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- Title
'Man Can be Subject to Woman': Female Monastic Authority in Fifteenth-Century Poitiers.
- Authors
Edwards, Jennifer C.
- Abstract
While scholars argue that the authority of traditional monastic women declined in the later Middle Ages under the pressures of episcopal oversight, enforced claustration, financial difficulties and a lack of papal or royal support, the abbesses of Sainte-Croix in Poitiers continued to claim pre-eminence and superiority over male canons in the fifteenth century. When a dependent community of men employed contemporary misogynist rhetoric to challenge her – complaining that it was ‘against nature’ to subject men to the authority of a woman – the abbess of Sainte-Croix drew on competing discourses to emphasise the power of office holding and ancient tradition. The abbess’s arguments convinced royal authorities to support her claim to authority over men well into the fifteenth century. This case prompts a reconsideration of the assumption that authority was gendered male and excluded from female monastics in the late-medieval church.
- Subjects
POITIERS (France); DE Couhe, Isabeau; CHRISTIAN abbesses; MONASTICISM &; religious orders for women; POWER (Social sciences); AUTHORITY; RELIGIOUS superiors; CANONS, Cathedral, collegiate, etc.; CATHOLIC Church; MONASTICISM &; religious orders; MEDIEVAL monasticism &; religious orders; SOCIAL conditions of women; MEDIEVAL French history; FRENCH church history
- Publication
Gender & History, 2013, Vol 25, Issue 1, p86
- ISSN
0953-5233
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/gend.12001