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Chaucer and Religious Women in the Middle Ages, Part 1© Michelle Powell-Smith
Dec 14, 1999
Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales include individuals from all walks of medieval life. His pilgrims and the characters in their tales include both men and women, poor and rich, noble and crude. Among their numbers are several religious women, and their impact on both medieval society as a whole and on the Tales themselves is clear.
Religious women played a major role in the life in the late Middle Ages, in England and elsewhere. They were nuns, anchoresses, and mystics. Some lived within the world, while others were cloistered away from the world. The impact of religious women in English society is seen in both the art and the literature of the period. Several religious women, or examples of religious women, appear in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The women in the Canterbury Tales include the Prioress, a nun, several virgin martyrs, and two examples of ideal wives or secular holy women.
This paper will attempt to explore the relationship between the religious women depicted in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and those of late medieval England. The records of the lives of religious women will, of course, be used as source material, as will the autobiography of a well-known fourteenth century mystic and pilgrim, Margery of Kempe. I hope to explore several questions during the course of this paper. Are Chaucer's religious women an accurate depiction of religious women in late medieval England? How do religious women as portrayed in the Canterbury Tales relate to religious women who actually lived? In order to fully understand the roles of these women, we must understand their lives and circumstances. The options available to women, both within religious and secular society, were relatively few. Marriage and childbearing posed a number of physical and emotional risks to women, as well as limiting their educational and creative opportunities. The religious life offered greater freedom of education and thought, but usually confined a woman to the cloister, denying her access to the outside world. Taking vows at a traditional convent implied a permanent dedication to the church, but also served to place women under the authority of the male dominated church. Convents in the Middle Ages were not, as they later became, refuges for poor women. The nuns of the Middle Ages were wealthy women, who had to be dowered by their families in order to enter the convent.
Nuns lived under the rule of an abbess or prioress, typically following some variance of monastic rule. Their lives were, at least ideally, quite simple, devoted to work and to prayer. Some women entered the convent because of their own personal devotion and piety, while others entered the convent for political, familial or economic reasons. While the convents were not refuges for poor women, it was often a less expensive option to send a daughter, particularly a younger daughter, into the church rather than dowering her for marriage. One can easily imagine that the Prioress was such a case.
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