Sister Benedicta Ward
Anglican nun who drew on her experience of the religious life to explore early Christian spirituality
SISTER BENEDICTA WARD, who has died 89, was an expert in early Christian spirituality who combined a prodigious scholarly output with the life of a contemplative nun.
Regarded by many as one of the most significant medievalists of her generation, as Reader in the History of Christian Spirituality at Oxford and a fellow of Harris Manchester College, she lectured on pre-reformation Christianity, on medieval mysticism, and on the worlds of St Anselm of Canterbury, St Teresa of Avila, and the Venerable Bede.
Her work was illuminated by her lived experience of the religious life. She redefined academic understanding of Julian of Norwich by simply asking how Julian could have been presumed to have been a nun for so long, when her writings contained no hints of the cloistered life which she herself lived.
The same down-to-earth rigour ran through all her writings and teaching. Her soft voice and gentle demeanour belied a sharp mind and a dry wit; she was well-loved by her students and got the best out of them. Given her distinction, the refusal of the Faculty of Theology to make her a Doctor of Divinity raised eyebrows in Oxford and further afield.
The withholding of the honour spurred friends to action and she became the dedicatee of a Festschrift, published by Bloomsbury in 2014, which included contributions from Dom Henry Wansbrough and Rowan
Williams. Its title – Prayer and Thought in the Monastic Tradition – reflected the field to which she had dedicated her life’s work. A former student, Dominic Mattos, contributed the last chapter: “Sr Benedicta Ward: Nun, Scholar, Teacher”.
Florence Margaret Ward was born on February 4 1933 in Durham, the daughter of a former Anglican who had left the Church of England to marry his Methodist wife and had become a minister in his new denomination.
She was a late second child and not close to her mother; she was raised by her much-older sister, Marjorie. By 1939 they were in Middlesbrough; Sister Benedicta later acknowledged that her childhood had come to an abrupt end at the age of six, when the bombs started falling around her.
A combination of the war and her father’s peripatetic work meant that she was largely home-schooled. During a spell at Bolton School, however, a teacher recognised her nascent passion for medieval history; she went on to the University of Manchester in the early 1950s.
When her father was posted to Devon she accompanied him as his driver; in the course of one journey she happened to enter a Roman Catholic church during Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, a ceremony full of candles and clouds of incense. The rational part of her mind was repulsed, but the other part was swept away and she soon came to realise that Methodism was no longer for her.
Initially she considered becoming a Catholic, but when the elderly priest allocated to her for preparation advised her to ask fewer questions and “let yourself fall asleep in the arms of Mother Church,” she decided to look elsewhere.
She came to High Anglicanism through the beauty of Choral Evensong and at the age of 22 she entered the convent of the Sisters of the Love of God, an enclosed community of Anglican contemplative nuns at Fairacres in East Oxford, as Sister Benedicta of Jesus.
Sister Benedicta began doctoral studies under RW Southern in 1972; her thesis appeared as Miracles and the Medieval Mind in 1981, followed by the striking Harlots of the Desert a few years later.
The books kept coming, aided by her being granted dispensation from curfew by the wise and practical Mother Mary Clare, SLG, who realised that she needed to be able to stay in the libraries until closing time, and to attend evening lectures.
One morning a bruised Benedicta explained to her worried sisters that she had fallen off a ladder in the Bodleian; she had to tell her Mother Superior that she had in fact come a cropper climbing back into the convent through a window. Thereafter she was provided with rooms in town, and latterly a flat in the curtilage of St Stephen’s House.
Her collection of Peter Rabbit memorabilia went with her to “Staggers”; knowing that the new resident was an author, one of the more imaginative college scouts took her to be Beatrix Potter.
Sister Benedicta often felt that her two vocations, one religious and the other academic, pulled her in opposite directions. However she continued teaching well into her eighties, only stopping when the Covid-19 pandemic forced the University into lockdown.
In her last years she returned to live at Fairacres, where she was laid to rest in her full monastic habit and veil.