Sacred Calling

[bumbershoot]

I think that for many noble women, life in the convent presented an attractive alternative to court life and forced dynastic marriages, particularly if the woman was of a scholarly bent. Many of the medieval convents were oases of learning and culture for women of the era. Some of them were artists, writers, composers, musicians and others were natural leaders of communities of women. Some of them found the convent a place where they could serve humanity in ways that might not have been approved in the castles and palaces.  And sometimes the families of women who entered or who founded a religious community  would endow that organization handsomely.

I think that if I lived in that era, I would far rather have chosen female monastic life to a forced marriage to some hairy stranger who would otherwise invade my father's lands. 

[PeDe]

wasn't it also a habit/custom that either the eldest or at least one daughter of nobility or royals had to become a nun?

[bumbershoot]

I don't think that it was a rule the way it so often was for the second son to go into the clergy or the military. But sometimes pious parents would dedicate one child for religious life from birth or in response to answered prayers for something else. The child's feelings on the subject were not taken into consideration.

[CyrilSebastian]

Also this practice might not always be done if there were only two sons. Hopefully the eldest son, who was the heir, would marry and father sons. However the second son, his brother would be looked upon as the spare, or as the heir to to the heir.

[Kristallinchen]

I don't think that it was a rule the way it so often was for the second son to go into the clergy or the military. But sometimes pious parents would dedicate one child for religious life from birth or in response to answered prayers for something else. The child's feelings on the subject were not taken into consideration.

This and they simply often had no other choice. Either live as a spinster in a palace where nobody wants you or enter a convent (where you can learn and study and do something good).

This was the case f. e. of two daughters of Empress Maria Theresia.

[fairy]

On the other hand, life in a convent was no ponyhof either and it was not the "life at the university with lots of women friends".
Few convents did "charity work" or "good" in our modern sense of view. Most did not do much more than live behind closed walls, pray, work for the convent (kitchen, garden etc) and be silent for most of the day. Reading and "learning" was the bible and the prayer books.
Really as an alternative to being married off to some "hairy stranger" who would force you to endlessly birth babies it sucked. Choosing between pest and cholera...

[Hester]

In the biography of St Anselme (11th century Frenchman who became Archbishop of Canterbury) he complained that the aristocratic nuns in his Normandy monastery were keeping their little dogs with them and having a fine time!

[CyrilSebastian]

Eleanor of England (1215-1275) was the daughter of King John of England. She married Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester. After her husband's demise in 1265, The Countess of Leicester became a nun at Montargis Abbey.

[CyrilSebastian]

Countess Anna of Stolberg-Wernigerode (1504-1574) reigned as Princess-Abbess of Quedlinburg from 1516 until 1574. She was elected princess-abbess at the age of twelve.

[CyrilSebastian]

Margrethe of Horne Perwez was the Princess-Abbess of Thorn Abbey from 1389 to 1397 in the Holy Roman Empire (The Netherlands).