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Eileen Edna Power's 'Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535' offers a thorough exploration of the social and religious history of English nunneries during the Middle Ages. Power draws from a wide range of sources, including wills, account rolls, and visitation documents, to provide a detailed picture of life inside these cloistered communities. From the motivations of the women who took the veil to the financial difficulties that plagued many nunneries, Power delves into the day-to-day realities of monastic life. She also addresses controversies such as the moral state of nunneries, and the attempts at reform made by external authorities. This book is a fascinating and meticulously researched account of a little-understood aspect of medieval England.
The literacy and education of medieval nuns has been a subject of dispute and study in recent years. In his third Index of medieval libraries, David Bell presents a comprehensive list of all manuscripts and printed books which have been traced with certainty or high probability to english nunneries. A systematic listing of the books available to english nuns, and in the process an indication of the wealth, the intellectual level, and the spirituality of english nuns from the Conquest to the Reformation.
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.
In her ground-breaking new study, Katie Bugyis offers a new history of communities of Benedictine nuns in England from 900 to 1225. By applying innovative paleographical, codicological, and textual analyses to their surviving liturgical books, Bugyis recovers a treasure trove of unexamined evidence for understanding these women's lives and the liturgical and pastoral ministries they performed. She examines the duties and responsibilities of their chief monastic officers--abbesses, prioresses, cantors, and sacristans--highlighting three of the ministries vital to their practice-liturgically reading the gospel, hearing confessions, and offering intercessory prayers for others. Where previous scholarship has argued that the various reforms of the central Middle Ages effectively relegated nuns to complete dependency on the sacramental ministrations of priests, Bugyis shows that, in fact, these women continued to exercise primary control over their spiritual care. Essential to this argument is the discovery that the production of the liturgical books used in these communities was carried out by female scribes, copyists, correctors, and creators of texts, attesting to the agency and creativity that nuns exercised in the care they extended to themselves and those who sought their hospitality, counsel, instruction, healing, forgiveness, and intercession.
By the late Anglo-Saxon period almost all newly founded nunneries were founded by royal patronage. This detailed study, which traces the histories of royal nunneries in the 7th and 8th centuries, examines how they differed from other types of religious communities in terms of their organisation, status, special secular and ecclesiastical features and the authority and power which the abbess and other women held. Barbara Yorke reveals how the royal nunneries were not only subject to the changing fortunes of the Church and state, but also to the successes and failures of the royal houses that patronised them. This particular group of nunneries is also compared and contrasted with the variety of other arrangements available to religious women, both within and outside of convents and male religious establishments, and with gender and societal norms.
Examination of the role of the convent superior in the middle ages, underlining the amount of power and responsibility at her command.