Spiritual Economies. Nancy Bradley Warren

name, publicly appearing as legitimate possessor and controller in temporal matters.

      Another aspect of this court case demonstrates that Joan Ketteryche was in fact remarkably shrewd in taking advantage of both her distinctive gendered status as bride of Christ and her maternal authority over resources suggested in foundational Franciscan texts and ceremonies. During the dispute with Thomas Burgoyne and his executors, she wrote a letter to her kinsman John Paston asking that he aid Denney with goods left in his hands as executor of John Fastolf’s estate. In this letter Joan, like the famous letter-writing Paston women with whom she is connected, mobilizes textual practices for material gain. Her rhetoric reveals not only a self-awareness of the implications of being scripted as a bride of Christ, enclosed and subject to spousal authority, but also a sophisticated ability to use this identity to achieve material goals.

      Joan begins the letter with a reference to “the reverens of oure spouse ihu,”³⁸ and she makes the nuns’ enclosure, necessitated by their status as spouses of Christ, a reason for Paston to find them deserving of help. She also takes up a gendered religious stereotype to the house’s potential advantage by stressing in her request for aid that she was chosen as abbess “ful myche agens my will” and that she is “ful symple and ʒounge of age.”³⁹ Her use of this terminology brings into play the ideal of nuns’ detachment from material affairs and invokes the “myth of women’s financial incompetence,” the very myth so often reiterated by ecclesiastical officials as a reason for taking away nuns’ independent control of resources, in what is in fact a calculated effort to obtain a desired economic gain.

       Benedictines: Brides of Christ in the Marketplace

      As the preceding examples suggest, the religious identities constructed in profession and visitation for Franciscan and Brigittine nuns and the identities to which they laid claim in practice have much in common. Disjunctions between theory and practice are somewhat more pronounced, however, when one considers what Benedictine nuns were doing in their everyday lives. A chancery case brought in 1500–1501 by Elizabeth, the prioress of Sopwell (a Benedictine nunnery dependent on St. Albans Abbey), provides a compelling illustration with which to begin probing not only gaps between theory and practice but also ways in which Benedictine nuns enlarged windows of opportunity opened for them in their foundational ideological scripts.