ABSTRACT
‘Finally,’ wrote the twelfth-century canon of Liège, ‘we shall return to women who lead the eremitical life, rising to be holy nuns, and to those who sweetly take up the yoke of Christ with holy men or under their guidance.’ 1 But the promised supplement to his little book on The Orders and Callings of the Church was either never written or it has been lost. This is a pity, because the canon's views on the place of women in the monastic movement of his time would have been instructive, especially as he was based in Liège, where women played an unusually prominent part in the religious life of that period. Few woman wrote about it themselves, and this makes the mental world of the nunneries hard to penetrate. There was the rare prophetess, like St Hildegarde of Bingen, whose spiritual experience was transmitted from the Rhineland to other parts of Europe by means of a voluminous correspondance; but there is a dearth of the kind of narrative writing that tells us about the inner life of many of the men's establishments. For the most part, the experience of religious women of the Middle Ages is communicated to us by celibate males; and they were rarely adequate spokesmen.
