This book is the first to explore the archaeology of female monasticism in medieval Ireland, primarily from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. Nuns are known from history, but this book considers their archaeology and upstanding architecture through perspectives such as gender and landscape. It discusses the archaeological remains associated with female monasticism in Ireland as it is currently understood and offers insights into how these religious communities might have lived and interacted with their local communities.
New approaches to understanding religious women's involvement in monastic reform, demonstrating how women's experiences were more ambiguous and multi-layered than previously assumed. Over the last two decades, scholarship has presented a more nuanced view of women's attitude to and agency in medieval monastic reform, challenging the idea that they were, by and large, unwilling to accept or were necessarily hostile towards reform initiatives. Rather, it has shown that they actively participated in debates about the ideas and structures that shaped their religious lives, whether rejecting, embracing, or adapting to calls for "reform" contingent on their circumstances. Nevertheless, fundamental questions regarding the gendered nature of religious reform are ripe for further examination. This book brings together innovative research from a range of disciplines to re-evaluate and enlarge our knowledge of women's involvement in spiritual and institutional change in female monastic communities over the period c. 1000 - c. 1500. Contributors revise conventional narratives about women and monastic reform, and earlier assumptions of reform as negative or irrelevant for women. Drawing on a diverse array of visual, material and textual sources, it presents "snapshots" of reform from western Europe, stretching from Ireland to Iberia. Case-studies focussing on a number of different topics, from tenth-century female saints' lives to fifteenth-century liturgical books, from the tenth-century Leominster prayerbook to archaeological remains in Ireland, from embroideries and tapestries to the rebellious nuns of Sainte-Croix in Poitiers, offer a critical reappraisal of how monastic women (and their male associates) reflected, individually and collectively, on their spiritual ideals and institutional forms.
Monasticism, in all of its variations, was a feature of almost every landscape in the medieval West. So ubiquitous were religious women and men throughout the Middle Ages that all medievalists encounter monasticism in their intellectual worlds. While there is enormous interest in medieval monasticism among Anglophone scholars, language is often a barrier to accessing some of the most important and groundbreaking research emerging from Europe. The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West offers a comprehensive treatment of medieval monasticism, from Late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. The essays, specially commissioned for this volume and written by an international team of scholars, with contributors from Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, cover a range of topics and themes and represent the most up-to-date discoveries on this topic.
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.
A multi-disciplinary re-evaluation of the role of women religious in the Middle Ages, both inside and outside the cloister. Medieval women found diverse ways of expressing their religious aspirations: within the cloister as members of monastic and religious orders, within the world as vowesses, or between the two as anchorites. Via a range of disciplinary approaches, from history, archaeology, literature, and the visual arts, the essays in this volume challenge received scholarly narratives and re-examine the roles of women religious: their authority and agency within their own communities and the wider world; their learning and literacy; place in the landscape; and visual culture. Overall, they highlight the impact of women on the world around them, the significance of their presence in communities, and the experiences and legacies they left behind.
This book celebrates the work and contribution of Professor Janet Burton to medieval monastic studies in Britain. Burton has fundamentally changed approaches to the study of religious foundations in regional contexts (Yorkshire and Wales), placing importance on social networks for monastic structures and female Cistercian communities in medieval Britain; moreover, she has pioneered research on the canons and their place in medieval English and Welsh societies. This Festschrift comprises contributions by her colleagues, former students and friends – leading scholars in the field – who engage with and develop themes that are integral to Burton’s work. The rich and diverse collection in the present volume represents original work on religious life in the British Isles from the twelfth to the sixteenth century as homage to the transformative contribution that Burton has made to medieval monastic studies in the British Isles.
In this engaging work, Bruce L. Venarde uncovers a largely unknown story of women's religious lives and puts female monasticism back in the mainstream of medieval ecclesiastical history. To chart the expansion of nunneries in France and England during the central Middle Ages, he presents statistics and narratives to describe growth in broad historical contexts, with special attention to social and economic change. Venarde explains that in the years 1000–1300 the number of nunneries within Europe grew tenfold. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, religious institutions for women developed in a variety of ways, mostly outside the self-conscious reform movements that have been the traditional focus of monastic history. Not reforming monks but wandering preachers, bishops, and the women and men of local petty aristocracies made possible the foundation of new nunneries. In times of increased agrarian wealth, decentralization of power, and a shortage of potential spouses, many women decided to become nuns and proved especially adept at combining spiritual search with practical acumen. This era of expansion came to an end in the thirteenth century when forces of regulation and new economic realities reduced radically the number of new nunneries. Venarde argues that the factors encouraging and inhibiting monastic foundations for men and women were much more similar than scholars have previously assumed.
This book investigates the impact of the dissolution of the monasteries on women religious and examines their survival in the following decades, showing how, despite the state's official proscription of vocation living, religious vocation options for women continued in less formal ways. McShane explores the experiences of Irish women who travelled to the Continent in pursuit of formal religious vocational formation, covering both those accommodated in English and European continental convents' and those in the Irish convents established in Spanish Flanders and the Iberian Peninsula. Further, this book discusses the revival of religious establishments for women in Ireland from 1629 and outlines the links between these new convents and the Irish foundations abroad. Overall, this study provides a rich picture of Irish women religious during a period of unprecedented change and upheaval.
Isle of the Saints recreates the harsh yet richly spiritual world of medieval Irish monks on the Christian frontier of barbarian Europe. Lisa Bitel draws on accounts of saints' lives written between 800 and 1200 to explain, from the monks' own perspective, the social networks that bound them to one another and to their secular neighbors.
