CHAPTER 1

Setting the Boundaries for Legitimate Experimentation

In spring 1059, Pope Nicholas II presided over a synod that is now remembered as one of the most dramatic episodes in the eleventh-century church reform. Its aim was to formulate a mission plan to establish a stronger papacy, make the ecclesiastical institutions and their officers less dependent on lay rulers, and assert the pope’s and the councils’ supremacy in religious matters. Its mastermind was Archdeacon Hildebrand, later to be Pope Gregory VII, and it is his voice that we hear most distinctly in the remaining documentation that records a series of epoch-making sessions held over the course of these months. In each of these sessions, he forcefully, sometimes quite bluntly, stated the priorities, criticisms, and ambitions of the reformers.1
On the first of May, Hildebrand addressed the issue of organized religious life, particularly that of canons regular and women religious. He first denounced the “audacity, stupidity even” of “a rule, said to be compiled … at the order of Emperor Louis” that excerpted canonical and patristic texts to make it seem legitimate for canons regular to own private property. He then turned his attention to women religious. Beginning in apostolic times, professed virgins or widows had no choice but to live in a monastery (rather than their own house) and had been barred from accepting stipends and benefices. Because of Louis, these principles were no longer observed. To illustrate this, he invited the bishops to consider a chapter of Louis’s rule, according to which each woman religious should each day be given three pounds of bread and four measures of (alcoholic) drinks. The author of the protocol barely concealed his satisfaction at what followed:
The holy gathering of bishops exclaimed that this decree was to be removed from the canonical institution, for it invited not to Christian temperance, but to a cyclopic stupor devoid of reverence for God or man, and that the expense seemed to suit more that of husbands than canons, or matrons than nuns, with the result that they would run—for this is how herds of pimps, lovers, easy women, or other pests fraternize—a risk to their integrity or chastity, or some other harm through temptations … similarly (they condemned) those chapters that allowed for ecclesiastical benefices.
In his speech, Hildebrand was referring to a set of decrees issued in the wake of another church meeting, held in 816 at Aachen, by the order of Louis the Pious, who “although an emperor and a devoted man … was still only a layman.” His address—besides echoing a trend among church leaders to intervene in the organization and observance of women religious and to condemn the involvement of lay rulers in the legislation and supervision of religious communities—has informed the classic scholarly notion that the publication of these decrees was a turning point in the history of women’s monasticism. Unlike Hildebrand, modern historians did not see the issuance of the rule for canonesses as a development that was necessarily negative. But like him, they did rely on that text and on Saint Benedict’s Rule to reconstruct the realities of the life of religious in the aftermath of the reforms. Any evidence that spoke against strict, literal observance of these norms was taken in one of three ways. It was indicative of the women’s unwillingness to comply with society’s new standards for religious life, pointed to ineffective oversight, or showed that other circumstances were preventing the women from following the reformers’ instructions to the letter.2 More recently, a number of experts of women’s history took these normative texts as evidence of the catastrophic disempowerment and marginalization of religious.3 They too recognized a pattern of decline: but in their view, the new regulations dramatically contributed to this course, barring groups of women religious from ways of remaining relevant spiritually and socially.
Questions remain, however, whether Hildebrand and modern historians were right in assuming that the creation of two homogeneous cohorts of female religious communities had really been lawmakers’ objective, and whether it had truly been their intention to apply the reform decrees to the letter.4 This chapter shows that the decrees for nuns and canonesses were intended to serve neither purpose. Instead, they showed female religious, their associates, and their patrons where lay the outer boundaries of legitimate experimentation. To make these points I will consider, in order, the decrees of the Aachen reform synod of 816; the context in which they originated; their impact on subsequent prescriptive and legislative texts; and, finally, their reception in female religious contexts. These observations will allow us to reassess, in chapters 2 and 3, the concrete situation of female communities in ninth- and early tenth-century Lotharingia.

Rereading the 816 Reform of Women’s Monasticism

The reputation of the Aachen decrees as foundational texts for women’s monasticism derives more from the wider context of reform in which they originated than from their actual content. In the half decade following his accession as sole ruler of the Carolingian Empire in 814, Louis the Pious set up a series of ecclesiastical meetings that, considered together, form a comprehensive discussion of Carolingian religious policies. One of several focuses of the reform program concerned organized groups of religious, both male and female. For groups of monks, Louis and his collaborators - the most influential of which was Abbot Benedict of Aniane - laid out a comprehensive plan not to allow any other form of monastic discipline and organization than the one outlined in Saint Benedict’s Rule, actively seeking to have the principle of “one rule, one custom” (una regula, una consuetudo) implemented in Frankish monasteries.5
The reformers—whom we know were far from being in agreement ideologically—advocated the principle of enclosure as key to the pursuit of ascetic perfection. In turn, ascetic perfection was key to the execution of a monastery’s main function, which was to provide prayer service for the emperor and his realm and, if necessary, support the emperor both financially and through the supply of troops.6 Because these principles were hard to reconcile with the pastoral and other tasks of clerics living communally, Louis and his associates at the Aachen synod of 816 issued the Institutio canonicorum, a well-conceived document in which the organization of groups of canons regular was laid out in detail. The Institutio’s promulgation was a watershed event, not so much in disciplinary and organizational terms—clearly much inspiration came from Chrodegang of Metz’s mid-eighth-century Rule for canons7—but in indicating that it would henceforth be the standard norm for all such groups in the empire. The subsequent success of the policies outlined for monks and canons was helped in no small part by the fact that both rules (Benedictine and canonical) gave local leaders considerable liberties in shaping the finer details of communal life. Saint Benedict’s Rule in particular represented views on purity, community, and salvation profoundly different from those held in ninth-century monastic contexts and therefore was in need of considerable, in part localized, tweaking and glossing.8
Because a new rule for canonesses was also issued at the same Aachen meeting, historians assumed that the objectives of this text were identical to those of the Institutio canonicorum, namely to create a unified cohort of canonesses as an alternative to those who observed Saint Benedict’s Rule.9 Certainly earlier legislation had been lacking in precision. Franz Felten’s detailed reconstruction of the terminology of the royal and conciliar decrees in the second half of the eighth and the early ninth century reveals that lawmakers, despite promoting canonical communities as the alternative to those following the Rule, before 816 had declined to define precisely what they meant by this “canonical” alternative.10 For instance, as early as 755, the council of Ver had decreed that veiled women were supposed to live in a monastery “under the regular order” (sub ordine regulari) or, with the bishop acting as supervisor, “under the canonical order” (sub ordine canonica).11 While the text of this council does not explain what is meant by either of these ordines, contemporaries at least distinguished them from veiled women living outside of the context of organized religious life.12 And in 796, the council of Frankfurt instructed that abbesses were either to make profession under Saint Benedict’s Rule or to accept a status regulated by conciliar legislation.13 Similarly, one of Charlemagne’s capitularies dated around 802 states that “canonical abbesses and women religious should live canonically according to the canons, and their monasteries should be organized in an orderly fashion”; however, “regular abbesses and women religious living the monastic life should understand the Rule and live according to it.”14 A similar argument may be found in the decrees of the council of Mainz, held in 813.15 In these and other instructions, “the canons” and “the decrees of the councils” remained vague notions, referring to a body of late antique and early medieval conciliar legislation and patristic texts that was by no means free of contradictions and lacunae. And often, lawmakers did not bother making explicit distinctions between different modes of life, preferring to focus on services (prayer for ruler and empire) and behaviors (obedience, enclosure, stability, observance of the basic principles of religious life) that were expected from cloistered women generally.16
It was such vagueness, so Emperor Louis found, that made non-Benedictine female groups particularly vulnerable to abuse and misconduct. His response and that of his reformers was to draft and promulgate as law the Institutio sanctimonialium Aquisgranensis,17 a set of rules that would henceforth function as an objective yardstick with which one could measure the conduct and organization of women religious and that could be wielded to bring uniformity to non-Benedictine modes of women’s communal life.18 In a capitulary Louis issued in 818–19, he referred to his wish to “assemble sayings of the Fathers … into one rule for canons and canonesses and transmit it to canons and women religious for them to observe … to the letter.”19 The lifestyle the reformers proposed for the canonesses was less demanding than that of Benedictine nuns and allowed for more personal freedom.20 Although lawmakers expected these women to carry out similar prayer and commemorative services, their instructions foresaw a more comfortable lifestyle, with individual members enjoying the benefits of private ownership (with some properties and goods being able to pass back to their relatives), in some cases living in privately owned homes within the monastic enclosure, and sometimes even wearing secular clothes.21 Unlike Benedictine nuns, canonesses could also choose to abandon their veiled status: entering a convent essentially meant withdrawing, temporarily or permanently, from the matrimonial market, which relieved some of the pressure for single or widowed women to marry and gave their relatives more time to plan strategic alliances through advantageous unions.22
Later commentators imagined all kinds of scenarios in which this alternative rule for canonesses had been debated and subsequently applied.23 Writing in the ninth or early tenth century, the author of a Life of Saint Odilia, the seventh-century abbess of Hohenbourg in Alsace, had her decline a request by her subjects to adopt the Rule, arguing that “this place is very unsuited … to a regular life, since water can be brought here only with great effort.”24 For his part, the fourteenth-century chronicler Jacques de Guise allegedly relied on a lost narrative called the Deeds of Bishop Walcand of Liège to claim that the Institutio had originated as a result of a standoff between, on one side, the abbesses of female communities in Lower Lotharingia (particularly Nivelles and Sainte-Waudru in Mons and others in the Cologne region) and, on the other, the bishops of Cambrai and Liège and Emperor Louis. On being presented with the reformers’ plans to turn all female houses into Benedictine nunneries, the abbesses had declared that they would not accept the Rule; that they would be chaste but were not willing to take a vow to that effect; and that they were willing to promise being obedient to the abbess and living an honest life. Desperate to see the women live according to an established rule, the reformers issued a separate set of written instructions for secular religious (religiose seculares), the Institutio.25
Factually incorrect and replete with anachronisms, De Guise’s account remains valuable as a testimony of how canonesses in later centuries were routinely represented as leading a religious life less sincere than that of Benedictine nuns and how biased authors tried to make sense of Carolingian lawmakers’ bipartite vision of female religious life, by putting the blame for this flawed model squarely on the women themselves. Modern observers, even though they were skeptical of these accounts, admitted that the creation of the Institutio truly was a landmark legislative act. In their view, although the reformers had been reluctant to allow the liberties aw...