So this question might be a little morbid, but it seems like nunneries would be easy /attractive targets for thieves, roaming hordes and rapists. A place filled with women, no men around, a lot of them old/frail. How were these places and the nuns themselves protected throughout more brutal time periods?
Was it simply isolation and dressing as nonsexual as possible? Seems like it had to be more.
EDIT: Thanks for all the comments. Convent was the word I was looking for, I just kept thinking of the “get thee to a nunnery” line in Hamlet. Everything I know about life in a convent is pretty much from Sound of Music and a handful of shows.
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During the medieval period Christian nunneries and monasteries were largely populated by members of wealthy merchant families or noble families. That meant that many orders had the wealth to develop economic relationships with their local communities and to hire people to protect them if they faced a period of unrest.
While the church didn’t exactly charge an “admission fee” to join a holy order it was expected that families would contribute to the upkeep of the order. Even the Franciscan order, which was established in 1209 with a vow of poverty partly in reaction to the wealthier orders of the time, was initially founded with the wealth of Francis and a few other wealthy early members. (Amusing note: the Franciscans wore brown robes as an open commentary on the black robes of some other monastic orders – black is an expensive color to dye, so it was a sign of wealth and power to wear black, and a sign of poverty to wear brown homespun).
With the level of personal wealth and secularism in the West now it’s hard to picture the amount of power held by the church in medieval Europe. Unless someone was backed by a huge local political force or was just psychotic it really made little sense to piss off the church.
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