Publication: Feminist Studies
Publication Date: 22-JUN-03
Format: Online - approximately 9449 words
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Klaus, Carrie F.
Article Excerpt
Recent critical theory has made much of connections between architecture and sexuality. In the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argues that sexuality was a significant, but unstated, concern of eighteenth-century French boarding schools. "On the whole," he writes, "one can have the impression that sex was hardly spoken of at all in these institutions. But one only has to glance over the architectural layout, the rules of discipline, and their whole internal organization: the question of sex was a constant preoccupation." (1) According to Foucault, classroom design, students' daily schedules, and the sleeping arrangements in the schools all reveal an awareness and fear of adolescent sexuality. This implicit attention to sexuality, he argues, is a component of a discourse of power that thus perpetuates itself even as it shapes sexual identity. Although Foucault has been criticized for an exclusively male perspective and for a failure to allow for individual agency, his formulations of the relationship between architecture, sexuality, and power provide suggestive frameworks for further study.
Roberta Gilchrist has examined connections between architecture and gender in medieval English convents. The spatial arrangement of these convents, she finds, shows signs of a deep concern with gender, much like what Foucault describes. Considerations of gender were fundamental to convent design, from the selection of a building site to provisions for the separation of regular members from visitors inside convent walls. The relationship between architecture and gender is, she argues, a reciprocal one. If notions of gender influence the design of a convent or school, this design in turn informs the actions and reflections of the humans who come into contact with it. Spatial organization thus plays a significant role in the production of gender. "Space provides more than just a map of social relations," Gilchrist observes, "it is primary to the construction of gender identity." (2) In the medieval English convent, for example, a strong emphasis on privacy, made possible by sexual segregation, affected nuns' conceptions of what it meant to be religious women, and to be women.
Privacy was essential for medieval nuns, argues Gilchrist, perhaps even more than for their male counterparts. According to her study, the remotest room in a women's convent--that is, the room separated from the outside by the highest number of doors, gates, and other boundaries-was almost invariably the dormitory. Although the dormitory in men's houses was also remote, the chapter room (used for meetings) and the sacristy (used for storing holy garments and vessels) were often just as remote. Sacristies were much more easily reached in women's than in men's houses, because a male priest needed access to the women's sacristy in order to celebrate mass.
Sexual segregation was necessary for the protection of the nuns' privacy in convents because men were often present. Nuns depended on priests to officiate at masses, and visitors were common. "Double" houses, with orders for both women and men, also existed. Sexual segregation was the rule, however, and may have been more strictly enforced in women's houses than in men's. This sexual segregation extended to the parts men and women played in mass. "In nunneries," Gilchrist writes, "emphasis was on the construction of" gender identity through the strict enclosure of nuns, and in demarcating male and female liturgical roles." (3) Although religious women took vows that resembled men's, their positions in the convent and in the church were distinctly different.
In fact, according to Gilchrist, the sexual identities of religious women were much closer to secular women's than to religious men's. "Both secular and monastic women demonstrated constructions of female sexuality which centered on monogamy and chastity facilitated by spatial segregation." She adds further that "The strict, perpetual enclosure of medieval nuns may be seen as an extension of the segregation of aristocratic and gentry women within a domestic domain." (4) A certain amount of segregation was critical even to the sexual identity of secular women, and this sexual identity was only heightened when a secular woman took monastic vows.
Jeanne de Jussie's account of the Protestant Reformation in Geneva and its effect on her own Convent of St. Clare bears witness to the importance of privacy and sexual segregation in the convent. Jussie cast the whole of the Reformation as an assault on the nuns' right to spaces of their own, and she dramatized the Poor Clares' fight for control of their convent. As we consider the significance of the spatial organization of the Convent of St. Clare, looking first at archaeological evidence and then at what Jussie had to say about it, we will see that architecture was tied closely to sexual identity for these religious women. The convent itself may be seen to represent the woman's body in Jussie's text. Although the walls of the convent--and cloister--made the nuns sexually inaccessible, the women retained strong sexual identities, and threats to the walls that surrounded them carried with them a high risk of sexual violence. By paying close attention to both architecture and narrative, we will see how the spiritual and the political are inseparable from the sexual in Jeanne de Jussie's Petite chronique.
The Context
The Convent of St. Clare was established in Geneva in 1473 by Yolanda, Duchess of Savoy and daughter of Charles VII of France. The only women's convent within the Genevan city walls, it was situated at the top of the rue Verdaine, just off the busy place du Bourg-de-Four and not far from the cathedral, on the site now occupied by the Palais de Justice. This central location was desirable both for its proximity to main church buildings and for its visibility to the Genevans on whose generosity the Poor Clares depended. Despite its centrality, the location was relatively tranquil, the convent garden extending all the way to the city walls. (5)
Jeanne de Jussie, author of the Petite chronique, was born in 1503 in the village of Jussy-l'Eveque, not far from Geneva. The youngest child of a family of the lesser nobility, she attended school in Geneva and then entered the Convent of St. Clare in 1521. Sometime before 1526, she became the official writer, or ecrivaine, of the convent. She moved with the rest of the Poor Clares to Annecy in 1535, where she became abbess in 1548 and died in 1561. (6)
Two manuscripts of Jussie's chronicle are extant, both held at Geneva's Bibliotheque Publique et Universitaire. The copy that Helmut Feld, Jussie's most recent editor, calls Manuscript A is in two hands, presumably Jussie's own and that of another nun to whom she dictated when she was ill. This manuscript was most likely completed before 1555. Manuscript B, which includes clarifications of and corrections to the first manuscript, was probably copied from the original sometime during the second half of the sixteenth century. (7)
Jussie's chronicle was first published by the Catholic press of the Freres du Four in Chambery under the misleading rifle, Le Levain du calvinisme (The Leaven of Calvinism). (Calvin does not, of course, appear in this account of the early years of the Genevan Reformation.) The preface to this edition reveals the polemical motivation of the publication: The editor called her narrative "a Tragic Story, a source of Lutheranism, Calvinism, Bezaism, & other ... heresies," and he praised the Poor Clares' constancy and devotion in the face of adversity. (8) The text was edited nine times from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, including translations into Italian and German. Feld's critical edition appeared in 1996.
Jules Vuy published a monograph on Jeanne de Jussie in 1881, but little modern scholarship has been devoted to her. Henri Roth has written a master's thesis on her chronicle, as well as a brief article that appeared in the Revue du Vieux Geneve. (9) Recent studies have focused on Jussie's contact with Marie Dentiere, an abbess-turned-Reformer who authored at least one feminist text and whose preaching in the Convent of St. Clare Jussie described with contempt. (10) Irena Backus, one of the first to draw attention to the craft of Jussie's work, identifies elements of satire and propaganda in the Petite chronique. Jeanne de Jussie is thus just beginning to attract the critical attention she deserves, not only for the story she tells but for how she chooses to tell it.
The Space
From archaeological evidence and from indications in Jussie's and other historical documents, Edmond Ganter has reconstructed the Convent of St. Clare. (11) The main entrance to the convent, properly known as the "Monastere Jesus de Bethleem," was on the place du Bourg-de-Four. A visitor to the convent would enter through this door and climb a few steps into a vaulted corridor. This corridor, the main public area of...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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