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Article Excerpt
The saints played a significant role in the life of any medieval Christian: structuring the sense of time through their feast days, appearing in church paintings and sculptures, featuring in sermons and Gospel readings, acting as intercessors and patrons in the business of daily life, to note only a few of their most obvious functions. And within this larger picture, as recent research has shown, the particular uses of a given saint in different populations could be extremely varied across time and place. (1) My focus here is on the role that the saints might have played, as far as we can recover it, in the imagination and spiritual life of the nuns and brethren of Syon and the monks of Sheen, the sibling monasteries founded by Henry V around 1420, and particularly their views of their vocational and spiritual labor within and outside the cloister. (2) I focus here primarily on Syon, the only Brigittine foundation in England, although some of what I have to say also involves Sheen, the strictly enclosed Carthusian monastery located near Syon and closely connected with it.
Most lay relationships to the saints also, of course, obtained for professed religious, but nuns and monks had further connections to the saints beyond those of their secular counterparts. They were more likely to read, or frequently to hear read, the lives and writings of the saints; they lived under the rule of a given saint; and their monastery or abbey was quite likely dedicated to a patron saint. In the case of the Brigittines of Syon Abbey, these connections were intensified by the fact that their saintly founder, relatively recently deceased, was emphatically present in all three contexts. (3) Moreover, Birgitta's sense of her own relationship to the saints, and the way this relationship was expressed and instituted in her Revelations and her Rule (conveyed to her directly in a vision, by Jesus), had an important shaping effect on Brigittine spirituality. Essentially, I suggest, the saints, male as well as female, performed a simultaneous function of enclosure and exposure for both Birgitta and her order, acting as a kind of mediating community that structured not only the nuns' and brethren's practices within the monastery, but the public aspects of their foundation and their spirituality, their connections to the larger world.
This marks one of the greatest differences between the Brigittines of Syon and the Carthusians of Sheen. If, as Neil Beckett says, "among the noblest expressions of the Carthusian ideal is 'To make many saints but not to publicize them' (Non sanctos patefacere sed multos sanctos facere)," we might say that among the noblest of the Brigittine ideals was, rather, "sanctos patefacere." (4) As one might expect, however, such a public ideal, especially when associated with an order of enclosed women, could rouse anxieties, and the resistance to Birgitta's own canonization and the resulting problems with the foundation of her order reflect this. (5) It was thus necessary for Birgitta and for her order to inflect their claims to a public role (especially in the case of the nuns) by presenting those claims in culturally acceptable terms and imagery.
A consideration of what is distinctive in Birgitta's and Brigittine uses of the saints--in the founder's Revelations, in Brigittine church architecture, and in devotional, liturgical, and hagiographic texts composed or copied at Syon--shows us how they modeled, for these holy women and their brethren, a transcendence of the kinds of boundaries that could have made an enclosed life seem more isolated from the world than in fact it was. The saints' overlapping and fluid roles, crossing the gaps between heaven and earth, life and death, domestic and public, male and female, enabled both Birgitta's own public vocation and the collaborative spirituality of Syon. The saints, always a bridge "in medieval culture, became for the Brigittine nuns and brethren also a way to make the enclosed, domesticated, female-ruled space of the Abbey interdependent with the public, political, and seemingly male-dominated world of Lancastrian England.
Recent scholarship has been attentive to the ways in the nuns and brethren of Syon negotiated the gender trouble potentially created by their unusual institutional structure, and has acknowledged and explored their substantial links to the outside world. (6) Such studies have often, and with good reason, focused primarily on the Abbey's female networks and on women's strategies for managing the various hierarchical structures that contained and potentially constrained them. What a consideration of Birgitta's own relationship to the saints, and its development at Syon, can contribute is a rounding out of the picture that, while acknowledging the primacy of women in the order and the extraordinarily important role of Mary, also considers the broader realm of male and female saints who surrounded the community and, as it were, brokered its connections to both heaven and earth. As I will argue, their influence helped to shape a sense of labor, profession, and familial networks that was perhaps less hierarchically confining and less strictly gendered than a focus on the nuns alone, and their "all-girl show," can fully convey. (7)
WORKING FAMILIES: THE SHAPE OF LIFE AT SYON
I begin with a consideration of what made Birgitta's own relationship to the saints so distinctive. First, the saint who ranked above all others, St. Mary, was centrally important to Birgitta's spirituality, and her complex role both modeled and shaped the role of the saints more generally. (8) Second, Birgitta was a visionary, and her Revelations are extensively populated with saints (Mary prominent among them) participating in her visions, commenting on or explicating scripture or current events, and conveying advice to her or to those who requested her help. Since the Revelations and Birgitta's vita were well known at Syon, the sense of the saints as participants in the creation of their founder's spirituality and public mission, and thus of their own order, would presumably have been familiar to the Abbey's inhabitants. (9) Finally, Birgitta's strong tendency to convey spiritual ideas through powerful imagery and significant objects has some intriguing implications for the saints' role. (10) All three of these aspects were linked in Birgitta's thought, in her Rule, and thus in the life of Syon, and in turn contributed to the Abbey's distinctive practices and its textual production.
Mary's importance in Birgitta's spirituality has been the subject of extensive research. Here I emphasize two strands of that importance: Mary's role in shaping the structures of the Brigittine order and its practices, and as an enabler of Birgitta's own prophetic and public vocation. Mary's motherhood was of course the foundation of her role in medieval spirituality generally, and this is as clear at Syon as elsewhere. In one example from the Syon Additions for the sisters--that is, the accretions to the Rule specific to Syon--the abbess, speaking for the monastery, responds to a petitioner who wishes to become a lay brother or sister of the monastery, a member of its lay confraternity. "In the name of our lorde ihesu criste, and of hys blissed moder our lady saynt marye, ande of our holy moder saynte birgitte, and of al sayntes, and in the name of al the hole congregacion of sustres and brethren, and in myn owen name ..." she addresses the prospective "sibling." (11) The collective identity of the monastery reinforces the parallel motherhood of Mary and Birgitta as heads of the community, a community that includes "al sayntes, and ... al the hole congregacion of sustres and brethren" both within and outside the walls. As Roger Ellis observes, "office is the obvious expression of motherhood in the Order," so that motherhood becomes less a private or domestic role than an important public aspect of the monastery's identity, the terms on which it engages with the outside world. (12)
Mary's structural importance is even more evident in her role as the model for the order's abbess; her place as head of the post-Ascension community validated the abbess's rule over nuns and brethren alike. (13) The context of Ascension and Pentecost is particularly important since the brethren's responsibility for preaching was taken very seriously (here again echoing the outspoken Birgitta's own emphases); the abbess, like Mary, thus becomes explicitly the head of a community with an important pastoral function. (14) While the sisters themselves, whose strict enclosure was widely admired, did not of course preach, their primacy in the order--which was founded "per mulieres primum et principaliter," first and especially for women--makes the brethren's preaching a kind of offshoot of the sisters' religious vocation. (15) The abbess's symbolic role as Mary, moreover, is echoed in the Rule's establishment of the order's numbers: there are to be sixty sisters, thirteen priest-brothers (the apostles plus St. Paul, the honorary apostle), four deacons (representing the four Doctors of the Church), and eight lay brothers; the community as a whole thus numbers eighty-five, equaling the thirteen apostles and seventy-two disciples. (16) These numbers, combined with the nuns' preeminence in the order, imply that the "apostles" exist for the sake of instructing the "disciples," an emphasis that subtly shifts the hierarchy between them.
The subtle reworking of standard hierarchies of speech and pastoral function is of course a notable feature of Birgitta's Revelations and of her own public career. Claire Sahlin has shown how effectively Birgitta revised traditional ideas of Mary's silence and femininity to make her a model for outspoken prophecy, turning her motherhood into a basis for speech rather than a substitute for it, much as the order's structure turns that motherhood into a public and official status instead of a purely domestic role. (17) This shift from a private and enclosed role for Mary to one with a more public aspect can also be seen in the Rule's command that there are to be three daily readings from the Sermo angelicus, a revelation in praise of Mary and her virtuous life, dictated to Birgitta by an angel. (18) As Ingvar Fogelqvist notes, "In the monastic tradition, these three readings were normally Bible readings and explanations of the Bible by the Fathers"; the Brigittine Rule thus places Mary and her life in a position ordinarily occupied by canonical, biblical readings. (19) As Katherine Zieman has pointed out, turning Birgitta's Revelations into part of the liturgy moves them away from a personal identification with Birgitta herself, enabling their "participation in a powerful symbolic system." (20) Indeed, as Margot Fassler notes in her response to Zieman, "the cult of the Virgin and the cult of St. Birgitta were entwined" in the Brigittine liturgy for the sisters who sang and the brethren and laity who listened to the service, and the chants and hymns in praise of Mary formed "the undergirdings of liturgical and devotional life." (21) The nuns were encouraged to consider that life, and especially the performance of the liturgy, as "a primary sign of the community's responsibility to the outside world." (22) Through their performance of the Brigittine Office, these strictly enclosed women became part of a larger network, responsible to and participating in the full community of the faithful through the models of Mary and Birgitta.
If Mary's preeminent role in Birgitta's spirituality is a key aspect of the saints' importance at Syon, however, many other saints populated the communal life of the Brigittines as they populate Birgitta's visions. While Mary and Jesus are by...
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