"Women Priests at Barking Abbey in the Late Middle Ages"

In 1404, Sibyl de Felton, the abbess of Barking Abbey (1394-1419), requested the production of an ordinal for the convent’s use. This ordinal, now Oxford, University College, MS 169, details the masses and hours of the Divine Office that were to be celebrated throughout the entire year. It negotiates the coincidence of multiple feasts on a given day; provides incipits to chants, prayers, and readings; assigns roles to specific monastic officers, other members of the convent, and attendant clergy; and, supplies performative cues for the intonation of chants and for the staging of processions and liturgical dramas. Among the most surprising of the ordinal’s directives is its identification of the women playing the three Marys in the Visitatio Sepulchri, the drama that was to be performed at Matins on Easter Sunday, as sacerdotes. This paper seeks to determine whether this identification was the result of scribal error or the express instruction of the ordinal’s patron and principal users – Sibyl de Felton and her consorors at Barking. Close analysis of the chants sung, postures and positions assumed, vestments worn, and objects handled and mediated by the Marys--especially when compared with those scripted in Visitationes from other communities of women religious--will demonstrate that the identification of the women as sacerdotes offers the most fitting characterization of their performance, for they, not the attendant clergy playing Christ’s disciples, were to channel priestly authority.