12 - Nuns’ Clothing and Ornaments in English and Northern French Ecclesiastical Regulations

Summary

In her book Medieval People, Eileen Power offered a reflection on medieval nuns’ lives based on the Canterbury Tales. Among the faults and foibles the poet attributed to Madame Eglantine, the prioress, were her fashionable wimple, a well-made cloak, a coral rosary, and, most famously, a golden broch on which was inscribed Amor vincit omnia. Power drew on late medieval visitation records to show briefly how nuns, usually members of noble or gentry families, sometimes adopted fashions found in the world. Since many had entered the religious life to save their parents the cost of a marital dowry, some almost certainly felt entitled to their creature comforts, including their clothing. Although Power's examples of fashions worn by nuns were drawn from episcopal visitations, her study was neither deep nor systematic. Consequently, there is room for a more detailed study of the norms English and northern French prelates expected to apply to professed sisters and their religious superiors in a society that identified dress with status and women with moral weakness. Equally, there is a need to examine the actual patterns of complaint revealed by episcopal visitations to determine whether the foibles of Madame Eglantine often represent the problems the bishops identified or which were brought to their attention by the nuns themselves. An issue also worth raising is the effect of poverty or maladministration on the lives and dress of nuns, since their communities often were less well-endowed than those of male religious. In many cases, nuns can be found not just flouting discipline but fashioning their own patterns of dress and ornament when the eyes of the authorities were not on them.

The universal canon law, as we shall see, gave very limited attention to nuns from the twelfth century onward; and the local bishops enacted statutes affecting women religious only on occasion. However, professed sisters were treated as bound by legal norms crafted for observance by monks. To these were added ideas of due modesty and a suspicion that women, even nuns, were easily led astray by vanity or sexual desire. Thus, both the general canons and local statutes tried to prohibit excessive contact of nuns with any men, including clerics and servants, even in a monastic parlor in the presence of trusted sisters. Nor were lay kin to be trusted implicitly, whether coming to the monastery or visited at home.