Letters Between Mothers and Daughters

Barbara Caine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138667990
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317212034
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

There are now many studies of family letters in Europe, but most of them focus on marital letters and letters between parents, especially mothers, and their sons. Little attention has been paid to the letters to and from daughters. This volume seeks to begin filling that gap by exploring the continuities and changes evident in the letters written between mothers and daughters over several centuries. Some of these changes reflect the history of letters and the ways that they were written and delivered, especially the move from the use of scribes and couriers in the medieval and early modern period, which made both the writing and reading of letters a public affair, to the use of pens and the situation in which letters were able to be written in private and read only by the person to whom they were addressed. But the letters also reveal the changing nature of the mother and daughter relationship, as the formal and more distant ties evident in the early period, in which dynastic and other matters were often more important to a mother than her daughter's personal happiness, were replaced by closer and more intimate ties and a concern with particular personalities and individual needs. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women's History Review.

Poor Maternity: Clare of Assisi’s letters to Agnes of Prague

Clare Monagle

During the first half of the thirteenth century, Clare of Assisi and Agnes of Prague sustained a long epistolary relationship. Clare’s part of the correspondence is extant, and reveals much about the intersection of the language of gendered piety and political ambition in this period. This article seeks, in particular, to place Clare’s use of maternal imagery within the context of her attempts to build patronage networks in order to support her ambitions to secure the ‘Privilege of Poverty’ for herself and her sisters, the right to live without landed endowments and claustration.

During the thirteenth century Clare of Assisi, an Umbrian nun, engaged for a number of years in a correspondence with Agnes, a Bohemian princess who also wanted to live a life devoted to Christ.¹ Both women were committed to apostolic poverty. That is, they wanted to free themselves from material possessions and landed endowments, in order to be able to live the Imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ. Clare was older and more experienced than Agnes, and wrote to her to support her ambition to live in holy penury, a controversial choice for a woman of Agnes’s social standing. There are four extant letters from Clare to Agnes, which span the twenty years following 1235. What is striking about these letters is the maternal language within which Clare couches her advice to Agnes. Although the two are not biologically related, Clare writes to Agnes as a spiritual mother, calling her ‘O blessed daughter’, and noting that she writes ‘from the deepest heart of your mother’.² She uses the language of motherhood to position herself as both authoritative and loving. As such, these letters offer a significant insight into the rhetorical possibilities offered by the idea of motherhood in the Middle Ages.³

Relative to later periods in western European history, we have very few medieval letters written by women. The number of letters written by women to other women, moreover, constitutes but a small subset of our sample. Clare’s letters to Agnes, then, are important as a rare example of how one woman conceived of her epistolary relationship to another woman; and, as an example, they suggest the possibilities of the metaphor of motherhood for female writers in the Middle Ages. As we shall see, the language of spiritual motherhood offers Clare a register within which she can express both devotion and authority. Clare’s maternal imagery, I will show, is key to her performance of power, both religious and political. Clare and Agnes may not have a biological connection, but the language of filiation which structures Clare’s part of the correspondence, demonstrates the creative ways in which the language of maternity could be deployed in the Middle Ages.

In the absence of a postal service, and with very low rates of literacy, letters in the Middle Ages were the province of the elite few. Only those who were separated in some capacity from others with whom they were connected were in what one commentator has called the ‘epistolary situation’⁴ and had the need to send letters. The production and delivery of a letter often required a vast cast of characters, beginning with a scribe and a courier. Generally they were produced by communities, rather than by individuals, and read and experienced by communities as a way of making things known and public across distance. As far as we know, letters were almost never private. Even the letters that are written in the most intimate of language, such as those between Heloise and Abelard, would have been widely read missives, written with the inevitable wide readership in mind. There are relatively few extant medieval letters, relative to later periods, and even fewer written by women. Those that remain are mainly written by religious women such as Hildegard of Bingen, Clare of Assisi or Catherine of Siena.⁵ There is also a small archive of letters written by aristocratic women to family members to broker marriages, alliances or manage property. So, for the Middle Ages, there are no mother–daughter letters of the type we will see in following centuries, letters that express affection and intimacy in a private register. Nor are there any letters that might provide insights into how an actual mother and daughter might have experienced their relationship, or elucidated their closeness or distance. What we do have, in this instance, are four letters from Clare to Agnes that suggest what work the idea of motherhood was able to do in both a spiritual and political sense during the high Middle Ages. Motherhood is, of course, always a constructed and contested notion. Looking at these letters, which are not about a ‘real’ mother and daughter, reminds us of this, and helps us to unpack the theoretical work done by mothering in the Middle Ages.

Women and Religious Life

The first half of the thirteenth century saw individuals embracing a range of new forms of religious life in western Europe. Francis and Clare of Assisi were two of the most famous examples, both rejecting lives of wealth and status in their Umbrian town in order to live in informal communities that were reliant on mendicancy for their livelihoods. In the imitation of Christ, they eschewed conventional family lives and the trappings of ownership, in exchange for radical communal lives and apostolic poverty, often based in the practice of mendicancy, relying on begging for their sustenance. Francis and Clare were two, among many, throughout western Europe who sought these new forms of religious and social identity. These new religious movements offered, however briefly, all sorts of new opportunities for women in particular. Male religious had always been able to choose between joining the secular clergy or entering a monastery, between working within the larger hierarchy of the Church or entering a particular foundation as a monk. For women, however, the monastery had been the only opportunity for a life devoted to God and one protected from the demands of marriage and childbearing. Thus the emergence of these more informal religious communities that based themselves in towns and relied on alms and paid labour offered women a new option. They could reject marriage, in favor of forming new forms of religious organization.⁶

Clare was at the vanguard of this movement. According to hagiographical accounts, her conversion occurred when, at around eighteen years of age, she heard Francis of Assisi preach. Inspired by Francis’ radical mission, Clare rejected her noble family’s desire that she make a good marriage, and instead sought to join the Franciscan movement. In a provocative gesture, she tonsured herself in order to display her repudiation of the world, as well as to make herself unmarryable. Eventually, Clare founded her own convent at San Damiano, and was joined by other women. Following Francis’ injunction towards radical poverty, Clare also refused to found her community with an endowment that would provide land and income. Instead, she and her sisters supported themselves by begging and by paid labour. Consequently, they were of the world and not of it. They had eschewed the two clearest paths for aristocratic women in the period, neither marrying nor entering a wealthy Benedictine monastery in order to aim at a radical new life of physical abnegation and spiritual sanctification. The nature of their work, however, and their dependence on the world for provisions embedded them in local economy and society.⁷

These new types of religious communities were often economically unstable, unorthodox in their living arrangements and did not usually follow a recognized monastic rule. This was often precisely the point, as members of these communities sought a life of exposure, both physical and spiritual. For the papacy, however, they were a volatile proposition that risked scandal. After 1215, they were subject to attempts by Cardinal Ugolino and Pope Honorius III to bring them into the fold, providing a new monastic rule as well as papal protection. This ruling caused significant concern to Clare and her sisters. They feared that such forms of patronage and papal protection would undermine the essence of their life at San Damiano. Clare thus devoted much of her career to securing and maintaining the ‘Privilege of Poverty’ that would enable her and her sisters at San Damiano to live as they wished. And while Clare was able to do so, because of her influence and her well-known intimacy with Francis while he was alive, many other houses in what we might loosely call the ‘Damianite’ movement had endowments forced upon them as part of the Ugolinian reforms.⁸

It is no wonder then that Clare wrote to Princess Agnes of Bohemia to express her delight at Agnes’s decision to join the Poor Ladies. ‘I rejoice’, she wrote, ‘because you, more than others, could have enjoyed public ostentation, honors and worldly status having had the opportunity to become, with eminent glory, legitimately married to the illustrious emperor, as would befit you and his pre-eminence’.⁹ Agnes’s conversion was a sign of the growing influence and prestige of Clare’s vision for female religious life. Franciscan missionaries were spreading the word of Francis and Clare’s new apostolic model even as far afield as Prague. Her conversion also offered the possibility that Agnes could become a crucial ally in Clare’s quest to maintain the Privilege of Poverty. Clare foregrounds their shared desire for poverty when she writes, ‘Spurning all these things with your whole heart and mind you have chosen instead holiest poverty and physical want, accepting a nobler spouse the Lord Jesus Christ, who will keep your virginity always immaculate and inviolate’.¹⁰

There is an important context for Clare’s targeted communication with Agnes. Clare delightedly proclaimed Agnes’s decision to reject the earthly spoils of life as an empress in favor of the spiritual nobility of life as the spouse of Christ, in so doing invoking larger geo-political stakes. This distinction between royal and spiritual nobility was a telling one for Clare. For at this point the Pope and the Emperor were in conflict over the latter’s claim to Italy. Agnes’s rejection of Frederick Barbarossa would have read as a rejection of an alliance between Bohemia and the Emperor. This would have pleased the Papacy, in as much as Agnes was spurning the Pope’s enemy. Clare had every reason to hope that Agnes’s noble status, as well as her repudiation of the Emperor, would make the papacy better disposed towards her determination to acquire the Privilege of Poverty. We can imagine that, for Clare, Agnes’s conversion to the status of bride of Christ offered the possibility of a significant alliance that encompassed both the spiritual and the strategic. Clare seeks to guide Agnes in both the affairs of the soul and those of the world. In figuring herself as Agnes’s advisor, she constitutes her concern for Agnes around issues of marriage and love. In this case, however, she was not brokering an aristocratic marriage in order to forge an alliance with another power. Rather, she was urging her daughter to embrace her life as bride of Christ, and to use this marriage to create an alliance with her fellow sisters in their shared love of poverty.

Epistolary Maternity

The language of maternity offered Clare a familial metaphor which she was able to extend into a number of intimate registers. That is, figuring herself as Agnes’s spiritual mother provides the framework from which she pursues their alliance. In one letter, she wrote to Agnes:

O mother and daughter, spouse of the King of all ages, even if I have not written to you as frequently as both your soul and mine would have desired and longed for, do not for a moment wonder or in any way believe that the fire of my love for you burns any less sweetly in the deepest heart of your mother.¹¹

Such fervent expressions of maternal desire framed the rhetorical intensity of Clare’s epistolary communications with Agnes, and then enabled Clare to construe further family resemblance with Agnes.

Rhetorically, Clare’s letters to Agnes are metaphorically replete, brimming with lush and erotic imagery of her expressed love for Christ. Clare did not only position herself as mother to Agnes in the four letters, she also constructed herself as a fellow spouse of Jesus. Clare’s expressions of motherly love to Agnes sit alongside gestures of romantic sympathy and spiritual exhortation. For example, Clare writes to Agnes to remind her that love for Christ is greater than the devotions of lovers on earth. ‘And completely ignoring all those who in this deceitful and turbulent world ensnare their blind lovers’, she declares, ‘you might totally love him who gave himself totally out of love for you’.¹² Clare also suggests that Agnes might devote herself to the love of Mary: ‘May you cling to his most sweet Mother, who gave birth to the kind of Son whom the heavens could not contain, and yet, she carried him in the tiny enclosure of her sacred womb, and held him on her young girl’s lap’.¹³

This is the language within which Clare writes to praise Agnes in her steadfast commitment to poverty. Clare contrasts the deceptions and trickery of real-life lovers with the perfect love that inheres between Christ and his bride. She also reminds Agnes to cling to the Virgin, whose ‘sacred womb’ contained Christ. All of this expressive language served to applaud the younger woman’s devotion to the cause of poverty, and beseeches her to continue the practices of fasting and penance as befits their status as Poor Ladies. While they are unable to feast on earthly things, Clare encourages Agnes and her sisters to re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Letters between Mothers and Daughters
• 1. Poor Maternity: Clare of Assisi’s letters to Agnes of Prague
• 2. Social Negotiations in Correspondence between Mothers and Daughters in Tudor and Early Stuart England
• 3. What’s Love Got to Do with It? Dynastic Politics and Motherhood in the Letters of Eleonora of Aragon and her Daughters
• 4. ‘My daughter, my dear’: the correspondence of Catherine de Médicis and Elisabeth de Valois
• 5. Tenderness, Tittle-tattle and Truth in Mother–Daughter Letters: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Wortley Montagu Stuart, Countess of Bute, and Lady Louisa Stuart
• 6. ‘A conscientious and well-informed Victorian mother’: Elizabeth Gaskell’s letters to her daughters
• 7. From ‘Dearest Mama’ to ‘Dear Mother’: changing styles in early twentieth-century letters from daughters to mothers
• Index