"Temples to Christ's Indwelling": Forms of Chastity in a Barking Abbey Manuscript

Abstract

Br i t i s h l i b r a r y , m a n u s C r i p t a d d i t i o n a l 10596 (hereafter MS add. 10596), a fifteenth-century collection of Middle english religious texts, belonged at first in succession to two nuns of Barking abbey in essex, england. This article interprets the self-contained latter half of this manuscript, perhaps copied by one of these nuns, Matilda Hayle, as an anthology of writings on christian chastity that derived particular meanings from the social milieu of Barking. The book gathers a unique group of narratives and prayers that together emphasize the overlapping and mutually influential sexualities of virgins, chaste widows, and continent wives in a religious setting where these groups mingled with unusual freedom. When one reads this book’s contents in terms of contemporary discourses of chastity and the particular practices of Barking, it becomes clear how the anthology made monastic chastity inseparable from the states of wifehood and widowhood. in the later Middle ages women of varying social and sexual statuses played important roles in the administration and support of Barking, a Benedictine abbey founded in the seventh century. a royal house dedicated to the queenly Saint ethelburga, Barking enjoyed a history of aristocratic abbesses, including three queens and two princesses, and it drew members and bequests from the higher echelons of english society, though by the end of the Middle ages new recruits came primarily from the gentry class, that is, from wealthy commoners. among its many late