sister_raphael | Alice Boyton v Medieval Nunnery life (Reply)

This is Alice Boyton, changing her status from In A Relationship With God to It's Complicated.

It's no real secret that women were often dumped into nunneries for the convenience of others and not willingly from a true religious vocation. Our Alice, it seems, was the latter. There are many reasons why a medieval woman might be sent to a nunnery. These include, but are not limited to:

A daughter kept away from unsuitable suitors until a husband could be found.
A bit of an education (to a point)
A grab for assets
An actual religious vocation
Avoiding to provide a dowry upon marriage
Point-scoring with God

Either way, most of these involved not asking the woman involved or talking her into it against her will.

The life of Heloise, mistress then wife of famed medieval scholar Peter Abelarde was one such arrangement. Heloise had absolutely no vocation at all and her correspondence with him reflects this quite vividly. One feels poor Alice Boyton may have been in such a position- an inconvenient women shoved into a life where she would be no trouble to others.

Except it seems to not have worked out that way. Complaints about her bad behaviour made the church records and the fact that she wasn't to be let out unless accompanied by a sensible woman firmly in charge of her lefts us know that she was proving to be a bit of a handful.

Poor Alice. At least she wasn't going quietly!

For more snippets of medieval women's lives, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women is available online and in all good book shops, and is currently 30% off until the end of January at Mango Publishing.