Julie Ann Smith - Ordering Women’s Lives: Penitentials and Nunnery Rules in the Early Medieval West

ORDERING WOMENS LIVES

For my mother
in loving memory

Contents

This is a book about expectations which sanction modes of behaviour. It is a study of articulated norms for womens behaviour as devised by religious authorities in early medieval Europe. The study engages with a world which had both new and traditional elements and in which womens lives were governed by a variety of rules, norms, and expectations. The main influences came from two intersecting worlds, that is, from within the traditional cultural spheres of the post-migration folc and from the increasingly influential Christian Church whose clergy were endeavouring, with varying levels of success throughout the period, to overlay traditional practices and beliefs with their expectations. The ultimate aim of the clergy in this undertaking was to replace pre-Christian understandings and values with their salvific cosmos. To help them in this process the clergy employed a variety of methods for disseminating their expectations including such textual sources as sermons, doctrinal treatises, and conciliar canons. They infiltrated the law-giving process, firstly, through encouraging the newly-converted kings to write down their traditional laws, and then gradually remodelling these pre-Christian expectations to conform with Christian ideals. The penitentials and nunnery rules played a fundamental role in this Christianising process but their significance is increased for historians of womens experience by their potential for a closer proximity to the experiential worlds of a broad spectrum of women than that of such texts as the law codes and conciliar canons. Both the penitentials and nunnery rules, which were designed and written throughout the period with the express purpose of creating behavioural expectations for their audiences, are extremely useful for accessing the lives of early medieval women because they can be expected to have influenced a broad band of social degrees and economic statuses.