Emotions and the Ritual of a Nun's Coronation in Late Medieval Germany
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CHAPTER 9 1 Emotions and the Ritual of a Nun’s 2 Coronation in Late Medieval Germany 3 Julie Hotchin 4 Ecce quod cupivi iam video quod speravi iam teneo 5 illi sum iuncta in celis quam in terris posita tota devotione dilexi. 6 Lo, what I desired, I now see; what I hoped for I now hold; 7 in heaven I am joined to him whom I loved with complete devotion when 8 I was on earth.1 9 Sung in joyous celebration by newly crowned nuns to conclude the ritual 10 of their coronation, the antiphon expresses the passionate desire for and 11 love of Christ that defined a nun’s spiritual role. These words, attributed 12 to the fourth-century virgin martyr Agnes, voice the multiple transitions 13 enacted by the liturgy of a nun’s coronation: from woman into virgin-mar- 14 tyr and heavenly bride, from longing desire to anticipated fulfilment and 15 from earthly love into heavenly union. According to the account of her 16 life by Ambrose of Milan (339–91), Agnes rejected a worldly suitor and 17 riches out of her desire for her heavenly lover.2 She thus offered a potent 18 spiritual and emotional model for religious women dedicated to Christ. As 19 reward for her sacrifice Agnes received the crown of martyrdom; nuns too 20 J. Hotchin (*) School of History, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia © The Author(s) 2017 171 M. Bailey, K. Barclay (eds.), Emotion, Ritual and Power in Europe, 1200–1920, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44185-6_9 172 J. HOTCHIN 21 offered a bloodless sacrifice of their virginity through their ascetic life in 22 the cloister, similarly anticipating the reward of a heavenly crown in their 23 afterlife. In northern Germany, this spiritual reward was given material 24 form; nuns received a linen band crown, worn over their veil, during their 25 coronation, as a symbol of their virginity and status as a sponsa betrothed 26 to Christ. The ritual of a nun’s consecration—or coronation (coronatio) as 27 it was known in northern German convents—was an evocative drama of 28 spiritual betrothal through which religious women acquired a privileged 29 status, spiritually and socially, as a bride of Christ. Participation in the 30 ritual, for individual coronands and the community, was an intensely emo- 31 tional experience that shaped how nuns, both individually and collectively, 32 created, affirmed and negotiated their identities. 33 As Robert Orsi has observed, ‘religious rituals, with their movements, 34 smells, sounds, and things, are privileged sites for rendering religious 35 worlds present’.3 Ritual practice is one means to make the ‘invisible vis- 36 ible’, such as through the relationships between people and things that 37 materialise the sacred.4 Attention to the emotional dimension within reli- 38 gious ritual is central to explaining how the experience of the sacred is 39 ‘conjured’ by arousing certain feelings through ritual performance, and 40 to our understanding of how ritual can have lasting effects upon partici- 41 pants.5 Emotions are social and relational; the feelings aroused in religious 42 ritual express and produce relationships between individuals, communities 43 and the sacred. As Joanna Bourke has argued, emotions also serve to align 44 people with others within social groups, thus subjecting people to power 45 relations.6 Emotional arousal in liturgical performance is therefore not a AU1 46 free expression of emotion, but a disciplined rehearsal of ‘right attitudes’. 47 Through the corporate experience of the liturgy individual feelings are 48 shaped and aligned to collective norms, generating an attitude or orienta- 49 tion to the sacred that permeates other aspects of religious life (see also the 50 discussion in Chap. 11).7 51 As a dramatic enactment of the betrothal of the loving soul with Christ, 52 the liturgy of a nun’s coronation provided a narrative model that shaped her 53 spiritual role and expressed her place within the social and power relations 54 of the convent, the church and with the divine. The significance of the rit- 55 ual of coronation for constituting religious women’s identities, the theo- 56 logical meanings of the nun’s crown and the deep emotional investment 57 of nuns in the symbol of their crown have been perceptively examined 58 by scholars such as Eva Schlotheuber, Evelin Wetter and Caroline Walker 59 Bynum.8 My interest here is to look more closely at how the narrative and EMOTIONS AND THE RITUAL OF A NUN’S CORONATION IN LATE MEDIEVAL... 173 emotional arc of the ritual of a nun’s coronation provided a pattern for 60 the cultivation of feeling appropriate for a bride of Christ. Analysis of the 61 rich textual and visual evidence from convents in northern Germany offers 62 insight into how women interpreted and understood the coronation ritual 63 and its influence on their emotional and spiritual lives, and how emotional 64 stimulation in ritual performance articulated, affirmed and reproduced 65 religious women’s individual and collective identities. 66 CORONATION AND CONVENT ENTRANcE PRAcTIcES 67 Entrance rites transition new members into the group, mobilising material 68 forms including dress, imagery and shared practices, such as processions 69 and liturgical chants, to generate the feeling of participation in a shared 70 religious world.9 Convent entrance ceremonies with their rich symbolic 71 and dramatic enactment of spiritual marriage socialised girls into their 72 community, providing them with social, spiritual and emotional maps for 73 AU2 their future life as a nun (for a parallel discussion in a protestant context, 74 see Chap. 12). A girl was placed with a convent when she was very young, 75 usually around five years of age, in the practice of oblation.10 She then 76 spent around five to eight years in the convent school, where she received 77 instruction in Latin, scriptural and theological knowledge to comprehend 78 the liturgy, and training in practices of self-discipline through which she 79 learnt to ‘adhere to the norms of emotional expression’ of the convent.11 80 The girl received her monastic habit and veil in the rite of investiture, 81 marking her formal departure from her family and entrance into religious 82 life, when she was around 12–14 years old. By wearing monastic dress, 83 the girl was understood to be offering tacit consent to the decision of her 84 parents to offer her to religious life. Customarily, the girl then made her 85 profession once she reached the age of majority of 14 years, although it 86 was not uncommon for girls to profess their vows earlier.12 The future 87 nuns’ social and spiritual preparation to take their place in the convent 88 represents a form of emotional management through which the senior 89 nuns ensured the continuity of their community and reproduced their 90 religious world. 91 A nun’s coronation was the culmination of a sequence of entrance 92 rites that could extend up to a decade or more. Whereas profession was a 93 monastic ritual, subject to the requirements of the respective order, coro- 94 nation was not a requirement for monastic life and in theory could be 95 celebrated at any time. According to canon law, nuns were to be crowned 96 174 J. HOTCHIN 97 only after they had made their profession; in practice, however, nuns in 98 northern German convents in the later fifteenth century frequently were 99 crowned before they professed their vows.13 The ceremonial performance 100 of a nun’s coronation marked her transition into a full member of the 101 religious community and dramatised the self-understanding of the nun 102 as a virgin bride of Christ. However, the spiritual marriage enacted by 103 the coronation ritual was conditional, as union with a heavenly spouse 104 could only be achieved after death. Nuns referred to their coronation as 105 a spiritual betrothal (desponsacio), an expression of their legal union with 106 Christ in this world that would be fulfilled as marital union with Him in 107 the afterlife. 108 The excitement and anticipation with which girls awaited their corona- 109 tion were amplified through these years of preparation. An account writ- 110 ten by a young future nun at the Benedictine monastery of Ebstorf in the 111 1480s conveys the urgent anticipation she and another four young sisters 112 felt about their impending coronation. She recounts how they yearned 113 to be crowned and had asked their provost to bring forward the date of 114 their profession. Their longing is expressed in the rapturous language of 115 spiritual union: ‘sighing daily we desire with the innermost desires of our 116 heart that longed for day on which we can be united and betrothed to 117 our most adored spouse … and have the red sign of His most holy cross 118 placed on our heads so that we can be called and become brides and wives 119 of Christ’.14 The impatient young nuns at Ebstorf were all below the stipu- 120 lated age of profession of 14 years, indicating that their coronation was 121 the result of a compromise whereby the provost and nuns adhered to the 122 monastic requirement that nuns be professed before they were crowned, 123 although at a younger age. The protracted period of a girl’s spiritual edu- 124 cation, punctuated by the sequence of entrance rituals, shaped her emo- 125 tional and religious identity as a loving bride of Christ, and taught her to 126 cultivate and express her love in communally authorised ways (for similar 127 phenomenon in marriage see Chap.