Women seeking asylum in convents

Is she planning to stay for a little while or for life?
It's worth bearing in mind that the ritual for joining a community was heavily based on the funeral service - she was dying to the world when she entered the convent.

Tricky!

I don't think a genuine 16thC female would flout her religious upbringing by making a mockery of the vows a nun would take by pretending to want to be a nun. If she's a normal female she would revere the nuns' sacrifice.

Could you have your female take refuge in a Convent? It might depend on which religious order and who ran it and whether there was a relative or distant family member or acquaintance in the order, but most Convents had a chapel or church which was a sacred place and therefore a woman could make a claim for Sanctuary, which would give her 40 safe days in the Convent. Or she could be hidden by the nuns.

Have a rethink and see if you can do something which would be more in keeping with your MC's and her society's religious views.

It's complex. Women could and did "retire" to convents during this time period without necessarily taking vows. However, there were different rules for different classes. Also, depending on what part of the 16th century, and what country your story is based in you could run into problems. During the Reformation era in certain countries a convent was not the safest place to be. I recommend doing research in the stacks of a good university library - historians have done a lot of work on women of this era. If you post country and more specific year I would be happy to recommend specific works and historians.
My degree in 16th Century religious and women's history actually coming in useful? Who wudda thunk it?

rosemerry said:

If a woman during the 16th century wanted to hide because she feared for her life could she voluntarily join a convent? Is this possible and would the convent let her? Or would she have to lie and say she was called by God or something like that?

Thanks in advance
rosemerry

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I'll try and go find you a link I came across...good info.
ETA: Check this and I believe some parts go all the way back to 12th century, all reasons for joining.
http://www.ejhs.org/volume1/fisher/nun20.htm

It comes down to money, frankly.

She needs to have it.

Also, depending on what part of the 16th century, and what country your story is based in you could run into problems. During the Reformation era in certain countries a convent was not the safest place to be.

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England least of all...

You've got a lot of choice in there - neither Germany nor Italy were unified countries in that period. Lots of city states and regions like Prussia etc.

You got four basic considerations, I think.


-- Who is she fleeing from?

If it's somebody powerful, and powerfully annoyed, the men and women in charge of the welfare of the convent aren't going to want to get mixed up in her quarrel. There is no profit to them and the possiblity of hazard, discomfort,expense, inconvenience and danger. It would be irresponsible of them to give refuge to somebody who had annoyed a powerful man if there were some way to avoid it.

Alternately -- if she has some potential protector, they're not going to want to irritate him by refusing refuge.

You see why Mother Superior is not going to be just delighted when this bundle of difficulty wanders in out of the night.


-- Who does she 'belong' to?

One great difference between here-and-now and there-and-then is that just about everybody in your there-and-then belonged to somebody who had the right to tell them what to do and to profit by their labor and who was responsible for their actions.

The very first task of the Mother Abbess will be to determine where this refugee fits into the great scheme of things. Is this a serf who must be returned to her master, a wife to her husband, an heiress to her guardian, an errant daughter to her father, an apprentice to her master, a bondmaid to her mistress, a nun to her own convent ...?

There were exceptions -- independent widows. Vagabonds. But just about everyone, especially every woman, was the property of someone.

The convent can no more 'keep' her than they could keep a strayed horse. Honesty, in that period, required that every effort be made to restore her to those who had authority over her.


-- You couldn't just join a convent.

Joining a convent involved, among other things, a transfer of authority from whoever the woman belong to, to the convent. One couldn't just walk in and ask to join. You had to be 'given' by your father or feudal lord.

The convent, accepting you, had to be sure you were free to take the vows required -- that you were not married or betrothed or otherwise committed elsewhere.

Those taking vows generally brought a dowery with them. This helped support the convent in which they lived. Even lay sisters would bring a small amount.


-- Convents were just hotbeds of benevolence.

All that said, all these considerations raised -- Convents were filled with kindly, humane women, independent, powerful, well-intentioned souls who might very plausibly intervene to save some suffering scrap of humanity.

Be aware of all the reasons the nuns couldn't help your girl,
but then, you can write it that they did
because there was almost certainly a lot of that going on too.

rosemerry said:

My MC is a woman who is widowed. Her husband was part of a Landsknecht band that was completely annihilated in the Battle of Pavia in 1525. She was a camp follower. She has two children but they are already married. So I'm hoping that this would make her independent with her own wealth to give to the convent. Or would she have to go back to father or belong to her son or son-in-law. ..

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If you got a middle-aged, non-noble widow with portable funds it sounds to me like exactly the kind of woman who could make her own decisions. (Think Wife of Bath.)

In a separate nit ... the word 'camp follower' may be technically correct in the largest sense, but is often used to mean 'inexpensive army whore'.

rosemerry said:

.... So her fear is of being captured by the enemy and/or being killed. So I'm thinking the 40 day asylum thing that pdr mentioned might actually work better..

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-- Do you mean she's a refugee from battle?

In that case she'd have a lot of company. If there's a battle, the convent would be chock full of fleeing townsfolk and non-combatants.
A likely scenario would be for the convent to shelter everybody in the stables and hope the army wouldn't loot a religious house.

So your girl wouldn't need to 'claim sanctuary' in this case. She'd just be one of the pack, taken in.


-- Or do you mean the enemy is chasing her down in particular?

My own take on this is that it wasn't customary for the victorious army to track down the hordes of non-combatant auxilliaries (family members, whores, laundresses, cooks, donkey boys, garbage collectors) after battle.
Yes, the donkey boys would get slaughtered if they were underfoot when the tents were being looted, but nobody went hunting them down later.

If you want the authorities chasing her in particular, you could probably come up with some reason for it.


To get a feel for this, you might try to get hold of Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael series or the BBC production thereof. It's earlier than your time and in England, but three or four of the books portray how a religious house dealt with war being fought on top of it. In one (Santuary Sparrow, I think,) an accused criminal seeks sanctuary in the church.

rosemerry said:

The Landsknecht band she belonged too fought against the Holy Roman Empire which was a huge no no even though they were mercenaries. If you did the group was hunted down and killed to the last man.

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Er...really? I don't think I've heard of this kind of Imperial policy. Many of the Landsknechts in Imperial service actually seem to have fought against the Empire at one point or another in their careers.

job said:

In a separate nit ... the word 'camp follower' may be technically correct in the largest sense, but is often used to mean 'inexpensive army whore'.

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Only in an informal context, and--if I'm not mistaken, only in modern times. I use the term "camp followers" all the time in my ficion for people other than whores and people have never raised an eyebrow at it. In fact, most of the dictionary definitions still state the primary meaning of "camp followers" as just the assorted hangers-on following the march of an army, without any specific reference to whores.

Actually...

I believe you can find a writtten comment made by Wellington about camp follwers as whores. 1814 I think.

I'm not sure how far back I can go, but in the 17thC there was an official army baggage train of civilians and wives and then the camp followers who were actively discouraged because they were held to be whores and thieves.

That's Wellington. In the 16th and 17th centuries, when they wanted to say "whores" then they said "whores," not "camp followers." Just look at this excerpt from the Earl of Leicester's 1586 disciplinary code for the English forces in the Low Countries:

And for that it often happeneth, that by permitting of many vagrant & idle women in an armie, sundry disorders and horrible abuses are committed: Therefore it is ordeined that no man shall carrie into the fielde, or deteine with him in the place of his garrison, any woman whatsoeuer, other then such as be knowen to be his lawful wife, or such other women to tende the sicke and to serue for launderers as shall be thought meete by the Marshall, vpon paine of whipping and banishment

See? "Vagrant & idle women." Not "camp followers."

l_clausewitz said:

Only in an informal context, and--if I'm not mistaken, only in modern times. I use the term "camp followers" all the time in my ficion for people other than whores and people have never raised an eyebrow at it. In fact, most of the dictionary definitions still state the primary meaning of "camp followers" as just the assorted hangers-on following the march of an army, without any specific reference to whores.

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Whether 'whore' is the first or second definition listed for 'camp follower', that is, at the very least, an important secondary meaning. One should be aware of this and use the term unambiguously.

This use of the term 'camp follower' to mean prostitute is not particularly modern. See here for Websters 1913 def. which lists prostitute as the primary meaning.

The modern Merriam-Webster also lists prostitute as the primary meaning here


When we consider what word should be used to describe the ragtag women following in the wake of an army,
we draw from two major sources.

-- What word is used in the place and time the story occurs? ... something German or Italian in this case.
-- What is the modern English usage? ... Since that is what one is writing the book in.

It makes sense to avoid stirdently modern vocabulary in the mouth of a C16 character.
But it is not necessary to vet usages back to Shakespearean English,
especially since this story is not based in England.

Just defending logic here ...
I feel I must point out that the use of another term for army whore,
or fifty other terms,
does not in any way affect the validity or venerability of this term.

'Camp Follower' has a fine robust historical feel, perfectly suitable in either of its technical meanings.
I'd just suggest each meaning is applied with full knowledge that the other exists.

Thank you, Job.

You've saved me saying all that.

It's a tightrope for a writer this historical business. You spend a lot of time checking the validity of your language, then explaining it without info dumping and then making sure that the modern usage of your voc hasn't turned to something quite different.

Don't waste time arguing here. Just make sure you have three valid quotes on your usage from the time period for the editor (They always quibble!) and that you have made it quite clear in the text what your usage is as opposed to today's usage.

May I beg you, Rosemerry, to get into a library and find some well written history books by experts who have studied original documents and have had their books edited and proof read. I say this because I followed your links to the Landsknecht site. It's mainly a regurgitation of other people's work by enthusiastic amateurs and when I see regular mispellings - thier and it's instead of its - in two short paragraphs I do wonder about the quality of information you are getting.

Hm...well, I concede the point, though I'd still say that there are many, many readers out there (mostly military historians) who will not immediately get the "whore" implication of the word "camp follower" without an explicit reference to it. Me, for instance. So anybody who uses the phrase "camp follower" in the sense of "prostitutes" had better make that clear early on, because otherwise people like me would miss the saucier implications of the term.

Sometimes I wish English had a different an unambiguous term that we can use to call the ragtag assortment of people who followed armies everywhere in the absence of a regular, incorporated logistical service.

About the Landsknechts: like pdr said, I'm still not convinced that the Empire hunted down those Landsknechts. For one thing, it would have been a huge waste of resources--why on earth would a powerful empire want to spend time, money, resources, and men just to hunt down a bunch of ordinary grunts? For another...well, it's a waste of resources, again. If they could recruit those renegades back into their armies, why kill them? Nationalism wasn't yet a very well-developed concept at that time, and deserters who deserted back to their old camp were not always automatically seen as traitors. They were (at least) as likely to get accepted back into the fold as not.

BTW, "Black Band" was something of a generic term for famous mercenary companies in the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. However, if we're talking of the Black Band that participated in the Italian Wars, then it was a largely Italian company, led by an Italian, and it didn't participate in the Battle of Pavia (although it did participate on the French side in the campaign that eventually led up to the battle).

There might have been another Black Band composed mostly of Landsknechts/lansquenets, and they might have fought at Pavia since there were, indeed, some Landsknecht formations that fought on the French side in that battle. But any slaughter being inflicted upon them was likely just the effect of an ordinary pursuit by the victors of the battle, not a systematic retaliation for their "disloyalty" or something like that. Not to mention that the battle was fought on a foggy morning, so it would be more than likely that the Imperial Landsknechts mistook the French Landsknechts for the Swiss!

pdr said:

It's a tightrope for a writer this historical business.

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All else being equal, if I were in O.P.'s place, I'd use 'camp follower' only to mean the ragtag and bobtail -- because that is a valid meaning and there is no other exact and specific term to replace it in that usage. There are lots os synonyms for whore.

I'd check every bloody usage in the text to make sure each one was absolutely unambiguous.

That is, I would never simply refer to any woman as a 'camp follower'. I would always use the term where there were obvious non-prostitutes included in the reference. And that is why you have to know secondary meanings and connotations of words. So you don't make a fool of yourself.

The use of the innocent phrase 'working girl' comes to mind as a modern parallel.
We avoid the snicker factor and use it unambiguously.

The word 'kampfrau' might be useful, if it is historically correct, and if it hasn't acquired unfortunate connotations in German in the C20. The SCA uses it, but that does not necessarily fill me with unalloyed confidence.

As to someone being unfamiliar with the term 'camp follower' or the primary historical and modern meaning of it ...
many terms need to be explained.
Nobody's going to know what an arquebus is either, or a caliver.
Though I'll admit I would expect a historian in the period to know all three.