The great contributions made by women to the religious life of the Middle Ages are attracting increasing attention. New book focuses on female monasticism

This international and interdisciplinary collection discusses a wide range of aspects relating to the lives of women in religious communities across medieval Europe

Women in the Medieval Monastic World
Ed. by J. Burton and K. Stöber
Series: Medieval Monastic Studies (MMS 1)
Brepols 2015 (June)
ISBN: 978-2-503-55308-5

ABSTRACT:

There has long been a tendency among monastic historians to ignore or marginalize female participation in monastic life, but recent scholarship has begun to redress the balance, and the great contributions made by women to the religious life of the Middle Ages are now attracting increasing attention. This interdisciplinary volume draws together scholars from Spain, Italy, France, the Low Countries, Germany, Transylvania, Scandinavia, and the British Isles, and offers new insights into the history, art history, and material culture, and the religiosity and culture of medieval religious women.

The different chapters within this book take a comparative approach to the emergence and spread of female monastic communities across different geographical, political, and economic settings, comparing and contrasting houses that ranged from rich, powerful royal abbeys to small, subsistence priories on the margins of society, and exploring the artistic achievements, the interaction with neighbours and secular and ecclesiastical authorities, and the spiritual lives that were led by their inhabitants. The contributors to this volume address issues as diverse as patronage and relationships with the outside world, organizational structures, the nature of Cistercian observance and identity among female houses, and the role of male authority, and in doing so, they seek to shed light on the divergences and commonalities upon which the female religious life was based.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

• Introduction — by Janet Burton and Karen Stöber
• Female Monasticism in Spain: Family Nunneries and their Transformation (Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries) , Gregoria Cavero
• Cistercian Nuns in Northern Italy. Variety of Foundations and Construction of an Identity, by Guido Carboni
• Female Monasteries of the Early Middle Ages (Seventh to Ninth Centuries) in Northern Gaul: Between Monastic Ideals and Aristocratic Powers, by Michèle Gaillard
• Forms of the cura monialium in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century England, by Brian Golding
• Female Religious Communities and Male Authority by Janet Burton
• Women and Monasticism in Venice in the Tenth to Twelfth Centuries by Anna Rapetti
• Cistercian Nuns in Medieval Denmark and Sweden: Far from the Madding Crowd? Bu Brian Patrick McGuire
• Female Mendicant Spirituality in Catalan Territory: The Birth of the Earliest Communities of Poor Clares, by Núria Jornet Benito
• ‘For they wanted us to serve them…’ Female Monasticism in Medieval Transylvania, by Carmen Floria
• Medieval Nunneries in Ireland: An Archaeology, by Tracy Collins
• Silk Purse or Pig’s Ear? Swine Priory and the Art and Architecture of Northern English Cistercian Nunneries at the End of the Middle Ages, by michael Carter
• Neither Male nor Female in Christ: Gender, Space and Cistercian Nunneries in Thirteenth-Century Flanders, by Erin Jordan
• The Symbolic Meaning of Space in Female Monastic Tradition, by Anne Müller
• The Location of the Choir in German Nunnery Churches, by Matthias Untermann
• FemMoData – A Database on Medieval Female Monasteries in Europe, by Hedwig Röckelein

ABOUT THE EDITORS:

Janet Burton is Professor of Medieval History at The University of Wales

Karen Stöber is a Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Lleida, Spain.