International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2009 - Space/l'Espace
Abstract

The abbesses of Sainte-Croix in Poitiers remained vigilant in protecting their privileges throughout the medieval period.  The abbey not only controlled extensive land holdings outside of Poitiers, but the abbesses also demanded obedience from several chapters of canons attached to nearby churches.  In the fifteenth century, however, the abbesses faced serious challenges from their dependent chapter of Sainte-Radegonde.  The canons resisted demands that they swear oaths of obedience before Sainte-Croix’s altar, they thwarted the abbesses’ attempts to enter Sainte-Radegonde during feast day celebrations, and they circumvented requirements that the men carry Sainte-Croix’s emblems and banners in processions. 

This paper investigates the gendering of space and power revealed in this local dispute.  Sainte-Radegonde’s men resisted the abbesses’s efforts to pull them into the female spaces of Sainte-Croix for rituals that demonstrated the women’s superior position.  They also refused to grant the women entry to the heart of their church for feast days celebrations, yielding their masculine inner sanctum to female control.  And, in processions that would reveal their subordination to the urban community, the men refused to serve the abbesses.  While the women argued that sex was irrelevant to these disputes—and that their dominance resulted, instead, from their superior office—the men were keenly aware that the chapter’s inferiority flouted traditional gender hierarchies.  The men became unwilling to reveal their inferiority to the urban community by granting the women control of their church or by serving the women in the abbey. These men and women linked their identities with the buildings they controlled, thus allowing access to outsiders upset the usual power dynamic within their walled spaces and shifted understandings of their communal identities.  Here, I argue that control of space was a visible and crucial aspect of disputes between Poitiers’ male and female religious communities.