Preface

Summary

This book is about cloistered nuns and the lawyers who worked for them. It links the rise of legal professionalism in late medieval England with the successful institutionalization of an old ideal – the fully enclosed yet economically self-sustaining nunnery. Crafted in antiquity and legislated about for centuries thereafter, this ideal had almost never before been realized in England prior to the arrival of mendicant and Bridgettine nuns in the late Middle Ages. Like their continental sisters, English nuns in traditional orders had long resisted hierarchically imposed cloister regulations, but these latecomers to the English scene embraced them. Dominican, Franciscan, and Bridgettine nuns saw strict enclosure as conducive to the special brand of devotion, the contemplative spirituality, characteristic of their orders. Lay founders and patrons shared their vision and made their bequests with an eye to spiritual rather than practical, temporal rewards. Finally, and most importantly for their institutional survival, these cloistered nuns did not have to compromise their spiritual ideals in the interests of economic security; their endowments were safeguarded and augmented by the professional lawyers whom they hired to act for them in the courts of Church and Crown.