Secular canoness

Secular canoness

In medieval Europe, many communities arose where unmarried daughters and widows from among the nobility could withdraw to monasteries in which they lived pious lives of devotion, but did not become nuns. As they did not follow a monastic Rule (Latin: Regula), they were termed secular canonesses. Generally speaking, these monasteries were entirely composed of aristocrats. Unlike nuns, they took no permanent vows, and were not committed to a life of poverty, or to a common life for eating and sleeping. Essentially they provided a respectable, yet religious, way of life for those women who might not have been desirous of marriage at that stage in their lives, or simply wanted to focus on prayer in a manner befitting their station in life. In some examples they lived in their own houses, and most had servants available. They took no vows of perpetual celibacy (often excepting the abbess, as at Essen Abbey), and thus could leave at any time to marry, which happened not infrequently. An influx of Greek names at Essen suggests that after the death of the Empress Theophanu in 991, a Byzantine princess, her Greek ladies-in-waiting were retired en masse to Essen, where at this period the powerful abbesses were mostly women from the ruling Ottonian dynasty.