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question was unsuited to the enforced celibacy of the life of a woman religious. According to Aelred Of Hexham (1110-1167), who chronicled the case of the Nun of Watton, the rebellious teenager made the accquaintance of a lay brother at an adjacent male monastery, had sex, and became pregnant. After her sisters at the convent discovered that their wayward fellow member was less than celibate, they proceeded to strip, whip and chain her up, but not before testing the guilt of the lay brother through sending out a monk dressed in her habit, whereupon the offending lay brother tried to consummate their prior relationship with him as well! After hatching a plan, the nuns debated what to do with their errant member. Some of the younger nuns wanted her burnt, roasted or skinned alive, but the older sisters decided differently. Unchained, the imprisoned pregnant sister lured the miscreant lay brother into a trap, where he was castrated at the hands of his former lover. Repentant, the Nun of Watton was 'miraculously' deprived of her pregnancy and apparently resumed the life of a celibate sister in her convent. Modern chroniclers, such as John Boswell and Sarah Salih, have professed bewilderment at the degree of brutality that these nuns perpetrated on their hapless charge and her unfortunate lover. Boswell's ''The Kindness of Strangers'' (1989) provided a Modern English translation of Aelred's original account, and Aelred similarly professed ambivalence about the propriety of the nuns behaviour toward their charge and her lover, and apparent absence of pastoral care available to the hapless young woman at the centre of this case. Brian Golding's history of the Gilbertines places the incident in its historical context. For some reason, the case above failed to capture the interest of Nunsploitation film makers in their heyday during the sixties and seventies, although its subject matter would seem ideal for such a treatment, and has the added advantage of possible veracity, if one disounts the 'miraculous' resolution of the plight of the pregnant renegade. BIBLIOGRAPHY
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