Lesbian Historic Motif Project: #21 – Weston 2001

[hrj]

(I explain the LHMP here.)

Medieval popular culture sometimes had a prurient interest in the sexual lives of cloistered religious people -- both the opportunities for a member of the opposite sex who snuck into an institution thought to be filled with potentially sexually frustrated partners, and the possibilities for homosexual activity in these definitively homo-social communities. Lesbian historians find convents fertile ground for slightly overlapping reasons. Both the opportunities and the anxieties inherent in a same-sex institution mean that considerations of same-sex desire and activity will be more concentrated in this environment. But women's religious institutions were also a concentration of educated and literate women who wrote and corresponded about their lives and concerns. So if collections like the present volume sometimes seem to put undue focus on religious women and institutions, it needn't be because they were a relative hotbed of lesbian activity (although some may have been) but because they are a hotbed of useful data.

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Weston, Lisa. “Elegiac Desire and Female Community in Baudonivia’s Life of Saint Radegund” in Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages (ed. By Francesca Canadé Sautman & Pamela Sheingorn), Palgrave, New York, 2001.

Like Schibanoff, Weston looks at the framing of religious devotions in same-sex imagery associated with the convent of saint Radegund. An episode in Radegund's Vita in which she encounters Christ as Bridegroom is turned around and echoed more strongly in Radegund’s relationship to the female community she founded, which is expressed in the language of desire and relationship. Within the female-authored part of her Vita, Radegund becomes conflated with Christ the Bridegroom in her relationship to the Brides/nuns who venerate her. This interpretation is clearly on the symbolic-cerebral end at the same-sex desire scale, but in the context of an all-female community, the license that this framing gives for same-sex internal desire is an important part of that continuum.

Keywords: marriage desire convents

Comments

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Did I infer correctly from earlier posts that medieval nuns were drawn from the upper classes primarily? So that lower class women were unlikely to end up there? Were women mostly dedicated by their families as children, or did they mostly make their own choices as adolescents or adults?

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Like all historic questions, the answer starts with "where and when?" The specific observations about convents being an option only for the wealthier families was specifically about Italy (and possibly specifically about urban Italy). In those Italian examples, the general context seems to suggest that this would be a family decision, not a personal one. But I'm not an expert in monastic dynamics, so I don't know how things worked in general. I do know that there was a distinction in some convents between nuns from working-class backgrounds who did more of the everyday labor and those who came in with more education and money whose lives would lean more toward the devotional work. But this probably differed in part based on which order it was. I know some orders had a stronger emphasis on manual labor for all. (Or was that just for men?) I know there was a tendency for establishments to require the equivalent of a "dowry" for entrance, which helped to sustain the convent. But in some times/places charitable funds were established to pay this for poor women. If xrian is reading, perhaps she could chime in with some good resources on this question.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Thanks, the questions just got more interesting.