ABSTRACT
The above excerpt from the dormitory regulations from the Augustinian canoness house of St. Agnes at Emmerich, a fifteenth-century women’s community belonging to the monastic branch of the Devotio Moderna, typifies how medieval women’s monastic vows initiated a lifetime spent preparing for a deathbed wedding and an eternity in heaven embracing a beloved spouse. Unlike the married women I discussed in the last chapter, these sisters or “mulieries religiosae” [women religious] received physical rings and new clothes during the rituals which began their monastic profession, liturgies which visually consecrated marriages between the bodies and souls of each vowed sister and Christ. In this interim period, dead to the world but not yet reborn in heaven, sisters worked, prayed, tended the sick, cooked their meals, and taught one another to beautify their souls for their heavenly bridegroom. Consequently, though women religious are often called-and call themselves-brides of Christ, their vocation entails far more than wearing a ring and veil while vigilantly guarding their chastity.
