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Abstract
This dissertation examines the lived experience of the women in St. John’s Monastery in Arles, founded in 512 by the zealous bishop Caesarius for and with his sister Caesaria, its first abbess. This female monastery is particularly emblematic and important in the history of Western monasticism and female religious life for two reasons: it was the first strictly regulated cloister; its rule, the Regula Virginum, was the first rule in history written expressly for women. In the past, scholars have tended to study the Monastery of St. John by peering into the cloister and monastic life from the outside; the enclosure thus appeared as negative space, defined by what it was not, and the life within often seemed no more than a pastoral imposition of the Bishop Caesarius on women of his diocese. My study seeks to revise this fragmentary and reductionist view of the Monastery of St. John by entering the cloister and examining the monastery from within and on its own terms.
To this end I use a wide variety of texts associated with the monastery and its enterprising second abbess, Caesaria the Younger, and re-interpret them through the lens of female agency. New material evidence, including the masterfully restored textile relics of Caesarius and the recent excavations at the southeast corner of Arles, helps to develop a new understanding of the life and relationships in the monastery. My methodology brings together fields that have often stayed far apart from each other: philology, theology, liturgy, textile studies, law, economy, archaeology, and material culture.
Various chapters examine the different spaces and aspects of the Monastery of St. John. Close study of Roman and biblical precedents reveals how the monastery borrowed its economic, affective, and social structures both from traditional Roman models of household and family and from innovative Christian ideals. The names the sisters gave themselves and the physical spaces inside the monastery helped forge their strong collective identity. The community considered itself a “congregation,” “holy sheepfold,” and “chorus of virgins,” and thus a communal dormitory and oratory took the place of the private ascetic cell. Textiles production within the female monastery was not only a large-scale industry; its regulations were also an expression of the poverty, simplicity, chastity, and moral status of the souls of the sisters. Caesarius’ burial tunic, probably made by the sisters, proves a powerful material example of their handiwork and ideals. The literacy mandated within the Monastery of St. John and the injunctions regarding a profound and constant lectio divina reveal the monastery as a residence of highly literate and biblically versed women, who even had their own productive scriptorium. The end to which a sister’s whole life tended, with which this study also ends, was the entrance into the heavenly mansions; the funeral rites, exceptional burial prayers, and specially- constructed burial church Sancta Maria all describe this ineffable passage and show a certain continuity between the monastic life and eternal life.
The monastery’s probable location in the heart of a great episcopal complex symbolized its physical and spiritual place in the heart of the Church of Arles. The sisters’ incessant prayers and their example of holiness paradoxically were meant to transcend the boundaries of the cloister. Thus the enclosed space of St. John’s Monastery, out of which the women were never permitted to leave, became for them a multivalent space of salvation for themselves and the people of Arles. Rightly seen it consisted of separate and intersecting domestic spaces, physical spaces, conceptual spaces, working spaces, interior spiritual spaces, and eschatological spaces. The women within rightly emerge as property owners, producers, workers, readers, writers, manuscript-copyists, agents of powerful intercessory prayer, collaborators in the Christianization of Southern Gaul, and hidden missionaries of the Gospel of Christ.
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