Joan of Leeds: you go, girl!

I am a 16 year product of Catholic schooling, all at the hands of the same order of nuns.

When I was really little – third grade, the year we had a nice, young, pretty nun – I wanted to become one of them. For Halloween, I went out as a nun, the all-purpose witch costume my mother had made a few years earlier (with ample hems to take out as I grew) easily repurposed into a nun’s habit.

I’m not sure how successful I was in figuring out the headpiece part. On Halloween, we were allowed to bring costumes – as long as they represented a saint, holy person, or historic figure – and wear them for the afternoon. As the patrol lines were forming, Sister asked me whether I was supposed to be a nun. Hmmmm.

Anyway, by the time I reached the true age of reason, somewhere beyond the age of eight, I realized that having a vocation would be a terrible thing. I prayed against having one.

Seriously, who would want to be a nun?

So many of them seemed miserable, angry all the time and taking it out on the kids. Sure, there were some who were kind and good teachers, but you were just as likely to spend your schooldays with a sadist who shouldn’t have been anywhere near children. They were mean, bullying, psychologically (and on occasion, physically) abusive.

The worst nuns seemed to be in grammar school. Take the first grade nun who told a group of boys who’d had the audacity to stretch their arms out, lightly blocking a kid’s return to his desk, that they were heading to reform school.

“If you brought your lunch today” – and very few kids brought their lunch; most of us legged it home for our soup and sammy – “it’s your last meal. If not, breakfast was. And I hope you kissed your mother goodbye, because you’re never going to see her again.”

Then there was the nun who, on December 2, 1958, the day after a fire at Our Lady of Angels Grammar School in Chicago took the lives of nearly 100 children (and a few nuns), told us, “God seldom makes mistakes, but in this case he made one.” Because we were so awful and sinful, she continued. “He had intended to burn down Our Lady of the Angels in Worcester. But there was a slip up.”

A fair number of crazies appeared during my grammar school years. There were also some nutters when I was in high school, but proportionately there were fewer of them than there had been in grammar school. (By college there were few of them in evidence, and they were as far as I could tell pretty much intelligent and sane.)

But the high school nuns did dispense some fairly odd “wisdom.” Ringo Starr, we were told, was retarded and, thus, we should avoid The Beatles.

If you read Catcher in the Rye, you will lose your faith. So don’t!

And this gem: “Just because you did better on your math college boards, it doesn’t mean you’re a homosexual.” Thanks, Sta, for letting us know.

No surprise, then, that I didn’t want to be one of them.

And no surprise when I learned about what formation had been like for those woman when they’d entered the convent. “Our” order was semi-cloistered. Once a girl – and they were girls, often the daughters of large, poor Irish immigrant families – joined up, she had little contact with her family, little access to news, scant opportunity to go out in public. They weren’t allowed to make friendships with other nuns, let alone with anyone in the parishes where they served. They were transferred around regularly, and didn’t know until mid August what school they’d be teaching at in September, not even the city where they’d be living. A pretty grim life.

With my history with the nunny-bunnies, as we not-so-affectionately called them, I was naturally amused when my sister Trish came across an article in The Guardian about Joan of Leeds.

A team of medieval historians working in the archives at the University of York has found evidence that a nun in the 14th century faked her own death and crafted a dummy “in the likeness of her body” in order to escape her convent and pursue – in the words of the archbishop of the time – “the way of carnal lust”.

A marginal note written in Latin and buried deep within one of the 16 heavy registers used by to record the business of the archbishops of York between 1304 and 1405 first alerted archivists to the adventures of the runaway nun. “To warn Joan of Leeds, lately nun of the house of St Clement by York, that she should return to her house,” runs the note written by archbishop William Melton and dated to 1318.

Melton, writing to inform the Dean of Beverley about the “scandalous rumour” he had heard about the arrival of the Benedictine nun Joan, claimed that Joan had “impudently cast aside the propriety of religion and the modesty of her sex”, and “out of a malicious mind simulating a bodily illness, she pretended to be dead, not dreading for the health of her soul, and with the help of numerous of her accomplices, evildoers, with malice aforethought, crafted a dummy in the likeness of her body in order to mislead the devoted faithful and she had no shame in procuring its burial in a sacred space amongst the religious of that place”.

After faking her own death, he continued, “and, in a cunning, nefarious manner … having turned her back on decency and the good of religion, seduced by indecency, she involved herself irreverently and perverted her path of life arrogantly to the way of carnal lust and away from poverty and obedience, and, having broken her vows and discarded the religious habit, she now wanders at large to the notorious peril to her soul and to the scandal of all of her order.”

Trish (only 12 years in Catholic school; only 8 with the semi-cloistered nuns) was, quite naturally, quick to share this story with me and my sister Kath (a fellow 16-year product). She passed the link along with the comment, “You go, girl!”

Kath wrote, “If only I could have selectively faked my death to escape some of the Psycho Killer Nuns.”

I dubbed Joan of Leeds “our new hero.”

Trish hoped that she got away with it.

I imagined that the head nun’s response was “over my dead body.”

The professor who led the project trumped us all. She likened the discovery to a Monty Python sketch.

No information has been unearthed to indicate whether Joan was dragooned back into the convent, or whether she made a full escape.

But I like to think that she had a good old irreverent life, wandering at large, with plenty by the way of carnal lust, etc.

You go, girl, indeed!