4 Mediaeval Mystics
W
e saw that women who didn’t fit the norm – transgressive women – were for a long time considered to be witches. If a witch supposedly dedicated herself to the devil then her opposite was a nun, who dedicated herself to God. But some senior nuns in the later middle ages wrote books – a transgressive act of itself for any woman at that time but even more so for one who had taken vows of obedience to a patriarchal religion. And worse, they often transgressed orthodox religious views. Literally cloistered in female communities and away from the control of men these religious women expressed deeply personal views in a way they would never have been allowed to do in the outside world. Of course any male priest, however junior, could give orders to any female nun, even an abbess, but in practice some convents were large and powerful; their abbesses were often highly literate and some communicated – discreetly – on equal terms with scholars around Europe in Latin even though the mere learning of Latin was transgressive for a woman. 23