CHAPTER XIII
THE NUN IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
| “Or dient et content et fablent.” Aucassin et Nicolette. |
“La science,” said a wise Frenchman, “atteint l’exactitude; il appartient à l’art seul de saisir la vérité.” And another, “L’histoire vit de documents, mais les documents sont pareils aux lettres écrites avec les encres chimiques; ils veulent, pour livrer leur secret, qu’on les réchauffe, et les éclaire par transparence, à la flamme de la vie.” The quotations are complementary, for what, after all, is literature but a form of life; the quintessence of many moods and experiences, the diffused flame concentrated and burning clearly in a polished lamp. The historian who wishes to reach beyond accuracy to truth must warm those invisible writings of his at the flame of literature, as well as at his own life. He must vitalise the visitation reports for himself (it is not difficult, they move and live almost without him); but he must make use also of the life of writers long since dead. There is hardly a branch of literature which has not its contribution for him. The story-teller has his tale, which holdeth children from play and old men from the chimney corner. The ballad-man has his own pithy judgment in the guise of an artless rhyme. The teacher has his admonitions, whence may be learnt what men conceived to be the nun’s ideal and purpose in this cloistered life. The moralist has his satire, to show wherein she fell short of such lofty heights. And the poet himself will hold his mirror up to nature, that we may see after five hundred years what he saw with his searching eyes, when Madame Eglentyne rode to Canterbury, or when the nuns of Poissy feasted a cavalcade from court. The world was subject matter for all these, whether they wrote with a purpose or without one; there is life even in the crabbed elegiacs of Gower, grumbling his way through the Vox Clamantis; there is much life in the kindly counsels of the Ancren Riwle; there is God’s plenty indeed in the stories and songs which the people told. It is the historian’s business to call in these literary witnesses to supplement his documents. To the account-roll and the bishop’s register must be added the song, the satire and the sermon. Alnwick’s visitations, with the story of “Beatrix the Sacristan” behind them, have twice as much significance; Madame Eglentyne and Margaret Fairfax lend to each other a mutual illumination; little captured Clarice Stil needs Deschamps’ Novice of Avernay by her side before her case can be well understood. It is of these composite portraits that truth is put together and history made.
An analysis of the classes of medieval literature in which there is mention of nuns shows from how wide a field the historian can draw. The most obvious of these classes is that which contains biographies and autobiographies of saints and famous women who were nuns. Such are the writings of the great trio who made famous the nunnery of Helfta in the thirteenth century, the béguine Mechthild of Magdeburg and the nuns Mechthild of Hackeborn and Gertrud the Great[1539]; the lives and writings of Luitgard of Tongres[1540], of St Clare[1541] and of St Agnes of Bohemia[1542]; the memoir and letters of Charitas Pirckheimer, Abbess of a Franciscan convent at Nuremberg, who was a sister of the humanist Wilibald Pirckheimer and herself a scholar of repute[1543]. The autobiographies of one or two nuns in the later sixteenth century (for instance St Theresa[1544] and Felice Rasponi[1545]) have a certain retrospective value; and the lives of the three béguine mystics, St Douceline[1546], St Lydwine of Schiedam[1547] and St Christina of Stommeln[1548] afford supplementary evidence, which is interesting as showing the similarities and dissimilarities between regular and secular orders. For present purposes, however, these works may be neglected. Their interest is always rather particular than general, since they deal with great individuals, and the information which they give as to the life of the average nun is conditioned always by the fact that a woman of genius will mould her surroundings to her own form, even in a convent. This is true of the medieval saints; while the careers of women such as Charitas Pirckheimer, Felice Rasponi and St Theresa owe much of their significance to the special circumstances of the time. An additional reason for neglecting biographies and autobiographies lies in the fact that the class is unrepresented in English literature belonging to this period. The short panegyric of Euphemia of Wherwell is the sole approach to a biography of an English nun which has survived, unless we are to count the description of Joan Wiggenhall’s building activities. For some reason which it is impossible to explain, monasticism did not produce in England during the later middle ages any women of sanctity or genius who can compare with the great Anglo-Saxon abbesses[1549].
Outside the personal records of great individuals, our informants fall (as has already been suggested) into four classes: the people, with their songs and stories, the teachers, with their didactic works, the moralists, with their satires and complaints, and finally the men of letters, poets and “makers,” for whom the nun is sometimes subject-matter. First, and perhaps most interesting of all, must come the people and the people’s songs, for in the literature of the continent there exists a class of lyrics (“Klosterlieder,” “Nonnenklagen,” “Chansons de Nonnes”) which is specially concerned with nuns[1550]. There is much to be learned about all manner of things from such popular poetry. So the people feel about life, and so (reacting upon them) it makes them feel. Songs crooned over the housework or shouted at the plough steal back into the singer’s brain and subtly direct his conscious outlook; this was the wise man’s meaning, who said that he cared not who made the laws of a nation if he might make its ballads. Now it is extremely significant that almost all the popular songs about nuns, the songs which
The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones
Do use to chant,
are upon one theme. They deal always with the nun unwillingly professed. It was the complaint of the cloistered love-birds which these knitters sang.