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.
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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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Replying to @AdmiralHip
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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Replying to @FlorenceHRS
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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But yeah, Hilda wasn't abbess because she was scholarly, she was abbess because she was a royal.
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