Abstract
The Hospitaller brothers were well aware that interaction with women posed a risk. Hence, a vernacular version of the Hospitaller rule warned the brothers to keep a distance when they were near women:
If you happen, unexpectedly
To come where women trod,
Watch with care your chastity,
Which you have by the grace of God.
.....
Lest Satan leashes your staff immediately;
Do not allow a woman near your rod.1
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Notes
Malcolm Barber, The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple (Cambridge, UK:Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 266–74.
Judith Bronstein, The Hospitallers and the Holy Land: Financing the Latin East, 1187–1274 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), pp. 141–42.
Alan Forey, “Women in Military Orders in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” Studia Monastica 29.1 (1987): 91 [63–92].
“[I]n fact, after 1187 there was never again any clear sign, either in east or west, that fully-professed Hospitaller sisters were active in hospices or hospitals …” Anthony Luttrell, “A Hospitaller Soror at Rhodes, 1347,” in Dei gesta per Francos: Études sur les croisades dédiées à Jean Richard—Crusade Studies in Honour of Jean Richard, ed. Benjamin Z. Kedar, Jonathan Riley-Smith, and Michel Balard (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), p. 135; Forey, “Women in Military Orders,” 68.
Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland: Papal Letters, ed. William H. Bliss and Jessie A. Twemlow, 14 vols. (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1893–1960), 1:163; Cartulaire général des Hospitaliers, 2:no. 2167.
Anthony Luttrell, “The Hospitallers’ Medical Tradition, 1291–1530,” in The Military Orders. Vol 1, Fighting for the Faith and Caring for the Sick, ed. Malcolm Barber (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1994), pp. 64–67 [64–81];
Susan B. Edgington, “Medical Care in the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem,” in The Military Orders. Vol. 2, Welfare and Warfare, ed. Helen Nicholson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 32–33 [27–34].
Carlo Marchesani, Ospedali genovesi nel Medioevo (Genoa: Società Ligure di Storia Patria, 1981), p. 119.
Joaquin Miret i Sans, Les cases de Templers y Hospitalers en Catalunya: Aplech de noves y documents històrichs (Barcelona: Casa Provincial de Caritat, 1910), p. 124.
Helen Nicholson, The Knights Hospitaller (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2001), pp. 87–88;
Hugh of Saint-Victor, “Lettre inédite de Hugues de Saint-Victor,” ed. C. L. Sclafert, Revue d’ascétique et mystique 34 (1958): 280–84 [275–99]; Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Knights of St. John in Jerusalem and Cyprus, c. 1050–1310 (London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 231–33. The Hospitallers’ religious inferiority becomes apparent when one looks at rules for transferring religious: it was possible to move to a stricter order but not to a laxer order: Canons of Arrouaise were allowed to become Carthusians or Dominicans, but not allowed to join a military order, likewise Franciscans were not allowed to transfer to a military order (1245).
Giles Constable, Crusaders and Crusading in the Twelfth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), p. 171.
On the general topic, see F. Donald Logan, Runaway Religious in Medieval England, c. 1240–1540 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
“La regla del monestir de Santa María Sixena,” edited by Antoni Durán Gudiol, Monastica 1 (1960): 135–91.
Sources Concerning the Hospitallers of St John in the Netherlands 14th–18th Centuries, ed. Johanna M. van Winter, Studies in the History of Christian Thought 80 (Leiden: Brill, 1998), p. 453.
Documentos de Sigena, ed. Augustín Ubieto Arteta (Valencia: Anubar, 1972), no. 8.
Gabriele Zaccagnini, Ubaldesca. Una santa laica nella Pisa dei secoli XII–XIII (Pisa: GISEM, 1995) includes three editions of Ubaldesca’s life (pp. 196–245) and a discussion of the manuscripts (pp. 7–17).
V. Cavalleri, “Considerazioni e congetture sui tempi di Santa Toscana,” Studi storici veronesi 24 (1974): 5–45.
Fiona J. Griffiths, “Men’s Duty to Provide for Women’s Needs: Abelard, Heloise, and their Negotiation of the Cura Monialium,” Journal of Medieval History 30.1 (2004): 23 [1–24].
La encomienda de Zaragoza de la Orden de San Juan de Jerusalén en los siglos XII y XIII, ed. María Luisa Ledesma Rubio (Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza, 1967), no. 17. The son seems to have been born out of wedlock.
Year Books of Richard II, 12:71–77, 150–53; Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries, c. 1275 to 1535 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1922), pp. 36–38.
Anthony Luttrell and Helen Nicholson, “Introduction: A Survey of Hospitaller Women in the Middle Ages,” in Hospitaller Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Anthony Luttrell and Helen Nicholson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 31 [1–42].
Alguaire’s statutes of 1330 rule that sisters cannot leave the convent without the prioress’ permission, but they do not prohibit going out of the cloister all together. Bertran Prim i Roigè, “Les ordinacions del convent d’Alguaire,” Cuadernos de historia economica de Cataluña 17 (1977): 53, no. 44 [25–55].
Anthony Luttrell, “The Structure of the Aragonese Hospital: 1349–1352,” in The Hospitaller State on Rhodes and its Western Provinces, 1306–1462, ed. Anthony Luttrell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 320 [315–28].
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© 2012 Myra Miranda Bom
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Bom, M.M. (2012). The Hospital and its Female Members. In: Women in the Military Orders of the Crusades. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137088307_8
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