Peckham went out of his way to make a specific defence of the practice in 1282, when the Prioress and Convent of Stratford sought to excuse themselves from veiling a little girl called Isabel Bret, by reason of her youth, "since on account of this minority she is the more able and capable to learn and receive those things which concern the discipline of your order"[1].
It is impossible to make the generalisation that even children professed at such an early age could have had no consciousness of a vocation for the religious life; the history of some of the women saints of the middle ages would be enough to disprove this[2]. The German monk Caesarius of Heisterbach, who is to be equalled as a gossip only by the less pious Salimbene, has some delightful stories of youthful enthusiasts in the Dialogus Miraculorum, which he wrote between 1220 and 1235 for the instruction of the novices in his own Cistercian house. One child, destined for a worldly match, protests daily that she will wed Christ only; and, when forced to wear rich garments, asserts "even if you turn me to gold you cannot make me change my mind," until her parents, worn out by her prayers, allow her to enter a nunnery where, although very young, she is soon made governess of the novices. Her sister, given to an earthly husband while yet a child, is widowed and, "ipsa adhuc adolescentula" enters the same house. Another girl, fired by their example, escapes to a nunnery in man's clothes; her sister, trying to follow, is caught by her parents and married, "but I hope," says the
- ↑ Reg. Epis. Johannis Peckham (Rolls Series), i, p. 356. Compare Caesarius of Heisterbach: "In the diocese of Trèves is a certain convent of nuns named Lutzerath, wherein by ancient custom no girl is received but at the age of seven years or less; which constitution hath grown up for the preservation of that simplicity of mind which maketh the whole body to shine" (Dial. Mirac. i, p. 389, quoted in Coulton, Medieval Garner, p. 255). The thirteenth century visitations of the diocese of Rouen by Eudes Rigaud make it clear that novices there were often very young, e.g. at St-Saëns in 1266 "una earum erat novicia et minima" (Reg. Visit. Archiepiscopi Rothomagensis, ed. Bonnin, p. 566). The Archbishop ordered novices to be professed at the age of fourteen and not before (ib. pp. 51, 121, 207).
- ↑ For example the béguine Christina von Stommeln, who said of herself, "So far back as my memory can reach, from the earliest dawn of my childhood, whensoever I heard the lives and manners, the passion and the death of saints and especially of our Lord Christ and His glorious Mother, then in such hearing I was delighted to the very marrow" (quoted in Coulton, op. cit. p. 403). At the age of ten she contracted a mystic marriage with Christ, and at the age of thirteen she joined the béguines at Cologne. Cf. St Catherine of Siena.
