Abbess

An abbess governs an autonomous monastery of nuns with an authority closely paralleling an abbot's own governance of a monastery of monks, responsible for the community's spiritual formation, its temporal administration, and, within limits set by canon law and the monastery's own constitutions, its internal discipline; because an abbess, as a woman, cannot receive Holy Orders, her authority over her community is understood in Catholic canon law as a form of governing jurisdiction distinct in kind from a bishop's or abbot's own sacramental and juridical authority, even where its practical scope over the monastery's members is extensive.

Some historical abbesses held authority considerably broader than governance of their own convent alone: the abbess of certain great medieval double monasteries, houses combining communities of both monks and nuns under one superior, exercised authority over the monks as well, a genuinely unusual arrangement within a generally male-governed medieval church, and a small number of territorial abbesses held quasi-feudal lordship over surrounding lands and their inhabitants comparable to a territorial abbot's own exempt jurisdiction, though such arrangements have not survived into the modern period.

Hildegard of Bingen, abbess of a twelfth-century Benedictine community on the Rhine, exemplifies the scope some medieval abbesses achieved beyond ordinary monastic administration: she corresponded with popes and emperors, preached publicly with ecclesiastical permission unusual for a woman of her era, and produced theological, medical and musical works of lasting influence, activity her standing as abbess helped make possible within a church otherwise closed to female public authority. Other medieval abbesses, particularly those governing wealthy and well-connected royal or noble foundations, similarly wielded influence well beyond their convent walls through their communities' land holdings, political connections and, in the case of double monasteries such as several English and Frankish houses, direct authority over male religious as well as female.

An abbess is elected by the professed nuns of her own monastery according to the community's constitutions, generally for a fixed term though historically often for life, and her election, like an abbot's, is followed by a blessing conferred by a bishop rather than an ordination. The scope of an abbess's authority has narrowed considerably since the medieval period, as canon law reforms progressively brought women's religious communities under closer and more uniform diocesan and Vatican oversight, ending the more autonomous, occasionally quasi-territorial standing some medieval abbesses had achieved.