Hey #medievaltwitter, I have encountered a strange statistic in a 40 year old paper, and a student of mine was asking about it because she questioned it too. It says that "The most scholarly nuns became abbesses, often at the early ages of 12 to 14." I am suspect of this.
There is no citation, and no specific examples. The abbesses the author talks about in her paper were all likely to be older when they became abbess so I am wondering where this idea came from.
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...I just want to say: that’s really fucking weird. Romanticized piety?
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No idea. This paper was published in an pedagogical journal about the history of women's education. So, it's brief. I don't blame my students for choosing it...it's the first hit when you search medieval learning on JSTOR.
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Weird age thing aside, in my period it wouldn’t generally be the most scholarly nuns who became abbesses but the highest status e.g princesses, kings widows etc
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it's definitely the case for the early medieval period. My class is from the late 11th c. to the early 16th c. though, and I think it is slightly different but generally nuns were all from wealthy families anyway?
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