6 - ‘Speech is silver, silence gold’: Enclosure and Silence in Late Medieval Texts for Religious Women

Summary

Silence.

Speech is silver, silence gold:

Speech goes out,

Speech roams about,

To market flies, is bought and sold:

Silence at home spins fold on fold,

Folds thick or thin

To wrap her in,

Thoughts strong or weak,

Spins she round her body bare,

Having nothing else to wear:

But speech is silver, silence gold!

Why should we speak?

Even with a noticeable surge of interest in the Middle Ages in the nineteenth century – one has only to think of the Gothic Revival which began in the eighteenth century – it is unlikely that the unnamed woman referred to in William Bell Scott's poem led a religious life comparable to that of a medieval nun. Silence, of course, means different things to different epochs, to different people and in different circumstances, and is certainly not restricted to the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, in many ways, the medieval recluse or nun would empathize with Scott's ‘nineteenth-century’ female character and would even recognize in her depiction a description of her own individual circumstances. Anchoress or nun, her fate is to remain ‘at home’, inside a building, ‘environné de clausture de murs suffisamment haulz’ [‘surrounded by an enclosure of sufficiently high walls’], as set out in the chapter ‘De la clausture et d’ycelle non yssir’ [‘Of enclosure and not leaving it’] in an augmented translation of the Rule of St Benedict (1505).6 The nun and anchoress is also told not to ‘wandere abrode into the townes and cytees’, in order to avoid ‘speech roam[ing] about’. Even more so, she is advised to ‘for al uuel speche […] stopp[en] ower earen’ [‘block your ears […] against all sinful speech’], that is, including gossip from the market place and the world. She must do as the prophet Jeremiah recommends: ‘Me schal sitten […] him ane ant beo stille’ [‘one must sit alone […] and be silent’] and perhaps at times imitate the Virgin Mary and spin in her chamber. She may even have her own answer to the poem's last line: ‘Why should we speak?’

As numerous medieval religious texts point out, enclosure and silence are essential components of the contemplative life and have been so at least since the Desert Fathers initiated the heremetic and cenobitic lives in the early centuries of Christianity. Both are particularly important to achieve the ultimate goal of the religious vocation, that is, union with the divine.