I started reading a set of Thalbach’s convent statutes and discovered that their late-fifteenth-century Provincial, Heinrich Karrer, was remarkably worried about women talking.
That’s perhaps an unfair way to put it—but not entirely unfair.
In 1479 Karrer, Provincial of the Upper German Franciscan province and Visitator General of the brothers and sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis, issued a new set of statutes for the women living at Thalbach in Bregenz. An earlier set of regulations had apparently not worked entirely as intended, so Karrer replaced it with something he considered more useful.
What caught my attention was what these new statutes regulate—and what they (mostly) do not.
There is very little here about reading. Nothing about study. Almost nothing about household labor. Prayer itself receives surprisingly little detailed attention.
Instead, again and again, the statutes return to speech: when the sisters should be silent, what kinds of conversation they should avoid, what they may say to outsiders, how they may speak to one another, and what happens when words damage the peace or reputation of the house.
First,silence
The statutes begin predictably enough with worship. The sisters are to attend divine service diligently, especially Mass and preaching, unless illness or necessary work prevents them. Then Karrer moves almost immediately to silence:
Let all the sisters observe silence diligently in the morning, in the evening, and at the table. (Und das alle swesteren ir schwigen mörgens und öbendes und ob tische flißenklich haltent; und welche das an nottorft bricht, die sol vor tische sitzen.)
Break that silence without necessity and there’s a consequence: the offender must sit apart at table.
But this is not really a rule demanding silence all the time. The next provision makes that clearer. The sisters are to be prudent in “speech and conduct,” both inside and outside the house, and to avoid idle talk. Anyone who fails must confess not simply that she talked, but how often, in what way, and about what. The Mother then decides on a suitable penance.
And the regulation is communal. A sister who hears another breaking the rule and fails to report it receives the same punishment.
That last bit recurs often enough to matter. This is by prescript a self-regulating community. You’d better tattle if you see things going wrong.
Good sound, dangerous sound
To my eye (or ear), the contrast is not between sound and silence so much as between kinds of sound.
The very first sounds mentioned in the statutes are good ones: Mass and the preaching of God’s Word. The sisters should be there to hear them. Dangerous sounds come afterward: idle talk, private conversations, insults, accusations, gossip, contradiction.
That distinction makes sense within the broader Franciscan tradition.
The Third Order rule confirmed by Nicholas IV in Supra montem in 1289 imagined a religious life structured in part through hearing and speaking.
Let each strive, while the office of Mass is being celebrated and the word of preaching is being offered, to observe silence and to be intent upon prayer and the office.… (Studeat quilibet, dum Missae celebratur officium, et praedicationis verbum proponitur, servare silentium; orationi et officio sit intentus...
Brothers and sisters were to say the canonical Hours—or substitute Pater nosters if they could not—and attend Mass when possible. They were to hear preaching and exhortation. But during Mass and the homily they were also to observe silence and attend to prayer. The rule even warns about careless oaths made in ordinary speech, noting rather ruefully that slips happen when one talks a lot.
Silence, in other words, was not simply the absence of religious sound. It helped distinguish useful speech from useless speech, attentive hearing from distraction. Francesca Sbardella makes a related point in her study of silence in Catholic cloistered life: silence is not an empty space left when speech stops. It is a practiced condition through which speech, behavior, relationships, and religious identity are organized. And the rule thinks so too: unfortunate things tend to happen in much speaking (prout contingere in multiloqui consuevit).
That seems especially useful for Thalbach.
What words can do
Karrer seems intensely aware that words have consequences.
No sister is to have unauthorized “familiarity, conversation, or private interaction” with anyone, priest or layperson.
Furthermore, no sister shall have any familiarity, conversation, or private dealings with anyone, whether priest or layperson.… (Item und will auch daz keyne schwester kaynerlay fruntschaft noch gesprech noch haymlich mit nyemands hab, er sy priester oder lay..)
(Again, a sister who knows about such behavior and does not report it shares in the punishment. Self-regulating!)
Inside the house, the stakes rise further.
If one sister were to attack another’s honor—accusing her of theft or sexual misconduct, insulting her, calling her a liar, or cursing her—she must confess publicly before the Mother and the community, ask the injured sister’s forgiveness, and eat her next meal on the floor. (Shaming and visual set-asides reinforce speech rules, but no corporeal punishment is ever mentioned, except for food deprivation, which is mentioned for unauthorized jaunts outside of the convent and as part of the increasingly severe penalties for sowing discord within the convent community.)
Words directed upward are dangerous too. Insolent speech against the Mother receives a doubled penance. And speech does not need to stay inside the convent to cause harm. A sister who speaks maliciously to outsiders in a way that damages another sister or the reputation of the house is to be called to account and punished according to the harm—or even the potential harm—her words have caused. Once again, anyone who hears and conceals such speech may receive the same penalty.
The underlying concern is not difficult to see. Words can disrupt peace within the house. They can injure another sister’s honor. They can create suspicion around a woman’s relationships with men. And they can move beyond the convent walls, damaging the reputation of the community itself.
Speech travels.
Guard your mouth AND your ears
There is a wonderful late-medieval image that gives visual form to some of these anxieties.
Almuth
Seebohm discussed this image in her study “The Crucified Monk.”
Around the figure are texts concerned with disciplining the senses
and the body. One set of verses instructs the religious to guard
speech, restrain anger, and metaphorically place a lock upon the
mouth and a balance upon words.
Custodi
visum vehementer comprime risum The
image also draws on the biblical tradition of guarding both tongue
and ears: “Keep your tongue from evil” (Psalm 33:14); “I have placed a guard
over my mouth” (Psalm 38:2); and even the wonderfully prickly advice from Sirach
28:28 to “Hedge in thy ears with thorns, hear not a wicked tongue, and make doors and bars to thy mouth.” What
I like about the image in relation to Thalbach is that the discipline
runs in both directions. You must govern what comes out
of the mouth. But you must also govern what comes into
the ear. That
is very nearly what Karrer’s statutes ask the sisters to do. A
woman is responsible not simply for what she herself says, but
sometimes for what she hears another woman say. Listening itself
creates obligation. And
here the statutes become particularly interesting to me. There
is nothing unusual about medieval religious rules valuing silence or
warning against idle talk. Benedict had done both centuries earlier.
Nor is a Franciscan concern with disciplined speech surprising. But
at Thalbach, the issue becomes unusually concrete. These
statutes regulate women speaking to one another, women speaking to
outsiders, women speaking privately to men, women insulting one
another, women talking back to authority, women spreading damaging
information, and women listening to one another’s prohibited
speech. It
would be easy to turn that into a simple story about male authorities
silencing women. Karrer was, after all, a male provincial laying down
rules for a female community. Yet the
statutes are more complicated than that – more
nuanced, and more reflective
of women’s own exercise of authority.
The
Mother is repeatedly given discretion to judge offenses and assign
punishment. Sisters are expected to admonish one another. They are
responsible for noticing breaches and maintaining communal
discipline. The system certainly governs women’s voices, but women
themselves are also part of that governance. Nor
is the object silence for silence’s sake. The
convent was not imagined as acoustically empty. It contained Mass,
preaching, prayer, confession, admonition, correction, and ordinary
communication. Some speech was necessary. Some was holy. Some
sustained communal life. The question was which words belonged. Reading
the statutes this way makes silence look less like the opposite of
sound than one means of organizing a religious soundscape. What
mattered was not simply whether a Thalbach sister spoke, but what
she said, to whom, where, when, who heard it, and what her words
might do. That
is a surprisingly large burden for a few spoken words to carry. Gerold
Fussenegger, “Das Frauenkloster Thalbach bei Bregenz,” Alemania
Franciscana Antiqua 9 (1963): 93–140;
pp. 108-112 includes a transcription of the Thalbach statutes
of 1479 that have been the basis for my assessment. Nicholas
IV, Supra montem (1289), Rule of the Brothers and Sisters of
Penance. (This is a blog post; I used online copies today: a Latin
text https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Supra_montem
and the English translation from
https://ofsgb.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Supra-Montem-1289-exNAFRA.pdf.) Francesca
Sbardella, “Embodying Silence: The Resilient Action of the Unspoken
in Catholic Cloistered Life,” Studi e materiali di storia delle
religioni 88/2 (2022): 494ff. Almuth
Seebohm, “The Crucified Monk,” Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 59 (1996), 61ff. Translation
note: Translations of the Thalbach statutes quoted above are
mine, based on Fussenegger’s published transcription and checked
against the original German wording.
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[IMAGE:
“The Crucified Monk,” Wellcome Collection, WMS 49, photo
L0029361. CC BY.]
Sis custos oris et
habenam stringe furoris
>Ori pone seram verbis impone
stateram
Ne quid confundas ne quid sine crimine fundas
Curb the urge to
laugh; be the guardian of your speech and rein in your fury. Place a
lock upon your mouth; set a balance upon your words, so that you
cause no confusion nor utter anything blameworthy.
Governing
women’s speech
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