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Show THE MEDIAEVAL ABBESS. The coming woman, when emancipated from home and husband and raised to a seat among the law-givers at Westminster, will have regained only a part of the authority formerly possessed by certain of her kindred. The mediaeval Abbess, in the midst of her devout family, was endowed with prerogatives which might satisfy the utmost greed of the votary of social science of the present, but which the latter will no more recover in full for her sex then Isis will again gather into one body the alienate limbs of the good Osiris. It might hardly be suspected that so advanced a stage of feminine rights had been reached more than five centuries ago as that women should be invited to co-operate with Bishops and Barons at the National Council. Fuller, indeed, says in his "Church History" (book 8) that Abbesses though holding Baronies, "never were summoned as Baronesses to Parliament, because that honor was never conferred on any ecclesiastical female." A reference to Palgrave's "Parliamentary Writs" (vol. 1, p. 164) will show that certain Abbesses were not only theoretically entitled, by their territorial importance, to a seat in the Legislature, but that they were actually required to attend, at least on one occasion, with all the Abbots, prelates, and secular magnates, the King's Parliament at Westminster. The business was to treat upon a set for conferring knighthood on the first Prince of Wales, with three hundred of his companions; and the Abbesses of Shaftsbury, Barking, Wilton, and St. (Saint) Mary's Wilton were summoned "in propria persence" to the consultation. A grand religious ceremony closed the proceedings, when the crowd was so dense at the Abbey that two knights were killed in the crush, and the Prince could only find room to go through his part of the ceremony by standing (so it is said) on the high altar. The agitation for women's rights, at least in the form of assertion of some specific claims which might seem prescriptive only to certain classes of men, dates many centuries back. The spiteful frenzy of the platform aspirant to masculine privileges is suspiciously modern. More convincing that passionate outcries against oppression was the authority of the vellum deed with its inspeximus, sealed with the seals of successive monarchs, which the mediaeval Abbess coolly brought before the royal commissioners who demanded the antecedents of her tenure. Whether the contracted Latin of her characters was always intelligible to the Abbess herself may be questioned, but she had at hand some learned chaplain or lawyer who could unfold the mystery. For instance, we find a generous expounder of the muniments of Godstow Nunnery, whose reason for affording a translation of these documents is, he says, "that women of religion, in reading books of Latin, be excused of great understanding where it is not their mother tongue." - The Saturday Review. |