When Women Ruled the Churches 2

Actress Peggy Wood as the Abbess in
The Sound of Music

We have looked at several powerful women who had great (and positive) influence in the Church, indeed who parlayed their role as abbesses to playe direct roles in Church administration.  Matilda of Quedlinburg convoked reforming synods as did Hilda of Whitby.  Brigid of Kildare actually exercised jurisdiction over a diocese and, through her royal connections, was the most influential leader of the Irish Church in the sixth century and became not only one of the three great “patron saints” of Ireland but did so precisely because she, like Patrick and Colombanus—the other two—actually shaped the character and temperament of Irish Christianity.

How did these women—and others like them—achieve this power?  We need to understand the role of women in Germanic culture as opposed to the role of women in Mediterranean culture.  Now, first of all, when I say “Germanic” let me be more specific.  I do not mean among the peoples who comprise modern day Germany but rather all the tribes from Northern Europe who occupied what is today Germany, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria and the non-Slavic lands north of the Alps.  Much of what we say about them can also be said of the Scandinavian tribes and the Celtic peoples of Ireland and Britain.  In these societies there was a fundamental equality in and before the law between men and women.  Women had rights of inheritance, property, and often even say in political assemblies.  It was not unknown for women to exercise kingship.  In 61 AD The Celtic queen,  Boudica, stormed and burned the Roman colony where London stands today.  Caesar, in the Gallic wars, tells us how surprised he was at female military and political leadership.  This is because in the Mediterranean world women were subordinate to men. They never would have led an army or commanded men!  Women had no legal personage.  They could not sue in court nor could they be sued.  They lived under the “mundiburd”—the legal protection—of a male.  A woman was under the authority of her father until he took her hand in placed it in the hand of her husband and with that gesture, the authority over her passed from father to husband.  In her widowhood, she lived under the authority of her son (and usually the thumb of her daughter-in-law). 

A Real Abbess, The Right Reverend Dame Benedicta
von Spiegel, Lady Abbess of Saint Walburga in Eichstatt
until her death in 1950. Note the crozier, pectoral cross,
and pontifical gloves as signs of her rank. 

Monastic life freed women from this subordination.  When women fled to the desert to live as hermits or in colonies of nuns they escaped male authority.  Nuns were women monks.  We lose the awareness of this in modern English where we have two words—“monk” and “nun” for men and women monastics respectively.  In Syriac, Greek, Latin, and even the modern romance languages such as Italian this is not so.  It is the same word with only a gender-specific suffix to let us know if the monastic is a male or female.  A female monastic community in the ancient world might often inter-related with a male monastic community.  The women monks might offer to weave clothe for the monks in return for some of the harder physical labor—construction projects perhaps—that they did not feel they had the strength to do.  (You might be surprised, however, at some of the projects these “delicate ladies” did undertake.)    And the nuns depended on monks for chaplaincies, though even there many of the duties we associate with a chaplain—the various blessings and rites and even the hearing of confessions—were performed by the abbess.  (The linking of “confession” and sacramental absolution, as well as the requirement for the Sacrament of Penance was not defined until the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.  Before that time, in monastic communities confession was linked more to the spiritual direction the abbot (not always a priest until the eleventh or twelfth centuries) or abbess.)  Sometimes, in fact in the early and central Middle Ages (the fifth through the eleventh centuries), and sometimes even later, the chaplains attached to monasteries of nuns were actually monks or canons who belonged not to an abbey of men but to the nuns’ abbey and owed their obedience to the abbess. 

An Abbess, by the way, is an interesting person legally.  While in the desert communities of ancient Egypt and Syria monks were governed by an abba (a “father”or a “Dad”—remember that Jesus tells us to call God “Abba”), and nuns by an ama (a “mom”), the practice soon dropped the feminine idea of an ama and feminized the word for “Dad.”  An abbess is a female abbot.  She is a women who is doing the work of a man.  She is a woman who has the authority of a man.   The Abbot is the pater familias of his monastic community.  The Abbess is also the pater familias, the “father” of her monastic community.  She is not a “mother superior;” she is a female “father superior.”  This is a hard concept for us to understand, but do you know that Queen Elizabeth of England is legally a man?  Elizabeth Windsor, the lady who drives a Land Rover and breeds racing horses is a woman, but Elizabeth II, the person who wears a crown and opens parliament stands before the law as a man.  In fact in the Middle Ages a queen regnant (a woman who heads a nation as different from a queen consort—a woman married to the king) most often referred to herself as “Rex” (king) rather than “Regina” (queen).  In the same way an abbess is legally a man, or at least was so regarded in the Middle Ages.  (And again, the key word is “legally” which differentiates between the person in private life and the person in their public office.) 

When one combines this monastic autonomy with the Germanic legal codes recognizing women as equal to men in law, then any problem with women exercising ecclesiastical jurisdiction vanishes.   If an abbot can be an Abbot Nullius—an abbot who governs a diocese—then so can an abbess.  One such Abbacy Nullius headed by a woman was Las Hueglas in Spain which I understand lasted at least until the middle of the last century.  Another was the Abbacy of Conversano in Italy.  This lasted until suppressed by Napoleon in 1806.  Here is a description of the ceremonial of obeisance by the clergy to a newly enthroned Abbess.  

A power of jurisdiction almost equal to that of the Abbess of Las Huelgas was at one time exercised by the Cistercian Abbess of Conversano in Italy. Among the many privileges enjoyed by this Abbess may be specially mentioned, that of appointing her own vicar-general through whom she governed her abbatial territory; that of selecting and approving confessors for the laity; and that of authorizing clerics to have the cure of souls in the churches under her jurisdiction. Every newly appointed Abbess of Conversano was likewise entitled to receive the public "homage" of her clergy,--the ceremony of which was sufficiently elaborate. On the appointed day, the clergy, in a body repaired to the abbey; at the great gate of her monastery, the Abbess, with mitre and crosier, sat enthroned under a canopy, and as each member of the clergy passed before her, he made his obeisance, and kissed her hand. 

We will look more at these medieval abbesses in future entries.  But in the meantime remember there is historically no problem having a woman at the head of your diocese.

Roots of the Reformation XXI: Leave it to the ladies: An Abbess' progress

Quedlinburg Abbey

Well, let’s go  back to the Emperor Otto and his determination to reform the Church.  In the first place Otto, like Charlemagne before him, needed the Church if he was going to bring unity to his vastly diverse empire.   It would be religion that could provide a common basis for all the different races and tribes, languages, legal codes, and traditions that comprised the empire he was trying to forge out of his vast holdings.  Otto also needed the Church—or to be specific—the bishops and abbots to be a counterweight to the power of the nobility and attain a true political supremacy and not just the imperial title.  Even so, supremacy did not come easily and Otto had to put down several rebellions by various dukes who were used to independence from any outside authority. 

Otto’s first brush with the papacy was when John XII, a particularly unworthy pope, appealed to Otto for help against Berengar II who was occupying the Papal States.  (Check entries for June 6^th, and June 18^th for more details on John and his alleged crimes ranging from incest to the invoking of demons.)  Otto defeated Berengar and Pope John crowned Otto as emperor.  Together they issued the Diploma Ottonianum—an agreement by which Otto pledged himself to defend the Church.  John was treacherous, however, and not wishing Otto to have control of Italy any more than Berengar, John tried to build an anti-Imperial alliance with the Magyars and the Emperor of Constantinople.  The Emperor returned to Rome and convoked a synod that deposed John and elected Leo VIII. Today the Catholic Church says that this deposing a pope by a synod and at the insistence of the Emperor was invalid and Leo was (initially) an anti-pope, but in that time and for centuries afterwards this was recognized as a legitimate act.  The Emperor claimed—and was accorded—this right to “make and break” popes as part of his oversight of the Church.  The story doesn’t end there, by the way, but we need not go further for our purposes other than to say that Leo may not have been as evil as John XII, but he was no worthy successor of Peter either.  It would be a while before the Emperors were able to get men of good moral character on the papal throne.

That doesn’t mean that Otto wasn’t sincere about Church reform, but the greatest efforts of reform during his reign were actually accomplished by his daughter, Matilda, the Abbess of Quedlinburg.  Quedlinburg was an abbey of canonesses.  A canoness is a woman religious much like a nun (or even, one might say, a type of nun) whose chief purpose is to serve the church to which her community of canonesses is attached by providing for the daily round of liturgical offices.  Just as canons are (usually) religious (in this case, men) whose chief work is to sing the offices in their abbey church, so too canonesses are obliged to sing the liturgical hours for the edification of the faithful.  They differ from monks and monastic nuns who, while the sing the daily offices, have their chief work in lectio divina (contemplation of the Word of God) and manual labor (ora et labora).  That distinction is a bit simplistic but perhaps in a future entry we can explore canons and canonesses more deeply.  I am using an awful lot of parentheses today, bear with me. 

Anyway Quedlinburg was a somewhat exceptional abbey.  It had been established by Otto’s mother who, in her widowhood, served as its first Abbess.  Otto appointed his daughter Matilda as its second Abbess when she was just eleven years old.  When Otto went to Italy to sort out various problems with the papacy, he left his daughter the Abbess Matilda, as regent in Germany.  She subsequently served as regent for her brother, Otto II, when he was occupied in Italy with various issues regarding the papacy.   While still in her teens, she convoked a reforming synod of the German prelates.  She was determined to end many of the abuses that were plaguing the Church at the time—especially the domination of important abbeys and dioceses by the various nobles who interfered with the election of bishops and abbots to put family members or clients in those positions.  This was ironic, of course, as Matilda herself had been appointed Abbess by her father, the Emperor. 

The Abbess of Quedlinburg, like the abbesses of many other imperial abbeys, was exempted from the authority of the local bishop and, indeed, had a virtual diocese of her own having jurisdiction of the many churches that belonged to the Abbey.  It was not unusual in the Middle Ages for abbeys, both of men and women, to be Abbeys Nullius—that is an abbey where the Abbot or Abbess held “ordinary” jurisdiction, i.e. the administrative (though not necessarily the sacramental) jurisdiction of a bishop.  Such Abbots and Abbesses had their own canonical tribunals, appointed pastors, gave letters dimmisorial  permitting ordinations, gave dispensations, granted faculties to the clergy and the various other jurisdictional responsibilities of bishops.  Today Roman authorities claim that one has to be in Holy Orders to exercise jurisdiction in the Church, but history testifies that this was not always the case.  In 1540 the Abbess and canonesses of Quedlinburg embraced the doctrines of the Reformation, becoming Protestant, but they continued leading their lives of prayer and education until suppressed by Napoleon (along with Catholic abbeys) in 1802.