Lindsay Rudge PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

all religious women together and direct them to follow a single way of life, privileging
neither Benedictine nor canonical norms.
What can the text itself reveal about its purpose? The first point here must
concern the title of the work. The description Institutio sanctimonialium is itself original.
One manuscript, Munich Bay. Staat. Clm 14431, describes the work as both Incipit
regula et modus vivendi sanctimonialium que vocantur canonicae, and in the list of
chapter headings, Concilii Aquisgranensis liber II, qui est de institutione
sanctimonialium. 108 The phrase sanctimonialium que vocantur canonicae, ‘nuns who are
called canonesses’, is of great significance. The most important fact about the dedicated
women it concerned was that they were sanctimoniales: nuns, just as the women who
lived in other styles of institution were nuns. Contemporary annalists provide their own
interpretations of the documents produced at Aachen, and reflect the understanding that
the ‘type’ of religious woman the rule was intended for was less important than the fact
of it being for religious women at all. The Lorsch annals record that after it had been
ordered that all monks should follow the rule of Benedict, duo codices scripti sunt, unus
de vita clericorum et alter de vita nonnarum. 109 To some extent, then, debates over the
difference between monastic and canonical forms of dedicated life are less than helpful.
The Institutio is recognizably part of the same instinct to present current
requirements in the context of the past that lay behind the Concordia regularum. In
particular, this is represented by the extended preface to the rule itself – perhaps just less
than half of its entire contents – which is made up of selections from letters on virginity,
and so forms a florilegium on the subject. These are Jerome’s letters to Eustochium,
Demetrias and Furia, Cyprian’s De habitu virginum, Caesarius’ ‘sermon’ to nuns (in
reality his letter Vereor) and Pseudo-Athanasius’ Exhortatio ad sponsam Christi. 110
Caesarius stands out in this group as a somewhat later figure than the others, and also as a
religious thinker more closely linked to the same monastic tradition in which Benedict
108 MGH Concilia II, 1, 422.
109 MGH SS I, 122. The use of the term ‘nonna’ may itself be revealing, since it was rarely used before the
eighth century and then was found most often in capitularies.
110 Jerome Epistolae Ed. I. Hilberg, CSEL 54-6 (Vienna, Leipzig, 1910-18); Cyprian, De habitu virginum,
PL 4, 443-444; Pseudo-Athanasius’ Exhortatio ad sponsam Christi CSCO 593.
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