Female Hospitallers in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
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FEMALE HOSPITALLERS IN THE TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH CENTURIES Myra Struckmeyer A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History. Chapel Hill 2006 Approved by: Advisor: Michael McVaugh Reader: Judith Bennett Reader: Jaroslav Folda Reader: Richard Pfaff Reader: Jonathan Riley-Smith © 2006 Myra Struckmeyer ii ABSTRACT MYRA STRUCKMEYER: Female Hospitallers in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Under the direction of Michael McVaugh) “Female Hospitallers in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries” is an analysis of the presence of female members in the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, who were associated with the order as lay sisters involved in hospital care, as women devoted to the liturgy, and as commanders. The study gives special attention to the differences among types of female association, the accommodation of female religious, the cooperation between men and women (or lack thereof), and motivation. It is the first large-scale study of women in the military orders in English and first serious attempt to relate the study of military orders to the framework of the study of female monasticism. With predominantly archival sources as her evidence, the author argues that, 1. the female members of the Hospital of Saint John were not an anomaly to the order but formed an integral part of the order, as they contributed financially, physically, socially, and above all, spiritually; 2. the Hospital of Saint John was, in comparison to other religious orders, remarkably open to receiving and accommodating women. Some of these women associated as fully-professed iii religious, others as lay associates or semi-religious; consorores, donatas, or the like, depending on when or where the association was made. At the end of the twelfth century and in line with a general trend in the history of monasticism, the Order of Saint John began to segregate the women from the men and established religious houses specifically for them. However, this segregation was never complete, and unlike most other religious orders, the Hospitallers continued to welcome female association in male, female, and mixed-sex congregations throughout the thirteenth century. Its positive attitude towards women was only matched by other Augustinian institutions, and points at a difference between Augustinian and Cistercian-Benedictine oriented military religious orders. iv To Mary Lou Ruud, Jonathan Riley-Smith, and Michael McVaugh, whose teachings were my inspiration. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Even such lonely work as writing a dissertation is never done alone. The following people have been my inspiration and support, and I thank them from the deepest of my heart. My first thanks go to my advisor Michael McVaugh. He always had an ear for my troubles, and he had always a sensible reply. Secondly, I am greatly indebted to Jonathan Riley-Smith, who took me on as an unofficial advisee and has shared his great knowledge with me over the seas and over the years. Thirdly, I would like to thank Ronnie Ellenblum, who planted the idea of doing a PhD in my head during a walk through the old city of Acre. There are others. I would like to thank Richard Pfaff, Jaroslav Folda, Judith Bennett and Maura Lafferty for serving on my committee and for giving me their advice. I would like to thank Judith Bennett, Jacqueline Hall, and all the wonderful scholars of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship for making me aware of the fact that feminism is a positive enterprise and that the study of gender is valuable. My gratitude also goes to Helen Nicholson, Anthony Luttrell, and Hans Mol for their helpful comments on my work, and to Luis García-Guijarro, who rightfully warned against wanting to pick the fruit before it was ripe. vi Many of the ideas presented here developed during discussions with colleagues and friends, whose scholarship I admire and friendship I cherish. Thanks to Caroline Smith, Jochen Schenk, Merav Mack, and the other crusaders for more or less serious, but always enjoyable conversations. The same to my friends at UNC: Michael Allsep, Danielle Slootjes, Rosemary Stremlau, Pamella Lach, Elsa Filosa, Simona Muratore, and Adriano Duque for keeping me sane for all these years. I feel also deep gratitude to Carol Lewald, who kept reminding me there is a world beyond history, Anne Menkens, for her company and her corrections of my English, Willemijn Geldorp, who is always on call, and Sophie, for her admirable patience. A special mentioning goes to Erik Jan and Liesbeth Geldorp, whom I thank for their most generous support. And finally, thank you, Carl, for helping me through the final months with stoic calm. My love is to all. No scholarship is possible without sufficient financial support. I would like to thank the Graduate School of the University of North Carolina for having faith that I would complete this project and being willing to finance my last year, as well as the American Association of University Women, which financed my penultimate year. Research was made possible through grants by the Medieval Academy of America, The Hill Monastic Library, The UNC University Center of International Studies, the UNC History Department, and the Cambridge University Lightfoot Fund. Preliminary presentations at conferences were sponsored by the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East and the UNC Graduate School. vii Finally, I thank my parents, Wim and Jacinta Hogeweg, who were always there for me. viii PREFACE The deserts of Aragon. Los Monegros, a barren landscape. Empty fields, low bushes and some leafless trees stand along a fast rushing river, all cloaked in a cold mist. Except for a few poor and dilapidated villages the area is desolate. Then and now. I arrived at Sigena at 3 PM on Christmas day, 2003. This is the place where Queen Sancha built her Hospitaller monastery, endowed it well, and directed the community from a distance until she could retire from court. She purportedly noted in a letter to the prioress in the 1190’s how she longed for the tranquillity of religious life, writing: “I would very much like to see you and live with you for the delight, tranquillity and peace which you enjoy because all we have here is the barking of the dogs.”1 From a distance she took care of the construction of the house by sending a Saracen engineer to oversee the erection of mills and sturdy defence walls, and by ordering English artists to execute an elaborate decorative program for the chapter house.2 I touch the walls and feel the crumbly sandstone. The walls are slightly orange, like the soil around them. The curved wall of an apse has a sole arched 1. Documentos de Sigena, ed. Agustín Ubieto Arteta (Valencia, 1972), no. 1. 2. Documentos de Sigena, no. 10. ix window decorated with two simple and worn columns. Just below the roofline a row of rounded corbels embellishes the structure.3 A woman opens the small side door. A modern woman in a green coat, not the wide-capped, black-cloaked Hospitaller sister I had imagined. I lower my head and step through the gate. I see a large courtyard with little left of its former glory. It is burnt out, strewn with rubble, and surrounded by a skeleton of arches. “Dormitorio,” the woman says. I nod and take pictures. She points to her left, “Refectorio.” I nod again and click my camera. We enter a room. “Capitularia.” This room, once decorated by Sancha’s famous frescoes, is now restored and washed pink. Then we enter the church: dark, tall, simple, and currently with a minimum of decorations. We exit through the main portal of the church, which on the outside is elaborately decorated with a fan of fourteen simple stone pillars and arches; a royal execution of Romanesque simplicity. Finally we go into the mortuary where the empty graves of Sancha, her son King Pedro, and two of her daughters are placed along the walls. New are the eight slots for deceased Hospitaller sisters of recent times. The forces of the Civil War had tried to destroy Sigena and burned it to the ground in 1936, almost seven hundred and fifty years after the sisters first came here. They managed to halt religious life only for a short period of time because in 3. According to Gardelles, this is a typical feature of twelfth century churches erected by military orders in Spain and Southern France. Jacques Gardelles, "Le Prieuré de Sigena au XIe et XIIIe Siècles. Étude Architecturale," Bulletin Monumental, 133:1 (1975), pp. 15-28. See also K. F. Schuler, "The Pictorial Program of the Chapter House of Sigena" (PhD Dissertation; New York University, 1995), p. 33. x 1986 the sisters of Belén obtained the property and revived it, “helped by the grace of God and several miracles of the Virgin.”4 A copy of a thirteenth-century medieval Madonna and child stands in the abbess’s reception room.5 And just as the Hospitaller sisters told Mildred Staple Byne the story in the 1920’s, the sisters of Belén told me about the miracle of the found image of the Virgin, the reason for the house’s existence. When Byne visited Sigena in search of its art treasures, she saw on the wall of the prioress’s hall (a room now in ruins) “one of the most stupidest and disagreeable pictures” of a “brownish bull snorting about in the center of a still more brownish landscape.” “Of course,” she wrote condescendingly, “we had to hear all about that.” 6 According to Byne, the story went as follows: Sometime in the twelfth century a bull had the habit of wandering off and not returning until nightfall.