Lindsay Rudge PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

primarily intended for canonesses. 123 For instance, the Benedictine requirement for
stability in the community finds an echo in the claustration of the nuns. As with other
rules, the community is organized along hierarchical lines, with a designated abbess,
cellarer, portress and so on. 124
On the other hand, some provisions of the Institutio remain antithetical to the
Benedictine ideal being upheld by reformers. Although some canons mention the
existence of a dormitory in which the nuns were required to sleep, 125 the sanctimoniales
could have their own houses [mansionculas], within the enclosure, and were also
permitted to retain personal property, both moveable and landed, managed through
contact with an advocate. 126 The asceticism and personal poverty of earlier monastic rules
is difficult to locate. Requirements for official entry to the community appear to have
consisted of a reading of the Benedictine rule and a vow of chastity, and the possibility of
leaving the community in order to marry also may have existed, although this has been
called into question. 127
However, to attempt to fit the Institutio into a Benedictine or a canonical pattern
is to ignore the overriding message of the preface to the text. The extended extracts from
older writers deal with the ethos of dedicated life. In the more practical articles, similarly,
the objective of the text is to present a range of measures that are available to be selected
from according to an individual community’s needs. Male communities did need to be
distinguished by two different texts, and so in 819 a further rule for monks was produced
by Benedict of Aniane; 128 monks and canons had different living environments
(monasteries and cathedrals) and different functions.
123
Schilp Norm und Wirklichkeit, 119-20.
124
Ibid., 121.
125
Canons 10, 17.
126
Canons 9 (property), 13 and 23 (housing).
127
Canon 8. Katrinette Bodarwe suggests that this apparent laxity, often upheld as typifying the canonical
life, rarely came into play in practice, and that leaving a canonical community to marry was uncommon in
the early middle ages: ‘Stabilitas loci: women’s self-regulation within early medieval monasticism’, paper
delivered at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds, July 2003.
128
K. Hallinger (ed.) Corpus consuetudinem monasticarum I: Initia consuetudinis Benedictinae (Siegburg,
1963), at 432-582.
244