|
You are here:
Women as guests
(1/3)
That in our Order it is forbidden for women to live under
the
same roof (as monks) and that even entry past the monastery
gate is denied them. Excluding every pretext – whether it be
animal husbandry and care or the laundering of monastery
goods (as is sometimes necessary), or, finally, anything whatever
that needs to be done – it is absolutely forbidden for us and for
our lay-brothers to have women living under the same roof as
ourselves. Therefore they may not be permitted to be lodged
within the grange enclosure or to come within the monastery gate.(1)
At harvest time, however,
women might be employed to work in the fields, but they were kept at
a respectable distance.
|
In the Middle
Ages women were ambivalently perceived. On the one hand, they were identified
with Mary, the Mother of Christ, but on the other, they were associated
with the Temptress, Eve. Monks were reminded that no man, since Adam, had been
able to resist the wiles of a woman and accordingly, nuns, female relatives,
workers and visitors were kept outside the Cistercian precinct. Early legislation
prohibited women from entering Cistercian abbeys and granges. Any abbot who
ignored these rulings risked being deposed; any monk who helped
a woman to gain access
without his abbot’s knowledge would be transferred to another community.
The Cistercians did not refuse to provide for women as
such and were happy to refresh dignified women elsewhere, for example, in
the vill.(2) The
late thirteenth-century account book for King John’s foundation, Beaulieu
Abbey, in Hampshire,
states that relatives of the community and other women ‘who could not
be refused without scandal’ should receive bread from the ‘furno’,
beer from the cellarer and pittances from
the sub-cellarer (although the guestmaster was to account for this in his
audit).(3) The
monks’ kind-heartedness did
not extend to those whom they considered unworthy of their care, such as prostitutes
and local women, who were only to receive help in exceptional times (for example,
during a famine).(4) The Cistercian Order
was not, therefore, against providing for women per se, but was
wary of the risks posed by their presence within the abbey precincts.
<next>
|