There might also be accommodation for pilgrims who had travelled to see the holy relics the nuns had acquired and looked after (which could be anything from a slipper of the Virgin Mary to a skeletal finger of a saint). The heart of the complex was still the cloister which ran around an open space and to which were attached most of the important buildings such as the church, the refectory for communal meals, kitchens, accommodation and study areas. Monastic BuildingsĪ female monastery had much the same architectural layout that a male monastery had except that the buildings were laid out in a mirror image. In 1263 CE, though, the Order of Saint Clare was officially recognised with the proviso that the nuns remain inside their convents and follow the rules of the Benedictine order. The Church did not allow women to preach amongst the ordinary population so the female mendicants struggled to gain official recognition for their communities. By 1228 CE there were 24 such convents in northern Italy alone. Women also took up this vocation Clare of Assisi, an aristocrat and follower of Saint Francis, established her own all-female mendicant communities which are known as convents (as opposed to nunneries). 1220 CE) and subsequently by the Carmelites (late 12th century CE) and Augustinians (1244 CE).
1181-1260 CE) famously established one of these mendicant (begging) orders, the Franciscans, which was then imitated by the Dominicans (c. Like male monasteries, nunneries were able to support themselves through donations of land, houses, money and goods from wealthy benefactors, from income from those estates and properties via rents and agricultural products, and through royal tax exemptions.įrom the 13th century CE, there developed another branch of the ascetic life pioneered by male friars who rejected all material goods and lived not in monastic communities but as individuals entirely dependent on the handouts of well-wishers. Throughout the Middle Ages, male and female monastic communities largely used a shared corpus of authoritative texts and a common repertoire of practices. The long-lasting experiment of shaping ideal religious communities and stable monastic institutions created forms of monastic life that were largely applicable to both genders (albeit usually in strict separation). …medieval monastic life emerged as a sequence of “uni-sex” models. It is perhaps important to remember that, in any case, the medieval monastic life for men and women was remarkably similar, as the historian A. Nevertheless, such separation was not always the case and there were even mixed-sex monasteries, especially in northern Europe with Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire, England and Interlaken in Switzerland being famous examples. Monasteries such as Cluny Abbey in French Burgundy, for example, prohibited the establishment of a nunnery within four miles of its grounds. Such nunneries were often built some distance from monks' monasteries as abbots were concerned that their members might be distracted by any proximity to the opposite sex.
According to legend, Benedict had a twin sister, Saint Scholastica, and she founded monasteries for women. 543 CE) formed rules of monasterial conduct and established the Benedictine Order which would found monasteries across Europe. The monastic idea spread to Europe in the 5th century CE where such figures as the Italian abbot Saint Benedict of Nursia (c. Nunneries were able to support themselves through donations of land, houses, money & goods from wealthy benefactors.
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