Sacred Energy

Renunciation of marriage was, for many medieval women, the only path to education, authority, and a life of the mind their own society otherwise denied them

For centuries, entering a convent was one of the very few socially acceptable ways a woman could gain access to literacy, leadership, and intellectual life.

Historical scholarship on medieval convents documents them as unusual institutions in their societies: places where women could learn to read and write Latin, study scripture and philosophy, and eventually rise to positions such as abbess, governing significant property and communities of dozens or hundreds of people. Outside the convent, most medieval women had no comparable path to literacy or institutional authority, since education was overwhelmingly organized around and for men destined for clerical or noble roles. Choosing religious celibacy over marriage was, for many of these women, not a renunciation of opportunity but the opening of one, trading the domestic authority of a household for the intellectual and administrative authority of a religious community. This is part of why so many surviving works of medieval women's writing, music, and scholarship come specifically from convents rather than from lay society.

Written about in

• What the celibate traditions say about envy and comparison

  For medieval women the comparison ran the other direction. The convent was where you could learn Latin, study scripture and philosophy, and govern property and people as abbess — which is why so much surviving medieval women's writing, music and scholarship comes from convents rather than from lay society.