elizabeth, as her receiving it, along with her vow of obedience to Conrad “in many ways could be likened to the groom’s conferral of nuptial clothes” (Proving Woman, 93). 101. Ibid., 102.



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in the thirteenth century displayed how a strict confessor might dictate spiritual practice to a wealthy and powerful widow who had royal dynasties on both sides of her lineage, providing a model that other hagiographers adopted to describe widowed sanctity. Elizabeth’s abject submission to Conrad’s authority emphasized her obedience and penitence as characteristic elements of chaste widowhood. Elizabeth’s cult proved to be an influential model, providing both extraordinary examples of penitence and obedience in widowhood, such as the great physical suffering Elizabeth experienced, as well as more viable practices for lay widows, such as becoming Franciscan tertiaries or members of other penitential orders, and wearing the special habit that signaled that affiliation Following in Elizabeth’s hagiographic tradition, Bridget of Sweden and Dorothy of Montau professed explicit obedience to their confessors, who completely regulated their manner of living and contacts with others. In Bridget’s case, she shared Elizabeth’s noble background and commitment to poverty and penitence; in her Revelations, Bridget writes that she was urged to observe Elizabeth’s treatment of the poor and her voluntary poverty.102 Under the direction of several men, Bridget organized her household according to that ideal: first under Mathias of Linköping in Sweden, then Prior Peter Olafson of Alvastra, Master Peter Olafson of Skånninge, and Alfonso of Spain in Rome. Widowed in 1344, Bridget left Alvastra to live in Rome in 1349 for a variety of reasons—to make pilgrimages at its holy sites, but also to see the pope and to advocate for the return of the papal seat to Rome from Avignon.103 She lived in Rome for the rest of her life, traveling from the city only for pilgrimages to other cities. In Rome, Bridget developed an affinity for Franciscan spirituality and earned the admiration of lay and religious women alike, having established a quasi-monastic routine in her city residence for herself and the members of her household.104 She based 102. “‘Audiui,’ inquit, ‘quod sancta Elizabeth, filia regis Vngarie, delicate enutrita et nobiliter nupta magnam sustinuit paupertatem et deieccionem. Que maiorem consolationem obtinuit in paupertate a Deo et sublimiorem coronam, quam si manisset in omni honore mundi et eius consolacione’” (Revelaciones, 4.30–31, p. 72). 103. Tore Nyberg, introduction to Life and Selected Revelations, by Birgitta of Sweden, Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1990), pp. 27–28. Bridget’s departure from Sweden also coincided with the arrival of the Black Death in Sweden; her travels to Italy brought her into contact with a Rome recovering from the ravages of plague. 104. Bridget’s example of widowed piety appears to have been important to at least some of her female followers in Rome: a pious widow and witness in Bridget’s canonization proceedings, Francesca

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her daily round of activity on a vision from Christ, in which he dictated explicit instructions for sleep, prayer, fasting, and confession; the regimen from the vision became the basis for the monastic order (the Order of the Most Holy Savior, informally known as the Brigittine order) she later founded at Vadstena.105 The fusion of Bridget’s domestic and spiritual life were also evident in her relationship with her daughter, also a widow, who was represented as an extension of Bridget’s own piety in her hagiography. Children often fitted uneasily into the hagiographies of matron saints, both because their existence was a reminder that the women had engaged in carnal acts, and because their care and supervision detracted from more spiritual activities. In contrast to the ethereal Virgin Mary, moreover, who raised a perfect child, matrons’ discipline of normal children in the world was difficult to represent gracefully in the hagiographical tradition, particularly when conflicts arose between parent and child. In Bridget and Catherine’s case, hagiographers navigated this awkwardness by continuing the theme of Bridget’s obedience to her confessors: beyond following her confessors’ strict control and discipline over her household, Bridget submitted her daughter to strict submission as well. After an argument in which the young widow Catherine desired to return to Sweden but capitulated to her mother’s wishes that she remain with her in Rome instead, Bridget insisted that Catherine pledge obedience to her confessor Peter, as Bridget “wished for her daughter to be bound more tightly by the yoke of obedience and humility so that she would not be remiss in following the path of holy penitence because of the indulgence of maternal compassion.”106 Papazzuri, allowed Bridget the use of her residence on the Campo del Fiore, and later donated it to Bridget’s foundation at Vadstena; it became the convent for the Birgittine order in Rome. Bridget’s Roman community must certainly have included many widows, such as Selena, the kinswoman of Bridget’s friend Count Niccolo Orsini (Morris, St. Birgitta of Sweden, 99). Henrick Roelvink notes that although Bridget was a great admirer of St. Francis and that her process of canonization was promoted by the Poor Clares of Rome, Bridget never actually took a vow as a Franciscan tertiary, as some sources in her hagiographical tradition have claimed. He also suggests that in the visual tradition of St. Bridget in Rome, she is most often depicted in the habit of the Birgittine order, whereas representations of Bridget in Sweden tend to depict her as a widow; see Henrick Roelvink, Franciscans in Sweden: Medieval Remnants of Franciscan Activities (Assen: Uitgerverij Van Gorum, 1998), 30–31. 105. The vision concerning the ordering of the house is from the Revelationes Extravagantes and is reprinted and translated in Morris, St. Birgitta of Sweden, 103–4. 106. “Volens igitur B. Birgitta filiam suam humilitatis et obedientiae jugo arctius obligari, ne ex



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In the later Middle Ages, popular modes of piety brought the holy matron and her domestic life into clearer hagiographical focus and invested the household with religious potential and purpose. At the same time, however, this development also witnessed the incursion of male clerical authority over such women in the absence of their husbands. Bridget’s household leadership, the theological sophistication of her Revelations, and her spiritual authority as the sponsa et canale (spouse and channel) of Christ did not afford independence from her confessors’ control. At her process of canonization, witnesses testified that she did not leave her house without her confessors’ permission. Her spiritual fathers oversaw even her most basic pious exercises, including fasting, vigils, and prayers, which Bridget did not resist: her greatest joy, she told her confessor Mathias during her residence at the monastery of Alvestra, was her demonstration of “obedience without remorse of conscience.”107 Such an attitude was confirmed in Christ’s revelation to her that “virginity merits the crown, and widowhood draws near to God, but obedience leads all to glory.”108

Common Threads: Patterns of Widowed Sanctity The vitae of widowed saints of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries were diverse in their authorship, contexts, and particular hagiographical agendas. Yet despite their differing situations and motives, hagiographers engaged certain themes about their subjects that forged important associations between these holy women and the profession of widowhood, both in hagiography and in other genres, such as sermons, exempla tales, and popular literature in the later Middle Ages: the widow’s gift of prophecy as a means of purgatorial intervention, the importance to widowed spirituality of Marian devotion, and the centrality of St. Elizabeth’s vitae as a model for widows, both saintly and secular. maternae compassionis indulgentia in via sanctiae poenitentiae remissuius viveret,” AASS March III (March 24): 507; cited in Elliott, Spiritual Marriage, 280–81. 107. “Nam summe gaudeo in anima mea, quia habeo, cui obedienciam sine remorsu consciencie” (Acta et Process Canonizacionis Beate Birgitte, ed. Collijn, 80–81, 489–90); see also ibid., 17, 312; and Elliott, Spiritual Marriage, 256–65. 108. “Nam virginitas meretur coronam, viduitas appropinquat Deo sed obediencia omnes introducit ad gloriam.” Revelaciones, 6.111, p. 272.

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Purgatory  Hagiography emphasized a connection between evolving

concepts of purgatory and the widow’s gift of prophecy. Scholars such as Jacques LeGoff have argued for the “birth” of purgatory in the twelfth century, situating this nascence in the context of the broader trend toward theological sophistication in the schools of the twelfth century Renaissance. The introduction of purgatory to a religious audience beyond the schools of philosophy added a new element to the medieval conception of the holy widow’s spiritual responsibility toward her husband and other loved ones: a “spiritual housekeeping” beyond the grave. Just as widows embodied a state between the carnality of marriage and the perfect, intact chastity of consecrated virgins, they came to have a special affinity with souls in purgatory, who were saved from eternal damnation but uncertain of how or when they would enter the perfection of paradise. While many religious men and women in the High Middle Ages were concerned with the subject of souls in purgatory, chaste widows and matrons took a special interest in not only their own salvation, but also that of their loved ones on the threshold of heaven. Ottonian models of sanctity represented the persistence of the marriage bond beyond the grave as dutiful widows remembering their distinguished emperor-husbands’ souls in their intercessory prayers. This tendency was echoed in popular practice by the eleventh century, as husbands were increasingly recognized alongside a woman’s natal family in the “spiritual economy” of remembrance, as illustrated in of the formula pro remedio anime sue et mariti sui (“for the good of her soul and her husband’s”) in widows’ donation charters to religious institutions.109 New developments in the twelfth century, including women’s involvement in mendicant movements and clerics’ expression of a tangible, spatial notion of purgatory accentuated the widow’s role in purgatorial intercession. As Barbara Newman has argued, “visionary women . . . seem at the very least to have served as midwives at the birth of purgatory. . . . Purgatorial piety, while not the exclusive preserve of women, occupied a privileged place and took on a distinctive character in their religious lives.”110 In addition, the movement in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to recognize marriage as a sacrament, interpreted in 109. Tertullian, De monogamia, 10.4; see also Corbet, “La pastorale Ottoniene du veuvage,” 239–40. 110. Newman, “On the Threshold of the Dead,” in From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, 111.



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hagiography through positive depictions of matrimony in the vitae of saints such as Hedwig and Elizabeth, strengthened the sense of a marital bond beyond the grave. In this context, holy widows represented not only the spiritual bereavement of mourning for one’s spouse, but also a state of repentance for their formal carnal lives as wives and a hopeful striving toward the greater spiritual fruits of chastity. Such a mentality resonated strongly in beguine and mendicant communities which, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, offered pious matrons active spiritual roles in a voluntary and secular capacity, and did not require widows to join a convent in order to participate fervently in acts of charity and communal devotions. The widow’s purgatorial responsibilities emerged quite clearly in Guibert of Nogent’s account of his mother’s widowhood. In her dreamvision of purgatory, the mother’s soul wandered among the dead in a nightmarish abyss and observed the purgatorial punishments in store for one of her sons; the vision informed her that her widowed companion in her retreat at Fly had been a fraud, and led her to assume part of her husband’s current purgatorial penance.111 Guibert used new theological views of purgatory to demonstrate his mother’s authenticity as a holy woman, giving support to Barbara Newman’s notion that the increasingly sophisticated medieval conception of purgatory in the twelfth century and onward offered women “a new sphere of influence” for their ministerial gifts.112 The burden of this extension of the marriage bond into purgatory was also evident in Jacques of Vitry’s life of the early beguine matron, Mary of Oignies (d. 1213). Mary was greatly moved by the suffering of souls in purgatory and its resonances with the beguine and Franciscan movements’ interest in penitential suffering on earth. On numerous occasions she became an ardent defender of souls on their deathbeds who were threatened with visiting demons who were greedily trying to claim them for eternal damnation.113 Though not a widow herself, Mary took a particular interest in the fate of a widowed woman who was a member of Mary’s community of beguines in Willambrouk. This widow 111. Guibert, Autobiographie, 1.18, pp. 148–58; trans. Archambault, 64–68. 112. Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, 11 113. Vita B. Mariae Oigniacensis, bk. 1, 3.27, p. 553; bk. 2, 6.52, p. 557, and 9.83, p. 565.

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had not only fulfilled the duties of pious widowhood but also encouraged her daughters to embrace consecrated virginity and the religious life. As the widow lay dying, Mary of Oignies saw the Virgin tenderly fanning the widow’s brow to ease her suffering. She also observed an “ethereal key-bearer” wielding a crucifix, who drove away the demons who lurked at the scene in hopes of claiming the soul of this ostensibly unimpeachable woman.114 After the widow’s burial, however, Mary saw the woman’s soul in purgatory being cleansed for those sins that had not been remedied during her life, and which were in fact her husband’s misdeeds and not the widow’s own. An unscrupulous merchant (as, Jacques points out, so many merchants are), the husband had fraudulently acquired some goods and the widow, as his wife, had inadvertently participated in this fraud and had profited from it. Although Mary later had a vision that this widow entered the “eternal banquet” with her soul transparent like glass and more brilliant than the sun, the widow nonetheless was obligated to atone in purgatory for her husband’s sake, despite her contrite heart and pure intentions.115 The spirit of prophecy served as evidence that the vere vidua was an honorable woman, but it also linked her to her husband’s sins in purgatory. One story from Caesarius of Heisterbach’s miracle collection, the Dialogus Miraculorum, illustrated both the earthly and spiritual obligations of wives and widows in this new context of purgatory: a certain usurer of Liège died with so many terrible sins unremitted that his widow was forced to plead in Rome, against the will of her local bishop, to have his body buried in consecrated ground so that he could be saved from eternal damnation. Her request was granted, but she lived as a recluse for fourteen years to deliver the husband’s soul and, perhaps, her own from purgatory because of transgressions that were his alone.116 The examples of Guibert’s mother and of Mary of Oignies and her beguine community represented empowering possibilities for holy matrons. These women offered chastity and devotion to the spiritual life as antidotes to their former, more sinful lives as wives and worldly women. In later medieval saints’ hagiographies, like those of Yvette of Huy, 114. Ibid., bk. 2, 6.52, p. 557. 115. Ibid. 116. Caesarius, Dialogus Miraculorum, 12.24, pp. 335–36.



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Dorothy of Montau, Bridget of Sweden, and the would-be saint Margery Kempe, prophetic purgatorial insights became an important component in the portrayal of the widowed saint, offering clear proof of the saint’s spiritual authenticity. Yvette constantly received revelations of the secret sins of those around her and insight into the fate of their souls.117 Dorothy of Montau, according to the records of her process of canonization, also had visions of tormented souls in purgatory and saw the horrible tortures of the damned.118 Bridget of Sweden had extensive contact with her husband, Ulf, in purgatory. When Ulf reported in a vision that he had deprived a certain widow of the goods he had bought from her, he asked Bridget to make good on his sin by restoring to the widow what was rightfully hers; not only did Bridget correct the error, but purchased lavish indulgences to lessen Ulf’s punishment.119 Ulf also informed Bridget that their chastity within marriage was already helping to reduce his purgatorial sentence. Like Mary of Oignies, Bridget received intelligences of a friend and holy matron who suffered the punishments of purgatory, explaining how Bridget might avoid such torments. Bridget, however, was fortunately relieved of worry about her sins and the implications of her husband’s deeds for her own fate in purgatory, because Christ had promised her the opportunity to remit all her sins through trials on Earth, rather than after her death.120 Margery Kempe, who styled her own religious experiences on those of matron saints like Elizabeth, Bridget, and Dorothy, echoed Bridget’s powers of purgatorial visions. While scholars recognize the difficulty of finding Margery’s personal voice in the layers of narration and transcription that constitute her Book, it is clear that she collaborated with her author to create an image of herself as a widowed saint, or perhaps, as Tara Williams has suggested, a “widow-wife” who, like the Wife of Bath, preserved the functions of both states.121 Her autobiogra117. De B. Juetta sive Jutta, 24, pp. 159–60, and 26, p. 161; see also Anneke Mulder-Bakker’s discussion of Yvette’s prophecies in “Ivetta of Huy: Mater et Magistra,” in Sanctity and Motherhood, 240–42. 118. Stachnik, Akten des Kanonizationsprocesses, 45.27, p. 314 119. Julia Bolton Holloway, trans., The Life of St. Birgitta, 26–27; Revelationes Extra 56, pp. 178–79, from Revelaciones Extrauagantes 75, ed. Lennart Hollman (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1956), 198, cited in Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, 117. 120. Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, 117. 121. Tara Williams, “The Host, His Wife, and Their Community in the Canterbury Tales,” The Chaucer Review 42, no. 4 (2008): 390.

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phy described the duty of widows’ intercession and—interestingly and perhaps characteristically of Margery’s own persistent yet often unsuccessful efforts to be recognized as a holy woman—the unwillingness of certain widows to accept it. When a certain pious widow sought Margery’s advice and spiritual insight about her husband’s fate after death, Margery replied that Christ had told her that the widow’s husband was in purgatory, and that although the widow herself would eventually be saved, it would take her a long time to get to heaven.122 Unfortunately, the widow was displeased with this report, claimed that her husband was a good man, and rejected Margery’s advice. A second widow asked Margery to pray for her husband and find out if he needed anything in the next world. Margery learned that the woman’s husband was relegated to purgatory for thirty years and needed the intercession of friends if he wanted to shorten his time there. Margery advised the widow to pay three or four pounds for the husband in Masses and give alms to the poor in order to help the state of her husband’s soul, but this widow likewise refused to accept the burden of her husband’s sins or to acknowledge Margery’s advice and visionary authority. Later, however, in a vision, Christ confirmed that the dire state of the husbands in purgatory was precisely as Margery had predicted.123 Hagiographers from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries developed the notion that chaste matrons could gain special, prophetic insight into the fate of their relatives in purgatory, and introduced the idea that widows might even themselves suffer in purgatory for their deceased husbands’ sins. The development of the concept of sacramental marriage created a sensibility that marriage bonded couples even in death, and the purgatorial episodes underscored this. Assuming this purgatorial burden willingly emerged as a hallmark of the holy widow in hagiography (and hagiographic-style texts like the memoirs concerning Guibert’s mother). The implication, however, was that all widows were culpable for their husbands’ transgressions. While the prophetic powers inherent in widows’ purgatorial visions created new avenues for exploring these women’s holiness, the widows’ shared responsibility 122. The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech, 1.18, EETS (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 45. 123. Ibid.



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for their husbands’ sins also placed new duties and burdens on wives to spiritually tend to their husbands, and on widows to devote the remainder of their earthly lives to charity, piety, and service to the church in order to escape, literally, a fate worse than death. Marian De votio n  In addition to the gifts of prophecy and foreknowledge of the impact of earthly sins on one’s purgatorial punishment, the intervention of and spiritual contact with Virgin Mary became a commonplace in widows’ hagiographies. This association was part of a larger pattern of lay devotion in both hagiography and other forms of devotional literature. Numerous exempla and miracle stories recount the Virgin’s being, for many different types of people, a source of help in times of crisis. Her intervention often countermanded deserved or expected punishments, as in Caesarius of Heisterbach’s story, in his Dialogus, of a nun (not a widow) who had run away with a cleric, become a prostitute, and returned to the convent years later. The Virgin, taking pity on the wayward nun, had assumed her place when she left, so no one had ever noticed her missing, thus saving the nun from shame and punishment.124 Among the various exempla stories of the high and later Middle Ages, widows appear as a particular group deserving of the Virgin’s help. In hagiography, a widowed saint’s devotion to the Virgin Mary would be rewarded with the Virgin’s aid: Mary would help a widow protect her chastity. In the case of Yvette of Huy, Marian devotion was an important component in the protection of her widowed chastity. Before she enclosed herself in the leprosarium, she had a persistent suitor, a distant kinsman who preyed on Yvette’s widowhood as pretext for spending time with the holy woman, with whom he had become infatuated. Although Yvette contrived to keep herself at a distance from the man, some relatives pressed her to let them stay at their house, and the kinsman was among the party.125 As Yvette feared would happen, the man sought her out during the night; hopeless with worry about what would become of the man’s spiritual state as well as her own reputation for chastity, 124. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, 7.34, pp. 42–43. 125. De B. Juetta sive Jutta, 8.20–23, p. 149.

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Yvette appealed to the virgin, who appeared in a glorious vision. The Virgin’s presence caused Yvette to remain invisible to her pursuer, and caused the kinsman himself to become confused and beset with fear concerning the sinfulness of his intended assault on the saint. From then on, he never bothered Yvette again, and the gift of the Virgin’s presence rendered the saint “fully restored to herself” and able to “see truly at a glance.”126 Yvette used this gift of vision to detect the sins of those around her, such as the priest whom she ordered to repent to the Virgin for his seduction of a matron.127 Mary also appeared as an intercessor with Christ concerning Yvette’s own sins; Mary secured forgiveness for Yvette’s earlier hatred of her husband during their marriage and her wish for him to die.128 In John of Marienwerder’s life of Dorothy of Montau, Mary often intervened on Dorothy’s behalf both for her physical and her spiritual safety. Mary warned Dorothy of a fire that had started in Dorothy’s house when she was on her way to church to celebrate the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, and on another occasion saved Dorothy’s daughter from drowning when Dorothy and Adalbert’s sleigh skidded from the road into icy water.129 Dorothy established a spiritual connection to the Virgin through various prayers and devotions, particularly during her pilgrimages to Mary’s churches. On a pilgrimage to Marian sites in Aix and Einsiedeln, Dorothy visited the church at Aix, then went on to Einsiedeln where she happened to leave and then return three times before she went back again to Mary’s church at Aix; this repeated series of visits “knit the knot thrice that tied her to the service of Mary, the most worthy empress and mother of mercy.”130 In another vision, the Virgin confirmed Dorothy’s sanctity and holiness by allowing her to hold the Christ Child in her arms.131 126. “Ita ut mulier venientem ad se pleno et vero videret intuitu” (ibid., 8.24, pp. 149–50; trans. McNamara, The Life of Yvette, 52). 127. De B. Juetta sive Jutta, 27.82, p. 161. 128. Ibid., 15.46, p. 154. 129. Vita Dorothye, 2.43, p. 109, and 3.12, p. 128. 130. “Und in der selbin reyse quam di selige Dorothy zcum dritten mal zcu unswer vrouwen capelle zcum eynsediln, of daz sy einen vestin knotin drivach strickte, sich zcu vorbinden zcu dinste Marien, der aller wirdigesten keyserynne und mutir der gnoden.” Das Leben der Heiligen Dorothea, 1.31, pp. 228–29, trans. Stargardt, 70. Cf. Vita Dorothy, 2.44, p. 110; the Latin text does not employ the imagery of the knot. 131. Vita Dorothye, 2.3, p. 116.



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Marian reassurance of her chastity and sanctity was also a sustaining force in the Revelations of Bridget of Sweden. On several occasions the Virgin spoke to Bridget to remind her that her widowed chastity was adequate in the sight of God. Mary not only reassured Bridget that her widowhood was as valuable to Christ as a virgin’s devotion, but also explained that this value was contingent on the saint’s obedience. In one conversation, Mary, though not typically described as a widow in medieval religious language, identified herself to Bridget as such because, as the mother of Christ, she too had a son who lacked an earthly father.132 Mary’s personal identification with widowhood (rather than with virginity) was unusual in the Middle Ages, but it is consistent with the leitmotiv of anxiety that characterized the lives of matron saints that their spirituality be considered as worthy as virgins’, as well as with broader transformations in the ways medieval clerics articulated their understanding of the marriage of Mary and Joseph and the imagery associated with the Holy Family in later medieval pastoral care.133 The reassuring notion of Mary’s own widowhood as parallel to Bridget’s was especially pronounced in the Middle English version of Bridget’s life, attributed to Thomas Gasgoine, and dating from the early fifteenth century, in which he represented Mary as a comforter and helper of widows. Mary consoled Brigit with the reminder that Mary too was a widow after the crucifixion of Christ (perhaps conflating the traditional metaphor of the “widowed” Ecclesia with images of a bereaved Mary at the foot of the Cross, which were well-known in the later Middle 132. “Ego fui quasi vidua, eo quod habuit filium in terris, qui non habuit carnalem patrem.” Revelaciones, 4.53, pp. 176–77. See also Sancta Birgitta Revelaciones, Book I, with Master Mathias’ Prologue, ed. Carl-Gustaf Undhagen (Uppsala: Amqvist and Wiskell, 1978). 133. Medieval clerics reflected deeply on Mary and Joseph’s union as an example of sacramental and chaste marriage; see Irven M. Resnick, “Marriage in Medieval Culture: Consent Theory and the Case of Joseph and Mary” in Church History, 69, no. 2 (June 2000): 350–71. Cynthia Hahn summarizes the two main characterizations of Joseph in the later Middle Ages: first, as an elderly, comical figure and second, in contrast, the “hard-working foster-father of Christ” whose humble profession as a carpenter found great sympathy among both lay and monastic audiences (“Joseph Will Perfect, Mary Enlighten and Jesus Save Thee: The Holy Family as Marriage Model in the Mérode Triptych” in The Art Bulletin 68, no. 1 [March, 1986]: 55). Interest in Joseph increased in the literary texts of the later Middle Ages, in which medieval authors played with the idea of the elderly Joseph as a cuckolded husband (as, for example, in the traditional medieval English “Cherry Tree Carol,” in which God reassures Joseph that Mary’s pregnancy is truly virginal). Barbara Newman articulates the elasticity of the pastoral messages that were possible concerning the Holy Family in her discussion of the conflation of Nativity and Trinitarian imagery in her essay “Intimate Pieties: Holy Trinity and Holy Family in the Late Middle Ages” Religion and Literature 31, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 77–101.

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Ages), and that it was the lot of all widows to be patient and constant.134 The Virgin’s intervention was not always wholly reassuring, however, and at times took on a disciplinary aspect. Hagiographers used the connections they established between their subjects and Mary’s holy example to reinforce messages of obedience to worldly and spiritual authority. On occasion, Mary had to take a firm hand even with her devoted servants: Mary appeared to Dorothy and reprimanded her for speaking to her confessors without asking the permission of the Virgin mother and her infant son. In another example from the life of Catherine, daughter of Bridget of Sweden, Mary ordered the recently widowed Catherine to remain in Rome at her mother’s request rather than returning home to Sweden as Catherine initially wished to do.135 Another variation on the Marian connection to widows in hagiography was the likening of the hagiographical widow’s husband to a “new Joseph.” The Dominican friar Theodoric of Apolda, in his 1289 reworking of Elizabeth of Thüringia’s life, referred to Louis in this way, which both romanticized and sanctified Elizabeth and Louis’s marital union as an illustration of the church’s ideal of companionate marriage.136 John of Marienwerder also used this trope to describe Dorothy’s husband, Adalbert, in a more sophisticated version of the Joseph motif: onlookers, who doubted the chastity Dorothy and Adalbert maintained in their marriage, made fun of Adalbert as Dorothy’s “Joseph,” combining an analogy to the holy family with the late medieval trope that Joseph was a cuckold to his beautiful young wife.137 John’s use of this secular commonplace had a double effect: he both demonstrated that Dorothy’s married chastity with Adalbert was genuine, and also anticipated skepticism concerning her cause and demonstrated that such disbelief was evidence of the saint’s patience in the face of adversity. Ultimately, any doubts about the saint’s chastity were dispelled by the security of Dorothy’s permanent enclosure. The association of Mary with widows sometimes heightened the sense of danger facing the widow in the sinful world, but also rein134. Holloway, trans., The Life of St. Birgitta, 26. 135. Vita Dorothye, 5.15, p. 234; John of Marienwerder, Leben der Heiligen Dorothea, 3.9, pp. 292– 93; Vita Catharinae, 2.18, AASS March III (March 24): 506. 136. Theodoric of Apolda, Vita S. Elysabeth, 3.3, p. 53. 137. John of Marienwerder, Leben, 2.10–11, pp. 242–44; cf. Vita Dorothye, 3.9, p. 125.



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forced the validity of the widow’s proposed chastity. Marian association with widowhood gained momentum as a hagiographical theme in the thirteenth and especially fourteenth centuries, in which visionary encounters with Mary offered unique reassurance that Christ valued his widowed brides as well as his virginal ones While earlier hagiographers and preachers were careful to maintain distinctions between virgins and widows, the use of Mary as mediator for widows helped to efface this difference, especially when she identified herself explicitly as a widow.138 The Hagiographer and the Preacher: Elizabeth of Thüringia as a Model of Holy Widowhood  André Vauchez has argued that the

trend of lay sainthood in the thirteenth century, a movement that offered a spirituality “appropriate to the estate” of laypeople, had no future as it was supplanted by the “monasticization of the laity” in the later Middle Ages.139 In this context, widowhood in the lives of the saints represented an opposite trend: the laicization of what began as an “order” of widows that had a monastic ethos at its center: even when a widow lived outside of the cloister, her vow of chastity, rigor of life, and characteristic devotion to prayer established her profession of widowhood. Widowed women had intuitively found their locus between the absolute divisions of “lay” and “clerical” throughout the Middle Ages through various kinds of relationships with religious houses. With the rise of the penitential ethos and lay associations such as beguines and tertiaries, the widow’s role found a clearer expression in secular life as well. Women such as Yvette of Huy and Elizabeth of Thüringia, who were, respectively, neither a “proper” beguine nor a formally vowed tertiary, nevertheless left behind hagiographies that were evocative of those groups’ way of life. Even as churchmen tried to draw those boundaries more rigidly, widows slipped into the many cracks of the official ecclesiastical structure to become popular models of piety for a broader lay community. From the inception of her cult in the first half of the thirteenth century, St. Elizabeth of Thüringia served as a contemporary embodiment 138. This development seems to be located in the very late fourteenth century in hagiography and the fifteenth century for sermons; for example, I have not found any sermons to lay widows before the fifteenth century that suggest Mary as an example; see below, chapter 5. 139. Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, 385–86.

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of the characteristics of chaste widowhood. In addition to her function as an ideal woman in all three stages of life (virgin, wife, and widow), Elizabeth was a tremendously beloved saint who embraced the Franciscan penitential ethos of service and humility. At least two hagiographers writing on other saints explicitly invoked her example as a means of authenticating their own subjects’ saintly inclinations. The Prussian Jutta of Sangershausen’s vita expressly mentioned Elizabeth’s use of her dowry for the care of the poor as a precedent for Jutta to do the same.140 John of Marienwerder likewise cited Elizabeth as a model of sanctity for Dorothy, and it was probably no coincidence that Dorothy entered her anchoress’s enclosure on the feast of the translation of the relics of St. Elizabeth to the pilgrimage church at Marburg.141 Elizabeth’s widespread appeal popularized the combination of a laywoman’s penitential sentiment with long-standing ideals of what chaste widowhood should look like. Narratives of her life, told and retold in many different formats, repeatedly demonstrated the compatibility of these roles. Models of holy widowhood within the community of saints were profoundly influenced by reforming and mendicant orders’ insistence on a demanding personal spirituality, one that required the labors of one’s own hands and that was oriented toward voluntary poverty and service, rather than on the adoption of the monastic way of life. Through new expressions of sanctity and piety, hagiography presented medieval lay audiences with a variety of models of female holiness and a number of exemplars of chaste widowhood. Even within the traditions of one saint such as Elizabeth, the lessons of the saint’s life had multivalent functions: the example of the saint could speak at once to married women or widows, cloistered or lay women. In the early phase of Elizabeth’s cult, the Libellus de dictis quatuor ancillarum, Conrad of Marburg’s letter supporting her sainthood, and the bull of canonization presented Elizabeth as both a bride of Christ and a “true widow” according to the specifications Paul set forth in the Pastoral Epistles. In this phase of Elizabeth’s cult, the “bride of Christ” aspect of her sanctified image emerged as the dominant characteristic and illustrated various modes of chaste behavior to the laity. A reworking of Elizabeth’s 140. De B. Juetta sive Jutta, 1.4, p. 595. 141. Vita Dorothye, 4.23, p. 186; Leben, 1. 21, p. 218.



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life in the last decade of the thirteenth century by Theodoric of Apolda, based on the Libellus and other early materials, developed new aspects of Elizabeth’s life, such as the amity and even romance in Elizabeth’s marriage to Ludwig. Such a reading of Elizabeth’s life suggested to both married matrons and widows that marriage and sanctity were compatible for laywomen.142 The inclusion of a narrative of Elizabeth’s life in the Golden Legend also presented a coherent preaching model for the profession of widowhood. Although the cults of later, fourteenth-century widowed saints such as Dorothy of Montau and Bridget of Sweden had strong followings and bases of support (Bridget’s especially because of her foundation of the Brigittine order), the saints who became most closely associated with widowhood—Elizabeth; Paula, the friend of St. Jerome; and sometimes Helen, the mother of Constantine—were all represented in the Golden Legend (composed ca. 1263–73) and vernacular collections based on it.143 The Golden Legend was a profoundly influential force in determining the visibility and durability of a saint’s cult and had a strong effect on patterns of sanctity generally. The version of Elizabeth’s life incorporated into the Golden Legend, whether by Jacobus of Voragine or a later continuator, was fashioned from the Libellus de dictis quattuor ancillarum, her bull of canonization, Gloriosus in majestate, and the 1235 report of her miracles.144 Elizabeth’s life was one of the few contemporary entries in the collection, and the only example of a contemporary married saint. Scholars are unsure whether her life was initially part of the collection at all; it could have appeared in association with the 142. Petrakopoulos, “Sanctity and Motherhood: Elizabeth of Thuringia,” in Mulder-Bakker, Sanctity and Motherhood, 275–76; see also Gecser, “Aspects of the Cult of St. Elizabeth of Hungary,” 17. 143. See Werner Williams-Krapp, Die deutschen und niederländischen Legendare des Mittelalters: Studien zur ihrer Überlieferungs-, Text-, und Wirkungsgeschichte (Tübingen: Max Niemayer, 1986), 302, 317, 331. 144. Elizabeth’s vita probably was not among the lives in the original Golden Legend and only became fully incorporated into the body of the collection after about 1281, thereafter quickly becoming an established component of the text; see Barbara Fleith, Studien zur Überlieferungsgeschichte der Lateinischen Legenda Aurea, Subsidia Hagiographica 72 (Brussels: Societé des Bollandistes, 1991), 340–41. Elizabeth’s memory was already being celebrated in certain collections of saints from much earlier: she was included in the Dominican Calendar of Humbert de Roman in 1250; a noted Franciscan breviary, Newberry MS 24 (ca. 1230, with fourteenth-century additions), contains nine lessons on St. Elizabeth; and Newberry MS 128 contains a collection that included Elizabeth, Liber epilogorum in gesta sanctorum, composed by Bartholomew of Trent (d. 1250/1255), dating from ca. 1244. In any case, by the 1280s Elizabeth was consistently associated with the corpus of saints in Jacobus of Voragine’s collection.

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collection in the early 1280s and been incorporated through a clerical mistake. Her vita in the Golden Legend provided abundant material for preachers, who borrowed liberally from this version for sermon references. The version of Elizabeth’s life in the Golden Legend articulates the connection between Elizabeth’s widowhood and her pious deeds, which may have helped clerics looking for exempla to illustrate the lessons of widowhood: [after the death of Louis] Elizabeth now piously embraced the state of widowhood, taking care not to be defrauded of the reward of a widow’s continence and to gain the sixty-fold fruit by observing the Decalogue together with the seven works of mercy. . . .145

But Jacobus of Voragine’s identification of Elizabeth’s “state” of widowhood revealed its implied dangers as well: But as soon as the news of her husband’s death had spread throughout Thuringia, she was denounced by some of the landgrave’s vassals as a prodigal, wasteful woman and was shamefully banned from her country. Thus her patience was brought fully to light, and her long-standing desire for poverty realized.146

Elizabeth’s cult was widespread, and her vitae were translated into many vernacular languages. Theodoric of Apolda’s life of Elizabeth, for example, was translated into several German dialects, beginning in the mid-fourteenth century, and was incorporated into German vernacular versions of the Golden Legend such as Der Heiligen Leben, compiled circa 1390, and its variant edition, the Redaktion der Heiligen Leben.147 145. “Et sic ipsa vidualem statum cum devotion amplectitur, ne vidualis continentiae praemio fraudaretur, sed fructum sexagesimum sic perciperet, utpote quae decalogum praeceptorum cum septem misericordiae operibus observaret.” “De sancta Elisabeth,” Legenda aurea, ed. Theo Graesse (Osnabrück: Otto Zeller, 1965), 758; trans. Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger, The Golden Legend of Jacobus of Voragine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 307. 146. “Verum cum mores viri sui per totam fusset Thuringiam divulgata, de patria ipsa tamquam dissipatrix et prodiga a quibusdam vasallis viri sui turpiter et totaliter est ejecta, ut ex hoc ejus patientia claresceret et paupertatis diu conceptum desiderium obtineret.” “De sancta Elisabeth,” 758; trans. Ryan and Ripperger, 307–8. 147. Theodoric’s vita of Elizabeth was translated by an anonymous Franciscan author at the request of the countess Margaret of Nassau, who was associated with the Claresses of Nuremberg; see Wolfgang Stammler, Mittelalterliche Prose in Deutscher Sprache, Deutsche Philologie im Aufriß, (Erich Schmidt, 1954), 1548. See also Williams-Krapp, Die deutschen und niederländischen Legendare des Mittelalters, and his briefer article, “German and Dutch Legendaries of the Middle Ages: A Survey,” in Hagiography and Medieval Literature: A Symposium (Odense: Odense University Press, 1981), 66–75, as well as his massive study, Die Elsässische Legenda Aurea (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1980). Many devotional manuscripts contain extracts from the Golden Legend that vary from a few sentences to a few pages, and



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Versions of Elizabeth’s legend also circulated in French and German verse narratives, and the events of her life were depicted in visual media as well as texts and sermons.148 Through sermons and collections of saints’ lives, Elizabeth came to represent both the consecrated chastity of pious widows and the married chastity of lay matrons. Her celibacy in widowhood compensated for the lost virginal state and illustrated the benefits of the sixtyfold fruit for widows who followed her example; for the married, she showed that there was still potential for chastity within the conjugal state; for all Christians, she demonstrated the sanctity that arose from humility, obedience, and the good works accomplished manibus suis, by one’s own hands. For the rest of the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, preachers incorporated Elizabeth’s narrative into sermons, exempla, and advice treatises for widows, distilling the varieties of chaste widowhood from hagiography into an intelligible paradigm for the practice of pious widowhood in secular society. excerpts from it are found in dozens of manuscripts in the collections of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek; a smaller fraction of these explicitly reference or discuss Elizabeth’s widowhood, including Latin texts in Clm 701, 3083, 5664, 5883, 6910, and German vernacular texts in Cgm 537, 735, 4438, 4638. 148. See Cazelles, The Lady as Saint, 151–71, for a discussion and translation of verse legends in the French tradition; for legends from Germany, see Margaret Lemberg, Die Marburger Fragmente der mittelhochdeutsche Verslegende vom Leben der heilgen Elizabeth (Marburg: Hitzeroth, 1991). The art history bibliography on Elizabeth is extensive; see Anja Petropoulous’s treatment of the Lübeck cycle of panel paintings based on Theodoric of Apolda’s life, discussed in her article “Sanctity and Motherhood: St. Elizabeth of Thuringia,” in Mulder-Bakker, Sanctity and Motherhood, 270–84; and Monika Bierschenk’s study of the iconography of the stained glass window cycles in Elizabeth’s Marburg church, Glasmalerei in der Elisabethkirche in Marburg (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1991).

Medieval Sermon Liter ature

Chapter 5

Managing the Matron Widowhood in Medieval Sermon Literature In a 1427 sermon addressed to the large Sienese crowds that gathered yearly to hear him speak, the famously popular preacher Bernardino of Siena posed this rhetorical question to his audience: “How would you know about any good act, and how you must go about it, if you didn’t learn it through sermons?”1 Preachers of the later Middle Ages taught the widow “how to act” in their sermons promoting pious widowhood, in which they enumerated the spiritual rewards of widowhood, provided virtuous examples such as biblical widows and saints, and articulated distinctions between “good” and “bad” widows for the edification of both pious widows themselves and the Christian community at large. Preaching on widowhood remained closely tied to the patristic texts that initially formed the discourse on widowhood we have already encountered in chapter 1. Florilegia (anthologies of literary extracts, literally “flowers” for reading ) that collected the wisdom of the Bible and the church fathers on widowhood (as well as its counterparts in the tripartite discussion of chastity, virginity, and marriage) continued to be copied for preachers’ reference into the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.2 Sermons and sermon-writing aids also came to include the contributions of medieval authors, such as Bernard of Clairvaux (1090– 1153), and the occasional reference to authors of antiquity, such as Vir1. “Che sapesti tu di niuna buona operazione, come tu la debbi fare, se non per mezzo della predica?” Bernardino of Siena, Sermon 3, in Prediche volgari sul Campo di Siena 1427, ed. Carlo Delcorno (Milan: Rusconi, 1989), 149, cited in Franco Mormando, The Preacher’s Demons: Bernadino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 242n10. 2. For example, the compilations De virginibus, de viduis, de mulieribus (Clm 5037, fols. 88r–106r) and the Conditiones septem viduarum (Clm 447, fol. 154) preserved in manuscripts in Munich’s Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. The former is dated from 1504 from the monastery of Benediktbeuern. The latter lacks a clear provenance but dates from the fourteenth century and contains several texts associated with pastoral care, such as fragments of homilies, two sets of exempla (one from the Gesta Romanorum and another set of unattributed tales); three of the exempla in the latter group involve tales of pious widows.

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gil and Aristotle. They explored new and contemporary themes, such as the place of widowed chastity in the heretical beliefs of the Cathars, and, particularly in the case of popular preachers, engaged stories from exempla collections to illustrate the virtues and pitfalls of pious widowhood. In the thirteenth century, preachers discoursing on widowhood began to cull hagiographical materials for saintly as well as biblical examples of good widows upon which medieval matrons could model their lives, and drew heavily on the life of St. Elizabeth of Thüringia for this purpose. Early sermons on widows that were produced in medieval monasteries and schools offered little in the way of pastoral care of actual widows. The content and tone of these early sermons suggest that widows and widowhood were topics that occasioned reflection upon the intellectual traditions that expounded upon the meaning and function of these terms as concepts rather than as literal experiences that required a pastoral response. Sometimes the authors were truly concerned about widowhood as an aspect of female chastity; other times, their interest was exegetical or academic, and widowhood served as a mental exercise in the development of a catena that illustrated the author’s proficiency in citation rather than his concern with the actual state of widowhood. Even when the author’s ostensible goal was to preach about true widowhood or the merits of widowed chastity, the sermon genre and its themes were, as Mark Zier has noted, “strictly subordinated to Biblical exegesis and to the liturgy, dependent on its peculiar rhetorical rules.”3 The liturgical factor was of particular importance in governing sermons’ content, as the great number of sermon collections were written for the Bible verses assigned to a particular day (sermones de tempore) or for feasts and festivals throughout the year (sermones de sanctis).4 3. Mark Zier, “Medieval Preaching in Italy (1200–1500),” in Beverly M. Kienzle, ed., The Sermon (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 449. 4. The strong governance of sermon content by liturgical dictates can in some cases help the researcher locate sermons on widowhood; for example, many authors chose to preach about Anna, Luke 2:36–38, on the feast of the purification of the virgin Mary, and of course one could look for discussions on widowhood in sermons featuring those verses that concern themselves with the relative merits of chastity, for example, under Pauline passages such as “Qui habunt uxores,” or John 2:1, “Nuptia factae.” However, the author did have the freedom to interpret a given day’s verse in the direction he chose, which might not necessarily include a discussion of widows, and, to complicate matters, sermons about widows turn up in discussions of biblical verses that do not immediately suggest such a direction, as in the case of Berthold of Regensburg’s sermon Simile est regnum.

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David D’Avray has argued that, despite the methodological problems involved with interpreting popular preaching, sermons are essential to the study of medieval attitudes, because they are the closest thing we can identify to “mass media” in medieval society, especially after the concerted effort Innocent III proposed in the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) to further the “duty of sacred preaching” in order to provide the laity with the “nourishment” of God’s word and build up the Christian community “by word and example.”5 Certainly popular preaching from the twelfth century onward drew large crowds, but even the regular homilies of the liturgical calendar communicated theological messages to the medieval laity. As D’Avray argues, It might be described as the drip-drip method of inculcating beliefs. The same or similar topoi would be greatly repeated year in, year out, and eventually they would become assumptions. Moreover, since preachers all over Europe would be borrowing material from the same internationally available model sermon collections, almost the same ideas and formulae would reach people in many different countries and—since the model collections often had a long life—over an extended period.6

In the sermon discourse on pious widowhood, the legacy of patristic writing established a highly durable set of topoi that “dripped” into high medieval sermons on widowhood; these included St. Paul’s discussion of the merits of widowhood, the reaping of the fruits of chastity in the virginal, widowed, and married states, and a repertory of biblical figures to exemplify the chaste widow’s virtues.

Patterns of Widowhood in Exegetical Sermons of the Eleventh to Thirteenth Centuries: Rhetorical Strategies and Contemporary Concerns Widows throughout the medieval period represented the poor and the oppressed within Christian congregations. Through the example of the 5. Canon 10, Fourth Lateran Council, cited in Carolyn Muessig, ed. and trans., Faces of Women in the Sermons of Jacques de Vitry (Toronto: Peregrina Press, 1999), 12. 6. David D’Avray, “Method in the Study of Medieval Sermons,” in Modern Questions about Medieval Sermons: Essays on Marriage, Death, History, and Sanctity, ed. Nicole Bériou and David D’Avray (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi Sull’Alto Medioevo, 1994), 9.



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widow of the two mites, the story of the widow whose only son was resurrected by Christ, and the injunction against priests who exploited or failed to protect widows, widows’ status as a general category of miserabiles personae continued into the high and later Middle Ages.7 Such exhortations often arose in the context of preaching to priests about their duties to the laity. A sermon attributed to Hildebert of Lavardin (1056–1133/4), bishop of La Mans and archbishop of Tours, reminded clerics of their duty in consoling the widow. Hildebert wrote letters of consolation to notable widowed patrons; the letter he wrote to Adela, countess of Blois and daughter of William the Conquerer, was sympathetic to the burdens Adela faced both before and after her husband’s death as her family was separated by both crusade and civil war.8 The widows of the Bible also continued to hold a place of significance in the discussion of both the literal virtues and the spiritual meaning of widowhood. Anna, Judith, and the widow of Sarepta provided examples of chastity, hospitality, sobriety, and strength. Exegesis on Anna and the widow of Sarepta emerged as particularly instructive for sermon authors in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and strengthened the association of chaste widowhood with the spirit of prophecy, as Anna received this gift after years of fasting and praying in the temple, and the widow of Sarepta received the prophet Elijah and succored him with her last bit of oil and grain. These stories and their prophetic overtones also had allegorical meanings that remained commonplaces throughout the medieval period. Ambrose had established a prophetic parallel between the widow of Sarepta and Mary, claiming that God had sent a prophet to the widow, prefiguring the angel who would announce Christ’s coming to Mary.9 Medieval authors remained 7. On references to the pitiable condition of widows, see the sermons attributed to Hildebert of Lavardin, PL 171:461ff., 483ff., 712, 893ff.; Aelred of Rivaulx’s sermones de tempore on the “desolate widow” and the justice of God in defense of the widow and orphan, PL 195:331, 401; Peter Comestor, Sermones, PL 198:1732ff.; Peter of Blois, Sermones, PL 207:697ff., 723ff., 43ff.; Peter of Celles includes widows among a long list of “afflicted” persons in his sermons (PL 202:891), and he refers to the exploitation of widows (p. 900); see also Peter the Chanter, Verbum abbreviatum, chap. 47, Contra eos qui dant non indigentibus, PL 205:147–49. 8. Hildebert, Sermones de diversis 41: Synodus ad Pastores, PL 171:916ff. Only four of Hildebert’s sermons are accepted as genuinely his, whereas the rest are of uncertain authorship. His letters to Adela of Blois are generally assumed to be genuine; see Peter Von Moos, Hildebert von Lavardin 1056–1133 (Stuttgart: Pariser Historischen Studien, 1962). 9. Ambrose, De viduis, 1.3, PL 16:248.

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interested in the story of the widow of Sarepta, sometimes interpreting her role symbolically, as Cardinal Drogo of Asti (d. 1138) did in his sermon on the sacrament proper to Passion Sunday: he interpreted the widow as succoring God the Lamb through her kindness toward Elijah by feeding him with her last bit of food.10 Through this act of kindness, Drogo asserted, the widow became Christ’s spouse; she was the raven that changed into a dove, losing the blackness of her sin to become a better creature as Elijah’s (and, by extension, Christ’s) arrival elevated her widowhood to an exalted purpose.11 The widowhood of Anna was a key element in the high medieval liturgies of consecration of widows to chastity, and it affirmed the spiritual and prophetic gifts that arose from widowed chastity. Peter Abelard (1079–1142) praised Anna as an example that not only virgins, but also widows, could be spouses of Christ and examples of worldly renunciation; and Alan of Lille (1120–1202), in his guide to preaching, De arte praedicatoria, used Anna as an illustration of the Pauline preference for chastity.12 The passage describing Anna, Luke 2:36–38, was frequently glossed and sometimes treated to a more in-depth discussion, particularly in liturgical sermons celebrating the feasts of the Nativity, Presentation in the Temple, and Purification of the Virgin.13 Such sermons emphasized the Augustinian interpretation that Anna’s prophetic ability to recognize the infant Christ was sent by God because of her chaste 10. Drogo, Sermo de sacramento dominicae passionis, PL 166:1538. Similar interpretations of the widow of Sarepta in connection with prophecy arise in the sermons of Peter Damian, Sermon 48: II. Homilia de exaltatione sanctae crucis, PL 144:767; Peter of Blois, Sermones, PL 207:699ff.; Martin of Léon, Sermones, PL 208:500, and Sermones de sanctis: De sancta cruce, PL 209:33–34; in the latter sermon, Martin compared the widow of Sarepta to the Church, reiterating Drogo’s parallel between Elijah and Christ. 11. Drogo, Sermo de sacramento dominicae passionis, PL 166:1538. 12. Peter Abelard, Sermones, PL 178:596; Alan of Lille, De arte praedicatoria: De viduis, chap. 46, PL 210:194. Abelard’s letter, Epistle 7, to Heloise on the origins of female monasticism characterizes Anna’s profession of widowhood as the same office described by Paul in 1 Timothy 5:3 concerning the “true widow,” and Abelard also argues that widows in apostolic times contributed to the historical precedent for nuns and deaconesses (PL 178:237–38). 13. See Fulbert of Chartes, who explicitly makes the connection between Anna’s widowhood and prophecy, in Sermones ad populum, Sermo 3: De purificatione beatae Mariae, PL 141:319; see also Guerric of Igny, Sermones per annum, PL 185:70 (in which Anna is referred to not only as a prophetess of Christ’s nature but as a “mediatrix”); Adam of Dryburgh (Adamus Scotus), Sermones, Sermo 39, In eadem dominica infra octavam, nativitatis domini: de interna puritate mentis, qua soli Deo offerenda est, PL 198:353–63, and Sermo 40, In eadem dominica infra octavam nativitatis domini: de exercitio religiosae conversationis, pp. 363–64; and Martin of Léon, Sermones, PL 208:500. In Martin’s sermon, Anna is also celebrated together with the widow of Sarepta.



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widowhood.14 Always closely associated with the temple, Anna was also frequently paired in this context with Simeon, the old man who welcomed Christ into the temple at his presentation.15 Guerric (d. 1157), abbot of Igny and student of Bernard of Clairvaux, interpreted this pairing of Simeon and Anna as proof that both sexes were present to witness the incarnation of Christ. Jesus came to the old man (Simeon) and Mary to the widow (Anna) in the temple as a lord and lady might to a male and female servant. Guerric suggested that Simeon and Anna, through their respective modes of piety in the temple, provided instruction for both men and women on the progression to a superior way of life. He interpreted Anna as an exemplar of true widowhood and preached that her fasting and prayer night and day commended the sermon audience to do the same. Likewise, Simeon’s joyous reception of Christ in the temple was an example of male devotion. Together, the “just old man” (senem iustem) and the “widowed old woman” (viduam anum) represented the redeeming power of chastity for both sexes.16 The Premonstratensian canon Adam of Dryburgh’s sermon on the Feast of the Nativity interpreted Anna in her role as a widow serviens nocte et die in the temple as a multivalent symbol of Christian belief and community. Her long sojourn in the temple symbolized eight metaphorical or thematic “temples” in Scripture: the body of Christ, the Virgin Mary, the unity of the church, the assembly of holy men, our bodies, our souls, angelic and human intellectual capacity, and the kingdom of the Father.17 Another allegorical theme that preachers associated with widows and widowhood in high medieval preaching was the figure of the widow as the church (Ecclesia). Here again, this was an ancient topos that 14. Augustine, De bono viduitatis, chap. 7, PL 40:436 15. Honorius Augustodunensis, in his Gemma Animae, linked the themes of the temple, the Church, and the sixtyfold fruits of widowhood in the interesting interpretation that the time of the Church’s “widowhood” (tempus viduitatis Ecclesiae) was also the widow’s number, “sexagesima” (chap. 39, PL 172:653); this idea also appears in the sermons of Martin of Léon, Sermones, In septagesima II, PL 208:606. 16. Guerric of Igny, Sermone, vol. 1, ed. John Morson and Hilary Costello (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1970), Sermon 2:4–6, pp. 332–36. Guerric’s use of differentiated gender roles to express the value of chastity and the different ways male and female Christians receive the incarnate Christ may relate to broader themes in his writing, particularly maternal imagery concerning the divine, which were influential in Cistercian circles; see Carolyn Walker Bynum, Jesus As Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 120–21. 17. Adam of Dryburgh (Adamus Scotus), Sermon 60: In eadem dominica infra octavam nativitatis domini: De exercitio religiosae conversationis, PL 198:354.

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persisted in part out of tradition, but also in part as an expression of contemporary thought. In his sermons on the Song of Songs, Bernard of Clairvaux utilized the ancient image of the widowed Ecclesia as part of his thematic development of the church as Christ’s beloved seeking her spouse.18 Examples of specific biblical widows, such as the widow of Sarepta and Anna, could also function as analogues to the widowed church. The Augustinian canon Martin of Léon (1150–1203) identified both the Old Testament widow of Sarepta and the New Testament widow Anna as symbols for the widowhood of the church.19 He also employed a different interpretation of the widowhood in a comparison between the Ecclesia and the Synagogue.20 In the latter case, he employed the term “widow” in a negative way to denigrate the Synagogue as it was surpassed by the virginal figure of the Ecclesia: whereas the virginal soul remained a spouse of Christ, the widowed soul was the Synagogue who turned away from the gospels. Conflating a verse about the marriage of priests (Leviticus 21:14) with the fate of the Synagogue, Martin interpreted “a widow, or one divorced, [or a woman who has been defiled], or a harlot, these he shall not marry, but he shall take to wife a virgin” as a categorical repudiation of the Synagogue, and therefore determined that the “repudiated Synagogue is a widow.”21 Synagoga’s widowhood was a punishment imposed upon her because she did not turn to Christ, and because she failed to serve his precepts; thus she was separated from the body of Christ, even if she was not wholly thrust out of the church.22 18. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones in Cantica Canticorum, PL 183:829, 1015, 1135; see also Kienzle, The Sermon, 171. 19. Martin initially attempted to live as a regular canon at the monastery of St. Marcellus in Léon, but when that house was secularized by the episcopate, he moved to the collegiate Church of St. Isidore, where after his death in 1203 he was venerated by the brethren, with a chapel dedicated to his honor, though no official sanctification followed thereafter; see Vita S. Martini, AASS February II (February 11): 568–70. 20. While the figures of Synagoga and Ecclesia were commonplaces in theological writings, the formulation that Martin of Léon used here is rather rare in the sermon literature of the High Middle Ages; Martin had a precedent in Bede’s Commentarii in Pentateuchum (PL 91:353) concerning the verse “viduam et reputidatam, ac meretricem non ducat uxorem.” Rabanus Maurus and Walafrid Strabo wrote of the Synagogue as viduata (the Latin perfect passive participle form of the verb viduo—to deprive, bereave—used as an adjective, meaning deprived, bereaved, or widowed), but not as a vidua (the Latin noun for “widow”); cf. Rabanus Maurus, Commentaria in Libros Regem, PL 109:207; and Walafrid Strabo, Liber III regum, PL 113:605. 21. “Viduam, et repudiatam, ac meretricem non ducet uxorem, sed virginem. Vidua est repudiata Synagoga.” Martin of Léon, Sermones, Sermo tricesimus: In ascensione Domini, PL 208:1121. 22. “Dicitur etiam anima Christi sponsa, sed illa quae fidei simplicitate et actuum puritate incorrupta probatur et virgo. Est et vidua anima, quae discendens a jugo legis et Evangelii praecepta non



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Widowhood in this special case seems exceptionally negative; such a widow was not a figure that inspired either compassion or faith, as did the long-standing topos of the Ecclesia viduata, who represented the spouse continually lamenting the death of Christ. Rather, the Synagogue was a widow only in the sense of being left behind, without any of the virtues that were normally associated with widows in exegesis. The controlling idea in this sermon seemed to be the erosion of the dignity of the Synagogue in comparison to that of the church. Though the superiority of virginity over widowhood enhanced this argument, female chastity itself was not the central issue; rather the chastity of priests was Martin’s concern, indicated by his reference to the Leviticus verse restricting the consorts of priests.23 This sermon also reflected a deteriorating interpretation of the relationship between Jews and Christians, and the perception of Jews in relationship to the Christian church. Whereas Drogo, writing over half a century earlier than Martin of Léon, had characterized the widow of Sarepta as a symbolic sponsa Christi, Martin, in his sermon De coena domini, elected a more antagonistic interpretation of the widow of Sarepta as the Synagogue. While Martin had also identified the widow of Sarepta as symbolizing the Christian Ecclesia elsewhere, in the sermon De coena domini Martin represented the woman of Sarepta as the negative example of the Jewish Synagogue left widowed by Moses, and Elijah as Christ, bringing the Christian message to the Jews who stubbornly refused to hear it.24 Though his original source for the widowed Synagogue was Bede, this trope was not a common thread in the fabric of widowhood’s theological representations. Such textual machinations suggest that in the noisy parliament of exegetical traditions, liturgical commonplacservat. Est repudiata, quae peccando a Christi corpore separatur, etiamsi ab Ecclesia non projiciatur.” Ibid. Cf. Bede, Commentarii in Pentateuchum, PL 91:353: “Virgo enim Ecclesia est, cui dicit Apostolus: Despondi enim uni viro virginem castam. Alter vidua anima quae, discedens a jugo legis, praeceptum Evangelicum non servat, et repudiata, quae peccando a Christi corpore separatur.” Interestingly, Peter of Celles (d. 1187), abbot of St. Remigius at Reims and later bishop of Chartres, marshaled a similar argument to defend the purity of the Virgin. In a sermon celebrating the Assumption of Mary, commenting on the verse from the Song of Songs 6:8 “una est columba mea,” Peter specified that the dove was the spouse, the Church, and the virgin mother Mary; specifically, the one and only desired “dove” was not, as in Leviticus 21:14, a widow, a repudiated woman, or one who has been linked to another husband (PL 202:836). 23. Martin, In ascensione Domini, PL 208:1121ff. 24. Martin, In coena Domini, PL 208:856.

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es, and authors’ motives, widowhood itself was often subordinated to any number of other rhetorical objectives. Martin’s harsh application of the concepts of vidua and viduata in this context stand out as unusual in the sermon literature on widowhood throughout the Middle Ages, but very characteristic of the growing anti-Jewish discourse of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. As in the famous example of Cato the Elder’s tendency to slip his recommendation for the destruction of Carthage into speeches for any occasion, medieval sermon writers of the late twelfth century found reason to articulate the church’s growing hostility toward Jews even in unlikely sermon topics. Another contemporary concern that drew sermon authors to the subject of widowhood was the problem of heresy, and here a discussion of widows and their state of holy continence emerged in a more focused and practical fashion than in the preceding examples. Authors such as Bernard of Clairvaux, Martin of Léon, and Eckbert of Schönau reiterated the debates of fourth-century theologians in an effort to correct the Cathar claim that widows who remarried committed adultery; such correction was part of the larger project of addressing the Cathars’ erroneous rejection of marriage and procreation. The pressures brought to bear on the church to clarify its position on marriage contributed to the ecclesiastical reaffirmation of marriage in the thirteenth century, with an attendant interest in promoting married saints and the pastoral care of married persons.25 In response to the Cathar renunciation of sex and procreation, twelfth- and early thirteenth-century preachers emphasized for the laity the correct interpretation of chastity in life’s various estates. In 1144, Bernard of Clairvaux included the clarification of such issues in his sermons on the Song of Songs, in a section that discussed a variety of heretical errors, including those regarding marriage, baptism, purgatory, prayers for the dead, and the invocation of the saints. Concerning widows, he noted that, contrary to the heretics’ claims, the widow’s remarriage was just as licit as the first marriage of a virginal wife.26 Eckbert of Schönau and Martin of Léon devoted more lengthy ser25. Elliott, Spiritual Marriage, 134. 26. “De erroribus haereticorum circa nuptias, baptismum parvulorum, purgatorium, orationes pro defunctis et invocatione sanctorum.” Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones in Cantica canticorum, PL 183:1096.



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mons to the subject. In his sermon correcting the heretics’ errors about marriage, Eckbert focused in detail on the biblical evidence for remarriage, including the marriage of widows, especially the Pauline teachings that a widow was dissolved from her obligation to her husband upon his death (and therefore was not a bigamist, as the Cathars claimed), and Paul’s encouragement to younger widows to remarry and bear children.27 Martin of Léon, drawing on Augustine’s letter to Ecdicia and other works on marriage, preached on the one hand the error of the Cathars’ condemnation of marriage while still asserting on the other that the goodness of virginity was not coequal with married or widowed chastity; for widows, marriage was a concession, whereas virginity for women was preferred but not commanded.28 Later on in the same sermon he methodically refuted the Cathar condemnation of widows’ second marriages, beginning with a list of laudable widows from Scripture such as Naomi, the widow of Sarepta, Judith, and Anna.29 Martin celebrated Anna as “the widow who first acknowledged Christ, whom the Virgin bore,” giving Martin opportunity to underscore the relationship between virginity and widowhood.30 Following Augustine (especially his work De bono viduitatis), Martin distinguished the integrity of virginal chastity from the widow’s maintaining continence when she has known pleasure.31 Unlike sermons that were concerned primarily with explicating the symbolic or allegorical meaning of passages of Scripture, sermons on Cathar misunderstandings of widows’ remarriage related directly to the pastoral care of the laity and preachers’ concerns that laypeople received accurate theological information. The authors required systematic refutation of heretical belief. Like the fathers on whom they based their texts, authors of anti-Cathar sermons found themselves in the difficult position of asserting their preference for widowed chastity while still wholeheartedly (lest a lukewarm or vague response seem to support Cathar teachings) reassuring those who remarried that they were not perpetrators of adultery or bigamy. 27. Rom 7:23, 1 Tm 5:14; Eckbert of Schönau, Sermones contra Catharos: Circa primam haeresim de conjugio, PL 195:34. 28. Martin of Léon, Sermones, Sermo Quartu in Natale Domini II, PL 208:489–90. 29. Ibid., 494, 500–501. 30. “Christum quem Virgo peperit, vidua primum agnovit” (ibid., 500). This formulation originated with Isidore of Seville. 31. “Felix ergo virgo, qui intacta, fortiter vidua quia experta” (ibid., 501–3).

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Discussions of widowhood in twelfth-century monastic and early scholastic sermons indicates some of the language available in the mental dictionary of those authors who were reading and writing about the subject of viduitas in the context of study of Scripture rather than those using the subject for the explicit purpose of lay preaching. Yet it is difficult to imagine from this repertory of texts whether such a mental dictionary existed for the laity who may have heard these sermons, or ones like them, preached in cathedrals and parish churches. The transmission of ideas about pious widowhood to the laity becomes easier to trace as popular preaching turned the sermon genre into a decidedly oral event rather than a meditative and exegetical one, and as married and widowed saints appeared on the horizon to embody pastoral examples of female chastity more concretely than complex layers of exegesis permitted.

Preaching to Widows as a Social Order in the High and Later Middle Ages An understanding of the meaning of “widow” as a religious category in sermon literature is complicated in the high and later Middle Ages by an overall shift in medieval society’s self-conscious perception of its social composition. Geneviève Hasenohr has argued that the categorization of women as wives, widows, and virgins that predominated in the theological texts of the earlier Middle Ages waned as clerics of the later Middle Ages recognized, in their efforts at pastoral care, new social realities. As medieval professions became more specifically regulated and social organization became correspondingly more complex, so too did medieval religious authors realign traditional schematic “orders” for both men and women into new categories according to profession, class, and lay status.32 This realignment indicated not only a changing socioeconomic situation, but also acknowledged women’s anxieties about their spiritual position. To assuage this concern, medieval authors shifted their emphasis from a strict paradigm of spiritual merits, 32. Hasenohr, “La vie quotidienne,” 25–26. Cf. Bernhard Jussen, “Virgins-Widows-Spouses: On the language of moral distinction as applied to women and men in the Middle Ages,” History of the Family 7 (2002): 13–32; and Der Name der Witwe, 319.



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broken down by number and category, to a more general idealization of the contemplative life and the composition of spiritual exercises that could lead laypeople of all estates closer to this ideal.33 Earlier medieval paradigms had defined medieval women’s status according to the three orders of virgins, widows, and wives (and, in descending order of which had a counterpart in the “orders” of medieval men who prayed, fought, and worked). Both of these systems of social ordering underwent changes and challenges in the later Middle Ages, as these limited categories no longer encompassed the various groups that composed the medieval body social, nor did these categories express the range and diversity of their roles and activities. While Hasenohr’s interpretation of this realignment of social orders identifies an important current in medieval preaching, the identification of widows as a group or “order” nevertheless continued, both in sermon discourse and in social practice, throughout the later Middle Ages and early modern period.34 The tripartite categorization of women as wives, widows, and virgins in fact remained a durable rhetorical construct in discussions of widowhood. Authors continued to situate widowed continence in relationship to marriage and virginity and meditated on the varieties of female chastity they observed in women’s spiritual communities. This tripartite structure also fit neatly into the rhetorical style of Scholastic preaching, which employed the tricolon, a rhymed or rhythmic triplet. For example, in his sermon to widows, Guibert of Tournai situated widows within the triplet of “bona enim est copulatio conjugalis, melior continentia vidualis, perfectior integritas virginalis.”35 Preachers used the ad status sermon, a genre that was more specific and directive than liturgical preaching, to offer direct pastoral advice to designated groups within lay society.36 Jacques 33. Hasenohr, “La vie quotidienne,” 31. 34. Hasenohr underestimates the durability of an “order” of widows in later medieval sermons but is correct that they are not distinguished as “orders” in devotional literature that offered laypeople a regimen of prayer and contemplation interspersed with worldly tasks. Rudolf Bell also comments on the relative paucity of advice manuals to widows despite the proliferation of that genre in fourteenthand fifteenth-century Italy; see Bell, How to Do It: Guides to Good Living in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 265. 35. “For the union of marriage is good, widowed continence is better, intact virigity the most perfect.” Guibert of Tournai, Sermo ad viduas, in Carla Casagrande, ed., Prediche alle donne del secolo XIII (Milan: Bompinani, 1978), 97. 36. Nicole Bériou, “Les Sermons Latins Après 1200,” in The Sermon, 393.

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of Vitry’s sermons expressed many of the same associations with the varieties of chastity as did his hagiographical writings about Mary of Oignies and her beguine circle, and described these varieties as ordines; his interpretative focus in preaching to widows was to examine their relationship to virgins. In his ad status “sermon to widows and continents” Jacques used the metaphor of the church as Noah’s ark, in which there were two chambers, the active and the contemplative, but also, in another way, three chambers, designated for virgins, continents, and the married.37 He employed this architectural metaphor in his Sermones de sanctis, in which he instructed virgins that they were an order who followed the example of Mary, the “doyenne of virginity”; their companions were widows and wives, who were subordinate in every possible sense: Good, indeed, is the married order; better is the widowed order; best is the virginal order or state. Their elevation exceeds the others in degree, and surpasses the others in dignity. This was indicated by Solomon’s temple in which there were three floors: the lowest floor, namely by which the order of the married is designated; the middle floor, by which the order of the widow is designated, and the highest floor—which was more narrow than the others—by which the order of virgins and the strict way of virginity is designated.38

Jacques also used the paradigm of spiritual fruits, noting the sixtyfold designation was awarded to widows because their cares were greater 37. “Archa quidem Noe, id est Ecclesia, bicamerata est quantum ad activos et contemplativos; tricamerata est quantum ad virgines, continentes, et virgines.” Sermon 69, Ad viduas et continentes, Bnf lat. 3284, fol. 185, cited in Hasenohr, “La vie quotidienne,” 22n9. 38. “‘Primiceria uirginitatis’; Bonus quidem ordo coniugalis; melior ordo uidualis, optimus ordo seu status uirginalis. Alios in gradu superlatio excedens, et dignitate precellens, quod signatum est in templo Salamonis, in quo tria tabulata erant: inferius scilicet per quod ordo coniugatorum, medium per quod ordo uiduarum, et superius—quod aliis artius erat—per quod ordo uirginum et arta uia uirginitatis designatur.” Sermo 1, Communis de uirginibus, in Muessig, Faces of Women in the Sermons of Jacques de Vitry, 51 (translation) and 164 (Latin text). The spatial and architectural metaphors are similar in their organization to actual illuminations that circulated in manuscripts of the popular Speculum Virginum, ca. 1140, attributed (inconclusively) to Konrad of Hirsau. The text in book 7 of the Speculum Virginum, in the dialogue between Theodora, a virgin, and her interlocutor, Peregrinus, discussed the vere vidua according to 1 Timothy 5, and the thirty-, sixty-, and hundredfold fruits. One of the text’s illuminated pages showed the “fruits” of the three estates through images of four married couples selected from among the biblical patriarchs, four widows, and six virgins “growing” on a stalk topped by Christ. Another folio in the manuscript showed the hand signs illustrated for each estate (Cologne, Hist. Archiv W 276 a, fol. 55, mid-twelfth century). Yet another image depicted the three estates in a series of three parallel horizontal panels, in which (from top to bottom) virgins, widows, and wives harvest their appointed share of wheat; see Jutta Seyfarth, ed., Speculum Virginum, CCCM 5 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1990).



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than those of married people: they performed “works of perfection,” they did not have children, and they were “bound to many things to which married women are not bound.”39 Unlike some of the earlier examples that paired the continence of virgins and widows as a tighter unit within the varieties of chastity, Jacques realigned the categories to denote conjugal and widowed continence as praiseworthy states, but emphasized their distance from intact virginity. For Jacques, the virgin’s wholeness of body was all-important: Virginity is called abstinence from illicit practice both in body and in mind. . . . Therefore the Apostle says I have espoused you to one husband so that I may present you as chaste virgin to Christ (2 Cor. 11, 2). However, subsumed under this abstinence, just like under a genus, a threefold continence is contained, that is: conjugal chastity which is abstinence from all illicit coition; widowed continence which is abstinence from all coition after the breaking of the body; virginal continence which is abstinence from all coition with the integrity of the flesh.40

Perhaps to underline the distinction between the “unbroken” body of virgins as compared to the “broken” body of widows, Jacques of Vitry further highlighted the differences between virginal and widowed chastity, noting that whereas both groups earn spiritual fruits in heaven, virgins also earned the “aureole,” an honor denied to widows, because it is reserved for “those who have a special claim from their works, namely, martyrs, virgins, and doctors.”41 Jacques of Vitry’s emphasis on intact virginity and its superiority to the other two estates of chastity, together with his heavy-handed sermons and exempla concerning the woes of the married life, suggest that 39. “Sexagesimus uiduarum numerus est que debent opera perfectionis habere; nam si licet coniugatis thesaurizare propter filios, hoc non licet uiduis, et ad multa alia tenentur ad que non tenentur coniugate.” Muessig, Faces of Women, 57 and 170. 40. “Virginitas continencia a re illicita tam corpore quam mente. . . . Vnde Apostolus: Dispondi uos uni uiro uirginem castam exhibere Christo (2 Cor. 11,2). Sub hac autem abstinencia tanquam sub genere triplex continencia continentur, id est, coniugalis castitas que est abstinencia ab omni coitu illicito, uidualis continencia que est abstinencia ab omni coitu post corporis fractionem, uirginalis continentia que est omnimodi abstinencia ab omni coitu cum integritate carnis.” Sermo 2, Communis de uirginibus, in Muessig, Faces of Women, 64 and 176. 41. “Eis [virginis] enim non solum promittur aurea . . . sed insuper, aureola que debetur hiis qui habunt prerogatiuam operum, id est, martiribus, doctoribus, et uirginibus.” Jacques de Vitry, Sermo 1, De communis de uirginibus, in Muessig, Faces of Women, 57 and 170. Thomas Aquinas came to the same conclusion using his own logical methods in the Summa Theologica, Suppl., q. 96, a. 5, “Whether an Aureole Is Due on Account of Virginity?” Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947), 2986–88.

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his attitude toward female chastity and spiritual potential was essentially pessimistic. As his translator Carolyn Muessig has noted, however, much of Jacques’s anti-marriage rhetoric in his sermons (in particular in his exempla) occurred in the context of encouraging clerical celibacy; his denigration of marriage enhanced the attractiveness of the church as the cleric’s true spouse.42 Jacques’s sometime tendency toward a misogynistic interpretation of marriage and his strong advocacy for physically intact virginity was also tempered by his identification of the goods of marriage. Like Martin of Léon and Eckbert of Schönau, Jacques recognized the Cathar rejection of marriage and procreation as a heresy that needed clarification by orthodox preachers, and he praised the merits of the conjugal bond.43 In his writings on Mary of Oignies and her beguine companions, Jacques praised women who pursued the beguine vita activa in all three states of chastity. Thus, his sermons articulated a rhetorical as well as a social space—emphasized through his architectural metaphors of levels and chambers—for both the conceptualization and practice of widowed continence. Another preacher who directed an ad status sermon to widows, the Franciscan Guibert of Tournai, drew heavily on the work of Jacques of Vitry.44 Like Jacques, Guibert employed the tripartite hierarchy of chastity to locate widows within medieval society. Significantly, his sermon to widows collected many of the diverse themes we have seen in this chapter into a single, coherent sermon designed to instruct widows as well as the larger Christian community about the nature and duties of the widowed state. Guibert’s sermon drew its theme from 1 Timothy 5, “honora viduas que vere vidue sunt,” and discussed the duties the Christian community owed to the “office” of widows as well as the moral and spiritual responsibilities of widows within that office. Drawing on traditional passages from Scripture identifying widows as vulnerable persons, Guibert argued that widows should be “supported in their office, protected by subsidies, visited for consolation, and defended in their practical affairs.”45 42. Muessig, Faces of Women, 35. 43. Ibid., 36–37. 44. Bériou, “Les Sermons Latins Après 1200,” 392. 45. “Effendere preconiis, fovende subsidiis, visitande solatiis, deffendende in negotiis.” Guibert, Sermo ad viduas, in Casagrande, Prediche alle donne del secolo XIII, 97.



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Guibert’s sermon suggested multiple audiences: in addition to providing instruction for widows themselves, the sermon taught priests and others in the community about their obligations in caring for widows in general, and how to recognize the vere vidua in particular. Guibert described the true widow through the example of Anna in the temple, dedicated to prayers and fasting nocte ac die, and also through Judith, because like the Old Testament heroine the true widow should resist the workings of the devil and the temptations of the flesh, including gluttony. Like both Judith and the widow of Sarepta, the true widow was mature and restrained (Judith’s abstinence from food and drink in comparison to the drunkenness of Holofernes was considered a particularly apt example of widowed fasting and sobriety).46 To emphasize these points, Guibert borrowed liberally from Jerome’s letters to Furia and to the mother and daughter of Gaul to articulate specific ways in which widows could emulate these examples, such as avoiding vain attire or makeup.47 The ad status sermon of the High Middle Ages added little that was theologically new to the discourse of widowhood, but it organized the many patristic and medieval exegetical traditions on widowhood and articulated them not only for scholars and preachers but also for lay audiences. Such sermons perpetuated the tripartite model of female chastity as inextricably linked to widowhood, despite the social and economic changes that complicated corporate identities in the later Middle Ages. This ancient formulation was joined by new rhetoric, influenced by Scholastic methods, to illustrate the nature of chaste widowhood. Such sermons enumerated different kinds of widowhood and often highlighted a single saint’s example in addition to or instead of the tripartite hierarchy.48 These new approaches to preaching about widowhood in 46. Ibid., 99 47. Ibid., 103. 48. Other schemas for organizing and dividing social groups for spiritual purposes coexisted alongside the ubiquitous virgin-widow-wife formulation in medieval rhetoric. The Carolingian author Theodulf of Orleans addressed his sermon De omnibus ordinibus huius saeculi to a diverse audience, including virgins, men, women, widows, the powerful, the poor, and servants. In the portion of the text dedicated to widows, Theodulf urged widows to be silent and keep custody of their widowhood, so that they may be the sort of widows who, together with orphans, await the Lord (Theodulf of Orléans, Fragmenta Sermonum, PL 105:280–81). Likewise, Odilo of Cluny’s sermon on the Holy Cross addressed society in terms of its various members’ relationship to this holy symbol: he characterized the Cross as

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the High Middle Ages addressed widows as a literal, visible group within medieval communities. Sermons educated the laity about widows’ need for charity and pastoral care, and closely identified them with the service and patronage of beguine movements and tertiary institutions. A notice from Munich’s city council in 1484, moreover, suggests that widows in that city were recognized as corporate presence, as they were assigned to march as a group in the Corpus Christi festival procession, positioned second to last in the parade, among the representatives from the city’s various guilds. Widows occupied the end-of-the-line position, just after the wood choppers and before the city’s cooks, although, since not all of Munich’s guilds were listed in the processional decree, the exact rank of each group in the processional is not certain.49 It is also not clear whether this reference to widows implied vowesses, recent widows who were currently in mourning, or widows of guild members who were identified as a separate group rather than with the male members of their affiliated trades. In any case, such examples suggest that widows commanded recognition as a group, whether located within the rhetorical structures of preaching or in a more concrete social and professional status. Just as widows had long been a quasi-clerical order within the church, in the later Middle Ages, they developed a quasi-professional identity in secular life. Their charity and pious works, routinely prescribed for their state from page and pulpit, was not explicitly professionalized, but women’s lay ministries in hospitals and other charities represented a trend in that direction. In the mendicant orders and similar religious associations of the high and later Middle Ages, widows often sought modes of pious living that enabled both private devotion and public activities and that brought them into contact with religious and conferred a privileged spiritual status without the official membership in a religious order. The circulation of the preaching manuals, compilations such as the Golden Legend, and collections of exempla narratives aided later the defender of widows, the chastity of virgins, the father of orphans, the joy of priests, and the abstinence of monks, among other examples (Sermo de sancta cruce, PL 142:1034). 49. Helmuth Stahleder, ed. Chronik der Stadt München, Herzogs und Bürgerstadt. Die Jahre 1157–1505 (Munich: Hugendubel, 1995), 505–6. As of 1340, the city of Munich had appointed an Anweiser or Vorspruch—representative to the courts—on behalf of widows, orphans, and minor children, according the city law book, the Versiegeltes Buch. Only a man of high standing could serve, but he was not required to be a professional jurist (ibid., 120).



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medieval preachers not only in addressing established groups within medieval society and but also in redefining these groups according to ecclesiastical ideals. In preaching to widows, the use of narrative exempla stories and thematic incorporation of relevant saints’ examples took place alongside the older rhetorical apparatus of patristic rhetoric, examples from Scripture, and exegetical catenae referring to widows. Sermon stories connected the merits of continent widowhood to the veneration of the Virgin by characterizing the Virgin Mary as the “helper of widows.” Versions of the life of St. Elizabeth, which became widely available through the circulation of Latin and vernacular collections of saints’ lives, helped preachers to flesh out their teachings for laywomen interested in the “profession” of widowhood in secular life.

Danger and Discretion: Pious Widows in Preachers’ Exempla Exempla, or instructive anecdotes used to underline a sermon’s main theme, were a staple of the preaching revival of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and continued to be useful to preachers throughout the Middle Ages. Jacques of Vitry closed every address in his collection of Sermones feriales et communes with an exemplum.50 Exempla collections drew on miracle stories from early medieval texts, such as the Vitae Patrum and the writings of Bede, and also borrowed from the popular fable genre, including Aesop’s fables and more contemporary collections such as the Fables of Marie de France. Although originally located within long sermons, many popular exempla stories were extracted from sermons and compiled separately in new collections as handbooks for clerics’ use in composing sermons. Compilers recognized the value in organizing exempla into collections for preachers’ reference. These widely read collections, such as the thirteenth century Gesta Romanorum, the Dialogus Miraculorum of Caesarius of Heisterbach, and the somewhat-later Alphabetum of Arnold of Liège, could both be used as reference works for sermon composition and stand on their own as story collections. The continued compilation of miracle tales and other stories, such as the fifteenth-century collection of mira50. Muessig, Faces of Women, 15.

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cles of the Virgin, drawn largely from earlier sources, by the Dominican preacher Johannes Herolt (d. 1486), testified to their usefulness and popularity. These collections were in turn often digested and combined in manuscripts with other pastoral texts.51 Exempla concerning widows functioned as a type of preaching ad status, since they often invoked some of the same themes and messages as explicit sermons and advice treatises did concerning widows’ conduct.52 Stories meant to edify widows also educated medieval audiences more generally: they defined the piety appropriate to widows but also illustrated the value of Marian devotion and the importance of confession. As Mark Johnston has argued concerning the exempla of Raymond Lull, tales and audiences were matched “according to the virtues and vices whose understanding and exercise they promote.”53 Lessons about widowhood in exempla tales generally articulated three themes: praise for the widow and the spiritual rewards of the widowed state, the difficulties of maintaining proposed chastity, and narratives relating the vulnerability of widowhood (and the powers of the Virgin’s intervention in protecting widows). One kind of text that falls into the first category is the homiletic reference associating the chaste widow with the turtledove. This bird was thought never to seek another mate after hers died, hence authors interpreted the “natural” chastity of the turtledove as a symbol of the Apostle’s expressed preference for widowed chastity. Initially introduced as a topos in Western Christendom by Ambrose in the Hexameron, this trope was used consistently throughout the Middle Ages, and particularly so as bestiaries and aviaries came into widespread use in the twelfth century.54 A mid-fourteenth-century 51. This transmission history lent itself to many variations of the same or similar stories, which are helpfully (though not exhaustively) tracked by indices such as F. C. Tubach’s Index Exemplorum: An Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeaketemia, 1969). 52. Some exempla employ the terms matrona and vidua interchangeably to describe widowed women. Exempla that are labeled “de quadam matrona” almost always describe a woman on her own, with no mention of a husband or children in the story. 53. Mark D. Johnston, “Do Exempla Illustrate Everyday Life?” Presentation at the Modern Language Association Convention, Chicago, Ill., November 1994, cited from text reproduced at http:// mahan.wonkwang.ac.kr/link/med/society/daily-life/johnston.html. 54. For example, see T. S. White, The Book of Beasts: Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century (New York: Dover, 1984), 145–46. Cf. the Aberdeen Bestiary, created ca. 1200 (Aberdeen University Library MS 24, fols. 31v–33v); following the description of the turtledove in this manuscript is an entry for the palm tree, associated with the widower Job (the theme of the entry revolves around the verse, “I shall multiply my days as the palm,” Job 29:18). The invocation of the turtledove



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text, housed in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, attests to the continued use of such texts for preaching purposes. The author included this text, De viduali continentia per similem turturum, in a book of exempla titled the Liber de similitudinibus rerum. Widowed continence was best shown through the behavior of the turtledove because “the turtledove is a most chaste bird” and loves solitude after she loses her mate.55 Moreover, taking an example from Aristotle, the author noted that the turtledove loses its feathers in winter in order to build its nest, and so too, should the widow in the difficult “winter” of her life remain in the home of her husband and lose the “feathers” of pleasures and riches. In the summer of her life, when there was prosperity, she should use it for the benefit of her children and for fruitful good works such as almsgiving and care of the poor. 56 Another exemplum, preserved in a fifteenth-century manuscript, concerned a widow who became a nun and lived in a convent with two virgins. The first of the virgins died, and as the widow lay on her deathbed, the surviving virgin asked the widow to report back from heaven what her companions experienced after death. Thirty days later, the widow returned to her companion in a luminous cloud with a heavenly chorus of virgins and widows, and announced her great joy in her heavenly reward. Moreover, when the virgin asked about the status of their other friend, the widow said that “if all the world were parchment, and the sea were of ink,” they could not hold the full expression of how the virgin exceeded her in merit. When the vision disappeared, the smell of the heavenly flowers that had adorned the spiritual chorus lingered for many days.57 This tale affirmed the widow’s particular role as a mediator between the living and the dead, but also characterized her spiritual reto stand for chaste widowhood also occurred frequently in sermons; see Guerric of Igny, Sermones per annun: Sermo II, Adventu Domini, PL 185:70; Alan of Lille, De arte praedicatoria, PL 201:194; and also Clm 3435, fols. 24r–25v, “Sermo denouo anno aliude de collectus non ex Nider.” 55. “Vidualis continentia qualiter sunt seruanda turtures ostendunt, quia turtur est auis castissima . . . et memoria perdite societatis semper gemit, solitudinem diligit.” Clm 23432, Liber de similitudinibus rerum: est collectio amplissima exemplorum in X libros distributa, bk. 3, chap. 80, fols. 113v–114r (cf. Clm 14057 and 16465). 56. Clm 23432, fols. 113v–114r 57. “Si totus mundus foret pergamentum et mare incaustum.” Clm 447 (fifteenth century), Exempla, fol. 126r. Although this manuscript contains other tales from the Gesta Romanorum, this particular exemplum did not originate from that source and does not appear in Tubach’s index. A Bavarian-dialect version of this tale appears in Cgm 626, fols. 219r–220r, among exempla in a collection titled Der Magnet Unser Liben Frauen, dating from 1493 from the Benedictine library of Tegernsee.

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ward as inferior to the virgins’. In a similar vein, Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus Miraculorum included an exemplum that illustrated a similar hierarchy between these two types of holiness: Theodoric, the bishop of Livonia, had a vision of two saints consecrating groups of virgins and widows. St. Margaret—virgin and martyr—admitted the virgins (depicted as nuns) to the veil, while Mary Magdalene—a penitent saint who reinforced the notion of widows’ spiritual bereavement—attended to the widows.58 Caesarius included several exempla in the Dialogus that identified divine interventions for “true” widows: in one tale, a pious widow’s house was spared from a fire.59 In another, a widow named Hildegund who, like Anna, “departed not from the temple in the manner of those widows of the Gospel serving God with fasting and prayer” received the Eucharist from Christ when her own son was not willing to bring a priest to her as she lay gravely ill.60 Such tales were possibly intended to reassure women that, despite the hardships of the widowed state, widowed chastity afforded them divine protection in their earthly lives as well as spiritual rewards in heaven, and that such benefits applied to ordinary widows as well as to saintly figures. More commonly, however, exempla focused not on the fruits of chaste widowhood but on its dangers. Whereas the stories highlighting the rewards awaiting chaste widows tended to locate the widows in convents, or, in the case of Hildegund, in the “temple,” monitory exempla most often described widows on their own in the world, and thus addressed the ancient concern that proposed widowhood was best practiced in a conventual setting.61 Clm 447, the same manuscript that preserved the tale of the widow as heavenly messenger to her fellow sister, also contained the grisly exemplum of a noble widow who was impreg58. Caesarius, Dialogus Miraculorum, 7.80; in another exemplum concerning the Magdalene, St. Elizabeth and the Virgin Mary join her in appearing to a devoted monk (7.15). 59. Ibid., 10.31, pp. 39–40. 60. “Haec more illius viduae evanglicae pene numquam recedebat de templo, ieiuniis et obsecrationibus serviens Deo” (ibid., 9.36, p. 192). The language alone suggests the reference to Anna, even though she is not mentioned by name; cf. Luke 2:37. 61. A similar case was the exemplum of a poor woman (probably a widow) who for a long time devoted her prayers and almsgiving to Mary, but was graced with a vision of the Virgin only after she has entered a convent and dedicated herself to prayer every night in the church. This tale (Clm 19166, fol. 21r–21v) is preserved in a group of exempla titled “Miracula de Sancta Marie” (fols. 15–30) dating from the fourteenth century and owned by the monks of Tegernsee. Besides the exempla, the manuscript contains a collection of the miracles of St. Catherine and other devotional texts.



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nated by a relative with whom she lived. Desperately afraid that her sin would be discovered, she compounded her transgression by attempting suicide.62 She tried to hang herself, stab herself, and poison herself by swallowing sand, but none of these methods resulted in her death. Unable to die and unable to live with her shame, the widow repented to the Virgin Mary, who offered her comfort and ordered her to make her confession. The widow obediently went to the Dominican preacher Jordanus, confessed, and, following his counsel, entered the religious life.63 The Dominican preacher Thomas of Cantimpré (ca. 1200–1270) compiled a book of sermon stories, Bonum Universale de Apibus (On the Good Work of Bees, ca. 1260), in which several exampla elaborated on the fear of worldly contamination in widows. He included a tale of a married woman who feared her beauty would entice other men and lead her into unchastity, and thus was miraculously given leprous outbreaks on her face. After her divine recovery, her husband died within the year, allowing the recent widow to enter a Dominican convent with her considerable possessions. Another rich widow in Thomas’s collection was both generous and chaste but plagued with mysterious pain until she was liberated—through an eruption of tricolored stones that poured from her side—by the Virgin Mary.64 The particular significance of the unusual story of the tricolored stones as the source of the woman’s trouble is not entirely clear, but the curious tale is consistent with Thomas’s 62. This tale, which is also not indexed in Tubach’s register as an exemplum concerning widows, is preserved in a group of exempla in Clm 447, and is titled “quedam nobilis vidua per cognatum suum cui commansit impregnatur” (fol. 126r); the same tale appears in Clm 19166, fol. 20r, under the rubric “de quadam vidua.” 63. David Flory has astutely suggested that such Marian tales engaged the Virgin Mary’s intercession specifically as a powerful counterbalance to the Church’s authoritarian exercise of power; in this case applying her mercy on behalf of the widow who might have been considered culpable by ecclesiastical authorities for the illicit act; see Flory, “The Social Uses of Religious Literature: Challenging Authority in the Thirteenth-Century Miracle Tale,” Essays in Medieval Studies: Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association, vol. 13, eds. Thomas Bestul and Thomas N. Hall (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 1996), 61. For example, here, Mary overrode the widow’s (reasonable) pessimism that her mortal sins could be expunged, and sent her to Jordanus, who expiated her sins through commending her to the religious life. This exemplum may also be an oblique statement that proposed chastity for widows was truly possible only within the walls of the convent. 64. Thomas of Cantimpré, Bonum Universale de Apibus (Douai, 1627), 2.30, p. 335, and 2.29, pp. 291–92. In the latter story, Thomas claimed that he had kept part of the tricolored stones (red, white, and black) that poured from the mysterious wound the Virgin healed: “Partem autem lapillorum habuimus, et vulnus eruptionis, nisi verecudia obstitusset, videssemus.”

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fascination with the interplay between the natural and the supernatural worlds, and the meaning of such interaction in morality and pastoral care. As Rachel Smith suggests in her doctoral study of Thomas’s exempla, stories that reflected upon the boundary between the marvelous and the natural (based on his considerable formal study of natural phenomena, such as plants and stones, in works like De rerum natura) informed many of Thomas’s moral tales.65 In the case of the afflicted widow, the marvelous outpouring of the stones expressed somatically a moral disturbance in the widow’s chaste profession, and Thomas’s efficacy in ministering to this ailment. The stories in Thomas’s collection also evince a concern, in contrast to Jacques of Vitry’s more confident view of women’s spiritual pursuits in a worldly environment, about the dangers of worldly contamination for independent widows and the need for supervision by confessors and institutions. In another tale, set in ancient Rome, an otherwise pious widow was accused, because of rumors instigated by the devil, of conceiving a child by her own son: I heard that a certain very religious widow was in the city of Rome, who, having a small son, always placed her son in bed with her until he was an adult. On account of this arose by devilish suggestion that the mother conceived from her own son. The devil, however, fearing that she would not suffer regret for that, since she gave many alms and prayed to the Virgin Mary, transformed himself in the appearance of a scholar and going to the Emperor of the Romans, he said: Lord, I am such an experienced astrologer that I am never mistaken. I know how to predict the future, to reveal the hidden future, and many other new things, that you will be able know with certain proof if you would want to retain me in your household.66

65. Rachel Smith, “Exemplarity and Its Limits in the Hagiographical Corpus of Thomas of Cantimpré” (doctoral diss., Harvard University, 2012). 66. “Audivi quod quedam vidua valde religiosa erat in ciuitate romana, que paruulum suum habens filium semper in lecto secum ponebat donec fuisset adultus. Unde dyabolica sugestione quadam vice accidit, quod mater ex proprio filio concepit. Timens autem dyabolus ne peniteret eo quod multas elemosinas faciebat et beatam virginem salutabat, transfigurabat se in speciem scolaris et ueniens ad imperatorem romanum ait: Domine, ego sum peritissimus astronomus ita qui numquam fallor. Scio futura predicere, futura latentia reuelare, et multa alia noui, que certo experimeto cognoscere poteris, si me de familia nostra uolueritis retinere.” Clm 23435, fols. 25v–26r; cf. Jacques of Vitry’s version of the tale, in The Exempla or Illustrative Stories from the Sermones Vulgare, ed. Thomas Frederick Crane, Folk-Lore Society Publications 26 (London: Folk-Lore Society, 1890; reprint, Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1967), 110–11, 246–47.



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The devil persuaded the emperor that if he suffered this woman to go unpunished, evil events would befall the Empire, and so the woman was called before the emperor to be judged for her sins: However, when the woman entered the house of the Emperor, the demon began to be terrified and to gnash his teeth, and the Emperor said to him: What is the matter with you? And the devil was silent. When the woman drew near however, he began to emit a fearful shrieking and he said: “Behold, Mary came with the woman and led her by the hand.” And saying this, he disappeared, receding with a whirlwind and a foul stench. In this way the above-mentioned woman through the virtue of confession was liberated from infamy and death by the help of the Virgin Mary, and thereafter persevered more circumspectly in the service of God.67

In the Dialogus Miraculorum, Caesarius of Heisterbach related a similar story of an incestuous widow (in a contemporary rather than Roman setting) that illustrated the power of the widow’s contrition for her great sin.68 Whereas Caesarius’s version emphasized the power of confession to expunge such mortal sins as incest, the Bavarian manuscript version of the tale, cited above, suggested the widow’s innocence of incest, but faulted her carelessness in attending to her public reputation. Her excessive attachment to her child gave the devil occasion to instigate rumors about her. This tale thus emphasized the fragility of the widow’s reputation and the many dangers she faced if living unsupervised in the world. Without the help of the Virgin Mary’s intercession, exempla widows were powerless against diabolical influences. In a fourteenth-century exemplum from the Benedictine monastery of Tegernsee, a poor widow, desperate after the death of her husband, received counsel from the 67. “Cum autem vidua ingrederetur domum imperatoris cepit demon expauescere et fremere cui imperator ait: Quid habes? At ille obmutuit. Appropinquinte autem muliere, cepit dirum ululatum emittere et ait: Ecce Marie cum mulier uenit, et eam per manum adducit, et hoc dicto cum turbine et fetore recednes disperuit. Ita supradictam mulierem per virtutem confessionis auxilio habere virginis a morte et infamia, liberata est postmodo cautius in Dei seruitio perseueratur.” Clm 23435, fols. 25v–26r. 68. Clm 23435, from a section entitled “Viridarium consolationis de uitiis et uirtutibus,” fols. 25v–26r. This story also appears in Jacques de Vitry’s exempla (#243) and in Caesarius’ Dialogue, 2.11; for a discussion of Jacques of Vitry’s version of this tale, see Joan Young Gregg, Devils, Women, and Jews: Reflections of the Other in Medieval Sermon Stories (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 94– 96, 156–57. Caesarius updated the tale in the Dialogus Miraculorum, relocating it from ancient Rome to the papal court of Innocent III, thereby invoking contemporary themes such as the power of penance and the power of the papacy to remit sin.

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devil on how to conduct herself in widowhood. He instructed her with the following anti-sermon: she should fornicate with priests, invite the poor into her home by day, and then turn them out during the night, talk during prayers in the church, and confess none of these sins even when she approached the time of her death. Fortunately for the unconfessed widow, her son’s repentance on her behalf liberated her from her sins after her death. This type of exemplum illustrated the intercessory powers of the Virgin, but also introduced the devil’s influence on the pursuit of proposed chastity. Indeed the twin themes of demonic possession and Marian intervention, which arose in many different types of sermon stories in the later Middle Ages, were joined here to illustrate clerics’ perception of the competing influences on the widow’s chastity. Thirteenthcentury preachers were fascinated by stories of interactions with demons and of demonic possession, which created a new arena to demonstrate the clergy’s mastery over laypeople, particularly lay women, and the diabolical influences that infected those under their pastoral care.69 Such stories merged the dualist struggle between divine and diabolical influences with the perennial double identity of the widow: the vere vidua and her inverted counterpart, the “bad” and lustful widow.70 One tale from Thomas of Cantimpré’s Bonum Universale de Apibus illustrated a particularly sophisticated version of the widow’s unstable and dual nature. A good widow named Margaret, who had dutifully directed all of her compassion toward her dead husband, was possessed by a demon precisely because she had emptied herself of good works in the process. Thomas instructed the demon that he was not only a liar but was also laboring under errors of theology in his taking the woman’s charity as grounds for possession, and urged him to repent. The demon remained unconvinced by Thomas’s arguments but nevertheless relinquished the woman.71 The demon’s confusion echoed the widow’s troubled and con69. Barbara Newman, “Possessed by the Spirit: Devout Women, Demoniacs, and the Apostolic Life in the Thirteenth Century,” Speculum 73, no. 3 (1998): 734, 745–46. Although Thomas was successful in combatting the demon afflicting Margaret, Newman makes an eloquent argument that even the lack of mastery over the demons sometimes served a rhetorical purpose in the miraculous narratives of Thomas of Cantimpré, to illustrate the “just and secret judgement of God,” and then persuade the penitent to accept this judgment (Newman, 743). 70. Clm 19166, “Miracula et exempla diversa,” fol. 35r. 71. Bonum Universale de Apibus, 2.57.67, pp. 591–92.



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flicting loyalties: her persistent ties to her husband rendered her wifelike and encroached on the chaste expectations of widowhood, yet the remembrance of and pious intercession for her husband was also a duty that widows rightfully performed. Thomas’s intervention highlighted the apparent discord between the widow’s role as a celibate and her ongoing obligations to her mortal spouse. In addition to tales of well-intentioned but vulnerable widows, some exempla were cautionary tales about purely sinful widows, the most famous of these being the widow of Ephesus, who no sooner buried her husband than she courted a new lover at the husband’s grave. This widow became notorious in many kinds of medieval literatures, not only the exempla genre, as a caution to husbands that widows were both lustful and forgetful, and would jeopardize their husbands’ salvation by abandoning the expected intercessory prayers.72 Other tales of this variety included a widow who married her husband’s enemy while the husband was still warm in his grave (she callously told critics to blow on her husband to cool him off), the widow who allowed herself to be seduced by her confessor (who had consulted the devil on how to achieve this goal), the widow who cruelly forced her lover to fast in order to win her affections (the lover lost interest and preferred a good meal to a sexual rendezvous), and the widow who tempted a hermit to fornication.73 The discourse on reward and punishment of widows in exempla was softened somewhat by the invocation of the widow as a pitiable figure. An oft-repeated exemplum tale described the Virgin’s intervention on behalf of a widowed mother, and even overlooked that widow’s irreverence for Mary in the process. In versions of this tale, the widow’s child was stolen (in some versions by a wolf, in others taken hostage by enemies), and the widow appealed to the Virgin Mary for help at her shrine. Seeing that the heavenly mother bore her child, Jesus, on her lap in the image at the shrine, the distraught mother stole the Christ child from the Virgin, threatening that she would keep the image of the Virgin’s son until the Virgin insured that her own was returned. The Virgin Mary, understanding a mother’s desperation, miraculously returned the wid72. Tubach, Index Exemplorum, 5262. 73. Ibid., 5055, 2231, 40, and 5261, respectively.

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ow’s child.74 Another exemplum from the Gesta Romanorum applauded the efforts of widows to maintain their difficult state in the story of Constantine’s three daughters, all of whom refused to remarry, despite pressures to the contrary.75 Other exempla depict widows as recipients of mercy and charity, including a servant who stole gold from a widow but repented his crime and returned it, and a widow whose bishop, Paulinus of Nola, sold himself into captivity to redeem her kidnapped son.76 Exempla texts, in a similar fashion to other kinds of narrative literature in the high and later Middle Ages, created realistic portraits of widows whose status and behavior were simultaneously constructed and critiqued. The exempla also articulated more dramatically than formal sermons the widow’s spiritual potential, such as bestowing and receiving visions, and revealed an increasing fascination with diabolical as well as earthly corruption of her chaste purpose. Exempla themes remained fairly stable over time, especially since collections of tales were often assembled through the accretion of older stories as well as the composition of new ones. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, even the widow’s positive spiritual capacities came under greater suspicion. The popular fifteenthcentury preacher Bernardino of Siena questioned the power of widows to commune with the Virgin. Bernardino ridiculed the women in his audience for believing that it was likely for them to receive visions from Mary, an angel, or some other divine entity, discounting female spirituality and its ability to place women in proximity to the holy.77 Ber74. This popular Marian miracle occurs in Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus, in the Golden Legend’s lesson celebrating the birth of the Virgin (chap. 131), and in Johannes Herolt’s miracle tales concerning the Virgin (chap. 14), as well as in many manuscripts, including Latin versions in Clm 9595, fol. 93, and Clm 19166, fol. 19r, and a Bavarian-dialect version in Clm 626, fol. 220r–220v. This story perhaps arose from the tradition that Patrick Geary has described as the “humiliation of saints,” which occurred in both monastic and lay contexts to stir the saint to intercessory action; see Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 113–15. 75. Gesta Romanorum, 75; cf. versions of this story in Clm 3261, Cgm 54. 76. Tubach, Index Exemplorum, 5260, 4484. 77. Examples of Bernardino of Siena, ed. Adah Harrison (London: Gerald Howe, 1926), 88–90. Bernardino’s thoughts on this matter were consistent with those of the influential Jean Gerson (1363– 1429), who doubted women’s capacity in spiritual matters and sought to bar such saints as Bridget of Sweden from official canonization through arguments rooted in that conviction; see Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality and Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 42.



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nardino claimed that women’s visions were caused either by madness or by diabolical influences, emphasizing women’s susceptibility to the devil’s powers. Demonic torments also shadowed widowed figures in hagiography, and the dramatic narratives of exempla tales demonstrated with particular efficacy the challenge that worldly temptations posed to women’s saintly aspirations. Although sermons implied that ordinary widows could be exalted through widowed chastity, they also reminded audiences that ubiquitous devils and demons lurked, ever-prepared to corrupt the chastity and reputations of widowed women. As widows gained more visible social roles and recognition, so too arose suspicions concerning potential abuses of the profession of widowhood. Without the intervention of the Virgin, and the instructive examples of saints, widows proposing widowed chastity in the world were profoundly vulnerable to public scandal and diabolical interference.

Embodying the Prescriptions of Widowed Chastity: St. Elizabeth, Holy Widowhood, and the Preachers of the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Centuries Jacques of Vitry explicitly described his sermones de sanctis as examples that encouraged the imitation of the saints, and, as André Vauchez has argued, the lay imitation of saints was a goal of twelfth- and thirteenthcentury hagiographers.78 A substantial number of saints’ lives from the Carolingian period onward articulated a saint’s widowhood as a state of proposed continence and introduced theological discourse to define and explain the nature of that state. Few of these saints, however, received sustained treatment in the sermon literature of the high and later Middle Ages. The vitae of early saints such as Clothilde and Rictrude did not circulate widely beyond the monastic communities that produced them; these saints would not have been considered timely or fashionable examples even if high and later medieval preachers had 78. Muessig, Faces of Women, 46; Vauchez, “Saints admirables et saints imitables: les fonctions de l’hagiographie ont-elles changé aux derniers siecles du Moyen Age?” in Les Fonctions des saints dans le monde occidental (IIIe–XIIIe siecle); Actes du Colloque organisé par l’École française de Rome avec le concours de l’Université de Rome “La Sapienza,” Rome, 27–29 Octobre 1988, Collection de l’École française de Rome 149 (Rome: École française de Rome, 1991), 161–72, cited in Muessig, Faces of Women, 46, 134n144.

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had access to their hagiographical materials.79 Later medieval preachers used even the vitae of recognized saints, whose cults were better known, quite selectively to illuminate their sermons—of the immense numbers of saints celebrated throughout the liturgical year, only a small proportion received consistent treatment in collections of sermones de sanctis.80 Most saints, even those canonized and promoted by the papacy, retained only a local following, compared to the internationally venerated saints such as Francis, Clare, Elizabeth, and the like.81 Elizabeth of Thüringia came to be the saint that preachers used to illustrate the state of pious widowhood.82 Her prolific hagiographical tradition, the dynastic support for her cult, and a popular tradition that encouraged retellings of her life throughout the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries brought her to the attention of preachers, and her exempla79. In fact, in the twelfth century, Rictrude’s narrative had been conflated with another saint, the virgin Rotrude of Andres; see Leah Shopkow, The History of the Counts of Guines and Lords of Ardres (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 221n125. The early thirteenth-century monk and historian William of Andres awkwardly attempted to explain this slippage in monastic memory by arguing in his narrative history, the Chronicon, that not only were they the same person, but also that their different sexual categorizations were irrelevant. Few medieval authors were as indifferent to such distinctions between virginity and widowhood as William, but here his interest in Andres’s appropriation of the saint apparently overrode conventions about the sexual hierarchies of merit. In the first chapter of his Chronicon, William explains, “For after her husband died, she [Rictrude] spurned a second marriage, she transferred herself completely to the celibate life; she lived the rest of her life in the holy proposition of widowhood, and thus she did not lack the merit of virginity. For our doctors distinguish three types of virginity, that is, the virginity of the flesh, the virginity of the mind, and the virginity of profession.” (Quia uiro defuncto secundas nuptias spreuit ad uitam coelibem se omnino transtulit in sancto uiduitatis proposito uitae residuum felicter expleuit et ita uirginitatis merito non carebit. Doctores enim nostri distinguunt triplex genus uirginitatis: quia est carnis, uirginitas mentis et uirginitas professionis.) I am grateful to Leah Shopkow for bringing this passage to my attention and for sharing her Latin transcription (quoted above) and in-progress translation of this text with me. Her translation is now available in published form: William of Andres, The Chronicle of Andres, trans. Leah Shopkow (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2017); the passage concerning St. Rictrude appears on p. 43 of Shopkow’s edition. 80. The sermons written in honor of St. Hedwig’s canonization in 1267 provide a good example. The three sermons by Odo of Châteauroux emphasized Hedwig’s family and noble lineage, and were most concerned with affirming her canonization and cult; see Otfried Krafft, “Drei Predigten des Kardinals Odo von Châteauroux über Hedwig von Schlesien,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 55 (2006): 505–8. 81. George Ferzoco, “Sermon Literatures Concerning Late Medieval Saints,” 121, and A. T. Thayer, “The Roles of the Saints in the Penitential Themes,” 353, in Kienzle, Models of Holiness in Medieval Sermons. 82. Gecser argues that Elizabeth’s cult actually introduced widowhood as a theme in medieval sermons. While this theme in fact pre-dated Elizabeth’s cult, Gecser correctly emphasizes that preaching on Elizabeth “unified the themes of the active and contemplative life as well as (post-marital) sexual abstinence,” providing an immediately relevant model of the chaste widow to later medieval audiences (“Aspects of the Cult of St. Elizabeth of Hungary,” 254).



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ry potential for many different kinds of women helped to secure her place as a subject of popular preaching. As Ottó Gecser persuasively demonstrated in his study of Elizabeth’s cult, Elizabeth’s name and image became ubiquitous by the late thirteenth century as her cult found enormous popularity and support all over continental Europe. Already by 1250, Elizabeth’s church at Marburg was among Europe’s mostvisited pilgrimage sites, and a broad range of institutions and individuals, including many of Europe’s noble families and the Emperor Frederick himself, promoted her cult. Initially, the Teutonic Order functioned as the foremost monastic patrons of Elizabeth’s cult. Over the course of the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, members the Franciscan and Dominican Orders gradually not only assumed a larger role in fostering Elizabeth’s veneration, but increasingly authored new vitae. Elizabeth’s identification as a Franciscan tertiary arose circa 1310 and became a marked aspect of her sanctity, both in texts and visual images thereafter.83 In sermon literature, the specific identification of Elizabeth with widowhood developed gradually in the course of her veneration, although, as Gecser notes, the Libellus, or “Deposition of the Four Handmaidens,” emphasized Elizabeth’s exemplary function for all women— virgins, wives, and widows—as a fundamental aspect of her sanctity.84 Caesarius of Heisterbach, in his sermon on the translation of her relics to her newly-built pilgrimage church in Marburg, mentioned her widowhood but did not elaborate on it; instead, his primary interest was to demonstrate her prolific good works.85 The sermon treated Elizabeth’s life as representative of the six gates of Jerusalem through her six acts of mercy: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, providing hospitality, clothing the naked, visiting the sick, and helping prisoners. Caesarius also associated these exterior actions with Elizabeth’s interior holiness, through which she exemplified the four cardinal virtues of 83. Gecser, “Aspects of the Cult of St. Elizabeth of Hungary,” 162, 251–53. Gecser’s quantitative survey demonstrates that although the Franciscans and Dominicans were most active in preaching and authoring vitae, the highest concentration of manuscripts were found in libraries of Benedictine houses (19), followed by the Franciscans (13), Cistertians (11) and Dominicans (10) (p. 154). 84. Ibid., 254. 85. Caesarius, Ad decus et honorem, printed in Huyskens, Quellenstudien, 381–90.

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justice, prudence, fortitude, and temperance.86 At the very end of the sermon, Caesarius briefly referred to Elizabeth as a widow. He urged admiration for the saint because, despite the fact that she was not a virgin but a widow who had known a husband, she had received the glory of miracles, surpassing the many virgins (both in convents and in secular life) who had not received any such miracles.87 Several decades after the launching of Elizabeth’s official sanctity, the Golden Legend popularized Elizabeth’s life, provided sermon authors with their primary material on the saint, and facilitated a closer identification of Elizabeth with the sixtyfold fruit of widowhood. The vita of Theodoric of Apolda celebrated the widowed Elizabeth as a sponsa Christi, and his German translation of her life was well known because of its insertion into vernacular collections of saints’ lives based on the Golden Legend.88 Although other widowed saints were included in the Golden Legend, only Elizabeth’s life highlighted the saint as a particular model for widows, and the Golden Legend was a powerful vehicle for the transmission of this association. Elizabeth’s widowhood also played a substantial role in the Latin and vernacular sermons of popular German preachers of the late thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, such as Berthold of Regensburg, Johannes Nider, Johannes Herolt, and Pelbart of Temesvar.89 The Franciscan preacher Berthold of Regensburg served as an inspector to the convent of Niedermünster beginning in 1240, and began preaching around 1246. He remained one of Germany’s most charismatic preachers until his death circa 1272. He traveled throughout Germany and abroad to Austria, Moravia, Bohemia, and Silesia, drawing crowds, according to chroniclers, that numbered in the tens of thousands. His sermons, especially the collection of his Sermones de tempore et de sanctis, called the Rusticanus, were widely circulated in a written redaction that Berthold compiled. Berthold is generally thought to have preached in German (or with the help of a translator when he preached in Slavonic-speaking regions). Vernacular versions of the sermons were transcribed in the late thirteenth century by Berthold’s Franciscan brothers, especially the 86. Ibid., 382 87. Ibid., 390. 88. Theodoric of Apolda, Die Vita der heiligen Elizabeth, ed. Rener, 85. 89. Gecser, “Aspects of the Cult of St. Elizabeth of Hungary,” 184.



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mystic and preacher David of Augsburg (ca. 1200–1272), and these circulated widely as well.90 Berthold, like other popular preachers of the thirteenth century, mastered the traditional themes associated with widowhood, and several of his sermons added significantly to the development of “sermonizing” widowhood by drawing connections between this corpus of associations and the life and works of St. Elizabeth, identifying her as a role model for “the humble, the merciful, and the widows.”91 As a Franciscan, Berthold was certainly concerned with Elizabeth’s charity and humility, but his characterizations of Elizabeth, and of widowhood, were nearly always presented in the context of the virgin-widow-wife hierarchy; his interest in wives and widows was their ability to strive toward, if not fully achieve, the perfect chastity of virgins. Berthold used Elizabeth as an example for both married and widowed women in his sermon on 1 Corinthians 7:28 “If a virgin marries she does not sin.” 92 Although this verse appeared frequently in association with the feast of the virgin St. Cecilia in the Rusticanus sermons, Berthold used Elizabeth in this sermon because she illustrated the place of widows in the spiritual hierarchy of the three holy “orders” of women in the church.93 Berthold affirmed marriage as an institution given by God, but reserved his highest praise for virginity and its hundredfold reward in heaven. Berthold encouraged couples to practice chastity before, during, and after the nuptials, and emphasized that outside of the three orders there existed only fornication and the influence of devils and bad angels, reminding his audience, using a phrase borrowed from Gregory of Tours, that “the pleasure of fornicating is brief, but the penalty of the fornicator is eternal.”94 90. Stammler, Mittelalterliche Prose, 1533. The German versions have been edited and published, but as yet the Latin sermons are largely unpublished and preserved only in manuscripts. The Latin sermons evaluated here are preserved in manuscripts in the collection the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and represent thirteenth-, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century redactions of Berthold’s sermons from Bavarian monastic houses: Clm MSS 5531, 14093, and 18301 (from, respectively, the houses of The College of the Virgin Mary in Diessen, St. Emmeram in Regensburg, and the Benedictine house of Tegernsee). 91. Reber, Die Gestaltung des Kultes Weiblicher Heiligen im Spätmittelalter, 35. 92. Clm 14093, 18301. Cecilia’s liturgical function varies by region; in Italy, Cecilia is associated with sermons on marriage; in the German preaching traditions of Berthold and the Hungarian preacher Pelbart of Temesvar, Cecilia is associated with sermons on the subject of virginity. 93. Berthold uses the term ordines (Clm 18301, fol. 75r). 94. “Momentanea est voluptas fornicantis, sed eterna est pena fornicatoris” (Clm 18301, fol. 75r).

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In his treatment of the order of widows, Berthold stressed that only women who were widows in body and mind like the “true widows” in the Pastoral Epistles were worthy of inheriting the sixtyfold fruit. Represented by the example of the blessed Elizabeth, “true widows,” according to the Scriptures, would have much glory in heaven. Excluded from this reward, however, were those widows who were merely widows by circumstance and who sought a new partner because they desired the delights of a husband over the sweeter refreshment of chastity. 95 Distinctions between deserving and undeserving widows occurred elsewhere in Berthold’s German and Latin sermon texts. In the vernacular sermon attributed to Berthold, “Concerning Marriage,” his view of widowhood remained linked to its relationship to marriage and chastity. In this sermon he enumerated three kinds of widows. The best widows sacrificed their virginity only through marriage, whereas widows who lost their virginity through fornication were inferior to this group, but could inherit the sixtyfold fruits nonetheless if they repented of their sin. The worst type was not a true widow at all but an imposter-widow, a procuress who worked at Satan’s bidding and who would receive reward neither on Earth nor in heaven, but would rot in hell with the likes of Judas.96 Berthold developed even more lurid examples of bad widows in his Latin sermon on the wedding at Cana (Jn 2: 1–11).97 Berthold spoke here of the three orders of chastity as represented by Moses’s candelabrum: the three branches to the right represented the three orders that pleased God; the three branches to the left signified those Cf. Gregory of Tours: “momentaneam saeculi lucem perdere, sed repente ineffabilem claritatem aeternitatis invenire” (Commentarii in librum I Regum 3.5, PL 79:205). 95. “Refectio dulcendis castitatis” (Clm 18301, fol. 75r). This subdivision into positive and negative exemplars also occurs in the German redaction of Berthold’s sermon “concerning the seven peoples” who will be saved. Elizabeth is mentioned within a framework of six groups of pious people, where each group is further subdivided into two kinds: worldly knights, holy knights, the clergy, married people, widows, and virgins. There, widows are divided further into those who had lost their virginity through fornication like St. Afra, and those who had lost it through marriage, like St. Elizabeth. This structure reflects older patterns of social classification—the “orders” of the Church—and also persists in the tradition of linking Elizabeth’s sanctity with her “proximity” to virginity. Berthold von Regensburg: Seiner Deutsche Predigten, vol. 2, ed. Franz Pfeiffer and Joseph Strobl (Vienna, 1880, Reprinted Berlin: Walter de Gruyter and Company, 1965), Sermon 46, p. 100. 96. This sermon was delivered on the feast of St. Paul, 1263; see Berthold von Regensburg: Seiner Deutsche Predigten, vol. 1, ed. Pfeiffer and Strobl, 309–38. 97. Clm 5531, Nuptie facte sunt in chana etc., fols. 17rb–18rb. The Clm catalogue attributes this sermon to Berthold, although Schneyer in his Repertorium does not attribute to him a sermon based on this text.



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that pleased the devil. Under each category Berthold further subdivided the degree to which members of each category pleased God or the devil most. The widows that pleased God much were repentant fornicators; still more, widows who were unwillingly parted from their husbands by death, but who preserved chastity; and most, the widows who embraced chastity for the love of the Creator by parting willingly from a husband before widowhood to live as religious women. The ones who pleased Satan much, conversely, were those who lived slothfully, even more those who still thought about the members of the opposite sex in their widowhood, and most, those who appeared to pray constantly but in fact become “enchantresses, the worst contrivers of debaucheries, mediators of the devil, and most efficient huntresses,” in short, witches.98 Like Guibert of Nogent in the twelfth-century and other preachers of his own day, Berthold viewed the vere vidua as persistently accompanied by a shadowy sister who could at best manipulate her status for sinful ends, and who, at worst, invited demonic temptation and possession. In this catalogue, Berthold’s recognition of widows on the positive and negative ends of the spectrum functioned mostly to praise or condemn their states and to distinguish these two types for his audience, so that listeners could identify each one through their conduct. The groups in the middle, such as repentant fornicators, were the main objects of his pastoral exhortation to penitence and confession; widows who examined their private intentions concerning their widowhood and thereafter adopted the position of the exemplary chaste widow could move upward in the scale of merits. Another rhetorical strategy that Berthold engaged was the comparison of the marital relationship to the relationship between a woman and her spiritual spouse, Christ. This was the structure Berthold adopted in his sermon on St. Elizabeth dedicated to the subject “Five things loving and praiseworthy wives render.”99 Berthold’s theme for the ser98. “Que post mortem contecalium cum quasi semper orare deberent, fiunt incantrices pessime stuprorum machinatrices et conciliatrices dyaboli efficatissime uenicatrices” (ibid., fol. 17v). Cf. Clm 19117, fol. 10v (fourteenth century): “quae post mortem contecalium cum quasi semper orare deberent fiunt incantatrices pessime stuprorum machinatrices et consiliatrices.” 99. Clm 14093, fols. 87v–93r. As with many of Berthold’s sermons, this one circulated in more than one redaction, some integrating Elizabeth into the sermon as an example of the sponsa Christi, others circulating without her inclusion. A version of this Latin sermon, in Clm 18301, with the title “Concerning the Married, second” follows the Cecilia sermon and makes no mention of Elizabeth despite her appearance in the text of the preceding sermon on Cecilia.

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mon was “her husband praises her” (Prv 31:28). Elizabeth modeled this verse because she was loved and praised by her earthly husband; after his death, her spiritual husband Christ praised her “in the presence of the angels.”100 Berthold defined the wife’s five duties to an earthly husband as honoring her in-laws, loving her husband (even if her love exceeds his), disciplining the household, maintaining the home with cleanliness and hospitality, and keeping herself above reproach of rumor.101 In the spiritual component to earthly marriage, Christ represented the spouse and the heart represented the home that must be kept spotlessly clean and always prepared for a guest. The dwelling of the heart was ruled by three noble maids: power, wisdom, and will of the soul. Five lesser, “outer” maids ruled the five senses, particularly the mouth and tongue, to prevent indiscretion and to foster self-discipline.102 Berthold invoked Elizabeth in this text as both a wife and a widow because her life represented the perfection of both states, but details of her personal biography were strikingly absent. Instead, Berthold further articulated the continuities between good wives and good widows through a discussion of the holy widows Ruth and Naomi; whereas the widowed Ruth clung to Naomi and swore never to forsake her, Naomi’s second daughter-inlaw, Orpha, deserted Naomi to return to her own people and remarry. Here, Berthold interpreted widowed chastity as the natural response of the good wife. The good woman, exemplified by Elizabeth, was a permanent sponsa Christi, whether as a wife or as a widow. Berthold’s manipulation of widow imagery supplemented his preaching on marriage and virginity, but his sermons offered only scant details on the pastoral care of actual widows and little explication of Elizabeth’s life as a prescription for pious widows’ conduct. In his enumeration of different kinds of widows, Berthold identified extremes of good and bad widows, each relatively secure in their respective states of blessedness or condemnation. The widows in the middle, such as widows who had fornicated but might yet repent, or widows who were not yet persuaded of the value of widowed chastity per se and were merely 100. “coram angelis” (ibid., fol. 87v). 101. Ibid., fols. 88v–89v. 102. Ibid., fols. 89v–92v.



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looking the part, constituted an audience who might yet be stirred to a deeper commitment to widowed chastity. Despite his interest in her conduct as wife, Berthold focused on Elizabeth as an example of married chastity rather than an exemplar of a happy and companionate marriage. As a bride of Christ even in marriage, Elizabeth was already prepared for her duties as a true widow. Berthold’s interpretations of Elizabeth were consistent with the early stages of her hagiography, in which three developments in thirteenth-century medieval theology—the Cathar heresy, new pressures on proof of sanctity for canonization, and the influence of mendicant spirituality—shaped Elizabeth’s model of sanctity. First, the church’s efforts against Catharism and other anti-materialist heresies placed its theologians in the awkward position of defending marriage while advocating chastity as a better choice. This had been a problem as early as the fourth century, when Augustine championed the legitimacy of marriage in the face of more ascetic movements within the church. In the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries the problem took on a renewed significance in sermons as preachers attempted to clarify the errors of the Cathars, such as their condemnation of the flesh and of procreation. Churchmen responded to Catharism by defending marriage as both a fleshly and spiritual union that was blessed in the eyes of God. Theologians reaffirmed the church’s jurisdiction over marriage, establishing its sacramental nature and insisting that it take place at the church door, under the auspices of a priest. In the early 1230s, as Elizabeth’s supporters were developing her cult, pursuing her canonization, and building her memorial church, Elizabeth functioned as an excellent example of how married people could be exalted and sanctified, which probably increased the likelihood of her canonization and facilitated the process. André Vauchez has illustrated that the thirteenth century witnessed the creation of the married saint as a new form of holy person. The earliest liturgical expressions of Elizabeth’s cult associated her closely with chastity within marriage as well as with chaste widowhood thereafter.103 Elizabeth’s church at Marburg, built to accommodate the pilgrims 103. Vauchez, “Lay People’s Sanctity in Western Europe,” in Blumenfeld-Kosinsky and Szell, eds., Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, 30–32.

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who streamed into her hospital and the small shrine erected there, became a monument to thirteenth-century orthodoxy as well as the central monument to this popular saint. Conrad of Marburg, Elizabeth’s confessor and an inquisitor in the city of Marburg, was instrumental in erecting the church and designing its iconographic program after Elizabeth’s death in 1231. Conrad died the following year, so his initial strong input into the development of her cult was cut abruptly short, and the cult’s development was taken up by Elizabeth’s equally avid proponents, the Marburg chapter of Teutonic Knights. Even Conrad’s commissions for the stained glass windows for Elizabeth’s church at Marburg reflected his commitment to orthodoxy in the face of anti-Trinitarian and spiritualist heresies: the church displayed an iconographic program that emphasized such themes as the indivisible Trinity and Old Testament creation scenes.104 Just as her physical church became a space to advocate theological orthodoxy as well as the charismatic nature of her cult, the textual tradition of Elizabeth’s legends in the thirteenth century promoted an orthodox view of marriage and clerical supervision of married laypeople. Second, the great enthusiasm and volume of material generated in support of Elizabeth’s process of canonization assisted in the widespread dissemination of her cult upon its recognition. As a new model for lay sanctity, Elizabeth was an excellent source of encouragement and inspiration to all three female “orders” (virgins, widows, and married women), whom Berthold addressed in his sermons. Through her example, female audiences learned that conventual life was no longer synonymous with Christian perfection. Moreover, while the loss of perfect virginity was a problematic consideration for a pious laywoman, it was not an obstacle to holiness, canonization, or a successful cult when other values such as humility, service, and chastity within or after marriage were introduced.105 The flexible meaning of Elizabeth’s sanctity as an edifying lay model contributed to her rapid canonization and the flourishing of her cult. Her obedience, service, and chastity in all three “orders” created a sympathetic figure who engendered great popular devotion, yet whose example could not be misunderstood or misappro104. Bierschenk, Glasmalerei in der Elisabethkirche in Marburg. 105. Vauchez, “Lay People’s Sanctity,” 30–32.



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priated thanks to her unquestioned submission to clerical authority. The third important thirteenth-century development was the tremendous impact of the Franciscan mendicant values that Elizabeth ardently embraced. Her dedication to the poor, for whose benefit she wrested her rightful dowry from greedy in-laws, her construction of a hospital in Marburg, and her constant suffering, both self-imposed and as a result of her struggles with her husband’s family, coordinated perfectly the mendicant values of poverty and humility, and resonated with the hagiographic traditions of their greatest exponent, St. Francis. In the bull of Elizabeth’s canonization, Gregory IX lauded her assumption of the habit of a Franciscan tertiary as a proper expression of pious widowhood. As an example of Elizabeth’s impact on subsequent candidates for sanctity, the blessed Jutta of Sangerhausen (d. 1260), also a widow with young children, consciously styled herself on St. Elizabeth (according to testimony from her process of canonization) and wanted to follow in Elizabeth’s footsteps of voluntary poverty.106 In German preaching, Elizabeth’s widowhood assumed a central role. Her profession of pious widowhood and extraordinary generosity to the poor allowed preachers to demonstrate the virtues of good widowhood and their opposing vices, pride and vanity. Elizabeth’s example was frequently invoked to stir noblewomen from sin and complacency: for example, Elizabeth was the subject of vision for the late thirteenth-century mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg (1207–ca. 1289), who wrote in The Flowing Light of the Godhead (ca. 1280), “Our Lord explained to me how St. Elizabeth became holy and had lain underground for just a short time by saying: The messenger has to be swift. Elizabeth is and was a messenger to unholy women who sat in the castles, steeped in lasciviousness, wrapped in pride and constantly surrounded by vanity that by rights they should have descended into the abyss.”107 A simi106. De Sancta Jutta vidua, 1.4, AASS May VII (May 5): 595. 107. “Des berihte mich unser herre und sprach alsus, ‘Es ist der botten reht, das si snelle sien. Elyzabeth die ist und si was ein botte, den ich gesant habe zu den unseligen vrowen, die in den burgen sassen, mit der unkuscheit also sere durflossen und mit dem homute also sere uberzogen und mit der italkeit also stete umbevangen, das si nach rhete in das abgrunde solten sin gegangen.’” Mechthild von Magdeburg, Das fließende Licht der Gottheit, ed. Hans Neumann and Gisela Vollmann-Profe (Munich: Artemis 1990), 5.34, p. 194; in The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Christiane Mesch Galviani, ed. Susan Clark, Garland Library of Medieval Literature, vol. 72 Series B (New York and London: Garland, 1991), 162–63.

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lar exemplum from the fourteenth-century Liber de similitudinibus rerum (the same work that preached the turtledove’s ascetic tendencies as a lesson to widows) included a reference to Elizabeth’s almsgiving and care of the poor as a demonstration of how contemporary widows might follow in her footsteps.108 Early texts promoting Elizabeth’s cult, such as Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Sermon ad decus et honorem had treated the issues of her widowhood and her acts of mercy separately. Fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury texts, however, joined the two themes in the pastoral applications of the saint’s life and example. Johannes Nider (d. 1438) and Johannes Herolt (d. 1468), both Dominican friars and confessors to the nuns of St. Catherine’s convent in Nuremberg, were active in monastic reform, especially with respect to the movements toward spiritual revival and strict enclosure for Nuremberg’s convents. As confessors to Nuremburg nuns, both men focused on comparisons between marriage and chastity and praised the religious life over the ephemeral luxuries and pleasures of the world.109 While deeply critical of worldly women’s proclivities toward worldly vanities, however, these authors were surprisingly gentle toward widows, compared to Berthold and his speculations about their potential misbehavior and the exempla tales that characterized chaste widowhood as a fragile enterprise. Although much of Nider’s and Herolt’s counsel was directed toward nuns, their sermons also addressed laywomen, instructing them on child-rearing and the rejection of worldly luxuries. Their sermons enumerated the virtues of a chaste profession in widowhood and encouraged women to emulate St. Elizabeth’s example. Nider and Herolt repeated the tripartite formulation concerning widows’ inferiority to virgins, but also found new formulations beyond the parable of spiritual fruits. For example, in a German-language text simply titled “letter to a widow,” attributed to Nider, the author constructed his arguments on the theme of vere vidua (waurlich wittwen), comparing behavior that led to damnation (living 108. Clm 23432, fol. 113v. 109. Nider had greater measurable success in enforcing measures of reform than did Herolt; see Gecser, “Aspects of the Cult of St. Elizabeth of Hungary,” 202. Concerning Nider’s role as a reformer and its relationship to his writing on witchcraft, especially the Formicarius, see Michael Bailey, Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy, and Reform in the Later Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003); see also J. W Dahmus, “Dormi Securi: The Lazy Preacher’s Model for Holiness in His Flock,” in Kienzle, Models of Holiness in Medieval Sermons, 310–13.



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for pleasure) to behavior that brought widows before God (maintaining courage, raising children, and serving God through prayer and works of mercy).110 This generation of preachers was more deeply concerned about the sin of vanity than about sexual transgression.111 Superbia and luxuria were among the keenest pastoral issues in the increasingly urban, mercantile societies of the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance.112 Preachers frequently reminded their audience that the widow who lived in pleasure is dead even while she was alive, construing “pleasure” as unchastity but also, more importantly, as a general weakness for the luxuries of the material world. Widows as a group thus became an ideal exemplum for teaching the Christian community how to resist pride and material extravagance, and Elizabeth remained a valuable embodiment of these traits. Although Nider and Herolt still employed the paradigm of spiritual merits at various places in their sermons, the hagiography of the saint determined most directly the structure of their homilies on St. Elizabeth and her widowhood. They organized their sermons around her biographical material, drawn primarily from the sources of the Libellus and the life of Theodoric of Apolda. In Nider’s and Herolt’s treatment both of Elizabeth and of widowhood, the identification of the widow with the sixtyfold fruit remained important, but the saint’s biography became the instructive framework, replacing the traditional scheme of the comparative ranks of merit that had more often shaped the ad status preaching of the thirteenth century. In his sermon on St. Elizabeth, Nider illustrated seven states of life (status) for devoted women. The first three (which Nider attributed to 110. Cgm 3891, fols. 136r–139r. 111. Such an arrangement of virtues occurs in a devotional text that circulated in Latin and German versions that taught the seven conditions of true widowhood: (1) hope in God, (2) maturity and restraint, (3) frequenting the church, (4) fasting and moderation, illustrated through the example of Judith, (5) constant prayer, (6) service to the world, as outlined in 1 Timothy 5, caring for the sick, the poor, the saints, the pilgrims, and the like, and (7) following Paul’s injunction to think on things of the spirit, that is, not to take a second husband; such behaviors were not related to the sixtyfold fruit. An older model that promised the sixtyfold reward was a popular text by Johannes von Inesdorfer, Von Dreierlei Wesen der Menschen, a devotional treatise for laypeople that was organized around the examples of Lazarus, Mary, and Martha (Cgm 514, fol. 49). A later marginal note in the manuscript reinforces the lesson: “merck da die wittib”; see also the edition of this text by Bernard Haage, Der Traktat Von Dreierlei Wesen der Menschen (dissertation, Heidelberg University, 1968), 398ff. 112. Helga Schüppert, “Frauenbild und Frauenalltag in der Predigtliteratur,” in Frau und Spätmittelalterlichen Alltag, 103–51.

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Augustine) were the traditional groups of wives, widows, and virgins, in which each one reaped the respective rewards of the thirty-, sixty-, and hundredfold fruit. The remaining four states included contemplatives, women who performed works of mercy, religious, and those who lived with Christ.113 These states corresponded to seven stages in Elizabeth’s life, and because she had lived perfectly in all of them her life was exemplary of the liturgical verse that begins the sermon, Proverbs 31: “Many women have done excellently but you surpass them all.”114 In childhood, or virginity, Elizabeth demonstrated her sanctity by praying prostrate in the family chapel rather than playing. As a married woman, she was not vain or interested in luxuries but rather obedient and devoted to serving others, taking the normal domestic tasks of the home and performing them for the community of the poor and needy. She often rose from the marital bed at night to pray, and approached the church humbly and barefooted to receive her blessing post partum, carrying a candle and a lamb, in imitation of Mary. In widowhood, unlike the negative examples of Orpha and Abigail, Elizabeth did not take another husband, nor, like the youthful and therefore undisciplined widows of 1 Timothy 5, could she be dissuaded from persevering in widowhood. Nider noted as an example here Elizabeth’s defiance of her uncle, the bishop of Bamberg, and her willingness to disfigure herself rather than remarry. Elizabeth’s choice of widowhood allowed her to advance through the 113. Another, rather curious example of rearrangements of social groups in sermons is a text, composed sometime after 1468 and preserved in Clm 3435, fols. 24r–25v, that is rubricated “Sequitur sermo de nouo anno aliunde de collectus non ex nider” (despite the negation in the rubric, the text retained an association with Nider and his circle and was compiled in this manuscript along with Johannes Nider’s Latin sermons). This sermon for the New Year combined the letters of Christ’s name (I, e, s, u, and s), plant symbolism, aviary themes, and the tripartite hierarchy (transformed into a quintipartite hierarchy of virgins, the married, priests, widows, and sinners). “Not-Nider” presented each of his social groups with an item from the preceding categories as New Year’s gifts, with an explanation of the gift as the moral lesson. Each group received a letter of Christ’s name in the order listed in the parentheses above. The gifts were ascribed as follows: for the wreaths, virgins received lilies and violets; married people, dried leaves; priests, pine; widows, thorns; and sinners, wormwood. In donating birds to represent their states, he gave virgins a phoenix; married people, a pelican; priests, a cock; widows, a turtledove; and sinners, a bird that is mixed with black and white feathers (an ostrich is implied here; this bird was characterized as a hypocrite). Finally, each of the groups received one of the four horses of the Apocalypse: virgins received a white horse (conquest), married people, a red horse (war), priests, a black horse (famine), widows, a pale horse (death), and sinners, no horse unless “per penitentiam et vera contricionem auerant ad vitam!” 114. In festo beate Elizabeth, Sermones de tempore et de sanctis, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, SB 2° Inc. s. a. 929B (the leaves of this incunable are not paginated).



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other four states of life that afforded her both an active life of charity and a contemplative spirituality. Her vow of chastity, taken in the presence of Master Conrad before her husband’s death, and her humble dress confirmed her as living in the habit of a religious, in Nider’s view, and her good example as a consecrated widow served as a corrective to the three common vices rampant among female religious: pride, vanity of attire, and disobedience.115 Nider referred to Elizabeth’s humility, ability to receive divine revelation, and her “fervor of love” as evidence of her mastery of the contemplative life, while at the same time she continued her good works of mercy (the sixth state), founded her hospital with her dowry, and did not shrink from the gruesome wounds and sores of the patients. Upon her death, she had a vision of Christ who addressed her as “electa mea” and brought her to heaven, completing the seventh and final stage of living with Christ.116 Johannes Herolt, also known as Discipulus, was much influenced by Nider’s preaching style. Herolt’s use of the name Discipulus derived from his eclectic borrowing from famous authors, including the work of Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Jacobus of Voragine, Nicholas of Dinkelsbühl, and many others, making him a student or “disciple” of all of them. His skill as a compiler was evident in his sermons on Elizabeth, which drew on the sermons of Nider and on the Golden Legend as well as on the usual patristic writings on widowhood. Herolt’s discussion of Elizabeth as a holy widow adopted a similar structure to Nider’s. In Sermon 43, De sancta Helizabet, in which Herolt preached on the theme “Pray for us, for you are a holy woman” (Judith 8:31), he associated the widow Judith with St. Elizabeth and with pious widowhood in general.117 Like Nider, Herolt incorporated Elizabeth’s life in his sermon through a progression of exemplary vignettes. He referred to nine moments in her life as “privileges” that denoted her sanctity.118 Unlike Nider, in this ser115. “Sunt autem religiosorum tria vicia quidam superbi vestitu et inobedientes . . . religiosum habitum induit griseum quem alio colore appeciauit, et prologauit eodem modo pallium. Obediens etiam magistro Conrado fuit. . . . Quo ad secundum mendicasse panem voluit, nisi quod magister dictus eam prohibuit, coram quo etiam castitatis votum emisit” (ibid.). 116. “Caritatis feruorem” (ibid.). 117. Sermo 43, De sancta Helizabet, in Sermones Discipuli de Tempore et de Sanctis, (Cologne, 1510), fols. L l i verso–L l ii verso. 118. “privilegia” (ibid., fol. L l ii recto). The nine privileges were Elizabeth’s noble birth, her chastity, her love of God, her observance of the feasts of the Church, her humility in marriage, her perfect

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mon Herolt dispensed with the thirty-, sixty-, and hundredfold model of reward and focused even more intently than Nider on the subject of vanity, underscoring Elizabeth’s selflessness in comparison to the pride and complacence of those around her. For example, he asserted that Elizabeth’s role in abstaining from childhood games was to temper the other girls’ vanities. Household tasks she performed, such as spinning wool, were good not only because she did them for the poor, but also because she did them with her own hands (manibus propriis). Herolt’s catalogue of Elizabeth’s privileges elaborated on her abstention from riches, again underscoring her material asceticism, and her service as a merciful mother to orphans. The latter privilege subtly engaged the exegetical language of widowhood: clerics unanimously enjoined their communities to protect helpless widows and orphans, and not “devour the houses of widows” (Mk 12:40). By establishing Elizabeth as the “mother of orphans” (a tactic St. Hedwig’s hagiographer also employed in the vita of that saint), Herolt not only illuminated Elizabeth’s charity as an extended example of social housekeeping, but he also empowered widows by removing them from the victimized category of “widows and orphans,” a symbol of vulnerability in patristic exegesis, and represented them as strong caretakers of another vulnerable group. After expounding upon the nine privileges, Herolt referred his audience to his sermon on the life of professed widows, Sermon 116, De viduis. The two sermons taken together highlight the relationship between the pastoral care of widows and the use of the cult of St. Elizabeth as an example to laywomen. In De viduis, Herolt took his theme from Luke 7:12, concerning the widow whose son was raised from the dead. Herolt’s sermon on widows defined the profession of widowhood, offered examples of pious widows, and argued against the widow’s remarriage. Herolt reviewed the Pauline description of the vere vidua, which required the widow to be an example for her family in word and deed, to go often to church, hear mass and make confession, to keep God before her eyes in her words and deeds, and to be humble, chaste, merciful, and obedient.119 Herolt then explained how Judith’s faith in God and bodily self-discipline and Anna’s unceasing prayer in the temple and voluntary obedience, her abstention from food and drink, her mothering of children and orphans, and Christ’s appearance to her in life and in death. 119. Ibid., Sermo 116, De viduis, in Sermones Discipuli de tempore et de sanctis, fols. U i recto–U ii recto.



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illustrated holy widowhood. Alongside these examples from Scripture, Herolt presented Elizabeth’s manual labor and conscientious maintenance of the household as instruction for how widows should avoid leisure and sin. Herolt also praised Elizabeth’s modest dress as an antidote to vanity, noting that some widows mistakenly tried to please two lords, Christ and the world, by adorning themselves in fine clothing.120 He also instructed widows to emulate Elizabeth’s works of mercy, because such acts fulfilled the Apostle’s command in 1 Timothy 5 regarding the widow’s obligation to perform good works. Herolt concluded his sermon on widowhood on a practical note about the reasons that it was better to remain in widowed continence than to remarry. In line with the Pauline and patristic traditions, he compared widowhood favorably to remarriage, arguing that a widowed woman’s desire to remarry instead of maintain her widowhood was as a sign of “incontinence.”121 By living in the world, the widowed servant of God gained spiritual freedom, peace, and security: a widow was “her own woman” who could live in peace without the complications of a bad husband while at the same time signaling her love for her deceased spouse.122 In the tradition of the popular preaching of Berthold, Nider, and Herolt, the late fifteenth-century sermons of the Observant Franciscan Pelbart of Temesvar (1435–1504) continued to link St. Elizabeth with widows’ pastoral care.123 Pelbart’s four sermons on St. Elizabeth all incorporated aspects of her widowhood in central ways and represented a culmination of the preaching on widows discussed in this chapter: like Guibert of Tournai and other early authors of ad status sermons to widows, Pelbart used the paradigm of the fruits of chastity and referenced 120. Regarding Elizabeth’s dress: “unde legitur de beate Helizabet, quod post mortem sui mariti vestes griseas et abiectas induit, fuit enim tunc habitus eius ita despectus vt defferet griseum pallium panno alterius coloris prolongatum, et manicas ruptas cum panno alterius coloris reformatas”; on pleasing two lords: “Contra hoc aliquae vidue faciunt quae se ornant in vestibus, volentes duobus dominis seruire et placere, scilicet Christo et mundo, quod est contra euangelium, unde etiam Apostolus (Gal. 1:10), Si adhuc mundo placerem, seruus Christi non essem” (ibid., fol. U i verso). 121. “Incontinentie” (ibid.). 122. “Sui domina” (ibid., fol. U ii recto). Herolt cited Jerome here, but softened Jerome’s harsh tone considerably when speaking of marriage and remarriage. 123. Pelbart’s sermons are preserved in at least fifteen editions from 1483 to 1515; here I have consulted the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek’s edition P. lat 1176, Sermones Pomerii de Sanctis Huemalis et Estivales editi per fratrem Pelbartum de Themeware divi Ordinis Francisci, fols. D ii verso–K ii recto.

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patristic themes in the discussion of widowhood. Like Berthold of Regensburg, he warned against diabolical interference in the endeavor of widowed chastity, and like Herolt, he fused a recognition of Elizabeth’s ideal widowhood with the continence and service expected of all widows, to whom he preached directly as a corporate presence in medieval society.124 Pelbart wrote four sermons that associated Elizabeth with widowhood (Sermons 123 and 126–28). He structured his sermon on virginity and widowhood (Sermon 123) around the passage honora vidue que vere vidua sunt. Pelbart used the ancient paradigm of the estates of chastity to show all three states of women—wives, widows, and virgins—how to lead a holy life.125 In this sermon, Pelbart subdivided widows into three genera: those who were “perfectissima,” devoting themselves to prayer night and day, those who were dedicated to the care of their children, and those who lived in pleasure. In this sermon, he paired Elizabeth with Anna as examples of the perfect widows who showed how widows should live. Pelbart’s other three sermons in honor of St. Elizabeth offered a prominent discussion of widowhood through his celebration of the saint.126 Sermon 126 discussed how Elizabeth earned the fruits of each state of her life, especially in her widowhood, which he characterized by the sleepless nights she spent in prayer, away from her marriage bed. Sermon 127 celebrated Elizabeth’s rejection of the world and the poverty that her widowhood and exile from her patrimony occasioned. Finally, in Sermon 128, De sancta Elisabeth Sermon iii, de viduis, Pelbart brought together the themes of the previous sermons, invoking Elizabeth as a model for holy widowhood and examining different 124. Pelbart wrote the sermons between 1489 and 1498, and with their publication in 1499 in Augsburg (and later in Venice, Paris, and Strasbourg) he became an internationally-known author. Born in Temesvar and of Hungarian descent, Pelbart spent most of his career, after becoming a magister of theology, at the Franciscan convent of Buda; he also served as the provincial head of the Observant Friars in Hungary. He was a traditional scholar who distanced himself from both new currents such as Neoplatonism and dangerous ones such as the Hussite heresy; his sermons drew on exegesis, theology, patristic florilegia, and classical texts, and he knew the works of Jacobus of Voragine, Nider, and Herolt as well as those of Augustine, Bede, Alcuin, Rabanus Maurus, and Heimo of Auxerre; Gabriel Adrianyi. See “Pelbart von Temesvar,” Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexicon, vol. 7 (Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz, 1994), 174–78. 125. He reaffirmed, however, the distinction that only virgins earned the aureole. It is worth noting that in a later sermon (128) Pelbart mentioned Mary explicitly as the best possible model for widows, because they could relate to her suffering as she watched Christ suffer on the cross. 126. Pelbart, Sermons 126–28, in Sermones Pomerii de Sancti.



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types of widows as they compared to and contrasted with her example. According to Pelbart, the first type consisted of “totally diabolical” widows, who were widows only in name.127 Second were widows who maintained continence for worldly rather than spiritual reasons, and who planned to remarry. Such widows, as Berthold of Regensburg had also argued, would not earn the sixtyfold fruit. Third were widows who were “partly diabolical, partly Christian,” who attempted to live in widowed chastity but fell from that proposition through envy, pride, anger, and similar sins.128 Lastly, the fourth and the true widow was devoted to God. Pelbart introduced the problem that had consistently shadowed the pastoral care of chaste widows, whether in exempla tales or in the discordant canons of canon law: what was the appropriate setting for the vere vidua? Pelbart identified three possibilities for widows who wished to live in chastity and earn the sixtyfold fruit: widows without vows, the least desirable type; vowed widows, who were preferable to unvowed widows; and those who entered religion, whom Pelbart designated as “perfectissimae.”129 Pelbart offered St. Elizabeth as an example to such widows. He did not firmly distinguish to which category Elizabeth belonged but implied (as Nider had also done) that through her vow of chastity in marriage and her “religious” habit in her widowhood, she should be classed in merit with those widows who enter religion, emphasizing the clerical preference that widows make a monastic profession but acknowledging the secular-dwelling widow’s vocation as well.130 Pelbart concluded the sermon with a lesson on the seven “rules” of widowhood, which applied to both the monastic life and the vita activa of the world. Pelbart invoked Elizabeth as a model for widows living in proposed continence, which included consolation through hope in God, the defense of widows by the larger Christian community, prayer (exemplified 127. “Totaliter diaboli” (ibid., fol. K ii verso). 128. “Vidue partim diaboli: partim Christi” (ibid., fol. K iii recto). 129. “Tales autem tria sunt differentia, quia quedam se totum deo offerunt perpetuo continentes sine voto: solo firmo proposit et effectu. Alie autem sunt perfectiores que bono faciunt vouendo. . . . Alie autem sunt que perfectissime bono implent religionem intrando et solemni professione castitatem tenendo” (ibid.). 130. “Ad propositum beata elisabeth primo quidem seruauit virginitatem castissime, tandem inuita tradita est a patre in coniugium vbi votum fecit quod post mariti mortem contineret. Demum viduata tam perfectissime castitatem tenuit quod scilicet religionis habitum suscepit et solemniter vovit” (ibid.).

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by Elizabeth’s activity as a member of the Third Order of Franciscans), avoidance of excessive speech, charitable actions, death to worldly things, good works of mercy, and meditation on the cross and Christ’s passion (exemplified in Elizabeth’s visions of Christ and his death and in the characteristics of sanctity that rewarded her following her own death). Pelbart recommended these actions for widows who “firmly intended” continence, even if they were not vowed or veiled as nuns, and distinguished them from the general population of widows as pious women, marked by their intentions for chastity.131 Pelbart’s sermons educated the laity about widows living in a special state of elective continence. Although Pelbart was writing in a very different era from the twelfth-century Schoolmen or earlier generations of popular preachers, his sermons retained elements of an ancient discourse on widows that were probably not merely “artifacts” of earlier times, but that remained perennially associated with widows’ pastoral care. In the later Middle Ages, the growth of towns, the development of the professions, and the profound impact of mendicant piety began to change old categories for describing female behavior and spirituality. At the same time, older ideas were retained and recast throughout the later Middle Ages in response to spiritual and literary trends. Moralists discussed women in categories other than “virgin, wife, or widow.” Yet amid these shifting normative trends, the category of widow persisted. The tripartite hierarchy of women’s states had not excluded other formulations of social orders for preaching purposes, and so, too, the ancient category of “widow” was incorporated into newer descriptive schemas in preaching.132 The medieval widow was presented simultaneously as a symbol for the church, a needy figure commanding human pity and divine protection, a person able to redeem her chastity, which had been lost through marriage, and a real-life woman requiring pastoral care. The widow who remained in the world but lived under a vow of continence continued to mark a theoretical middle ground between the absolutes of monastic and married life, a middle ground that was rife with both worldly diabolical dangers and spiritual rewards. 131. “Firmo proposito” (ibid.). 132. Claudia Opitz, “Emanzipiert oder Marginaliziert? Witwen in der Gesellschaft des spaeten Mittelalters,” in Auf der Such nach der Frau im Mittelalter, ed. B. Lundt (Munich: W. Fink, 1991), 28–29.



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St. Elizabeth’s widowhood came to represent an idealization of this middle ground and assisted hagiographers and preachers as they developed and rationalized their pastoral care of laypeople, particularly women. The pastoral care of consecrated widows created spiritual, social, and economic benefits that flowed in both directions. The church gained submissive servants: Elizabeth’s almsgiving, care for the poor, hospitality to strangers, and prayerful intercession perfectly exemplified the way of life for the pious widow. In return, medieval widows earned a second chance for spiritual excellence after marriage, as well as protection and validation from clerical authorities. Preaching on widows also provided an opportunity for clerics to express their concerns about women’s particular susceptibility to diabolical influence. The same textual communities that wrote and preserved sermon literature also produced the Malleus Maleficarum and other misogynistic texts that fostered the climate of the witch persecutions. In Johannes Nider’s Formicarius (The Anthill), in which he was much concerned with witchcraft and demonology, we would expect to see the harshest rhetoric against widows and to find sermons depicting widows as witches, particularly vulnerable to demons through their earthly carnal experiences and their spiritual proclivities for prophecy and purgatorial intervention. Mention of widows as maleficae and suspicions about the sexual dangers of widows living independently in the world, however, are strikingly absent from both the Formicarius and the Malleus Maleficarum. Nider’s text described, for example, the pious widowhood of Margaret of Constance. Though she received prophetic visions, Margaret claimed recognition through neither monastic nor mystical accomplishments (Nider strongly disapproved of female claims to authority in both of these arenas). Rather Margaret’s simple faith, based in humble conduct and active service in the world, impressed Nider favorably in comparison to many of the professed nuns he had dealt with in the context of convent reform.133 Fears about diabolical influence and sexual purity reverberated strongly in the thirteenth century sermons, where the all-too-fragile ideal of perfect chastity was still the primary way to measure women’s virtue and identity. Pastoral care in the fifteenth century, by contrast, treated the pious widow as a more de133. Elliott, Bride of Christ, 263.

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pendable model for lay obedience and moderation. As we will see in the following chapter, by the later Middle Ages, the harshest and most pessimistic critics of widows were not preachers, but literary authors. The voices that most aggressively and bitterly denigrated the widows’ proposed continence in the late Middle Ages were the creators of the imaginative literature designed to amuse and delight audiences, authors who enthusiastically deconstructed the sanctity of the pious widow that hagiographers and preachers had so carefully assembled.

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Chapter 6

Reading Widows Grief, Memory, and the Parody of Chaste Widowhood in Medieval Literature The previous chapters have discussed holy widowhood from the perspective of the church. Clerics wrote about widowhood in order to understand for themselves the implications of voluntary female chastity and to communicate their vision of it to lay women through exempla and preaching. The depiction of the widow in literature related closely to the ecclesiastical construction of pious widowhood, but admitted other social ideas and functions of widowhood, as authors interpreted and circulated ideas about the moral expectations of pious widowhood in secular vernacular texts. Across genres and various vernacular languages, later medieval literature offers their audiences essentially two types of widows: dutiful and profligate. Throughout the later centuries of the Middle Ages the treatment of religious widowhood in various vernacular traditions indicated chaste widowhood as a laudable but overly optimistic ideal of female piety. Literature in the later Middle Ages perpetuated images of the vere vidua and promoted examples of widowed chastity through among epic heroines and female saints in verse hagiographies. At the same time, literary genres presented elaborate condemnations of the fallen or fraudulent widow that exceeded even clerical authorities’ disapprobation of such women. The dutiful widow in literature conformed to the images of the vere vidua reiterated in both Roman and Christian prescriptive literature. When emplotted within the romance genre, however, the pious widow also served as the object of romantic desire. The literary heroine enacted “true” widowhood through appropriate mourning rituals and grief for the dead spouse, earning the admiration of a new man who sought

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to marry the virtuous widow.1 The dutiful widow’s evil twin, the profligate widow, had pagan as well as Christian literary antecedents. Ancient satires such Petronius’s widow of Ephesus in the Satyricon demonstrated how women assumed the conventions of pious widowhood to entrap men: a beautiful widow quickly turned from her tears, fasting, and vigil beside her husband’s grave to desecrate the husband’s tomb with a new lover: Chaste though she was, the lady found him singularly attractive and his arguments persuasive. . . . To make the matter short, the lady’s body soon gave up the struggle; she yielded and our happy warrior enjoyed a total triumph on both counts. That very night their marriage was consummated, and they slept together the second and third night too, carefully shutting the door of the tomb so that any passing friend or stranger would have thought the lady of famous chastity had at last expired over her dead husband’s body.2

As if the indecorous affair were not enough to show the inconstancy of wives and widows, Petronius narrated how the soldier, assigned to guard the corpse of a crucified man, neglected his duty while he dallied with the widow, which resulted in the corpse being stolen. Facing a death sentence as punishment for his lapse, the soldier contemplated suicide. The clever widow saved her lover by offering her husband’s body to replace the stolen one. Petronius’ anecdote offered a bitter comment on the rarity of a true univira in the social context of first-century Rome, but it circulated in the Middle Ages as a cautionary tale about widowed chastity and devotion and the forgetfulness of women. The tale was reproduced in such diverse works as the Policraticus of John of Salisbury, the Fables of Marie de France, and an Old French version of the story, Cele que se fist sur la fosse de son mari.3 Heather Arden notes that in Marie de France’s version 1. Rebecca Hayward, “Between the Living and the Dead,” in Carlson and Weisl, Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity, 221. 2. “Nec deformis aut infactundus iuvenis castae videbatur. . . . quid diutius moror? Ne in hanc quidem partem [corporis] mulier abstinuit, victorque miles utrumque persuasit. Iacuerunt ergo una non tantum illa nocte qua nuptias fecerunt, sed postero etiam ac tertio die, praeclusis videlicet conditorii foribus, ut quisquis ex notis ignotisque ad monumentum venisset, putaret expirasse super corpus viri pudicissimam uxorem.” Petronius Arbitri, Satyricon, ed. Konrad Mueller (Munich: Ernst Heimeran, 1961), 119–20; in The Satiycon of Petronius, trans. William Arrowsmith (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), 124. 3. Hayward, “Between the Living and the Dead,” 221. The story of the widow of Ephesus also appeared in an anonymous thirteenth-century Italian collection, Il Novellino, and in a fable compilation



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of the tale, Marie “reduces the reprehensible faithlessness of the widow considerably” by beginning the story with the theft of the crucified corpse and making the replacement of the guarded corpse with the husband’s the suggestion of the soldier rather than widow. Marie also omitted the showy mourning behavior as well as the actual sexual liaison between the widow and soldier. Marie’s exclusion of the widow’s sexual misbehavior in her version of the tale both suggests a more sympathetic approach to female emotion and desire than many twelfth-century authors had, and also underscores the more general fear, expressed in many medieval narratives, about the forgetfulness of the living toward the dead. The widow of Ephesus remained an important example of medieval society’s simultaneous identification of and uneasiness with women as memory-bearers. As the natural keepers of this tradition, widows also bore the suspicion that they were unequal to the task because of their inherent sensuality and weakness, a secular expression of the true / false widow typology so often mentioned in ecclesiastical sources concerning widows’ professions of chastity. On the opposite end of the spectrum of female constancy is an anecdote, popularized by Boccaccio in Concerning Famous Women, about widows’ extraordinary capacity to mourn and remember the dead. A sort of antidote to the fears in the story of the widow of Ephesus, the story shows Queen Artemesia of Caria providing a “lasting example of chaste widowhood” when, upon her husband Mausoleus’ death, Artemisia dissolved his ashes in a liquid that she then drank, making her body the ultimate sepulcher for her husband.4 She spent the rest of her life in mourning and erected a great tomb in her husband’s honor. The extremity of these two versions of widowed devotion to a spouse—descalled the Book of the Seven Sages or Liber Septem Sapientium, as well as in a fourteenth-century novelle collection by the author Sercambi. Petronius scholar Philip Corbett suggests that of these various interpreters of the story, only John of Salisbury had first-hand knowledge of Petronius’s text; see Philip B. Corbett, The Influence of Petronius (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970), 122–23. See also Heather Arden, “Grief, Widowhood, and Women’s Sexuality in Medieval French Literature” in Mirrer, Upon My Husband’s Death, 310–11. The story also appeared in Jehan le Fevre’s Lamentations of Matheolus, which transformed the widow of Ephesus into a low-class chambermaid who married a knight, and the Roman soldier into Sir Gilbert; the latter rejected the advances of the widow in Jehan de Fevre’s version. See Lamentations, 2.451–578, cited in Alcuin Blamires, ed., Women Defamed and Women Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 185. 4. “Integre viduitatis exemplum posteris.” Giovanni Boccaccio, “Artemisia, Queen of Caria,” chap. 57 in Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women, ed. and trans. Virginia Brown, I Tatti Renaissance Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 232–33.

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ecrating the husband’s tomb, or becoming it—reminded audiences for these tales that protection from oblivion rested on the impulses of the “unstable” female sex. The negative stereotype of widows created from ancient literature combined assumptions about women’s fickleness and sexual voracity with ridicule of women whose sexual drives did not befit their station in life as matrons, especially elderly ones. Such constructions of unseemly matrons resonated with a masculine Schadenfreude regarding the decline of female sexual attractiveness through age. For example, in Horace’s ode to Lydia, a courtesan, the poet mocked her fading charms: Less often now do yeasty youths arrogantly shake the shutters of your windows with repeated knocking, depriving you of sleep. Now the door which once swung so willingly open on its hinges, clings like a lover to its jamb. . . . Your turn shall come, old woman, forlorn in some neglected alley, you too shall bewail those insolent adulterers while the Thracian wind rages against the new moon: season when passion takes fire, and desire maddens the mares, hot for stallions.5

The poet’s vindictive tone suggests pleasure at seeing the once-soughtafter lady who could dispense her sexual favors at will reduced to a frustrated old woman. An early example of this sentiment expressed in the medieval tradition is the Irish poem “The Lament of Baoi, The Nun of Beare Island,” which described in Baoi’s own voice her lost youth, riches, and glittering court life as she ends her days as a poor woman: “Tide’s giving, then taking,” she mourned, “has been my unmaking.”6 The poem, of uncertain date, suggested the Irish tradition, dating from the eighth century, of women who retreated in later life into convents 5. “Parcius iunctas quatiunt fenestras / iactibus crebris iuvenes protervi, nec tibi somnos adimunt, amatque / ianua limen, / quae prius multum facilis movebat cardines. . . . Invicem moechos anus arrogantis / flebis in solo levis angiportu, / Thracio bacchante magis sub interlunia vento, / cum tibi flagrans amor et libido, / quae solet matres furiare equorum, / saeviet circa iecur ulcerosum.” Horace, “To An Aging Hetaera,” 1.25, in Horace: Odes and Epodes: A New Latin Annotated Translation, ed. Daniel Garrison (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 55; in The Complete Odes and Satires of Horace, ed. and trans. Sidney Alexander (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 37. 6. Harrington, Women in a Celtic Church, 164; “The Lament of Baoi, Nun of Beare Island,” in The Penguin Book of Irish Verse, ed. Patrick Crotty (London: Penguin, 2010), 65.



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or lived in enclaves near male monastic enclosures as penitents. Despite her regret, Baoi accepted the way of life appropriate to her age and station and redeemed herself through her piety. Later medieval continental literature, by contrast, focused on the scorn women earned when they retained their earlier appetites, characterizing such women as both inappropriate and ridiculous. Old Woman in the Romance of the Rose (ca. 1277), for example, expressed regret over her own physical deterioration; lamenting her lost sexual power over men, she advised the young woman Fair Welcome to learn the ways of love as a youth, because her opportunity for using the knowledge she has gained in this area has passed: It was too late, and I was miserably unhappy, I was already past my youth. My door, which formerly was often open, both night and day, stayed constantly near its sill. “No one is coming today, no one came yesterday,” I thought, “unhappy wretch! I must live in sorrow”. . . . How could I stand it when those handsome young men came along, those who formerly had held me so dear that they could not tire themselves, and I saw them look at me sideways as they went by near me, bounding along without counting me worth an egg, even those who had loved me most; they called me a wrinkled old woman and worse before they had passed on by.7

In The Canterbury Tales (ca. 1400), Alisoun, the Wife of Bath, likewise grieved the loss of her youth and beauty, but unlike Baoi asserted she was not yet ready to give up on love’s pleasures: But—Lord Christ—whan that it remembreth me Upon my yowthe, and on my jolitee, It tikleth me aboute myn herte roote. Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote That I have had my world as in my tyme. But age, allas! that al wole envenyme Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith 7. “Ce fu trop tard, lasse dolente! J’ere ja hors de ma jovente. Mes huis qui ja souvent ouvroit, Qui par nuit et par jour ouvroit, Se tint assez pres du lintier: ‘Nus n’i vint huy, nus n’i vint hier,’ Et me pensé, ‘lass chaitive! En tristeru estuet que je vive’. . . . Comment pouisse je durer / Quant ces jolis valez venoient / Qui ja si chiere me tenoient / Qu’il ne s’en pooient lasser, Et jes veoie trespasser, Qu’il me regardoient de costé / Et jadis furent mi chiere oste? Devant moi passoient saillant / Sanz moi prisier .i. oeuf vaillant. Neis cil qui plus jadis m’amoit / Vielle ridee me clamoit; Et pis disoit cascuns assez / Ainz qu’il s’en fust outre passez.” Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Armand Strubel, Lettres Gothiques (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1992), lines 12835–42, 12848–60, p. 684; in The Romance of the Rose, trans. Charles Dahlberg, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 223.

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The Old Woman and the Wife of Bath embodied the problem of the oversexed matron who did not know when to abandon her sexual life. The scorn reserved for the crone figure in ancient satire was frequently applied to widows who possessed a voracious sexuality that their supposedly chaste exterior disguised. The widow of Gautier le Leu’s fable La Veuve, Boccaccio’s widowed character in the Corbaccio, and Jehan le Fevre’s comments on the widow who was like a dung-beetle or a shewolf in heat were inspired by ancient satire and perpetuated the notion of the oversexed widow-crone in medieval literature. By the later Middle Ages, authors consciously engaged this stereotype in juxtaposition with the conventions of Christian widowed piety. Gautier’s and Boccaccio’s widows manufactured a public image as young and beautiful wives who adopted the profession of widowhood after the deaths of their husbands. In both cases, the authors exposed such supposedly pious women as dangerous frauds who possessed neither youthful beauty nor chastity. Medieval literature also resonated with social and economic realities that influenced the widow’s ability to conform to the prescriptions for chaste widowhood. In the practical economy of the marriage, widows’ dowries and inheritance sometimes rendered them highly coveted partners for ambitious suitors. In such cases, widowed women’s real power in the marriage market engendered resentment. Late medieval authors’ preoccupation with the theme of the false widow who used her position to manipulate men suggests that literature articulated a backlash against the image of the wealthy widow whose status and resources gave her the upper hand in choosing or refusing a mate, depicting such women as greedy, domineering, and dishonest. In point of fact, few widows possessed such prodigious resources to bolster their position on the marriage market. Martha Howell’s study of the legal implications for widows’ remarriage in late medieval Douai showed that many widows, even when 8. “Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” lines 470–79, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 111.



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customary law empowered them with extensive control over their marital assets, struggled to meet their financial obligations, and often required a new mate in order to do so.9 In contrast to popular notions of widows as a poor bachelor’s windfall, the widows Howell studied usually married men whose social status was similar to their own. In the records Howell investigated for the 1390’s, only one of seven cases of widows’ remarriage resulted in a substantial improvement in economic status for the new husband.10 Such persistent notions perhaps reveal more about bachelors’ challenges and aspirations than widows’ actual ability to gain a financial upper hand over men in the later Middle Ages. The inconsistencies in the widow’s status—inferiority and vulnerability from a gender perspective but her advantageous position from an economic one—nevertheless proved to be a lightning rod for expression of envy and scorn of male authors from Juvenal to Boccaccio.11 In his first satire, for example, Juvenal lamented that “today we are elbowed aside by men who earn legacies in bed, who rise to the top via that quickest, most powerful route— the satisfied desires of some old matron. Each lover will get his cut . . . depending on the size of his services rendered.”12 Similar sentiments echoed through medieval culture, from Boccaccio’s bitter comment that “nothing is harder to bear than a rich woman” to the popular charivaris surrounding affluent widows’ remarriage among the French peasantry in the historical-anthropological work of Natalie Zemon Davis.13 Although male narrative voices expressed doubt about a widowed woman’s pious façade, or made fun of an elderly widow who was ruled 9. Howell, The Marriage Exchange, 14–17. 10. Ibid., 121. 11. See Barbara Hanawalt, “The Widow’s Mite: Provisions for Medieval London Widows,” in Mirrer, Upon My Husband’s Death, 21–46; Rowena Archer, “Rich Old Ladies: The Problem of Late Medieval Dowagers,” in Property and Politics: Essays in Later Medieval English History, ed. Tony Pollard (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984); and Mavis Mate, Daughters, Wives, and Widows After the Black Death: Women in Sussex, 1350–1535 (Woodbridge, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 1999). 12. “Cum te summoueant qui testamenta merentur noctibus, in caelum quos euehit optima summi nunc uia processus, uetulae uesica beatae . . . partes quisque suas ad mensuram inguinis heres.” Juvenal, Satires, Book I, ed. Susanna Morton Braund, 1.37–39 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 41, 46; in The Sixteen Satires, trans. Peter Green (New York: Penguin, 1967), 66. 13. “Niuna cosa e piu grave a comportare che una femmina ricca.” Giovanni Boccaccio, L’AmetoLettere, Il Corbaccio, ed. Nicola Bruscoli (Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1940), 216; in Il Corbaccio, trans. Anthony K. Cassell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 30; see also Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Reasons of Misrule,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1975), 106–7.

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by libido even though she had lost her attractiveness, widows in literature were also portrayed as desirable particularly because of their social and sexual position. As Boccaccio advised in his work Il Filocolo, a widow was a most ideal woman to take as a lover because she sexually experienced—like a wife—but independent of a husband who might interfere with the liaison.14 Wealthy, sexually knowledgeable, and independent, the well-situated widow was a valuable commodity made more charming by the challenge of attaining her favor, whether because of a vocation to chastity or merely her prerogative to reject a suitor. This inaccessibility was balanced, in medieval texts, against perceptions of women’s natural lust that drove them to seek a partner, as in the example of the often-married Alisoun, the Wife of Bath. Wealthy and attractive, Alisoun possessed currency on the marriage market. Yet conversely, such a woman, well over thirty and determined to have her way, was just the sort “old wydwe” who could potentially become the shrewish wife that the elderly widower Januarie of the Merchant’s tale dreaded.15 In contrast to the rich, oversexed matron and the faux-saintly widow who created a parody of the vere vidua, truly poor widows reminiscent of the biblical widow of the two mites received universally sympathetic treatment in medieval sources; it was only her wealthy and sexualized counterparts who became the targets of misogynistic satire. In creating satires of the inconstant widow, medieval authors parodied the rhetoric of widowhood from hagiography and preaching but also drew on recognizable social conventions of pious widowhood such as mourning rituals and clothing. These texts interpreted the lessons of sermons and conduct literature and further disseminated their content in different genres. The twinned figures of the pious and the merry widow in literature explored the dynamic aspect of widowed chastity, emphasizing the widow’s situation as a contest in which success or failure was marked by her ability to reject potential suitors and to eschew the traps of an independent life, such as greed, sensuality, and gossip. 14. Boccaccio, Il Filocolo, ed. Salvatore Battaglia, 4 q. 9, Scritori d’Italia, Boccaccio Opere no. 167 (Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1938), 346. 15. Or, as Januarie in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale noted, if the widow accepted an offer of marriage, the man was then saddled with the problem of an “olde wydwe” as an exceedingly demanding wife (The Riverside Chaucer, lines 1423–26, p. 156); see Margaret Hallissy’s discussion of this tale in Clean Maids, True Wives, Steadfast Widows: Chaucer’s Women and Medieval Codes of Conduct (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993), 142–44.



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Across many genres, including fables, plays, and satires, depictions of widowhood contrasted “bad” widows’ transgressions with the religious ideal of the widow’s profession. The bawdy widow in literature embodied the perpetual shadow of failure that haunted even the best-intentioned chaste matrons in saints’ lives and exempla. Stories about fickle, greedy, and lusty widows vividly reiterated clerical fears about the failure of proposed continence and the disgrace for women who could not maintain it. The social context for and narrative interest in literary widows therefore relied on both authors’ and audiences’ understanding of the ideals of professed widowhood and the ways that these contrasted with misogynistic assumptions about women’s failure to live up to the ideals. Many stories suggested that widows routinely schemed to entrap a second husband, lusted after men who were younger or otherwise inappropriate, and deceived others into thinking that they were respectable by adopting the appearance of the vere vidua. Within this literary context, then, widows performed a variety of ideological tasks. Sometimes widows’ misadventures were simply entertaining, but more elaborate narratives explored the widow’s situation as an opportunity for moral reflection, or as an outlet for misogynistic frustration with the status incongruity of independent women. For example, Boccaccio’s treatment of widows in his anthology Concerning Famous Women both denigrated women for their inferior moral fiber, and celebrated those women who rose above their sex to be viragos in the widowed state. Boccaccio acknowledged the impressive powers of the women of Antiquity, even corrupt widowed queens such as Semiramis or Tamyris,16 but argued that few women from his own day could compare in virtue to the ancients. Although he included a few contemporary widowed matrons in his anthology, Boccaccio expressed his view of a typical “modern” widow most clearly in the widowed antiheroine of his satire Il Corbaccio, who posed as a devout tertiary but lived as a wanton woman. Criticism of the profession of widowed chastity also engaged a second target: the clergy, and its claims concerning the superiority of religious celibacy. Attacks on the minor clergy were commonplace in medieval fabliaux; Gautier le Leu’s fabliau La Veuve revealed the greed and 16. For a discussion of Boccaccio’s humanist use of the rhetoric of praise and blame, see Virginia Brown’s introduction to her edition and translation, Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women, xix–xx.

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incompetence of the cleric who rushed through the ritual mass in order to collect his full fee for a minimum expenditure of time and effort.17 Likewise, in the Corbaccio, Boccaccio implied that the Franciscan brothers were either oblivious to or complicit in the false widow’s intention to live near them in order seduce them. Widowed chastity proposed a challenging standard of conduct that affirmed the superiority of celibacy and the authority of the clergy who supervised women and advocated for celibacy among laypeople. Satirizing a “fallen” widow presented a critique of both the clerical ideal of celibacy as well as the moral failings of widowed women. Authors juxtaposed prescriptive images of chaste widowhood with flagrant and often comical violations of that chastity, suggesting that the clerical authority itself was under attack.

Intersections of the Sacred and Secular in Literary Images of Widowhood The literary phenomenon of the profligate widow was embedded within larger patterns of medieval literary misogyny, but the particular dynamics of widowhood arose, as Cindy Carlson and Angela Weisl have argued, in the “contested social space” between the widow’s orthodoxy and transgression, empowerment and confinement, and the subversion and acceptance of the roles prescribed for her gender and situation.18 While the discourse of widowhood in theology and pastoral care identified the widowed state as a potentially unstable category because of the fragility of chastity, widowhood in literature overwhelmingly emphasized the weakness of the women themselves and the futility of proposed continence. For example, medieval authors seized upon the widow’s dutiful mourning dress—the appropriate signifier of the widowed state that designated grief for the dead spouse—as an indicator of her availability to new suitor-husbands, or worse, to would-be fornicators.19 Within the bawdy fabliaux genre, it is not surprising to find exam17. Gautier le Leu, “La Veuve,” in Gallic Salt: Eighteen Fabliaux Translated from the Old French, ed. and trans. Robert Harrison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 344–45. 18. Cindy Carlson and Angela Weisl, “Introduction: Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity,” in Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity, 6. 19. Hayward, “Between the Living and the Dead,” 221.



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ples of women who were depicted as “lascivious, demanding, verbose, irrational, and not very smart,” whose existence was reduced to a caricature of excessive sexuality; she is a “pure body . . . a welcoming sexual orifice without thought or speech.”20 In the case of Gautier le Leu’s thirteenth-century fabliau La Veuve, this was exactly the portrait of the widowed woman that medieval audiences received.21 In contrast to some of the fictional widows discussed later in this chapter, who self-consciously constructed the identity of a pious widow to conceal their abuses of the widowed state, Gautier’s widow was an unabashedly “bad” widow. Except for an initial show of grief at the husband’s funeral, she displayed little concern for the prescribed behavior for pious widows and scarcely attempted to hide her transgressive behaviors or impure motives under a cloak of piety. Rather, while the elements of pious widowhood were the implicit foil against which Gautier presented this widowed figure, her only conscious efforts to strategize about her widowhood were limited to obtaining those things that should have been anathema to the chaste widow: sex, a new husband, money, and gossip. The fabliau began, in the tradition of the satirical tale of the widow of Ephesus, with Gautier’s exhortation to the males in his audience to be aware of the inconstancy of their wives. The widow feigned grief at her husband’s funeral: she cried, moaned, beat her palms, and averred that she regretted she must go on living when her lord had died.22 In a parody of the prophetic associated widows and other holy matrons of hagiography, Gautier’s widow recalled the omens that foretold her husband’s death: bird calls, the howling of a dog, and the singing of a chicken. Then she remembered her dreams of the past days, which foreshadowed her husband’s passing:

20. E. Jane Burns, “This Prick Which Is Not One: How Women Talk Back in Old French Fabliaux,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 188–89. 21. While fables were at one time assumed to be a literature that entertained the bourgeoisie of medieval towns, its parallels to the romance genre have led more recent scholarship to suggest that this type of literature could well have been directed toward the literary sensibilities of noble audiences (Harrison, Gallic Salt, 6–11). 22. “Ensi va acontant ses fables qui ne sont mie veritables.” Gautier, “La Veuve,” in Harrison, ed. and trans., Gallic Salt, 342–45.

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Medieval Liter ature Oh God, this year the dreams I’ve dreamed! I’ve never mentioned them, they seemed too vile and gross to think about. . . . Milord, two days ago I dreamed that you were in the church; it seemed the doors were bolted all around and you’re locked up underground! I dreamed again, before I woke, you wore a long black hooded cloak and massive boots of lead; in sleep I saw you plunge into the deep, and never surface afterward; soon after that your death occurred. That dream, unhappily, came true And once I also dreamed that you were muffled in a hooded frock; within your hand you held a rock, and beat this wall till all was reft. Oh husband, what a gap you’ve left! And no one ever mourned for you, A fact which you must often rue.23

The widow’s failure to remember her spouse and use her gift of prophecy for the benefit of her spouse in purgatory persisted in late medieval devotional literature for laypeople. In The Gast of Gy, a tale that arose in Alais, France, in 1323 and circulated in both Latin and English manuscripts throughout the following century, Gy’s spirit in purgatory haunted his widow both to report on his travails in purgatory and to ask for earthly intercession in the process.24 After a long discourse on purgatorial theology with a Dominican friar, whom his wife had summoned for help in the matter, Gy agreed to cease tormenting his widow if she 23. “Dix, con jou ai awan songie, / encor ne l’aie je noncié, songes et vilains et hontex! . . . Sire, je songoie avant ier ke vos estiés en ce mostier, / s’estoient andoi li huis clos. / Or estes en la terr enclos. / Puis resoingoie aprés en oire, / vois aviés une cape noire et unes grans botes de plont; / en cele eve faisés un plonc, / ains puis ne reveniés deseure. / Or estes mors en molt peu d’eure./ Cis songes est bien avertis. / Je songai vos estiés vestis d’une grant cote a caperon; / en vo main teniés un peron, / si abatiés tout cel assiée. / Sire, quel treu m’avés laissié! / Ja mais n’ert par nul home plains, / Biens est drois qu vos sovens plains” (ibid., 346–49). 24. Mona L. Logarbo, ed. and trans., “The Gast of Gy,” in Cultures of Piety: Middle English Devotional Literature in Translation, ed. Anne Clark Bartlett and Thomas H. Bestul (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 64–65.



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promised to live chastely in widowhood and paid for three hundred various types of masses to be said for his soul, similar measures that Margery Kempe claimed to have advised certain pious widows to undertake in remembrance of their husbands.25 Related to such anecdotes concerning purgatorial intercession were exempla and mirabilia tales of “revenant” husbands who haunted their widows. Despite their lack of corporeal substance, these spectral mates were violent and vindictive, frightening their wives, punishing them for remarrying, and often seeking sex with them. Janine Peterson argues persuasively that such tales, which appeared in both popular stories and sermon anecdotes of the thirteenth century, promoted themes in pastoral care concerning the permanence of sacramental marriage and the importance of clerical supervision of married people (even beyond the grave, as priests and confessors had the spiritual knowledge and authority to exorcise disruptive demon-husbands). While these stories affirmed certain tenets of church doctrine, they put others into disarray, conflating the spiritual and earthly realms and reversing commonly held ideas about gender. Such tales portrayed men as violent, a vice typically assigned to men, but absolved the widow from the sin of lust and instead made her a victim of her husband’s lascivious impulses.26 Both the vengeful ghost-husband and the forgotten one who languished more politely in Purgatory affirmed the sentiment that the widow still belonged to her husband and owed him eternal service and obedience. In contrast to the haunted widows, the matron in Gautier le Leu’s nasty fabliau deliberately abandoned her responsibilities in widowhood even when her husband’s spirit called out to her from the abyss. The widow’s dreams suggested the potential for a spiritual connection between the widow and her husband similar to that of Guibert’s parents and Gy and his wife, but the widow was too foolish and selfish to act upon it. Indeed, she admitted that she did not mourn her husband at all, and only reflected on the omens and dreams with a sort of detached curiosity. The fabliau’s narrator commented that the widow’s sexual desire and pursuit of a new match had drowned out her husband’s en25. Ibid., 82–83. 26. Janine Larmon Peterson, “Til Death Do Us Part? Sexual Relationships and the Vengeful Ghost in the Middle Ages,” 15th Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, University of Massachussetts at Amherst, June 9–12, 2011.

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treaties to her from purgatory, where he faced a harsh judgment from “that great high court.”27 Gautier’s widow was a typical example of unsupervised female sexuality run amok. She was so eager to obtain “the dangling sausage after which the multitude of women itch” that she devoted all of her attention to securing a new husband and abandoned any outward display of piety.28 She socialized strategically in the town, acting “sweet as candied cinnamon” in the hope of cultivating an agreeable reputation to attract a potential mate.29 The remainder of the fabliau narrated the widow’s self-promotion as a more eligible marriage partner than she actually was. She abandoned any pretense of fasting or mourning and circulated shamelessly at every possible social occasion to find a new husband.30 She was concerned that her children might discourage potential husbands, and treated them cruelly, even praying for their deaths because “no man . . . will marry me with them around; who’d dare leap into such a trap?”31 Quite the opposite of the vere vidua who devotedly raised her children, Gautier’s widow conformed to the negative stereotype of the “cruel mother” who disadvantaged her children by remarriage rather than devoting herself solely to their welfare. Meanwhile, the widow led potential suitors to understand that she was very rich and even bribed informants with rewards for their help in making a successful match. She cultivated rumors that depicted her prior marriage as a chaste May-December affair in which she was a dutiful, if somewhat neglected, young wife, implying that she was well positioned to serve a new husband’s every wish as a virginal yet enthusiastic sexual partner. Throughout these efforts to find a new man, she also suggested she was in a position to be very choosy, and would reject any potential husband who was too old or poor.32 All the while, however, her coldly calculating schemes for remarriage belied an inner sexual torment in which her “Goliath” craved satisfaction so desperately that she accepted the very first proposal she 27. Gautier, “La Veuve,” in Harrison, Gallic Salt, 350–51. 28. “ains est de l’andolle pendant u les plusors sont atendant” (ibid., 350–51). 29. Ibid., 352–53. 30. Ibid., 354–55. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 364–65.



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received.33 Though she had intended to dominate this new husband, particularly by exhausting him sexually night after night, he was a violent man who soon gained the upper hand, claiming that “one’s got to be tough skinned to let fiends trick him into taking on a widow woman and her spawn.”34 The husband refused to satisfy the widow sexually, then beat her viciously when she nagged and insulted him. At the tale’s end, Gautier dispensed marital advice: the widow finally learned to become a submissive wife, but the narrator urged husbands not to go as far as the man in his story, asserting that “the mild will always have more fun” and that only a “discourteous” husband “takes his wife to task for doing nothing more than ask for what the neighbor women do.”35 Gautier’s thirteenth-century fabliau interpreted contemporary stereotypes of the lustful and inconstant nature of women through the specific transgressions of the widow. The model of the vere vidua was deeply embedded in such stories. The woman’s moral failure to uphold ecclesiastical ideals of marriage and widowhood engaged the authority of this religious model to express long-standing secular concerns such as spousal memory and social competition. Another popular tale that elaborated on the widow’s inexhaustible sexuality and subversion of the social order was the fifteenth-century Nuremberg Fastnachtspiel, or carnival play.36 Der Wittwen und Tochter Vasnacht (Widow and Daughter Carnival Play) pitted a widow against her unmarried daughter before a panel of a judge and ten advisors to settle the question of which of the two of them was entitled to seek a husband first. Such plays were typical of the urban festivities leading up to Shrove Tuesday (Fastnacht), which preceded the beginning of Lent, and often dealt with bawdy themes and comic reversals of the normal 33. Ibid., 366–67. 34. “Molt a li hom le car hardie, cui li diables tant sporent qu’i veve feme a enfans prent” (ibid., 370–71). 35. “Li auduin ont mellor mai. . . . Gautiers Li Leus dist en la fin que cil n’a mie le cuer fin qui sa mollier destraint ne cosse, ne qui li demande autre cosse que ses bones voisines font” (ibid., 378–79). 36. This play, composed in a northern Bavarian dialect, is preserved in Cgm 714, a compilation manuscript containing various other Fastnachspiele, Minnereden, and fables; see A. von Keller’s edition, Fastnachspiele, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Bibliothek des lit. Vereins, 1853). The date of composition is approximately 1450–75. German literary scholar Eckehard Catholy attributes the authorship of this play to Nuremberg artisan Hans Rosenplüt (d. 1470), who also wrote devotional and political poems, and who appears to have been affiliated with Hussite sectarians; see Catholy, Das Fastnachspiel des Spatmittelalters: Gestalt und Funktion (Tübingen: Max Niedermeier, 1961), 236n1; see also Catholy, Fastnachspiele (Stuttgart: J. B Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1966), 48.

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social order. Nuremberg artisans organized the carnival festivities and participated as both performers and audience. The story was particularly relevant in Nuremburg, where large numbers of the city’s journeymen anxiously awaited license to practice their trade and, thereafter, the opportunity to marry.37 The urgency of the daughter’s suit to marry before her widowed mother might have had a particular resonance with such men, as permission to marry and the competition for advantageous brides represented a generational point of contention in which the elder male establishment greedily hoarded resources—the right to marry and begin a life of one’s own—that rightly belong to the next. The widow introduced herself to the presiding Bürgermeister (mayor) at the beginning of the text as a “proud lusty widow” who demanded the right to find a new husband. Her daughter, also eager for a man, and filled with “lust through all her members” insisted that she should be the first to marry instead.38 Statements followed from the ten Ratherren (advisors or councilmen) who reviewed the two women’s arguments. The judges acknowledged the painful lusts that plagued each woman, but only two ruled in favor of the mother over the daughter: one suggested that as the widow was used to men, she will never be cured of her lust, so she might as well go ahead and marry; the other suggested that if the widow would be willing to make a truly loving and companionate match, she should be allowed to marry before the daughter.39 The majority, however, decided that the daughter should be allowed to marry first, in a parody of the “true” widow’s sacrifice for her children: for her daughter’s sake, the widow should overcome her sexual appetite and allow the daughter to marry a young man whose member would “feed her hunger below the navel.”40 Other rhetorical strategies supporting the daughter’s marriage included arguments that the daughter was more fertile, more likely to attract a husband, and that church law (gaistlichen rechten) 37. Catholy, Fastnachtspiele, 42; Catholy also suggests that the Nuremberg journeymen were typically subject to strict moral codes within their masters’ houses, and that the overt vulgarity of the Fastnach plays offered a temporary loosening of sexual norms. 38. “Ich pin ain stolze wittwe gail. . . . Und wolt mir gern wider nemen ainn man, Daran mich niemand geirren kan” (Keller, Fastnachspiele, 2:746); “Das mich hat oft ains mans gelust. . . . Das durchgieng mir alle meine glider” (ibid., 747). 39. Ibid., 748–49. 40. “So schol ir muter darnach stellen. . . . Und der da hab ainn guten Schnabel, Der püßt irs hungers unter irm nabel” (ibid., 747).



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forbade a parent to hold a child back from a desired marriage.41 In the bawdy context of the carnival play the women’s unchastity was taken for granted. The judges did not condemn the women’s openly lustful behavior, nor were the women offended by the judges’ remarks about it. At the end of the trial, the Ratherren issued their decision in favor of the daughter, and the widow good-naturedly accepted their verdict: Mister Bürgermaister, I thank you all You have well pleased us both And have decided our case well and rightly Now I will take an oath And will give my daughter a young man.42

While it briefly seemed that the lusty widow had changed her ways as a result of the verdict, she quickly clarified her point about the young man she intended for her daughter: “I know one, since he’s mine in fact,” and intended to go home immediately to fetch “her” young man for her daughter.43 The Wittven and Tocther Vasnacht magnified popular assumptions about the difficulty of maintaining widowed chastity to make it seem an impossible and ridiculous goal, particularly for unsupervised women, who in turn set bad examples for their daughters: the widow and daughter became sexual competitors, then accomplices, in satisfying their lusts. As in the case of Gautier’s fabliau widow, the characters, narrator, and audience expected bad behavior from the women, and the amusement of the tales arose from the widow’s delivering in full measure on these negative expectations. The stories illustrate what Heide Wunder has described as the distinction between the “social problem”—the impact of women’s participation in marriage alliances and economic life—and the “societal problem”—male authorities’ perception of women’s effect on the social and moral order.44 In this case, the judges were not debating, as a genuine problem, which woman’s arguments for marriage were more valid, but rather were us41. Ibid., 748–50. 42. “Herr der Bürgermaister, ich dank euch allen. Ir habt uns paiden wol gevallen / Und habt uns recht und wol entschaiden. Nu wil ich trachten umb ain aiden, Und wil menen tochter einem jungen man geben” (ibid., 750). 43. “So waiß ich ain, der ist mir eben” (ibid.). 44. Heide Wunder, He Is the Sun, She Is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 142.

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ing the marriage debate as a vehicle for discussing both men’s access to women’s bodies, and male authorities’ efficacy in the regulation of women’s sexuality. The cruel characterization of Gautier’s fabliau widow and the lusty mother in the Vasnachtspiel represented not only perennial misogynistic thought about women in medieval society, but also articulated masculine resentment concerning the widow’s ability to make autonomous decisions about access to both her body and her property. Each tale relocated the socially independent widow—one who might choose among interested suitors and bring assets to the match—within a fictive framework of male assessment and authority, castigating the widow simultaneously for not choosing the “right” suitor, and for desiring a suitor at all. The anger of the deceased husbands in purgatory and of other revenant spouses of the netherworld was equally matched by the anger of living suitors that widows could reject their marriage plans and aspirations. Whether widowed characters in medieval literature abided by the conventions of pious widowhood or not, it was clear that authors of imaginative works from at least the eleventh century incorporated theological and pastoral expectations of widowhood into their texts.45 Some references to patristic and medieval theologians’ prescriptions for widows were oblique, and dovetailed with social and legal customs, such as demonstrated grief, mourning dress, and devotion to the dead husband’s memory, as was the case in Gautier’s fabliau. Other texts, such as Boccaccio’s collection of ancient women’s histories, Concerning Famous Women, written circa 1362, explicitly employed patristic arguments concerning chastity.46 Boccaccio labeled the women by the traditional categories of virgins, wives, and widows, offering positive and negative examples of each. Boccaccio included the widowed Carthaginian queen, Dido, as a positive example of chaste widowhood, providing a version of her story in which she killed herself to avoid a forced remarriage to the African king of the Massitani before Aeneas ever reached Carthage (rather than the Virgilian version in which Dido broke her vows of chastity with Aeneas).47 Boccaccio drew heavily on Je45. Or even earlier if one included, for example, works such as the Anglo-Saxon epic Judith. 46. Virginia Brown, introduction to Famous Women, ix, xiv. 47. Marilyn Desmond, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), esp. chap. 1, “Dux Femina Facti: Virgil’s Dido in the Historical



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rome’s letter to Furia and the treatise Adversus Joviniam, reiterating Jerome’s recommendation of chaste widowhood for all widows, not only elderly ones. Boccaccio, like Jerome, bitterly scolded widows who were inclined toward remarriage for material reasons or the desire for children.48 He also rebuked young widows who, because of their youthful passion, accepted Paul’s license to remarry and used Scripture as a defense of their lust: How well spoken! As if I recommended chastity only to old women, or as if Dido had not been a young woman when she determined to remain chaste! How wicked it is that Paul’s holy counsel should so often be dishonorably quoted in defense of a shameful act.49

Boccaccio’s version of Dido’s story reiterated the sexual pessimism of Jerome’s teaching while also demonstrating his own command of patristic learning and facility with classical Latin.50 Chaucer, placing the same discussion in the mouth of Alisoun, the Wife of Bath, treated the prescriptions for chaste widowhood more playfully. Alisoun spoke as a lay scholar-theologian to refute the pious conventions of widowhood in favor of a lifestyle that was more agreeable to her tastes. Chaucer scholar Margaret Hallissey, who has analyzed Chaucer’s women in terms of the wife-widow-virgin paradigm, characterized Alisoun as an “archwife” rather than relegating her to only one of the “wife” or “widow” categories. As a survivor of multiple marriages and not yet ready to quit the institution, Alisoun was supremely knowledgeable about both the married and widowed states.51 Chaucer’s Alisoun summarized the ancient patristic discourse on widowed chastity and remarriage, and applied the Scholastic logic she had learned from her fifth husband and Oxford student, Jankin, to the conventional disContext,” 1–22. Desmond traces the literary paths of the two Didos, the chaste widow, or “historical” Dido, and the “Virgilian/Ovidian” version of her story. 48. Boccaccio, “Dido or Elissa, Queen of Carthage,” chap. 42, in Famous Women, ed. Brown, 167–68. 49. “O quam bene dictum! Quasi ego aniculis imperem castitatem, vel non fuerit, dum firmavit animo castimoniam, iuvencula Dido! Oscelestum facinus! Non a Paulo tam sancte consilium illud datur quin in defensionem facinoris persepe turpius alligetur.” Ibid., 178–79. 50. Ibid.; cf. Tertullian, Exhortatio Castitatis, 13.63. 51. See especially Hallissy, Clean Maids, True Wives, Steadfast Widows, chap. 9, “Summa Feminarum: The Archwife,” 163–84. Hallissy identified the Wife of Bath’s multivalent nature as indicative of expanding socioeconomic categories for women in the later Middle Ages: women could be categorized as towns- and tradeswomen as well as by the traditional hierarchy of virgin, widow, and wife (163–64).

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course encouraging chaste widowhood. Responding to the notion that she should keep widowed continence rather than remarry, Alisoun cited contradictory biblical examples to illuminate both sides of the issue. Although Jesus attended the wedding at Cana and reproved a Samaritan woman for her multiple marriages, Alisoun noted other examples, such as the polygamy of Solomon and the injunction in Genesis to be fruitful and multiply, to argue in favor of remarriage.52 She noted the advisory rather than compulsory nature of the Pauline preference for chastity over marriage and then pronounced her own unambiguous judgment on this passage: “for hadde God comanded maydenhede, Thanne hadde he dampned weddyng with the dede.”53 Alisoun thus argued the sound theological position that she incurred no blame according to Pauline doctrine by choosing remarriage over “continence eek with devocion.”54 Alisoun herself preferred Paul’s assertion that the wife had ownership of her husband’s body, which made him officially bound to satisfy her sexual demands.55 As for the Pauline rhetoric valorizing the prize of chastity, Alisoun declared herself happy to let others run the race for the chastity prize and “cacche whoso may.” As the Wife of Bath saw it, not everyone was cut out for chastity, least of all she.56 Some of the earliest non-hagiographical texts in which we find a self-conscious treatment of the expectations of pious widowhood are French vernacular romances, especially the case of Chrétien de Troyes’s heroine Laudine in Yvain (written ca. 1177). As Rebecca Hayward has observed, the widow was a problematic figure as a romance heroine. Whereas the typical heroine yielded to a sexual liaison with the hero, the virtuous widow should ideally remain celibate. Two different and competing discursive systems became emplotted in one figure, and as a result, widowed heroines such as Laudine were rather rare in twelfth-century romance.57 Her role as a widow, adequately performed 52. “Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” lines 10–14, 35–39, and 28–29. 53. “Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” lines 10–22, p. 105, and lines 70–71, p. 106. Cf. Chaucer’s reference to the Samaritan woman with Jerome’s use of this example in chapter 14 of Adversus Joviniam. 54. “Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” line 106. 55. Ibid., lines 157–59, p. 107. The reference is to 1 Corinthians 7:4 and 7:28. 56. “Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” line 76. 57. Another example of a widowed heroine is Jocasta in the Roman de Thebes; however, in contrast to Laudine, Jocasta is not represented as a Christian widow, especially in light of the incest relationships in the Oedipus tale (Hayward, “Between the Living and the Dead,” 223–25).



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through grief for her husband and chastity before her remarriage to Yvain, yielded to a more conventional role as love object. This pattern had an analogue in the interstitial role widowhood played in hagiography (prior to the late twelfth- and thirteenth-century lay influences of the penitential ethos), as the widow moved in the other direction, from marriage to the convent, through the mediating stage of widowhood. Laudine and other widowed romance heroines were characterized principally through what Leslie Abend Callahan has termed the “pedagogy of grief,” in which the heroine’s mourning for a dead husband illustrated proper devotion to the husband’s memory.58 The institutionalized character of mourning behaviors as an ornament of chaste widowhood masked potential insincerely in their enactment: “antiwidows” like the widow of Ephesus engaged in exaggerated, indecorous mourning that masked their own new independent desires. Overly intense displays of grief were just as inappropriate as insufficient regret for the loss of a spouse. Mourning also signaled availability. Although in liturgy and pastoral literature the mourning dress was closely associated with the permanent state of widowed continence, in secular life and literature, it also meant the sexual availability of a young, beautiful, grieving heroine such as Laudine. Laudine demonstrated pious widowhood through her sincere grief for her noble knight-husband and her intentions to remain chaste: she responded with profound yet credible sorrow, participated in the funeral, and remained in the church praying with her psalter after all the funeral guests departed. Though brief, Laudine’s mourning enacted the basic elements of widowhood that medieval audiences recognized: she withdrew from the world, dwelt in solitude in the church (like Anna), and devoted herself to her husband’s memory. Faithful attention to these rituals demonstrated Laudine’s authenticity as a true widow, but also aroused Yvain’s desire to win her. In an unfortunate complication, however, Yvain was actually the husband’s killer; he had slain the man in vengeance for an injury committed against Yvain’s lord, Calogrenant. Undeterred nevertheless, Yvain secreted himself within Laudine’s castle and enlisted the help of Laudine’s clever maidservant, Lunete, who gave him a ring that made him invisible. 58. Ibid., 247.

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Thus hidden, Yvain observed Laudine during her husband’s funeral, despairing of ever gaining access to the young widow: When the body had been buried, all the people, clerics, knights, and men-atarms departed. Not a lady remained, except the one who made no concealment of her grief. She stayed there all alone, often clutching her throat and writhing her hands and beating her palms. She was reading psalms from a psalter illuminated with golden letters. And Sir Yvain was still at the window gazing at her. The more he looked at her, the more she delighted him and the more he loved her. Love, who caught him at the window, filled him with the desire that she stop weeping and reading and find pleasure in speaking to him. But he despaired of his desire, unable to think or believe that it might happen.59

The propriety and liturgical quality of Laudine’s mourning identified her with the duties of a vere vidua. Unlike the fabliau widow, her grief was genuine and private rather than a display for the sake of friends and neighbors. The mourning scene established her intention to live in Christian widowhood, until she accepted Yvain as her new husband and shifted her role from widow back to wife. By defining Laudine as a “Christian lady,”60 Chrétien distinguished her from the “easily consoled” widow of Ephesus, who was instantly seduced by a new lover at the husband’s tomb.61 He acknowledged the awkwardness of this transition. The narrator commented on how Laudine’s duties to the dead husband would in future be neglected: “From then on Lord Yvain was lord and the dead man forgotten. His killer was now the husband of his widow, and they lay together. The people loved and esteemed the living lord more than they ever did the dead 59. “Quant en ot anfoie le mort, s’an partirent totes les genz; clers, ne chevaliers, ne sergenz, ne dame n’i remest, que cele qui sa dolor mie ne cele. Mes iqui remest tote sole, et sovant se prant a la gole, et tort ses poinz, et bat ses paumes, et list en un sautier, ses saumes, anluminé a letres d’or. Et mes sire Yvains est ancor a la fenestre ou il l’esgard; plus l’ainme, et plus li abelist. Ce qu’ele plore et qu’ele list volsist qu’ele lessié eüst et qu’a lui parler li pleüst. An ce voloir se despoire, car il ne puet cuidier ne croire que ses voloirs puisse avenir.” Les Romans de Chrétien de Troyes IV: Le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain), ed. Mario Roques, lines 1410–31 (Paris: Librarie Honoré Champion, 1971), 43–44; in The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, trans. David Staines (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 271. 60. Yvain, line 1148, p. 35. Hayward observes that medieval readers would recognize Laudine’s prayerful vigil by her husband’s side not only as a memorial to him, but as a necessary duty to pray for him in purgatory (Hayward, “Between the Living and the Dead,” 226). 61. See Hayward, “Between the Living and the Dead,” 226; and Callahan, “The Widow’s Tears,” in Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity, ed. Carlson and Weisl, 252, 261n25. Callahan notes Heather Arden’s opposite assessment of Laudine, characterizing her in the Ephesus tradition, in Arden, “Grief, Widowhood, and Women’s Sexuality in Medieval French Literature,” in Mirrer, Upon My Husband’s Death, 306–7.



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lord.”62 The relationship between desire and forgetfulness remained a theme throughout the rest of the story. Laudine would have been justified in denying Yvain her hand, and her prerogative to withhold herself from Yvain was, for him, the cruelest revenge for her husband’s death that Yvain could imagine. This power to reject men, although countered here by Laudine’s merciful acceptance of Yvaine, was a theme that resonated strongly in depictions of widows in medieval romance as well as other types of literature. Although Yvain ultimately won both Laudine’s heart and her considerable landed wealth, his brief phase of torment at her perceived inaccessibility suggested that the balance of power in the situation rested with her. The jeu parti of prerogative, desire, and forgetfulness between Yvain and Laudine continued to define their relationship in the narrative. Once married to Laudine and thus protector of her lands and magic fountain, Yvain traveled abroad on knight-errant adventures and forgot to return to his wife as promised, breaking faith with Laudine and leaving her effectively “widowed” a second time. Realizing his error, Yvain once again conspired with the maidservant Lunete to regain his wife’s love and favor. Lunete manipulated Laudine into forgiving and reuniting with her husband, and the couple finally made peace and fulfilled their mutual commitments.63 Fourteenth-century versions of the affair of Troilus and Criseida further explored the widow’s precarious position in the romance genre.64 Although Criseida (Briseis) was not a widow in the original tale, Boccaccio’s vernacular poem Il Filostrato, published around 1335, introduced Criseida’s identification as a widow and linked her widowhood with female inconstancy.65 Chaucer’s version, Troilus and Criseyde, was probably 62. “Mes or est mes sire Yvains sire, et li morz est toz obliez; cil qui l’ocist est mariez; sa fame a, et ensanble gisent; et les genz ainment plus et prisent le vic c’onques le mort ne firent.” Yvain, lines 2166–71; trans. Staines, 283. 63. Fredric L. Cheyette and Howell Chickering make a strong case that Chrétien’s development of these plot twists within the couple’s marriage consciously mimic the language and customs of aristocratic honor and feud; see “Love, Anger, and Peace: Social Practice and Poetic Play in the Ending of Yvain” Speculum 80, no. 1-1 (January 2005): 75–117, esp. 110ff. 64. Many scholars agree that Chaucer’s Troilus is in fact not a romance, but rather a mixture of romance, epic, history, and tragedy; see Hayward’s comments on Barry Windeatt’s and Gayle Margherita’s interpretation of these combined elements in Chaucer’s text (Hayward, “Between the Living and the Dead,” 234, 243nn40–41). 65. The story originated from the twelfth-century author Benoit de Sainte-Marie’s Roman de Troie, which related the love triangle of the Homeric figure Briseis/Briseida, daughter of Calcas, and her two

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completed about fifty years after Boccaccio’s, and retained and embellished the role of the heroine’s widowhood.66 Both texts used the themes of mourning and the widow’s dress to characterize the heroine, and each version of this character manipulated her identity as widow to accomplish her goals in romantic relationships with men. Boccaccio’s narrator tells us that she was a widow “as prudent, noble, wise, and well-mannered as any other lady who had ever been born in Troy.”67 Like Laudine, Criseida’s appearance as a widow ostensibly demonstrated her honorable character, but unlike Laudine, Criseida’s behavior as a widow was merely a parody of good widowhood. Both Boccaccio and Chaucer emphasized the vulnerability of Criseida’s position as a widow who was also abandoned by her father, Calcas. Boccaccio wrote that she was left behind “in mourning habit and tears,”68 and Chaucer’s Criseyde embodied the figure of the widow as a miserabilis persona and a penitent: [Calcas’s] doughter, which that was in gret penaunce; For of hire lif she was ful sore in drede, As she that nyste what was best to rede; For bothe a widewe was she and allone Of any frend to whom she dorst hir mone.69

Like Laudine’s, Criseida’s grief and bereft state signified sexual availability; a beautiful woman, she attracted attention even in the drab colors of mourning. When Boccaccio’s hero Troilo first saw her in the temple of Pallas, she was wearing a “white veil and a dark habit” and successive lovers, Troilus the Trojan and Diomede the Greek. In brief, Briseis and Troilus pursued a love affair in Troy until events of the Trojan War determined that Briseis was to be given back to the Greeks in an exchange of hostages. Briseis declared her love for Troilus and promised to somehow return to Troy, but forgot her promise once she was back among the Greeks and was wooed by Diomede. Ultimately, when Troilus realized that Briseis had broken her word, he engaged in battle against the Greek Achilles, motivated in part by his grief and despair, and was killed. The story circulated widely in a Latin prose translation written in 1287, and was further popularized in a 1325 work by Armannino, the Florita, in which the Briseis character’s name was changed to Criseida; see Robert P. apRoberts and Anna Bruni Seldis, introduction to Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Filostrato (New York and London: Garland, 1986), xii-xv; see also Hayward, “Between the Living and the Dead,” 230. 66. For a discussion of the dating of Chaucer’s text, see Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 207n41. 67. “Al mio parare, accorta, onesta, savia e costumata quant’altra ce in Troia fosse nata” (Filostrato 1.11, pp. 22–23). 68. “In abito dolente, e lagrimosa” (ibid., 1.12, pp. 22–23). 69. Troilus and Criseyde, bk. 1, lines 94–98, Riverside Chaucer, p. 474.



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a “black mantle,” suggesting the medieval widow’s customary clothing of mourning and proposed continence; Chaucer’s Criseyde wore even more distinctive garments as widow, which he described as a “widewes habit large of samyt broun” and, later, as a “widewes habit blak.”70 Like Yvain, who received help from Laudine’s maidservant, Boccaccio’s Troilo also had a co-conspirator: Pandaro, Criseida’s kinsman and Troilo’s friend, agreed to help Troilo win Criseida’s love. In Il Filostrato, Pandaro believed that Criseida was virtuous, but he also acknowledged: “my cousin is a widow and has desires, and if she should deny it, I would not believe her.”71 Troilo admitted to Pandaro when he solicited Pandaro’s help that he knew his love for Criseida was an unseemly trespass on convention: “Do you hesitate to kindle your flames under her widow’s weeds, my lord? No greater glory will be yours than this; enter into her breast with that desire which dwells in mine and torments me.”72 Rebecca Hayward characterized this consciousness of a “vidual” sexuality in Boccaccio’s text—notably absent from Chaucer’s—as a force that Boccaccio implied was “simmering powerfully beneath the chaste surface” of all widows, not only Criseida, whom Pandaro described as more chaste than most women.73 This characterization is consistent with other characters Boccaccio created, such as the widow of Il Corbaccio, who deliberately manipulated social expectations of chaste widowhood to perpetrate even greater sexual exploits and social dishonesty than did the ill-fated Criseida. Although Criseida seemed to be a more passive victim of her sexuality than the scheming widow of the fabliaux genre, she did manipulate the conventions of widowhood in her own interests. She first tried to fend off Pandaro’s suggestion that she court Troilo by invoking her grief for her husband,74 but eventually came to the conclusion that she was entitled to engage in a love affair: “I am young, beautiful, lovely, and gay, a widow, rich, noble, and beloved, without children and leading a quiet life. Why should I not be in love? If perhaps propriety forbids me 70. “Candido velo in bruna vesta” (Boccaccio, Il Filostrato, 1.26 and 1.30, pp. 30–33); Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, bk. 1, lines 109 and 170, pp. 474–5. 71. “La mia cugina é vedova e disia, e se ‘l negasse non gliel crederia” (Il Filostrato 2.27, pp. 64–65). 72. “Dubiti tu sotto la bruna vesta / d’accender le tue fiamme, signor mio? / Nulla ti fia maggior gloria che questa; / entre nel petto suo con quel disio / che dimora ne mio e mi molesta” (ibid., 2.60, pp. 80–81). 73. Hayward, “Between the Living and the Dead,” 231, 234. 74. Il Filostrato, 2.49, pp. 76–77.

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this, I shall be discreet and keep my desire so hidden that it shall never be known that I have ever had love in my heart.”75 Criseida, like Troilo and Pandaro, was aware that she was supposed to remain chaste, but was drawn by the allure (and feasibility) of a secret love. When she learned that she must leave Troilo to return to the Greeks, Troilo suggested that they should run away together rather than participate willingly in the separation. Criseida opposed the idea, horrified at the thought that flight would expose their affair, thereby destroying their honor and revealing her unchastity. Her desire to keep the affair a secret not only served her own interest to protect her reputation, but articulated the inherent pleasure of their transgressive element of their relationship; as she argued, “if we wish our love to last, as we do now, it must always be stolen.”76 In the crisis of separation from Troilo, Criseida revealed her sophisticated understanding of her widowed state as a literal garment that could be put on and removed at will. In promising her loyalty to Troilo, she exclaimed that in parting from him: “now I shall in truth be a widow, since I am obliged to part from you, heart of my body, and the black attire will be a true testimony of my sufferings.”77 Later, when she was back at the Greek camp, the process played itself out once again: Diomede, attracted to Criseida’s beauty and austerity as she played the grieving widow, pursued her, but she rejected him with the excuse that she was a widow in mourning (ostensibly for her husband, but in reality for Troilo): “I have not known love since the man died to whom I gave it loyally as my husband and lord. Nor did I ever care for any other, Greek or Trojan, in such fashion; nor do I desire to care for any, nor ever shall.”78 Criseida’s arbitrary use of her widowhood to attract and reject suitors would have been abundantly clear to Boccaccio’s readers. Rather than the vere vidua she pretended to be, she belonged unambig75. “Io son giovane, bella, vaga, e lieta, / vedova, ricca, nobile ed amata, / sanza figliuoli et in vita quieta, / perché esser non deggio innamorata? / Se forse l’onesta questo mi vieta, io saro saggia, e terro si celata / la voglia mia, che non sara saputo / ch’io aggia mai nel core amore avuto” (ibid., 2.69, pp. 86–87). 76. “Per che, se ‘l nostro amor vogliam che duri, com’or facciam, convien sempre si furi” (ibid., 4.153, pp. 266–67). 77. “Or vedova saro io daddovero, / poi che da te dipartir mi conviene, / cuor del mio corpo, e ’l vestimento nero / ver testimonio fia delle mie pene” (ibid., 4.90, pp. 232–33). 78. “Amor io non conobbi, poi morio colui al qual lealmente il servai, si come a marito e signor mio, né Greco né Troian mai non curai in cotal atto, né m’é in disio curarne alcun, némi sara giammai” (ibid., 4.29, p. 333).



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uously to the category of “easily consoled” widow. Boccaccio’s narrator concluded that the unhappy fate of Troilo, who died grieving for his betrayal by Criseida, as a warning to young men not to waste their lives on an evil woman. Chaucer’s Criseyde also provided a cautionary tale about female betrayal, but with a greater sense of play, and without of Boccaccio’s acidic pessimism concerning the widowed state. Just as Chaucer left it to the Wife of Bath to sort out the interpretations of the Pauline exhortation to widowed continence, Chaucer’s Criseyde also struggled to find a place in between the conventional polarities of the chaste and the easily consoled widow.79 Perhaps because the institution of vowed widowhood was particularly well-established in the religious landscape of fourteenthcentury England, Chaucer’s widowed Criseyde emerged in even clearer detail than Boccaccio’s Criseida with respect to her dress and her own ability to articulate her state. In one scene, Pandarus visited Criseyde in the hope of persuading her to love Troilus while she sat with her maidens, reading the geste of the siege of Thebes. Jesting, he asked her to take off her wimple and dance, and Criseyde replied: “I, god forbede!” quod she, “be ye mad? Is that a widewes life, so god yow save? Ye ben so wylde; it semeth as ye rave It satte me wel bet ayy in a cave To bidde, and rede on holy seyntes lyves; Lat maydens gon to daunce, and yonge wyves.”80

Although she was in fact caught reading a romance instead of more appropriate devotional literature with her companions, Criseyde showed she understood the behavior required to cultivate her image as a chaste and austere widow. Pandarus repeatedly urged her to “cast aside youre widwes habit to mischaunce,” both literally, through the invitation to dance, and figuratively, in encouraging an affair with Troilus.81 It was also clear that Pandarus was not asking Criseyde to marry Troilus, but rather to engage in a secret romance, telling Criseyde that he did not require her to “bynde yow to hym thorugh no byheste.”82 79. Hayward, “Between the Living and the Dead,” 234. 80. Troilus and Criseyde, bk. 2, lines 113–19, p. 490. 81. Ibid., bk. 2, line 222, p. 492. 82. Ibid., bk. 2, line 359, p. 494.

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In both Boccaccio’s and Chaucer’s version of the story, the figure of Pandarus found himself in the curious position of encouraging a relationship that most widows’ kinsmen would want to avoid. Even Criseyde herself seemed perplexed at Pandarus’ request, since he “ret me to love, and sholde it me defende.” 83 Whereas Boccaccio’s Pandaro reasoned that a widow’s desire was merely waiting under the surface to be discovered, Chaucer’s Pandarus felt that love’s adventures were a higher calling than her “widwes habit,” and openly accepted the responsibility for safeguarding Criseyde’s honor.84 In order to persuade her, Pandarus told Criseyde that it would kill Troilus if she rejected him, and then he would die too out of sympathetic grief for his friend.85 Chaucer’s version made Criseyde’s lapse of widowed continence more sympathetic than Boccaccio’s, especially because Criseyde attempted to find an honorable way to resolve the conflict between desire and duty: A, lord! what me is tid a sory chaunce! For myn estat lith in a jupartie, And ek myn emes life is in balaunce; But natheles, with goddes governaunce, I shal so doon, myn honour shal I kepe, And ek his lif”—and stynte for to wepe.86

Soon, however, Chaucer’s Criseyde—now sounding a bit more like the Wife of Bath—came to the same realization as Boccaccio’s Criseida, that maintaining the appearance of professed widowhood provided cover for a secret romance and left her free from the restrictions of marriage: I am myn owene womman, wel at ese— I thank it God—as after myn estat, Right yong, and stonde unteyd in lusty leese, Withouten jalousie or swich debat; Shal noon housbonde seyn to me “chek mat.’ For either they ben ful of jalousie, Or maisterful, or loven novelrie

83. Ibid., bk. 2, line 413, p. 495. 84. Ibid., bk. 2, lines 355–58, p. 494. 85. Ibid., bk. 2, lines 439–41, p. 495. 86. Ibid., bk. 2, lines 464–69, p. 495.



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What shal I doon? to what fyn lyve I thus? Shal I nat love, in case if that me leste? What, pardieux! I am not religious And though that I myn herte sette at reste Upon this knyght, that is the worthieste And kepe alwey myn honour and my name, By alle right it may do me no shame.87

In her declaration that she was “not religious,” meaning that she was neither nun nor consecrated widow, Criseyde asserted that there perhaps might be a legitimate place in the middle for one who was also not a wife, but who might take her pleasure in a discreet affair. Yet ultimately, Criseyde shared Criseida’s duplicity in invoking the cloak of widowed piety only when it benefited her. Both characters used the privilege of widowed grief to reassure Troilo/Troilus of their faithfulness when they were forced to part from him, and both traded on the sympathy engendered by widows as miserabiles personae to gain as much control as possible in their later dealings with Diomede.88 Unlike the fabliaux widows whose grief at their late husbands’ funerals was purely feigned, Criseyde was a multidimensional character who demonstrated genuine grief and regret for her disloyalty to Troilus.89 Despite Criseyde’s attempt to negotiate her own sense of honor and survival in the widowed state, male authors were deeply suspicious of widowed chastity and steeped in the assumptions of ancient satire and medieval farce. At best, as in the case of Laudine, pious widowhood stabilized the interim between the death of a spouse and remarriage. More prevalent, however, was the assumption that a permanent widow was “wel at ese” and would use her position for her personal, sexual, and social advantage. Boccaccio was as pessimistic as anyone about women’s inability to maintain chaste widowhood. In Concerning Famous Women, he explained that his specific concerns about the fragility of proposed continence derived from his mistrust of contemporary women. Ancient and pa87. Ibid., bk. 2, lines 750–63, p. 499. 88. Ibid., bk. 4, lines 778–84, p. 548, and bk. 5, lines 974–80, p. 573. 89. “Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” lines 590–59, p. 113; see also William Dunbar, Tretis of the Twa Mariit Women and the Wedo, lines 415–16, in The Poems of William Dunbar, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 55.

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gan examples, however, offered the women of his day prescriptions for good conduct as virgins, wives, and widows. In his chapter on Dido, whom Boccaccio clearly identified as a positive exemplum of chaste widowhood, he wanted to “cleanse away (at least in part) the infamy undeservedly cast on the honor of her widowhood”90 by her fall from grace in the Aeneid, and to inspire modern-day women to imitate her: O Dido, venerable and eternal model of unsullied widowhood! I wish that women who have lost their husbands would turn their eyes upon you and that Christian women in particular would contemplate your strength. If they can, let them meditate upon how you shed your chaste blood, especially women for whom it is a trivial matter to drift into second, third, and even more marriages. . . . Let the women of today blush, then, as they contemplate Dido’s lifeless body. While they ponder the reason for her death, let them bow their heads in sorrow that Christian women are surpassed in chastity by a woman who was a limb of Satan. Let them not think that by mourning and dressing in black they have executed all the duties owed to the dead. Love must be maintained to the end if they want to fulfill the obligations of widowhood. Nor should they think of contracting another marriage; this some do under the false name of matrimony more to satisfy their passion than to observe its sacramental character and avoid the defilement caused by lust.91

Boccaccio emphasized Dido’s ability to transcend the physical and sexual weaknesses of the female gender and emerge as a triumphant virago.92 Boccaccio also described her flight from her brother Pygmalion’s schemes and her founding of the city of Carthage as proof of her manly strength and cleverness.93 As an essentially desexualized woman—a 90. “Si forte paucis literulis meis saltem pro parte notam, indigne obiectam decori sui viduitatis, absetegere queam.” “Dido or Elissa, Queen of Carthage,” chap. 42 in Famous Women, ed. Brown, 166–67. 91. “O pudicitie inviolatum decus! O viduitatis infracte verandum eternumque specimen, Dido! In te velim ingerant oculos vidue mulieres et potissime christiane tuum robur inspiciant; te, si possunt, castissimum effundentem sanguinem, tota mente considerarent, et he potissime quibus fuit, ne ad secunda solum dicam, sed ad tertia et ulteriora etiam vota transvolasse levissimum! . . . Erubescant igitur intuentes Didonis cadaver exanime; et dum causam mortis eius excogitant, vultus deiciant, dolentes quod a membro dyaboli christicole pudicitia superentur; nec putent, dum lacrimas dederint et pullas assumpserint vestes, defuncto peregisse omnia. In finem usque servandus est amor, si adimplere velint viduitatis officium. Nec existiment ad ulteriora vota transire; quod nonnulle persepe faciunt, potius ut sue prurigini, sub ficto coniugii nomine, satisfaciant, quam ut sacro obsequantur connubio, impudicitie labe careat.” Ibid., 174–75, 178–81. 92. Desmond, Reading Dido, 62. 93. Boccaccio related that although she was called Elissa, she earned the name Dido, the Phoenician equivalent of the Latin virago (Phenicum lingua sonans quod virago latina), through her valor in opposing her brother (“Dido,” in Famous Women, 168–69).



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pagan version of the Judith figure whose murderous actions and clever wiles could be considered tamed by her chastity and sobriety—Boccaccio’s Dido contrasted sharply with the women of her own day, yet still functioned within the gendered discourse of chaste widowhood. The fact that Dido’s story was situated in antiquity, a favorite period of the early Italian humanists, gave Dido a historical distance from her modern counterparts that clearly appealed to Boccaccio. He expressed reverence for the human dignity and morality found in ancient examples and distaste for their absence in contemporary life. In the life of Pompeia Paulina, wife and widow of Seneca, Boccaccio linked the integrity of the estates of marriage and widowhood and their demise among women of his era: Certainly it is not at all plain whether such women can be said to leave the chamber of a dead husband or the cell of a brothel. . . . Alas, what wretches we are! To what depths have our morals plunged! The ancients, who were naturally inclined to purity, used to regard a second marriage as disgraceful, much less a seventh; they also held that after remarriage it was wrong to permit such women to mingle with respectable wives. The women of our day are quite different. They conceal their itching lust and think they are more beautiful and beloved for having pleased so often the various husbands of their frequent marriages and for having overcome the misfortune of widowhood.94

The one exemplary contemporary widow in Concerning Famous Women, Camiola, performed the charitable deed of ransoming a captive of war named Roland by offering him her hand in marriage. Having accepted Camiola’s proposal, Roland was released and immediately reneged on the betrothal. Camiola brought him to court to enforce the agreement, and presented a long list of Roland’s wicked deeds and intentions. The court decided in her favor, but Camiola withdrew her offer, stating that “henceforth I shall be satisfied with my widowhood, and I shall leave the fortune God has given me to heirs more honorable than you [Roland] might have sired.”95 Though Camiola’s intentions were laudable, 94. “Equidem non satis certum est an ex lupanari cellula an ex premortui viri thalamo tales exire dicende sint. . . . Heu miseri, quo nostri corruere mores? Consuevere veteres, quibus erat pronus in sanctitate manimus, ignominiosum arbitrari, nedum septimas, sed secundas inisse nuptias; nec posse de cetero tales honestis iure misceri matronis. Hodierne longe aliter; nam libidinosam pruriginem reticentes suam, formosiores carioresque se existimantes, quoniam crebris sponsalitiis, viduitatis superata fortuna, totiens placuerint maritis variis.” Boccaccio, “Pompeia Paulina, Wife of Seneca,” chap. 94 in Famous Women, ed. Brown, 402–3. 95. “Ego de cetero mea viduitate contenta consistente; et quas michi prestitit fortunas Deus, qua,

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Boccaccio’s tale expressed her charity as misplaced and implied that she would have been better off not seeking a second husband at all. Camiola’s widowhood—though “blameless,” an example “contrary to the usual feminine avarice”—paled in comparison to Dido’s heroics and her fatal dedication to her vow of widowed chastity.96 Boccaccio frequently addressed his works, including the lewd (and eventually proscribed) Decameron, to female readers. In his preface to Concerning Famous Women, Boccaccio expressed the hope that contemporary female readers would find inspiration as well as rebuke in the examples of women in his collection. Marilyn Desmond has argued that Boccaccio’s convention of addressing women as his audience constructed a dynamic that “constrain[ed] women in order to manage their interpretive responses.”97 Boccaccio’s writing simultaneously rebuked widows and matrons for unchastity and provided examples of particularly clever women who evaded social rules and constraints; these examples were so detailed that the anecdotes functioned as instruction as well as warning, a criticism that Christine de Pizan later articulated about Boccaccio’s works. The plot of Boccaccio’s vernacular satire Il Corbaccio revolved exclusively around the machinations of a falsely chaste widow who typified the predatory female reader: the Corbaccio widow ensnared the narrator (her would-be suitor) through her physical beauty and sympathetic appearance as a mourning widow, but also through a feigned understanding of humanistic literature and philosophy, expressed in an exchange of letters in their initial courtship. Similarly, as the narrator’s dedication that preceded the Filostrato indicated, Boccaccio urged the lady to find a moral lesson in Criseida, a wry invocation that contrasted sharply with Criseida’s unchaste widowhood in the text.98 If Concerning Famous Women’s dedication suggested a text directed to women and “overheard” by male readers,99 Il Corbaccio provided both ex te genitis, honestoribus relinquam heredibus,” Boccaccio, “Camiola, a Sienese widow,” chap. 105 in Famous Women, ed. Brown, 464–67. 96. “Commendabile” (ibid., 454–55); “adversus tenacitatem feminam” (ibid., 466–67). 97. Desmond, Reading Dido, 58, 67–68; on the Corbaccio widow’s literary pretensions, see Corbaccio, ed. Buscoli, 204. 98. Laura Kellogg, “Boccaccio’s Criseida and Her Narrator, Filostrato,” Critical Matrix 6 (1991): 46–48, cited in Hayward, “Between the Living and the Dead,” 230, 242n31. 99. Desmond, Reading Dido, 67.



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a manual for the misuse of chaste widowhood and a warning to men that exposed the foibles of the supposedly pious widow.100 Boccaccio explored more intricately than did any other medieval author the relationship between saintly examples of widowed chastity and the failure of these models in women’s pious practice. The romance, fable, and farce genres had long exploited popular and ecclesiastical mistrust of chaste widowhood, but Boccacio’s portrayal crystallized the contrasts between ideal widowhood and widows’ self-conscious duplicity enacted under the cloak of piety. Florence was a meaningful setting for Boccaccio’s exposition of the scheming widow. Both the constraints placed on widows in that city and the important role widows bore in continuing and honoring family memory suggested that the stakes for widows’ proper conduct were especially high in the Florentine city-state. Both the 1424 Florentine census and the long-established Florentine tradition of men marrying very young wives suggested that the city was home to an especially large number of widows, perhaps as high as 25 percent of the total female population. The intensely patriarchal nature of Florence’s legal system greatly constrained widows’ autonomy, particularly in comparison to widows’ rights in other parts of Europe and elsewhere in Italy.101 Widows’ public, legal authority in Florence was limited by a combination of Roman and Langobard traditions that restricted women’s property and inheritance rights and deprived them of independent status in legal affairs. Marginalized by the law, Florentine women were also disadvantaged by an agnatic kinship structure that determined inheritance exclusively through the male line. The absolute authority of the household’s patriarch, a lack of independent legal status, and the use of marriage as a means of securing family alliances combined to relegate widows of the magnate classes to the status of second-class citizens, placing them at the mercy of patriarchal family interests.102 Florentine 100. The title “Corbaccio,” which could be translated as “wicked raven” or “evil crow,” probably derived from the fable in Phaedrus, Liber fabularum 1.3, concerning the crow that dressed in peacock’s feathers—a widespread exemplum used in sermons, homilies, and other moralizing works criticizing female vanity, and characterized the ugly and sinful widow’s preoccupation with her appearance (Anthony Cassell, introduction to Corbaccio, xxvi–xxvii). 101. The Florentine ages of marriage for men and women were based on the Florentine Catasto of 1427, cited in Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “La mere cruelle: Maternité, veuvage, et dot,” in La Maison et le nom, 250. 102. On the status of Florentine women, see Thomas Kuehn’s articles, “Cum Consensu Munduali:

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matrons perhaps compensated for this restricted public role by their personal involvement in groups such as the mendicant tertiary orders, but even those activities, as we have seen, at times conflicted with the authority of fathers, brothers, and husbands. The recent widow faced a particular moment of crisis, because her situation created a conflict of interest between her natal and marital families. Particularly when widows were young enough to consider remarriage, the dowry became an issue of contention. Florence practiced partible inheritance for sons in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but the male children’s portion was often inherited as shares in the family’s property or business. Women’s inheritance was generally given in the form of a sizable dowry, usually in cash, but those liquid assets eventually commingled with the marital family’s business assets.103 Marital families thus had a strong incentive to keep the widow’s dowry in place and avoid returning it to the widow’s natal family in cash. Such practical considerations as well as conventions of family honor led marital families to prefer that widows remained in their husband’s household as chaste widows even as widows’ natal families pressured them to remarry. While these concerns and practices were not unique in Florence, Florentine wills documented especially aggressive strategies to ensure control of the widow from beyond the grave. Husbands often arranged their finances to discourage a wife’s remarriage, providing her with a stipend (alimenta), permission to remain in the marital residence, and use of the husband’s property until her death, but only if she agreed not to withdraw her dowry from the patrimony and remarry. Some wills expressly encouraged women to take vows of celibacy or to join tertiary religious orders.104 Christiane Klapisch-Zuber has noted that Florentine culture addiLegal Guardianship of Women in Quattrocento Florence,” Viator 13 (1982): 309–33, and “Women, Marriage and Patria Potestas in Late Medieval Florence,” Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschied 49 (1981): 127–47. Martha Howell offers a brief comparative perspective on widows’ status in various regions of Europe in The Marriage Exchange, 223–24. 103. Lansing, The Florentine Magnates, 109, and Kuehn, “Mundualdi,” 319. 104. Ann Morton Crabb, “How Typical Was Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi,” in Mirrer, Upon My Husband’s Death, 49–50; see also Lansing, The Florentine Magnates, 132, and Gene A. Brucker’s example of the settlement of Pia Ubertini, who received 125 florins, her dowry, her wardrobe and belongings, and an alimenta that supported her, with her children and a servant, in her husband’s home, on the condition that she remain a widow; she was also permitted to join a tertiary order. Brucker, The Society of Renaissance Florence: A Documentary Study (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 49–50.



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tionally vilified women who remarried as “cruel mothers” who selfishly abandoned their children for a second husband.105 Stepfathers were presumed unlikely to have a compelling interest in providing for the children’s futures, and families were loath to see their offspring and assets come under the influence of stepfathers from a potentially rival kin group. Further, women who invested their dowries in second marriages had less control over it while the new husband lived, thereby depriving their children of liquid capital when they attained their majority. Children generally resided with the paternal kin, so a widow’s marrying into a new household often meant the physical abandonment of one’s children. In contrast, a widow who devoted herself to child-raising, celibacy, and good works was seen as a credit to the marital family and brought honor to the memory of her dead husband. Unlike widows in England—where a variety of laws enabled women to manage property without guardianship, so that widows might indeed be, like Criseyde, “wel at ese”—Florentine widows faced more limited financial resources and social freedom. Anna Benvenuti Papi’s study of Florentine widowed tertiaries, such as Humiliana of Cerchi, emphasized the strict family control that reigned over such women’s lives even in the absence of a husband.106 Women escaped contentious negotiations with fathers and other kin only through the mediation of confessors, or through interior religious experiences such as mysticism. Ideals of pious widowhood thus had particular relevance in Florence, where vows of chastity or entrance into a tertiary order shielded a woman from suspicion, distinguished her from “ordinary” widows who intended to return to the marriage market, and enhanced her good name and reputation in the public view as she managed her household and children. Pious works and contact with religious also gave women a focus for their charity and spirituality. Nevertheless, these freedoms could be misinterpreted. Boccaccio’s Il Corbaccio (The crow, ca. 1355), his last work of vernacular fiction,107 offered an extended diatribe on 105. Klapisch-Zuber, “La mere cruelle,” 258. 106. Anna Benvenuti Papi, “Mendicant Friars and Female Pinzochere in Tuscany,” in Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 86. 107. Editor Anthony Cassell suggests that the possible composition date, while conventionally accepted as ca. 1355, could indeed be as late as 1356–66, according to recent scholarship. Cassell sees 1355 as a plausible date in part because it coincided with Florence’s reissuing of stringent sumptuary

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the misuse of the profession of widowhood and a broader indictment of women. Written a little over one hundred years after Humiliana of Cerchi’s vita, which was intended as a model for Florentine women in tertiary orders, the Corbaccio satirized the mendicant ideal of chaste widowhood. Whereas Vito of Cortona’s vita of Humiliana of Cerchi illustrated the spiritual rewards of a young widow’s decision to remain chaste and modeled these benefits for future Franciscan tertiaries, Boccaccio’s pious widow was an “anti-saint,” a model of vice rather than of holiness, and a parody of a Florentine tertiary who exploited her position as an ostensibly chaste widow to pursue vanity, greed, and lust. In Boccaccio’s text, the narrator, a prospective suitor to a certain widow of Florence, has been rejected and scorned by her.108 The narrator fell asleep and met the spirit of the woman’s first husband in a dream. The first husband revealed that he had returned from purgatory to warn the narrator of the widow’s true and evil character, as well as of the vices of women in general, and portrayed his former spouse as the culmination of the worst vices of the female sex: greedy, lustful, vain, shrewish, and deceitful. The husband lingered in particular over the falseness of the widow’s beauty and revealed to the narrator, who was initially beguiled by the widow’s looks, all of the secret tricks of cosmetics and attire that lent her grotesquely wrinkled face and body an illusion of youth and attractiveness. The husband claimed that this harsh revelation was a necessary dose of spiritual medicine to break the narrator’s infatuation with the widow.109 The theme of the widow’s physical and moral putrefaction permeated the subsequent description of her fraudulent life as a seemingly devout widow. The first husband related how he died of the torment his wife had caused him and how his soul was barely out of his body before she rellaws, which occurred in that same year, and the theme of female dress received emphatic treatment in the text (Cassell, introduction to Corbaccio, xxvi); on the text as a “palinode” or parody of the courtly or romance genre, see ibid., xviii–xix. 108. In what was perhaps a sly self-parody, the narrator’s first view of the widow was extremely similar to Troilo’s first sighting of Criseida; the widow appeared in church wearing a white mantle and black widow’s weeds (“le bende biance e’ panni neri”), and stood out as a beauty in the crowd despite the plainness of her costume, as did Criseida; a kinsman of the widow, playing the role of Pandaro to the narrator’s Troilus, filled the narrator in on the widow’s identity (Corbaccio, ed. Bruscoli, 202). 109. Corbaccio, ed. Bruscoli, 239–41.



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ished her newfound freedom. She shed false tears over his demise while stealing his household possessions and the inheritance of her husband’s children by a former marriage. Then “with piteous words she said that she wanted to retire to some little cottage close to a church of holy people, so that there, a lonely widow, she might end the rest of her days in prayer and church-going.”110 The narrator’s widow displayed all the commonplace vices attributed to widows in the society of late medieval Florence: mismanagement of family finances, lack of devotion to the deceased husband’s memory, and mistreatment of her stepchildren as a “cruel mother.” She also pursued her sexual adventures in widowhood with the full complicity of the neighborhood’s friars: She got as close, then, as she could to the friars’ church in which you first met her, not, of course, to say prayers—of which I believe she knows none, nor ever cared about knowing any—but so that she could satisfy her lecherous cravings more easily without having too many eyes upon her, especially those of people for whom her honor was of some concern, and, even though every other man might fall short, so that the friars, who are most holy, merciful men and consolers of widows, might not fail her.111

The widow enjoyed the reputation of a piety by donning the black mantle, a sign of proposed continence, but used it to hide behind as she spied on and gossiped with churchgoers when she was supposed to be praying. Like Chaucer’s Criseyde, she read French and Italian romances (including Boccaccio’s own Florio and Blanchefleur) instead of the Bible and the lives of the saints. She also distracted herself by playing with pets “like a wanton young girl” and had a lover who visited her retreat. “To such a good and saintly life near the friars,” claimed the first hus110. “Mandati dunque ad esecuzione tutti gli ufici funerali, poiché ‘l mio corpo, terra divenuto, fu alla terra renduto, la valenta donna, disiderosa di piu scapestratamenta la sua vechiezza menare che non l’era paruto potere la giovanezza, sentedosi caldo di quello che suo essere non dove, per cio che ne di sua dota ne di patrimoniale eredita sostenersi arebbe potuto di quello che a fare s’apparecchiava, ne nella mia casa rimaner volle né in quella de’ suoi nobili parenti e consorti tornare. Ma con parole piene di compassione disse sé volere alcuna piccola casetta e vicina ad alcuna chiesa, e di sante persone, riducersi, accio che quivi, vedova e sola, in orazione e in usare la chiesa il rimanente della sua eta consumasse.” Corbaccio, ed. Bruscoli, 244–45; trans. Cassell, 58. 111. “Appropinquossi adunque quanto piu poté alla chiesa de’ frari, nella quale tu prima la conoscesti; non gia per dire orazioni, delle quali niuna credo che sappi, né di sapere occhi addosso, e massimamente di persone alle quali del suo onore calesse, le sue libidinose volunta compiere; accio che, dove ogn’altro uomo le venisse meno, i fratri, che sanctissimi e misericordiosi uomini sono, e consolatori delle vedove, non le venissero meno.” Corbaccio, ed. Bruscoli, 245; trans. Cassell, 59.

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band, “did that woman retire, who, while I lived, was not my lady but my torment.”112 Whereas proximity to the friars through tertiary vows and a life of lay piety dignified the status of chaste widowhood for saints such as Humiliana of Cerchi and prominent Florentine matrons such as Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi,113 Boccaccio’s satire suggested the widow’s interest in the friars functioned was merely another outlet for her insatiable lust. Turning the model of a saint’s life on its head, Boccaccio interpreted conventional female piety, such as participation in the religious community of the friars, as purely transgressive behavior. Boccaccio’s innuendo about the mendicant friars as, construing their role as “consolers of widows” as providing sexual companionship rather than pastoral care, implied either the clerics’ stupidity in not recognizing the false widow’s behavior, or their complicity in permitting it. In Boccaccio’s portrait, both the mendicants’ pastoral care and the profession of widowhood itself provided cover for every immoral excess, and dismissed the possibility for true holiness in these institutions as naive. Both Vito’s life of the saintly Humiliana and Boccaccio’s bitter portrait of the oversexed matron touched on the tensions and contradictions that society recognized concerning the widow. Both Humiliana and Boccaccio’s nameless widow displayed strained relationships with family members and incompetence in handling financial affairs, both lost interest in their departed husbands and experienced distractions in their solitude. While Humiliana might be forgiven for these social lapses because they occurred as she turned her attention to her new “most worthy husband,” Christ, both stories dealt with the social anxieties that attended the life of the independent widow and indicated the narrow boundaries within which medieval widows—particularly in the Florentine context—were placed: as dutiful wives, they were expected, when the time came, to live according to the Christian guidelines for chaste widowhood, yet they were seen as frauds for doing so and were forced to protect their virtue and good name from the stinging accusations of their society. Boccaccio’s satire condemned the established 112. “A guisa d’una fanciulletta lasciva; A cosi buona vita adunque, e cosi santa, s’e ritrovata vicina de’ fratri colei che non mia donna, ma mio tormento fu, mentre vissi.” Corbaccio, ed. Bruscoli, 246–47; trans. Cassell, 60. 113. Strozzi became a tertiary in 1465, after all of her sons had attained their majority (Crabb, “Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi,” in Mirrer, Upon My Husband’s Death, 47).



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model of female sanctity, when practiced by ordinary Florentine women, as a pretense that could be exploited to serve the widow’s lust and greed, which were so egregious that they constituted an indictment of the general nature of women. His parody of the widow throughout his works dismissed the possibility of a genuine vocation to chaste widowhood. In fact, the only widow he seemed to consider truly successful was Dido, who preserved her widowed chastity by dying. Although the widows in Boccaccio’s works might have represented the particular context of late medieval Florence, they resonated with representations of widowhood in literature throughout the high and later Middle Ages. Boccaccio’s powerful contribution to the discourse of the literary widow was his systematic deconstruction of the conventions of chaste widowhood and his demonstration that a “merry widow” lurked behind the pious façade of even the most dedicated professed widow. Later authors would use Boccaccio’s bitter assessment of the profession of widowhood casually, for example, Chaucer’s Alisoun, who boasted about her skill at pulling a proper long face at her fourth husband’s funeral,114 and the widow in William Dunbar’s Tretis of the Twa Mariit Women and the Wedo (1508).115 Like the Corbaccio widow, Dunbar’s widow cynically pretended to put on the metaphorical garment of widowhood. In the poem, she confided that while she dressed in mourning clothes and retreated to the church, I droop with a deathly look in my mourning weeds as though I had done with men for all the days of my life When I go to church, clad in mourning, I dissemble my expression, like a fox in a lamb’s fleece; then I lay my beautiful book spread open on my knee with many a splendid letter illuminated in gold and draw the hood of my cloak forward over my white face.116 114. “Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” lines 590–94, p. 113. 115. The Tretis of the tua mariit wemen and the wedo, in A. D. Hope, ed. and trans, A Midsummer’s Eve’s Dream; Variations on a Theme by William Dunbar (New York: Viking Press, 1970). Felicity Cable suggests that Dunbar intended his widowed character to present an inversion of the example of St. Elizabeth that was popularized in Osebern Bokenham’s Legends of Holy Women; see Cable’s paper “The Leggend of my Lyf: Dunbar’s Tretis of the tua mariit wemen and the wedo,” presented at “The Merry Widow: Rethinking Widowhood in History, Culture, and Society,” a conference hosted by the Centre for Research into Gender in Culture and Society (GENCAS) at the University of Wales, Swansea July 8, 2007. 116. “I drup with a ded luke in my dule habit, / As with manis daill I had done for dayis of my

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Like Boccaccio’s widow, Dunbar’s widow used her widow’s weeds to spy on potential lovers and developed even more clever special effects behind her garments to manufacture the appearance of grief: I have a water sponge for grief inside my roomy cloak and at these times I squeeze it cunningly and wet my cheeks so that my eyes may water and the tears roll down Then all those sitting around say: “Alas, do you not see, yonder unhappy creature, who loved her husband so faithfully. It is enough to impress pity in a prince’s heart, that such a pearl of delight should have to endure such suffering as that.” I cross myself like a saint and look like an angel. . . . I have to keep up sober behaviour to go with my black weeds otherwise they will see the truth, for truly we women set ourselves to blind men to the sight of truth; we mourn for no evil deed as long as it is kept concealed.117

By the end of the Middle Ages, descriptions of both the virtues and the failures of professed widowhood were ubiquitous across many genres. Despite their richness concerning social mores and perceptions, these sources conveyed little about the actual thoughts and experiences of widowed women. In the last part of this chapter, we turn to a widowed female writer who was able to “speak” her own widowhood.

The Widow’s Voice: Christine de Pizan (1364–1430) The vast majority of this book has been concerned with the negotiation and representation of the widowed experience through male eyes and voices. When widows spoke about their own experience, they not only refuted the shadow of the “merry” widow that haunted the image of the life. / Quehen that I go to the kirk, cled in cair weid, / As foxe in a lambis fleise fenye I my chier; / Than lay I furght my bright buke on breid one my kne, / With mony lusty letter ellummynit with gold; / And drawis my clok forthwart our my face quhit.” Dunbar, Tretis, lines 420–26, in The Poems of William Dunbar, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 55; trans. Hope, 292–93. 117. “I haif a watter spunge for wa, / within my wyde clokis, Than wring I it full wyley and wetis my chekis, / With that watteris myn ene and welteris doune teris. / Than say thai all, that sittis about, “Se you mought, allace! / Yone lustlese led so lelely scho luffit hir husband: / Yone is a pete to enprent in a princis hert, / That sic a perle of plesance sult yone pane dre!” / I sane me as I war ane sanct, and semys ane angell / . . . According to my sable weid I mon haif sad maneris, / Or thai will se all the suth; for certis, we wemen / We set us all fra the syght to syle men of treuth: / We dule for na evill deid, sa it be derne haldin.” Dunbar, Tretis, lines 437–44, 447–50; trans. Hope, 294–95.



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vere vidua in clerical descriptions of the widowed state, but also articulated from experience the pragmatic rather than ideological concerns of their status. The Venice-born author Christine de Pizan, writing at the French court in the early fifteenth century, defended women’s nature in a broad range of texts and fervently engaged in the literary discourse known as the Querelles des Femmes (Quarrels of Women) to refute male authors’ misogynistic attitudes. Christine came from Venice to the court of the French king Charles V when her father was hired as a royal physician, and she seemed destined for a life of favor and happiness when she made a love match with another courtier, Etienne de Castel. Between 1380 and 1389, however, the couple’s fortunes turned abruptly: their patron Charles V died, Christine’s father passed away, and Etienne himself died prematurely in 1389. As far as we know, Christine made no attempt to remarry, but rather supported herself, their three children, and also her mother and her niece through her writing, and struggled to build up sufficient patronage to provide sufficient income.118 When Christine wrote about these experiences, she not only identified herself as a perennially pious widow, she also refuted the shadow of the “merry” widow that undermined the spirituality of widowed state. She responded to the burdens of widowhood and to the attacks, spread through gossip and hearsay, on widowed chastity. Christine’s writing articulated a consciousness of the temporal challenges and spiritual rewards of widowhood, and introduced the novel interpretation that chaste widowhood invited not only consolation from others, but also provided the consolation of one’s own solitary writing and study, as she discovered through her own experience. Christine echoed the Wife of Bath’s sentiments about “who painted the lion” concerning the traditional discourse on women in her preface to the Book of the City of Ladies, when she related that she was distressed by remarks in the Lamentations of Matheolus, a treatise on the vices of women. That text convinced Christine that “judging from the treatises 118. Christine traveled as a girl to live at the French court with her father, Thomas de Pizan, in 1368, and she married Etienne de Castel, a court notary and secretary, in 1379. The couple had three children, two sons and a daughter, but fell upon hard times when their patron Charles V died in 1380. Christine’s father, Thomas, passed sometime after 1384, and Etienne died of an epidemic illness in 1389. Christine was left to support their children as well as her mother and niece through her writing. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kevin Brownlee, introduction to The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), xi–xii.

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of all philosophers and poets and from all the orators—it would take too long to mention their names—it seems that they all speak from one and the same mouth: that the behavior of women is inclined to and full of every vice.”119 Initially despondent at the negative view of women presented in the established authority and the unanimity of the many authors who appeared to agree with Matheolus, Christine was consoled by a vision of Lady Reason accompanied by her companions Rectitude and Justice. Reason urged Christine not to interpret the misogyny she perceived in Matheolus’ Lamentations, the Romance of the Rose, and others (to which group Boccaccio’s works also belonged) as articles of faith but rather to selectively profit however she could from these authorities’ teachings.120 The allegorical Ladies further helped Christine build a city of exemplary women, an assembly that largely rehabilitated certain reviled ancient figures from Boccaccio’s Concerning Famous Women. The City of Ladies provided a refuge and defense for righteous women who had suffered from popular perceptions of their wicked nature.121 Christine’s City was a response to the “Quarrels of Women,” particularly the misogynistic representation of women in the popular Romance of the Rose. Despite Lady Reason’s advice to glean edification from even hateful texts, Christine viewed the Rose as a damaging work, arguing that teaching through bad examples was less profitable than through good ones.122 She rejected any identification with the Rose’s characters, claiming that “I am not Fair Welcome nor do I fear the Old Woman, nor do I have any buds to guard.” 123 Christine thus articulated a hard-won ability, especially difficult given the authority she recognized in her literary predecessors, to view herself as outside of the stereotypical range of characters such as “maiden,” “old crone,” and “bad widow” that historical and contemporary sources offered.124 As both a widow and an author, Christine utilized her position to rehabilitate women’s reputation on a broad philosophical level, as she did in her extended allegory of the City of Ladies, but also on a personal one. She construct119. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, ed. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea Books, 1982), 4. 120. Ibid., 6–7. 121. Ibid., 10 122. From “The Debate on the Roman de la Rose,” in The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan, 42. 123. Ibid., 43–44. 124. See Desmond’s discussion of Christine’s authorial self-construction, in Reading Dido, 223ff.



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ed her writings about her own widowhood to reflect herself and her life rather than the prescriptions for and attacks on widowed piety that she encountered in contemporary texts, particularly in Boccaccio’s works. For Christine, widowhood meant both the necessity and the opportunity for a life of study. Her L’Avision Christine (1405) expressed, in a semi-autobiographical visionary discourse with Philosophy, the bitterness of her situation as an alien and a widow at the French court. This Christine was a perfect example of the widow as a miserabilis persona. She had many debts and pending lawsuits and was forced to earn a living to support her three children and other family members.125 In the midst of these practical difficulties, rumors about the young widow began to circulate, insinuating that she had a lover.126 Feeling bereft of help, Christine wrote a ballad expressing her condition: Alas! Where will they find comfort, Poor widows despoiled in their goods Since in France, once their haven Of safety, where the exiled And uncounselled once fled They now no longer have friends.127

None of the normal protectors of widows—nobles, knights, prelates, judges, or officials—provided her any aid. Even those who offered help were not always reliable; as Christine lamented, “for them the road to hell is made ready [if] they willingly trust false counsel.”128 Perhaps Christine referred not only to the lack of material help and advice about practical matters, but also of the negative sexual connotations and conventions associated with the young widow. Christine commented to Philosophy on these and other trials that afflicted her widowhood: “Do you hear in what sad pleasures I passed the youth of my widowhood? Did I have the opportunity for superfluous flirting to make me listen to 125. Lavision Christine, 3.6, in Lavision Christine, Introduction and Text, ed. Mary Louis Towner (Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1932), 153. 126. Ibid., 190. 127. “Hélas! Ou donc trouveront reconfort / pouvres veuves de leurs biens despouillees. / puisqu’nen France qui seult estre le port / De leur salu et ou les exilees / seulent fouir et les desconseilles / Mais or n’y ont mais amistié.” Lavision Christine, 3.6, p. 159; trans. Glenda K. McLeod, Christine’s Vision (New York: Garland Library of Medieval Literature, 1993), 115. 128. Lavision Christine, 3.6, p. 159, trans. McLeod, 116.

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foolish lovers?”129 She characterized her widowhood in the tradition of oppressed widows whose houses were devoured by the powerful persons who more rightly ought to have been their protectors. Yet in narrating her story she displayed profound embarrassment at her need and bitterness, rather than an air of sanctity or piety about her suffering in widowhood. She acknowledged her suffering as wasted time and emotion rather depicting it as an ennobling experience. In L’Avision Christine, the social perceptions associated with widowhood, with its supposed cloak of respectability and protection if a widow remained dutiful and chaste, were like the emperor’s new clothes: neither the lasciviousness and avarice attributed to “bad” widows, nor the supposed clerical and noble protection owed to “good” widows, accurately represented her experience. Instead, she had to make her own way, at times hindered by scandal and rumor that seemed ludicrous to her: with three children to care for and debt lurking like the wolf at the door, who had time for an affair, much less the studied artifice of Boccaccio’s and Dunbar’s widows? Christine’s hardships in her early years of widowhood shaped her understanding of herself as an author, particularly as one engaged in a solitary, contemplative life of study. Julia Simms Holderness has made an eloquent case for the influence of Boethius’s model of philosophy as consolation on Christine’s thought. Christine shared Boethius’s status as an exile and stranger. Following Boethius’s example of finding comfort in study, Christine journeyed from worldly concerns to a more purely contemplative existence through reading and study. She thus achieved in her widowhood a position of critical distance from the world through the vita contemplativa of learning, characterizing her widowed life not in patristic or Boccaccian terms, but as a state that permitted her a Boethian cultivation of natural reason.130 By privileging the voice and authority of Boethius over Jerome, Boccaccio, or Matheolus to express her position within the widowed state, Christine removed herself from the direct and contentious attack by male authorities on the established conventions of the profession of widowhood. She instead 129. Lavision Christine, 3.6, p. 160, trans. McLeod, 116. 130. Julia Simms Holderness, “Widowhood as an Intellectual Ideal,” paper presented at the ThirtyFifth International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 2000. I thank Dr. Holderness for allowing me to cite from the text of her presentation.



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followed her own advice about the greater profit derived from good examples than from cautionary tales. Boethian philosophical consolation was not Christine’s only model for establishing distance from what she considered distressing sociocultural assumptions about women. Angela Weisl identified Christine’s striving for distance from worldly associations and negative assumptions about the female gender through Christine’s self-constructed, viragolike status, which also invoked the chastity of her namesake, the virgin St. Christine.131 Christine described her widowhood as the position from which she produced a “desexualized” narrative in her writing, a virago text that offered a female perspective without the taint of female sexuality. The combination of these two approaches to critical distance were linked in Christine’s comments on her early education, presented in part 3 of her Vision, in which she remarked that she wished she had studied more philosophy in her youth.132 Here, Christine slyly replaced the expected topos of her widowed (or crone) status—a sentimental yearning for one’s lusty youth—with a chaste and studious desire to have marshaled the energy and mental suppleness of youth toward a greater understanding of the contemplative state in which the adult Christine now resided. Christine also used her experiences as a widow to advise other women about how to conduct themselves in the widowed state, but her personal construction of her widowhood was not a general nostrum. In the advice to widows she offered in the Livre de trois virtus (Book of Three Virtues) she focused on how women could work within the expectations of society, rather than transform them, in order to have honor and respect in widowhood. For noble women, Christine offered advice typical of a “mirror of princes.” For widowed women in positions of political responsibility, this constituted proper (but not exaggerated) grief for the spouse, appropriate mourning dress, and a period of social retirement following the spouse’s death.133 In the longer term, the widowed princess or queen must maintain perpetual chastity, and sedulously attend 131. Angela Jane Weisl, “The Widow as Virgin: Desexualized Narrative in Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la Cité des Dames,” in Carlson and Weisl, Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity, 49–62. 132. Lavision Christine, 3.9, p. 162. 133. Christine de Pizan, Le livre de trois vertus, ed. Charity Cannon Willard (Paris: Champion, 1989), 86–87.

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to the husband’s will, his assets, and the patrimony of her children.134 In politics, she must be wary that if she has children who are not yet of age, a widow must anticipate contention concerning their succession and inheritance; she must engage in peacemaking among hostile or aggressive factions within her kingdom, and court the loyalty and affection of the baronage.135 For common widows “young and old,” Christine’s advice was more personal. She urged widows to maintain the dignity of their state, but warned them of its pressing dangers: lack of sympathy and social exile, lawsuits and debts, and evil talk. As remedies, turning toward God and acknowledging the unreliability of earthly things helped to assuage the coldness and solitude of the widowed state, whereas gentleness and kindliness toward everyone, accompanied by humble requests for help when necessary, assisted the widow in negotiating the problems of debts and legal actions.136 She sympathetically offered urban, middleclass widows the legal advice she herself had acquired through hard experience: the widow must find a specialist in customary law and learn how to present one’s documents, prepare for a trial, and handle practical matters. She also added that without proper counsel and plenty of money to pay a lawyer, even valid lawsuits might fail. Good help was essential in legal matters, and Christine recommended the model of the virago—a model she herself emulated—as preparation for dealing with hardship: If she wishes to avoid further trouble and bring her [legal] case to a successful conclusion, she must take on the heart of a man. She must be content, strong, and wise in judging and pursuing her advantage, not crouching in tears, defenseless, like some simple woman or like a poor dog who retreats into a corner while all the other dogs jump on him. . . . So, do not work on your own judgment, but hire always the best advice, particularly on important matters you do not understand. Thus your affairs should be well managed among those of you who have reached a certain age and do not intend to remarry. 137 134. Ibid. 135. Ibid., 88–90. 136. Ibid., 188–89. 137. “Si lui convendra bien pour ces choses faire, et pour resister a tous les autres enuis se a chief en veult venir, que elle prengne cuer d’omme, c’est assavoir constant, fort et sage, pour avisier et pour poursuivre ce qui lui est bon a faire, non mie comme simple femme s’acroupir en pleurs et larmes sans autre deffense, comme un povre chien qui s’aculle en un coignet et tous les autres lui cuerent sus. . . . Si



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Christine also pointed out that close friends and family not only provided advice but also safeguarded against the third problem of widowhood: malicious gossip. Christine nevertheless warned that none of her counsel alone would suffice to protect one’s reputation; in addition, one must stay quietly in your own house, not involving yourself in an argument with a neighbor, not even with a servingman or maid. By always speaking quietly while protecting your own interests, as well as by mingling little with miscellaneous people if you don’t need to you will avoid anyone taking advantage of you or ruining you.138

Christine’s advice validated the legitimacy of the widow’s situation, but also capitulated to the very misogynistic forces she challenged elsewhere in her works. No matter how sincerely chaste a widow’s life, gossip about her chastity was, as she knew from experience, inevitable. Hence, widows must withdraw completely from the world, particularly from contact with men, to avoid any hint of suspicion or opportunity for slander. Christine echoed Jerome’s consolation that widowhood offered an opportunity for peace and repose that marriage seldom did, but also shared his pessimism that rumor was the widow’s constant companion.139 Christine accepted her culture’s misogynistic suspicion of widows, but educated them on matters where help was possible, offering them a quotidian version of her own Boethian critical distance in the form of sexual isolation within a network of sympathetic friends and counselors. Quite in contrast to Boccaccio and other authors who perceived vidual sexuality as eroding the intentions and conduct of the pious widow, Christine saw the social isolation of widowhood, rather than inherent female unchastity, as the source of widows’ failure to maintain their ne devez pour tant ouvrer de vostre test n’en vostre ens vous fier, mais tout par bon conseil, par especial es grans choses que vous ne savez. Et ainsi et par tel voye vous devez gouverner entre vous, veuves, en vos affaires,—c’est a entendre celles qui sont ja d’aage et qui plus marier ne se veulent.” Ibid.; in A Medieval Women’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasury of the City of Ladies, trans. Charity Cannon Willard (New York: Persea Books, 1989), 199–200. 138. “Vous tenir closement en vox hostelz, ne prendre debat a voisin ne a un ne aultre, ne meismes a varlet ne a chamberiere; tousjours parler bel et garder vostre droit,—et par ainse fair, et par pou vous mesler avec diverses gens se besoing ne vous en est, eschiverez que vous ne soiez folees ne suppenditees par aultrui.” Le livre de trois vertus, 188–89; trans. Willard, Mirror of Honor, 198. 139. Le livre de trois vertus, 188–89

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reputations.140 She recognized, however, that it was a futile proposition to attempt to decouple a widow’s sexual and social independence from the shadow of the vices such freedom afforded: “No matter how devout a woman herself may be,” she warned, “the world is inclined to speak evil.”141 Like Alisoun, Christine knew who in her society painted the lion—and the widow. 140. For an analysis of this theme in French romance literature, see Anna Roberts, “Helpful Widows, Virgins in Distress,” in Carlson and Weisl, Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity, 25–48. 141. “Quelque devote que elle soit, pour ce que le monde est tant enclin a dire mal” (Le livre de trois vertus, 193).

Tr ansitions to the Early Modern World

Chapter 7

Like a Picture before the Eyes Transitions to the Early Modern World The popularity of St. Elizabeth of Hungary and the reflections of pious widows like Margery Kempe and Christine de Pizan illustrated the contours of Christian widowhood with greater definition and articulation in popular spirituality than ever before in medieval society. The chaste widow was a female identity that real widows could sometimes appropriate as a component of their spiritual and social identities. The importance of the chaste widow continued into the era of the Renaissance and Reformation, providing an opportunity to study how medieval concepts such as the vere vidua retained a surprising degree of continuity into the early modern era even amidst significant religious and social change. Ideas and images of pious widowhood found expression in new genres through the spread of Renaissance humanist education, and after the mid-fifteenth century printing assured that pastoral works on widows received wider circulation through novel methods for reproducing texts and images. The Protestant Reformation, whose texts were also dramatically affected by technologies of print, likewise presented a new context for the dissemination of ideas about widowhood. In Protestant theology, clerical celibacy was replaced with the universal priesthood of believers, and Catholics redefined models of lay, and especially female, catechism and piety. Reformers rejected the Catholic assertion of a hierarchy of merit based on chastity, and focused instead on the benefits of marriage and strong Protestant families. Reformation theology theoretically ought to have downplayed or eliminated the ideal of the Christian widow vowed to permanent chastity, but in fact the image and ideal of the vere vidua assumed clearer distinctions and greater visibility in the sixteenth century, finding new expression in the writings of Christian humanists and Protestant reformers

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348 Tr ansitions to the Early Modern World alike. Portraiture and other novel forms of visual media strengthened the connection between the Christian widow’s persona and her memorial function. The Protestant inclination to abolish social and spiritual hierarchies of merit based on chastity challenged the medieval model of professed widowhood, in which sexual purity differentiated a good widow from an ordinary woman. A pragmatic element of this Protestant ethos was concerned with redirecting women’s spirituality and religious aspirations away from formerly Catholic institutions, such as monasteries and voluntary associations, and toward the maintenance of strong Protestant homes and families.1 Yet Protestant preachers and advisors to women nevertheless recognized and praised the value of the perpetually chaste widow who served as a living monument to her husband’s memory, suggesting that the secular function of the vere vidua as the keeper of conjugal memory and the guardian of children’s interests was too strong to be displaced even by Protestant theologies that downplayed purgatorial intercession and lay chastity. Indeed, the social institution of chaste widowhood allowed both Catholic and Protestant humanists and artists to use new genres to explore women’s roles through the theme of consolation of widows and to perpetuate its medieval expression in new contexts. As Vives put it in his treatise On the Education of the Christian Woman, written for Catherine of Aragon for her own edification and that of her daughter, Mary Tudor: “There is no husband who does not wish his death to be mourned by his wife, and that he be missed.”2 Although Vives was a Catholic and a traditionalist, Protestant authors echoed his praise for widows’ allegiance to a departed spouse—evidenced through the rejection of remarriage and a devotion to family and religious piety—in glowing terms. At the same time, Protestant authorities experienced the same unease with the exercise of independent widows’ autonomy and spiritual au1. For an excellent summary of the scholarship on this topic, see Lyndal Roper’s essay, “Was There a Crisis in Gender Relations in Sixteenth-Century Germany?” in her collection, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994), 38–42; see also Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). 2. “Nullus est maritus qui non et suam mortem ab uxore doleri velit et se desiderari.” Juan Luis Vives, De institutione feminae Christianae, Liber secundus et liber tertius, ed. C. Fantazzi and C. Matheeussen, trans. C. Fantazzi, Selected Works of J. L. Vives 7 (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 3.7.30, pp. 218–19.

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thority that their medieval Catholic counterparts had been expressing for centuries. Medieval clerics had created a discourse around chaste widowhood that was fraught with paradox. First, alongside misogynistic discourses of mistrust for the “profession” of widowhood, male clerics also expressed admiration for pious widows, engaging them as examples and suggesting the partnership between male clergy and pious laywomen in educating the Christian laity. As confessors and supervisors of such women, clerics demonstrated their own power and authority. The uneasy balance between the positive potential for widows’ chaste religious devotion and the clerical pessimism that cast doubt on this vocation remained a nagging tension in Renaissance texts on widowhood. Conduct manuals on widowhood in the fifteenth century addressed the situations of noble women living independently of male supervision at court and in towns.3 Authors such as Erasmus and Vives were deeply concerned with the preservation of female honor and the widow’s role in the husband’s commemoration, especially when the widow’s chastity was threatened by greedy suitors. Another problem, the support and supervision of widows versus the practical benefits of remarriage, received greater attention in the later Middle Ages and early modern period. Giovanni Boccaccio’s and William Dunbar’s scathing vernacular parodies of corrupt, lusty widows articulated both the contested nature of the widow’s body in moral terms, and also expressed a practical resentment of the autonomy the independent widow enjoyed in governing and dispensing herself and her fortune. Such texts made plain the economic dimension of independent widowhood, a theme that increased in resonance in the lean years of the fourteenth century and plainly expressed the widow’s commercial value on the marriage market and in the workplace. The economic implications of widowhood—both for affluent women and those in need of financial support—received new attention in early modern town governance as towns weighed the costs and benefits of the moral value of widowhood against the problems that arose concerning their support. 3. Janine M. Lanza demonstrates this dynamic particularly well through the responses of Parisian artisanal widows to both legal traditions and conduct manuals for widows; see From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris.

350 Tr ansitions to the Early Modern World The sexuality, conduct, and social identity of the widow remained important to early modern authors as expressions of broader concerns about the female gender, albeit in new and different contexts. This chapter focuses on three areas in which medieval ideas about widowhood receive novel treatment in emerging Renaissance genres: humanist consolation literature, portraiture, and confessional advice literature.

Consolation and Direction: Christian Humanists Advise Widows Desiderius Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives wrote extensive treatises on women’s conduct; Vives dedicated his lengthy treatise On the Education of the Christian Woman to Catherine of Aragon in 1523, and Erasmus, writing for Mary of Hungary, the recently widowed spouse of King Louis of Hungary, completed his treatise On the Christian Widow in 1529.4 The force of tradition in these texts is strong. The early fathers relied heavily on exemplary widows from Scripture, interpreting passages from Paul and examples of Old and New Testament widows such as Anna and Judith for the edification of their female widowed friends and patrons. Erasmus and Vives likewise generated conduct manuals for female patrons, manuals that were dominated by the sacred authority of the fathers’ dicta on pious widowhood, but that also reflected a changing social understanding of the chaste widow. Erasmus was a leading editor of Ambrose and Jerome’s work; he not only culled examples from his reading but reinterpreted them for women living in the contemporary settings of court and household; for example, he used the widow Judith to show Mary how a woman might live modestly at court. Instructive literature for widows prior to the fifteenth century had consisted principally of hagiography, sermons, and florilegia compiled from Scripture and patristic authors. In the Renaissance world of letters, the genre of the consolation letter or treatise, widows became a new arena for authors to demonstrate a masterful knowledge of classical history and rhetoric. Humanist authors thus seized upon the death 4. John O’Malley, introduction to Spiritualia, vol. 66 of Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. xlviii; Matheeussen, introduction, De institutione feminae Christianae, Liber secundus et liber tertius, ix.

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of a spouse as an outlet for restructuring the ancient discourse of advice to widows around contemporary themes such as the bitterness of war— that “purveyor of deaths and funerals”—the principles of just rule, and detailed lessons on household management. Erasmus claimed that the purpose of his treatise for Mary was not “in order to banish grief from your breast . . . but rather to set you forth, illustrious young woman, as an example of fortitude for the consolation of other widows.”5 Mary had demonstrated an interest in the teachings of Martin Luther during her marriage, and Erasmus took this opportunity to address current debates in canon law (not least of which were divorce and the nature of solemn vows), subtly realigning the tropes of patristic thought to present a reformer’s comment about the nature of marriage and lay celibacy.6 Vives’s stated purpose was to provide women with practical instruction at all stages of the female life cycle, and, like Erasmus, marshaled patristic thought to develop his preferred blueprint for the modern female domestic sphere.7 Both authors wrapped their advice to widows in a humanist package—an elaborate demonstration of classical anecdotes and rhetoric—and the combination of old material in a new genre created some jarring juxtapositions in these texts.8 Both Vives and Erasmus engaged the patristic theme of how Christian widows ought to outdo their pagan counterparts in adhering to chastity, and they put a new twist on this old theme by drawing on new Roman historical examples from their repertory. Vives reminded his female readers of the classical example of Valeria Messalina, the wife of Sulpicius, who

5. “Non enim hoc ago, ut tu pectori moerorem eximam, ut lacrymas abstergeam, ut gemitus reprimam, sed ut in aliarum viduarum consolationem.” Erasmus, De vidua Christiana, in Desiderii Erasmi Roterdami Opera Omnia, vol. 5 (Hildesheim: Georg Holms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1962), 726; trans. Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, in Spiritualia, ed. O’Malley, 187. 6. Erasmus, De vidua Christiana, 726; trans. Roberts, 187. Mary had apparently been interested in Luther’s writings but continued to profess Catholicism under pressure from her family; her court preacher, Johann Henckel, a friend and devotee of Erasmus, suggested to Erasmus that he dedicate a piece of writing to her, given Mary’s enthusiasm for Erasmus’s scholarship after she read his paraphrases on the New Testament (Roberts, introduction to De vidua Christiana, in Spiritualia, 179). 7. Vives, De institutione feminae Christianae, Liber secundus et liber tertius, 1.1, 1–5. 8. Vives claimed, rather disingenuously, that he chose to write in a plainer style because he was writing for women; see Matheeussen, introduction to De institutione feminae Christianae, Liber primus, ed. C. Fantazzi and C. Matheeussen, trans. C. Fantazzi, Selected Works of J. L. Vives 6 (Leiden: Brill, 1996), xiii.

352 Tr ansitions to the Early Modern World was asked by her brothers after her husband’s death whether she wished to marry again since she was still youthful, healthy of body and a woman of refined beauty. She answered, “indeed not, for Sulpicius will always be alive for me.” These were the sentiments of a pagan woman who had no certainty about the immortality of the soul. A widow shall cultivate the memory of her husband, not as if he were dead, but absent, with more veneration and piety than weeping. It will be a great oath for her to swear by her husband’s departed spirit. Let her so live and act in the knowledge that she will please her husband, no longer a man, but a pure and simple spirit, almost a divine presence. Let her place him as an observer and guardian not only of her external actions, as he was when confined by the body, but now relieved of this burden, a free and pure spirit, he will become the guardian of her conscience as well. . . . Let her not conduct herself in such a way that his angry spirit will take vengeance on a wicked, unprincipled woman.9

Vives’s mention of the husband’s “angry spirit” recalled not only the medieval theological view of the widow’s permanent state of spiritual bereavement for Christ and her intercessory obligations to her earthly spouse, but also the theme from popular literature that dissatisfied husbands might observe and even punish their wives from beyond the grave. Vives added to the tradition the suggestion that, like Christ, the widow’s human husband remained her divine custodian; the husband attained this exalted position not though his widow’s beneficial prayers of intercession but through a conjugal authority that persisted beyond the grave. Especially striking was the language chosen for the enormously popular English version of Vives’s text, which was reprinted and circulated frequently throughout the Reformation period, which called the husband not “observer and guardian” but rather “keper and spy, nat only of her dedes, but also of her conscience.”10 Scholars such as 9. “Valeriam Messalinam, Sulpicii coniugem, interrogabant fratres sui post mariti mortem, cum et aetate esset adhuc integra et valido corpore et forma eleganti, nobere iterum an vellet. ‘Minime vero, inquit illa, ‘nam Sulpicius mihi semper vivit.’ Hoc gentilis et de immortalitate incerta; quid Christiana? Ergo memoriam mariti non velut mortui, sed absentis colet vidua maiore veneratione ac pietate quam fletu. Magnum illi ius iurandum erit per coniugis manes; sic agat, sic vivat quomodo marito, iam non viro, sed spiritui cuidam simplici puroque et tamquam numini placitura sciet. Illum sibi observatorem et custodem apponat non actionum exteriorum modo, ut antea circumsaeptum corpore, sed nunc eo exoneratum liberumque ac merum spiritum, conscientiae quoque suae. Sic familiam tractet, sic administret domum, sic educet liberos ut gaudeat coniunx et bene secum actum sentiat quod talem post se reliquerit uxorem. Ne ita se great ut de flagitiosa et scelesta femina irati manes poenas sumant.” Vives, De institutione feminae Christianae, Liber secundus et liber tertius, 3.3.11, pp. 213–17. 10. Virginia Walcott Beauchamp, Elizabeth H. Hageman, and Margaret Mikesell, eds., The Instruction of a Christen Woman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 3.3, p. 168. Betty S. Travitsky has

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Jennifer Panek have suggested that Vives’s “Mediterranean” harshness toward women might have seemed “repressive” and “foreign” to more English audiences who harbored less restrictive attitudes toward women, but Vives’s popularity in the Anglophone world suggests otherwise.11 He spent a great deal of his career in England, and his works circulated among both a Protestant and a Catholic readership. Vives’s text perpetuated the pervasive supervisory influence of the deceased husband over his wife that emerged in the later Middle Ages. Even in the gentler admonitions of householders, such as the late-fourteenth century treatise of the Goodman of Paris for his young wife, whom he fully expected would eventually remarry, the Goodman is concerned above all with his wife’s absolute obedience to a present or future husband, which he believed would in turn preserve his household and his honor.12 Both Vives and Erasmus popularized this same anecdote concerning Valeria Messalina (Erasmus included it in his treatise On the Christian Widow),13 ostensibly as sign of widows’ virtuosity in Roman history. The Messalina anecdote, however, was a curious example for the proper education of women, as Valeria Messalina was anything but a chaste widow. She went on to marry—and betray through an affair—the emperor Claudius.14 Did Vives and Erasmus assume that their widowed readnoted that although both Vives and Catherine of Aragon experienced declining fortunes in England in the course of the sixteenth century, Vives’s work itself was highly popular and was printed and reprinted over nine times in the course of that century (Travitsky, “Reprinting Tudor History: The Case of Catherine of Aragon,” Renaissance Quarterly 50, no. 1 [Spring 1997]: 164). Both Erasmus and Vives had written treatises for Catherine of Aragon; Vives’s De institutione was dedicated to Catherine in 1526; Erasmus dedicated his treatise on marriage to Catherine and sent it to her in 1526 (interestingly, his correspondence with Vives at that time makes no mention of this work or its patron, despite the extensive sections on marriage Vives had provided for Catherine in De institutione (Fantazzi and Matheeussen, introduction to De institutione feminae Christiane, Liber secundus et liber tertius, ix). 11. Jennifer Panek, Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 25, 19. 12. Gina L. Greco and Christine M. Rose, ed. and trans., The Good Wife’s Guide: Le Ménagier de Paris, A Medieval Household Book (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009), 2. 13. Erasmus, De vidua Christiana, 734; trans. Roberts, 201. This anecdote must have been persuasive among both Catholic and Protestant humanists, however inaccurate, because at least one Protestant theologian, Lucas Stoeckle (Witwenspiegel, 1607) also picked it up to reinforce the value of remaining chaste; see Britta-Juliana Kruse, Witwen: Kulturgeschichte eines Standes im Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), 574. 14. Cf. Suetonius, De Vita Caesarum, “Vita divi Claudius,” 36; Tacitus, Annales 11.2ff.; and Juvenal, Saturae, 6.115–32 and 10.329–45. Roberts is unsure what reference Eramsus is using here and suggests that the text might have been “corrupt,” though the reiteration of Vives’s invocation of Messalina’s example suggests a deliberate usage (Roberts, in Erasmus’s De vidua Christiana, 323n48). Vives’s editors suggest that Sulpicius might have been known to the early modern authors through his legal

354 Tr ansitions to the Early Modern World ers simply would not know the full history of Messalina? It is difficult to imagine that both were unfamiliar with the history of the Emperor Claudius’s marriages. The two authors appeared to engage in an elaborate inside joke, mocking the state of both widowed chastity and female education in similar ways to how their medieval predecessor, Boccaccio, had done in Concerning Famous Women. The latter had used classical exemplars to demonstrate that practically no women of his own day could measure up to his standards of conduct. Were Vives and Erasmus familiar with Boccaccio’s anthology, they would recall his discussion of Dido’s exemplary widowhood, which shamed modern widows by comparison, and they would also have been familiar with Boccaccio’s assessment of Messalina as a cautionary tale for modern widows who remarried: “In fact,” Boccaccio argued of such women, “how can seeking and having intercourse with so many men differ from frequenting the brothels after the example of Valeria Messalina?”15 A well-read woman such as Christine de Pizan might have caught this small irony, and from it learned afresh that an unsupervised and unchaste widow faced censure indeed; the less educated woman might simply enjoy the story, and perhaps even commend herself on her virtue being as pure as Messalina’s. The texts by Erasmus and Vives adopt the language of consolation ostensibly to advise the Christian widow in difficult modern times, but undermine the sincerity of their advice with irony. For example, both men advised widows to isolate themselves from prolonged contact with their household clergy on pains of arousing suspicions about their chastity. Vives discouraged Catherine of Aragon and her daughter from being often in the company of priests and monks. Erasmus used passages of Scripture to warn Mary to beware “false teachers” who “devour the homes of widows” and the wolf in lamb’s clothing who presumed to become her spiritual advisor.16 Erasmus also cautioned her against solitary consultations with male clerics generally: “Safer,” he argued, is opinions in Justinian’s Digest (C. Fantazzi and C. Matheeussen, in Vives’s De Institutione Feminae Christiane, 213n11). 15. “Quid enim aliud est tot hominum amplexus exposcere, tot inire, post Valeriam Messalinam, caveas et fornices intrare?” Boccaccio, Famous Women, 43.24, ed. Brown, 180–81. 16. Both authors refer to Mark 12:40, concerning priests who devour the houses of widows (Vives, De institutione feminae Christianae, Liber secundus et liber tertius, 3.4.19, pp. 227–29).

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“familiarity with books.”17 One is left to wonder what role for the widow’s guidance was left for Mary’s court preacher, Johann Henckel, the very man who secured Erasmus the job of composing Mary’s treatise. Vives and Erasmus collaborated while producing their works, but also competed for patrons, creating a complex textual community for their learned humor. In 1526, three years after Vives dedicated his treatise On the Education of the Christian Woman to Catherine of Aragon, Erasmus sent a long treatise, On the Institution of Christian Matrimony, to Catherine without informing Vives (a rather disingenuous gesture, considering their extensive correspondence concerning Vives’s earlier treatise dedicated to the same patron).18 The struggle to establish their humanist credentials and secure patronage might have caused sixteenth-century advisors to favor erudition over instruction, often offering contradictory advice depending on the situation and patron. In On the Institution of Christian Matrimony Erasmus took a rather cynical view of widowhood when writing to Mary Tudor about Xenophon’s advice to husbands in the treatise Ischomachus (Oeconomicus): It is up to the individual to decide whether it is more advisable to marry an untutored virgin or a widow with experience. I know some people concur with what appears to be the opinion of Xenophon’s Ischomachus that it is better to marry an inexperienced girl. . . . Conversely, a man who wants to escape the drudgery of educating her, which is a long and not always successful job, may prefer a widow who is already broken in and formed.19

Writing for Catherine of Aragon, the widow of Arthur Tudor and the repudiated wife of Henry VIII, Erasmus took quite a different tone about the education of girls and women than he did in 1529 when writing On the Christian Widow for Mary of Hungary, in which he praised Mary’s seriousness of mind and propensity for reading. Perhaps in the above passage, Erasmus was awarding Catherine of Aragon, who was simultaneously widow and wife, the backhanded compliment that widows’ worldly experience conferred stability and sobriety. In the context of the Greek anti-marriage rhetoric that framed this tradition, however, 17. “Tutior est igitur cum libris familiaritatis.” Erasmus, De vidua Christiana, 761; trans. Roberts, 248. 18. Matheeussen, introduction to De institutione feminae Christianae, Liber secundus et liber tertius, ix. 19. Erasmus, Institutio Christiani matrimonii, trans. Michael J. Heath, 203–438, in Spiritualia, vol. 66 of Collected Works of Erasmus, 312–13.

356 Tr ansitions to the Early Modern World such an assessment might be a bit too generous. Here, Erasmus seemed less interested in the widows or their plight than in the occasion their tutelage provided for his own rhetoric. Both Erasmus and Vives assumed the ancient role—established by the fathers of the church who likewise competed for widows’ patronage—of advising widows through letters and treatises, reconfiguring ancient patristic tropes in the new humanistic mode. At the same time, they undermined traditional medieval patterns of widows’ pastoral care by monks, canons, and confessors, warning widows away from such “wolves.” Whether ironic, reformist, or merely self-promoting in their critiques of household clergy, Vives and Erasmus composed texts that purported to provide the guidance that scurrilous local clerics could not be trusted to give to wealthy widows (and potential patrons for these authors’ future texts). Though different in style and tone, the works of both Vives and Erasmus expressed the same fundamental view that the goal of female education was directed less toward the development of women in their own right than toward the facilitation of “convenience and happiness” for husbands.20 In the absence of a husband, Vives’s antidote for the widow’s freedom was supervision: she “does not belong in the marketplace, in male gatherings, or in crowds. In those places there is great danger for the virtues which are most honored in a widow—chastity, modesty, good reputation, and holiness.”21 Erasmus likewise counseled the widow that her household must lack not only sin, but also suspicion. The emphasis on the husband’s presence, even in death, perhaps explains these Renaissance authors’ de-emphasis of the widow’s spiritual powers. While Vives and Erasmus followed the conventional boilerplate of praising biblical widows and the example of St. Elizabeth as models for widowed women to admire, the functions both men ascribed to contemporary chaste widows were more domestic, and less spiritual, than their medieval counterparts.’ 22 Indeed, Erasmus cautioned the 20. See A. D. Cousins, “Humanism, Female Education, and Myth: Erasmus, Vives and More’s ‘To Candidus,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 65, no. 2 (April 2004): 221. 21. “Ad hunc refereat vidua si quid dubitat, ignoret ceteros; In foro, in consessu virorum, in nihil esse debet viduae; in quibus locis magnum est periculum iis rebus quae viduae commendatissime sunt: pudori, pudicitiae, existimationie sanctitati.” Vives, De institutione feminae Christianae, Liber secundus et liber tertius, 3.4.21, pp. 228–29. 22. Erasmus, De vidua Christiana, 741, 753; trans. Roberts, 213–14, 235.

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young Mary that Anna, the widow who in medieval thought was most closely associated with widows’ prophetic powers, “almost overcome by age persevered in the temple, but the younger widow is nowhere safer than in a secret chamber.”23 Both Erasmus and Vives downplayed or avoided the medieval widow’s roles of purgatorial intercession and prophecy, redirecting ordinary widows’ efforts toward conjugal loyalty and domestic respectability, concerns that would also dominate the writings of Protestant clergy over the course of the sixteenth century. Regional and confessional differences may also have played a role in the recasting of the widow in the early modern period. Some scholars have noted emerging distinctions between Protestant and Mediterranean Catholic authors on the subject of the widow’s remarriage. In her study Widows and Suitors in Early English Comedy, Jennifer Panek identified a Mediterranean and Catholic view of chaste widowhood as a superior option for widowed women in comparison to a more lenient attitude toward remarriage in northern and Protestant countries, for that lenient attitude came at a cost. She noted that this difference became a stereotypical device in English drama that contrasted strict familial control over widows, based on legal and social practices from Italy and Iberia, with greater English freedoms for wives and widows.24 Panek argued that even in the medieval period in England, there was less opprobrium for widows’ remarriage than in Continental Europe, an attitude that carried over into early modern instructional literature recognizable to English audiences as “a kind of Catholicism inextricable from its Mediterranean heritage, more representative of a foreign culture than of a monolithic and tenacious theology.”25 While English theatergoers could congratulate themselves on a more enlightened treatment of women than their Mediterranean counterparts, Panek nevertheless found that widows’ remarriage in English plays was principally focused on the exercise of male authority and engaged the dramatic competition 23. “Anna vidua Euangelica, quoniam aetatis erat pene decrepitate, perseverabat in Templo. At juvencula Vidua nusquam est tutorior, quam in secreto cubiculo.” Erasmus, De vidua Christiana, 739; trans. Roberts, 210. 24. Bernhard Jussen, Der Name der Witwe, and idem, “Virgins-Widows-Spouses: On the Language of Moral Distinction as Applied to Men and Women in the Middle Ages,” The History of the Family 7, no. 1 (2002): 13–32. 25. Panek, Widows and Suitors, 25.

358 Tr ansitions to the Early Modern World between men to “tame” the widow and (re)domesticate her as a wife.26 While seventeenth-century early modern comedy doubtless drew on different concepts of regionalism and nationality than would have arisen in the medieval period, widows’ prominent representation as the object of suitors’ affections rested on a long-standing set of assumptions about the widow’s body and freedom of action. Panek employs the Marxist concept of “ideological work” (drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s reflections on hegemony and ideology) to discuss how the situation of the marriageable widow both confirmed and destabilized dominant beliefs about gender and masculinity in early modern drama. Widowhood in this context performed the ideological work of facilitating male desire: in comedic fiction, seducing and containing such a woman’s sexuality was construed as a man’s duty, and was expressed as a correction to the widow’s lusts rather than an expression of his own.27 The courtship of the rich and sexually voracious widow in early modern comedies such Keep the Widow Waking provided a contest for the proving of male authority; the conquest and acquisition of such a woman as a marriage partner became an arena for male characters to enact their masculinity by reasserting control over a woman who had temporarily, in widowhood, escaped the rules of the patriarchal game. This pattern of the widow as a malleable figure who served male desires and goals in any number of ways was not novel to the seventeenth century, nor was the remarriage of widows in large numbers, despite strong religious sentiments to the contrary, a phenomenon unique to Reformation England. Rather, widows’ remarriage in seventeenth-century English comedy articulated a long-standing and persistent assumption about widowhood in the medieval and early modern world: widows were situated between the often-irreconcilable polarities of chastity and remarriage, clerical direction and familial interests, contemplation and the active life. The widow in medieval writing often functioned as an expression of these tensions, particularly as they related to the marriage aspirations of seventeenth-century English audiences. Panek’s obser26. Ibid., 29ff. Panek is particularly interested in representations of Mediterranean settings in English dramas, as in the case of the Duchess of Malfi, as an assertion of English men’s masculinity. In a sort of proto-colonial fashion, English pity for the “Mediterranean” widow’s plight, captive as she was to male family interests, enabled a more kindly self-opinion for English viewers. 27. Ibid., 4–7, 201.

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vation that lust itself was seen as feminized, rendering men “womanly,” and that the lusty widow conveniently functioned as the sole bearer of desire in the widow-suitor scenario, could equally describe the position of the “worldly” widow in the writings of Boccaccio or the Nuremberg Fastnachtspiele. As was so often the case in widowhood’s history, ancient ideas continually found new expression in changing genres and contexts, yet the ideals of widowhood—sexual purity, service to others, and, from the High Middle Ages onward, vigilant protection of her husband’s memory, were the perennial hallmarks of the “good widow.” Likewise, English comedy presented a more complex exploration of another long-standing belief: a well-behaved widow indicated her potential as a good wife, but an unsupervised widow who established herself as such for the remainder of her life was indeed suspect and in need of control. Although Protestantism might have removed the hierarchy of merit associated with chastity in the theological realm, it retained ancient suspicions about female behavior and introduced renewed anxieties about the management of widowed women, anxieties that were rooted in patriarchal structures that undergirded Catholic and Protestant social order alike. In crafting consolation and advice literature for women, both Erasmus and Vives undermined the medieval tradition of monks’ and clerics pastoral care of pious widows, and reduced the function of the chaste widow from its medieval dimensions of spiritual intercession and prophecy to a role more directly oriented toward conjugal loyalty and domestic respectability. And, while these authors had a Catholic perspective, these same concerns did not lie far afield from the concerns of Protestant clergy.

“A Household Full of Rogues”: The Chaste Widow and Household Management Vives’s purpose in educating wives was to render them subordinate and agreeable to their husbands—he even claimed to favor the ancient Roman tradition of widowed women’s perpetual guardianship—and interpreted the widow’s function as an extension of this role.28 Erasmus’s relationship to the issue of marriage and female supervision was more 28. Vives, De institutione feminae Christianae, Liber secundus et liber tertius, 3.4.20, p. 227.

360 Tr ansitions to the Early Modern World complicated than Vives’s. Erasmus, familiar with the patristic and medieval rhetoric that rehearsed the relative spiritual merits of virginity, widowhood, and marriage, explicitly claimed that he avoided such comparisons because he had already witnessed that “this line of argument has been dragged out in a most contentious manner by several authors from the earliest times”29 and, like Augustine, argued that “each of these states of life has its own distinction and honour in sacred writings.”30 Instead, Erasmus framed his discussion around the narrative of Judith, presenting her example as a portrait for the modern noble widow who withstood the temptations of the world and lived simply and humbly in her household. Concerning the central issue of the widow’s remarriage, Erasmus showed more tolerance for widows’ remarriage than did Vives, and was more lenient on the matter of divorce than other Catholics of his day.31 Yet Erasmus often did not land so far afield from Vives as his less doctrinaire reconsiderations of marriage and celibacy might suggest. Both authors created a model of good conduct in widowhood through the rhetoric of praise and blame, noting “good” ancient and biblical chaste widows—“from whom,” according to Erasmus, “sacred literature appears to exact particularly exemplary conduct”—in contrast to “bad” modern widows, who engaged in the frivolities of court life, and they warned their patrons away from such behaviors.32 When Erasmus provided Vives with critiques of On the Education of the Christian Woman in an epistolary exchange in 1526 and 1527, Erasmus claimed that he objected to Vives’s harshness in his judgments of women and restrictions on their daily life, but essentially agreed with his views on marriage. 29. “Nec tractabo comparationem Virginitatis, Viduitatis, et Conjugii, quod argumentum a priscis nonnullis contentiosius tractatum video.” Erasmus, De vidua Christiana, 734; trans. Roberts, 201. See also O’Malley’s introduction to Erasmus, Spiritualia, xlviii. 30. “Habet horum quisque status ornamenta su laudesque ex sacris litteris.” Erasmus, De vidua Christiana, 734; trans. Roberts, 201. 31. Erasmus, De vidua Christiana, 758; trans. Roberts, 244. Both Vives and Erasmus affirmed Paul’s statement in 1 Timothy (1 Tm 5:14) that young widows might better marry “and not give the adversary any occasion to revile us” (Vives, De institutione feminae Christianae, Liber secundus et liber tertius, 3.7.28, p. 237). On Erasmus’ views on divorce, see Reinier Leushuis, “The Mimesis of Marriage: Dialogue and Intimacy in Erasmus’ Matrimonial Writings,” Renaissance Quarterly 57, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 1285; and Anton G. Weiler, “Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam on Marriage and Divorce,” Dutch Review of Church History 84, no. 1 (2004): 154–55. 32. Erasmus, De vidua Christiana, 200. See also Roberts’s introduction, Spiritualia, 179; on epideictic rhetoric, see O’Malley’s introduction to the same volume, l, lvi.

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Vives responded that as the editor who had “restored Jerome to us” Erasmus ought to be familiar with the value of strict guidance for women: “what is more uncontrollable than a woman? If you relax the reins even a little, there will be no limit or restraint. But Cato will defend me. . . . I did not mention those things by way of example or to exaggerate, but because I think that is the way they should live.”33 Both Erasmus and Vives likewise came to the same moral judgment about the superiority of chaste widowhood over remarriage, though Erasmus put it more gently than Vives, who asserted that “[s]econd marriages should be celebrated in silence, almost in secret, without fuss and dancing. . . . no one with a foul disease asks publicly that the medicine be administered to him, and no one, unless perhaps he is insane, claims to have attained something which he will be criticized for having even desired.”34 Whereas Vives echoed Jerome’s universally harsh opinion on second marriages, Erasmus viewed the context for the widow’s remarriage as a significant factor to her course of action: There are three considerations which argue against a new marriage for widows by whom children have been brought up: age, reputation, and piety. All good omens favor the weddings of virgins, but not so those of widows. Now rumour and gossipy chatter of the rabble should not be so important to a woman that she prefers to burn than to marry. Disapproving gossip, however, tends to pursue a woman who is rather more advanced in years. . . . The auspices are hardly good that attend on a marriage prompted by incontinence.35

33. Percy Stafford Allen, Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterdami, Epistle 1847, 29 July 1527, cited in Matheeussen, introduction to De institutione feminae Christianae, Liber secundus et liber tertius, viii. This criticism might not have been quite fair on Vives’s part; as Hilmar M. Pabel has argued, while Erasmus was the Renaissance’s foremost scholar on Jerome, he read Jerome as a “literary critic” and “observer of contemporary customs” without necessarily espousing all of his views; see Pabel, “Reading Jerome in the Renaissance: Erasmus’ Reception of the Adversus Joviniam” Renaissance Quarterly 55, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 492–93. 34. “Itaque secundum nuptiae silentio ac paene clanculum transigentur sine strepitu ac choreis et coniuges acquiescentes consanguineorum affiniumque conscientia alienos devitabunt, ut coniunctos prius audiant matrimonio quam coniungi. Nemo in foedo suo morbo medicinam sibi adhiberi poscit publice. Nemo, nisi forte insanity, assectutum se praedicat quod expetisse vituperabitur.” Vives, De institutione feminae Christianae, Liber secundus et liber tertius, 3.3.30, p. 241. 35. “Tria igitur sunt quae Vidus, quibus liberi sublati sunt, dissuadent iteratum matrimonium, rumor, aetas, et pietas. Virginum nuptiis bene ominantur omnes, Viduarum non item. Caeterum, rumorem ac loquacis popelli fabulas, nec apud foeminam tantum oportet valere ut malit uri quam nubere: rumoris autem convitium magis sequitur provectiorem aetatem, praesertim si eo progressa est . . . parum enim plausibilibus auspiciis coit matrimonium, quod conciliat incontinentia, et cujus usus numquam vacat culpa, etiamsi vacet crimine.” Erasmus, De vidua Christiana, 759; trans. Roberts, 245.

362 Tr ansitions to the Early Modern World Erasmus and Vives articulated ancient dilemmas about widows, but also new solutions for widows’ pastoral care. When widows followed Vives’s advice and remained chaste, he was not only suspicious of their interactions with monks and priests, but generally suspicious of widows’ motives for retaining their independent status “alleging freedom as an excuse.”36 The widow did best to receive religious counsel from “an old man, whose lust is spent. . . . let the widow have recourse to such a person, and ignore others,” and to surround herself with a minimal domestic staff headed by an “upright and prudent” older woman, or, better still, lodge with her in-laws, who would harbor the least tendency to indulge her and would keep the most watchful eye on her chastity. The prudent widow also avoided the courts, even to pursue legal rights in her own and her children’s interests.37 Just as repeated iterations about widowed chastity might actually have been a response to the small number of cases in which such advice was followed, Vives’s prescriptions for widow’s timidity in the face of familial and legal concerns might also have been more honored in the breach. As Grace Coolidge’s research into Spanish noble widows’ activities on behalf of their children in legal matters has shown, Iberian women often achieved greater autonomy through chaste widowhood than through remarriage because they retained de facto control over their children’s guardianship; as sainted matrons and heads of household, they were able to exercise considerable control in the gerontocracy of elite noble families that determined their children’s futures and fortunes.38 Erasmus, though less restrictive of the widow’s affairs than Vives, likewise counseled the widow that the absence of suspicion was crucial to household management. Erasmus contradicted Ambrose’s association of the widow with the temple and suggested that, like the consecrated virgin, the widow was “nowhere safer than in a secret chamber.”39 He focused his discussion upon Judith, rather than Anna, engaging her story in new ways to demonstrate the appropriate direc36. “Praetendentes liberatatem” (Vives, De institutione feminae Christianae, Liber secundus et liber tertius, 3.7.28, pp. 236–37). 37. “Si quem de pietate consulere vult vidua, deligat senem aliquem cui libido iam emortua sit nec tamen alia vitia renata.” Ibid., 3.6.21, p. 228; 3.5, pp. 224–27; and 3.6.22–23, p. 231. 38. Grace Coolidge, “Families in Crisis: Women, Guardianship, and the Nobility in Early Modern Spain” (PhD diss. Indiana University, 2001). 39. Erasmus, De vidua Christiana, 739; trans. Roberts, 210.

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tion of the widow’s household. A significant portion of Erasmus’s On Christian Widowhood is dedicated to how the narrative of Judith’s widowhood could inform the modern matron’s household management. Judith’s ascetic self-discipline, retreat into solitary prayer, lack of material vanity, and avoidance of rumor were antidotes to the moral snares of the modern-day court. Failing such restraint, widows managing their own households placed themselves open to rumor, which, when grounded in reality, it grows constantly and “acquires strength in its course,” as Virgil says. Women whose behavior is immodest, whose speech is improper, who spend a good part of the day on powders, rouges, mascara, cards, gaming, feasting, dancing, who take delight in the constant company of well-groomed youths, who have badly brought up children, who have a household full of rogues, these people have no right to take umbrage at gossip. . . . Let a widow, then, who desires an unblemished reputation place before her eyes the example of Judith and follow along in her footsteps.40

Widows who emulated the biblical heroine’s prudence, keeping an image of Judith literally on the walls of their homes as well as “firmly fixed in their minds,” did battle with Satan in similar fashion to Judith’s confrontation with Holofernes—though with the caution that Judith’s murder of Holofernes was to be admired, perhaps, but not imitated on the literal level.41

Widows and Early Modern Visual Culture Erasmus’s use of portrait imagery in his advice to widows was not merely metaphorical. Early modern visual media constituted a new genre for expressing cultural ideas about marriage, bereavement, and remembrance. From late antiquity until the High Middle Ages, pious widowhood had well-known tropes in the written and spoken word of treatise 40. “Ubi ex vero nascitur rumor, semper in majus crescit, viresque acquirit enndo, ut ait ille. Quarum cultus lascivior est, sermo impudicus, quae bonam diei partem, cerussa, purpurisso, stibio, chartis, aleaque, conviviis, choreis, consumunt: quae juvenum comtorum consuetudine delectantur, quae liberos habent perperam instituos, quae famulitium male moratum, immerito indignantur finistro rumori. . . . Ergo Vidua, quae fma cupit incontaminatam, Judith Viduae sibi proponat exemplum, huius ingrediatur vestigiis.” Erasmus, De vidua Christiana, 742; trans. Roberts, 215. 41. Erasmus, De vidua Christiana, 737ff.; trans. Roberts, 209–11, 219; see also Roberts’s introduction, in Spiritualia, xlix, and Matheeussen’s introduction to Vives’s De institutione feminae Christianae, Liber secundus et liber tertius, ix.

364 Tr ansitions to the Early Modern World and liturgy. An iconography of pious widowhood, however, seems to have appeared consistently only in the later Middle Ages, and then primarily in support of the written word as textual illumination and illustration of specific individuals, such as saints. The rise of portraiture in the fifteenth century, which was indebted to a culture of memoria after the Black Death and to humanistic interest in Roman portraiture, began to assimilate the traditions of the widow’s spiritual bereavement and communicated its functions in an independent genre. In On the Christian Widow, Erasmus deliberately applied the metaphor of the portrait as instructive for Mary, the widow of King Louis of Hungary and regent of the Netherlands, promising that his textual commemoration of her widowhood functioned by way of having an image placed like a painting before the eyes so that anyone may compare it to the living being when he wishes. Whoever has examined carefully the face of a human being depicted in colours recognizes whose it is, provided that he has gazed rather closely on the individual himself; and similarly anyone who examines the image of your mind at close range will recognize a portrait that is no way false.42

Erasmus attempted to guide Mary of Hungary’s character through a kind of textual portrait of vere viduitas itself. The juxtaposition of text and image in this metaphor recognized a shift in the early modern period toward the visual expression of the religious widow’s identity, a shift that translated a set of ideas that had been principally textual in the Middle Ages to visual culture in novel ways. As we have seen, medieval culture produced a few iconic representations of chaste widowhood that drew on established theological interpretations. The images appeared in the specific contexts of liturgical books and saints’ shrines, and did not constitute a widespread pattern of representation. The social and economic contexts of early modern Europe, however, lent new opportunities to systematically represent the Christian widow in art. Such representation is perhaps related in 42. “Imago velut in tabula subjiecitur oculis, ut cuivis liberum sit conferre, quum volit. Qui faciem hominis coloribus expressam attente contemplatus est, protinus agnoscit cujus sit, si tamen hunc si tamen hunc ipsum proprius est intuitus: sic qui ex interiore convictu mentis tuae simulacrum perspexit, agnoscet haud quaquam mendacem imaginem, nisi quod plus videmus in homine vivo, quam in picta tabula. Paucis igitur ostendam, quibus rebus nobilem foeminam oporteat esse instructam.” Erasmus, De vidua Christiana, 727; trans. Roberts, 189–90.

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part to the late medieval tendency, noted long ago by Johan Huizinga, to solidify abstract concepts into images.43 Whereas only a few types of medieval images depicted widows and their distinct social and religious connotations, during the Renaissance the widow portrait genre became a popular means of expressing Christian widowhood and its specific memorial functions. The genre of portraiture in the fifteenth century—itself indebted both to a culture of memoria after the Black Death and a humanistic interest in Roman-style portraiture—assimilated the work of the widow’s spiritual bereavement that had in the earlier Middle Ages more typically found expression in text and liturgy, and only rarely in visual culture. For example, despite their function as touchstones in texts on widows’ conduct, the biblical widows Anna, Judith, and the widow of Sarepta were generally not depicted typologically as widows in medieval art. The widow Anna often appeared in scenes of Luke’s narration of Christ’s Presentation in the Temple.44 Her position, standing at the temple door or grouped around the altar with Simeon, Mary, and Joseph, represented the transition from the old order of the temple to the new order heralded by Christ, since Anna recognized him as the Messiah (p. 366). Anna was always dressed in modest robes and veil, suggesting a matronly affect, but her identity as a widow was generally subordinate to the narrative of the presentation. Later medieval Italian iconography, such as the baptistery reliefs of Nicola Pisano (1260) and Giotto’s Presentation (1304–6), represented Anna holding a scroll or poised in a gesture that emphasized her prophetic insight, a trait often associated with widowhood but not exclusive to that state (pp. 367–68). For viewers who were familiar with the traditions of pious widowhood, such images may have reinforced the textual traditions that linked the chaste widow to contemplation and prophecy in the temple, but they 43. Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 173. 44. Until the fourteenth century, Anna was often omitted from Franco-Flemish and German depictions of the Presentation; her inclusion generally suggested an Italian or Byzantine model’s influence, as Anna was a commonplace in the scene in those traditions; see Dorothy Schorr, “The Iconographic Development of the Presentation in the Temple,” The Art Bulletin 28, no. 1 (March 1946): 17–32; Joan A. Holladay, “The Iconography of the High Altar in Cologne Cathedral,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 52, no. 4 (1989): 472–98; and Penny Howell Jolly, “Learned Reading, Vernacular Seeing: Jacques Daret’s Presentation in the Temple,” The Art Bulletin 82, no. 3 (September 2000): 430, 434.

Ivory book cover of the Simeon Codex

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Nicolo Pisano, Presentation in the Temple (panel detail)

more immediately evoked popular and familiar stories about the Nativity and the Holy Family. Similarly, when twelfth-century sculptors began depicting the church personified as a woman, she was not primarily depicted as a bereaved widow, despite the importance of this imagery in the textual traditions of chaste widowhood. Rather, the triumphant church, Ecclesia, was paired with the “blind” Synagoga unwilling to recognize Christ.45 Thus, while biblical widows and the church itself personified as the widowed Ecclesia were important textual themes that articulated the widow’s social and theological role for much of the Middle Ages, this notion found little direct expression in art prior to the thirteenth century. 45. Bernd Nicolai, “Orders in Stone: Social Reality and Artistic Approach. The Case of the Strasbourg South Portal,” Gesta 41, no. 2 (2002): 111.

Giotto, Presentation in the Temple, 1304–6, fresco

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The textual and visual traditions associated widowhood with began to draw closer together through the artistic representation of widowed saints such as Elizabeth of Thüringia and Humiliana of Cerchi. Images intended for their shrines established a visual language that expressed the connection between the widow’s clothing and her holy profession. The panel on Elizabeth’s sarcophagus at her Marburg pilgrimage church depicting her receipt of the tunica grisea, or “grey habit” of a penitent and the similar motif in the east choir widows of the church became a widespread theme in her visual tradition and emphasized the similarities between the “penitent’s habit” and the “widow’s weeds” in the depictions of other matron saints.46 The association of widows and matrons with the duties and activities of the mendicant orders made the long-established image of the “professed” widow more immediately recognizable and provided a context for the widowed matron in contemporary secular society. As we have seen, Guillaume le Clerc’s Bestiary, dating from 1260 or 1270, depicting a widow contemplating Christ’s Scourging and Crucifixion expressed her status as a penitent in perpetual bereavement for both her earthly husband and her heavenly spouse, Christ (p. 173).47 Images of Franciscan and Dominican clergy engaged in various acts of preaching and prayer suggest that the book’s patron—perhaps depicted in the illumination—took an avid interest in mendicant and penitential spirituality,48 and illuminated manuscripts of William Durand of Mendes’s Pontifical from the early fourteenth century also indicated strong visual associations between the representations of the widow and the penitent in the miniatures that accompanied the liturgies. Pictorial expressions of the vere vidua’s responsibilities and character were gradually incorporated into a variety of later medieval works depicting the narratives of matron saints as well as ordinary laywomen’s activities. For example, Nicholas A. Eckstein has argued that Masolino’s fresco painting of St. Peter raising the widow Tabitha from the dead, located in the Brancacci Chapel of the Church of Santa Maria del Carime, 46. See chapter 4, figures 4.1 and 4.2. On the representation of Elizabeth and other widowed saints, see Catherine Lawless, “Widowhood Was the Time of Her Greatest Perfection,” in Widowhood and Visual Culture, ed. Allison Levy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 19–38. 47. Paris, Bnf MS fr. 14969. See chapter 3, figures 3.7 and 3.8. 48. Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, 2:110–11.

370 Tr ansitions to the Early Modern World Florence, symbolized the ethos and activities of the local confraternity that commissioned it. This confraternity of San Frediano, the Brucciata, had a long tradition of charitable service financed by widowed patrons, and constituted an audience for whom “a tradition of local memory remembered that just such a virtuous widow [as Tabitha, a thirteenthcentury widow known as Mona Agnese] had played a decisive role in the foundation and construction of the very church that housed the Brancacci Chapel.”49 Tabitha was not among the biblical widows who were most often mentioned in theological discourses and sermons as an exemplar of widowhood, but in this instance the scene depicting her resurrection drew together a number of cultural and visual factors in the chapel: her charity emphasized an aspect of Christian community that softened the effect of another famous fresco in the church, Masolino’s Expulsion. Eckstein argues that the Tabitha series provided a more accessible and practical model of Christian virtue than the figure of St. Peter, with whom she is linked and whose other miracles are presented in accompanying frescoes. Eckstein interprets the overarching iconography of the frescoes as presenting “visual sermons on the necessity to take care of the poor and the weak in society.”50 The explicit linking of the biblical Tabitha with the everyday work of the Brucciata’s widows affirms Huizinga’s impression that late medieval people required a more direct explication of how religious ideals applied to their lives. Yet identifying this phenomenon in the Brancacci Chapel, a monument of early Renaissance and humanistic art, complicates assumptions about transitions from medieval to modern too. As Dyan Elliott has noted, throughout the history of Christianity the “implicit pull in favor of embodiment was not only integral but often irresistible” rather than merely “a matter of late medieval decadence.”51 The particular spiritual and social work that widows performed persisted across the imagined barrier between medieval and Renaissance as the rise of lay religious orders for women in the later Middle Ages marshaled a long-standing system of images and associations concerning pious widowhood into practice. These practices in turn found a more widespread expression in both the expansion of traditional forms of medi49. Nicholas A. Eckstein, “The Widow’s Might: Women’s Identity and Devotion in the Brancacci Chapel,” Oxford Art Journal 28, no. 1 (2005): 107. 50. Ibid, 112. 51. Elliott, Bride of Christ, 7.

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eval devotional art and the new genres that Renaissance humanism fostered in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Such imagery became widely engaged in widows’ donor portraits, usually commissioned as part of a memorial to her husband, a gift to a religious institution, or both. Donor portraits representing laypeople, both men and women, as diminutive figures witnessing a religious scene, became commonplace in the course of the fourteenth century. An early and typical example of the widow donor portrait is a thirteen-foot-high cross, fashioned by the artist Guariento and commissioned by Bona Maria Bovolini in the 1360s, that hung in the Church of San Francesco at Bassano. The cross depicted Christ’s Crucifixion, with Bona as a tiny supplicant at its base, above an inscription that read: “Bona Maria de Bovolini, imitator of St. Helen who found the cross and the nails, dedicated this herself to the piety of the people of Bassano, that they might pray for her to Christ our Lord” (pp. 372–73).52 Bona appeared in the tertiary or widow’s habit, a light veil over a dark dress, on the left-hand side, but her husband’s presence is also included by the shield of the Bovolini family on the right. Catherine E. King suggests that both Bona’s clothing and her identification with the widowed St. Helen suggest that Bona identified herself as a widow at the time of the commission and chose the thematic content of this public memorial accordingly to reflect her status.53 King notes that “donatrix” votive portraits, which first appeared in the thirteenth century and became widespread in the fourteenth, “presented interesting disturbances of conventional viewing expectations. Donatrixes tended to have themselves placed in the position of honour normally reserved for the man, to the left or in the centre of their altarpiece,” exactly the configuration represented in the portrait of Bona Maria.54 Widow52. Catherine E. King, Renaissance Women Patrons (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 142–43. 53. Ibid., 140. 54. Ibid., 131. King notes that on a smaller scale, a donor-portrait crucifix had appeared, commissioned by a Donna Maria in Spoleto, as early as 1257, roughly contemporary with the illuminated manuscript of Guillaume le Clerc (Renaissance Women Patrons, 143–44). There are also some very early examples of this practice in book art, such as the eleventh-century Gospel Book from the Reichenau School (the so-called Gospel of Saint Mihiel, Bibliothèque des Facultés catholiques de Lille, Ms. 1, fol. 253v–254r), which depicts the widow Irmengard, the donor of the book, handing it to Christ. In the image, Irmengard presents the book together with her husband; Bernhard Jussen notes that while the text names Irmengard alone as the donor, who offers the book for the good of her husband, the image presents the two together, with the husband as the one who is actually handing the book to Christ (Jussen, Der Name der Witwe, 202–4).

Guar iento, Crucifixion with the Donatrix Bona Maria Bovolini, ca. 1360

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Guar iento, Crucifixion with the Donatrix Bona Maria Bovolini, ca. 1360 (detail)

donors adopted the role of humble penitent in such portraits, but this act of self-representation was paradoxically bold: women’s independent commissioning of artwork was rare, and widowed donors who commissioned self-portraits undertook the traditionally male role of patron and inserted themselves into the crucial scenes of the Christian narrative such as the Nativity, Crucifixion, Last Judgment, and Assumption. Donor portraits indicated a widespread acceptance of the intercessory and memorial functions of the widow, demonstrating both family honor and the ways her “profession of widowhood” protected and served that honor. The supplicating position of the widow testified to her devotion to her husband’s memory through the permanent refusal of a second marriage, confirmed in a monument that bore her husband’s name and carried his lineage’s memory forward in perpetuity. Her posture of perpetual devotion was also a reminder of the widow’s intercessory powers for the deceased. The practice of donor portraiture facilitated the representation not only of special widows such as saints, but of ordinary lay widows. Art

374 Tr ansitions to the Early Modern World historians consider this genre a precursor to the emergence of the fifteenth-century portrait; as donor images in religious scenes increased in size and became more fully incorporated according to the Renaissance sensibilities of perspective and realism, they ultimately became a genre of their own. Within this practice, widow portraits—images of wives in mourning, either as a single panel or part of pair that included the husband—were usually planned and commissioned by men, but the development of this genre also afforded widows opportunities for patronage and identity formation. They expressed their widowed status in art and could thus commemorate their imitation of the saints, their dress, and their vows of chastity. Whether a widow commissioned a portrait to demonstrate her mourning, or the husband prepared such artistic commissions in anticipation of his own death, what is striking about the widow portrait is the compression of an elaborate and ancient textual tradition into a concise and modern one, which unified the respectability of the chaste widow and the departed husband into a single image. Returning to Erasmus’s use of the portrait metaphor in his treatise On the Christian Widow, Erasmus underlined the relationship between portraiture and commemoration when he invoked the metaphor as a promise that his textual commemoration of Mary’s widowhood constituted a portrait or mirror of her honor. His long treatise of advice provided a catalogue of classic examples that modeled the behavior of the “true widow,” including exegesis on the examples of Anna, the Old Testament widow Judith, and widowed saints such as St. Elizabeth. In addition to creating a mirror for other queens and princesses out of his representation of Mary’s character, Erasmus also wrote to persuade Mary to remain a professed widow in the image he had fashioned for her. His language engaged the contemporary shift toward the visual expression of the religious widow’s identity, translating of a set of ideas that had been principally textual in the Middle Ages. His role as a clerical advisor found a parallel in Conrad of Marburg’s careful management of St. Elizabeth’s widowhood. Erasmus clearly understood the power of images in Renaissance painting as both instructive and normative. He suggested that widows like Mary actually possessed works of art containing the very images

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upon which they should reflect as they withstood worldly temptations, and could use these as part of their chaste devotions: Let widows keep Judith’s picture before them—on the walls of their rooms, certainly, but also fixed firmly in their minds; and let them contemplate themselves in her reflection, those who live in self-indulgence, spending—or rather wasting—the better part of the day among girls who live all dressed up, among wanton youths, in banquets, dances, gambling, making up their faces, amongst stories of questionable modesty. Let them blush before her image.55

Whether or not at Erasmus’ urging, Mary indeed assumed the profession of widowhood: she never remarried, and several images representing Mary’s tenure as regent of the Netherlands depicted her living out the serene and sober life that Erasmus recommended. In her own widow portraits, Mary’s widow’s clothing and bearing bespoke the life of the professed widow. The prominently displayed ring also suggested her continued loyalty to her husband and the duties her marriage to him had conferred (pp. 376–77). Allison Levy has argued that the distinctive subgenre of widow portraiture grew out of Italian Renaissance male anxieties about memory and forgetfulness. Men’s commissioning of portraits of themselves, and of their widows living in perpetual chastity and mourning, provided consolation to anxious elite males even during their lifetimes. The image of the perpetually devoted widow perhaps assuaged male fears of the oblivion men might suffer through a wife’s remarriage and her subsequent inattention to his earthly patrimony and spiritual salvation.56 Roughly contemporary with Erasmus’s treatise for Mary of Hungary, Bernardino Licinio’s Portrait of a Woman shows a widow dressed in black and holding a portrait of her husband, emphasizing the constancy of the elegantly dressed young wife in her new role as a perpetual widow 55. “Hujus igitur Viduae vitam in cubiculis quidem, sed in animis potius depictam habeant omnes Viduae, ad hoc speculum sese contemplentur, quae vivunt in delitiis, inter comptas puellas, inter lascivious juvenes, conviviis, choreis, alea, fucis, parum pudicis fabulis, maximam diei partem exigentes, aut, ut melius dicam, perdentes; ad hanc imaginem erubescant.” De vidua Christiana, 745; trans. Roberts, 219–20. Mary owned a large personal collection of artwork; according to one inventory, she brought forty-two paintings with her from the Netherlands to Spain in 1556, and was herself painted many times both as wife and as widow; see Erna Auerbach, “Holbein’s Followers in England,” The Burlington Magazine 93, no. 575 (1951): 46–48. 56. Allison Levy, Re-Membering Masculinity in Early Modern Florence: Widowed Bodies, Mourning, and Portraiture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 14.

Master of the Magdalen Legend, Portrait of Mary of Hungary, ca. 1550

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Attr ibuted to Jan Cornelisz, Mary (1505–1558), Queen of Hungary

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(p. 379). Though her dress is not religious, its collar is embroidered with the emblem of two small dogs (representing fidelity), and her rich accessories display the husband’s wealth and status. As Levy notes, “if male portraiture memorializes the sitter . . . widow portraiture not only memorializes the husband, but it also provides him with a perpetual mourner . . . not only is the husband remembered, but he is also remembered in what was considered to be an ideal manner—by a virtuous and chaste widow.”57 The new use of portraiture to express the widow as passive, frozen forever in her mourning, and ever-vigilant in guarding her husband’s name and family interests, provided reassurance for the patrons of Italian city-states, for whom lineage history was of paramount importance. The passive image also belied the many duties and responsibilities that commonly fell to widows, whether they remained burdened by secular affairs or turned their attention to charitable works. The reassurance offered by the widow was destabilized by the parallel discourse that underscored the inconstant, forgetful, and lustful nature of woman. In both text and image in early modern Europe, the widow’s body remained a contested site, where suitors vied for widows’ wealth even as religion and society required her to make a monument of her chaste body. In the Licinio portrait, the attractiveness and wealth of the widow underscored the ways in which a woman’s widowhood was fragile, for these were assets that would naturally draw new suitors and test the widow’s commitment to chaste remembrance of her husband; even her conjugal loyalty was, ironically, her recommendation as a virtuous, and therefore desirable, new wife. The thrice-widowed Caterina Sforza, for example, had portrait medals cast for each of her widowhoods. While this act of commemoration honored each husband’s passing, it also advertised her availability and undercut the very constancy that widow portraits were intended to ensure.58 Levy thus argues that for the anxious male, even the immutable widow portrait was ultimately insufficient as a memorial. The widow who did not follow the representation with action—such as undertaking a vow of chastity or entering a convent 57. Allison Levy, “Framing Widows: Mourning, Gender, and Portraiture,” in Widowhood and Visual Culture, 223. 58. Levy, “Framing Widows,” 224.



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Bernardino Licinio, Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1525–1535

as a nun—could always change her status in life, even as she displayed a portrait of perpetual widowhood. As Erasmus suggested, the aspiration that the widow’s image and her actions be equally virtuous might exert a persuasive force that bound the widow to the ideals inscribed in her portrait, but the endeavor of chastity always rested on the unstable nature that medieval society ascribed to women. The rise of widow portraits in the early modern period underscored the ancient concern about the forgetfulness of women, a literary and cultural trope that entered the medieval discourse on widowhood in earnest as purgatorial intercession became an important duty of widows, and that implied concerns of lineage and remembrance in a world where remarriage was common. The uncertainty that the portraiture

380 Tr ansitions to the Early Modern World expressed about feminine custodianship of the husband’s spiritual and worldly affairs also echoed the medieval and Renaissance tradition of controlling the behavior of one’s widow from beyond the grave through one’s will. Best known as a male strategy in Florentine wills,59 but also common north of the Alps in Nuremberg, men commonly rewarded their widows for remaining single by awarding them the usufruct of property and guardianship of the children if they remained chaste, but withdrawing such benefits if they remarried.60 Such practices demonstrate that, despite changing economic and social conditions, Europe’s elites from medieval to early modern times continued to elevate the ideal of chaste, perpetual, and holy widowhood even in the face of overwhelming odds that both husbands and wives would remarry. A very late example, Bassano’s portrait of a widow, demonstrates the culmination of these developments by the end of the sixteenth century (p. 381). Here, the widow’s representation aligned perfectly with ancient textual traditions that defined her conduct: this widow, in the world but not of it, remained until old age at home in her widow’s weeds, devoted, like Anna, to prayer. This widow, apparently presented in a domestic setting or private chapel, prayed before a panel depicting the birth of the Virgin (possibly one of Bassano’s own works) and thereby engaged intimately in the 59. Crabb, “Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi,” in Mirrer, Upon My Husband’s Death, 49–50; see also Lansing, The Florentine Magnates, 132. 60. Men from Nuremberg’s patrician families throughout the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries had internalized the notion of chaste widowhood for their wives, and they provided strong disincentives to remarriage: should the widow remain permanently in her Witwenstuhl (widowhood, literally “widow’s chair”) she retained guardianship of her children, use and management of her husband’s patrimony, and, often, residence in the husband’s home. The widow was appointed a guardian to represent her in legal matters, but retained control over her property, children, and household. Should she remarry, she received a sum (generally equivalent to her dowry) and her personal effects and household items, but usually no further support. The wills frequently reiterated that the widow would forfeit these privileges whether she abandoned her widowhood “geistlich oder weltlich,” for the convent or for remarriage. See Stadtarchiv Nürnberg (hereafter StadtAN) NUB, Familienarchiv Haller, Hallersches Geschlechterbuch Bl. 33, Nr. xxx 1340–07–04, will of Heinrich Haller, 1340; StadtAN NUB 1354–09–29, will of Heinrich Seibot, 1354; StadtAN NUB 1359–06–21, will of Bernhart von Newenmarcht; StadtAN E 56/II, Nr. 23 1371–08–27, will of Fritz Grundherr. In 1428, Hanssen Hallertauers additionally allowed his widow Gerhaus to take her jewelry and some wine with her upon remarriage, StadtAN A1, 1428–02–23. As late as 1532, permanent widowhood was the condition for the wife’s retaining the privilege of remaining in the family home, see StadtAN B 14/II, 1532, confirmation of the inheritance of Susanna, Hans Hofler’s widow, 1532. Kruse’s work on Nuremberg widows in the early modern period showed that treatises for widows through the eighteenth century characterized their status through permanent chastity (Witwen, 240).

Leandro Bassano, Portrait of a Widow at Her Devotions, ca. 1590–1600

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382 Tr ansitions to the Early Modern World events that led to both the Nativity and the Crucifixion. The entire visual landscape of holy widowhood presented in the painting affirmed that this widow engaged in active remembrance and prayerful intercession for her earthly husband. The images under consideration here represent a variety of different genres, each controlled by varying needs and purposes, but even across different media, the invocation of a specific notion of the “profession of widowhood” is clear. Innovations in the representation of widowhood in portraiture was in part driven by male anxiety about the inconstant nature of woman, but also arose from widows’ attempts to embody and visualize their status in various media; these forces acted within broader changes in the representation of women in the iconography of the later Middle Ages and early modern period. In “Learned Reading, Vernacular Seeing: Jacques Daret’s Presentation in the Temple,” Penny Howell Jolly argues that the various women represented in attendance in the temple in Jacques Daret’s 1435 Presentation—maids, matrons, and widows—were meant to be instructive for both the practice of churching and for women’s conduct more generally. Though Anna’s appearance in Presentation scenes was generally rare in northern art, she does appear as a significant element in this painting, suggesting the importance of the widow in the biblical narrative and perhaps in the contemporary pastoral care of women as well.61 Similarly, the veneration of St. Anne, the mother of Mary, became much more frequently represented in the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The interest in Anne was in part a result of the increasing focus on the Holy Family as an element of Marian veneration, but perhaps also represented an interest in emphasizing new models of family, including scenes of remarriage and step-children, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.62 Images of Judith underwent a particularly interesting iconographic shift from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, from sober widow—identified with both chastity and Marian imagery—to what Elena Ciletti calls its “submerged opposite” in the Renaissance, an adventuresome or even 61. Jolly, “Learned Reading, Vernacular Seeing,” 446. 62. See Ton Brandenburg, “St. Anne: A Holy Grandmother and Her Children,” in Mulder-Bakker, Sanctity and Motherhood, 31–68; and Catherine Lawless, A ‘Widow of God’?: St. Anne and Representations of Widowhood in Fifteenth-Century Florence,” in Women in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, ed. Christine Meek (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), 15–42.

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lustful heroine who gave full expression to the sexuality repressed in the medieval iconography that represented Judith as a chaste, heroic figure. Judith functioned as an allegory of female power in Renaissance art: in Italy, she often appeared as a female heroine or virago, and in northern art she was increasingly represented as a seductress or prostitute. Ciletti finds that this reordering of Judith’s iconographic meaning was “informed by the intersection of humanism with patristic theology within the patriarchal dialectic of gender common to both.” 63 The studied attempt of Catherine de Medici (1519–89) to construct her own widowhood through popular contemporary imagery and genres indicates the ways one powerful widow interpreted and manipulated traditional symbols of widowhood amid changing aesthetics and associations in art. Catherine had survived an unhappy marriage to the French monarch Henry II, in which, despite her success in producing heirs, she was constantly humiliated by her husband’s public preference for his mistress, Diane of Poitiers.64 Upon his death, she maintained a central role at court as queen mother and styled herself as devoted and heroic chaste widow in the tradition of Artemisia, Queen of Caria, who had consumed her own husband Mausoleus’s funeral ashes and thus became his living “mausoleum.” Like other elite widows, Catherine commissioned portraits, medals, and drawings of herself in widow’s weeds, but also patronized works that explicitly likened her to this classical heroine.65 Artemisia’s story was best known to medieval European readers through Boccaccio’s Concerning Famous Women, but Catherine’s courtier Nicolas Houel revitalized his patron’s close identification with Artemisia in a new vernacular legend, The History of Queen Artemisia. The manuscript, presented to Catherine in about 1563, bore the queen’s coat of arms and contained extensive references to illustrations that Houel commissioned from various court artists, especially Antoine 63. Elena Ciletti, “Patriarchal Ideology in the Renaissance Iconography of Judith” in Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender in the Italian Renaissance, ed. Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 46, 56ff. 64. Sheila ffolliott, “Catherine de’ Medici as Artemisia: Figuring the Powerful Widow,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 228. 65. ffolliott, “Catherine de’ Medici as Artemisia,” 230; Jeanice Brooks suggests that the actual date of the manuscript’s completion was 1563, not 1652 as ffolliott claims; see Brooks, “Catherine de Medicis, Nouvelle Artemise: Women’s Laments and the Virtue of Grief,” Early Music 27, no. 3 (August 1999): 421, 433n9.

384 Tr ansitions to the Early Modern World Caron, to explicate scenes from Artemisia’s legend. Houel suggested that Catherine use the drawings as cartoons (sketches or patterns) for tapestries in her residence, but historians have also noticed stylistic similarities between the drawings’ depiction of Artemisia’s mausoleum and the Valois tomb monument representing herself and her husband, which Catherine began at Saint-Denis, also around 1563.66 The tomb, much noted for its unusual portrayal of the couple, contains a double set of effigies: a traditional one, in which the couple appear on the top of tomb kneeling in prayer, and a second one below, in which recumbent figures of the couple lie under the canopy of the tomb as naked corpses on their deathbeds. Henry’s effigy resembles prior ones in SaintDenis that represented their subjects as wasted bodies already suffering from the corruption of death. Catherine, however, chose to portray herself as a young, living body in the genre of “Venus pudique,” perhaps another indication of her identification with classical forms and heroines.67 Catherine’s two effigies taken together suggest the complex ways the queen manipulated widowed imagery in both text and image: the kneeling effigy offered a traditional image of the spiritual bond and intercessory duty a wife owed her husband, but the voluptuous recumbent widow evoked the passionate physicality, and classical resonances, of Artemisia. This process of realizing the ideals of pious widowhood both in practice and in the visual arts invites consideration of the “undeniable escalation in the efforts to render spiritual truths in material terms” that Dyan Elliott has observed in the trajectory of women’s spirituality from late antiquity to the later Middle Ages.68 As a category of “woman,” the pious widow was never a complete abstraction; her bodily chastity and good works defined and preserved her status. Pious widowhood’s close association with the penitential ethos, and its twin duties of suffering and remembrance, intersected with a secular discourse that attached great significance to the widow within her family as rememberer and keeper of legacy, which the rise of portraiture expressed with greater clarity and immediacy. 66. Brooks, “Catherine de Medicis, Nouvelle Artemise,” 423–24, 433–44, 433n9; and ffolliott, “Catherine de’ Medici as Artemesia,” 231, 236. 67. Brooks, “Catherine de Medicis, Nouvelle Artemise,” 424. 68. Elliott, Bride of Christ, 284.

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Whereas the earliest conventions of chaste widowhood suppressed any rhetoric of grief of spousal loss, widows’ chastity and spiritual bereavement for Christ were quickly co-opted into widow portraits in the Renaissance to lament their husbands’ loss as well as recall their memory. Donor portraits provided a suitable iconography for both how the widow should look and how she should mourn, not only for Christ but also for her earthly husband. Although perhaps exacted under the duress of political pressure and personal humiliation, Catherine de Medici’s novel efforts to control the commemoration of her marriage and widowhood through visual media testify to the new potential for the embodiment of these ideals in art, particularly art informed by classical humanism. Huizinga argued that “the new arrives as form before it really becomes a new spirit,”69 but in the case of pious widowhood, the new forms channeled, amplified, and perpetuated medieval society’s spiritual interpretation of the chaste widow. As a means of ordering female sexuality, preserving lineage memory, and demonstrating loyal service to family and community, the widow proved indispensable to the medieval and early modern worlds alike.

“Provost and Bishop” in Her Own Home: Protestants Advise Widows Both Catholic and Protestant authors made a clear distinction between women who were temporarily widows by circumstance and sought a future marriage, and those who adopted widowhood permanently as a component of their social identity. Protestant pastoral care made a significant departure from the Catholic tradition with the sanctification of family life as an equal alternative to clerical and lay celibacy, yet the Catholic views held by Vives and Erasmus on widows’ remarriage, and the troubling nature of the unmarried widow’s independence, were not significantly different from Protestant advice literature to widows that proliferated in the latter part of the same century.70 Although Protestants 69. Huizinga, Autumn of the Middle Ages, 383. 70. Merry Wiesner, Gender, Church and State in Early Modern Germany (New York: Longman, 1994), 36. Like Wiesner, Juliana Kruse sees continuties between ancient and medieval ideas about widowhood and its expression in early modern Nuremberg; she demonstrates not only that widow portraiture functioned in a similar memorial fashion in both Protestant and Catholic Nuremberg, but also that

386 Tr ansitions to the Early Modern World did not object to widows’ remarriage in as strenuous terms as Catholic authors did, Protestant funeral sermons, “consolation books” and “widows’ books” nevertheless encouraged women to remain chaste in widowhood and consciously recognized such women as engaging in a distinctive tradition. German Protestant ministers encouraged widows to preserve their Witwenstuhl, the status of living in one’s marital home as a widow. The Catholic tradition of chaste widowhood thus did not fade away under Protestant efforts to elevate marriage and eliminate celibacy as a requirement for lay spirituality; rather, the idea of preserving one’s Witwenstuhl was central to the Protestant project of nurturing “holy households.”71 Protestant authors both respected the patristic tradition of writing to widows and added new dimensions to it. Britta-Juliana Kruse has noted that Protestant authors of Witwenspiegel (“Mirrors for Widows”) marshaled the medieval discursive traditions surrounding the widow to support a Protestant world view in which all events underpinned the will and counsel of God: God called husbands from their wives, but also constituted widows’ consolation and salvation. Texts designed to shape “good” Protestant women’s widowhoods expanded the Catholic discourse through a novel engagement with and visualization of the widow’s home as a space for creating family piety: in the absence of the departed spouse, according to the Salzwedel preacher Stephan Praetorius (fl. ca. 1580), widows were the “provost and bishop” (Probst und Bischoff) of the domestic Hauskirche.72 As heads of such households, widows generated pastors’ interest, but also provoked their anxiety. Treatises offering guidance in all aspects of the widow’s private life, especially her role in children’s education and social service, increased. As with the treatises of Vives and Erasmus, Witwenspiegel (mirrors for widows) and funeral sermons elevated the lives of individual women who served as examples of the Pauline ideal.73 In his “Mirror for Widows” of 1596, the northern German Protestant preacher Nicholas Gryse paraphrased Scripture, defining a visual conceptions of widowhood were likewise similar, emphasizing penitential service and humility, and were highly durable cultural images throughout the early modern period (Kruse, Witwen, 165–86, 339–62). 71. Lyndal Roper introduced this term in her excellent study The Holy Household. 72. Kruse, Witwen, 82, 161. 73. Ibid., 83, 161–62.

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widow as “a solitary woman who has chosen God as her protector, and with her children, like-minded fellows, and kinfolk lived according to Christian teaching, trusted God in her grief, and prayed day and night.”74 The works contained both moral instruction and practical guidance for solving problems widows faced, such as running a modest home, dealing with children (or alternatively, childlessness), and remarriage. German Protestant authors expanded on Erasmus’s and Vives’s versions of the practical manual by including much more detailed information concerning raising the children and establishing them in society, as well as attending to minutiae about the widow’s dress, socializing, and prayers.75 Widows’ autonomy evoked a similar concern in Protestant preachers that had obsessed medieval clerics. Nicholas Gryse suggested that God made wives into widows in order to punish them for their sins, and upbraided autonomous widows who acted like “know-it-alls” and “he-men” after losing their husbands.76 Lucas Stoeckle, a Protestant theologian whose Witwenspiegel was published in Heidelberg in 1607, was gravely concerned about widows marrying younger men—resulting in lustful, inappropriate, and ridiculous pairings—and articulated the distaste, shared by Catholic and Protestant theologians alike, for this practice: “So it often happens, that the little old widow takes the youngest boy, whose grandmother she could well be. Which is a great disgrace before all the world and generates all kinds of complaint and bad gossip. Therefore should an authority not lightly permit it, but rather punish it.”77 This criticism seems particularly targeted at the common practice of German guild masters’ widows marrying younger journeymen as a means of retaining their rights to operate a shop after their master-husbands had died. In a broader sense, however, widows’ lati74. Ibid., 552. 75. Vives, De institutione feminae Christianae, Liber secundus et liber tertius, 3.5.18, pp. 223–24; see also Kruse, Witwen, 161–65. Kruse provides an exhaustive summary of six extant Witwenspiegel that remain available only in early printings (Jodochus Lirich, Nikolaus Gryse, Phillipp Han, Matthias Tympe, Lucas Stoeckle, and Jakob Gilbert) and were published between 1586 and 1613 (Witwen, 537–652). She also provides lengthy discussions of the contents of ten Trostbücher for widows, published by various authors from 1552 to 1694 (Witwen, 84–85ff.). 76. “Haberrechte” and “Siemänner,” cited in Kruse, Witwen, 554. 77. “Dann es geschicht oft / dass die alte Vedlen die jüngste buben nemmen / deren großmutter sie wol sein könnten. Welches ein grosser vbelstand vor aller welt ist / vnnd allerley schimpfliche vnd böse nachrede gibt. Deßwegen sollte es ein oberkeit nit leichtlich gestatten / sondern straffen.” Lucas Stoeckle, “Wittwen-Spiegel,” Heidelberg 1607, excerpted in Kruse, Witwen, 195.

388 Tr ansitions to the Early Modern World tude in contracting marriages and running households invited observation and regulation from Protestant clergy because both widows’ iconic functions and their practical behavior were linked to patterns of social order. Female autonomy in widowhood threatened to throw the proper execution of gender roles and the appropriate relationship between the clergy and the laity into disarray.

Traditions, Transitions, and Difference: New Dimensions of Widowhood in Early Modern Sources Early modern conduct manuals and other genres of edifying literature for widows were particularly concerned with establishing moral and social boundaries for widows’ behavior. Such texts in part responded to perennial anxieties about the widow’s position as a woman living independent of male supervision, but changes in women’s lived experience as widows in early modern Europe complicated the discourse. The early modern sources placed a greater emphasis on the widow’s honor and shame than did medieval treatises, and a de-emphasized the widow’s spiritual prowess in favor of her role as a memorial to her husband. In some respects, this interpretation supports what scholars of early modern gender roles term a “declension narrative,” which argues that there was a general deterioration in women’s social status and economic opportunities in the public sphere that began in the later Middle Ages and intensified through the early modern period. As Merry Wiesner-Hanks has argued, however, this formulation is a narrow and often unhelpful generalization.78 Widowhood clearly created both hardships and opportunities, greater visibility and greater vulnerability at the same time, both in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Recent scholarship on widows has shed light on the transitions between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, an era for which the traditional historical narrative emphasizes its difference from rather than continuity with the medieval past. Janine Lanza, for example, a historian of widowhood in early modern France, has painstakingly doc78. Merry Wiesner-Hanks, “Do Women Need the Renaissance?” Gender and History 20, no. 3 (2008): 545ff.

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umented archival evidence for widowed women’s continued participation in Parisian guilds as maîtresses and their strategic uses (and abuses) of laws governing labor and inheritance. Lanza’s work suggests that the boundaries between public and private, while perhaps less fluid than in the medieval period, nevertheless remained porous throughout the era, serving Parisian widows well in their pursuit of employment in the absence of a spouse. The special situation of widows necessitated their continued presence in work and public life, and a public recognition of this necessity permitted widows to work when wives and other single women were refused the privilege. Lanza’s work defies a narrative of overall decline in female labor opportunities through the eighteenth century, although she notes that this decline does occur later, with the adoption of the Napoleonic Code. Even when men challenged the continued activities of women in guilds, for example, these challenges were not always successful: widows often constituted the exceptions to guild rules intended to establish an exclusively male public sphere. BrittaJuliana Kruse’s monumental study of widows in early modern Nuremberg also reveals continuities between their treatment in medieval and early modern urban life, and provides copious evidence of texts and images that popularized and elaborated upon the sentiments of medieval authors for both Protestant and Catholic widows. Protestant conduct manuals demonstrate that reformers had internalized medieval ideals of the vere vidua and were not quick to abandon these, despite changing religious, social, and economic contexts. In Nuremberg and other German Imperial cities, urban authorities increasingly assigned widows a quasi-professionalized role in maintaining the city’s churches and hospitals. The association of widows with church upkeep may in part have had ancient resonances with the almost-forgotten office of deaconess, but it more immediately echoed the “work of her own hands” that characterized widowed saints and the laywomen in tertiary societies who imitated their example. Kruse also found images of matrons in widows’ habits who tended the altars in churches and worked in the urban hospitals; these images proliferated in broadsheets and pamphlets, indicating another avenue of representation for widowed women alongside the widow portraits that had come into fashion around the same time. These images showed the complicated identity of the widow as both a

390 Tr ansitions to the Early Modern World needy person and a social helper. Wealthy widows were represented in portraits or performing works of charity; poor widows increasingly were seen as women who earned their keep in service to the urban community, just as Catholic widows had served in voluntary prayer societies and tertiary orders. The works of charity associated with Catholic mendicant lay associations continued to define the widow’s role in society even in Protestant German cities, but the context had changed: rather than representing widows’ participation in Catholic lay orders, such tasks increasingly occured as bartered exchanges with the urban administration to compensate the city for its support of widowed women through various forms of charity.79 Both Lanza and Kruse emphasized in their studies that the German widows operated in a similar fashion to medieval widows: both negotiated the interstitial spaces between theory and practice that religion, economy, and law permitted. The identity of the widow was continually created—sometimes in a contested and anxious fashion—through a dynamic that interpreted contemporary practices for women through familiar medieval typologies of the “good widow.” Likewise, widows of various ages and classes negotiated, conformed to, and transgressed against these typologies in ways that become more visible as new genres articulated and visualized the widowed experience in ways that medieval sources did not. The increased production of consolation letters, conduct manuals, and prayer books in Reformation Europe corresponded in part to reformers’ interest in regulating the conduct of women in Protestant Germany, but also to a more general social desire of the period to impose order on the chaotic gender implications of unsupervised women. Public service as a prescriptive outlet for widows’ charitable impulses grew out of an ancient ethos in which widows were designated as special agents in the care of souls for husband and family. Both Protestant and Catholic authors, despite differing theologies on the superiority of widowed celibacy, marshaled a long-standing, “cultic” image of women living in widowed chastity as the model for both social service and an exemplary personal relationship with God, articulating Reformation-era ideals through widows’ demonstration of proper female behavior. As in medieval Europe, early modern widows (especially younger 79. Kruse, Witwen; Lanza, From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris.

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widows or women who had little prospect of inheritance or annual support) often remarried, even in Catholic areas of Europe where clerical advice to both genders in devotional literature still advocated of a life of permanent celibacy. Men generally remarried more frequently than women in early modern Europe, as in the Middle Ages, but the status of widower received more systematic discussion in early modern sources.80 The emergence of a stronger consciousness of male widowhood in this era requires a separate study, but it is surely related to the sustained interest that both religious and secular authorities, on the cusp of the late medieval and early modern periods, demonstrated toward marriage and the treatment of the family as an instrument of social order. Likewise, concerns about poverty and the social dislocations that accompanied a changing economy drew renewed attention to the hardships that both widows and widowers faced as single heads of household, particularly when their responsibilities threatened to draw on the resources of the community for support.81 The widower saint did not constitute a commonly used genre in hagiography, as male saints who survived their 80. Cavallo and Warner, introduction, Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, 10. Heide Wunder summarized various remarriage rates in early modern German cities as varying by location, class, and age: younger widows who competed successfully on the marriage market, and women who had viable businesses and required help in running them, tended to remarry, whereas widows with independent means of support and older women more often appear in tax records as widows (whether voluntarily or not) (Wunder, He Is the Sun, She Is the Moon, 134ff.). Kruse’s assessment of biographical funerary sermons of German widows and widowers indicated that widowers remarried more quickly, and that widows with children or with little wealth made poor candidates for remarriage, whereas, like men, widows of standing and property could make multiple matches in the course of their lifespan (Kruse, Witwen, 196–97). For the Low Countries, Martha Howell touched on the challenges facing widows that often made remarriage for widows in Leiden and Cologne necessary; see her article “Women, the Family Economy, and the Structures of Market Production,” in Women and Work in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. Barbara Hanawalt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 211. Howell’s research on Douai revealed high remarriage rates for both men and women from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, however she noted that this was “unusual because there is good evidence that elsewhere in premodern Europe a widow did not easily make a new match, especially if she was burdened with another man’s children and if she was beyond her youth” (Howell, The Marriage Exchange, 113–15, especially 113n42). Natalie Zemon Davis identified the same problem for Lyon widows (“Women in the Crafts in Sixteenth-Century Lyon,” in Hanawalt, Women and Work, 177). Janine Lanza’s survey of Parisian widows found that although widowers tended to remarry more often that widows, about 25 percent of marriages in Old Regime France were second marriages, and that rural rates of remarriage were higher than urban ones (Lanza, From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris, 156). For English widows and remarriage, see Mavis Mate, Women in Medieval English Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 34–38. 81. For example, B. J. Van Damme has researched several widowers who were venerated as local saints in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, particularly in Florence; see “Widower and Servant of God,” paper presented at GENCAS (Gender in Culture and Society) Conference: “The Merry Widow: Rethinking Widowhood in History, Culture, and Society,” July 7–10, 2007, Swansea, Wales.

392 Tr ansitions to the Early Modern World wives were most often sanctified through other roles such as monk, confessor, or theologian and were not defined by the institution of marriage once their wives had died.82 When hagiographers did write about widowers, this designation provided a way to honor specific men of local importance, and often took inspiration from Jerome’s letter to the widower Pammachius, a worldly man who received the renewed opportunity after marriage to become a monk. Remarriage for widows was a fraught question, not only because widows bore a responsibility to the lineage and pastoral care of their deceased husbands’ souls and property, but also because their children’s inheritances were placed a risk when pitted against the interests of a new stepfather. Early modern sources give new and more complex consideration of these matters when balanced against the widow’s prospects for independent financial sustenance. Generally speaking, women who had sufficient annuities, property, or other forms of permanent income would be less likely to remarry, whereas a widow of the artisan classes who inherited little regular income but perhaps the means to earn money—such as an outfitted shop, equipment, and materials—would be more likely to remarry, especially if there were journeymen in the family business who would also benefit by marriage to a widow. In other words, although preachers perennially advocated widowed chastity, most people had to choose whether poverty or remarriage was the lesser evil. Both social histories and cultural studies of early modern widowhood indicate that the development of new kinds of documentation about marital life, such as marriage contracts, funeral sermons, and other descriptive sources that are generally not available for earlier periods, offer more candid reports than most medieval sources concerning men’s and women’s motivations for remarriage. The emotional and social needs for companionship and support that likely led to remarriage, but were rarely discussed in medieval sources, found much more direct and concrete expression in new genres of the early modern period. For example, biographical funeral sermons (Leichenpredigten) created a new opportunity for assessing the “careers” of pious widows 82. My thanks to Marita von Weissenberg of Yale University for her comments based on her dissertation research on husbands in medieval hagiography.

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retrospectively. Formal, circulated funerary sermons had originated with Martin Luther and became a common genre of commemoration (mostly in the Protestant areas of central Germany); printing facilitated the dissemination of such texts beyond the immediate audience of the deceased’s family and congregation. Protestants of the middle and upper classes commissioned sermons that offered a biographical sketch of the person, and a comment on her character.83 Sermons written about widows often illuminated their election of remarriage or permanent celibacy, the situations in which they remarried, and the process of their deaths—details that addressed elements of the widow’s life that had been so routinely suppressed in the more schematic genre of Catholic treatises and sermons. The funeral sermon narrated the practical demands of life that rendered a remarriage a desirable, even necessary, option. The focus on the person’s life and death also introduced the concepts of grief and loss into the discourse in ways that medieval discussions of widowhood generally ignored. Another innovation in Protestant literature was the introduction of practical prayers, written for widows, to help them find new husbands, to release to them from poverty, or to help them cope with their new situation.84 When widows chose to remain single, Protestant authors offered explicit guidelines for living in widowed celibacy, largely maintaining the contours of the Catholic practice of widowed chastity while establishing Protestant women as “provosts and bishops” of their households.85 While these new genres articulated popular perceptions of widowhood in new ways, the economic considerations that prevailed in medieval Europe remained relevant to early modern widows: wealth could either facilitate remarriage or permit a woman to establish herself in professed widowhood. The latter remained an attractive option—in both Catholic and Protestant traditions—because, by associating the widow with permanent celibacy and charitable impulses, it liberated the widow from economic and social interference by family members and suitors. The pious widowhood described in early modern sources also found 83. Kruse, Witwen, 196–99; Lanza, From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris, 71–73. 84. As late as the mid-eighteenth century, moralists in treatises on the pastoral care of widows criticized masters for not providing better in advance for their wives in widowhood, leaving the burden of widows’ support on the city coffers (Kruse, Witwen, 252). 85. Ibid., 81ff., 153ff.

394 Tr ansitions to the Early Modern World a new context within the emerging institutions that attempted to negotiate poverty and relief of the poor, particularly for women and children. Urban authorities were well aware of the stereotype of widows and orphans even as they often made it difficult for widows to provide for their children: German city councils expressed reluctance to allow widows to work within the crafts to support themselves, although widows nevertheless continued to do so, often invoking their role as “poor widows” to except them from restrictions on their labor.86 A Frankfurt widow submitted her plea to the city council to continue working when the guild officials demanded she reduce her profits: Although most Christian hearts, recognizing my misfortune, would let me go on in my occupation and livelihood and earn my meager piece of bread the heads of the wool-weaver’s guild came to me, in my own house, right after my late husband’s death, at the time of my greatest sorrow, and contrary to all Christian love, ordered me, with harsh and importune words, to slow down in my work.87

She asked the Frankfurt lord mayors to intervene and permit her to run her shop freely once more, in exchange for her thanks and “modest prayers . . . from my heart for the rest of my life for your future health and well-being.”88 The petitioning widow situated herself as a “good” and deserving widow when she tacitly invoked medieval topoi of both the needy widow and the pious intercessor whose prayers were considered efficacious. German towns reduced widows’ labor potential on the one hand, while on the other were slow to adopt a formal system of relief for poor widows and orphans when widowed heads of households could not earn their own living, investing the ancient notion of the “widow of the two mites” with an immediate social resonance. Lanza’s research on Paris likewise demonstrated that even though Old Regime authorities con86. Merry E. Wiesner posed this problem about German widows and the guilds in early modern Germany—why did the German cities restrict widows’ participation in the guilds when the overwhelming result would be impoverished widows and families, especially in cases where the widow did not or could not remarry? Wiesner argues that it was not practicality, but rather stubborn ideological notions of the working world as the male sphere, that caused cities to act against their own best interests in restricting widowed women from productive labor and limiting their membership privileges after the death of a spouse. Merry E. Wiesner, Working Women in Renaissance Germany (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986). Kruse investigates how seventeenth-century authors addressed the absence of relief for German widows (Kruse, Witwen, 207ff.). 87. Wiesner, Working Women in Renaissance Germany, 159. 88. Ibid., 160.

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tinued to permit widows’ participation in guild labor, and that even though widows within certain guilds, such as seamstresses, midwives, and drapers, still had significant potential for well-remunerated work, at the same time, in cultural discourse widows were associated with need and poverty.89 Even when widows negotiated around economic and legal restrictions in order to support themselves—with variable success in different regions of Europe—through guild participation and freelance work, social stereotypes consistently pictured them as needy representatives of the deserving poor. Since the Middle Ages, the “good” widow had been idealized in two separate but complementary images: on the one hand, the widow was represented as a self-sacrificing matron who nurtured the poor humbly with her own hands, in the tradition of the Apostle Paul’s description of the vere vidua, and widowed saints like Elizabeth of Thüringia. On the other, the widow was also an object of charity, such as the impoverished biblical widow of the “two mites.” Medieval commentators rarely articulated the relationship between these two types of widows. Britta-Juliana Kruse’s identification of patterns of charity among widows in Nuremberg illuminates how these topoi became conjoined in early modern archival and visual evidence. For example, wealthy widows clearly recognized the relationship between the independent widow in a position to serve others, and the “widow of the two mites” who required others’ assistance. Wealthy medieval widows’ preferences for certain types of mendicant charity and women’s institutions indicated that medieval women, too, saw a shared identity with women in need, but Kruse’s discussion of late medieval and early modern Nuremberg widows’ charitable activities clearly demonstrates a sustained interest among widows in causes that supported women and children.90 Widows 89. Lanza, From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris, 187–91, 226–28. 90. For example, Sharon Farmer observed that the Haudriette foundation in fourteenth-century Paris extended largesse to widows by providing them with a hospice, but at a very high personal cost: the widow surrendered her entire property to the institution, designated the hospice as her heir, and risked expulsion (without regaining her property) if she disobeyed its regulations or “sinned with her body.” The caretakers of the Haudriette widows granted widows housing and board in exchange for a sort of pious indentured servitude: the widows prayed three times daily for their founding patrons, and, like the reformed prostitutes of the Filles Dieu foundation, the women of the later Haudriettes were cloistered and strictly monitored. Farmer also identified a third institution, the Parisian beguinage founded by Louis IX circa November 1264, which housed a variety of women of different states, including wealthy widows who purchased their own lodgings and poor women for whom the institution

396 Tr ansitions to the Early Modern World took special interest in the foundation and patronage of Nuremberg’s Seelhäuser, hospitals that tended to the needs of widows, orphans, unwed mothers, plague victims, invalids, and the poor. The personnel of these houses, the Seelfrauen, were often themselves widows, who performed this public charity in exchange for financial support and housing. Kruse interpreted this pattern, which appeared in a variety of early modern Nuremberg charities from the late Middle Ages through the eighteenth century, as widows’ direct internalization of the precepts of the prescriptive literature available to them that had for so long articulated the religious obligations of widowhood.91 Moreover images of the Seelfrau, or hospital worker, and the Küsterin, or church custodian, become nearly interchangeable in the Nuremberg cityscape: woodcuts of widowed women serving in the Nuremberg churches often depicted matrons with white veils and dark robes, reminiscent not only of the liturgical texts depicting the widow’s consecration to chastity and the blessing of her veil, but also the biblical widow Anna’s presence as a caretaker and witness in the temple.92 A final development of note in the transition from the medieval to the early modern discussion of religious widowhood was the evolution of an association between widowhood and the perceptions of grief and mourning. As a cultural icon for understanding loss, the persona of the widow had long been synonymous with the church as the widowed spouse of Christ. In early modern texts, this image garnered more explicitly secular connotations and a personal, rather than allegorical, affect. The widow’s practical arrangements with family and guild members and the event of the husband’s funeral organized the grieving process that followed the unexpected crisis of the death of a spouse, and reminded the entire society of the consequences of mortality and unprepared death.93 Consolation books redirected readers’ attention to the widow’s personal, rather than symbolic, loss. Conduct manuals lent provided them; see Sharon Farmer, “‘It Is Not Good that [Wo]man Should Be Alone’: Elite Responses in High Medieval Paris,” in Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800, eds. Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 92–95. On James A. Brundage’s characterization of widows and orphans as persons in special need of mercy and charity, see “Widows as Disadvantaged Persons in Medieval Canon Law,” 193–201. 91. Kruse, Witwen, 407ff. 92. Kruse, Witwen, 339–56. 93. Lanza, From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris, 73.

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structure and expression to widows’ grief, and, in both Catholic and Protestant literature, capitalized on the occasion of spousal loss to provide edifying examples of female conduct. It is significant that these expressions of personal and social grief are novel to the early modern period. In medieval religious literature, the widow was interpreted as exercising a form of spiritual bereavement for Christ, and the widow’s personal grief was generally completely suppressed within a theological discourse that subordinated personal loss to the superior chastity of the widowed state and its beneficial freedom from marital concerns. Expressions of grief appeared mostly in secular epics such as Yvain, in which the issues of spousal loyalty would have been of critical importance to the audience for these texts. The widow’s appropriate grief for her husband, the ruling lord, signaled her goodness as both mistress of the demesne and as a potential wife to a new lord. Early modern authors, like medieval ones, also celebrated widowed celibacy as a release from the woes of marriage, but alongside this older trope, the idea of personal grief became a major point of concern in edifying literature. The contexts of plague cycles, the Reformation emphasis on the family, and humanist mediations on death and consolation generated a new and much more direct engagement with the personal grief of the widow, a phenomenon that merits further study in its own right. Early modern writing to and about widows followed many of the same discursive paths as medieval texts had done, including the scriptural traditions that signaled “good” widowhood, and the ways that “bad” women subverted the pious cloak of chaste widowhood for sinful ends. The meanings within this discursive tradition, however, evolved through new genres that brought further dimensions to the discussion of the social institution of widowhood. Consolation literature emphasized the related themes of conjugal memory and widows’ obedience, engaging the subject of the widow’s grief for the husband even as they encouraged her to remain chaste and devote herself to celibacy and good works. Often such discourses reminded the widow of the importance of seemly and proper mourning practices, which commemorated the loss of her partner and protector.94 Muted or lost in both Prot94. Kruse, Witwen, 568–96 and 579–81.

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estant and Catholic discussions of the early modern period, however, was the medieval sense of the pious widow’s status as a special, spiritual vocation, a “profession” of vowed chastity typified by Anna, or by widowed saints such as Elizabeth of Thüringia. This was perhaps no accident after the Tridentine reforms that clearly distinguished laypeople’s spiritual identity and roles from the clergy’s. Rather, the Witwenspiegel genre, whether in the hands of Catholic or Protestant authors, emphasized the widow’s social leadership in the parish through her demure, pious conduct. As Renaissance Europe rethought its institutions, the widow’s identity as a monument to her husband and family replaced the widow’s spiritual concerns with secular ones, but invested the secular duties of filial piety, family memory, and child-rearing with some of the spiritual cachet accrued over the medieval centuries through the “profession” of religious widowhood. At the same time, the perennially contested nature of the widow’s remarriage, the widow’s role as a valuable commodity with respect to eligible bachelors’ needs and desires on the marriage market, came into even sharper focus. The body and persona of the Christian widow remained a signifier of larger sexual and social concerns in both Catholic and Protestant lands.

Conclusion

Conclusion Women’s spirituality in pre-modern Europe was inevitably shaped by their social and domestic roles, both the roles ascribed to them by male authors and the ways they interpreted the divine through their domestic experiences. Especially for widows who had borne children and lived independently in their own households, it was often impossible to separate a discussion of their religious activities from their domestic settings. This process of “domestication” found its fullest expression in the lives of later medieval saints and contributed to Protestant expressions of women’s roles within the “holy household,” but it had roots in the correspondence between the church fathers and their female patrons in late antiquity. Fourth-century theologians substantially developed the meaning of the tripartite hierarchy of wives, widows, and virgins at the request of their female patrons. This schema conceptualized wifedom and widowhood as progressive stages through which a woman moved closer to the ideal state of virginal chastity, even if she could not regain the physical intactness that characterized a virgin. This discourse on the pious widow recognized the nurturing and serving roles— the social housekeeping that extended from the domestic—that mature widows performed as mentors to virgins and as the Christian community’s caretakers. In the early Middle Ages, the association of the true widow with the “sixtyfold fruit” became not only a means of praising and instructing significant female patrons, but also of explaining the spirituality of widowed saints and the contributions of married and widowed women in monastic histories. The patristic discourse on widowhood provided monastic authors with a language for interpreting the role of matrons in their institutions’ foundation histories. Parentage and motherhood became subjects that were engaged rather than avoided in the biography of the female saints of these eras. The domestic experiences of matron saints during their widowhood came to play a structural and

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400 Conclusion symbolic role in the articulation of their sanctity and in the history of the monasteries they founded or inhabited. Indeed, the combination of the longevity of the Ottonian dynasty’s widows and the imperial family’s interest in commissioning historical texts made the tenth and eleventh centuries generate an unprecedented focus on holy widows’ role in the creation of family memory. The category of widow-saint thus helped monastic authors to explain the role of royal or noble women who had been married and whose lineage played an important role in an institution’s history, linking the initial role of such women as caretakers of families to their eventual elevation as caretakers of monasteries and convents. Ottonian hagiographers in the eleventh century, moreover, introduced new elements into the widow’s duties: preservation of public memory of her spouse and his lineage, and intercessory prayers for the dead. In the twelfth century, these ancient traditions concerning the pious widow’s duty of spousal remembrance became intertwined with the evolving concept of purgatory. Concern for the fate of souls in purgatory enhanced the sanctity and intercessory potential of the new brand of lay saint—particularly female saints—that flourished in the urban movements of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and invigorated mendicant and beguine expressions of piety. Like the prayers of other holy widows such as Anna and St. Monica, the mother of Augustine, Guibert of Nogent’s mother’s ascetic devotions as a pious widow facilitated the gift of prophecy, giving her dreams about the fate of her husband and other dead family members in purgatory. While never a candidate for sainthood, Guibert’s mother was typical of a new genre of holy matron in the hagiographies and sermon stories of the High Middle Ages, in which female piety was characterized by purgatorial intercession, a form of spiritual housekeeping toward husbands and other loved ones that extended even beyond the grave. As hagiographers explored the ways to conceptualize female piety in the High Middle Ages, the widow’s purgatorial intercession provided a point of reflection on many of the significant concerns of the era, such as the nature of the marriage bond and the public role of women as leaders and exemplars of lay piety. The narrative of widowed saints’ lives in the early medieval period had tended to follow a trajectory from worldly marriage to the protec-

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tion of the convent; widowhood occupied a liminal position between marriage and the cloister. In the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, hagiographers began to articulate new spaces for widowed piety in the secular world. Extra-regular communities of beguines began to form on a large scale and with official ecclesiastical permission, particularly in the Low Countries and the German Rhineland, and the development of the Franciscan Third Order in Italy and subsequently throughout Europe allowed lay men and women to undertake a modified Franciscan rule that involved penance, daily prayer, fasting, and continence (meaning chastity for widows and widowers, and abstinence at appropriate times in the liturgical calendar for married couples). These new forms of female spirituality, which encompassed the lifestyles and practices of women in the world rather than within the convent’s walls, became entwined with the more ancient discourse on widowhood. While some clerics supported religious women’s participation in lay life because such women provided visible examples of Christian devotion, many clerics were also profoundly concerned with the perceived fragility of women’s chastity and women’s exposure to worldly temptations. New secular contexts for chaste widowhood rendered the garments and activities of the vere vidua an ever more important focus in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century hagiography. Hagiographers thus faced an interesting challenge: the vita activa and the charity of the widow’s own hands were powerful pastoral examples, however, the garments of widowhood could also be interpreted as a deceptive pallium pietatis—the feigned cloak of piety. This dichotomy revealed the perennial anxiety that secular chaste widowhood made women vulnerable to dangerous and even diabolical influences, and tempted them to profess a holy life while living a dissolute one. These misogynistic suspicions mingled with powerful new currents in popular piety in the thirteenth century. Though most saints continued to be drawn from the noble classes, urbanization and the expansion of the middle class were extremely important factors in the spiritual trends that influenced noble and middle-class women alike. As St. Francis became the consummate example of the urban middle-class saint who marshaled financial resources for spiritual ends, hagiographers found new ways to express this ethos in the lives of women saints,

402 Conclusion such as Yvette of Huy and Humiliana of Cerchi, both of whom during their widowhoods transitioned from domestic care of the poor in their households to visionary and prophetic powers in seclusion toward the end of their lives. Both Yvette and Humiliana typified the women that some thirteenth-century clerics were prepared to champion as saints: devoted, capable, rich women who strongly identified a time-honored model of permanent bereavement in widowhood with newer beguine and Franciscan currents of constant penitence and service in their public and private lives. The hagiography of St. Elizabeth of Thüringia and of St. Bridget developed this model. Elizabeth’s piety exemplified both the active and contemplative elements of female sanctity that proved appealing to many different kinds of lay women. Her hagiographical tradition provided ample material for preachers to illuminate a fresh, contemporary example of widowed piety as preachers turned greater attention to women’s pastoral care in the thirteenth century. Elizabeth’s cult remained popular and influential after her death, leading later medieval saints like Bridget of Sweden (and would-be saints like Margery Kempe) to pattern their understanding of widowed piety after hers. The narrative elements in Elizabeth’s hagiography, such as her devotion, in her youth, to chastity and her voluntary sexual abstinence in marriage, which prefigured a chaste widowhood that consisted of doing good “night and day” through “the work of her own hands,” were the signature elements that characterized the devotion and stability of the vere vidua; Elizabeth’s cult drew these traditional motifs of widowhood together and situated them firmly within the penitential practices and Third Order institutions of the later Middle Ages. Elizabeth’s spiritual “household” did not merely redirect familial domestic activity toward a broader audience of recipients, but rather was wholly transformed along the lines of monastic and mendicant piety, staffed by a circle of supporters who assisted her in tending to the poor and sick. Conrad of Marburg, Elizabeth’s confessor, repeatedly tested her will to live as a chaste and humble widow. While less concerned with the threats to Elizabeth’s chastity in the way that Hugh of Floreffe demonstrated in his representations of Yvette, Conrad appeared, in the vita, obsessed with Elizabeth’s asceticism and obedience. Such drastic submission to

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a male confessor in Elizabeth’s hagiography was key to her acceptance as a saint in her canonization process and reassured church authorities that her model of sanctity could function as a legitimate and efficacious instrument of pastoral care. The mendicant ethos that pervaded the hagiographies of saints like Yvette, Humiliana, and Elizabeth helped to bridge the distance between their piety as widows and an older monastic ideal of virginity as essential to sanctity, and Elizabeth’s cult was enormously influential for other widowed saints such as Dorothy of Montau and Bridget of Sweden, who explicitly claimed Elizabeth as a model. Throughout the Middle Ages, the spirituality of matrons and mothers was profoundly embodied within the household. The remembrance of husbands, the interest and interference of kin, and the demands of motherhood enlarged the space in which domestic metaphors for the divine functioned in visible and concrete ways in medieval hagiography. Widowed saints were an important conduit for clerics who sought to make pastoral care relevant, and while mundane elements of saints’ lives sometimes provided uncomfortable challenges to hagiographers’ sensibilities and conventions of gender, they also occasioned new formulas for piety. Christine de Pisan’s widowhood represented a departure from that of many of the women in this study, because she expressed her widowed continence not through a formal vow of chastity or a religious profession, but through her self-identification as a writer and her choice of the contemplative life that writing offered. Yet she adopted many of the qualities of the vere vidua in her personal context as evidence of the blamelessness of her life: celibacy, modest habits, successful household management, and a studied dedication to virtue, which she expressed in her writings to and about women. Her example raises the question of how images of pious widowhood expressed through hagiography and pastoral literature colored the lives of other women living independently who did not join convents or make a formal profession of widowed continence. The study of widowhood as an analytical category in medieval and early modern Europe remains in its early stages. This study has suggested some avenues for research into the continuities and changes in

404 Conclusion religious widowhood from the medieval to modern eras. Widows are everywhere mentioned in medieval and early modern studies of gender history, but systematic studies of widowhood remain rare. The diversity of widows’ roles in society complicates the scholarly attempt to define and categorize their status and activities within the scope of a single monograph. The evidence of the traditions and assumptions concerning pious widowhood provided here offers indications of the range of options available to widowed women in protecting their reputations and establishing themselves as living with a firm intention of chastity (to paraphrase Pelbart of Temesvar’s description of such women). Even if one did not retreat from the world or profess chastity, joining a tertiary order conferred respectability on married and widowed persons alike; in the absence of such orders, the biblical image of the vere vidua was ubiquitous in hagiography and preaching, and offered the example of a woman who, regardless of her station in life, worked suis manibus propriis, performed works of mercy, and maintained her household and children with diligence and care. This discourse, therefore, provided many different points of entry for all Christian widows to “perform” pious widowhood to the degree to which they were able, and was durable enough to resist the Protestant countercurrent that downplayed lay celibacy. Widows with great financial wherewithal, whether they were saints such as Elizabeth and Hedwig, or “real” women such as Elizabeth de Burgh and her pious friends, could distinguish themselves through many avenues, especially as benefactors of religious foundations as well as through the modesty and chastity of their private lives. For most widows, however, the widow of the two mites surely remained the example closest to their state. In either case, the church gained through its cultivation of pious widowhood a significant corps of women who contributed to the upkeep, both social and financial, of its institutions and its efforts to care for the poor, sick, and needy. While it would be naïve to assume that all (or even most) widows followed every ecclesiastical prescription for Christian widowhood, or that the fear of social opprobrium mattered equally to widows at every level of society, the literature depicting the profligate widow does suggest that there was a social price to be paid by those widows who

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neglected conventional assumptions concerning the behaviors appropriate to the widowed state. Christine’s warnings to widows in the early fifteenth century conveyed a sense that widows living on their own could not do enough to forestall social criticism and speculation upon their integrity, and pastoral, legal, and literary sources from all periods of the Middle Ages likewise implied the shadow of failure and disgrace that could fall upon widows living without male supervision. Although a widow’s ability to “purchase paradise” (to borrow Joel Rosenthal’s colorful metaphor) through rich and generous benefactions depended on her social class, through her engagement with the church and its images of pious widowhood, a widow might at least purchase a bit of respectability by using established and time-honored prescriptions of vidual piety to identify her widowhood as a legitimate and worthy form of female independence.

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Index

Index Acts 9: 39, 74 Acts of Peter, 41 Adam of Dryburgh, 255 Adelheid of Burgundy, 109, 114–18, 180 Ad uxorem, 47 Adversus Jovinianum, 58 Amand, 102, 138 Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, 18, 51 –57, 69 –70, 253 Anna, widow, 6, 53, 70 –72, 75, 77, 145, 149–50, 154, 163, 186, 253, 255, 270, 357, 365 Arnold of Liege, 267 Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, 13, 18, 24, 30–31, 35, 42– 43, 46, 61, 65– 68, 75 Beguines, 18, 195, 208, 238, 264 Benedictionals, 38, 170 Bernard of Clairvaux, 250, 255 –56 Bernardino of Siena, 250, 276 Berthegund, 83 Berthold of Regensburg, 21, 280 – 85, 294 Boccacio, 301, 304–8, 316, 321 –23, 327 –28, 330, 333, 349 Bona Maria Bovolini, 371 Book of the City of Ladies, 339 –41 Brancacci Chapel, 370 Bridget of Sweden, 205–6, 222– 23, 233–35, 239, 243, 402–3 Burchard of Worms, 130, 132, 134 Caesarius, Bishop of Arles, 56, 77, 81–82, 88 Caesarius of Heisterbach, 238, 241, 267, 270, 273, 280, 288 Camiola, 329

Catarina Sforza, 378 Cathars, 209, 259, 285 Catherine of Aragon, 348, 353, 354, 355 Catherine de Medici, 383, 385 Celtic Fedh, 124 Centesimus et sexagesimus et tricesimus fructis, 59 Charlemagne, 94 Chretien de Troyes, 318, 320 Christine de Pisan, 22, 338 –43, 347, 403 Clement of Alexandria, 31 Clm 100, 155 Clm 447, 270 Clm 10073, 161, 164 Clothilde, 93–98 Concerning Famous Women, 301, 307, 316, 329, 330 Conrad of Marburg, 225 –27, 231, 232, 246, 286 Constantine, 34 Council of Aachen, 127 Council of Carthage, 132 Council of Chalcedon, 132 Council of Mainz, 135 Council of Meaux, 141 Council of Orleans, 132 Counter-Reformation, 23 Deaconess, 37, 38, 43, 87, 149–50, 162p De exhortation castitatis, 48 De monogamia, 48 Dialogus Miraculorum, 238, 241, 267, 270, 273 Dido, 328–29 Dorothy of Montau, 218–23, 233, 239, 242, 403 Drogo, Cardinal of Asti, 257, 259

427

428 Index Ecdicia, 126 Eckbert of Schonau, 258–59, 264 Ekbert, Bishop of Bamberg, 226 Elizabeth de Burgh, 2, 404 Elizabeth of Hungary, 347 Elizabeth of Thuringia, 21, 205, 211, 222–23, 225–27, 244 –49, 251, 278, 369, 402 Enrolled widows, 36–38, 43, 49 Erasmus, 22, 350, 354, 360, 362, 364, 374, 385 Eustadiola of Bourges, 90 Eustochium, 40 1 Corinthians 7: 7 –9, 48 1 Corinthians 7: 8 –9, 25 1 Corinthians 7:24, 26 1 Corinthians 7: 32 –40, 25, 26, 31, 48 1 Corinthians 12: 31, 69 1 Kings 17: 8 –18, 73 1 Timothy 3: 2, 46 1 Timothy 5: 5, 2 1 Timothy 5: 3– 16, 27 –28, 36, 49 Flavia Arcas, 36 Florence, 331, 332 Florentine Wills, 332 –34, 380 Formicarius, 297 Fontevrault, 177 Fourth Lateran Council, 252 Franciscan Third Order, 21, 196, 208 401 Frankfurt widows, 394 Fredegund, 82 –83 Gast of Gy, 310, 311 Gautier le Leu, 307, 309, 311 –12, 316 Gelasian Sacramentary, 144 –45 Genesis 1: 28, 26 Geruchia, 61 Gnostics, 50 Golden Legend, 247, 266, 280, 291 Gratian, 132, 151 Gregory of Tours, 82 –84, 126 Guerric of Igny, 255 Guibert of Nogent, 181– 88, 190–91, 197, 214, 237, 283, 400

Guibert of Tournai, 261, 264, 293 Guilliame le Clerc, 369 Haimo of Auxerre, 104 Hedibia, 61 Hedwig of Silesia, 201 –3, 205 Helen, 247 Hildebert of Lavardon, 253 Hildegard of Bingen, 124–25 Hincmar of Reims, 93 Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, 177– 80 Hippolytus of Rome, 37 Hs. 21, 157 Hucbald of Saint Amand, 98 –108, 138 Hugh of Cluny, 177 Hugh of Floreffe, 17, 199, 210, 213–14, 222, 228 Humiliana of Cerchi, 214 –17, 220, 228, 231, 334, 336, 361, 402 Ida of Boulogne, 190, 214 Ideological work, 358 –59 Ignatius of Antioch, 30 Il Corbaccio, 308, 333 –34 Il Filocolo, 306, 321 Ingitrude, 83 Ivo of Chartres, 132, 137 Jacobus of Voragine, 21 Jacques of Vitry, 17, 208, 210, 261–64, 267, 272, 277 Jerome, 13, 18, 31, 39, 42 –43, 45, 55, 57–65, 69, 126 Jews, 257–58 Johannes Herolt, 268, 288, 291–93 Johannes Nider, 288–91, 297 John Chrysostum, 37– 38 John of Marienwerderer, 281, 231, 242, 244, 246 John 16: 20–23, 151 Jovinian, 45, 58–59, 61, 75 Juan Luis Vives, 22, 348, 351–53, 360, 362, 385 Judith, 72, 73, 350, 362–63 Juliana, 65

Index Jutta of Sangerhausen, 287 Juvenal, 305 Keep the Widow Waking, 358 Laudine, 318–21 L’Avision Christine, 341 Libellus de dictis quatuor ancillarum (Deposition of the Four Handmaidens), 224–25, 227–28, 231–32, 246–47, 279, 289 Liber Visionum, 120 liminality, 13 Limus, 14 Liturgies of Consecration, 124, 128, 131, 143 –44, 146, 152, 156, 160, 175 Livre de Trois Virtus, 343 Lucas Stoeckle, 387 Luke 1:36–38, 6 Luke 2: 36 –38, 70 Luke 7: 11 –17, 74 Luke 18: 3 –5, 74 Luke 20: 45, 74 Luke 21: 2 –4, 74 Malleus Maleficarum, 297 Marcella, 39– 41, 58, 71 Marcigny, 177, 193 Margaret of Constance, 297 Margery of Kempe, 240 –41, 247, 402 Marian Devotion, 241–45, 267 Marie de France, 300 –1 Martin Luther, 351, 393 Martin of Leon, 256 –58, 264 Mary, Virgin, 72, 77, 78 Mary de St. Pol, 3 Mary of Hungary, 350– 51, 354 –55, 364, 374, 376 Mary of Oignies, 201, 208, 211, 224, 237–39, 262, 264 Mary Tudor, 348, 355 Mathilda, 109 –14, 117, 121 Mechthild of Magdeburg, 287 Melania, 35, 51 Monica, 182, 186 Monodiae, 181, 187, 190 –91 Montanism, 46, 48, 50

429

Mourning dress, 126, 128, 132, 134, 143, 146–48, 150, 156, 164 MS Augsburg Hs. 21, 153 Munich Corpus Christi Festival, 266 Naomi, 259, 284 Napoleonic Code, 5, 389 Nicolas Gryse, 386–87 Notker the Stammerer, 95 Nurenberg Fastnachtspiel, 313 Nurenberg widows, 395–96 Oda, 177 –80 Odilo, Abbot of Cluny, 114–88 Olympias, 35, 37 –39 On the Christian Widow, 22, 358, 364, 374 On the Education of the Christian Woman, 348, 350 On the Good of Widowhood, 65 On the Good Work of Bees, 271–73 On the Institution of Christian Matrimony, 22, 355 On the Instruction of the Christian Woman, 22 Ordo of women, 75 Ordo Viduarum, 37 Paschasius Radbertus, 106 Paul, 25–29, 48, 54 Paula, 35, 39 –40, 58, 76, 247 Pelbart of Temesvar, 293–96 Penitential of Theodore, 143 Periculoso, 194–95 Peter Damien 137 Peter Abelard, 162, 254 Peter Lombard, 130, 137 Peter of Alexandria, 52 Petronius, 33, 300 Pilgrimage, 116 Pope Alexander III, 139 Pope Boniface VIII, 161 Pope Gelasius I, 131–32, 134, 144 Pope Gregory IX, 231, 287 Pope Innocent III, 252 Pope Sergius II, 179 Pope Urban IV, 204 Proba, 71

430 Index Professio viduitatis, 13 Protestant, 359 Protestant Reformation, 13, 347–48, 390 Purgatory, 14, 236, 311, 400 Querelles des Femmes, 339 Rabanus Maurus, 94 Radegund, 85, 90, 138, 201 Ranshofen, 192–94, 197 Ravenna, 217 Regina, 36–37 Regio of Prum, 137 Rictrude, 93, 98–108, 138, 212, 226 Robert of Arbrissel, 176 Roman Pontifical, 149, 151, 153 Romance of the Rose, 303, 346 Romano-German Pontifical, 144, 146, 148–49, 151–53, 157, 163, 186, Romans 7: 2–3, 25 Sacramental marriage, 236, 240 Salvinia, 55, 63 Second Lateran Council, 191 Sedit, 37 Sigolena, 89–90 Susanna, 53, 72, 77 Syneisaktism, 64 Synod of Orange, 135 Synod of Paris, 92, 138 Synod of Saint Jean de Losne, 93 Tabitha, 74, 370 Tertullian, 32, 41, 46–51, 69 The Flowing Light of the Godhead, 287 Theoderic of Apolda, 244, 248, 280, 289 Theodosian Code, 52 Theodosius, 34, 52 Theophanu, 118–20

Theudechild, 81 Thietmar of Merseberg, 120 Thirty-, sixty-, or hundredfold fruit, 18, 59, 67, 77, 127, 148, 399 Thomas of Cantimpre, 271, 274 Timothy, 130 Titus 2: 2–5, 29 Traditio Apostolica, 41 Tretis of the Two Mariot Women and the Wedo, 337 Troilus and Criseida, 321, 327 Turtledove, 54, 55, 172, 269 Univira, 31, 37 Urban festivities, 314 Usufruct, 380 Valeria Messalina, 353 Veil, 56, 102, 127–29, 132–36, 138, 142, 147, 176, 189, 195 Venantius Fortunatis, 86, 88 Vera vidua, 2, 25, 71, 79, 141, 404 Vito of Cortona, 214–16 “Widow and Carnival” play, 313–16 “Widower,” 8 Widow of Ephesus, 33, 300–1, 309, 319–20 Widow of Sarepta, 73–74, 149, 153, 253–54, 257, 259, 265, 365 “Widow’s mite,” 6, 163 Wife of Bath, 303–4, 317–18, 325, 337, 339 William Dunbar, 337, 349 William Durand, Bishop of Mende, 134, 139–40, 158–61, 172, 369 Yvette of Huy, 199–200, 210, 212, 214, 231, 241, 402 Zarephath, 73

The Profession of Widowhood: Widows, Pastoral Care, and Medieval Models of Holiness was designed in Filosofia with Scala Sans display type and composed by Kachergis Book Design of Pittsboro, North Carolina. It was printed on 60-pound Natures Book Natural and bound by Thomson-Shore of Dexter, Michigan.