Spiritual Economies. Nancy Bradley Warren

translation, on the other hand, contains fifty-five full verse lines in Latin, and only once does it employ the technique so common in the prose translation of abbreviating with “&c.”⁴⁰ The Latin lines in the verse break both meter and rhyme, standing out from the surrounding English. Thus, the Latin language of authority, the language of the original Rule as well as of the Scriptures, stands in a place of distinction from the feminine vernacular. This positioning works to assert Latin’s priority, power, and authority over the vernacular. The Latin chapter headings, together with the lines of Latin included within the body of the text, attempt, like the figure of St. Benedict in the prose version, to ground the translation in a hierarchical relation with the Latin text, prioritizing the authoritative original.

      The Latin chapter headings and lines suggest a correspondence between original and translation while simultaneously revealing, as does the added translator’s prologue discussed above, differences. These differences further emphasize the lesser perfection and subordinate position of both the feminine vernacular and the female audience. The English translations given for the Latin lines included in the text sometimes enact this strategy by altering the meaning of the passage, and in the verse version, alterations from Latin to English tend to involve issues of authority.⁴¹ The vernacular text reduces the scope of women’s authority in religion as part of the strategy to contain potentially disruptive forces and prevent women religious from asserting newfound power.

      The new opportunities for independent participation in spiritual life offered to women by the spread of vernacular literacy and the increased availability of vernacular texts proved particularly disconcerting for conservative ecclesiastical authorities, coinciding as they did with the late medieval “feminization” of sanctity.⁴² This process, like that of vernacular translation, presented new spiritual possibilities to women. The paradigm of the “virile woman,” in which women made themselves masculine in their pursuit of a spiritual life, gave way to one which Barbara Newman has aptly termed “womanChrist,” that is, “the possibility that women, qua women, could participate in some form of the imitatio Christi with specifically feminine inflections and thereby attain a particularly exalted status in the realm of the spirit.”⁴³ In the model of womanChrist, then, female particularity and difference came into their own as sources of spiritual power.

      Chapter 2 of the verse version concerns the qualities and responsibilities of the superior, who in the masculine Benedictine tradition is said to hold the place of Christ in the monastery since he is addressed by a title of Christ. The Latin reads, “Christi enim agere vices in monasterio creditur, quando ipsius vocatur pronomine, dicente apostolo: Accepistis spiritum adoptionis filiorum, in quo clamamus: abba, pater” (RB 1980 172). John E. Crean, Jr., who has examined Middle High German translations of the Benedictine Rule for women, describes this passage as “pivotal in evaluating any feminine RB version. In question is the persona of the abbess as perceived by the editor.”⁴⁴ As Crean says, the way in which a translator deals with “Christi Pronomine” is “a kind of litmus test of how intimately the abbess may be understood to ‘hold the place of Christ in the monastery.’”⁴⁵

      The Middle English verse does not describe the prioress holding the place of Christ at all. Rather, it says:

      And to be honored euer hir aw;

      Bot in her-self sche sal be law,

      Pryde in hert for to haue none,

      Bot loue god euer of al his lone

      And wirchip him werld al-wais,

      Als þe apostel plainly sais

      Vn-to all folk, who so it be,

      Pat takes swilk staite of dignite:

      “Accepistis spiritum adepcionis.”

      He sais: “ʒe take þe gaste of mede,

      Pat lele folk vnto lif suld lede,

      In þe whilk gaste we call & cry

      Vnto our lord god al-myghty,

      And ‘fader, abbot,’ þus we say.” (Verse 327–40)

      While the verse version does include the first line of the scripture passage in Latin connecting the superior with Christ, the English changes the passage’s meaning. The father abbot in the English is identified with God the Father rather than with Christ as in the Latin, but the female superior herself, who is made subordinate, receives no such validation of her position.⁴⁶ The three Middle High German versions Crean examines, which range from the fourteenth century to 1505, all identify the abbess with Christ to a greater or lesser extent. The Middle English verse, however, instead instructs the abbess to be meek and to love and worship God. The translator thus constructs her “persona” to be consistent with current, sanctioned ideals of female religious life. The identification of the abbess with Christ would have made the radical possibilities inherent in the image of womanChrist all too real and would have been dangerously counterproductive to clerical strategies to save the market.

      Bishop Richard Fox’s early sixteenth-century translation of the Benedictine Rule for the nuns in his Winchester diocese shows less anxiety about female authority in religion than the fifteenth-century verse translation does. Fox’s translation gives abbesses “the standing of diocesans, describing them as ‘oure right religious diocesans.’”⁴⁷ As Barry Collett points out, “In chapter 2 … he ascribed to an abbess all the authority of an abbot.”⁴⁸ Significantly, though, even in the humanist-influenced sociopolitical environment of the Tudor era, Fox still does not equate the abbess with Christ. He, too, modifies the Latin, and in doing so he “avoided any confusion between the full authority which pertains to an abbess, and the office of a priest. His clear belief that full authority, with its divine origin, could certainly be held by a woman did not imply that women could assume a priestly function.”⁴⁹

      Other important differences between the Latin and English verse treatments of the superior arise in chapter 64, which discusses the election of a superior and outlines the qualities that make a person an ideal candidate. Strikingly, the need for learning, described as desirable for an abbot but perceived at this period as so problematic for women, is absent from the English description of the female superior. Textual knowledge and education for the abbot become simply knowledge of proper conduct for the prioress. In describing the desirable traits of an abbot, the Latin reads, “Oportet ergo sum esse doctum lege divina, ut sciat et sit unde proferat nova et vetera, castum, sobrium, misericordem, et semper superexaltet misericordiam iudicio, ut idem ipse consequatur” (RB 1980 282). The English verse reads:

      Al if scho be highest in degre,

      In hir-self lawest sal scho be.

      Hir aw to be gude of forthoght

      What thinges to wirk & what noght,

      Chaste & sober, meke & myld,

      Of bering bowsum os a child. (Verse 2263–68)

      In addition to making a shift from a male superior who has textual learning to a female superior who knows how to behave properly, the different emphases in these passages exhibit a desire to neutralize the potential threat of female authority.⁵⁰ Saying that the female superior should be “lowest” echoes the stress put on meekness for the female superior in chapter 2 of the verse translation in accordance with contemporary ideals of female spirituality. While both the abbot and the prioress should be chaste and sober, the desire that the prioress be “meke & myld” is a departure from the Latin account of the abbot. The abbot is to be merciful (misericordem) rather than meek, and having mercy implies having power and authority.

      Earlier in the Middle Ages, twelfth-century Cistercian abbots used maternal imagery in discussing the exercise of authority out of a need “to supplement their image of authority with that for which the maternal stood: emotion and nurture.”⁵¹ The description of the prioress’s meekness and mildness does not, however, participate in this tradition,