Download PDF | Paula M. Rieder (auth.) - On the Purification of Women_ Churching in Northern France, 1100–1500-Palgrave Macmillan US (2006).
259 Pages
INTRODUCTION
On Ash Wednesday of 1259, Nicola of Rouen, a choir nun at the monastery of Saint-Saens in Normandy, gave birth to her second child by Simon, the rector of the village church at Saint-Saens. The birth took place inside the monastery where Nicola was subsequently churched. The child was sent to Rouen to be raised by one of Nicola’s sisters. In July of that year, during a regular episcopal visit to the monastery, Bishop Odo of Rouen heard about the child and Nicola’s churching and included the information, without further comment, in his register.1 By 1259, the purification of women after childbirth was a very old custom in France dating back, at least, to the ninth century, but at the time of Nicola’s churching, the meaning and importance of this ancient custom was in flux.
The practice of churching in France went back to the early Middle Ages and began as a purification of a new mother about a month after the birth of a child. Without the purification, a woman was prohibited from entering a church for fear she would desecrate sacred space with blood pollution. Gradually, in ways that cannot be traced with any precision, customs accumulated around the purification. By the twelfth century, it was a rite performed in the parish to which the new mother came, in the company of other women, bearing a candle and an offering. We have no way to know if Nicola’s churching conformed to these customs, but her purification can surely be explained in terms of sacred space. Her blood pollution would have endangered the monastery chapel and without purification Nicola would have been unable to participate in the divine office or other prayers central to her life as a choir nun. Yet even as Nicola was being purified in order to protect sacred space from blood pollution, the meaning and customs surrounding the rite were already evolving in a different direction.
While churching remained a rite of purification, the meaning and importance of that purification changed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as theologians became less concerned about blood pollution as a threat to sacred space and instead began to discuss it as an obstacle to marital intercourse. Acting in concert with this new concern, French bishops began issuing legislation aimed at controlling access to the rite. Their efforts made churching into a privilege for properly married mothers. Unwed mothers, marginalized by these developments, continued to find illegal means of obtaining the rite, seeking the healing or spiritual comfort it offered. Bourgeois matrons and their families, on the other hand, benefited from the bishops’ legislation and surrounded the celebration with secular customs intended to enhance social status and family honor. The French term for this occasion, relevailles, or getting up, suggests the common perception of the day as a celebration of a mother’s ability to rise from childbed and return to an active life with her family. For both practical and social reasons, this was a significant moment for women and their families. Churching, consequently, became important for husbands as a means of expressing their status within the community as the head of a proper household. Thus, this “women’s rite” became very useful to men. These divergent understandings of the rite ensured that churching became a site of conflict over issues of power and authority. As a mark of social status, churching also helped to create social identities.
A woman who was married to the father of her children was identified as a proper matron and a respectable member of the parish community by her right to a public churching. Conversely, women who conceived and gave birth outside of marriage were identified as sinners and marginal members of the community by being denied a proper churching. Churching, thus, helped to shape the definition of the proper woman by insisting that all mothers be married and equating unwed mothers with bad women. These definitions, in turn, shaped the borders and identities of Christian communities by including some women and their husbands and excluding other women and the men associated with them.
The liturgy of churching, celebrated at the parish church, was the main event around which these social constructions operated. As it was celebrated in late medieval northern France, churching centered on a mass attended by the new mother, her birth attendants, and family. The mass was sometimes preceded by a blessing at the church door and was always followed by the new mother receiving a blessing and the gift of pain bénit, blessed bread. The liturgical celebration was customarily followed by a feast honoring the new mother and her family. Following her purification, a woman was allowed and probably expected to resume her sexual role as wife, since the ritual had cleansed her of blood impurities that would have made intercourse dangerous. By the dawn of the Reformation, churching was an ancient custom rooted so deeply in the lives of medieval women, their families, and their communities that reformers found it virtually impossible to eradicate. Between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, the ritual of churching had developed into an established liturgical form and the public service had come to be surrounded with regulations and customs.
The ideas underlying the ritual maintained a loose connection to Mosaic prescriptions against blood pollutions and the Biblical precedent of the Virgin Mary’s purification, but its actual performance functioned in a variety of ways that served different and sometimes conflicting interests. Many of these meanings would not have developed had churching remained only a rite concerned with protecting sacred space. I argue that the episcopal redefinition of churching as a rite that honored marriage allowed it to evolve into a powerful element in medieval life capable of shaping social identities and the boundaries of community, especially on the local level. At the same time, the persistent notion of churching as a rite of purification underlined and confirmed the belief that women’s sexuality, especially when expressed outside the boundaries of legitimate marriage, was dangerous and polluting. Though churching was a women’s rite, it also served to support and maintain the patriarchal order of medieval society. This book examines medieval churching in France: its origins and redefinition, the character and form of its liturgy, and its development as a significant event in the lives of medieval women and their families. Chapter 1 explores the roots of churching in medieval France and traces what little is known about it up to the twelfth century. Chapter 2 documents the episcopal redefinition of churching between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries and describes the contexts in which this crucial change began. In spite of the bishops’ definition of churching in terms of marriage, clerics continued to describe the rite as a purification from blood, semen, and lust. This persistent understanding of churching is explored in chapter 3.
The liturgy of churching, discussed in chapter 4, expressed the clerical understanding of the rite as a purification, though as a ritual the meaning of the liturgy was open to other interpretations. Chapters 5 and 6 explore the meanings of churching for women. Within the context of childbirth, churching marked the end of a woman’s lying-in but also offered healing to women who had suffered through a difficult delivery. The public celebration of churching, explored in chapter 6, presented some women with a rare opportunity for recognition but served as a site of conflict for others; both experiences underline the character of churching as a women’s rite that, nevertheless, expressed multiple meanings. The final chapter expands the meaning of churching beyond those of clerics and women to include husbands, families, and the communities of parish and village. Studies of churching, such as this one, are rare. Until quite recently, the practice has been virtually ignored by scholars. Between 1909 and 1980, I am aware of only five works published on the ritual of churching and these are pastoral in tone having been generated by modern uses of churching and by the reform of the Catholic liturgy under Vatican II.
Since 1980, the situation has begun to change with the publication of a number of valuable articles on the rite in medieval and early modern Europe. The most persistent questions raised in this new body of literature is whether we should consider churching as primarily a rite of purification or whether its other meanings are more important to our understanding of its role in medieval and early modern life. Unsurprisingly, given the nature of the rite, recent scholarship has also debated the significance of churching in women’s lives: its impact on them, their role in shaping the rite, their interest in its continued existence. The earliest work on churching is found in Adolph Franz’s Die kirchlichen Benediktionen im Mittelalter published in 1909.3 He included one chapter on blessings for mothers in which he discussed rites for and at the birth, the blessing of a woman after the birth, the blessing for a woman on her return to church, that is, at her churching, and blessings for women who died in childbirth.4 Under these rubrics, Franz provided a broad scope of information, including numerous examples of folk customs and hagiographic traditions related to childbirth and mothers. Franz’s handling of churching is sweeping, in one sense, covering the rite in the Eastern as well as the Western Church, beginning in the third century and continuing, in some details, until the sixteenth. On the other hand, Franz based his research almost exclusively on German-speaking sources. Among the seven ordines that Franz used as examples of the rite, one is English and the rest are from either Germany or Austria. His discussion of customs surrounding the liturgy was largely taken from German sources though he sometimes noted practices in other regions, such as the French tendency to include a mass in the rite of purification.5
In spite of his emphasis on German sources, Franz’s work is not a comprehensive study of the German practice. His story of churching is stuffed with interesting facts and anecdotes but also leaves a great deal unexplored. He noted, for example, a diversity of opinion between those who thought it was absolutely necessary that a woman stay away from church after the birth of a child and those who thought it was salutary but not obligatory;6 but he seemed uninterested in the implications or potential impact of these different viewpoints. Moreover, his discussion shifts alarmingly from country to country and over large periods of time without any apparent concern for continuity or solid argument. Thus, his discussion of churching has some serious weaknesses. In spite of these limitations, Franz’s work remains an important resource for the study of medieval churching. Like more recent scholars, Franz was concerned with the meaning of churching. He described the prayers for a mother before, during, and after the birth, as well as the folk beliefs and customs that supported or conflicted with these official liturgies. Childbirth emerges as a dangerous moment not only because of the mother’s physical risk but also because of a lingering susceptibility to evil spirits that was only dispelled at her churching. He noted that the notions of female pollution and purification were basic to the origin and development of the liturgy of churching.7 Nevertheless, based on statements from the official church and pontifical decrees, he considered it a prayer of thanksgiving.8 Franz’s willingness to discount the common understanding of churching in favor of the church’s official opinion leads him to an understanding of churching that his own evidence does not seem to support. Because churching is concerned with childbirth and women’s role as mothers, it has great social significance. Sociologists and anthropologists have recognized this importance and struggled to understand the meaning of the rite, but have generally seen it in negative terms. Peter Rushton, writing as a sociologist, used the language of pollution devised by anthropologist Mary Douglas to explain the rite, which he believed was oppressive. He described women as “victims” of practices such as churching, which he saw as maintaining a negative ideology of reproduction.9 The author of an anthropological study of life in rural Spain described churching as “a pernicious superstition” and “another instance of the way that women are made to feel impure.”10 Many scholars have adopted the language of anthropologist Arnold van Gennep and describe churching as a classic rite de passage, moving a woman from a liminal position created by the pollutions and restrictions of childbirth to full reincorporation into the family and parish community. Such approaches to churching, as historian David Cressy has pointed out, are problematic because they tend to present the rite only from a single viewpoint rather than placing it within a wider context or considering it from a woman’s point of view.11 Recent studies by historians, mostly scholars of early modern Europe, have begun to address this problem. Most of these scholars suggest, as I do in the present work, that churching had different meanings to different audiences at different times.
A notable exception is William Coster, who understands churching in Reformation England as a kind of penitential purification. Consequently, he is puzzled by the fact that women held onto the rite when ardent Puritans tried to abolish it.12 Cressy, in contrast, emphasizes the multiple meanings of churching to women, men, Puritans, and Anglicans, as well as the fact that its meaning was hotly debated and unstable within the turbulent world of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.13 Adrian Wilson, looking at seventeenth-century England, describes churching as part of a women’s culture surrounding childbirth that allowed women to resist and challenge patriarchal authority.14 Susan Karant-Nunn, on the other hand, argues that churching in Reformation Germany ultimately worked for men, not women, and served to reinforce women’s subjugation.15 Using documents written between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, Becky R. Lee points out that English men understood churching as valuable for themselves, as well as their wives, long before the Reformation.16 Finally, Gail McMurray Gibson, focusing on similarities between the annual feast of Candlemas and the liturgy of churching in late medieval England, argues that these events offered conflicting and even contradictory messages that presented women as inferior and their bodies as polluted while at the same time acknowledging female importance and power.17 Since 1990, our understanding of churching has moved well beyond Franz’s rather disjointed beginning and has demonstrated its potential as a fruitful and fascinating window into life in premodern Europe. By examining churching over four centuries in medieval France, this book significantly deepens our understanding of the ritual and its importance. It reveals that many of the characteristics of churching in early modern England and Germany already existed in the French medieval rite. Recognizing the long history of the customs surrounding churching, especially its significance to men, allows us to understand better the persistence of this “popish” ritual into and through the Reformation. Moreover, this study argues that much of the importance and complexity of the rite, visible both in the Middle Ages and beyond, resulted from the episcopal redefinition of churching that began in the thirteenth century. Whether a comparable development occurred in other places in medieval Europe remains a question that future studies, focusing on other regions, could determine. The relative scarcity of sources for studying churching in the Middle Ages has, no doubt, discouraged scholars from tackling the subject. No medieval cleric wrote a treatise or a sermon specifically on the purification of women after childbirth. Medical authors had little, if anything, to say about it. Regulations concerning women after childbirth were included in lists of laws and books of penance, but almost invariably without commentary. I have not found a French liturgy of churching in any priests’ manual or liturgical book prior to the fourteenth century. Even then, extant liturgies are scarce; I have found only eight. While there are descriptions of the churching of medieval queens in England, French sources are nearly silent on the practice of churching among aristocratic and royal women of the Middle Ages. Indeed, the direct experience of French women is obscured in the sources, which speak almost exclusively in a male voice. This problem of sources is not, of course, unique to churching. Still, to complete this study required casting a very wide net. This study is focused on northern France because of the rich library and archival collections in that region and because the custom of churching was especially strong in Normandy. I originally intended to examine churching in the early and high Middle Ages but found material from these periods to be thin or nonexistent. I have no doubt that customs of purification after childbirth were practiced earlier and more widely than the sources seem to suggest, but the paucity of evidence makes it difficult to describe these practices in much detail before the twelfth century. A full picture of the liturgical and social celebrations of churching in France is possible only in the fifteenth century. Penitentials or early books of penance are the best sources of information about purification after childbirth in France during the early Middle Ages.18 The custom of private penance and the use of penitentials in the administration of this practice arose in the Irish Church and were brought to the Continent around the end of the sixth century by Irish and AngloSaxon missionaries. By the eighth century, penitentials were being produced on the Continent. All of the penitentials used in this project as evidence of French practices are continental in origin and have a Frankish connection.19 All are available in modern editions; the most important are those of Wasserschleben, Finsterwalder, Schmitz, and Bieler. Many of the penitentials brought to or produced on the Continent did not have official sanction for the Western Church or even for the whole of a country.20
Thus, aspects of church discipline reflected in the penitentials cannot be taken to indicate a uniform practice throughout the Frankish realm. On the other hand, some synods and individual prelates mandated that their priests have a copy of a penitential, suggesting that their use was supported and approved in these local regions. Furthermore, the numerous manuscripts and their wide circulation reveal the practical value of these books to the parish clergy who used them. Thus, while generalizations based on the penitentials must be made carefully, their widespread usage and local approval suggest a broader application than might be expected for works lacking official sanction. The production, copying, and use of books of penance continued into the eleventh century. Late examples of the genre include the tenth-century penitential of Regino of Prüm and the Corrector in Burchard of Worms’s Decretum (1007–15).21 Ivo of Chartres included material from the penitentials in his twelfth-century work;22 however, beginning in the thirteenth century, penitentials were largely replaced by confessors’ manuals. This new form of penitential literature developed partly in response to a perceived need to convert the laity through preaching and confession.23 The genre continued to develop and remained an important element in the ministry of penance through the fifteenth century.
The confessors’ manuals used in this study circulated within the French church, though not all were produced in France. A number of these exist only in manuscript or incunabula but some important manuals for confessors are available in modern edition, including those of Robert of Flamborough, Peter of Poitiers, and Thomas of Chobham. Penitential literature is especially helpful in uncovering clerical ideas about pollution and purification. A fuller understanding of clerical attitudes, however, can be found in more descriptive sources such as theological treatises and, especially, sermons. Preaching has always been part of the Christian tradition and was usually considered the best or at least a major tool for instructing and admonishing the laity.24 A number of factors, including concerns about heresy and efforts at church reform, contributed to major developments in the tradition of preaching from the thirteenth century. As a result, the number of extant sermons from the thirteenth century increases considerably. Sermons thus provide a consistent and relatively abundant source for clerical attitudes toward churching, especially during the central and later Middle Ages.25 Their didactic and hortatory nature, perhaps a disadvantage when using them as sources of social practice, make them quite valuable as reflections of clerical ideals and beliefs. All of the sermons examined for this book were written by clerics who either lived in France or whose preaching would have been known in France. Although some sermon collections have been edited, such as those of Bernard of Clairvaux, most sermons used in this study are available only in manuscript. Two groups of sermons are especially appropriate as sources on churching: sermons written for the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary and ad status sermons directed at married couples. Even in these contexts, however, preachers rarely discussed churching directly. The purification of ordinary women is used only as a foil for the real point of the sermon, Mary’s sinlessness and humility. Nevertheless, such arguments reveal clerical authors’ perceptions of churching by the way they argue for Mary’s freedom from the obligation to be churched. Women’s purification, however, was not a major focus in any of the sermons except for one by Vincent Ferrer, which is discussed in chapter 3. Ad status sermons were directed at specific social groups, such as married couples, and addressed what the clergy believed to be the major duties and responsibilities of the group along with their most prevalent faults or temptations.26 Whether the laity agreed with the ideas they were exposed to in such sermons is difficult to say, but the sermons are especially valuable as sources for the beliefs of the educated clergy regarding churching and its impact on the sexual lives of the married laity. To recover the actual practice of churching in the medieval parish or local community requires an entirely different set of sources. Liturgical books provide us with the actual liturgy and are discussed at some length in chapter 4.
In addition, synodal statutes (legislation issued by bishops) and records from ecclesiastical courts charged with enforcing canon law are useful. These latter sources reveal the intentions and designs of the French bishops and also tell us something about the laity’s cooperation with or resistance to ecclesiastical authority. Bishops were guided in the exercise of their authority by canon law and papal decrees but could promulgate diocesan legislation shaped to meet their own particular needs and circumstances. Often, though not exclusively, this was done by issuing statutes at diocesan synods, obligatory meetings of all the clergy in the diocese designed to educate and control the local clergy, especially parish priests.27 French diocesan assemblies date back to the sixth century but became more regular during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with the rapid growth in the number of parishes and the increased need to instruct and discipline the growing number of often poorly educated clergy who staffed them. Because of the regularity of diocesan synods, especially after 1215, the statutes issued at these meetings provide a relatively abundant and consistent source for the episcopal regulation of churching. Many diocesan statutes have been edited, although the records of some synods are missing or incomplete.28 For the majority of medieval Christians, ecclesiastical authority was exercised through the bishop’s court where breaches of canon law and local statutes, including those involving churching, were heard. These courts had developed during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries into a separate institution known in France as the officialité and were presided over by a cleric trained in canon law and appointed directly by the bishop.29 Although the records of episcopal courts are an important source for the history of churching, especially in terms of lay compliance with episcopal regulation of the rite, few are available before the very end of the Middle Ages. Methods of keeping records in the officialité developed gradually and took the form of official court registers only at the end of the fourteenth century.30 Ecclesiastical court records for northern France are in manuscripts housed in departmental archives, with the exception of the records from the court at Cerisy, which have been edited. All of the sources described above were produced by the clergy and express clerical ideas and beliefs. By far the most difficult task of this study was to find sources reflecting the views and practices of the laity, especially those of women. The one aspect of a churching celebration controlled and organized by the laity, however, was the family feast or feste des relevailles. The major source of information on these feasts is letters of remission from the Trésor des Chartes.31
These were formal statements issued by the royal chancery in the name of the king, or sometimes the queen, granting pardon for a capital offense.32 Over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the French royal chancery issued well over 40,000 letters of remission, many of which are now housed in the Trésor des Chartes in the French National Archives.33 Although references to churching feasts are relatively rare, the narrative character of the letters provides an especially valuable resource for the study of these events, which were an important part of the social life of many families in late medieval northern France.34 Letters of remission had a specific structure and purpose. They were collaborative efforts by the supplicant and an official scribe, usually a notary in the royal chancery, although supplicants with money could hire lawyers or agents for further assistance. The supplicant’s purpose for writing the letter was to attain pardon for a capital crime, often murder.35 In order to demonstrate that the murder was indeed pardonable, the body of the letter was a narrative in which the supplicant described, frequently in great detail, the circumstances surrounding the crime. It is here that we find references to churching feasts and the customs surrounding them. Most letters were written in French, though a small number are in Latin. The narrative itself was in proper French without reflecting local dialect, probably due to the editing of the scribe, though it often included direct quotes that retain the colloquial language of the supplicants themselves. This personal language may account for the variety of terms used to describe churching feasts and other events surrounding childbirth. The term feste des relevailles is commonly used to refer to a churching feast though some letters use feste de gesine. I consider these two terms as synonymous. Some scholars have understood the word gesine as a reference to childbed and consequently made a distinction between the feste de gesine and the feste des relevailles. Gesine comes from the old French verb gesir, which means to give birth or to be in childbed. The modern gésir, meaning to lie helplessly, is related to this meaning. The related Latin term, gesina, meant childbirth (puerperium) but was also used to refer to the celebration at a woman’s churching, that is to a feste des relevailles. 36 In his work on folklore in France during the Hundred Years’ War, Roger Vaultier understood the term feste de gesine as a festive gathering during a woman’s lying-in, that is, while she remained in childbed. He distinguished this from the feste des relevailles, which he understood as referring to the family feast given on the day of her churching.37 Some letters of remission, however, make it clear that the term gesine could refer to a churching feast. The letter of remission for John Grosparmi, for example, states that John was at home where he “faisoit bonne chiere avec pluseurs de ses amis, qui là estoient assemblez pour raison de la feste et gesine de sa femme, qui avoit esté acouchée d’enfant et relevée ce jour.”38 In other texts, the term gesine clearly refers to childbirth and not to the churching feast. In my reading of the letters of remission, then, I have translated the word gesine variously depending upon the context.
Beyond the descriptions of family feasts in letters of remission, visual representations of churching provide insight into the laity’s understanding of this celebration. A large number of such images are found in books of hours, a form of religious devotion that became popular among the bourgeoisie in the late Middle Ages. All of the illuminations examined for this study, and discussed more fully in chapter 6, are from books intended for use in the north of France, though not necessarily produced in that region, and all are housed in libraries located in northern France.39 The discussion of churching presented in the pages that follow relies on this collection of sources, supplemented with anecdotes from literature, chronicles, and cartularies. Further exploration of such anecdotal sources may prove fruitful for future studies of churching. Cartularies, in particular, are a rich possibility for more information about medieval churching. Personal family accounts, known as livre de raison, may also prove helpful in exploring the early modern practice in France. There is clearly more that could be done to uncover the medieval practices of churching in other regions of France as well as other countries. I make no claim to having the last word on this subject. Rather, I see this book as a beginning and hope that it will encourage others to continue the work of expanding our knowledge of churching in the Middle Ages.
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