1 of 5

Christina of Markyate made a formal vow of virginity at age 14, in about the year 1110. Two years later her family, an upper-class, Anglo-Saxon family in England, forced Christina into a betrothal. She was kept in physical custody for a year, during which an ecclesiastical judge was bribed to set aside her vow of virginity. The marriage took place at last.

The resisting bride, however, would not consent to its physical consummation. She spent the night prepared for her deflowering recounting to her husband the story of St. Cecilia—the saint who had convinced her husband, Valerian, to live with her chastely until each could enter a monastery. Christina’s husband had other dreams. The situation was at an impasse.

Christina then fled, with the aid of a local hermit. An anchoress (see “Terms of the Religious Life”) named Alfwen hid her for two years. Christina was then moved to a hermitage at Markyate, where some male hermits lived, and they secreted her for four more years. Ultimately her family accepted that her resolve would not weaken. The marriage was dissolved, and Christina became technically free to live a more “normal” religious life.

By this time, however, the solitary lifestyle had become established. She became a hermitess, inheriting the site where she had hid for four years. In time a group of disciples formed around her, the hermitage becoming first a group household and ultimately a convent with Christina as abbess.

Christina’s story takes us into all the types of religious life of her period. She was in turn a consecrated virgin, a recluse, a hermitess, and a nun. A traditional anchoress figures in her story as well. As her life illustrates, to be a bride of Christ was not necessarily to be a nun. Especially in the later Middle Ages, women pursued the religious life in a variety of forms.

Most medieval women married the men their families chose for them or peaceably accepted consignment to the convent, the fate of many upper-class women of the High and Late Middle Ages. Such marriages, whether to men or to Christ, were reasonably successful. To be a bride of Christ was for many women not a denial of the “natural” desire to marry and bear children, but rather the route to a life more independent and intellectually creative than in the marriage of the day.

Nuns were regulars, that is, they lived communally under rule (Latin regula) and took the three monastic vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. They came to the convent, often as children, from the households of the rich and powerful; the shelter of a medieval nunnery was available to the daughters only of those who had the resources to build and endow them.

One example was the great Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), famed mystic, author, and adviser to popes, kings, and emperors. As a frail child, she was dedicated to the church by her family, minor nobles in Rhineland Germany. At age 8, Hildegard was delivered into the care of a woman named Jutta, the daughter of the regional lord and a hermitess or anchoress.

In her youth, Jutta had refused both marriage and the convent. She chose the solitary life and the anchorhold. Her father provided the setting and financial support. But Jutta’s renowned holiness soon brought her not only the young Hildegard as disciple but also others desiring to be associated with her. What had been a cell for a solitary gradually became an irregular (without rule) household for a group. By the time Hildegard was old enough to take vows, the household had been formally constituted as a convent with Jutta as abbess. So it was that Hildegard rode out her career as a nun and later as an abbess.

next page... |  1 of 5

share this page

RSS Feed   RSS Help