Download Free Medieval Religious Women Distant Echoes Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Medieval Religious Women Distant Echoes and write the review.

Sherri Franks Johnson explores the roles of religious women in the changing ecclesiastical and civic structure of late medieval Bologna, demonstrating how convents negotiated a place in their urban context and in the church at large. During this period Bologna was the most important city in the Papal States after Rome. Using archival records from nunneries in the city, Johnson argues that communities of religious women varied in the extent to which they sought official recognition from the male authorities of religious orders. While some nunneries felt that it was important to their religious life to gain recognition from monks and friars, others were content to remain local and autonomous. In a period often described as an era of decline and the marginalization of religious women, Johnson shows instead that they saw themselves as active participants in their religious orders, in the wider church and in their local communities.
Ten interdisciplinary essays provide detailed, small-scale studies of a variety of medieval female communities from Germany to Wales between 1200 and 1500, examining a range of social, economic, and cultural groups, both religious and secular.
Hadewijch of Antwerp (c.1200?-1240), Beatrice of Nazareth (1200-1268), Margaret Ebner (1291-1351), and Julian of Norwich (1343-1416/19) are best known for their mystical experiences and literary styles. Medieval Women on Sin and Salvation explores the reality that these women understood their encounters in primarily theological categories. It is well documented that Anselm of Canterbury's 1098 Cur Deus Homo was quickly and widely adopted by late medieval religious men. Given the deeply relational, somewhat unconventional, yet clearly orthodox interpretations of Anselm's theory expressed by Hadewijch, Beatrice, Margaret, and Julian, it would seem that nuns, beguines, and devout lay women were compelled by the same understanding of Atonement as the priests, monks, brothers, and lay men of the era. Unable to offer academic theological treatises, given the constraints of their age, these women managed to convey, through their writings, profoundly theological insights into the crucial Christian concepts of the natures of soul and sin, the Fall, and the Incarnation and its benefits, both for God and for humanity. This book offers valuable new insights and is suitable for upper division undergraduate classes and graduate courses in the history of Christianity/Medieval Christianity, theology, spirituality, and women's studies.
This collection builds on the foundational work of Penelope D. Johnson, John Boswell's most influential student outside queer studies, on integration and segregation in medieval Christianity. It documents the multiple strategies by which medieval people constructed identities and, in the process, wove the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion among various individuals and groups. The collection adopts an interdisciplinary approach, encompassing historical, art historical, and literary perpsectives to explore the definition of personal and communal spaces within medieval texts, the complex negotiation of the relationship between devotee and saint in both the early and the later Middle Ages, the forming of partnerships (symbolic, economic, devotional, etc.) between men and women across medieval Europe's considerable gender divide, and the ostracism of individuals and groups through various means including imprisonment, violence, and their identification with pollution. Contributors include: Diane Peters Auslander, Constance Hoffman Berman, Elizabeth A.R. Brown, Alexandra Cuffel, Anne M. Schuchman, Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Katherine Allen Smith, Kathryn A. Smith, Christina Roukis-Stern, Susan Valentine, Susan Wade, and Scott Wells.
Dietz finds that this period of Christianity witnessed an explosion of travel, as men and women took to the roads, seeking spiritual meaning in a life of itinerancy. This book is essential reading for those who study the history of monasticism, for it was a monastic context that religious travel first claimed an essential place within Christianity.
In Dark Age Nunneries, Steven Vanderputten dismantles the common view of women religious between 800 and 1050 as disempowered or even disinterested witnesses to their own lives. It is based on a study of primary sources from forty female monastic communities in Lotharingia—a politically and culturally diverse region that boasted an extraordinarily high number of such institutions. Vanderputten highlights the attempts by women religious and their leaders, as well as the clerics and the laymen and -women sympathetic to their cause, to construct localized narratives of self, preserve or expand their agency as religious communities, and remain involved in shaping the attitudes and behaviors of the laity amid changing contexts and expectations on the part of the Church and secular authorities. Rather than a "dark age" in which female monasticism withered under such factors as the assertion of male religious authority, the secularization of its institutions, and the precipitous decline of their intellectual and spiritual life, Vanderputten finds that the post-Carolingian period witnessed a remarkable adaptability among these women. Through texts, objects, archaeological remains, and iconography, Dark Age Nunneries offers scholars of religion, medieval history, and gender studies new ways to understand the experience of women of faith within the Church and across society during this era.
Detailed study of female monasticism in the later middle ages, with particular emphasis on the nuns' importance to the local community.
History has, until recently, minimized the role of nuns over the centuries. In this volume, their rich lives, their work, and their importance to the Church are finally acknowledged. Jo Ann Kay McNamara introduces us to women scholars, mystics, artists, political activists, healers, and teachers - individuals whose religious vocation enabled them to pursue goals beyond traditional gender roles.
The medieval era has been described as 'the Age of Chivalry' and 'the Age of Faith' but also as 'the Dark Ages'. Medieval women have often been viewed as subject to a punishing misogyny which limited their legal rights and economic activities, but some scholars have claimed they enjoyed a 'rough and ready equality' with men. The contrasting figures of Eve and the Virgin Mary loom over historians' interpretations of the period 1000-1500. Yet a wealth of recent historiography goes behind these conventional motifs, showing how medieval women's lives were shaped by status, age, life-stage, geography and religion as well as by gender. A Cultural History of Women in the Middle Ages presents essays on medieval women's life cycle, bodies and sexuality, religion and popular beliefs, medicine and disease, public and private realms, education and work, power, and artistic representation to illustrate the diversity of medieval women's lives and constructions of femininity.