He faked his death to escape from the convent
Joan, a medieval nun who faked her own death to escape the convent. Women didn't even have many options in the Middle Ages.
The commitment of a medieval nun's life was demanding, requiring abdication of worldly pleasures and dedication to rigid religious routine in hierarchical convents isolated from outside influences.
Sister Joan, originally from Leeds, England, was a nun who entered the convent of St. Clement in the city of York. In Joan's time, at the beginning of the 14th century, entering religious life as a nun was a common path for girls from the age of 14, whether by choice or by imposition of their parents, but the young rebel Joan had no intention of carrying out this commitment.
Leaving religious life was not easy, as entering the convent was seen as the path to a life of renunciation in the name of faith and the harsh trials required. One does not abandon one's commitment simply by will and without facing the consequences. Joan knew this, but above all she knew that she wanted to leave São Clemente.
One day the young nun had the audacity to carry out a miraculous escape plan, faking her own death in order to be reborn outside of monastic life. Joan designed a kind of mannequin to impersonate her, a device that, according to records, was capriciously prepared "in the likeness of her body" and managed to place the fake object in a position that could be mistaken for a real corpse in order to presume herself dead and at the same time distract the other Benedictine sisters while they escaped from the convent duly disguised.
The ruse worked and she managed to get out of there. Obviously, it soon became clear that it was a trap, but by then it was too late and no one had any clues as to Joan's whereabouts. In a note in the register of 1318, Archbishop William Melton gave an account of the situation, noting that "she now wanders freely to the notorious danger to her soul and to the scandal of her whole order." The search for the mischievous nun eventually identified her in Beverley, some 50 kilometres from the convent, but the girl would not return, prompting Melton to vent: "Having turned her back on decency and the good of religion, seduced by indecency, she irreverently entangled herself and arrogantly perverted her way of life by the path of carnal lust and turned away from poverty and obedience."
Nothing more is known about Juana's life since this last record of her whereabouts.
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