But the abbess and the convent refused to accept these injunctions, and they were accordingly placed under an interdict. The hospital belonging to the house and its property were confiscated, the chaplains were forbidden to celebrate mass, and the ban of excommunication was pronounced against the nuns and was reiterated by the priest of the nearest church on feast days and on Sundays. This was a great humiliation to the nuns and helped to lower them in general estimation.
Sigmund was absent at the time. Soon after his return Pope Nicolas V, the patron of Cusanus, died (1455), and his successor Calixtus III warned the Cardinal against pushing things to extremes (p. 161). Sigmund also pleaded in favour of the nuns that they were staying within precincts, and that Verena was an estimable woman. Cusanus in answer contended that what he had done, he had done with the sanction of Rome, and that he had excommunicated and deposed Verena solely on account of her disobedience; and he then acknowledged that she was a thoroughly honest and excellent manager. In his letters to the abbot of Tegernsee, written about the same time, he speaks of Verena as a very Jezebel who is full of wiles against him (p. 153). ‘Maybe she will pretend obedience to deceive me,’ he wrote among other things, ‘but the devil of pride has her soul in his possession and will prevent her from really humbling herself.’ But the relations between Sigmund and his bishop were becoming strained in other respects. The first breach of the peace occurred when the abbess came to Innsbruck to seek support. Cusanus despatched a deacon to prevent her being received, and Sigmund had the deacon cast into prison.
The nuns on the Sonnenburg were in a sorry plight. They dared not leave the house, the usual tithes were not brought to them and there had been no ingathering of the produce of their own harvest, for Cusanus threatened excommunication to anyone having intercourse with them or looking after their interests. They were nigh upon starvation (p. 277), and had recourse to an unlawful step. They took a band of armed men into their service and directed them to gather the tribute due to them. But the soldiers sent by the archbishop put these men to flight and then stormed the cloister. The nuns fled into the adjoining woods and found refuge in a house. ‘But we were betrayed and had to fly again,’ they wrote in their chronicle; ‘during three days we were pursued and sought by the troops, repeatedly we were so near to them that we saw them and they saw us. But the Virgin Mary helped us to escape from them.’ Afra von Velseck had been put in possession of their empty house, but Cusanus could not support her; fearful of Sigmund he had fled from his bishopric and repaired to Rome. The archduke conducted the nuns back and begged Verena to resign, offering her a house near Innsbruck (p. 309). An envoy was accordingly despatched to Rome to proffer terms of submission to Cusanus if only he would take the ban of excommunication from the nuns. The bishop at last yielded to the Pope’s command, though with a sufficiently bad grace. ‘I send you a copy of Verena’s letter to me,’ he wrote to the envoy Natz, ‘she tells lies as usual.’ And on the margin of her letter, as a comment on her declaration that she had repeatedly sought absolution, he added the words, ‘this is a lie.’
Penance in its extreme form was undergone by the convent (p. 311), but as Cusanus persistently denied to Sigmund the right of appointing a new abbess, many letters passed before the conditions of peace were settled and ratified. The correspondence, as Jäger remarks (p. 315), throws an interesting light on the character of the women concerned. Verena, who throughout maintained a proud dignity, retired from the convent on a pension; Afra, who had resorted to various intrigues, finally renounced all claims, and Barbara Schöndorfer came over from Brixen and was installed as abbess.
Thus ended the quarrel about the privileges of Sonnenburg, which lasted six years and led to the curtailment of many of its rights. The story proves the inability of convents to preserve their independence, and shows how their weakness was made the excuse for interference from without to the detriment of the abbess in her position as landowner.
It remains to enquire how far the improvements effected in monastic life by peaceful and by forcible means were lasting, and in what position the nunnery stood at the beginning of the 16th century.
Some valuable information is given on the general state of monasticism by a number of addresses delivered by Tritheim, abbot of Sponheim († 1516), before the assembled chapter of Benedictine abbots between 1490 and 1492[1036]. Tritheim takes high rank among the older humanists; he was an enlightened man according to the notions of his age, and collected a wonderful and comprehensive library of books in many languages at Sponheim. His interest in necromancy afterwards brought reproach on him and he left his convent, but at the time when he pleaded before the assembled abbots he was full of enthusiasm for his order and full of regrets concerning it. In his address ‘on the ruin of the Benedictine order,’ he pointed out how effectually the Bursfeld and other congregations had worked in the past, but the beneficial results they effected had passed away and little of their influence remained. If only those who are vowed to religion, says Tritheim, would care more for learning, which has been made so much more accessible by the invention of printing, the outlook would not be so utterly hopeless.
In these addresses Tritheim takes no account of nunneries, but we can discover his attitude towards nuns in an address to a convent[1037], the keynote of which is that the women assembled there should cultivate love, lowliness and patience under tribulation. The address is gentle and dignified, but it shows that Tritheim, in common with other men of the time, attached importance to nunneries chiefly for the piety they cultivated. His belief in this respect is shared by the zealous reformer Geiler von Kaisersberg († 1500), who preached many sermons before the nuns of the convents of St Mary Magdalen (Reuerinnen), and of St Stephan at Strasburg, and who likewise saw the beauty of a nun’s vocation only in her devotional and contemplative attitude. We gather from his sermons, many of which are preserved in the form in which they were written out by nuns[1038], that a clear line of demarcation existed in his mind between reformed and unreformed convents, and that while emphatic in denouncing the ungodly ways of the inmates of unreformed houses, life in a reformed house was comparable in his eyes to Paradise. Geiler’s efforts as a reformer were so far crowned by success that the convent of St Mary Magdalen to which he had devoted his efforts, outlived the attacks to which it was exposed at the time of the Reformation.
The fact that Tritheim insists only on the devotional attitude of nuns is the more noticeable as he visited at the convent of Seebach, the abbess of which, Richmondis van der Horst, was equally praised for her own abilities and the superior tone she maintained in her convent. For instances were not wanting which show that intellectual tastes were still strong in some nunneries and that women living the convent life were themselves authors and took a certain amount of interest in the revival of classical learning, as we shall see later.
Thus Butzbach (called Premontanus, † 1526), a pupil of Hegius, who became a monk at Laach and was an admirer of Tritheim, was in correspondence with Aleydis Ruyskop († 1507), a nun at Rolandswerth, who had written seven homilies on St Paul in Latin and translated a German treatise on the mass into Latin. He dedicated to her his work on ‘Distinguished learned women,’ which he took from the work of the Italian Benedictine Jacopo of Bergamo, but from delicacy of feeling he omitted what Jacopo had inserted in praise of women’s influence as wives and mothers[1039]. In this work Butzbach compares Aleydis to Hrotsvith, to Hildegard and to Elisabeth of Schönau. He also wrote to Gertrud von Büchel, a nun who practised the art of painting at Rolandswerth, and he refers to Barbara Dalberg, niece of the bishop of Worms, who was a nun at Marienberg, and to Ursula Cantor, who, he declares, was without equal in her knowledge of theology.