In 1156, the German visionary Elisabeth of Schönau received a series of revelations concerning Saint Ursula, whose body, together with some of the eleven thousand virgins supposedly martyred alongside her, had allegedly been discovered in a cemetery just outside the city walls of Cologne. Elisabeth's revelations, which were prompted by the arrival at Schönau of two bodies from Cologne (one male and one female), resulted in one of her most controversial and certainly most popular works, the Liber revelationum. Prompted to investigate the Cologne discovery by “certain men of good repute,” Elisabeth reports that she was visited first by Saint Verena and then by Saint Caesarius, cousins whose bodies had come to rest at Schönau. The two regaled her with stories of the martyrs' journey from Britain to Cologne and confirmed for her the authenticity of their relics. Such confirmation was necessary: Elisabeth admits that she had initially been skeptical of the association with Ursula, since male as well as female bones had been discovered in the Cologne cemetery. “Like others who read the history of the British virgins,” she confesses, “I thought that that blessed society made their pilgrimage without the escort of any men.”Footnote 2 The bones of men, intermingled with those of women whose very sanctity depended on their virginity, caused Elisabeth no small discomfort. Pressing her saintly visitors on this point, Elisabeth nevertheless received assurance that although many men had indeed accompanied the women, they had done so licitly, primarily as members of the women's families.
Elisabeth's willingness to accept that the companionship of male relatives had not compromised the purity of the virgin martyrs has important implications for the study of medieval monasticism and, above all, for our understanding of relations between the sexes within the religious life of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. During Elisabeth's lifetime, the involvement of women in the monastic life increased dramatically—indeed, the number of monasteries for women in western Europe alone grew four-fold in the century leading up to her death in the 1160s, with some decades witnessing as many as 50 new foundations.Footnote 3 And yet, despite the obvious attraction of women to the religious life and the dramatic upsurge in houses for women during this period, there is a sense that this was a difficult time for religious women, a time when the church reform movement—with its increased attention to the enforcement of clerical celibacy—brought about creeping limitations on women's autonomy and spiritual opportunity.Footnote 4 One measure of the challenges facing religious women lies in the increased anxiety that surrounded contact between the sexes within the religious life. According to the prevailing rhetoric of the period, the separation of the sexes was essential for individual spiritual advancement; religious men in particular were encouraged to maintain their distance from women, who often appear as temptresses in monastic literature. As a result, male monastic orders appear to have limited their contact with women, withdrawing from women or denying them the crucial spiritual and material services (the cura monialium) that only a priest could provide.Footnote 5
It is against this backdrop that the visions of Elisabeth of Schönau are so important. As Elisabeth's visions demonstrate, alongside the drive toward sexual segregation within the religious life there was an alternate spiritual possibility, one in which contact between the sexes was not only acceptable, but could even be mutually advantageous.Footnote 6 As we have seen, Elisabeth's saintly visitor Verena confirmed that men as well as women had been martyred at Cologne. Moreover, the men had benefited from their proximity to women, drawing inspiration from their courage and devotion, and ultimately earning sainthood alongside them.Footnote 7 Nevertheless, the men's chief purpose in accompanying the women had been to provide spiritual care for them.Footnote 8 In several cases, the male martyrs were also bishops, who furnished the women with the sacraments during the course of their travels. In every case, however, the male-female relationship—admittedly treacherous spiritual territory—was legitimized through blood ties: the men were brothers, cousins, and uncles of the saintly women.Footnote 9
I. Spiritual and Biological Family in Early Christian Thought
The presence of men among the company of virgin martyrs and the centrality of family ties to Elisabeth's explanation for their presence raise important questions concerning the role of biological families within the overarching spiritual “family” that the Christian community—and above all the monastery—was thought to constitute. While contact between men and women within the medieval religious life was never easy, Elisabeth's account of the martyrs of Cologne suggests that it could be acceptable, provided that the men and women concerned were biological kin. Of course, Elisabeth herself may have had more than a passing interest in the legitimizing quality of kinship ties: she maintained a close relationship with her brother Ekbert throughout her life, even prompting him to join her in the religious life at the double monastery of Schönau, where he served as her secretary and aide until her death.Footnote 10
Nevertheless, the pointed celebration of family that appears in Elisabeth's Cologne visions stands in sharp contrast to a long-standing tradition within Christian thought of ambivalence concerning natural, or biological, family. According to early Christians, believers were united by ties of spiritual kinship, which superseded the bonds of biological kinship. Jesus himself championed such a view, commenting that “whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matt. 12:50; cf. Mark 3:34–35, Luke 8:21). Elsewhere, Jesus spoke out even more strongly against biological family, counseling followers to reject blood ties entirely and declaring that “if anyone comes to me, and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children … he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26; cf. Mark 10:29, Matt. 19:29). According to this teaching, biological kinship was not simply inferior to its spiritual counterpart but in fact posed an active obstacle to true discipleship.Footnote 11
Elisabeth's close ties with her brother Ekbert, together with the spirited defense of family that emerges from her Cologne visions, offers a robust challenge to this image of a Christianity in which biological ties presented little more than an obstacle for the holy man or woman to overcome. Even so, her defense of family, and in particular of the blamelessness of male-female kin relations, was not her own creation but formed part of a medieval tradition—rooted in late antiquity—in which kinship bonds could be privileged as a legitimate context for contact between ascetic men and women. Already in the fourth century, the Synod of Elvira had ruled that bishops and other clerics should allow their daughters and sisters to live with them, provided that these women had vowed themselves to God.Footnote 12 Some years later at Nicaea, the assembled church leaders declared that while clerics were to refrain from entertaining unrelated women in their homes, they could nevertheless continue to welcome their “mother or sister or aunt,” explicitly claiming that these women were above suspicion.Footnote 13
The validation of family ties expressed in these two councils reflects one side of an ongoing debate within early Christian communities concerning both the proper stance of believers toward their biological families and the ideal relationship between men and women within the newly constituted spiritual “family.” Neither topic was without controversy. Although Jesus had taught that all believers were joined to him—and thus to each other—by ties of spiritual kinship, there was nevertheless considerable concern regarding the conduct of spiritual siblings, the so-called “brothers” and “sisters” to whom the apostle Paul had addressed himself.Footnote 14 Close friendships between these men and women were routinely viewed with suspicion and even denounced by skeptical observers who doubted that such friendships could have a spiritual purpose.Footnote 15 The danger that spiritual brothers and sisters might overstep the limits of acceptable affection was made clear in Clement of Alexandria's fear that even the ritual kiss of peace might, through “unrestrained use,” cause “shameful suspicions and slanders.”Footnote 16
In response to these concerns, some Christian writers and church leaders seem to have celebrated and even promoted the biological family as an alternate, and legitimate, context for relations between the sexes within the ascetic life. Spiritual kinship—the rhetorical underpinnings of early Christian communities—was no longer sufficient to shield ascetics from scrutiny, as the early fourth-century Council of Ancyra explicitly ruled: “We prohibit those virgins, who live together with men as if they were their brothers, from doing so.”Footnote 17 In lieu of spiritual brotherhood, chaste men and women were encouraged to forge ties with blood kin, who—given similarities in age and lifespan—were most often biological siblings.Footnote 18
II. Brothers and Sisters in Late Antique Monastic Practice
In keeping with the promotion of family within certain segments of late antique Christian society, some saints' lives celebrate men's attention to the spiritual lives of their sisters, implicitly condoning, and even advancing, the legitimacy of the sibling bond. Antony and Pachomius, both founding fathers of monasticism, were each associated by their biographers with a sister, for whom they were reputed to have shown particular care. Athanasius's fourth-century Life of Antony records that, before adopting the religious life himself, the saint ensured his sister's future, placing her with a group of religious women.Footnote 19 Pachomius's biographer records that he demonstrated even greater concern for his sister, identified in the Bohairic Life as Maria, ultimately incorporating her into the religious life that he had chosen. Although he had initially refused to see her when she visited him in the desert, Pachomius later installed Maria as the head of a female community that was twinned with his male one.Footnote 20 Moreover, he guaranteed the viability of this new female community, sending brothers to build the women's monastery, selecting an old man named Apa Peter to provide for their spiritual needs, and furnishing them with a copy of his rule for monks.Footnote 21 Pachomius's community maintained close ties with Maria's foundation although the two were physically separate: according to Palladius, when one of the women died, her body was brought to the male house and buried in the men's own tombs.Footnote 22
The importance of the sibling bond, and its centrality to the monastic life and, above all, to the emergence of “double” or “paired” monasteries,Footnote 23 is confirmed in the fourth-century Life of Macrina. Bereaved of her fiancé at the age of twelve, Macrina claimed the dignity of widowhood and disdained further talk of marriage, shutting herself up in the family home, which became the basis for a small religious community.Footnote 24 Significantly, this community included both sexes. In addition to Macrina's mother, who soon joined her, Macrina raised her youngest brother, Peter, in the religious life; as her biographer and brother, Gregory of Nyssa, notes, “She became everything for the little boy: father, teacher, tutor, mother, counsellor in all that was good.”Footnote 25 That Peter lived among the holy women demonstrates that there was initially no segregation of the sexes within Macrina's community.Footnote 26 The mixed religious life of Macrina's community likely inspired a further brother, Basil the Great: the monastery that he founded, not far from Macrina's house at Annisa, likewise included both men and women, as well as children, in separate houses.Footnote 27
When monasticism was carried to the west, the association of brothers and sisters went, too. John Cassian, who introduced monasticism to southern Gaul in the early fifth century, devoted attention to both sexes, establishing a monastery for men as well as one for women—possibly for his sister—near Marseilles.Footnote 28 Just a few miles further west, Caesarius of Arles founded communities for both men and women, placing his sister, Caesaria, as abbess over the female house.Footnote 29 In addition to writing a letter to her on the religious life, Caesarius penned a rule for the women.Footnote 30 Although the male and the female communities were physically separate,Footnote 31 Caesarius envisioned himself in death not among the men, but among the women; Caesaria was buried alongside the tomb that was destined for Caesarius.Footnote 32 In Spain, the brothers Leander and Isidore—both bishops of Seville—maintained similarly warm relations with their sister, Florentina, a woman professed to the religious life. Leander, who had been a monk before being elevated to the bishopric, composed a rule to guide Florentina in her religious life, while Isidore dedicated his De fide catholica contra Judaeos to her.Footnote 33 Like Caesarius, these brothers also chose to be joined with their sister in death.
As these examples suggest, holy men were also men who had families, and often sisters who—in some cases—required their support in the religious life. In other cases, sisters like Macrina blazed a spiritual trail for the rest of the family to follow. Some men, like Gregory of Nyssa, memorialized their sisters in biographical accounts of their holy lives.Footnote 34 Others, like Pachomius and Caesarius, presided over double communities (or paired communities) in which their sisters held authority over the women.Footnote 35 Often these men also wrote rules governing the religious life for women, as Caesarius and Leander, as well as several others, did.Footnote 36 Although we rarely know very much about these sisters, some men, like Basil the Great, may well have derived spiritual inspiration from their sisters' piety. Men's devotion to their sisters was often confirmed in death: Gregory of Nyssa wrapped Macrina's body in his own grave clothes, while Caesarius of Arles, Leander, and Isidore of Seville chose to be buried alongside their sisters.Footnote 37
III. Benedict and Scholastica
By the twelfth century, when Elisabeth of Schönau received her Cologne visions, the early encouragement of family ties had been buttressed by centuries of Christian tradition, rendering contact between siblings something of a cliché, especially within the biographies of male saints.Footnote 38 Although not all male saints were associated with a sister (and some holy men continued to avoid female relatives),Footnote 39 the persistence with which sisters appear in the recorded Lives of holy men nevertheless raises several important questions. Clearly sisters were thought to play a vital role in the biographies of holy men. What role was that? What work did their presence perform in the spiritual portfolio of the holy man? Why—in short—do they appear so regularly, even when they remain largely shadowy figures? The fact that evidence for a sister's very existence is often shallow raises the interesting possibility that she may—in some cases—have been fabricated. Why?
The example of St. Benedict of Nursia is a case in point. Associated with a sister, Scholastica, from the late sixth century, Benedict nonetheless provides an ambiguous example of a brother-sister relationship. The evidence for Scholastica's life is thin—she appears only in Gregory the Great's Life of Benedict, and then only in two of its chapters. Nevertheless, her presence in the Life launched Scholastica to sainthood and provided the basis for the belief, current by the ninth century, that she and Benedict had been twins.Footnote 40
According to Gregory's short account, Scholastica had been given to the religious life as a child, yet she maintained contact with her famous brother, visiting him once a year at a house not far from Monte Cassino. On the particular occasion that Gregory records, Scholastica and Benedict had spent the day together in worship when dusk began to fall. Realizing that her brother would soon leave her, Scholastica begged him to stay the night and, when he refused, she began to pray, unleashing a torrential rain. When Benedict chastised her, Scholastica responded, invoking God as her advocate (and thereby implying his support for sibling intimacy): “When I appealed to you, you would not listen to me. So I turned to my God and He heard my prayer. Leave now if you can. Leave me here and go back to your monastery.” Resigning himself to the delay, Benedict spent the night in a holy vigil with his sister. Three days later Scholastica died, and Benedict sent for her body, which he then put in his own tomb at Monte Cassino. As Gregory concludes, “The bodies of these two were now to share a common resting place, just as in life their souls had always been one in God.”Footnote 41
The formulaic nature of Gregory's account—the brother momentarily rejecting the sister (Pachomius) and the burial in a shared tomb (Caesarius and Leander, as well as hints of Pachomius)—raises questions concerning the story's authenticity. To be sure, medieval hagiography was a formulaic enterprise, one in which past exemplars were routinely raided for present purposes. However, the possibility that Benedict did not have a sister or, more to the point, that Scholastica (if she existed) was not his biological sister,Footnote 42 raises some important questions. First, if Benedict did not have a blood sister, and there was no historical person named Scholastica, why did Gregory see the need to invent her?Footnote 43 Second, if Scholastica did exist, as a companion, or spiritual “sister,” but not a biological sister to Benedict, why did Gregory imply that she was his blood sister—and why was she later revered as his twin?
Answers to these questions point to the centrality of the sibling bond as a privileged form of engagement between men and women within the medieval religious life. The second question is straightforward enough: as we have already seen, relationships between brothers and sisters who were blood relatives were permissible within Christianity, while relationships between unrelated men and women were typically suspect. If Benedict had maintained a close friendship with a holy but unrelated woman, Gregory may have chosen to describe her as his sister in order to emphasize the closeness, and yet the blamelessness, of their bond. “Sisterhood” may be functioning here as a trope—a way for Gregory to talk about Benedict's holy relationship with one particular woman while warding off inevitable accusations of wrongdoing.
The answer to the first question is more complex. If Benedict had neither a sister nor a close female spiritual companion, why might Gregory have chosen to depict him with one? The answer may be that, by the time of writing, carefully prescribed contact with a holy woman—ideally a sister—had become an important element in the spiritual portfolio of a holy man. The pairing of a male saint with a woman (who was sometimes also a saint in her own right, as with Saints Clare and Francis of Assisi in the thirteenth century) broadened his appeal and made his story relevant not just to men, but to women as well.Footnote 44 While by the thirteenth century it was possible for such contact to be with an unrelated woman (who was nevertheless often described in familial terms, as with Thomas of Cantimpré and his spiritual “mother,” LutgardFootnote 45), in the earlier period such contact was almost always with a family member, and above all with a sister.
Gregory's decision to feature Scholastica in his account of Benedict's Life, and to paint her, at least temporarily, as the spiritual superior in the relationship, reflects the accumulated weight of several centuries of Christian tradition concerning the proper interaction of men and women, and of male and female siblings. It also, importantly, served to perpetuate the brother-sister bond, mediating the late antique paradigm of sibling intimacy to medieval audiences. Although Scholastica is not known apart from Gregory's brief reference to her, her fame nevertheless spread quickly in the century after his death and continued to grow throughout the medieval period. Her relics became the goal of acquisitive monks and were subject to conflict and controversy. Sometime between 690 and 707, monks from the French monastery of Fleury seem to have traveled to Monte Cassino, uncovered the tomb shared by the sibling saints, and retrieved the relics of both Benedict and Scholastica.Footnote 46 An account written by Adrevald of Fleury in the mid-ninth century adds that the Fleury group had been accompanied by monks from Le Mans, whose specific goal was to recover Scholastica's relics. Although the Fleury monks succeeded in retrieving the relics of both saints, the Le Mans contingent ultimately secured some relics of Scholastica and founded a new monastery in her honor to house them—solidifying her cult.Footnote 47
As we might expect, the model of brother-sister intimacy presented by Gregory influenced other hagiographers, among them the biographer of St. Hiltrude, who with her brother Guntard was described as being “another Scholastica and Benedict” and possibly also Felix, the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon biographer of saint Guthlac, who presented the saint as maintaining close (yet physically distant) relations with his sister, Pega.Footnote 48 Benedict's relationship with Scholastica may also have influenced Rudolf of Fulda's depiction of Boniface's relationship with his kinswoman (though not sister) Leoba. Although Boniface and Leoba were not biological siblings, Leoba specifically asked that she be allowed to consider Boniface as her brother, since, as she wrote to him, “There is no other man in my kinship in whom I have such confidence as in you.”Footnote 49 In keeping with their metaphorical brotherhood, and with longstanding late antique and early medieval traditions concerning saintly siblings, before his death Boniface requested that the two should be buried in the same tomb.Footnote 50
IV. Brothers and Sisters in the Twelfth Century
My purpose in detailing the early history of the sibling bond within Christian thought is to demonstrate that, by the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the idea was firmly in place that a male saint should have an intimate and exclusive relationship with one woman in particular: his sister. Despite a prevailing clerical rhetoric that emphasized the separation of the sexes, relationships between brothers and sisters, like Elisabeth and Ekbert, persisted with little apparent scrutiny. Brothers and sisters continued to maintain contact, often living in close proximity and not infrequently engaging in intimate spiritual relationships. In the first place, then, the continued prominence of these sibling relationships reveals that contact between the sexes within the religious life was not only possible, but could be actively encouraged and even celebrated by medieval Christians, despite escalating fears of sexual pollution. Indeed, the First Lateran Council, while forbidding priests to live with wives or concubines, nevertheless allowed that they could live with female kin, explicitly invoking the precedent set at Nicaea.Footnote 51
At the same time, sibling relationships demonstrate the essential mutuality of men's and women's spiritual lives. As we have seen, men contributed to the spiritual lives of their sisters, providing not only material support but sometimes also priestly services. The ultimately controversial practice of pairing male and female monasteries had its origins in the very real concern that male monastic founders like Pachomius and Caesarius had in ensuring the spiritual welfare of their kinswomen. This concern persisted in the central Middle Ages and provided the basis for such monastic foundations as Marcigny and Jully—paired with the male houses at Cluny and Cîteaux, respectively. In many cases, brothers also engaged their sisters spiritually in writing, composing letters for their edification, rules for their monastic observance, and even their Vitae after their deaths. Above all, a brother could ensure the viability of his sister's religious life, providing crucial pastoral support, which other men, although theoretically also spiritual “siblings,” could scarcely afford to risk. In sum, while familial relations provided a natural way in which men and women could establish contact in the religious life, they also provided a means through which women could claim—and receive—the care of a priest.Footnote 52
The benefits of the sibling relationship were not one-sided; men too derived significant benefits from their interactions with their sisters.Footnote 53 Like mothers, who often exerted a powerful spiritual influence over their sons' spiritual vocations, sisters too are depicted as playing an important role in the spiritual lives of their brothers.Footnote 54 Although in most cases the brother was at least nominally superior—especially if he was ordained—spiritual influence flowed in both directions. Sisters provided their brothers with spiritual encouragement, often serving as the spiritual leader in the relationship—as Scholastica appears in Gregory's brief account, or Macrina in Gregory's Life. Men in turn recognized deep piety in their sisters, often admitting a spiritual imbalance in the relationship from which they felt that they stood to benefit. Their devotion to their sisters was thus not entirely altruistic; men clearly expected to profit from their relationships with pious female siblings.
Leander of Seville offers one early example of a man who saw himself in a position of spiritual dependence with regard to his sister. Encouraging Florentina to maintain a life characterized by sexual purity, Leander makes clear his expectation that he would receive an eternal reward through her. “Although I do not have within myself what I wish you to achieve,” Leander writes, praising Florentina's virginity and hinting at his own unchasteness, “You are my shelter in Christ; you, dearest sister, are my security.” In his view, Florentina's power derived from her relationship as the bride of Christ. Placing his whole confidence in her, Leander therefore urges Florentina to intercede for him with her heavenly bridegroom: “If you are acceptable to God, if you shall lie with Christ upon the chaste couch, if you shall cling to the embrace of Christ with the most fragrant odor of virginity, surely, when you recall your brother's sins, you will obtain the indulgence which you request for that brother's guilt.”Footnote 55 As Leander writes, laying bare his own hope for salvation through Florentina, Christ will not “allow to perish a brother whose sister He has espoused.”Footnote 56
Leander is unusually explicit in detailing the spiritual benefit that he expected to achieve through his sister; however, other men shared his views concerning their sisters' potential spiritual superiority and echoed him in acknowledging the benefits they expected to receive through them. We have already seen how Macrina, whose Life was recorded by her brother Gregory of Nyssa, led her brother Peter to the religious life and presumably also influenced Basil in his own spiritual quest. Gregory's devotion to her is unmistakable, not only in his decision to record her Life but also in his presence at her death and his decision to have her corpse wrapped in his own grave clothes. He was also quick to point out Macrina's spiritual strength, likening her to Job and claiming that she had access to divine inspiration. Toward the end of her life, Gregory records that Macrina discoursed on many things, including the life to come, which he later recorded in his treatise De anima et resurrectione, where he refers to Macrina explicitly as “the teacher.”Footnote 57
In the same way, men during the twelfth century provided for their sisters' material and spiritual needs, yet expected to benefit from the relationship. This sort of spiritual exchange is clear in Elisabeth of Schönau's relationship with Ekbert. Although he was her superior in ecclesiastical matters, having been educated in Paris and ordained to the priesthood, Elisabeth was nevertheless the spiritual leader in the relationship. Sometime after she began to receive visions, Ekbert, then a deacon at Saint Cassius in Bonn, abandoned a promising career in the church in order to adopt the religious life alongside her. At Schönau, he was given the delicate task of recording Elisabeth's visions, a task that he executed with some editorial license. From Elisabeth's point of view, Ekbert's oversight may have provided a welcome degree of protection from potential detractors. For Ekbert, however, the advantages of his special relationship with Elisabeth were equally, if not more, profound. Through Elisabeth, Ekbert believed that he had access to theological truths, which she obtained in visionary dialogues, primarily with the Virgin Mary. Ekbert turned Elisabeth's visionary experiences to his own advantage, priming her with questions on delicate doctrinal matters, which he then encouraged her to present to her heavenly visitors.Footnote 58 Indeed, Ekbert was so fascinated by Elisabeth's visionary spirituality that he sought similar religious expression himself, asking his sister on her deathbed to intercede on his behalf so that he could inherit her visionary gift upon her death.Footnote 59
In addition to the tangible theological benefits that Elisabeth provided, Ekbert also profited from her personal spiritual strengths. It was most likely Elisabeth who prompted him to enter the religious life, and she who encouraged him to seek ordination.Footnote 60 She was, moreover, active on his behalf in spiritual intercession. On one occasion, Elisabeth comforted a priest (possibly Ekbert) who had accidentally spilled the consecrated wine at the Eucharist.Footnote 61 In his Death of Elisabeth, Ekbert describes Elisabeth as “that chosen lamp of heavenly light, that virgin outstanding and honored by the abundant grace of God, that splendid gem of our monastery, the leader of our virginal company.” Reflecting more directly on her influence on him, Ekbert wrote that “she bought me forth into the light of untried newness; she led me to the intimate ministry of Jesus my Lord; with her honeyed mouth she used to offer me divine consolation and instruction from heaven and made my heart taste the first fruits of the sweetness hidden from the saints in heaven.”Footnote 62
Ekbert's sense of his sister's spiritual superiority is echoed in the writings of Aelred, the Cistercian abbot of Rievaulx. In the rule that he penned for his sister's religious life, Aelred recalls their youth together, bemoaning his past sins and reminding her of her spiritual care for him: “You mourned for me and upbraided me often when we were young and after we had grown up.”Footnote 63 Even though Aelred had attained the abbatial dignity by the time of writing, he nonetheless continued to see his sister as his spiritual superior. Commenting that “we have run the same course, we were alike in everything: the same father begot us, the same womb bore us and gave us birth,” Aelred nevertheless contrasts his own life of sin to the holy example of his sister, who remained continent while he “freely abandoned [himself] to all that is base.”Footnote 64 “O sister,” he writes: “How much more happy is the man whose ship, full of merchandise and loaded with riches, is brought to a safe homecoming by favorable winds than he who suffers shipwreck and barely escapes death with the loss of all?”Footnote 65
The belief, expressed by Leander, Gregory of Nyssa, Ekbert, and Aelred, as well as countless others, that women had the potential to surpass men in their piety and the intimacy of their relationship to Christ deeply influenced men's interactions with women, adding to the traditional idea that brothers ought to attend to their sisters' needs, a sense of the real benefit to men of providing care. Whether men expected to achieve salvation through women, to gain access through them to visionary experiences, or to profit from the spiritual encouragement that women evidently provided, men clearly saw tangible benefits in their care for women. It is not surprising, then, that the relationship between a brother and his sister very often centered on the provision of spiritual care, as, for instance, in the case of Christina of Markyate, who received significant spiritual support from her ordained brother, Gregory, a monk at the neighboring monastery of St. Albans.
Christina's relationship with Gregory is revealing. Unlike Elisabeth, Christina is known from a source that was independent of her brother; he appears only briefly in her Vita and was not its author. Even so, Christina's relationship with Gregory was close; her biographer comments that she “cherished” him “with extraordinary affection.”Footnote 66 Gregory evidently returned her affection; it was his practice to visit Christina at Markyate, to stay with her and, while he was there, to say Mass for her community.Footnote 67 Yet despite Gregory's authority as a priest, there is no question that Christina was the spiritual superior in the relationship, interceding for her brother and mediating heavenly messages to him. Christina's intercession for Gregory—and also for a brother named Simon, who otherwise appears only as a witness to a Markyate charter—is confirmed in the so-called St. Alban's Psalter, which includes obits for both men.Footnote 68
Gregory's cameo appearance in Christina's Life confirms both the potential benefits that a brother in the religious life could derive from his saintly sister and his very real concern to provide for her spiritual needs. Gregory, though less spiritually mature than Christina, was nonetheless able to furnish her with one very central spiritual benefit: the Mass. As their example suggests, the pastoral care of women by a man related to them—here a brother, although elsewhere a nephew, or an uncle—raised few suspicions of wrongdoing. With his abbot's permission, Gregory was even able to stay overnight at Markyate, a feat that few monks would have dared. As Christina's brother, Gregory could presumably justify providing care for his sister, since the tradition of sisters in the lives of prominent holy men had made this relationship licit, respectable, and even a sign of male sanctity.
The catalogue of brothers and sisters could go on: Hugh of Cluny founding Marcigny with his brother Geoffrey II of Semur, no doubt with his mother, Aremburgis, and his sister, Ermengardis, in mind;Footnote 69 Anselm of Canterbury guiding and supporting his sister Richeza in her marriage and, later, widowhood;Footnote 70 Bernard of Clairvaux encouraging his sister Humbeline to adopt the religious life as a nun at Jully;Footnote 71 Richard of Springiersbach founding the Augustinian community at Andernach for his sister Tenxwind;Footnote 72 the hermit Godric of Finchale overseeing the religious life of his sister, Burchwine;Footnote 73 and Hildegard of Bingen's brother, Hugo, serving as provost at the Rupertsberg.Footnote 74 In each case, the brother provided care for his sister, founding a monastery for her, serving as her priest or as provost of her community, or writing letters or other texts to guide her in the religious life. In many cases, concern for a sister was part of a larger phenomenon that included a man's entire family—as with Bernard of Clairvaux, whose conversion was a family affair that involved several of his brothers and kinsmen. The conversion of so many men had obvious implications for their wives, many of whom were ultimately housed at Jully, alongside Bernard's sister Humbeline.
V. Families in the Religious Life
As Bernard's example suggests, it was not unusual for family members to convert to the religious life as a group. Nor, indeed, was it unusual for women, when they did convert, to live alongside their male kinsmen in communities generally designated as “male.” At Bec in the late eleventh century, where Anselm was a monk and then abbot before becoming archbishop of Canterbury, the community included several women, chief among them the founder's mother, Heloise.Footnote 75 During Anselm's time at Bec, several other women joined the community when their husbands became monks. The monastery's chronicle reports that “in the time of Abbot Anselm three noble matrons gave themselves in subjection to Bec: Basilia wife of Hugh of Gournay, her niece Amfrida, and Eva wife of William Crispin.”Footnote 76 According to Herman of Tournai, a similar situation unfolded at the monastery of St. Martin in the late eleventh century, where both his parents as well as at least one of his brothers made their profession.Footnote 77 Nor was Herman's family unique: he reports that “Henry, an extremely wealthy man, together with his wife, Bertha, his as-yet unweaned son, John, and two daughters, Trasberga and Iulitta, entered the monastic life in almost the same fashion.”Footnote 78 Ultimately the number of women who converted at St. Martin's meant that they required their own community, which the abbot Odo of Orléans founded and placed under the authority of his sister—a woman named Eremburg.Footnote 79
As these examples indicate, families during the central Middle Ages could embrace the religious life together, entering monasteries either as nuclear families with small children or as kin groupings composed of adult children.Footnote 80 Although saints' Lives from the period do often continue to present family as an obstacle to the religious life—as the Life of Christina of Markyate certainly does—it appears that family may have become more, rather than less, important with the late eleventh- and twelfth-century shift away from child oblation toward adult conversion.Footnote 81 This shift meant that new recruits to the religious life had lived many years in the world and, accordingly, brought with them not only strong family ties but also related obligations. Nor were these ties all external to the monastic community, given that entire families often converted to the religious life together. Even within the cloister, monks and nuns continued to concern themselves with family—with their mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, and even children. Elisabeth of Schönau maintained warm relations with several of her siblings, not simply Ekbert. At her death, she was surrounded by what may have been the last remaining members of her nuclear family, two of them at least “from afar.”Footnote 82 Likewise, Christina of Markyate re-created at Markyate and St. Albans a household in miniature, in which at least two of her siblings shared the religious life she had chosen. When her brother Gregory died, both Christina and her sister Margaret, also a nun at Markyate, were present at the burial.Footnote 83 At Sempringham, Sharon Elkins comments that “three nuns were sisters, their uncle was a member of the monastery, and their parents were affiliated, as part of the ‘fraternity.’ ”Footnote 84 Based on her study of nuns who had relatives within the religious life in the later Middle Ages, Marilyn Oliva similarly notes that several brothers “remembered their sisters in their wills, which indicates at the very least that the male clerics had not forgotten about their monastic sisters.”Footnote 85 Far from renouncing family and the associated dangers of the flesh, these examples demonstrate that medieval monastic men and women maintained close ties with their blood kin, despite their entrance into the new spiritualized “family” of the monastery. The blurring of spiritual and biological kin that was the result is most clear in a comment, made by Bernard of Clairvaux's biographer, that Humbeline “proved to be a true sister of the holy monks of Clairvaux not only in the flesh but also in the spirit.”Footnote 86
Elisabeth of Schönau's Cologne vision, with its abundance of episcopal uncles providing spiritual care for their saintly nieces, underscores the fact that contact between male and female family members quite often occurred within the increasingly controversial context of pastoral care. Indeed, some of the period's most interesting literature of spiritual advice for women was composed by a male relative, as in the cases of Peter the Venerable and Osbert of Clare, who wrote for their nieces, Margaret and Pontia, and Margaret and Cecilia, respectively.Footnote 87 Other women, too, found that male relatives were the most likely source for their spiritual care. Hildegard of Bingen's brother, Hugo, was not the only one of her kinsmen to support her in the religious life: when she encountered difficulties in securing pastoral care from the monks at neighboring Disibodenberg, she appealed to Pope Alexander III, who assigned her nephew Wezelinus to resolve the matter.Footnote 88 The underlying idea that men should support the religious lives of their female kin is confirmed in the letters of Heloise and Abelard. Writing to Abelard—formerly her husband in the flesh but now her “brother” in ChristFootnote 89—Heloise invoked their marriage as grounds for the care that she argued he ought to provide for her and her community. “Consider the close tie by which you have bound yourself to me,” she writes, “and repay the debt you owe a whole community of devoted women by discharging it the more dutifully to her who is yours alone.”Footnote 90 The relationship that these two had shared is certainly unique among medieval religious men and women; nevertheless, when Heloise came to claim Abelard's spiritual and material support, she did so on the basis of their familial connection, rather than their spiritual “kinship” in Christ.
VI. Conclusion
In this paper I have argued that, despite calls for the separation of the sexes within the context of church reform during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, relations between certain men and women—biological siblings—persisted and were even actively promoted in saints' lives, legend, and devotional literature. Late antique and medieval Christians, though typically ambivalent concerning the role of family within the spiritual life, nevertheless encouraged connections between brothers and sisters “in the flesh,” often preferring them to the ties of so-called “spiritual” siblings, unrelated men and women who (it was feared) could easily fall into sexual temptation and even sin.Footnote 91
The traditional use of kinship metaphors, especially the sibling motif, to describe bonds between unrelated Christian men and women confirms the importance of biological kinship as a model for the interaction of the sexes. From the first century, when Christians began to adopt the language of family to identify cobelievers, the sibling motif was used to signify the ideal relationship between chaste men and women. In the second century, the Shepherd of Hermas reports that an angel instructed the visionary to treat his wife henceforth as a “sister,” an injunction presumably to renounce sexual relations with her.Footnote 92 In the sixth century, Gregory the Great likewise wrote of a priest who “loved his wife as a brother loves his sister,” although he avoided her.Footnote 93 The fact that chaste men and women were described in kinship terms as “brothers” and “sisters,” a motif that was common both among early Christians and within medieval monastic communities as well, indicates the high esteem in which biological siblings were held by medieval Christians.
There was, nevertheless, a current of suspicion and anxiety associated even with kinship relations. Elisabeth of Schönau's otherworldly visitor Verena was quick to point out that among the 11,000 virgin martyrs of Cologne, the men had kept apart from the saintly women, joining them only on Sundays, and then for the sole purpose of providing pastoral care.Footnote 94 In a similar vein, Saint Augustine's biographer Possidius was careful to note that Augustine had not allowed his sister or any female relative to stay at his house, although such a visit would not likely have raised suspicions.Footnote 95 The eighth-century Anglo-Saxon saint Guthlac similarly refused physical contact with his sister, Pega, explaining on his deathbed, “I have in this life avoided her presence so that in eternity we may see one another in the presence of our Father amid eternal joys.”Footnote 96 Some brothers sought physical separation from their sisters, even when they otherwise supported them. For Pachomius, care for Maria and her community was furnished indirectly through the aged person of Apa Peter, leaving Pachomius himself free from potential temptation. That such temptation was real is clear from the writings of Jean Gerson. Having composed a series of letters and treatises for his six sisters, in which he encouraged them and provided guidelines for their religious lives, Gerson nevertheless admitted that he had suffered from carnal thoughts in their presence.Footnote 97
The fact that even relations between brothers and sisters could be tainted by sexual scandal was underlined in the biblical story of Amnon and Thamar, who were half-siblings through their father, King David (2 Samuel 13:8–14). Amnon, burning with illicit desire for his sister Thamar, feigned illness in order to lure her into his bedchamber, where he raped her before throwing her out of his house in disgust. The story of Amnon and Thamar was not lost on medieval audiences, who recognized that any relationship could be polluted with unchastity. The seventh-century Spanish abbot and, later, archbishop, Fructuosus of Braga, warned his monastic audience against contact with women, even those women related to them, reminding them pointedly of Amnon and Thamar: “That none may assume that his chastity is safe in the presence of a woman related to him, let him remember how Thamar was corrupted by her brother Amnon when he pretended to be ill.”Footnote 98 In the ninth century, Pope Nicholas I invoked Amnon and Thamar as evidence that the cohabitation of men and women—even those related by blood—could give rise to lechery.Footnote 99 In the twelfth century, Gerald of Wales reiterated Pope Nicholas's caution, reminding his clerical audience that although men vowed to continence were permitted to live with female relatives, they should avoid temptation since “Thamar was corrupted by her own brother Aman.” As Gerald writes, “We have even heard of certain priests who, at the instigation of the ancient enemy and because of the occasion and convenience afforded by living together, have indulged in detestable concubinage with their nieces, their sisters, and even their own mothers!”Footnote 100 For this reason, several early medieval church councils warned priests not to have female family members in their homes, even though the tradition established at Nicaea explicitly allowed such familial contact.Footnote 101
Interpretations of Amnon and Tamar did not always fuel fears of incest, however. An early thirteenth-century moralized Bible (Vienna ÖNB 2554) highlights instead the contemporary concern with clerical immorality, presenting Amnon not as a lecherous brother intent on the seduction of his biological sister, but rather as a corrupt churchman violating a female member of his flock (fols. 46rC-47*vD).Footnote 102 Interpretative texts make clear the threat posed to female congregants by lecherous churchmen. “That Moab [sic Amnon] feigns sickness to deceive his sister signifies the rich clerics who feign sickness to deceive the good virgins,” notes one commentary, while another observes: “That Moab lies with his sister Thamar by force and takes her virginity signifies those bad clerics who take the good virgins and force them and deceive them with gifts and with promises and take their virginity and their goodness.”Footnote 103 As these texts indicate, concern with the dangers of biological incest has been eclipsed in this manuscript by concern with the more immediate reality of spiritual incest—intercourse between a churchman and his spiritual child. As Peter Damian had argued, any ordained minister who had sex with a woman committed incest, since “all the children of the church are undoubtedly your children.”Footnote 104 According to the makers of ÖNB 2554, the real danger, then, lay not with biological brothers and sisters, who receive no attention here, but with male pastors who abuse the intimacy with women afforded them through their role as providers of pastoral care. Given the very real dangers of spiritual incest, one might conclude that a woman could be secure in her relationship with her priest only if he was, in fact, her biological brother.
Contact between the sexes within the religious life presented a perennial source of anxiety for medieval churchmen. Even so, men and women who were siblings both “in the flesh” and “in the spirit,” were accorded a degree of freedom in their interactions that those who shared merely in a spiritual kinship did not enjoy. Despite lingering concerns to do with incest and sexual temptation, the sibling bond remained one of the few licit means by which men and women could maintain contact within the religious life. As a connection that had been privileged since late antiquity, and that had become almost a prerequisite for male sanctity by the sixth century, the sibling bond was central to the pious medieval imagination. Like Benedict of Nursia and Scholastica, and Bernard of Clairvaux, who was paired with Humbeline in later medieval visual depictions despite the relatively small role that she played in his Vita,Footnote 105 male saints were frequently memorialized alongside female companions—who were most often their sisters. Clearly, brothers and sisters did maintain contact within the religious life; more important, it was very often assumed that they should and that such contact could be mutually beneficial.
As one of the few licit contexts for male-female monastic friendship during the medieval period, the relationship of a biological brother to his sister provides a valuable lens through which to consider relations between the sexes more broadly. The prevalence of the male-sister bond in the late antique and medieval religious world offers a compelling challenge to existing scholarly models of the medieval religious life, which have tended to assume the dissolution of family ties and the segregation of the sexes. Whether such segregation was ever more than the “pious wish” that Susanna Elm has argued for late antiquity,Footnote 106 it was, in any case, impossible, since at the very least monastic women needed sacramental services, which could only be provided by an ordained priest. Not surprisingly, these services were sometimes provided by male family members—brothers, cousins, uncles—on the basis of kinship ties. While it is true that male monastic orders routinely rejected the obligation to provide pastoral care for women, citing the distractions that such care would inevitably entail and the resources required, many individual monks were deeply involved with women. Despite the official stance of their orders, these men embraced the care of women in particular circumstances; moreover, they did so as part of a long and established tradition of men caring for their families within the religious life. Such care was not provided on the basis of an abstract obligation, but was born of deep, affectionate, and ongoing familial ties.
