K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000–1400

Between about 1000 and 1400, women across Europe used letters to console, cajole, petition, patronize, inform and inquire. They wrote to protect the interests of their family, to gain protection or freedom for their monastery, to admonish and advise people in authority, to seek patronage and advice, and to forge alliances. The letters that remain from medieval

European women are thus a rich resource. They offer a vista upon the ways in which some women – typically elites – were able to negotiate the world in which they lived, and the hierarchies into which they were born. As communicative tools, designed for a recipient, they can reveal much about relationships in a given period and, by reading them, we can glimpse how the sender constructed her place in the world in relation to those around her. We can also see the strategies she deployed in her efforts to secure outcomes for herself and her household.

Given that in this period sources written by men dominate the extant record, the letters of medieval women, taken collectively, offer a unique chance to explore how women constructed their own authority and managed their affairs. The centuries following 1000 CE witnessed the consolidation or emergence of major institutions of patriarchal authority, such as the papacy, royal administrative bodies and universities, and most textual production therefore favoured male interests. The growing needs of these institutions probably catalyzed the codification of letter writing norms and prompted the development of formal avenues for training in epistolarity which were in turn monopolized by men. The evidence of medieval women’s letters is therefore all the more valuable. Nevertheless, as much as we might seek to find real voices of medieval women in these sources, it is important to be mindful of the

1

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. myriad points of mediation that took place in the making of these letters. As Laurie Finke has

observed, ‘medieval epistolary prose does not support a distinction between a public realm of

business affairs dominated by men and a private domain of emotion and sentiment presided

over by women.’1 In the modern era the letter comes to be understood as a feminized genre, but this was not the case in the Middle Ages. As our discussion reveals, the surviving letters by women are mostly lordly or spiritual.

Medieval women’s letters were not ‘personal’, then, but rather were highly constructed formal texts that aimed to intervene in a given situation. They were also precious artifacts. Parchment and paper were difficult to procure and relatively expensive. Letters were written according to formal epistolary rules and required literacy in Latin, especially before the mid-thirteenth century. Consequently correspondents normally deployed scribes to help them compose and write. Senders also needed to arrange their own means of carrying missives to their destination as there were no standard postal mechanisms. Thus, each stage of the making of a letter – composition, writing, delivery – required means and resources. As a result, letter writing was an activity restricted to the few.

The surviving body of medieval women’s correspondence bears out this impression of epistolarity as an elite and expensive activity. Certainly, only particular types of correspondence were preserved. Just as with letters written by men during the same period, those that remain today tend to have been assessed positively at their time to be worthy of preservation. Our extant collection, then, consists of letters that were prized for their literary qualities, were written by an eminent author, or contained important administrative

1 Laurie A. Finke, Women's Writing in English: Medieval England (London New York: Longman, 1999), 117. 2

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. information that needed to be archived. Women’s inclusion in those categories is sometimes

notable in itself. It is probable, however, that other types of letters that have not survived also

proliferated in the Middle Ages, especially ones that deployed cheaper and more temporary

epistolary technologies such as wax tablets and bark.

The different types of medieval women’s letters that we discuss below necessitate

different reading approaches. Medieval religious women’s epistles survive commonly in

literary letter collections, and so what is left to us are frequently letters that were prized for

their writerly qualities, as well as the fame of the author. In order to understand their cultural and gendered work, we therefore need to pay heed to their rhetorical properties and their wealth of biblical allusions. In what follows, we perform close readings of some of the key surviving letters and we aim to show the way in which these female authors negotiated dictaminal norms to produce particularly gendered forms of self-authorization. They did this by figuring themselves within the frame of religious history, accounting for their own voice within a broader typological imaginary. The ‘Lordly’ letters we examine are different. They are far more numerous, often having been preserved in administrative records as part of a legal imperative, political interest, or dynastic strategy. With the exception of the highest political register of correspondence, these tend to be less self-consciously literary than the spiritual letters we discuss. In this case, instead, we examine patterns and incidence, as well as performing close readings, to gauge the ways they enabled aristocratic women to maintain and manage their kinship networks, express and exercise authority, and negotiate moments of personal and political contingency.

The boundaries of our chronology in this chapter stretch from the early emergence, in the eleventh century, of a formalized theory of letter writing in Latin, the ars dictaminis, to

3

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. the establishment of a less formal, genre of vernacular letters by the end of the fourteenth

century. Within these bounds, we examine women’s participation in both the discourse of

formal Latin epistolarity, and the new opportunities offered by vernacular letters from the

mid thirteenth century onwards. The growth of vernacular epistolarity, we argue, was neither

particular to women, nor the origin of women’s epistolarity. However, it did permit a new

social stratum of women —and men— to take part in letter writing: a change that would

contribute to the flourishing of commercial women’s correspondence in the following

centuries, and gradually free correspondents from some of the mediating factors of

production that underpinned Latin letters.

Medieval Epistolary Materiality

The production of a letter in the Middle Ages took resources well beyond most of the

population, male and female.2 The sender typically belonged to an institution of means, such

as a monastery or a court, or a significant aristocratic household. The most permanent and

costly materials of production were parchment, i.e. prepared animal skin, or paper. Parchment

was the hardest wearing and more commonly available of the two, although it required

intensive investment of time and money to produce.3 Producing letters on parchment

2 However, note the interesting example of letters scratched into strips of birch bark that have been found in archaeological contexts in Novgorod. See Mary Garrison, ""Send More Socks": On Mentality and the Preservation Context of Medieval Letters," in New Approaches to Medieval Communication, ed. Marco Mostert, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999). The accidental survival of these letters suggests circumstantially the possibility of a range of other epistolarities operating within the Middle Ages. 3 H. E. Bell, "The Price of Books in Medieval England," The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society s4, XVII, no. 3 (1936); Helmut Gneuss, "More Old English from Manuscripts," in Intertexts: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture Presented to Paul E. Szarmach (Tempe: ACMRS in collaboration with Brepols, 2008); Eric Kwakkel, "Commercial Organization and Economic Innovation," in The Production of Books in England, 1350-1500, ed. Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Thanks to Anne Holloway for these references. 4

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. therefore implied some degree of intent to preserve the epistle. For this reason, parchment is

the most common material of extant letters in royal archives, such as those found in The

National Archives of the United Kingdom. The Archives preserve several thousand originals

and enrolled copies of letters, the vast majority of which are on parchment, including several

hundred women’s letters from our period of interest. These letters concern matters of legal

and financial importance and constitute an official record of related requests, commands and

transactions, which suggests an explanation for the investment inherent in their materiality.

Similarly, letters collected and preserved in monastic letter books typically had some bearing

on the corporate life of the community, whether establishing lines of patronage and rights to

lands, or providing models of the most important kinds of letter for imitation.4 In both cases, official status thus lies at the root of the letters’ preservation: it encouraged their production in a durable form, and provided the institutional context for their collection and storage.

The desire to preserve a letter could also arise from the significance of its sender, especially in spiritual terms. For example, one twelfth-century abbess who wrote to the famous visionary, Hildegard of Bingen, asking for a brief response, enclosed some parchment on which it could be written.5 The abbess’s thoughtful provision of this high status material

perhaps suggests that she understood the economic burden that would be placed on Hildegard

and her community by expecting them to provide parchment for all of Hildegard’s

voluminous correspondence. It may also imply that her intent in writing to this famous

woman was to secure some lasting material evidence of the epistolary exchange. Paper was

4 See, for instance, examples from monastic letter books discussed below at n. 49. 5 Joan Ferrante, "Correspondent: "Blessed Is the Speech of Your Mouth"," in Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World ed. Barbara Newman (University of California Press, 1998), 101. 5

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. also a luxury commodity in Europe during these centuries. Paper mills are documented in the

Iberian peninsula and Sicily from the twelfth century, in Italy by the late thirteenth century,

and France and Germany from the fourteenth.6 However, European paper, made of linen rags

by a closely guarded process even more time consuming than marking parchment, remained

relatively costly even until the nineteenth century.7

The cheapest material on which to produce a letter was the re-usable wax tablet.

Although these do not typically remain extant, there is some evidence for their popularity.

For example, Baudri of Bourgeuil, Abbot of Dol, writing in the eleventh-century, composed

letter-poems dedicated to his wax tablets, and lamenting a broken stylus, ordinarily used to

make impressions in the wax.8 In her replies, one of Baudri’s female correspondents,

Constance of Ronceray, playfully mentioned committing her amorous thoughts to wax

because it feels no shame.9 The more common and prosaic reason behind using wax as a

medium of correspondence, however, was economic. Messages could be inscribed, deleted

and re-inscribed on the soft surface in an infinite cycle that constituted an efficient use of

resources, but was not conducive to preserving content. Constant Mews has suggested that on

some occasions senders may have sealed their parchment or wax tablets and sent them as

explicitly private missives.10 Messages of this kind tended to be preserved only if sender or recipient elected to keep a copy in a more permanent format, such as by copying into a letter

6 Susan O. Thompson, "Paper Manufacturing and Early Books," Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 314, no. 1 (1978). 7 Juraj Kittler, "From Rags to Riches: The Limits of Early Paper Manufacturing and Their Impact on Book Print in Renaissance Venice," Media History(2014). 8 Katherine Kong, Lettering the Self in Medieval and Early Modern France (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), 32. 9 Ibid., 50–51. See also P. Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (†203) to Marguerite Porete (†1310) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 89. 10 Constant J. Mews, The Lost Love Letters of Abelard and Heloise: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France (New York: St Martin's Press, 1999), 12. 6

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. collection or formulary.11 The famous letters of the twelfth-century lovers, Abelard and

Héloise, appear to have been preserved in this way, probably by Héloise copying out

Abelard’s letters for her records before erasing the original message in order to reply.12 Wax

could also be used for drafting letters, as the evidence of a miniature fourteenth-century wax

booklet discovered in York demonstrates. Among the various items drafted on its matchbox-

sized pages are a love poem in Middle English, and a legal letter in Latin.13 The

impermanence of wax and its convenience and economic advantages together suggest there

may have been many more letters —many more women’s letters— than we can ever recover.

Thus, only certain kinds of correspondence were produced, and only some of those

were afforded the honour of select preservation. Letters were kept as part of the archives of

government, church, family, and business, and as part of literary and authorial collections.

Each of these archives had different rules for inclusion that typically favoured the

preservation of men’s letters. For example, not even royal archives were produced in order to

itemize every transaction. In England, correspondents had to pay a ‘fine’ or fee to have their

letters enrolled in the royal collection. The fine would be a good investment if the letter

involved a major conveyance of land or rights, or recognition of an heir coming of age. It is

much more likely that men, whose task it was to manage the transfer of property and the

maintenance of dynastic succession, would have been prepared to pay this fee. Preservation

was equally, if not more selective for letters that have survived in letter collections preserved

for their literary merit or on account of the fame of the correspondents. Garrison has argued

11 However, compare the preservation of some French royal accounts on wax. See: Elizabeth Lalou, "Les Tablettes de Cire Médiévales," Bibliothèque de l'école des chartes 147(1989). 12 Mews, The Lost Love Letters of Abelard and Heloise: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France. 13 Michelle P. Brown, "The Role of the Wax Tablet in Medieval Literacy: A Reconsideration in Light of a Recent Find from York," British Library Journal 20(1994). 7

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. persuasively that the literary and hagiographic intentions of such collections prejudiced them

against preserving quotidian letters and women’s letters, both of which were probably

significantly more abundant than they now seem.14 In the collected letters of famous

medieval men, for example, there is frequent reference to correspondence with women, but

the medieval compilers of these collections typically copied only the masculine side of the

exchange because it was he whom they intended to lionize.15 The mechanism of a letter’s

survival in such a collection can also impact upon its expression, since editorial amendment

might be pursued as part of the attendant literary pretentions. As Giles Constable has noted, a

letter might be ‘liable to revision at any stage in its history’ by ‘would-be improvers’ ranging

from the author herself to ‘scribes, secretaries, and even the recipients of letters’.16

The role of the scribe became increasingly formalized over the course of the Middle

Ages. In response to the growing need to train students the art of letter writing, the ars dictaminis, began to be codified for pedagogic purposes. The fact that codification seems to have begun in the Italian peninsula, the most densely populated and urbanized region of medieval Europe, and home to the largest institution of this era – the papacy – is not surprising.17 It was in such contexts that the need first arose for systematic training of large numbers of secretarial staff in the pragmatic skills necessary for administrative careers.18 It

14 Garrison, "Send More Socks." 15 See, for example, Walter Fröhlich, ed. The Letters of Saint Anselm of Canterbury, 3 vols. (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1990–94). ALSO PETER OF BLOIS? 16 Giles Constable, Letters and Letter-Collections ed. L. Genicot, Typologie des Sources du Moyen Âge Occidental 17 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1976), 51. 17 For a detailed discussion of the development of the ars dictaminis see James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, Reprint ed., Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 227 (Tempe: Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001); Martin Camargo, Ars Dictaminis / Ars Dictandi, ed. L. Genicot, Typologie des Sources du Moyen Âge Occidental 60 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991). 18 The existence of ‘formularies’ preserving standard forms for epistolary and other legal documents from the Merovingian and Carolingian courts of Europe in the seventh to ninth centuries does not negate this argument: these were the most developed institutions in Europe outside the papacy; 8

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. quickly moved out of the monasteries into lay environments. Dictamen was not taught within

the developing universities themselves, but it was increasingly located as a subject in the

business schools that grew up alongside.19 The spread of ars dictaminis texts northward was fairly rapid in medieval terms, indicating its usefulness to contemporary societies. Alberic of

Monte Casino, the central Italian monk generally recognized as the first medieval author of a recognizable ars dictaminis text, produced his work c. 1087; by 1152, the dictaminal text of

Bernard of Bologna was known in France, and by 1167 it had certainly reached Cologne. In

England in the 1180s, Peter of Blois composed a theoretical text to preface a collection of his

own letters, and copies of earlier treatises had almost certainly already entered English

libraries.20

Basing their schemata on the parts of oratory described by Cicero in antiquity, these

medieval theorists created a five-fold taxonomy of epistolary parts to describe how any letter

should ordinarily be structured in order to achieve its ends. A letter should contain salutatio

(greeting), exordium (statement of ethos encouraging a positive reception), narratio

(background or rationale), petitio (core request or command) and conclusio (farewell),

normally in that order. Close attention was paid to the order of names and the vocabulary of

the salutatio, which had to reflect the respective status of sender and recipient in finely

Charlemagne ruled much of what is now Germany, France, Austria, northern Italy and the Low Countries. 19 John O. Ward, "Rhetorical Theory and the Rise and Decline of Dictamen in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance," Rhetorica 19, no. 2 (2001); Ian Cornelius, "The Rhetoric of Advancement: Ars Dictaminis, Cursus, and Clerical Careerism in Late Medieval England," New Medieval Literatures 12(2010): 303. 20 For the spread of these texts, see Murphy, Rhetoric, 194–268; N. Denholm-Young, "The Cursus in England," in Oxford Essays in Medieval History Presented to Herbert Edward Salter, ed. Maurice Powicke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934). 9

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. graded ways.21 Letters, of course, had existed long before this; the innovation was in the

attempt to describe them in a standardized way that facilitated relatively large-scale

education.

The formal education in dictaminal rules excluded women, yet the greater availability

of knowledge and texts probably increased women’s informal access to epistolary

materials.22 Dictaminal treatises were an amalgam of theoretical discussions of the parts and appropriate grammar of correspondence together with collections of real and fictive examples of good epistolary style of various kinds. These texts proliferated in aristocratic and

ecclesiastical libraries from the twelfth century, becoming more practical, with greater

emphasis on example than theory from the thirteenth century, and with greater physical

distance from Italy.23 Given the spread of the manuscripts, we may assume that some literate

women of aristocratic status or religious profession could have had access to texts on letter

writing and examples of letters. Indeed, we know of some cases where they did.24 However,

21 Giles Constable, "The Structure of Medieval Society According to the Dictatores of the Twelfth Century," in Law, Church, and Society: Essays in Honor of Stephan Kuttner, ed. Kenneth Pennington and Robert Somerville (Philaelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977); Carol Dana Lanham, Salutatio Formulas in Latin Letters to 1200: Syntax, Style, and Theory (Munich: Bei der Arbeo- Gesellschaft, 1975). 22 See below, n. 49. 23 Malcolm Richardson, "The Ars Dictaminis, the Formulary, and Medieval Epistolary Practice," in Letter-Writing Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present: Historical and Bibliographical Studies, ed. Carol Poster and Linda C. Mitchell, Series in Rhetoric / Communication (Colombia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2007). For a complete census of relevant manuscripts, see Emil J. Polak, Medieval and Renaissance Letter Treatises and Form Letters: A Census of Manuscripts Found in Eastern Europe and the Former U.S.S.R., vol. 8, Davis Medieval Texts and Studies (Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill, 1993); Medieval and Renaissance Letter Treatises and Form Letters: A Census of Manuscripts Found in Part of Western Europe, Japan, and the United States of America, vol. 9, Davis Medieval Texts and Studies (Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill, 1994). 24 See below, n. 49. 10

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. it is more likely that for most women their training in letter writing, as in many things, was

obtained through listening and doing rather than through formal education.25

Like men, then, most medieval women who sent letters would have relied to some

degree on trained scribes or notaries to transform their intentions into appropriate epistolary

form. The sender retained the status of author, but the end product represented their

composition (compositio) transferred to a scribe orally through dictation (dictatio), and transmitted into final written form by inscription (inscriptio) performed by the same or another scribe working from notes.26 Although there are references in some more intimate

correspondence to letters being produced by the hand of the sender (and clasped to the bosom

of the receiver) it is unlikely that this was widespread before the fourteenth century.

One way of gauging the incidence and prevalence of women’s letters in this period

might be scanning the theoretical manuals on letter writing that emerged during the Middle

Ages, as part of this dictaminal pedagogical process. The categories of correspondents

discussed in theoretical treatises on letter writing provide evidence for women’s place within

epistolary norms. Women were part of the hierarchy of correspondents envisaged by some

dictatores, although not all dictaminal texts attended explicitly to feminine categories.

Among the earliest attempts to codify the ars dictaminis, Adalbert Samaritanus’s Praecepta

dictaminum, c. 1115, noted a range of female kin among those whose relative rank and relationship would need to be taken into account in the proper composition of letters,

25 Rowena Archer, ""How Ladies... Who Live on Their Manors Ought to Manage Their Households and Estates": Women as Landholders and Administrators in the Later Middle Ages," in Woman Is a Worthy Wight: Women in English Society, 1200–1500, ed. P. J. P. Goldberg (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1992). 26 Giles Constable, "Dictators and Diplomats in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: Medieval Epistolography and the Birth of Modern Bureaucracy," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 46(1992). 11

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. including mothers, sisters and daughters. In the next decade Hugh of Bologna also included

abbesses in his category of ‘exalted’ people deserving of superior greetings.27 However, it is equally true that many dictaminal treatises did not explicitly discuss women’s place in the social structures underpinning proper letter writing. Bernard of Bologna, whose work,

Introductiones prosaici dictaminis, c.1144–52, had wide impact, categorized masculine society minutely according to power, office, dignity, kinship, birth and nobility, as well as clerical status, without mentioning female possibilities or equivalents.28 Women’s inclusion in or exclusion from such texts did not develop in a linear fashion. For instance, Peter of

Blois, in a reworking of Bernard’s treatise, c.1180, extended the received text by adding a variety of example salutations, including several female categories such as mothers, grandmothers and maternal aunts.29 Conversely, Master William’s early thirteenth century

system, in Summa grammaticalis, did not include female persons among its complex nine-

stage epistolary hierarchy.30

Rather than a simple chronological progression representative of increasing female

participation, the inclusion of women in dictatores’ mental worlds seems to have reflected the

context of epistolary production to which their text was directed, and, perhaps, the varying

likelihood of encountering women as epistolary participants in various times and places

across medieval Europe. For Peter of Blois, the courtier who wrote letters for the queen of

England, it can have been no surprise that women were active in epistolarity; for Bernard of

27 "Structure," 254–55. 28 Ibid., 256–57. 29 Ibid. 30 Charles Samaran, "Une Summa Grammaticalis du XIIIe Siècle avec Glosses Provençales," Archivum Latinatis Medii Aevi (Bulletin du Cange) 31(1961). 12

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. Bologna, operating in the centre of formal legal and administrative training in Italy, female participation was perhaps less natural or self-evident.

Among elites writing itself usually was delegated to underlings. A letter from

Gertrude, a twelfth-century nun in the Austrian convent of Admont mentions how her magistra, the leader of the women’s religious community, ‘sometimes in the dead of night composed a letter and dictated it to a scribe.’31 Eleanor of Castile, queen of England in the late thirteenth century, not only employed a scribe but maintained her own scriptorium, accounted for separately from the king’s secretariat.32 Another queen of England, Eleanor of

Aquitaine, used Peter of Blois as her amanuensis when she wrote impassioned letters to two popes, discussed further below. Hildegard of Bingen relied on a range of secretaries with apparently different responsibilities. She dictated her letters and visionary works, such as

Scivias, to two nuns, Richardis and Adelheid, from whose notes final copies were produced by male scribes such as Volmar, and Guibert of Gembloux.33 The enclosure of religious women, albeit of varying strictness, promoted the use of the nuns themselves as scribes. This was all the more likely in the case of the initial stages of dictation and drafting: the magistra of Gertrude’s letter, above, could hardly be seen dictating at midnight to a man and maintain her virtuous authority. However, nuns were also active in producing fine copies of books and no doubt letters too, as the evidence compiled from late medieval German convents shows.34

31 Alison I. Beach, "Voices from a Distant Land: Fragments of a Twelfth-Century Nuns' Letter Collection," Speculum 77, no. 1 (2002): 37. 32 John Carmi Parsons, "Of Queens, Courts, and Books: Reflections on the Literary Patronage of Thirteenth-Century Plantagenet Queens," in The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, ed. June Hall McCash (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996); The Court and Household of Eleanor of Castile, Studies and Texts (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1977), 13–14. 33 Ferrante, "Blessed Is the Speech." 34 Cynthia J. Cyrus, The Scribes for Women's Convents in Late Medieval Germany (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). Over 400 women scribes were identified in this study. 13

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. The degree of scribal intervention in a woman’s letter might vary considerably. For

some women in positions of responsibility delegation would have been both natural and

necessary in order to accomplish daily work. Hildegard of Bingen, for example, struggled to

keep up with the volume of correspondence required of her, even with the assistance of her

scribes. She remarked often on how busy and tired she was. Some writers asked her

repeatedly for a letter without receiving a reply: not all of them remained patient with her.35

Yet, since her words were the words of God, she seems to have rejected the degree of

secretarial independence that some male contemporaries, such as Bernard of Clairvaux, relied

upon to produce their voluminous correspondence.36 In fact, she was an outspoken critic of

implied attacks on her epistolary authority. For instance, Hildegard seems to have rejected the

implication that her long-term scribe, Guibert of Gembloux, deserved equal and auctorial

credit in her work.37 On the other hand, in some contexts a degree of scribal delegation even

amounting to communal crafting of a women’s epistolary voice could be driven by the need

to achieve the most effective and appropriate tone. An example of this can be seen in a letter

sent by Eleanor of Provence to her son, Edward I, for vetting. In a covering note, she asked,

‘we pray that you have it read, and if it please you have it sealed, and if not, that you might

wish to command it to be amended and sent quickly on to my lady of France [her sister

Queen Marguerite].’38 Thus, although the concept of compositio attributed authorship to the

35 Ferrante, "Blessed Is the Speech," 101–02. 36 For Hildegard’s insistence on her authorship of her letters, see ibid., 91–92. On Bernard of Clairvaux’s delegation of letter writing, see Constable, "Dictators and Diplomats," 44. 37 See below and John Coakley, Women, Men and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collborators (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 61. 38 Thomas Rymer, ed. Foedera, Record Commission ed., 20 vols., vol. 1, part 2 (London: Record Commission, 1816–69; reprint, Tanner Ritchie & The University of St Andrews, 2006), 611. Translation by Kathleen Neal; cf. Anne Crawford, Letters of the Queens of England 1100–1547 (Thrupp: Alan Sutton, 1994), 65. Note, Crawford’s translation is based on a slightly erroneous transcription of the source printed in A. Strickland, ed. Lives of the Queens of England from the Norman Conquest, 6 vols., vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Blanchard and Lea, 1864), 28. 14

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. dictatrix, the actual nature of the relationship between sender and letter, and the modes of mediation through which it was produced might vary considerably. This reveals the insufficiency of modern concepts of authorship to account for the highly mediated textual products of the Middle Ages.39

Having produced a letter, women wanting to send it in the period 1000–1400 had no recourse to an organized postal service. They had to rely on their existing networks or fortuitous circumstance to arrange delivery. On different occasions in 1253, Margaret, Queen of Scotland employed two valets and her tailor, William, to carry letters to her mother,

Eleanor of Provence, Queen of England. William was rewarded with a gift of 40s. on his arrival: a princely sum.40 Queen Eleanor herself used a number of different messengers whose social position depended on the status of the message and the recipient. In 1252–53 she used fourteen different cokini, i.e. messengers on foot, four different nuncii, or mounted messengers, and eight valetti, or high ranking members of her household, to carry her messages. The humble cokinus, Jordan, was her most frequently employed messenger, but for important and intimate tasks like going to her husband and daughter, she drew on the services of messengers of higher status. All these messengers were recompensed according to both the size of their mission and their degree of nobility, so that the costs of delivering letters varied

39 For examples of a growing literature on this historiographical issue, see Kimberley Benedict, Empowering Collaborations: Writing Partnerships between Religious Women and Scribes in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 2004); Beach, "Voices from a Distant Land."; James Daybell, "Women's Letters and Letter Writing in England, 1540–1603: An Introduction to the Issues of Authorship and Construction," Shakespeare Studies 27(1999); Jennifer Summit, "Women and Authorship," in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 40 TNA, E 101/308/1. See also Margaret Howell, Eleanor of Provence: Queenship in Thirteenth- Century England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 107–08. 15

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. considerably with significance and status of the content and correspondents, as well as with distances and difficulties of travel.41

Thus, women associated with large institutions and households such as courts or convents could make use of retainers or courtiers as messengers, although this was not necessarily the person’s normal work. For senders of fewer means or institutional resources, letters might be carried by kinsmen, merchants or friars who happened to be travelling in the right direction. Such obstacles to efficient correspondence militated against women exchanging letters of purely personal or affective significance. The resources required to produce and transport the message meant only significant economic, political and spiritual imperatives could justify the effort.

There is some evidence for women acting as the bearers of letters, but this was relatively rare. Unlike the cokini and nuncii of royal messenger accounts, the letters women bore were not usually messages on behalf of others, but related to the purpose of their own journey. For instance, in the 1280s Weverylle Goch and her sister Angharad carried a letter to the treasurer of England, John de Kirkby, in which Reynold de Grey, the justiciar of Chester, asked him to be of assistance to them.42 Similarly, the Earl of Warwick wrote a letter to

Walter de Merton, acting royal chancellor, seeking his favour on behalf of the bearer of the letter, a poor woman.43 In this way, women might occasionally take part in epistolarity without acting as either sender or recipient.

41 Ibid. 42 TNA, SC 1/8/73. 43 TNA, SC 1/7/35. 16

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. Authorship, Authority and Gender History

Model letters and dictaminal treatises intended for use in formal educational environments were designed to help male scribes. Some readers may therefore ask whether female letters imagined in such texts, produced by and for men, have any bearing on women’s letter writing in real terms. Indeed, given the scribal intervention between woman and epistolary product, discussed above, some may contest the validity of considering medieval women’s letters as women’s writing at all.44 Some scholars have even proposed that ostensibly women’s letters, such as the famous correspondence of Héloise with her lover Abelard, discussed below, were actually fictive creations by male authors adopting a female voice.45 Certainly, there was precedent for such literary play, for example in the Heroides of Ovid, in which the poet imagined letters from the tragic heroines of ancient mythology to their male protagonists. The

Heroides were known and used in grammatical instruction in the medieval period, meaning that educated men would have been familiar with them.46 However, the skeptical impulse which attributes all medieval written works to male intellect is problematic on several fronts.

As Alison Beach has argued, such questions arise from the burden of our own historiographical biases more than they reflect the weight of evidence; moreover, such

44 Alison Beach has written of her experience of this scepticism when discussing her work: Alison I. Beach, "Listening for the Voices of Admont's Twelfth-Century Nuns," in Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Notre Dame: 2005), 195–96. Anecdotally, this is a common experience of those working on such topics. 45 For a summary of and response to these arguments, see Barbara Newman, "Authority, Authenticity, and the Repression of Heloise," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22(1992). Thanks to Diana Jeske for this reference. 46 Ralph Hexter, Ovid and Medieval Schooling. Studies in Medieval School Commentaries on Ovid's Ars Amatoria, Epistulae Ex Ponto, and Epistulae Heroidum (Munich: Bei de Arbeo-Gesellschaft, 1986). Thanks to R. Natasha Amendola for this reference. 17

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. skepticism prevents the evidence from being recognized and permitted to accumulate to a

point where it can achieve a paradigm shift.47

Beach’s work on convent communities in the twelfth century has demonstrated that female scribes could and did exist in some circumstances.48 The Benedictine double monastery at Admont contained two extensive, separate libraries for the monks and nuns. The nuns, like the monks, were taught to read and write in the monastery’s own schools and these basic literacy skills were supplemented by higher education in liberal arts – including dictamen – for the more advanced or mature students.49 Among the nuns’ books were found

treatises of dictaminal instruction, and the lucky survival of a fragmentary letter book,

discussed more fully below. The neat, standardized hand taught and practiced among the

Admont nuns testifies to the comprehensive, formal instruction in literate technologies that

these women received.

Scribes rarely identified themselves in texts of any kind prior to the fifteenth

century,50 and the scribes who produced letters were even less likely to do so since their secretarial role explicitly entailed subsuming their personal identity beneath the voice of the dictator. Nevertheless, the Admont evidence implies both that some women were instructed

47 Beach, "Listening," 195–96. 48 Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-Century Bavaria, Studies in Palaeography and Codicology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); "Listening."; "Claustration and Collaboration between the Sexes in the Twelfth-Century Scriptorium," in Monks & Nuns, Saints & Outcasts : Religion in Medieval Society. Essays in Honor of Lester K. Little, ed. Barbara H. Rosenwein and Sharon Farmer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 49 "Voices from a Distant Land," 35. The Admont nuns were clearly not alone in accessing such instructional materials. See for example the request of H., his sister, for Sinold, librarian of Reinhardsbrunn monastery in Thuringia, to send “two little books concerning dictamen” to their sister G.. The letter is printed in Friedel Peeck, ed. Die Reinhardsbrunner Briefsammlung, Epistolae Selectae (Munich: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 1952), 80–81. 50 Beach, "Claustration and Collaboration," 58, n.4. Thanks to Jessica O’Leary for this reference. 18

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. in dictamen, and that women in such contexts sent letters. Although this evidence does not

link female education and writing directly to female letter production it opens up the

possibility for female production of female epistolary voices. Women may have worked as

scribes for female senders of letters; on occasion they may have written letters in their own

hands. However, it should not obscure the core issue, which is that we ought to extend

ostensibly female letter senders the same credit for authorship, though it be mediated and

collaborative, that any male sender of letters is normally granted. If scribes as third parties in

production are not ordinarily felt to have disrupted the fundamental relationship between

male compositio, dictatio, and scriptio, then the same must be assumed of epistolary women

unless strong evidence can be brought to the contrary.

In fact, advice literature for women in the medieval period points to their integral

participation in overseeing and confirming the construction of their personae and

management of their affairs through writing. Christine de Pisan’s fifteenth-century

admonition to women to watch closely over documents produced in their names echoed the

earlier advice of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln 1235–53, in his Rules of Household

Management, written for Margaret de Lacy, Countess of Lincoln.51 There, the bishop advised

the countess to conduct her own audits of accounts, and to use letters to convey her

commands to her agents. The continuity between these advice texts, separated by more than a

hundred and fifty years, is strongly suggestive of women’s ongoing involvement in pragmatic

textual forms throughout the medieval period, whether as writer, composer, or collaborator.

51 "The Rules of Robert Grosseteste," in Walter of Henley and other treatises on estate management and accounting, ed. Dorothea Oschinsky(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Christine de Pisan, The Treasure of the City of Ladies or the Book of the Three Virtues, ed. S. Lawson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985); Le Livre des Trois Vertus, trans. Charity Cannon Willard and Eric Hicks, BibliothèQue du XVe SièCle (Paris: Libr. H. Champion, 1989). 19

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. The upshot of this is that modern norms of authorship cannot apply to analysis of

medieval letters. Letters sent in the name of Eleanor of Aquitaine as queen of England, for

instance, survive only in the collection of correspondence compiled by her scribe, Peter of

Blois. The collection itself was a work of personal aggrandizement and self-promotion by a

man whose career was spent shaping the sentiments of aristocratic and ecclesiastical letter

writers into elegant and powerful rhetorical forms. In his collection Peter collated a large

epistolary output, little of which was written in his own name, and curated it for his own

ends. He was continually editing and updating his collected letters the better to reflect his

skills, his status, and his network of important friends.52 Within normative notions of

authorship it would seem that these letters are those of Peter of Blois rather than Eleanor. On

the other hand, Eleanor must have recruited Peter to the task of scribe in full awareness of his

extraordinary literary capacities, and with knowledge of the type of letter he could help her to

produce. Indeed, the collection of which her letters ultimately became part was designed to

produce just such an awareness among Peter’s potential patrons and employers, and to

provoke further patronage. What we do know is that Eleanor and Peter of Blois collaborated

in order to match exigency to rhetorical flourish in a manner that was provocative and

powerful.

The involvement of the scribe, whether male or female, paradoxically opens up

greater possibilities of female participation in epistolarity than have previously been acknowledged. The fact that during this period letters were rarely produced in the hand of the

52 On Peter of Blois and his management of his letters, see John Cotts, The Clerical Dilemma: Peter of Blois and Literate Culture in the Twelfth Century (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2009); R. W. Southern, "Review: Towards an Edition of Peter of Blois's Letter-Collection," The English Historical Review 110, no. 438 (1995). 20

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. author means that personal education in literate technologies need not have played a major

part in who ‘wrote’ letters. Provided they had access to an educated scribe with whom to

collaborate, medieval women were, in theory, as capable as men of putting their message on

the page. They may not even have needed a thorough grasp of Latin. Evidence from the royal

archives of England during the reign of Edward I demonstrates that even the king often

preferred to draft his letters in French, leaving the clerks to translate his words and sentiments

into appropriate Latin later. It has also been suggested that letters sent in particular languages

because of custom or appropriate linguistic register could be ‘read’ by messengers in

translation to facilitate understanding.53

With these possibilities, lack of Latin education ceases necessarily to be a barrier to

epistolary participation. This suggests that scholars may have been wrong to assume that

Latin per se excluded women from letter writing in the Middle Ages.54 Although women in

mercantile society may have been enabled to write letters in their own hands by the growth of

vernacular correspondence in later periods, women as dictatrices did not need to be

personally proficient in producing the language of the written letter (although, as we have

seen, some were). Rather, when the technology of letter writing was the preserve of

secretaries, the language of written expression could be considered part of the technical

apparatus brought to the epistolary project by the scribe, together with his dictaminal

education, parchment and careful script. As George Conkin has observed with respect to the

thirteenth-century French queen Ingeborg in particular, the ‘role of secretaries, scribes,

53 M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Tim William Machan, English in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 54 K. Cherewatuk and U. Wiethaus, "Introduction: Women Writing Letters in the Middle Ages," in Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistolary Genre, ed. K. Cherewatuk and U. Wiethaus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 2. 21

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. counsellors, and advisers in the composition of letters for females is too greatly stressed,

while for males it is the opposite.’55 Provided with the means and opportunities for such

collaboration, women – and men – could be letter ‘writers’ without being ‘literate’ in the

medieval sense of being learned in Latin.

What we have, then, is a limited sample of letters, mainly from relatively elite medieval women. It is unlikely to be fully representative of the range of possible female epistolarities in the medieval period. We are aware of the complex, mediated nature of these letters as texts and artefacts, and the pressure exerted on individualities of expression by the

normative structures of the ars dictaminis, and the expectations of specific epistolary genres

and situations. And yet despite these limitations, it is worth synthesizing what can be known

of women’s letter writing at this time to bring to light the sheer number of women who

participated in epistolarity in the period 1000–1400, and to acknowledge the ways in which

their voices came to be expressed, sometimes falling within dominant masculine norms, and

at other times forging new spaces for the construction of a feminine self.

Medieval Women’s Political and Administrative Letters

In this section we discuss women’s political and administrative letters. We use this

terminology to distinguish these letters from letters of spiritual consolation and advice, which

operated under different rhetorical and functional imperatives, and from the ‘personal’,

affective letters of interiority encountered in later periods. Medieval political and

administrative letters covered a wide variety of lay and secular epistolary contexts. Although

55 George Conkin, "Ingeborg of Denmark, Queen of France, 1193–1223," in Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe, ed. Anne J. Duggan (Woodbridge: Boydell), 51. 22

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. they did not exclude religious participants or matters of spiritual relevance, they functioned in

a realm of political and kinship relationships (sometimes indistinct), lordship, patronage, and

administering lands, finances and legal affairs.

For noble women in the Middle Ages, epistolarity was only deployed in certain

circumstances. Women tended to write when they had legal, fiscal, or political interests to

protect and direct, 56 and they were only able to write about these issues when they had a

legal or rightful capacity to do so. Because of women’s normally subordinate legal position,57

we tend to find women as letter writers when they were without male oversight —whether

through the death or absence of a guiding male influence — or in spheres in which they had

been granted some autonomous authority. In some instances, such as the case of Matilda of

Tuscany (1046–1155), the authority that enabled women’s political and administrative

epistolarity arose from the absence of male heirs; for others the departure of their husbands,

such as on the First Crusade in 1096, left them in charge of major estates with attendant

epistolary rights and responsibilities. Clementia of Burgundy (1078–1133), Countess of

Flanders, for instance, became the chief authority in Flanders while Count Robert II was in

the Holy Land. During Robert’s absence she corresponded widely on matters of

administration. For example, she wrote to Abbot Hugh of Cluny, granting him rights over a

corrupt monastery within her jurisdiction for the purposes of its reform; a letter to which we

will return. Women also acquired epistolary authority in less dramatic circumstances. Even

56 Kathleen Neal, "From Letters to Loyalty: Aline La Despenser and the Meaning(S) of a Noblewoman’s Correspondence in Thirteenth-Century England," in Authority, Gender and Emotion in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Susan Broomhall (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015). 57 C. Beattie, "'Living as a Single Person': Marital Status, Performance and the Law in Late Medieval England," Women's History Review 17, no. 3 (2008); Susan M. Johns, Noblewomen, Aristocracy and Power in the Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Realm (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 23

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. without major military campaigns such as the crusades, husbands were routinely absent, such

as in visiting distant parts of their estates, or fulfilling legal or political duties in their lords’

courts.58 As Philippa Maddern has observed with respect to the much later period of fifteenth

century England, women of land-holding classes generally expected to take their share of the

literate work engendered by the need to manage and protect those lands.59

Throughout the period 1000–1400, when opportunities presented themselves, aristocratic women used epistolarity to intervene in major politico-religious debates. A number of letters from women of high status to various popes in this period have been preserved which illustrate this high political register. Medieval popes were deeply embroiled in the politics of Christian lands throughout this period, and some of the most significant political disputes turned on the disputed boundaries between spiritual and temporal authority.

Aristocratic and royal women were impacted by these conflicts as much as their menfolk, and their letters demonstrate how they attempted to influence outcomes that impinged upon their spiritual and material lives. Such epistolary efforts could come from the women’s own initiative, but were also sometimes explicitly sought; a fact which implies trust in the efficacy of these instruments. During his conflict with Henry I of England, for example, Anselm,

Archbishop of Canterbury undertook an extensive correspondence with many aristocratic women across modern day England, France and the Italian peninsula, seeking their intercession on his behalf with king or pope.60 This senior cleric evidently counted these

women letter writers among his assets in the delicate negotiations, implying he recognized

58 Archer, "How Ladies...". 59 Philippa Maddern, ""Best Trusted Friends": The Concepts and Practices of Friendship in Fifteenth- Century Norfolk," in England in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Nicholas Rogers, Harlaxton Medieval Studies IV (New Series) (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1994). 60 Fröhlich, The Letters of Saint Anselm of Canterbury. To identify Anselm’s letters to women in particular, refer to the Epistolae database: http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letters. 24

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. some power in their epistolarity. Nevertheless, as shall become clear, women often couched

their epistolary interventions into the political sphere in humble terms that marked their

letters in gendered ways.

The pope represented the highest rank of epistolary person, and like all papal

correspondents, women writing to popes were normally careful to observe a prudent and

decorous tone, and to cast themselves as humble suppliants of his grace. This was both a

gendered and a hierarchical concern. We can see it, for example, in the letters of Matilda of

Scotland (1080–1118), queen consort of Henry I of England, to Pascal II. Matilda had a

personal and a political interest in the conflict between her husband and archbishop Anselm,

who was her spiritual advisor and the chief prelate of England. She wrote on behalf of the

exiled archbishop in impassioned rhetoric, telling the pontiff, ‘It is improper that such a

prominent member of the holy Roman church should be cast out as an exile like something

putrid… For this reason, on bended knee, we implore your clemency for him since we

believe without any doubt that his sole allegiance after God belongs to you’.61 Framed by the

trope of the humble woman supplicating her lord, Matilda’s request was nevertheless

powerfully political, implying that Pascal’s response might influence her obedience to the

Roman see: ‘deign to open your paternal heart to us that we may rejoice about the return of

our dearest father, Archbishop Anselm, and may keep unblemished the subjection which we

owe to the holy Apostolic See.’62 In this letter, Matilda alternated between rhetoric which

flattered the pope’s paternal authority, and that which implicitly threatened him with being

61 Matilda of Scotland, "Letter to Pascal II, Pope, 2/ or 3/1105," Epistolae (New York: Columbia Centre for New Media Teaching and Learning), http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/398.html. 62 "Letter to Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, 5/ or 6/1106," Epistolae (New York: Columbia Centre for New Media Teaching and Learning), http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/396.html. 25

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. responsible for the loss of a soul. Such alternation between humble and strident rhetoric represents a common strategy of women’s epistolarity when addressing men of exalted rank like the pope or emperor.

The most celebrated example of a queen addressing the papacy in strident terms comes from another queen of England, Eleanor of Aquitaine (c. 1122–1204), during the imprisonment of her son, Richard I, by the Holy Roman Emperor. Like Matilda, Eleanor’s epistolary self was similarly constructed through a complex combination of power and powerlessness. In Eleanor’s plea to Celestine III, preserved in the letter collection of her then secretary, Peter of Blois, Eleanor is presented as a lamenting mother, crying out rhetorically to her absent son:

Who will let me die for you, my son? Mother of mercy, look on a mother of

such misery, or if your Son, an endless font of mercy, exacts the sins of the

mother from the son, let Him exact them only from the one who sinned, let

Him punish the impious, not laugh at the punishments of the innocent. Who

began [my life], let Him destroy me, let Him take his hand and cut me off;

and let this be my consolation, that afflicting me with pain, He not spare me.

Pitiful and pitied by no one, why have I come to the ignominy of this

detestable old age, who was ruler of two kingdoms, mother of two kings?

My guts are torn from me, my family is carried off and removed from me.63

The letter quoted above is one of several surviving letters from Eleanor chastising two popes for their failure to assist Richard. Whether the erudition of the correspondence

63 Eleanor of Aquitaine, "Letter to Celestine III, Pope, 1193,"ibid., http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/141.html. 26

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. belonged more to Eleanor or to her secretary and collaborator Peter of Blois is unknowable.

However, the letters demonstrate a thorough understanding of the tropes of high epistolary rhetoric and a familiarity with the intellectual tradition of using both biblical and historical exempla to encourage and admonish.

It is clear that the balance achieved between aggressive and humble language in

Eleanor’s letters was a strategic and knowing one. This is evident from the very fact that

Peter chose to include the queen’s laments among his carefully curated collection. It is also evident in the skillful layering of exempla, building from the Biblical past, through the

Roman world and into recent times to construe the present pope’s obligation to grant the queen’s plea as natural and imperative:

If the Church of Rome keeps its hands tightly clasped and keeps quiet about

great injuries to the Lord’s Anointed, may God rise up and judge over our

plea, may He look upon the face of His own anointed one. Where is the

passion of Eli against Achab? The passion of John against Herod? The

passion of Ambrose against Valentinian? The passion of Pope Alexander III,

who solemnly and terribly excommunicated Frederick, father of this current

prince, with the full authority of the Apostolic See, as we have heard and

seen?64

Thus, although Eleanor’s lament presented her as a helpless and friendless woman, casting the pope as her potential rescuer and preserving the notional gendered norms of

64 "Eleanor, Queen of England, Widow of Henry II, to Pope Celestine III," in Letters of the Queens of England, ed. Anne Crawford (1994). 27

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. suppliant and patron, it also challenged him to be worthy of his papal office. Eleanor’s criticisms and demands were only thinly veiled by her ostentatious posture of despair.

As Eleanor and Peter were evidently aware, some very useful rhetorical positions were preferentially available to the female sex. In the medieval period, when petitioning for favour and interceding for others constituted important political work, of which more below, epistolary positions of humility were vital functional tools. Feminine personae such as mother, wife, widow, and daughter, offered special opportunities to construct the humble petitioner in letters. This in turn enabled those petitioned to perform their lordship, gendered masculine, by graciously granting the request. Hence, the twin cultural forces of the patron’s need to be seen to grant favour to dependents, and the Christian virtue of supporting the needy reinforced the value of the rhetoric of humility in certain political letters. The greater availability of such constructions to them thus afforded women certain advantages in their epistolarity, which they were evidently willing to exploit.

The case of Ingeborg of Denmark, Queen of France (1175–1236), is another poignant example of women weaving a careful path between rhetorical the extremes of feminine distress and masculine demands in letters. Spurned by her husband, Philip Augustus, after just one night of marriage, Ingeborg mounted a thirty-year epistolary campaign to fight the divorce proceedings brought against her and be recognized as queen in France. To Celestine

III, the same pope to whom Eleanor addressed the letters quoted above, Ingeborg wrote in

1196, asking him to press her husband for a marital reconciliation. In so doing, she constructed herself as a pitiable, yet proud subject, ashamed both of her own affective frailty and of the material and symbolic reduction in her status as woman, wife, and queen:

28

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. Who … would not commiserate with the sighs of his daughter? Who would

be little distressed by her sorrows? … Thrown down from the throne of glory

prostrate on earth, I seek and do not find a consoler; I weep for the damage

to my former prestige, while there are none to redeem me, none to make me

safe. I am ashamed of my misery, my spirit is distressed for me, my heart is

disturbed against me.65

In letters like these, women made use of their gendered access to postures of need and

distress to persuade. This was especially appropriate for correspondence with ecclesiastical

authorities, who had a responsibility towards the weak and vulnerable. It could also be

effective in petitioning secular lords, who had duties towards their followers, men and

women. Furthermore, the medieval letter was a perfect vehicle for constructions of normative

gender relations in which the inferior woman sought assistance from the superior man. As we

noted above, differentials of social status and, implicitly, power, were always inherent in the

letter as a form at this time through the hierarchical construction of the address clause. In

addition, the structure of the ars dictaminis around a central petitio, that is, a request of some

kind, presumed a further differential of capacity or need that leant itself to a rhetoric of

distress. This is not to say that there was not true distress behind women’s appeals in letters,

but that the epistolary medium was particularly suited to making them, just as women had

particular access to the relevant social scripts of helplessness. Hence, women who were able

to access letter writing at all, might find that their ability to construct an affecting appeal was

enhanced, rather than restricted by their sex. However, this did not automatically translate

65 Ingeborg of Denmark, "Letter to Celestine III, Pope, 1196," Epistolae (New York: Columbia Centre for New Media Teaching and Learning), http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/432.html. 29

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. into the success of their epistolary requests. The letters cited above, for example, met with varying success: Eleanor of Aquitaine’s appeals to two popes fell on deaf ears, while

Ingeborg was successful in being restored to her husband only after several decades, and

Anselm’s reconciliation with Henry I, sought by Matilda of Scotland, was temporary and uneasy.

Another powerful woman who used letters strategically to challenge the highest authorities was Agnes of Poitiers, the Holy Roman Empress (c. 1025–1077). However, rather than addressing the pope himself, in the example below, Agnes used letters to forge a network of political support for her own, anti-papal agenda. Agnes came into her independent authority on the death of her husband, Henry III, when she became regent for her young son,

Henry IV. When Anselm of Lucca was elected to the papacy as Alexander II without imperial assent, she was instrumental in appointing Cadalus of Parma, as antipope Honorius II, in order to demonstrate the historical imperial right to approve of papal election. In a surviving letter from Agnes to the abbot of the convent of Fruttaria in Lombardy, she sought the convent’s support for her rival candidate, ‘asking that with the piety Gregory showed Trajan you ask mercy for me from the Lord.’66 Although this letter laid claim to Agnes’ authority directly by performing her ‘pope making’ powers, her rhetorical presence is simultaneously couched in terms of humility, suffering, and supplication. Similarly, despite long-standing opposition between her late husband and the abbot of the great monastery at Cluny, Hugh,

Agnes wrote to him seeking his support in securing the accession of her son to the imperial throne:

66 Agnes of Poitiers, "Letter to Albert, Abbot of Fruttaria, and the Convent, April 1062,"ibid., http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/127.html. 30

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. [B]ecause the swift report of ills has, I believe, announced my grief to you, I

pray that my lord whom you did not wish to preserve long in the flesh, you

will at least commend to God in prayer … now that he is dead, and you will

obtain for your [godson], long his heir, that he be worthy to God.67

In this letter, emphasizing her widowed status, the obligation of churchmen to pray for the dead, and the abbot’s particular connection to her innocent young son, Agnes cleverly constructed an appeal that was gender appropriate. She was exercising authority through letters without on the surface appearing to do so. As in Eleanor of Aquitaine’s letters to

Celestine, we see that women engaging in letter writing of the highest political stakes often amplified the femininity of their rhetoric as if to authorize their entry into the debate by deflecting attention from and criticism of its possibly presumptuous nature.

Like many letters from elite women in the period 1000-1400, Agnes’ letters were both politically instrumental and powerfully literary. Especially appropriate, given that her political activities frequently involved her in communicating with members of the church, her epistolary language drew richly from biblical models. She quoted from the book of Job, the most famous biblical model of a loyal, suffering Christian, in her petition to Abbot Hugh, while in her letter to the Abbot of Fruttaria, she likened herself to the handmaid of God through quotation from the Psalms, and encouraged the abbot by comparing him with

Gregory the Great. In this, as we have already seen, she was not unique. Nevertheless, not all women’s correspondence followed such high rhetorical models. This was a feature of

67 "Letter to Hugh, Abbot of Cluny, 10/5/1056," Epistolae (New York: Columbia Centre for New Media Teaching and Learning), http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/126.html. For Agnes‘s letters in Latin, see Tilman Struve, "Zwei Briefe der Kaiserin Agnes," Historisches Jahrbuch 104(1984). 31

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. register, which distinguished letters of the highest political and spiritual importance from those with more quotidian concerns, and of context, through which some women were able to exploit other rhetorical strategies in their letters.

Matilda of Tuscany was another significant participant in the eleventh-century

Investiture Contest in which the boundaries of spiritual and temporal authority were contested. Unlike Agnes, however, she was a noted supporter of the papal cause. Matilda corresponded with three popes, sending letters of support and consolation and receiving appreciative replies that sought to secure her continuing support. Gregory VII, in particular, relied heavily on Matilda and her mother, Beatrice, in his struggle against the imperial party, writing in his letters to them that they were the only princes he could trust.68

The characterization of Matilda and Beatrice as princes reflects an important cultural phenomenon that occasionally facilitated women’s epistolarity. Lordly rank sometimes enabled women to function as lords within a circumscribed sphere of activity, in which their authoritative persona was gendered differently from their feminine body, a fact that was both articulated by the women themselves, and recognized by others. A classic example comes from Kimberley LoPrete’s work on Adela of Blois, Countess of Champagne (1067–1138).69

Following her husband’s departure and subsequent death on crusade, Adela was the main voice of authority in managing the county. She used correspondence to maintain her interests there through strategic deployment of petition and command, continuing to do so after her

68 See for example, Gregory VII, "Letter to Matilda of Tuscany, 10/16/1074," Epistolae (New York: Columbia Centre for New Media Teaching and Learning), http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/223.html. Note the interesting use of the masculine in Gregory’s description of the two women. 69 Kimberly A. LoPrete, "The Gender of Lordly Women: The Case of Adela of Blois," in Studies on Medieval and Early Modern Women: Pawns or Players?, ed. C. E. Meek and C. Lawless (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003). 32

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. retirement to the convent of Marcingy.70 Notably, Adela’s public documents declared themselves to be viribilis scriptis, manly writings, explicitly inscribing the masculinity of her written authority.

The lordly nature of a woman’s authority was sometimes articulated through the adoption of masculine titles in her correspondence. Matilda of Tuscany, for example, seems

to have exercised palatinate authority even during her husband’s lifetime and in his presence,

and sometimes used the title ‘duke’ to style herself in her letters, signifying her full power to

administer her lands and rights.71 As heiress of Tuscany in her own right, Matilda thus seems

to have inherited and steadfastly maintained her personal hold on power both in fact and in

words. This striking title was also used in the correspondence of Constance of France,

Countess of Toulouse, and sister of the king of France (1124–1176).72 After this time,

however, the gendered boundaries of ‘public’ political authority shifted, and women’s

adoption of masculine pronouns of authority seems to have receded until its well known

resurgence in the public pronouncements of Elizabeth I.

The letters of Matilda the empress, Lady of England (1102–1167), demonstrate

another form of ‘manly words’ in medieval women’s letters. Perhaps because of her struggle

to be recognized as the legitimate heir of Henry I, the ultimate ‘woman in a man’s world’,

Matilda never seems to have resorted to the kinds of particularly feminine rhetorical

strategies discussed above. Having been approached by Pope Alexander III to mediate

70 See for example, Adela of Blois, "Letter to Thibaut, Count of Blois, Her Son, 1133–37," Epistolae, http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/77.html. 71 Rosalind Jaeger Reynolds, "Reading Matilda: The Self-Fashioning of a Duchess," Essays in Medieval Studies 19(2002). 72 See for instance, Constance of Toulouse, "Letter to Louis VII, 1163–64," Epistolae (New York: Columbia Centre for New Media Teaching and Learning), http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/5.html. 33

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. between her son, Henry II, and another archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, she sent

the prelate a terse message detailing his offences against the king, and demanding to know

how he would act in the event that she were to uphold his petition to be readmitted into the

king’s peace. Concluding in a truly imperious tone, she wrote ‘One thing more I tell you

truly, that you cannot recover the grace of the king except by great humility and most evident

moderation.’73

Such a direct and authoritative style was common in the empress’s letters. Although

she did not adopt masculine titles, the rhetoric of her correspondence was strikingly ‘manly’.

In a letter to Louis VII, for example, she wrote:

May your Excellency recall that I have often asked you about the quarrel

between you and my son, the king of England, but you have made no

response which satisfies or informs me. Therefore I am sending Remegius of

St. Valery to implore your highness: do not delay… to send me the details

about your quarrel. For unless you do so, such may happen between you and

I that I will not be able to amend.74

Matilda may have intended her messenger to negotiate some form of honourable

retreat from open conflict.75 Thus, her letter was probably intended to facilitate mediation and peace-making, which suited feminine norms of political behaviour. Yet her direct style,

73 Matilda of England, "Letter to Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury,"ibid., http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/174.html. 74 "Letter to Louis VII," Epistolae (New York: Columbia Centre for New Media Teaching and Learning), http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/173.html. 75 Marjorie Chibnall, The Empress Matilda: Queen Consort, Queen Mother, and Lady of the English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 173. 34

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. evident dissatisfaction and open threats, unsoftened by any allusion to her frail, feminine state, show her to have been an epistolary virago, a man-like woman.

The rhetoric of the empress’ letter of mediation is all the more strikingly distinct when contrasted with those of her mother; it was not a standard feminine strategy of letter writing.

Matilda of Scotland had also corresponded directly with an exiled archbishop, Anselm, concerning mediating between him and the king, her husband. Promising to work for his reconciliation with the king, she sought to encourage him in his exile by writing fluently of her desire for his return:

The consoling love of your holiness may not be unaware, dearly beloved

father, that my soul will be seriously disturbed by your very long and

wearisome absence. Indeed, the sooner and the closer the date of your desired

return is promised to me by many people, the more it is desired by me, since

I long to enjoy your presence and conversation.76

The metaphor of distance and the longing for reunion exploited by Matilda in this letter was a common rhetorical device in correspondence. It played on the affective possibilities inherent in the epistolary situation, which depended on the physical separation of the correspondents, drawing playful and emotive attention to the idea of being together. In this way, far from the younger Matilda’s imperious style, Matilda of Scotland’s letters to

Anselm are redolent with an intimate and affective language common in much correspondence between ecclesiastical men and their lay and religious female devotees at the turn of the twelfth century.77 Hence, although this letter concerns a political mediation it is in

76 Matilda of Scotland, "Letter to Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, 5/ or 6/1106." 77 Thanks to Diana Jeske for this point. 35

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. fact more closely related to letters of spiritual consolation and friendship than much of the

political and administrative epistolarity of medieval women.

Letters of Female Lordship

So far we have examined letters of the most elite political register, but these were not

representative of women’s participation in political and administrative epistolarity. In letters

of the more standard kind, women wrote in their capacities as lords, embedded in socio-

political networks of kinship and patronage that constituted the fabric of aristocratic society

at this period. That is, they acted within political society as legitimate and legitimized

participants with certain rights and interests to protect and manage. Normally such roles were

occupied by men, but, as we have noted above, if circumstance devolved lordly authority to a

woman, her possession of and actions within that authority were in some senses gendered

separately from her feminine body.78 The majority of political and administrative letters, of both women and men, operated instead under an instrumental imperative: the dominant discourse of this correspondence was one of power and privilege. Women acting in this sphere did not signify a transgression of strictly policed gender boundaries separating a

‘public’ and political masculine sphere from a ‘private’ feminine one. Rather, they acted as lordly women within the boundaries of aristocratic norms.

Women’s lordly correspondence in the middle ages represented a different sub-genre

from women’s letters in the high political register. Notably, they were less likely to be

marked by rhetorical strategies of special femininity. Instead, women often used rhetoric

derived from feudo-vassalic relationships, relying on the obligations and duties inherent in

78 LoPrete, "Lordly Women." 36

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. those relationships for the basis of their authority to make a request or command, and to

encourage obedience of it. Surviving letters from Ida of Carinthia, Countess of Nevers (fl.

1140s–1170s), for example, demonstrate this emphasis on lordship language. She explained

to Abbot Suger of St Denis that ‘someone from the city of Auxerre complains about certain

men of Etampes, Galfred Crasso and his brother Ralph, who owe him ten and a half pounds

of Orléans money and do not want to give it back. … Wherefore I ask you, as my lord, to

have it restored.’79 In its legal concerns and relatively simple style, Ida’s letter is much more

representative of the majority of women’s political and administrative correspondence from

the period 1000-1400 than the highly literary and rhetorical correspondence of elite women

intervening in major political events.

Letters of this lordly kind depended especially directly on a woman’s legitimate

authority. Adopting positions of lordship in letters would not have been an effective strategy

in contexts of contested or doubtful legitimacy. However, the more secure a woman’s

position of authority, the more direct and brief her letters might become. For example,

Clementia of Burgundy, mentioned above, expressed herself forcefully and abruptly to the

abbot of Cluny, stating that she would uphold her decision to grant him reforming jurisdiction

over the monastery of St. Bertin despite any potential ‘dissention of nobles… [or] the

controversies and objections of the brothers.’80 In the opening of this letter, Clementia made

direct reference to the source of her legitimate authority, claiming ‘that same power and

stability as my lord, while he was in his land, [of] ordering and disposing whatever is in my

79 Ida of Carinthia, "Letter to Suger, Abbot of St Denis, 1147–48," Epistolae (New York: Columbia Centre for New Media Teaching and Learning), http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/25194.html. 80 Clementia of Burgundy, "Letter to Hugh, Abbot of Cluny, 1099–1100,"ibid., http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/345.html. 37

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. right.’ Her determination to exercise her administrative power according to her own decision,

and to adopt a lordly vocabulary in doing so, can also be seen in a letter sent to the Bishop of

Arras when she was engaged in a legal dispute with the clerics of Thérouanne. Here

Clementia made use of particularly commanding vocabulary, and adopted the position of

friend, rather than suppliant – explicitly claiming a social and political equality with her

correspondent.81 She wrote to the bishop to engage his assistance in the case, saying ‘I order

and admonish you as a friend to send a messenger to the archbishop or a letter with mine to

admonish and persuade him to give justice for the injury they do to me’.82 She concluded her

note with a formal sanctio, enjoining the bishop to act by implying that she would take action

if her request was not satisfied. Not only did Clementia draw on her real power in Flanders to

support these assertive epistolary positions, she also had the connections to make good on her

threats even within the clerical sphere: her brother, Guy, was Archbishop of Vienne, and later

became pope Calixtus II.

The lordly personae of women in letters of this kind, then, was not mere rhetoric.

Aristocratic women were imbricated both by role and by kinship in the social networks that

constituted the fabric of medieval lordship, and they used letters to manage those networks.

For example, both Constance of France, and Ermengard of Narbonne, suo jure Countess of

Nevers (c. 1127–1197), wrote to Louis VII of France concerning the fealty of a knight,

Berenger of Puiserguier. The content of the correspondence implies this man was seeking to

leave Ermengarde’s service to join Constance’s retinue. Constance, the king’s sister, wrote

81 For a discussion of this strategy see Neal, "From Letters to Loyalty." 82 Clementia of Burgundy, "Letter to Lambert, Bishop of Arras, 1098," Epistolae (New York: Columbia Centre for New Media Teaching and Learning), http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/346.html. 38

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. what appears to have been a letter of credence – a type of formal introduction for Berenger,

who was implicitly the bearer of her letter.83 She assured her brother that the knight had

always been a loyal subject of the French crown, and as such, she invoked both Louis’s lordly

responsibility to give heed to his vassal’s appeal, and his fraternal responsibility to respond to

her request. The letter was thus situated firmly within the norms of lordly behaviour and

epistolarity.

At about the same time, Countess Ermengarde also wrote to Louis describing the

situation. Her letter, too, emphasized the themes of the just exercise of lordship and the

proper loyalty of vassals, but cast the circumstances in the opposite light:

Your highness will have learned that a certain knight from our land, by name

of Berengar of Puisserguier, will soon arrive at your court. Who, as all those

in our province know, while he should be subject to my jurisdiction, driven

by excessive pride and inconstancy of spirit, tries by his lies to steal the grace

[i.e. favour] of your crown from me and… to withdraw from my power.84

She concluded her request by asking the king not to give faith to Berenger’s

‘deceptive suggestions’ but instead to ‘send him back to me under whose authority he

rests.’85 As this correspondence demonstrates, women not only constructed themselves as

lords through rhetoric, but expected to function as lords in certain circumstances, receiving

homage and dispensing favour. The tone of this correspondence contrasts markedly with the

feminized rhetoric of queenly appeals to popes. While we have argued for a distinction of

83 Constance of Toulouse, "Letter to Louis VII, 1164,"ibid., http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/6.html. 84 Ermengard of Narbonne, ibid., http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/15.html. 85 Ibid. 39

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. register above, it is also true that crusade and extinction of the male line placed many

aristocratic women of twelfth century France, in particular, in positions of comital authority,

whether de jure or de facto. Thus, it may also be the case that the high number of women

exercising lordly powers in this context had a practical influence on their epistolarity.

The Flow of Favour

In this period, the institutionalization of European governance was beginning, but incomplete.

As the preceding discussion has implied, politics and administration operated according to

social networks not only at the highest level, but also in local affairs, relying on favour and

request facilitated by interpersonal relationships. Letters seeking and granting patronage

therefore occupied an important and functional role. Medieval women have been recognised

since the seminal work of Lois Huneycutt John Carmi Parsons and as practising patronage in

the particular form of intercession,86 but paradoxically, this can cause women’s patronage to

be regarded as isolated from hegemonic favour mechanisms. In fact, intercession was

practiced by both sexes as a species of patronage through which one sought to act as a broker

of favour between patron and client.87 Recognizing intercession as a part of patronage is important in the context of examining women’s letters because it calls attention to the

86 Lois L. Huneycutt, "Intercession and the High Medieval Queen," in Power of the Weak: Studies on Medieval Women, ed. Jennifer Carpenter and Sally-Beth MacLean (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); John Carmi Parsons, "The Intercessionary Patronage of Queens Margaret and Isabella of France," in Thirteenth Century England VI, ed. Michael Prestwich, Richard Britnell, and Robin Frame (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997); "The Queen's Intercession in Thirteenth-Century England," in Power of the Weak: Studies on Medieval Women, ed. Jennifer Carpenter and Sally-Beth MacLean (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). 87 Michael H. Gelting, "Reflections on the Insertion of Bureaucratic Structures in Medieval Clientelic Societies," in Law and Power in the Middle Ages: Proceedings of the Fourth Carlsberg Academy Conference on Medieval Legal History 2007, ed. Per Andersen, Mia Münster-Swendsen, and Helle Vogt (Copenhagen: Djøf Publishing, 2008). 40

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. political work epistolary intercession could do, and allows these letters to emerge as evidence

of women’s participation in it.

Intercession was fundamental to managing the flow of favour, the ultimate political

currency of the middle ages, and a key mechanism of administration. Women’s letters, like

men’s, demonstrate their awareness of this fact. For example, they often concluded with some

variant of the phrase ‘do this so that [the client] may feel my request has been of use,’ or

sometimes ‘so that I may need to give you thanks.’ Such language imbricated women in

living political networks by signifying the importance of both giving and receiving favour for

their own position, and implying their own future indebtedness to their patron. The language

of favour and patronage was used by Constance of Toulouse when she wrote to her brother

Louis VII concerning her wayward vassal, discussed above. ‘I ask,’ she wrote, ‘if he seeks

anything justly from you, that he feel the power of my prayer to have availed him.’88 The

letter thus connected Constance’s request with the act of a patron bestowing favour on a

client. In the context of medieval socio-political relations it was vital not only to do favour,

but to be seen to do favour. In revealing her keen awareness of this fact, Constance’s letter

shows her to be a careful manager of the power of letters to affect the flow of favour in

aristocratic society.

The capacity to write an effective letter of intercession, in other words to petition on behalf of another, was not only an important part of male and female aristocratic identity, but also a form of social capital generally; one to which women sometimes had access. We can see this, for instance, in a letter from Amice de Kirkby (fl. late thirteenth century) to her son,

88 Constance of Toulouse, "Letter to Louis VII, 1164." 41

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. John de Kirkby, a senior clerk in the government of Edward I of England, discussed more fully below.89 The clerks of Henry III and Edward I’s courts frequently derived from fairly humble stock. Their mothers were not great ladies, but members of local gentry, or lower ranks of society. Often the families of clerks had left no previous imprint on the written record, leaving their origins obscure. Nevertheless, these women wrote letters to their sons, and in doing so elevated their own local importance. Amice aimed to capitalize on her capacity to write to her son and thereby to act as a broker of his favour towards others in her community. Her entreaty that John would assist the vicar of Gedney, Lincs, so that ‘he may feel the advantage of my prayer’ indicates the importance that attached to her position in this local epistolary chain. Implicitly, if her intercession failed, her social capital would also be devalued. Although the type and degree of favour varied greatly, Amice’s letter thus shared in the discourse of patronage that marked the correspondence of great ladies such as

Constance of Toulouse.

The epistolarity of patronage was not only important for women’s social capital, but sometimes a real tool of survival. This was especially the case for religious women. Lacking the cure of souls, religious women had fewer routes of access to lay patronage. Evidence demonstrates that nuns from aristocratic and royal families frequently used letters to maintain their connections to the world outside the cloister. Through these letters they sought to activate the same kinds of networks of kinship and patronage that secular women exploited in managing their estates and clients. An anonymous nun from Tegernsee in Bavaria, for example, wrote to her brother seeking assistance in overcoming an excommunication

89 Amice de Kirkby, "Letter to Her Son, John de Kirkby," in Letters of Medieval Women, ed. Anne Crawford (Thrupp: Sutton, 2002). 42

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. imposed upon the community because of the uncanonical election of a new abbess who had

been imposed on them by the king.90 The persistence of epistolary connections across the

convent walls was an ongoing concern for monastic authorities keen to enforce religious

discipline.91 Nevertheless, the evidence of letters like the Tegernsee and Admont collections suggests that nuns often relied heavily on such communicative opportunities for the very survival of their communities.

The anxiety that underpinned nuns’ letters seeking fiscal and political patronage amplifies a theme which occurs in many women’s letters of the period 1000–1400. Although these letters demonstrate aristocratic women acting and intervening in the political world and in the administration of estates with determination and authority, they often, simultaneously, reveal an underlying anxiety about the security of the women’s position. While men’s political and administrative letters operate to pursue similar interests — legal outcomes, the exercise of rights of lordship, the support of lords and the fealty of vassals — women’s letters nevertheless often encode the greater contingency of their position. It was not only enclosed religious women who were affected. Sometimes the indications are subtle, as in a letter from the Countess of Norfolk to the English chancellor in c. 1274, in which she may have attempted, through carefully coded rhetoric, to continue her political rehabilitation in the wake of the rebellion against Henry III.92

90 Ep. 192 in Helmut Plechl, ed. Die Tegernseer Briefsammlung des 12. Jarhunderts, Mgh: Die Briefe der Deutschen Kaiserzeit (Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2002), 224–25. 91 E.g. The Benedictine Rule for nuns permitted receiving correspondence only with the express permission of the abbess. 92 Neal, "From Letters to Loyalty." 43

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. A poignant letter to Louis VII from his sister Constance exposes female anxiety more

directly. During the breakdown of her marriage to Count Raymond VI, she fled his house,

and wrote urgently to her brother asking for support and safety:

I make known to your nobility … in whom alone, with the exception of God,

I confess all my hope hangs, that on the day our retainer Simon left me, I left

the household and entered the home of a certain knight in the town. For I did

not have anything to eat or to give my servants. The count has no concern

for me, nor do I accept counsel from him or anything from his land which

might be necessary to me. That is why I send to you, begging your highness,

that you not believe messengers who are to come to your court if they tell

you I am well. My situation is as I tell it. Indeed if I dared to write it to you,

I would say more about the harm to me.93

As Constance’s letter reveals, even with noble rank, a woman might find herself in

situations of genuine need and distress, in which epistolarity was her chief and perhaps only

means of seeking support.

Letters and Kinship

As the example of Constance’s letter to Louis dramatically demonstrates, aristocratic women

frequently used letters to negotiate the political fortunes of themselves and their kin.

Although these letters often concerned matters of a similar nature to general correspondence

related to patronage, kinship provided an additional source of persuasive, and often gendered,

93 Constance of Toulouse, "Letter to Louis VII, 1165," Epistolae (New York: Columbia Centre for New Media Teaching and Learning), http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/7.html. 44

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. rhetoric. Whether or not circumstances of considerable danger or subjection were present,

women’s relationships to kin were always freighted with gendered, emotional and symbolic

significance: mother–son, wife–husband, daughter–father, mother–daughter, and so on. In

letters to kin, women could make use of a palimpsest of rhetorics to construct obligations

based simultaneously on lordship, patronage, kinship and gender.

One example that demonstrates the complex interaction of lordship and kinship is a

letter of c. 1163 from Ida of Carinthia to Louis VII of France. Ida wrote in the role of mother

to excuse her son for failing to attend on the king as expected. Her son, William, had vowed

to undertake a local pilgrimage in return for his recovery from a serious illness, and his

determination to fulfil his promise before any other obligation meant that he was away from

home when a royal summons came. Ida’s letter sought to stave off the royal anger that might

be generated by such an affront by positioning herself between the king and his vassal, saying

‘at his departure he asked me to give his thanks to you, his lord, whom he wishes to love and

honor in all things, on his part and mine’.94 She concluded by giving assurances that ‘when

he comes back he will not delay to come to you and will speak with you about [your

concerns] and other business of his.’ Here, Ida constructed herself as maternal spokesperson,

but one who knew well the imperatives and language of lordship, showing how intimately the

discourses of lordship and kinship could be intertwined.

In a similar example of women using letters to negotiate their own status and preserve

that of their families within the context of feudo-vassalic relations, Ida’s niece, the widowed

Duchess of Burgundy, Marie of Champagne (1128–1190), wrote to Louis VII in 1163

94 Ida of Carinthia, "Letter to Louis VII, 1163,"ibid., http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/25195.html. 45

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. seeking his assistance in arranging the marriage of her young son to a daughter of the Count

of Vermandois. If achieved, the union would have created a powerful alliance between the

dukes of Burgundy and the family of the seneschal of France, a cadet branch of the royal

Capetian line. Such a connection was clearly in the interests of the duchy and the ducal

family, yet Marie’s letter cleverly constructed her request as an act of political fealty to the

king, skillfully combining deference with a veiled threat, saying:

You should know that my son could take a wife in another kingdom, but I

would much prefer him to marry within your kingdom. The closer he will be

to you, the more he will be yours, and the advantage will be entirely yours.95

In this letter, Marie simultaneously emphasizes her role as mother, planning the

marriage of her son, and political broker, seeking alliances that are of mutual benefit to her

family and the king. Like Ida’s letter, above, this correspondence shows how the concerns of

aristocratic kinship groups were also inextricably political.

Letters exchanged among kin by aristocratic women in this period, then, served as

important mechanisms to maintain networks which were at once public and private,

institutional and familiar. Women did not only exert these epistolary efforts on behalf of their

kin, but also exploited their own kinship connections to write letters for their own ends, as the

case of Constance of France, above, implies. For example, Joan of England (1210–1238), and

Joan, Lady of Wales (c.1191–1237), daughters of King John by his wife and mistress respectively, both corresponded with their brother, Henry III, in letters that blur the boundaries between diplomatic and personal correspondence. Joan of England, the younger

95 Marie of Champagne, "Letter to Louis VII, 1/1/1163,"ibid., http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/47.html. Marie was a granddaughter of Adela of Blois. 46

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. of the two, was betrothed as a child to Hugh de Lusignan in order to secure an alliance

between King John and this important Poitevin lord. She was raised from childhood in his

household as training for her married life in France. However, having been widowed in 1216,

Henry and Joan’s mother, Isabella of Angoulême (1188–1246), had married Hugh herself. An

extant letter from Joan, composed in her name when she was only about ten years old and

still living in France in her new step-father’s household, asks her brother briefly and

poignantly not to credit ‘what unfaithful persons say to you against our lord Hugh de

Lusignan.’96

Joan’s unspecified request for fraternal aid was probably an attempt to secure both her

own future status and that of her mother, whose unsanctioned remarriage had cast her into

disfavour with the child Henry’s regency government. Her actions had not only undermined

Angevin dynastic strategy, but also deprived Henry’s regents of the important asset of the

dowager queen’s remarriage. The awkwardness of Isabella’s own letter attempting to explain

her marriage to her young son in positive strategic terms points to the delicacy of the

women’s situation: Isabella had secured the protection of a new husband for herself, but

alienated herself, and perhaps her daughter from the potentially greater protection and

patronage of the English king.97 Ultimately, Joan was reintegrated into the English royal family, and provided with an elite marriage to Alexander II of Scotland. Isabella was effectively frozen out, demonstrating that in some contexts letters, lordship and kinship combined could not secure the sender’s desires.

96 Anne Crawford, ed. Letters of Medieval Women (Thrupp: Sutton Publishing, 2002), 51. 97 Isabel of Angoulême, "Letter to Henry III, 1220," Epistolae (New York: Columbia Centre for New Media Teaching and Learning), http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/457.html. 47

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. In another instance of sisterly attempts at epistolary mediation, Henry’s illegitimate

sister, the Lady of Wales, wrote passionately to him, ‘I am grieved beyond measure, that I

can by no means express, that our enemies have succeeded in sowing discord between my

husband and you.’98 In seeking to reconcile her husband and brother, this Joan was both

acting as a mediator in a family dispute, and performing an important function as a broker of

political favour. Exactly such work was expected of aristocratic wives, whose marriages were

concluded in order to secure alliances, end conflicts, and establish conduits for ongoing

negotiation between potentially conflicting parties. In Joan’s case, her husband, the Prince of

Wales, Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, had been frequently in conflict with her father and half-

brother,99 placing her in a difficult personal position that must have been familiar to many a medieval dynastic bride. Like many women in her position, Joan’s epistolary efforts were directed at both personal and diplomatic resolution.

Women also used letters to give advice to their children, although such letters do not survive as frequently as kinship letters of broader significance. For example, in the mid- thirteenth century, Lady Hawise de Neville (c. 1212–c. 1269), daughter of a local worthy, Sir

Robert de Courtenay of Oakhampton, Devon, and a moderately important landholder in her own right, is recorded writing an anxious letter of maternal advice to her son, Hugh de

Neville. Hugh had apparently become embroiled in one of the significant rebellions against the king, Henry III.100 Hawise’s letter ranges liberally from concern for her son’s welfare to

admonishment of his failures as a dutiful son, and back again to instructions through which

98 Crawford, Women, 54. 99 J. Goronwy Edwards, ed. Calendar of Ancient Correspondence Concerning Wales, Board of Celtic Studies, History and Law Series (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1935), 20. 100 The date may fall anywhere between 1259–1267, see the catalogue entry at http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C6420429 48

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. she attempted to ameliorate the family’s political and financial position. ‘I am much rejoiced

at the news that William Fitz Simon brought me of your health. God be thanked for it!’, she

begins. But she continues, ‘Your father-in-law [i.e. step father] and I … agree that you should

come to England, and we pray and entreat you, by the faith that you owe us, that you will not

by any means fail in this… we consider it a great sin, to suffer us and ours to be disinherited

by your indolence’.101 Finally, she instructs him to travel to Rome in order to secure letters to

the king of England to restore the family’s lands which had presumably been confiscated,

along with the lands and rights of all rebels and their families, who were sometimes known as

‘the Disinherited’.102 The letter closes not with a signature, or formal conclusio, but with a

seemingly heartfelt invocation of his familial duty; ‘take care of your house if God give you

courage to return.’ It may have been because the letter was intercepted and used as evidence

to indict Hugh that it found its way into the royal collection and survived as an early example

of maternal epistolary advice. However, the evidence of letter books for students, in which

model letters to and from parents of both sexes were provided,103 suggests that such

correspondence was relatively common, even if it did not regularly leave an impression on

the archives.

101 M. A. E. Wood, ed. Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladies of Great Britain: From the Commencement of the Twelfth Century to the Close of the Reign of Queen Mary, 3 vols., vol. I (London: Henry Colburn, 1846), 42–46. 102 See C. H. Knowles, "Provision for the Families of the Montfortians Disinherited after the Battle of Evesham," in Thirteenth Century England I, ed. P. R. Coss and S. D. Lloyd (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1986). 103 See for example H. E. Salter, W. A. Pantin, and H. G. Richardson, eds., Formularies Which Bear on the History of Oxford, c. 1204–1420, vol. 4, Oxford Historical Society, N. S. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), 363, 410. 49

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. Epistolary Networks of Women

All the letters we have examined above entailed women writing to men. In contrast to letters

of modern periods, medieval women’s letters that survive were intended neither as privileged

sites of female network formation, nor particular affective exchange within a female space.

The possibility of letters as special sites of friendship formation and expressions of interiority

among secular women does not seem to have emerged in the period 1000-1400. Certainly, it

was not yet regarded as an epistolary genre of literary or administrative merit, worthy of

record.

Occasionally during this period, however, networks of female epistolarity do survive.

For example, in the early thirteenth century a report concerning the conduct of a military

campaign in the Holy Land which involved their Castilian kin was circulated by letter

between Berengaria, queen of Castile and Léon (c.1179–1246), her sister Blanch of Castile,

queen of France (1188–1252), and their cousin, Blanche of Navarre, countess of Champagne

(1181–1229).104 Their respective letters preserve the central military report in slightly differing versions, with each woman appending her own short epistolary preamble. Their correspondence thus represents a kind of female epistolary network, but one which is strikingly dissociated from the kinds of expressions of interiority and affect which come to be associated with women’s letters in subsequent periods. Emotional vocabulary is present, but the letters themselves are not constructed as essentially affective vehicles. Berengaria calls

104 Berengaria of Castile and Léon, "Letter to Blanche of Castile, Queen of France, 1212," Epistolae (New York: Columbia Centre for New Media Teaching and Learning), http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/709.html; Blanche of Castile, "Letter to Blanche of Navarre, Countess of Champage, 1212,"ibid., http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/705.html. 50

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. her sister ‘beloved and worthy-of-love’, and announces, ‘I have joyful news for you.’105 She mentions, in passing, her unwillingness to believe the messenger until she received a letter from their father himself. Her elaboration of the military details implies a kind of elation, pride and relief at the achievements of her kin and their safe deliverance from the battle.

Thus, her letter does deal with what might be regarded as emotional ties of kinship. However, the core of the correspondence constitutes the circumstances and events of the men’s military engagement, rather than her reactions, fears or hopes. Blanche of Castile’s version of this letter to her cousin Blanche of Navarre is even less effusive in its affective elaboration. She addressed her cousin in terms of affection, sending ‘greetings and sincere and fitting love’.

Yet the body of her letter is relatively abrupt, beginning: ‘You should know that we have had a messenger from Spain, who brought us letters about the war among the Christians in these words…,’ whereupon the entirety of the military account is recited as if in reported speech.

As in the other correspondence discussed here, the sisters do not linger in describing their feelings. Such description would seem to have been at odds with the genre of political epistolarity in which they took part, irrespective of the gender of the recipient.

Thus, aristocratic women’s letters to each other in this period were not necessarily and specifically feminine sites of cultural work or identification, although it is evident that women did exchange letters, especially among networks of their female kin. Later in the thirteenth century, the sisters Marguerite (1221–1295) and Eleanor (c. 1223–1291) of

Provence, respectively the queens of France and England, are known to have corresponded with each other, although none of these letters has been preserved.106 We do know from the

105 Berengaria of Castile and Léon, "Letter to Blanche of Castile, Queen of France, 1212,"ibid., http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/709.html. 106 Howell, Eleanor of Provence, 107. 51

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. lucky survival of Eleanor’s messenger accounts for 1253 that at least one letter was carried to her from Marguerite ‘concerning the state of the Holy Land’ while the latter was on crusade with her husband, Louis IX.107 The bulk of the sisters’ extant letters suggests that their correspondence with each other, while resting on their kinship and presumed affection, most probably concerned their efforts to secure their rights of inheritance in Provence. Their extant letters to the French and English kings reveal that the sisters felt unjustly deprived of their share in Provence which had been inherited by their youngest sister, Beatrice, and her husband, Charles of Anjou, brother of the French king.108

Nevertheless, we should avoid ruling out any possibility of affective female epistolary exchange. In the first place, we cannot exclude the possibility that the fact of letter exchange was itself an affective practice, no matter the vocabulary or rhetoric. In the second place, preservation biases could account for the loss of such ‘ephemeral’ letters, as Garrison has shown. Indeed, Eleanor of Provence’s messenger account incidentally records many instances of letters and messages, now lost, that may have been of a less instrumental kind. The identity of these correspondents delineates a fairly restricted network of women, related by blood and marriage, with whom the queen was in regular contact.109 For instance, the account itemizes gifts of money given to members of the household of her daughter Margaret, Queen of

Scotland (1240–1275), in return for bearing letters and messages on their lady’s part. It is also possible that Margaret’s letters to her mother were one vehicle by which news reached

Eleanor and Henry III that their daughter was unhappy with her treatment in Alexander III’s

107 TNA, E 101/308/1, translated by Kathleen Neal. 108 Howell, Eleanor of Provence, 295; G. Sivéry, Marguerite de Provence: Une Reine au Temps des Cathédrales (Paris: A. Fayard, 1987). 109 Howell, Eleanor of Provence, 106–08. 52

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. court.110 It is even possible that the personal elements of Margaret’s communication were entrusted orally to the bearer, rather than committing them to parchment. However, such affective pleas for parental assistance by new brides in foreign courts are certainly attested in letters from the early modern period, as evident from the example of Perchta of Rožmberk, discussed in the following chapter.

There is no natural reason to expect that any personal letters, such as those that might

have existed between Margaret and Eleanor —addressed to the queen and not the offices of

royal administration— would have been preserved by the normal processes of collections like

the English royal archives. Yet, just occasionally and probably accidentally, even these

collections have captured correspondence of a more personal nature. For example, a letter

survives from Marguerite of Provence to Henry III after his release from captivity in 1265,

and the death in battle of his great rival and brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort, in which she

gently teases him about his longing for his wife after their long, enforced separation. In this

letter, Marguerite promises to send her sister home to England quickly, ‘since we fear that

you might contract matrimony with another lady, because of that long delay … ; and since we

know the countess of Gloucester is interested in your affairs, we shall not have good patience

until we know that our said sister is in your company.’111 In this chance survival, Marguerite

emerges from behind the norms of epistolary rhetoric as a vibrant and human woman,

expressing both concern and humour. It was evidently possible for a medieval woman’s letter

to do such work, but only if the context was right.

110 Ibid., 102–03. 111 Margaret of Provence, "Letter to Henry III, 1265," Epistolae (New York: Columbia Centre for New Media Teaching and Learning), http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/516.html. 53

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. Medieval Women’s Spiritual Letters

As we have argued, above, medieval letters were expensive and laborious artifacts, to be

deployed strategically and instrumentally. For medieval women religious no less than their

secular sisters, then, letters were designed to intervene in certain circumstances or events.

Furthermore, because they were excluded from producing many more formal genres of

religious literature, the letter tended to be the genre of writing to which women of religion

could most easily gain access in order to express and explore their faith. For all these reasons,

the letters of religious women are intriguing documents. They marry self-conscious

performance of humility with strategic intent. In what follows we map the evolution of the

epistolary genre of the spiritual letter, which we will argue did become gendered female

during the period after 1000. Medieval religious women, we argue, used the form of the

spiritual letter as a mode to develop novel forms of self-authorization that were theologically

bold, and were also able to bear significant political ideas and intent.

Writing around 1146, Hildegard of Bingen wrote to the famous Abbot Bernard of

Clairvaux that ‘I am untaught and untrained in exterior material, but am only taught inwardly,

in my spirit. Hence my halting, unsure speech.’112 In comparison to the authority she

accorded Bernard as recipient, Hildegard positioned herself as hesitant and unlettered, but

sensitive to the ways of the spirit. In so doing, Hildegard performed a strategy of feminized

self-authorization that would become increasingly familiar in the correspondence of religious

women throughout the Middle Ages. The following centuries witnessed a number of religious

112 Hildegard of Bingen, "Letter to Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux," in The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, ed. Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Erhrman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). The Latin edition of Hildegard’s letters is L. Van Acker, ed. Hildegardis Bingensis Epistolarum, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991). 54

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. women deploying tropes of abnegation and timidity to describe themselves, echoing the

epistolary strategies of female self-representation in letters of the highest political register,

discussed above. In so doing, however, religious women asserted themselves as vessels for

the Lord’s work in as much as their creaturely embodiment enabled greater spiritual

proximity to Christ’s incarnate self. Gendered, rhetorical postures of humility thus acquired a

special theological significance in the context of spiritual correspondence. For Hildegard,

being ‘untaught and untrained’ was what gave her access to the visionary and the prophetic.

Her capacity to experience the spiritual realm was engendered not in spite of her femininity,

but because of it. She wrote to Bernard, ‘Wretched, and indeed more than wretched in my

womanly condition, I have from earliest childhood seen great marvels which my tongue has

no power to express but which the spirit of God taught me that I may believe.’113

Hildegard was, of course, actually a very famous, powerful and intellectual woman.

She advised popes, managed large land holdings, intervened in a number of political disputes

in her time, and travelled relatively widely.114 She also wrote on a large variety of topics,

from musicology to the natural sciences to apocalyptic theology. She corresponded with

monarchs and popes, as well as all manner of local authorities. Yet even her most bellicose

and strident letters are framed in the language of her gendered frailty. In this, despite her

exceptional status, Hildegard reflects an increasing epistolary practice among religious

women writing spiritual letters during the period 1000–1400. Many of them described

themselves as flawed and creaturely. For example, in one twelfth-century letter the mystic

113 Hildegard of Bingen, "Letter to Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux." 114 On Hildegard’s life, works and career, see Sabina Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen: A Visionary Life (London: Routledge, 1999); Barbara Newman, Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 55

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. Elisabeth of Schönau described herself as a ‘lowly worm-person, broken down and

exhausted.’115 What were the rhetorical foundations of this language? And what spiritual,

political and cultural work did it enable these women to do?

We have seen, since Bynum’s epochal Jesus as Mother, an extraordinary and long

overdue flourishing of studies of the practice affective piety in the Middle Ages, as well as of

its poetics and its purchase.116 In particular, scholars have looked closely at the development

by women of forms of affective piety which offered alternate forms of spiritual authority to

which women were considered to have privileged access on account of their feminine

embodiment. This section on women’s spiritual letters considers the work done by the letter

within this historical movement. That is, we unpack letters written by religious women that

can be loosely understood through the prism of affective piety, seeing the strategic and

interpretative work that the letter as a genre enables them to perform. On the other hand, we

seek to show how these women actually transform the genre of the letter into a vehicle for a

gendered form of spiritual communication.

Old and New Lives

Medieval convents invariably had complicated relationships with religious and secular

authorities.117 Convents, like monasteries, were usually large corporations that supported a

number of religious women, as well as ancillary households of lay support staff. Sometimes a

115 Elisabeth of Schönau, "Letter 13," in Elisabeth of Schönau: The Complete Works, ed. Anne L. Clark (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2000), 244. 116 Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 117 For a general introduction to the history of medieval religious women, see Jo Ann McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 56

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. convent had a close relationship with a neighboring brother house, or a governing interest in daughter houses which could be widely scattered. Other convents received protection and governance, whether they wanted it or not, from local lords and/or episcopal authorities.

Theoretically, they were supposed to be outside of the world, protected from its ravages by benevolent overseeing patrons. In reality, however, medieval convents were involved in local political and financial economies that enabled their survival and flourishing. Convents received income from dowries, traded with their neighbors, and performed a great number of pastoral functions in their wider communities. They were firmly in the world, and bound relatively closely to the mother foundation or order to which they belonged. Within this context, letter writing and receiving enabled notionally enclosed nuns to intervene in the wider world to in support of their own survival and in furthering their spiritual vocation. For medieval religious women, the letter was their dominant mode for engaging in debates, maintaining contact with aspects of their previous lives, building political alliances with other women, and protecting their autonomy against encroachments from authority. The letter enabled them to be at home and away at the same time.

Without doubt, there were many more letters sent to and from religious women than are extant. Our sample does skew towards those letters written by women who achieved some fame in their lifetime, especially those who were considered by their communities to be candidates for sainthood, prompting a concerted effort to document their lives. Their writings were preserved partly to aid the anticipated canonization process that would take place after their death, or collected as an active part of that process. Evidence for a flourishing of letters between convents and their worlds can also be found in collections of men’s spiritual letters, documenting the interventions of these men in women’s religious lives. One example is the

57

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. epistolary output of the eleventh century monk, bishop and theologian Anselm of Canterbury.

Anselm wrote a number of letters to religious women, often imploring them to maintain their

commitment to the holy life. For example, he wrote to Gunhilda, a nun who had abandoned

her religious habit in the attempt to return to her prior aristocratic life. Anselm reminds her,

somewhat harshly, of the fragility of the things of the earth, in comparison to the glories of

God.

Turn away, sister and daughter, turn away your heart lest it be so concerned

with vanity that it cannot reflect the truth. Consider: what is the glory of the

world, what is it that you love? You were the daughter of the King and the

Queen. Where are they? They are worms and dust.118

More practically, but no less importantly, approximately two hundred years later

Francis of Assisi wrote to Lady Jacoba de’ Settesoli, a member of his community, to ask her

to bring some supplies to aid in a burial. The event of this correspondence was only recorded

in an account of Francis’s life, the letter itself is not extant.119 Its existence as a narrative

detail, however, testifies to the utility of the letter as a practical device that enabled

communication over distance. We cite these examples not to undermine the originality and

high-style of the letters that will be discussed below, but rather to remind ourselves of the

particularity of the surviving sample of medieval religious letters available to us.

From the first half of the twelfth century, we find a number of letters where religious

women deploy the letter to manage the legacy of their life prior to entering the convent. In a

118 Anselm of Canterbury, "Letter 169," in The Letters of Saint Anselm, ed. Walter Fröhlich (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1993), 66. 119 Francis of Assisi, "A Letter Written to Lady Jacoba," in Francis and Clare: The Complete Works, ed. Regis J. Armstrong and Ignatius C. Brady (Ramsey: Paulist Press, 1992), 162. 58

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. particularly poignant example from the convent at Admont, a nun wrote to her local

Archbishop requesting that care be given to the child that she abandoned prior to joining the religious community. Following dictaminal norms, in which the Admont community was well-trained, the sender began the letter with an appropriate salutatio:

To Archbishop N., worthy before the Lord, Sister N., the last of the

handmaids of Christ, sends her due portion of obedience and prayer to her

lord and most cherished father in a spirit of sadness.120

The form of the salutatio enabled this unnamed nun to perform humility as befit her status in relation to her superior, but it also enabled her to convey her emotional state. She then went on to explain that in her desire to join the religious life, under the advice of the

Archbishop himself, she left behind her child. She recalled ‘my little orphaned girl, whom I carried in my womb, nursed with my very own breasts.’ She implored the Archbishop to help her support the child in some way:

Carrying her in my arms, therefore, I have recourse to you, lord father, and

throwing myself down, I place before the feet of your lordship, and I wail

and cry out in the place of and in the voice of the Canaanite woman: Lord,

have mercy on my little daughter [Matt. 15. 22-28; Mark 7.24-30]121

Deftly, the author of the letter places her personal lament within the relief of biblical history, and in so doing also conflates the authority of the Archbishop as lord with that of the divine Lord himself. In so doing, the letter combines personal petition with exegesis. Her

120 Beach, "Voices from a Distant Land," 46. 121 Ibid., 47. 59

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. discussion of her physical life as mother is no accident, it relates her to Mary as mother, in

another move of what Alison Beach has called ‘epistolary transference’.122

Héloise, perhaps the most famous female letter writer of the Middle Ages, also wrote to a male patron to help secure the future of her child.123 In 1144 she wrote to Peter the

Venerable, who was then Abbot at Cluny which was at that time the most prestigious and

wealthy monastery in the western world. She thanked him for his recent visit to her convent,

deploying the humility topos with flourish, declaring ‘We are filled with pride and rejoicing,

gracious father, because your greatness has descended to our lowliness, for a visitation from

you is a matter even for the great.’124 She then went on to ask Peter to perform a number of

practical functions for her, including the procurement of a church income, a prebend, for her

son Astrolabe. Here we see Héloise using her mastery of the form of the letter, in order to

secure outcomes and affirm patronage. These examples show how the work of political and

spiritual correspondence might overlap, as elite women in both lay and secular contexts made

use of the special capacities of letters to intervene in the patronage economy that underpinned

their worlds.

Héloise had much prior experience in using the letter in complicated and profound

ways. Her correspondence with her ex-lover Abelard, in which they negotiated the new terms

of their relationship as nun and monk, still stand as classics of the form. Provocatively,

Héloise began one of her letters to Abelard with a playful and challenging riff on the

122 Ibid., 43. For another spatial metaphor developed by Beach, “epistolary visitation”, see "Listening," 194. 123 On Heloise, see Mews, The Lost Love Letters of Abelard and Heloise: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France; Newman, "Authority, Authenticity, and the Repression of Heloise." 124 Betty Radice, ed. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974). The Latin text of the correspondence between Abelard and Heloise can be found in J. T. Muckle, "The Personal Letters between Abelard and Heloise," Mediaeval Studies 15(1953). 60

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. salutatio, writing ‘To her master, or rather her father; husband, or rather brother; his

handmaid, or rather his daughter; wife, or rather sister; to Abelard, Héloise.’125 In so doing, she summarily invoked their complicated history in which their roles changed in relation to each other over time. This famous salutatio is rhetorically appropriate, and yet also enables her to register the myriad forms of ambivalence she feels in relation to Abelard. What is important about all of the letters mentioned above, so far, is the mutual imbrication of the affective language afforded through the rhetorical frame of the letter, with the negotiations of hierarchy with which each woman is engaged. Héloise was not only writing to Abelard simply to express nostalgia or personal emotional distress, she was also writing to secure forms of pastoral support for herself and her sisters, and to build the prestige of the Paraclete, her own convent.

Writing around the same time as Héloise, Princess Sophia of Hungary was also sending out letters to secure her future. Sophia had been betrothed the son of the German king Conrad. As a child Sophia was sent westward to Germany in order to prepare for her marriage. Due to tensions between the Hungarian and German kings, however, the marriage never took place. Instead, Sophia became a nun at the convent at Admont. The German king would not allow Sophia to take her dowry with her into the convent, making her position there difficult. Sophia thus wrote to a number of authorities, requesting intervention to aid in her efforts to secure her property. She wrote to her brother, who had since become King of

Hungary,

125 Radice, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, 109. 61

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. For having come from out of [your realm] into foreign lands, I ate the bread

of sorrow day and night… shame covered my face. For I was maintained not

as a queen betrothed to the son of a king, but rather, so should I say, as the

basest of handmaids.126

She then went on to compare her exile to the trope of the Babylonian captivity, once

again deploying biblical figuration to locate her suffering. Finally she told her brother that

she came to write to him not through the counsel of men, but through the ‘great angel of

counsel who installed these things, which I have written to you through many tears, in the

ears of my heart.’127

Princess Sophia noted that her letter was inspired; it came to her through a divine

angelic force. Her correspondence with her brother, the king, conveyed great emotional force

through the use of biblical allusion, and her invocation of this visionary mode. In so doing,

she performed an injunction upon him. He must support her claim, she argued, because she

was not just beseeching him as his kinswoman, but also as a spiritual sister who receives

divine messages from Angels. Her letter did not assert her authority as a princess; rather her

epistolary authority was seen to emerge from the spiritual realm.

From this letter, and others that we have discussed from the first half of the twelfth-

century, we can see the initial contours of the female spiritual letter that would develop over

the following centuries. Each of the letters was a practical intervention, designed to achieve

quite particular pragmatic aims for the convents from which the women wrote. Each was

126 Jonathan R. Lyon, "The Letters of Princess Sophia of Hungary: A Nun at Admont," in Writing Medieval Women’s Lives, ed. Charlotte Newman Goldy and Amy Livingstone (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 61. 127 Ibid. 62

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. rhetorically adept, produced in the scriptoria of their foundations. And each exploited a

posture of abasement, in relationship to the receiver, to ground their plea. In what follows, we

look more closely at the letter as a place to articulate these novel forms of abased, yet

exultant, feminine spiritual voices.

A Womanish Time

Although her life was mostly lived in the geographically small frame of monastic enclosure,

Hildegard of Bingen used letter writing throughout her long life to create networks, to build

her reputation and to intervene in the ecclesiastical politics of her day. Hildegard wielded

authority through her visionary powers. As a seer, whose visions were held to contain great

insight, Hildegard situated herself as having a privileged access to God’s work in history. At

the same time as the schools of Paris were gaining in prestige and formalizing their all male

institutional structures, Hildegard was carving out an alternative knowledge base generated

through spiritual vision. In this she was not alone; most importantly Bernard of Clairvaux had

also become a twelfth century power broker through his strategic deployment of spiritual

authority, often performed through epistolarity.128 Hildegard, however, was able to gender

the visionary female, in as much as she could posit that her female creatureliness enabled a

greater identification with the suffering body of Christ. That is, Hildegard was able to

transform the category of her femininity, which denied her access to normative power

structures, into a privileged place of abjection from which she could truly access God’s plan.

In this rhetorical practice Hildegard was indeed visionary, in that many medieval women

128 On Bernard’s letter writing see Michael C. Voigts, Letters of Ascent: Spiritual Direction in the Letters of Bernard of Clairvaux (James Clarke & Co., 2014), 162 ff. 63

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. writers followed in her wake, using womanliness as a place of Christological

identification.129

For Hildegard, it was her visionary capacities that made her the true author of her

letters, in spite of the contributions of her scribe, as we have noted, above. In fact, it is

through a discussion with one of her scribes about the nature of authorship that Hildegard’s

understanding of her capacities is revealed. Guibert of Gembloux had collaborated with

Hildegard between 1177 and 1180, after corresponding with her from his home monastery in

the Low Countries. In their correspondence, Hildegard offered spiritual advice to Guibert,

and eventually invited him to reside at her monastery. Guibert had arrived sometime in 1177.

As a guest at the Rupertsberg convent, Guibert worked on collecting Hildegard’s writings and

perhaps, also, worked as a scribe for her. From Hildegard’s surviving letter to him, it can be

inferred that Guibert had written to Hildegard to request that they collaborate in their written

output as co-authors in a collegial sense. Guibert’s motivation for this seems to have been his

conviction that in his role as scribe, he had already effectively contributed to her oeuvre, and

deserved some recognition. Although this letter from Guibert is no longer extant, we do have

a letter he wrote to Philip of Heinsberg, where he describes her writing as ‘carrying her

meaning but written by my pen’.130 Hildegard replied to this request for co-operation in her

‘Visio ad Guibertum Missa’, a long letter in which she outlines her vision of their

relationship. In this letter Hildegard explained why her particular feminine imperfections

enabled her to access the prophetic mode. As a priest, she explained to Guibert, he was able

to access the divine through his ministering of the sacraments. He ought to be content with

129 For Hildegard, see n. 114. On wider matters of visionary women’s texts, see Elizabeth Petroff, Medieval Women's Visionary Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 130 Quoted in Coakley, Women, Men and Spiritual Power, 61. 64

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. that. Hildegard, on the other hand, declared that her experience of creatureliness, through her infirmities and blighted female body, enabled her to experience union with God. She wrote

‘let the angel do what he will, nor spare it; I bravely give him my flesh to be sieved out, so that my spirit might be safe at the day of the Lord.’131 According to Hildegard, Guibert had a masculine access to the sacred achieved through the sacraments. She, however, had her body as a privileged place of sanctity. As John Coakley has written of Hildegard’s conception of the difference between her and Guibert’s access to God, ‘for her this is achieved not by a well-articulated mediatorship, a median mix of humility and purity, as in the case of Guibert, but rather a simultaneous embrace of the extremes of exaltation and debasement.’132

As we have seen, Hildegard is not the first to use these extremes of exaltation and debasement to construct her authority. She is the first, however, to theorize it in relation to male authority and to assert the differences between them. Likewise, Hildegard’s emphasis on the spiritual importance of her gender is clear in the following extract from her most famous letter, below, a scathing missive to the Prelates of Mainz, her local ecclesiastical authorities. Hildegard, and her community of nuns, had been placed under interdict, forbidden from receiving the sacraments. They had been charged with allowing the burial of a young nobleman in consecrated ground at Mount St. Rupert, the site of their convent. This was deemed sinful, as the young man had once been excommunicated. The Prelates, in imposing this penalty of interdiction, were accusing Hildegard of violating the sacramental order of things, in allowing a young man who had been exiled from salvation to dwell in the sacred space of the burial ground. In her reply, Hildegard declared firmly that the authority

131 Quoted in ibid., 65. 132 Ibid. 65

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. of her actions came from God, that she was a bellatrix, a female warrior fighting the good fight. She wrote to the Prelates:

And I heard a voice saying thus: Who created heaven? God. Who opens

heaven to the faithful? God. Who is like Him? No one. And so, O men of

faith, let none of you, let none of you resist Him or oppose Him, lest He fall

on you in his might and you have no helper to protect you from his judgment.

This time is a womanish time, because the dispensation of God’s justice is

weak. But the strength of God’s justice is exerting itself, a female warrior

battling against injustice, so that it might fall defeated.133

This letter is famous for many reasons, not all of which concern us here. In particular,

Hildegard goes into considerable detail about the ways in which she and her sister celebrate the mass, which has greatly interested scholars of music and liturgy. What interests us, however, is Hildegard’s insistence upon using the letter to chastise her male superiors, and to refuse their authority on the basis that they do not understand God’s intentions in the way that she does.

Finally, the larger frame of the letter also enabled Hildegard to construct herself in the context of transcendent biblical history, in opposition to the local ecclesiastical politics that surround her. The letter, as we have seen, concerned the fate of the body of a young man.

Hildegard sought to give this body, thought criminal by some, sanctuary in sacred ground.

The Prelates wanted him declared a spiritual outlaw, undeserving of the protections of the sacraments. Hildegard, however, deployed the visionary mode to insist on the primacy of the

133 Hildegard of Bingen, "Letter to the Prelates of Mainz," 79. 66

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. protections that she could offer this vilified young masculine body. In this, surely, was a

Christological frame. The young un-named man at the centre of the letter, whose sacred

claims were unrecognized by masculine authority, could only be protected by Hildegard, the

bellatrix. In that sense she was figuring the Prelates of Mainz as the authorities who refused

to recognize the savior in their midst and sent him to his criminal’s death. She, on the other

hand, in the living apostolic tradition can offer succor to this criminalized and broken body.

In Hildegard’s spiritual context, where infirmity, stigma and despair are modes to visionary

truth, the body of her excluded young man, unjustly accused, brokers her access to larger

Christological identification.

Female Bonds

We have focused on Hildegard’s letter above because it demonstrates the particular power

enabled by the visionary letter. The letter offers Hildegard the capacity for intervention, even

without leaving her enclosure, and her intervention is vouchsafed by her prophetic capacities.

She can match male institutional power with her feminized access to the divine. There were

other reasons for writing letters, however. So far, we have only read letters sent by women to

male religious or political figures, seeking support for a petition. Around this period, that of

the second half of the twelfth century, we begin to see female religious authors writing to

each other for support and succor. For example, Hildegard correspondend extensively with

fellow mystic Elisabeth of Schönau. Elisabeth had asked Hildegard for advice on how to

manage the gift of visionary power, and how to respond to the calumny from those around

her who questioned the validity of her visions. Hildegard wrote back to Elisabeth offering her

the consolation she craved, and confessing that she too experienced doubts and timidity on

occasions. She wrote ‘O daughter, let God make you a mirror of life. But I too lie in the 67

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. pusillanimity of my mind, fatigued much by fear’.134 In this register of forging affiliation

with Elisabeth and giving her consolation, Hildegard confessed insecurity and expressed a

different type of weakness. In so doing she offered Elisabeth a form of female solidarity.

Over fifty years later another female religious leader would also conduct a

correspondence with a fellow nun. Clare of Assisi would never meet Agnes of Prague, yet

their use of the epistolary form would enable a relationship of great spiritual and political

significance for both women. The first half of the thirteenth century saw a flourishing of new

forms of religious communities across Northern Europe which were inspired by the desire to

imitate Christ through practices of bodily penance and poverty. Inspired by the example of

Francis of Assisi, the young noblewoman Clare Offreduccio was so determined to join this

apostolic movement and repudiate a noble marriage that she famously tonsured herself and

set about to join Francis and his brethren. Clare of Assisi quickly established her own convent

at San Damiano and began her life long battle for the ‘Privilege of Poverty’, the right to live

without a landed endowment, instead relying upon mendicancy and paid labour for

survival.135 The papacy was reluctant to grant such freedoms to a group of women, and

Clare’s battle for poverty took up much of her life and required dexterous political jostling.

Clare used letter writing strategically throughout this campaign, in particular forging a crucial

alliance with the Bohemian princess Agnes of Prague, whom Clare was keen to recruit to her spiritual and political cause. Agnes was the highest profile convert imaginable, spurning the hand of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, in order to live in the Franciscan

134 "Letter to the Nun Elisabeth," in The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, ed. Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Erhrman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 108. 135 On the life of Clare, and the history of her Order, see Bert Roest, Order and Disorder: Between Foundation and Reform (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 68

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. way. Since the Pope was, at that time, engaged in bitter struggle with the Emperor over

territories in Italy, Clare had every reason to hope that Agnes’ rejection of Frederick might be

used as leverage with the Pope in their shared quest for spiritual and economic autonomy.

Clare’s first letter to Agnes made the political and spiritual stakes clear:

I rejoice 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. 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.136

Clare foregrounded the importance of poverty over earthly riches, and the priority of

virginity over marriage. Although she recognized that Agnes comes from nobility and

eminence, she assured the younger Agnes that her choice to eschew wealth and privilege is in

fact the nobler one. And just as Hildegard referred to Elisabeth as a daughter, Clare similarly

attempted to use familial metaphors to convey her affection for Agnes. In the four extant

letters from Clare to Agnes Clare repeatedly deployed maternal and familial language to

impel Agnes to join and maintain the struggle for the ‘Privilege of Poverty’. Clare wrote to

Agnes as a spiritual mother, and attempts to embrace her with mutuality and love. In so

doing, she joined transcendent spiritual language to practical advice. Enabled by the growth

136 Clare of Assisi’s letters to Agnes can be found in Joan Mueller, ed. A Companion to Clare of Assisi: Life, Writings and Spirituality (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 261–74. The Latin is printed in Edith Van den Goorbergh and Theodore H. Zweerman, eds., Light Shining through a Veil: On Saint Clare's Letters to Saint Agnes of Prague (Utrecht: Peeters, 2000). 69

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. of the Franciscan movement, which saw Franciscan missionaries travelling across Europe,

Clare was able to deploy newly developed infrastructure to welcome her spiritual daughter, and, in so doing, build a political base. Styling herself as Agnes’ mother, enabled Clare to position herself as a voice of loving authority, who can console and cajole Agnes into her following her cause. Clare 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.137

It is tempting to place Clare’s letters to Agnes within the genealogy of women’s religious writing that we have attempted to outline so far. Certainly, Clare’s letters to Agnes would seem to mix exigency with the affective metaphors in a way that evokes the spiritual letters we have already discussed. In fact, just as Hildegard exhorted Elisabeth to let God make her a mirror, so too did Clare suggest to Agnes to ‘Place your mind before the mirror of eternity.’138 . But Clare’s metaphorical range also owed a great deal to her Franciscan context. The intensity of Clare’s expressions of motherly love to the distant Agnes conveyed the weight she put upon their shared Franciscan identification and desire to live in the imitation of Christ, which superseded their other more earthly loves. There were antecedents for this use of maternal imagery within Clare’s Franciscan context. Francis and his followers,

137 Clare of Assisi, "First Letter to Agnes," in A Companion to Clare of Assisi: Life, Writings and Spirituality, ed. Joan Mueller (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 261. 138 "Third Letter to Agnes," in A Companion to Clare of Assisi: Life, Writings and Spirituality, ed. Joan Mueller (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 268. 70

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. both male and female, embraced the language of maternity as offering a model of governance

that could be deployed within their orders. We find the language of family love in Christ

being used by Franciscan writers of both genders. For example, Francis himself wrote

We are spouses, when the faithful soul is joined by the Holy Spirit to our

Lord Jesus Christ. We are brothers to him when we do the will of the Father

who is in heaven. We are mothers when we carry him in our heart and body

through a divine love and a pure and sincere conscience and give birth to him

through a holy activity which must shine as an example before others.139

The spiritual language of Clare, Francis and their followers was replete with what

Jacques Dalarun has called their kindred metaphors. Both male and female members of the

Franciscan movement played with ideas of gender and devotion in their expressions of their

sacred imaginary. So it is important that, in the case of Clare, we are careful not to link her

affective language with her performance of womanhood too literally.

Yet, when her language is matched to the political struggle that informed her letters to

Agnes we can argue that Clare was deploying the genre to engage in a particularly gendered struggle. While her Franciscan brethren were permitted to live their lives in holy poverty,

Clare and her sisters had not been afforded the same privilege. Clare’s four letters to Agnes reveal a woman seeking to build a political and spiritual alliance, which would benefit them both. The language of epistolary familiarity, then, offered a means for Clare to claim Agnes as her own kinswoman, and bring her into the fold. It was not merely a way into imagining spiritual identities, but also a structure to build a sense of kindred belonging that could be

139 Jacques Delarun, Francis of Assisi and the Feminine (Saint Bonaventure: The Franciscan Institute, 2006), 59. 71

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. harnessed in the service of the struggle for poverty. We know that over the course of their

correspondence, both women flexed their networks in order to petition the Pope to grant them

the Privilege. Agnes received hers first, after her brother, King Wenceslas, offered fealty to the Pope in exchange for his granting Agnes a hearing. Clare received hers on her deathbed, not long after she penned the fourth letter to Agnes. The Damianites, as Clare’s order was then called, was the only female organization of its kind to receive this Privilege.

Consequently, through their epistolary relationship, both women achieved an unprecedented outcome.

Engaging the World

Catherine of Siena’s letters represent the apogee of female spiritual epistolarity in the western

Middle Ages. Writing in the fourteenth century, she bequeathed a corpus of almost 400

letters, which were widely copied, and then eventually printed, in vast numbers.140 In many

respects she followed in the epistolary tradition we have outlined above. Her letters are

mystical, drawing upon visions and revelation as forms of authority. Her language is somatic

and affective. She figures herself, repeatedly, as frail and creaturely. In so doing, she creates a

powerful dialectic between her broken female body which is the vessel of her revelation, and

masculine discourses of authority and reason.

Yet Catherine’s relationship to the world around her was vastly different from the

religious women we have already discussed. As a non-noblewoman from highly urbanized

Tuscany, proudly identified with her town of Siena, Catherine was embedded in her

140 F. Thomas Luongo, "Saintly Authorship in the Italian Renaissance: The Quattrocento Reception of Catherine of Siena’s Letters," in Catherine of Siena: The Creation of a Cult, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Gabriela Signori, Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 135. 72

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. community in different ways from her predecessors among female religious correspondents.

First of all, Catherine was not a nun in the strictest sense of the word. As the daughter of a

cloth-dyer, and one of an enormous family of over twenty children, she came from urban

artisanal stock. This was not the sort of family to furnish their daughters with dowries so that

they could enter a convent. Rather, as a Dominican tertiary, Catherine occupied a middle

space between religious and lay. Tertiaries lived ‘in the world’, but professed devotion to the

Dominican way of life by practicing forms of austerity and penance.141 She was certainly

perceived as a holy woman by those around her, as having access to sacred gifts of revelation.

She was not, however, cloistered and received none of the material and social protections of

convent life. This enabled a number of freedoms, on the other hand, in as much as she had a

much higher degree of freedom of association and movement than conventionally did nuns.

In the period between Clare of Assisi and Catherine of Siena, roughly 1250-1350,

there was an astonishing flourishing of female spiritual writing. Women such as Marguerite

Porete, Hadewijch, Gertrude of Helfta, Mechtild of Magdeburg and Angela of Foligno

articulated highly somatic mystical visions that not only insisted upon Christ’s humanity as a

site of meditation, but as a site of mystical union.142 That is, in Mechtild’s words, they aimed

for a ‘blissful abiding’ with God.143 Clare of Assisi had instructed Agnes to look upon Christ

141 There is a wide literature on the forms of religious life open to women outside profession as a nun. See for instance Catherine M. Mooney, "Nuns, Tertiaries, and Quasi-Religious: The Religious Identities of Late Medieval Holy Women," Medieval Feminist Forum 42, no. 1 (2006); Daniel Bornstein, ed. Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Chiacago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Caroline Walker Bynum, "Religious Women in the Later Middle Ages," in Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation, ed. Jill Raitt, Bernard McGinn, and John Meyendorff (New York: Crossroad, 1987). 142 For biographies of these and many other medieval religious women, including bibliographies of their works in print, see Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden, eds., Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition, c. 1100–c. 1500 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). 143 Margot Schmidt, "Preface," in Mechtild of Madeburg: The Flowering Light of the Godhead, ed. Frank Tobin (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1997), xxxi. 73

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. as a mirror, seeing his image as a site of meditation. Some fifty years later Angela of Foligno,

herself a follower of Francis, described a vision of ecstasy about which she wrote ‘how great

was the joy and sweetness when I heard God tell me: ‘I am the Holy Spirit who enters into

your deepest self.’’144 In Angela’s telling, God is an intimate lover of sorts. These mystical

women were not famous for their letters — their reknown restricted to a more local sphere —

but nonetheless they must be counted as Catherine of Siena’s writerly foremothers. They

provided models of the erotic spiritual affection that subsequently infused Catherine’s letters,

as we shall see. They also shared Catherine’s third-order status as a religious woman. These

women were not nuns in the conventional, cloistered sense. As tertiaries, or beguines, they

had chosen collective living with other religious women, but they had not made vows to an

order. Writing in the early fourteenth century, in her vernacular Dutch, Hadewijch wrote to a

young woman instructing her in the form of her religious life,

O dear child, lose yourself wholly in him with all your soul! And lose in him

likewise whatever befalls you (apart from all things love is not); for our

adversaries are many, but if we can stand firm we shall reach our full

growth.145

Hadewijch’s letter of counsel implored the receiver to abnegate herself entirely to

God, to surrender completely to him. At the same time, she argued, it was only through

complete spiritual renunciation that they could find their political and spiritual voices, their

‘full growth’. The writings of these women deployed sensual spiritual language of abjection

144 Angela of Foligno, "The Book of Blessed Angela," in Angela of Foligno: Complete Works, ed. Paul Lachance(Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1993), 141. 145 Hadewijch of Brabant, "Letter 5," in Hadewijch: The Complete Works, ed. Columba Hart (Ramsey: Paulist Press, 1980), 55. 74

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. and desire, but they must also be understood politically as well in as much as they suggest

alternative and feminized ways of being in the world.

Catherine became famed for her visionary capacities, and her capacity to navigate the

social and political networks of Siena by offering spiritual counsel and topical prophecy.146

As a woman she was unable to preach, but as a letter writer she was able to disseminate her

prophecies widely. Importantly, in this respect, Catherine’s letters were written in her

vernacular Tuscan. In this Catherine was not unique, but participated in a newly developing

form of epistolarity in which women came to be particular masters. Famously she addressed

the Pope as her ‘babbo’ which to this day is a distinctively Tuscan word for Daddy.

Catherine’s letters were written down in dialect, and would have been able to be understood

by the Sienese people with whom she lived, and to whom she ministered. This is not to say

that her localized context precluded her words reaching more elite ears. Catherine intervened

in papal schisms, as well as battles between Sienese factions. It is to say that her letters,

composed in the vernacular, were designed to reach a more socially and economically diverse

audience than we have seen before, even if their reach seems to be geographically narrow.

This speaks to the flourishing urbanized world of the Italian peninsula of the fourteenth

century, which were laboratories for new forms of urbanized and communal devotional

expression, as well as locations for increasingly clear evidence of social stratification based in

money, as well as social status.

Finally, Catherine’s extraordinary career as a letter-writer forces us to think anew

about the relationship between scribe and author. With the exception of Hildegard’s missive

146 On Catherine of Siena, see F. Thomas Luongo, The Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Carolyn Muessig, George Ferzoco, and Beverly Mayne Kienzle, eds., A Companion to Catherine of Siena (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 75

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. regarding Guibert’s contribution to her oeuvre, it is hard to gauge the ways in which the

relationship between scribe and sender produced the finished product of the letter. As

something of a celebrity, however, Catherine’s life and relationships are much better

documented than the previous women we have encountered. And, in the period that separates

Clare of Assisi and Catherine of Siena, there was a remarkable rise in the use of writing in the

vernacular for mercantile and administrative functions in the place we now call Italy. This

created something of a public able to receive and enjoy Catherine’s literary work.

Consequently, Catherine’s career occurred in a time and place that affords us greater access

to understanding the logic of her epistolary creations. Catherine’s letters were composed in

tandem with her spiritual director, and confessor, Raymond of Capua. Prior to working with

Catherine, Raymond was already a learned friar.147 He was from a well-educated family of jurists, and a number of his relatives had held senior advisory positions to Naples royalty. It seems that Raymond, so some degree, functioned as a type of agent for Catherine. The visions and the language were hers, but it seems that Raymond aided her in their dissemination by transferring her spoken word to the page.

Considering one of Catherine’s most famous letters concerning the execution of a young nobleman Niccolo di Toldo enables us to encounter the rich mixture of registers in which Catherine wrote. This letter is theologically creative and deploys eroticism to create a sensual spiritual tableau. It also, however, drew upon local politics and events. The letter recounts the spiritual support Catherine gave the young man as she accompanied him to his

147 On Catherine’s relationship with Raymond, see Karen Scott, "Mystical Death, Bodily Death: Catherine of Siena and Raymond of Capua on the Mystic's Encounter with God," in Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, ed. Catherine Mooney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). 76

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. death on the scaffold. She casts herself as a female protectress of the incarcerated, producing

a Christological frame that finds sacred power in the body of a young criminal man. She

introduces him by writing,

I went to visit the one, you know, and he was so comforted and consoled that

he confessed his sins and prepared himself very well. He made me promise

for love of God that when the time came for the execution I would be with

him. This I promised and did.148

Catherine describes how she produces the spiritual transformation for him, by means

of her powers of comfort. She then goes to describe the execution in rapturous terms, in

language brimming with blood and fragrance and sweat. En route the execution, she writes

His head was resting on my breast. I sensed an intense joy, a fragrance of his

blood – and it wasn’t separate from the fragrance of my own, which I am

waiting to shed for my gentle Spouse Jesus.149

Catherine narrates the execution as a place of mystical transformation. The ordinary

criminal becomes transformed into her groom, the execution block becomes their wedding

altar. She commands him ‘Down for the wedding, my dear brother, for soon you will be in

everlasting life’ and ‘Courage, my dear brother, for soon we shall reach the wedding feast.’150

The execution itself becomes an ecstatic experience of divine union, ‘His mouth said nothing

but ‘Gesú’ and ‘Caterina’ and as he said this I received his head into my hands, saying, ‘I

148 Catherine of Siena, "Letter 31," in The Letters of Catherine of Siena, ed. Suzanne Noffke (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1988), 109. The Italian text is found in Piero Misciatelli, ed. Le Lettere Di S. Caterina Da Siena (Florence: Giunti, 1940), 173–81. 149 Catherine of Siena, "Letter 31," 109. 150 Ibid. 77

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. will!’ with my eyes fixed on divine Goodness.’151 The account was eroticized and sacramentalized at the same time, Catherine pledges ‘I will’ at the moment of death, and is then permitted a powerful vision of Christ with an open side wound within which he can absorb the blood, desire and soul of the condemned man. Catherine’s vision then recorded that ‘He [the executed man] turned as does a bride when, having reached her husband’s threshold, she turns her head and looks back, nods to those who have attended her, and so expresses her thanks.’152 The young man was made a bride, made pure, gendered female in his blissful surrender to Christ’s open wound. Catherine then lamented, ‘poor wretch that I am, I don’t want to say anymore. With the greatest envy I remained on earth!’153

After this extraordinary account of the execution and vision, which ended with

Catherine’s statement of her own wretchedness, there was a further extraordinary statement.

Catherine declared that ‘It seems to me that the first stone is already laid’.154 This was a reference to the Petrine dispensation that founded the Church. Here, Catherine figured herself again anew, as someone laying the foundation of a new movement or institution. From wretched Catherine to Simon Peter, the blood of the martyred man mixed with the wound of

Christ as the maker of a new dispensation. Catherine here merged herself with the Church, but only in its purest and most mystical form. The use of the Petrine reference offers an important clue to the political work of this mystical letter. She locates herself as the ‘real’

Church, as a form of radical orthodoxy. Catherine produces a powerful dialectic between masculinity, legalism, and authority as working against femininity, the spirit and

151 Ibid., 110. 152 Ibid., 111. 153 Ibid. 154 Ibid. 78

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. transgressive love. For Catherine, her love of the young man at his most debased and broken enables her to perform her love of Christ, and her devotion to Ecclesia in its most mystical form. In so doing, she transforms an earthly spectacle of life in the city into an urban sacrament of transformation.

A Space for Female Spiritual Authority

As we outlined in the introduction to this chapter, the demands of the ars dictaminis required that the sender always articulate their relationship to the sender in hierarchical terms. That is, the salutatio made necessary the negotiation of rank. Even though a great many medieval salutations are lost to us due to the manner in which letters were copied and kept, from the examples we do have it is clear that medieval letter writers did generally use the salutation in this way, as a way to negotiate status and authority. Thus a medieval letter was always expressly situated in relations of power and authority. As sources, they therefore enable us to consider the ways in which medieval authors understood themselves in the context of the social, political, economic and spiritual hierarchies within which they lived.

The genre of the female spiritual letter, of which we have considered some examples above, enabled women to respect the hierarchical situation, as well as to carve out alternative forms of authority that rested in their religious context. In this they resemble some of the women’s political and administrative letters we have already discussed, deploying maternal or lordly authority to ground their epistolary voice while observing formal hierarchies of address. Religious women’s letters perform appropriate piety for their superiors; they deploy dictaminal norms to display decorous compliance. At the same time, they speak from a spiritual authority that transcends the things of the world. Take these two examples of the

79

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. exordium, in which we see how a female writer could use rhetorical norms appropriate to the letter to both flatter her receiver, as well as to situate herself at their table. When Hildegard wrote to Bernard of Clairvaux, she appealed to his reputation as a warrior for orthodoxy, writing ‘you bring fear to the immoral foolishness of this world, and in your intense zeal and burning love for the Son of God, gather men [Luke 5.10] into Christ’s army to fight under the banner of the cross against pagan savagery.’155 Hildegard’s exordium, here, worked to suggest sender and receiver as comrades in the cosmic battle for souls. The letter went on to describe Hildegard’s own apocalyptic visions, which she was keen to legitimize by yoking them to Bernard’s profile. In this way, the canny correspondent could use the rhetorical potential of the letter to speak to audiences beyond the immediate addressee. In a different example, Héloise wrote to Abelard, ‘How lavishly the Blessed Jerome praised St. Marcella, enthusiastically approving and especially commending her zeal for study, which was entirely devoted to questions of sacred scripture, you wisdom knows better than my simplicity.’156 In this especially fine rhetorical example, Héloise followed the formal rules, deploying a patristic allusion to the great letter-writer Jerome in a manner that flattered both herself and her ex-lover.

But as we have seen, spiritual letters written by medieval women did not only display mastery of the form, they transformed it into something else. Medieval religious women were excluded from the episcopacy and the university. They were expressly denied permission to preach. They could, however, write letters. The letter became, in their ends, a genre for the

155 Hildegard of Bingen, "Letter to Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux," 28. 156 Heloise, "Problemata Heloissae," in The Letters of Abelard and Heloise: A Translation of Their Collected Correspondence and Related Writings, ed. Mary Martin McLaughlin and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 213. 80

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. communication of a feminized spiritual vision that inverted notions of authority. They forged

a different type of spiritual legitimacy, premised upon feminine identification with Christ’s

suffering. In the examples above we have seen how a number of women deployed the epistle

as way to constitute themselves as part of a Christian community, with concomitant feminine

forms of political agency.

Vernaculars and Emerging Epistolarities

A striking moment in the history of medieval women’s epistolarity is the emergence of the

vernacular letter. Catherine of Siena was its most famous medieval exponent, but she was by

no means alone. As we have already seen, there are numerous examples of women’s Latin

epistolarity from 1000 onwards, and considerable evidence that what has survived is merely

partial. Nevertheless, the rise of vernacular letters did influence the development of women’s

letters, and the accessibility of letter writing to women, by sowing the seeds of a less rigidly

dictaminal genre of epistolarity that was commensurately less reliant on formal learning.

European vernaculars emerged as possible languages of epistolarity at different times

in different places and contexts. The legitimation of French as a language of political and

diplomatic correspondence among French elites —both male and female— seems to have

happened in the mid-thirteenth century, at about the same time that French was emerging as

an epistolary option in England.157 In the Low Countries, women’s vernacular spiritual letters

also emerged during the mid-thirteenth century, such as those of Hadewijch in Middle Dutch,

157 Note, some of the examples of thirteenth century French letters preserved in English archives originated in the court of Philip III, see Xavier Hélary, "Les Liens Personnels entre les Cours de France et D’angleterre Sous le Règne de Philippe III, 1270–1285," in Thirteenth Century England XII, ed. Janet Burton, Philipp Schofield, and Björn Weiler (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008). For French letters in English royal archives see n.162. 81

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. c.1240.158 Spiritual letters in German languages begin to survive from c. 1290, growing in

number especially from the 1320s.159 The earliest extant examples of women’s letters in

Italian dialects were produced c.1360s.160 Women’s letters in English, however, do not seem

to have emerged until the 1390s.161

Once established, the use of vernacular epistolarity rapidly expanded. For example, in

England from the 1260s onwards, both men and women increasingly adopted Anglo-Norman

French – the vernacular of the court – as a legitimate language of epistolary exchange. In the

royal archives of England, the earliest French letters from women date to the 1260s, and the

earliest outgoing royal correspondence in French to the following decade. By the early

fourteenth century, over ninety percent of women’s letters in the series and over seventy

percent of the king’s letters survive in French copies in the Ancient Correspondence series,

demonstrating the rapid expansion of vernacular possibilities in correspondence even at high

levels of government.162

158 Saskia Murk-Jansen, "Hadewijch," in Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition, c. 1100–c. 1500, ed. Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). 159 Debra L. Stoudt, "The Production and Preservation of Letters by Fourteenth Century Dominican Nuns," Mediaeval Studies 53(1991); Mechthild of Hackeborn, "Letters from Mechthild of Hackeborn to a Friend, a Laywoman in the World, Taken from the Book of Special Grace, Book IV, Chapter 59," in Vox Mystica: Essays on Medieval Mysticism in Honour of Professor Valerie M. Lagorio, ed. Anne Clark Bartlett, et al. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995); Sara S. Poor, "Early Mystical Writings," in German Literature of the High Middle Ages, ed. Will Hasty (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2006). Barbara Koch, "Margaret Ebner," in Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition, c. 1100–c. 1500, ed. Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). Note, however, the inclusion of two lines of Middle High German poetry in a Latin letter from the twelfth century collection of Tegernsee. See Plechl, Die Tegernseer Briefsammlung, 363. 160 See following chapter. 161 See following chapter. 162 In the 1270s, around 3% (5 of 178) of the king’s outgoing correspondence preserved in the SC 1 series, in The National Archives, Kew, were written in French; by the first decade of the fourteenth century, 72% (237 of 328) of the king’s extant letters were in French. This figure includes draft letters as well as copies of final letters. 82

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. Use of vernaculars, then, did not necessarily begin as a marginalized form of

language, which was therefore more accessible and amenable to women, as has sometimes

been assumed. Instead, it first emerged in administrative contexts as an alternative, less solemn register of epistolarity, before developing the special potential for flexibility and intimacy that would enable so many later women letter writers to exploit it. In fact, many of the earliest vernacular political and administrative letters closely resembled their Latin counterparts.163 This is perhaps unsurprising, since they would initially have been produced

by the same cadre of scribes, operating in a variety of languages depending on context. The

drafting process of Latin letters themselves sometimes arose from dictation and drafting in local vernaculars. This was true of both administrative and spiritual letters, ranging from the letters of the English crown to the correspondence of Christine of Stommeln with Peter of

Dacia, which was translated into Latin for her by her local priest/scribe.164

During the emergence of vernacular epistolarity, then, distinctions of language were

distinctions of register, of discourse, rather than always distinctions of content or gender. The

English royal case provides a suggestive explanation which takes us beyond simplistic

assumptions which align the uptake of vernacular letters with women’s lesser educational or

intellectual capacities. English royal letters of sufficient solemnity to be sent under the great

163 For instance, compare a selection of Latin and French letters of Eleanor of Provence, printed in J. J. Champollion-Figeac, ed. Lettres des Rois, Reines et Autres Personages des Cours de France et d'Angleterre depuis Louis VII jusqu'à Henri IV, Tirées des Archives de Londres, 2 vols., vol. 1, Collection de Documents Inédits de l'Histoire de France (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1839), 245, 64– 65; Rymer, Foedera, I.ii, 573, 611. 164 Pierre Chaplais, English Diplomatic Practice in the Middle Ages [EDPM] (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2003), 97. For Christina, see Önnerfors’s foreword in Petrus de Dacia, Vita Christinae Stumbelensis, Lateinische Sprache und Literatur des Mittelalters (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1985). Cited in Stoudt, "The Production and Preservation of Letters by Fourteenth Century Dominican Nuns," 317. 83

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. seal of the realm needed to be in Latin, the language which ‘befitted the great seal.’165 Letters

of lesser degrees of formality and less dignified seals might by the 1280s be sent in French,

and later, English. In aristocratic, ecclesiastical and high level administrative correspondence,

a similar discourse of status operated to promote Latin letters above less formal modes of

communication, but from the mid thirteenth century this rule admitted some variety. For

example, the letters of female religious communities archived by the English crown during

the reign of Edward I were most often written and sent in French, while the letters of

abbesses and prioresses in isolation from their communities were always composed in Latin,

perhaps to highlight their noble status or the gravity of their requests.166 Thus, provided the

sender had access to trained personnel, early in the development of vernacular epistolarity the

process of language selection in letters depended on the discourse in which the letter was

intended to participate and the sender’s position relative to the epistolary discursive space,

rather than on the identity or gender of the sender herself.

Nevertheless, it seems unlikely to be coincidental that at the same time as this new

register of epistolarity was developing, the social range of letter writers, including women,

also increased. The availability of a less solemn register of letters, seems to have had the

effect of opening letter writing up to a ‘less solemn’ group of correspondents. The late

thirteenth and fourteenth centuries bear witness to the advance of this effective

democratization of the political and administrative letter genre. For example, Maud Pantulf

165 Chaplais, EDPM, 97; H. C. Maxwell-Lyte, Historical Notes on the Use of the Great Seal of England (London: HMSO, 1926), 51. 166 Six letters from abbesses in their own right, and seven letters from women’s religious communities in SC 1 survive in Latin; nine letters from communities to the crown survive in French. I have excluded from this count letters written to the King or crown by female members of his family, even when they had taken the veil, considering the kinship relationship likely to override or at least complicate the patterns of appropriate discourse. 84

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. (d. 1289), lady of the small and relatively insignificant manor of Wem in the Welsh March,

used her distant kinship to the royal chancellor of England to presume to send letters, in

Anglo-Norman, petitioning for legal assistance, not only to Robert Burnell, her kinsman, but

even to the king himself. Her language is relatively untutored, almost to the point of

confusion, and the letters are not structured in a sophisticated way.167 Yet she was forthright in putting forward her requests for assistance before the courts, asking the king to ensure that a fresh enquiry team is sent to enquire into her lands and debts because the original inquisitors were prejudiced against her. ‘[N]either for wealth nor health would I, nor any of mine go against your will,’ she assured him, ‘but I have many enemies to conquer.’168

In a similar vein, sometime between 1270 and 1286 Amice de Kirkby, mentioned

above, wrote to her son John, who had risen from the position of king’s clerk to become a

member of Edward I’s council and, after 1284, treasurer.169 Her Anglo-Norman letter is

poorly organized and seems to betray a lack of dictaminal expertise, yet it shows her to be an

active part of an epistolary network. She wrote in the first instance to broker John’s assistance

for William, the vicar of Gedney, Lincolnshire, who had written to her seeking her help in

approaching John. Amice forwarded William’s letter to her son with a cover note of her own.

The letter conveys its narratio, petitio, and a conclusio as normal. However, a series of

postscripts follow, disrupting the proper epistolary construction:

I pray you, dear son, and earnestly request that for love of me and my prayer,

for your advantage and honour, that you should wish to be of aid and counsel

in the affairs which you will see in [William’s] letter, according to what

167 Crawford, Women, 140–41. 168 TNA, SC 1/19/185. Translation from the manuscript with thanks to Dr Emma Cavell. 169 Crawford, Women, 116–17. 85

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. seems to you to be of honour to God and the Holy Church, and to your honour

and your claim of being a worthy man: do so much, if it please you, that he

feel the advantage of my prayer. Farewell always in God; if it please you,

send to me of your state, may God keep it ever good. On another point, dear

son, I pray you that you receive 2 marks from Sir Nicholas de Martelfeld

from his account for my use, or if you arrange things with him, I will charge

them to your purse. Farewell. On another point, dear son, I marvel much

because I have often sent to you of our need and our lack that we have of

money to carry out your affairs, and you have sent back nothing concerning

your wishes.170

In its list-like construction, Amice’s letter anticipated the correspondence of the

Paston women and other early modern letter writers, the inclusiveness of which has

sometimes been derided as a degradation of high epistolary style. Yet here it seems probable

that Amice’s concern to include her various postscripts might not arise from her unfamiliarity

with dictamen. The first ‘body’ of the letter is appropriately written; but the postscripts and

repeated ‘farewells’ are aberrations of the pattern. We may conjecture that Amice dictated

her letter verbatim, as there was clearly no attempt to redraft the letter as a coherent whole.

Perhaps the press of time as an opportune messenger waited or the expense of materials was

too great to permit starting again. Equally, it is possible that the shifting epistolary discourse

signaled by the entry of vernacular possibilities also newly permitted sacrificing pure

dictaminal structure to the pragmatics of communication.

170 F. J. Tanquerey, ed. Recueil de Lettres Anglo-Françaises (Paris: 1916), no. 62. Translation from the French by Kathleen Neal; an alternate translation is offered by Crawford. 86

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. The vernacular letters of lower status women, such as Maud and Amice, exemplify

the often unusual lexical choices and looser dictaminal structures of letters sent by women of

this social stratum. This may have reflected their reliance on less well trained notaries, or

their less certain acquaintance with the models of formal epistolarity. In addition, although

the vernacular did not of itself engender a new genre, the production of such less dictaminal

letters in vernacular languages may have contributed to the development of new and looser

epistolary norms. A letter sent to another English chancellor, John de Langton, by his

kinswoman Katherine Paynel (perhaps his step-mother; fl. late thirteenth century), illustrates this process. Her letter observes a generally dictaminal structure, but seems to have been composed from dictation, capturing dialectical variants of Anglo-Norman possibly influenced by Early Middle English. Katherine’s very relationship to John is ambiguous because of her idiosyncratic vocabulary, in which she calls herself his ‘jadis mere’, or ‘erstwhile mother’ – a term that is not attested in the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, and has appeared to elude precise scholarly translation.171 In its idiosyncrasies correspondence such as Katherine’s and Amice’s

anticipates the fluid, inclusive and individual style of famous vernacular mercantile

collections, discussed in the following chapter. It evinces a gradual shift in epistolary

discourse which eventually created space for less strictly dictaminal forms of epistolarity to

arise within the pragmatic sphere.

The opportunities offered by the vernacular as a new register of epistolarity also

afforded new avenues for female spiritual expression through correspondence. As we have

discussed above, the letter was a genre to which earlier generations of elite spiritual women,

171 K. Edwards, "The Social Origins and Provenance of the English Bishops During the Reign of Edward II," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser., 9(1959). 87

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. such as Hildegard, gained access despite being excluded from higher status forms of religious

discourse. The advent of the vernacular epistle enabled religious women of more humble

origins to participate as well. And it was particularly suited to letter writing in the mystic

mode, because of its association with the unlearned, in opposition to Latin. Just as the

creatureliness of women enabled their special embodied spirituality, the unlearnedness of

vernacular languages enabled their writing to convey authentic or ‘natural’, rather than

‘constructed’ knowledge of the divine, as Dante famously insisted.172 Hence, although

women such as Catherine of Siena who used vernacular letters to disseminate their religious teachings and advice reflected explicitly on their lack of learning, their reliance on scribes, and, occasionally, the miraculous nature of their ability to write at all, this should be understood as part of the authorizing rhetoric of the letter, rather than a simple statement of

(il)literacy.173 Finally, because of its ‘less solemn’ status, the vernacular register provided

particular epistolary opportunities to religious women from beyond the traditionally

sanctioned monastic space, such as the beguines and tertiaries of the urban world. Indeed, the

earliest extant vernacular women’s letters in the Low Countries and German lands issued

from beguines such as Hadewijch, and Mechthild of Magdeburg.174

172 Steven Botterill, ed. Dante: De Vulgari Eloquentia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Zygmunt G. Barański, "Divine, Human and Animal Languages in Dante: Notes on De Vulgari Eloquentia II–IX and the Bible," Transactions of the Philological Society 87, no. 2 (1989). 173 Jane Tylus, "Mystical Literacy: Writing and Religious Women in Late Medieval Italy," in A Companion to Catherine of Siena, ed. Carolyn Muessig, George Ferzoco, and Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Brill's Companions to the Christian Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Katherine Gill, "Women and the Production of Religious Literature in the Vernacular, 1300-1500," in Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance, ed. E. Ann Matter and John Coakley (Philadelphia: university of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). 174 Murk-Jansen, "Hadewijch."; Sara S. Poor, "Mechthild of Magdeburg," in Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia, ed. Magaret C. Schaus (2006). 88

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. Conclusion

In the period 1000–1400, as we have seen, women deployed letters to manage their own legal and financial affairs, negotiate the welfare of kin, express lordship, and influence politics at the highest levels, as well as to provide spiritual consolation, advice and admonishment.

Although women’s opportunity to do so was restricted compared to men’s, nevertheless, there was much more women’s letter writing during this period than is sometimes assumed.

The full recognition of medieval women’s epistolarity, however, depends on dismissing rigid notions of authorship and allowing the collaborative efforts of dictatrix and scribe to be mutually acknowledged as part of ‘letter writing’.

Women’s political and administrative letters were only occasionally gendered in specific ways. Although women sometimes found feminine scripts of need and subjection useful and rhetorically effective in their letters, this was not always the case. Especially in letters of lordship, women were constructed first as lords, sometimes even to the extent of adopting a masculine vocabulary to emphasize the legitimacy of their authority as epistolary persons. In lay contexts, as we have seen, medieval women tended to rely most heavily on gendered topoi when they addressed issues of the greatest political significance, or corresponded with the highest status leaders of the age. Through this rhetorical mechanism, women shielded themselves from accusations of presumptuousness by maintaining or appearing to maintain appropriately gendered and hierarchical submissiveness while nevertheless conveying their often powerful messages. By contrast, in spiritual correspondence the position of feminine creatureliness developed as an increasingly privileged and powerful mode of epistolary expression from the twelfth century onwards. The

89

K. Neal & C. Monagle, ‘From Latin to the Vernacular: Medieval Women’s Letters, 1000– 1400’. Pre-review draft. connection between the feminine self and the basest forms of worldly existence was not just a posture of political convenience in such letters, but an expression of a theological truth that gave women a unique connection to the embodied Christ. Thus, as we have seen, medieval women’s spiritual letters were more likely to adopt overtly female forms of expression, not despite but as an integral part of their message.

The gendered spiritual power of women’s spiritual letters was only amplified by the development, from the thirteenth century, of a less solemn and more flexible register of vernacular correspondence. Vernacular letters of informal kinds, free of some of the restrictions of dictaminal structure and expression that dominated Latin correspondence, created a forum for new kinds of letters and new participants in correspondence. It was the development of this vernacular register that was to prove the most productive vehicle for women’s epistolary output in the following centuries, in both secular and spiritual contexts.

90