Sylvia by Sylvia

Author:Sylvia
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780141942193
Publisher: Penguin Publishing
Published: 2010-01-28T22:00:00+00:00

I endured the first month as I served my postulancy, my introduction to serve in the order of the Benedictines, then finally somehow reached the end of my novitiate year and took the Benedictine vows of stability, obedience and conversatio morum. Brother Dominic had made repeated attempts to have me for longer periods of study but while I was a novice the abbess had complete control and she would not allow it. But when my first year was over and I must serve three more years before I could take the nun’s vows, he went to the abbot and asked that he intervene on my behalf with the abbess. The abbot was a kindly monk who claimed he had once heard me sing when he attended mass on a visit to St Mary’s on the Kapitol. He asked the abbess that I might come to sing each day at the high mass in the monastery after the Office of Tierce. While couched as a request, the abbess could not refuse him and so I would take my midday meal, under supervision, with Brother Dominic and then study the entire afternoon in return for singing. At last I was getting the true benefits of study and felt that I could happily endure the harsh treatment I seemed to endlessly attract from the abbess, and the scorn of the nuns, still led in my chastisement by Sister Angelica. While she was no longer my novice mistress, she remained the thorough bitch.

If the abbess had thought that she would show me for the peasant I was in the way I comported myself and with my table manners, she was to be disappointed. I had been well trained by Frau Sarah and had entertained in a great many noble palaces and houses of the rich burghers. I had learned the ways of comportment required of a gentle lady perhaps even better than the abbess herself and was the equal in all the niceties of behaviour of any nun, no matter how highborn. I fear that with this opportunity to chastise me denied, the abbess was even further angered.

I was the first and the quickest to learn the rule of St Benedict, a text that was read to the novices each day and was in length thought impossible to learn in recitation. This reading was traditionally the sternest test for the novices, who, while highborn, knew only a little Latin and struggled greatly, while I was by now fluent and found the text quite easily absorbed. This did not help the abbess’s quick temper and she would usually find reason to put me before her at the Judiciary. Yet I had refused to become compliant and to remain silent and felt that if I should do so I was denying the truth I had come to learn. She even required that I stop singing in the abbey as my voice showed up the voices of the nuns. ‘God does not want to hear thy voice as if there is no other to be heard,’ she castigated me in front of all the others.

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