29 - The Double Monastery as a Historiographical Problem (Fourth to Twelfth Century)

Summary

In fourth-century Cappadocia, monks and nuns at the monastery of Annisa lived in separate quarters, with the “tagma of monks” and the “choir of virgins” set far apart on the former family estate of Macrina the Younger. Even when the whole community gathered in the common church for regular prayers and when it had guests on special occasions such as Macrina’s funeral in 379, men and women remained segregated by sex, singing the psalms of the evening service. In seventh-century England, nuns and monks at the monastery of Whitby lived in an open ribbon of dwellings arranged in parallel rows that were divided from one another by a simple system of flagstone paths, with no surviving archaeological evidence of any kind of architectural structure to keep them separate. In twelfth- and thirteenth-century France, direct contact between the women of Coyroux and the men of Obazine, some 600 to 700 meters away, was strictly limited. Built in a steep and inhospitable valley, the women’s house was accessible only through a kind of airlock—a room that served as a neutral zone between their enclosure and the outside world that was accessed by two carefully locked doors, opened one at a time.