Lindsay Rudge PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

The abbess Caesaria and the foundation of St John
It is clear, then, that although coenobia for women did exist when Caesarius made
his foundation, the most immediate context for female dedicated life in sixth century
Gaul was that of privately maintained and family-supported dedication. What were
Caesarius’ intentions with regard to the monastery of St John, and how did these interact
with the religious dedication of his sister Caesaria? Caesarius’ motivations have been
widely explored. He had been a monk on the island of Lérins before moving to Arles, and
William Klingshirn’s study of the bishop emphasises his aim of bringing monastic
standards of asceticism and devotion into the wider community, as part of an effort to
Christianize both urban and country dwellers in his diocese. 95 To this end, as Conrad
Leyser has since argued, the nuns of St John ‘were to serve as the most potent emblem of
the moral purity evoked so fervently by the bishop in his homilies to the people’:
Caesarius’ ascetic projects – St John, his foundation for men and his own household –
and his preaching were but two props of the same mission. 96 Given Caesarius’
background, it may seem surprising that he did not found a monastery for men first.
Indeed, one of the assumptions underlying much early work on Caesarius was that he
wrote his rule for monks first, simply because he had been a monk before he became a
bishop. 97 It was only in 1971 that Adalbert de Vogüé laid out by careful textual analysis
the proof of the Regula virginum’s much closer links to its Augustinian sources than that
of the rule for monks, indicating that it had been written first. 98
Clearly, the community of nuns was profoundly important to Caesarius, and
fulfilled a range of needs in his agenda of conversion. However, as has been seen, the
somewhat teleological assumption that the monastery fitted in to a pre-existing pattern of
cenobitic religious life needs to be sidestepped. Although his own background was
‘monastic’, Caesarius’ creation of St John in the form it took was original. The
95 Klingshirn, Caesarius, 199-200; 242-3. For more on Caesarius’ efforts towards the christianisation of the
people of Arles, see R.A. Markus ‘From Caesarius to Boniface: Christianity and Paganism in Gaul’ J.
Fontaine and J.N. Hillgarth (eds.) The Seventh Century: Change and Continuity (London, 1992) 154-172.
96 Leyser, Authority, 89.
97 See, for example, the introduction to McCarthy, The Rule for Nuns, 88-92.
98 De Vogüé ‘La Règle de Césaire d’Arles pour les moines’ 369-406.
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