Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- PREFACE
- ABBREVIATIONS
- The Meetings of Kings Henry III and Louis IX
- Counting the Cost: The Financial Implications of the Loss of Normandy
- Networks of Markets and Networks of Patronage in Thirteenth-Century England
- Three Alien Royal Stewards in Thirteenth-Century England: The Careers and Legacy of Mathias Bezill, Imbert Pugeys and Peter de Champvent
- The Eyre de terris datis, 1267–1272
- Joan, Wife of Llywelyn the Great
- Town and Crown: The Kings of England and their City of Dublin
- English Landholding in Ireland
- The Reception of the Matter of Britain in Thirteenth-Century England: A Study of Some Anglo-Norman Manuscripts of Wace's Roman de Brut
- Fearing God, Honouring the King: The Episcopate of Robert de Chaury, Bishop of Carlisle, 1258–1278
- Cloistered Women and Male Authority: Power and Authority in Yorkshire Nunneries in the Later Middle Ages
- Taxation and Settlement in Medieval Devon
- Clipstone Peel: Fortification and Politics from Bannockburn to the Treaty of Leake, 1314–1318
- Royal Patronage and Political Allegiance: The Household Knights of Edward II, 1314–1321
- ‘Edward II’ in Italy: English and Welsh Political Exiles and Fugitives in Continental Europe, 1322–1364
Cloistered Women and Male Authority: Power and Authority in Yorkshire Nunneries in the Later Middle Ages
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- PREFACE
- ABBREVIATIONS
- The Meetings of Kings Henry III and Louis IX
- Counting the Cost: The Financial Implications of the Loss of Normandy
- Networks of Markets and Networks of Patronage in Thirteenth-Century England
- Three Alien Royal Stewards in Thirteenth-Century England: The Careers and Legacy of Mathias Bezill, Imbert Pugeys and Peter de Champvent
- The Eyre de terris datis, 1267–1272
- Joan, Wife of Llywelyn the Great
- Town and Crown: The Kings of England and their City of Dublin
- English Landholding in Ireland
- The Reception of the Matter of Britain in Thirteenth-Century England: A Study of Some Anglo-Norman Manuscripts of Wace's Roman de Brut
- Fearing God, Honouring the King: The Episcopate of Robert de Chaury, Bishop of Carlisle, 1258–1278
- Cloistered Women and Male Authority: Power and Authority in Yorkshire Nunneries in the Later Middle Ages
- Taxation and Settlement in Medieval Devon
- Clipstone Peel: Fortification and Politics from Bannockburn to the Treaty of Leake, 1314–1318
- Royal Patronage and Political Allegiance: The Household Knights of Edward II, 1314–1321
- ‘Edward II’ in Italy: English and Welsh Political Exiles and Fugitives in Continental Europe, 1322–1364
Summary
This paper seeks to investigate some of the issues associated with how medieval nunneries were governed, and the question of where power and authority lay within these institutions that were designed to accommodate women who wished to pursue a monastic vocation. Such questions are rather more complex than the same questions asked of male houses, where there was a clearly delineated structure of power and command, defined either in relation to an individual institution (by the Rule of St Benedict) or in relation to wider groupings of individual monasteries into orders. Recent scholarship has emphasized that we should not unquestioningly apply to female houses the same ideas about structure, or organization, as to male houses, and has demonstrated the richness and diversity of the female religious experience. There is, for instance, an ongoing debate about female participation in the Cistercian order: what did medieval people – nuns, monks, bishops, popes, founders of religious houses and their patrons, and so on – mean by a Cistercian nunnery? How – in what ways and to what degree – did Cistercian nunneries follow the observances of the White Monks and the structure of the order? In general, in terms of internal organization the experience in female houses was different from that of male houses in one important respect. Whereas in monasteries we would not expect to find women occupying any positions of authority, in nunneries we might expect to find a male presence.
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- Information
- Thirteenth Century England XProceedings of the Durham Conference, 2003, pp. 155 - 166Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2005