The previous chapter revealed that, in order to harness water’s potential, human intervention is sometimes required – the devoted reader is encouraged to use the cleansing agent of water to purify and maintain their souls, to help them withstand the filthy floods of sin. In the devotional treatise The Abbey of the Holy Ghost, for example, water cleanses sin and provides metaphorical wealth for the inhabitants of an imagined abbey, acting on its environment to enact positive change. It is the responsibility of the inhabitants to help facilitate this change, by preparing the building site where the river will flow and by engaging with the water itself – fetching water to provide sustenance and nourishment, for example. This chapter will turn from images of cleansing to the use of water as a metaphor for speech – both the words of women and the words of God. However, it will argue that even when the usage of water changes – from cleansing agent to speech – the emphasis on responsibility remains, especially in later medieval works. Women readers are encouraged to maintain and manage their thoughts as if they were the unruly element of water; if they dam up their speech, rather than letting it burst the floodgates of their mouths, then it can be transformed into heavenly thoughts, rising up to God instead of falling down to earth.

In order to support this argument, the first part of this chapter will briefly sketch the importance of water to real religious institutions, considering how the allegorical rivers in works like The Abbey of the Holy Ghost are drawn from the realities of religious life. The proximity of institutions to water sources make them an integral part of these spiritual landscapes, which in turn inform the allegorical usage of water in devotional prose targeted at women living in such institutions.