Chapter XII · (continued 2)

In the meantime the feelings against the nunnery were by no means unanimous. Geuder, the brother-in-law of Charitas, was emphatic at the council meeting in denouncing the throwing open of convents, which in his eyes also meant turning them into disreputable houses[1179]. But no amount of opposition made by him and others could prevent a scene from being enacted in the convent chapel, which was afterwards looked upon as disgraceful, not only by those who provoked it, but by outsiders whether partisans of the Lutheran movement or not. The repeated attempts to persuade the nuns to leave having failed and Charitas refusing to bid them go, two of the chief councillors, one of them Nützel, the representative of the convent’s interests, and the widow of a councillor who had long clamoured for her daughter’s release, repaired to the convent with a number of other persons, claimed to be admitted, and declared they had come to fetch their daughters away. The three nuns, who were between nineteen and twenty-three years of age, tried to hide, but Charitas bade them come forth, and they then sought refuge with her in the convent chapel. She has described in full how the young women besought her to protect them, how their parents and others abused and reviled them, and how in spite of their protests, their indignation and their tears, their relations at last resorted to violence. Four persons seized each nun and dragged and pushed her out of the chapel, while the women present shouted approval, and once outside their convent clothes were torn off and others substituted in their stead. After a scuffle and a scramble in which one nun was knocked over and her foot injured, they were carried to a chariot waiting outside and conveyed away.

Charitas remained behind in grief and despair. ‘I and all my nuns are so distressed at all this,’ she wrote a few days later[1180], ‘that I have almost wept out my eyes.... Nothing ever so went to my heart.’ Indignation at the violence of the act became general in the town and spread beyond its confines. ‘I never could have imagined women acting in such a cruel manner,’ Sabina, the abbess of Bergen, wrote to Wilibald; and in another letter, apprehending the destruction of the convent at Nürnberg, she proposed that Charitas and her nuns should seek refuge with her[1181].

But Charitas persisted in holding her ground, though with an aching heart. When the men who had fetched away their daughters sent word offering to pay for their maintenance during the time they had lived with her, she refused. Her trials in one direction had reached their climax,—the councillor Nützel, who admitted that things had gone too far, henceforth acted in a conciliatory spirit, and some approximation took place between them. Not that he ever tired of urging Charitas to desert her convent and her cause, but he now confined himself to persuasion and argument, and when one of the young nuns who had been carried off was so far reconciled to the world that she came to the convent window and urged her step-sister to return home, pretending that Nützel had sent her (p. 123), the councillor disclaimed having done so. His correspondence with Charitas, which she has faithfully inserted in her memoir, shows that she patiently listened to every argument in favour of the new doctrines. She had a conversation with the preacher Osiander which lasted four hours (p. 128), she listened to over a hundred sermons preached by the Lutherans, and she read their writings, yet she could find nothing to her taste and it seemed easy to her to confound their arguments. Her letters show that her unhappiness was great, for on one occasion she went so far as to put before Nützel (p. 122) what the result would be if women like themselves, many of whom were over sixty and several over seventy, returned to the world and tried to earn their living, as everyone said they ought to do. She declared she detained no one, the nuns were at liberty to go if they chose; everyone was giving her advice, she said, but she saw no salvation in the new doctrines, which did not appeal to her. Her readiness to listen to argument caused Nützel to set his hopes on a conference between Melanchthon and her (p. 133), and probably at the instigation of Wilibald, who was deeply grieved at the injustice done to his sisters without being able to give them direct help, Melanchthon, who was well known for his uprightness and conciliatory influence, came to Nürnberg towards the close of the year 1525. ‘I am glad to hear Melanchthon is coming,’ Charitas wrote; ‘since I have heard he is an irreproachable, upright and justice-loving man, I do not suppose he can approve of what has been done here.’

Nützel at once (p. 149) brought him to the convent. ‘A few days later our representative came with Philip Melanchthon,’ Charitas wrote, ‘who spoke much about the new faith, but finding that we set our hopes more on the grace of God than on our works, he said we might as well seek our salvation in the cloister as in the world.’ They had a long talk together and agreed on all points except on the subject of vows, for these the reformer declared were not binding, while Charitas maintained that a promise made to God must be kept. She describes Melanchthon as more moderate in his speech than she had ever known a Lutheran to be. Melanchthon, on hearing the various points of the case, blamed the councillors for having forbidden the Franciscans to confer with the convent, and for forcibly taking the nuns out of the cloister. ‘I trust God has sent this Lutheran at the right hour,’ Charitas wrote, ‘for they were discussing whether or not to expel nuns generally, pull down their houses, and put the older inmates of those convents which would not surrender into one house, driving back the younger ones into the world’ (p. 171).

According to her account Melanchthon represented to the council that no convent at Wittenberg had been destroyed by force, and after a great deal of argument it was decreed to make one more effort to persuade the nuns to go, and failing this to leave them alone. No concessions were made with regard to the friars, the nuns remained without a minister to take their confessions and to administer the sacrament, but after all the nuns had been severally asked if they wished to stay or to go, and only one declared herself ready to leave the house, the rest were left in possession till the end of their days.

With the account of the last visitation, which took place in 1528, the memoir of Charitas ends. From other sources we hear that short of annoyances about her income and a tax levied on the convent she remained unmolested, and passed the last few years of her life in peace. At the close of 1528, the fiftieth anniversary of her entering the convent, and the twenty-fifth year of her appointment as abbess, was celebrated with some amount of cheerfulness. Wilibald and others sent presents, and after dinner the nuns danced to the sound of the dulcimer (hackbrett), which the abbess played[1182]. Wilibald’s interest in the convent continued, and towards the close of his life we find him busy writing a pamphlet in justification of the nuns[1183], in which he developed at some length the arguments against those who had oppressed and coerced them. He died in 1530, and within a couple of years was followed by his sister Charitas (1533). Her sister Clara ruled the convent for a few months after her and was succeeded by Wilibald’s daughter Charitas. The number of nuns was slowly but steadily dwindling; before the close of the century the house had fallen into the hands of the town council by default.

The abbess Charitas Pirckheimer worthily represents the monastic life of women at the close of the Middle Ages. Faithful to the system she had embraced, she remained true to her convictions to the last, with a fearlessness, candour, and determination which give her attitude a touch of heroism. She is one among many staunch adherents to the old faith who experienced hardships which simple humanity and feelings of equity and justice alike condemned, but whose steadfastness could not save their cause from being lost.