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The convent in Early Modern Italy functioned as a uniquely queer space, denying women heteronormative lives while producing homosocial, virginal communities. As nuns wove together the dual acts of listening and vocalizing, they built queer sonic environments that were the site of massive power struggles between male church officials, the bodies of women religious, and the wealthy families of Italy. Connecting voice studies, feminist and queer musicology, sound studies, and nun studies to explore new ways of approaching convent musicking, the author examines Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana's 'O magnum mysterium' to illuminate the possibilities of women's agency and queerly inflected performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the unusual commemorative Office of the Virgin from Barking Abbey in a fifteenth-century book of hours, Cambridge, University Library, Dd.12.56 (hereafter Dd.12.56). As already evident in the Barking Ordinal, the nuns of this Abbey venerated Mary, one of their patron saints, with a weekly full three-nocturn, twelve-lesson Matins service. Dd.12.56, however, has only recently been linked to Barking Abbey and drawing on new material in this manuscript in correlation with others from the Abbey, I argue that the Barking nuns compiled a unique series of readings and responsories to honour Mary. The progression through the three nocturns of Matins articulates a Marian theology that intersects with the nuns' self-understanding and I demonstrate that they carefully crafted the lesser hours to highlight specific times of day and to complement Marian hymns sung at Barking. The accepted belief that books of hours were for personal devotion obscures the possibility that such books reflect communal liturgical practices, potentially serving multiple purposes within a monastic setting. Although Dd.12.56 dates from the fifteenth century, it may testify to a much older liturgical practice, which originated in the twelfth century when the three-nocturn format was still prevalent in Benedictine use and before it was largely replaced by a two-nocturn format in the thirteenth century. Benedictine tradition offered individual monastic houses the opportunity to craft this service. Dd.12.56 stands as a new and important testimony to the rich and imaginative ways in which the Barking community created, collated and curated materials that they steeped in their minds and hearts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The referent of Ἰησοῦς in Heb 4.8 is traditionally understood to refer to Joshua son of Nun and frequently as a type referring to Jesus the Christ. I will argue against this reading and, instead, maintain that the referent of Ἰησοῦς is Jesus. Two lines of evidence are provided. First, analysis of the context demonstrates that the 'Joshua' option disrupts the author's argument, and that understanding the referent to be Jesus clarifies the argument. Second, the use of the nomina sacra abbreviations to refer to Jesus in the earliest manuscripts demonstrates that they interpreted Ἰησοῦς as referring to Jesus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using received texts and excavated funerary epitaphs, this article examines the intricacies of gender and migration in early medieval China by exploring women's long-distance mobility from the fourth century to the sixth century, when what is now known as China was divided by the Northern Wei and a succession of four southern states—the Eastern Jin, Liu-Song, Southern Qi, and Liang. I focus on three types of migration in which women participated during this period: war-induced migration, family reunification, and religious journeys. Based on this analysis, I propose answers to two important questions: the connection between migration and the state, and textual representations of migrants. Though the texts under consideration are usually written in an anecdotal manner, the references to women, I argue, both reveals nuances in perceptions of womanhood at the time and elucidates the contexts within—and through—which long-distance travel became possible for women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the unusual history and legal status of the Tor de' Specchi community, founded by Francesca Romana (d. 1440) in Rome, in the face of shifting expectations for religious women in Counter-Reformation Catholicism. It is argued that Francesca Romana had sought to carve out a religious path for women distinct from that of nuns as brides of Christ ('sponsae Christi'). The article demonstrates the community's difficulties in maintaining this way of life in the face of Pope Pius V's 1566 bull Circa Pastoralis, which extended the Council of Trent's 1563 decrees on enclosure (clausura) to all nuns of every order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a specific type of religious travel—not pious pilgrimage to the Holy Lands—but more mundane trips performed by Eastern Orthodox sisters to beg for donations within and between three multi-confessional empires. More specifically, it focuses on how nuns' spatial movements put them on the bigger imperial and transnational maps of church, state, and society and contributed to negotiating space for gender. By combining mobility and gender as categories of analysis, I position the sisters' acts within three broad themes: travel, women's education, and social networks. I suggest that nuns' involvement in local communities and the establishment of schools for girls provides evidence for worldly as well as pious concerns. By encompassing rich social interactions, the sisters' story presents gender imbalances in more palpable form and embodies larger experiences of nineteenth-century women who strove to achieve self-development and to assert social visibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the performance of music in a Maltese female Benedictine monastery in the early modern period in relation to prevailing attitudes towards monastic music and polyphony. By placing these letters in their social and cultural context, it also offers fresh insights into female literacy in early modern Malta. The discussion centres on a set of fifteen unpublished letters that provide a rare example of a woman in early eighteenth-century Malta engaged in a written exchange of theological and philosophical ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of religious migration and experience of exile in the early modern period has received a great deal of attention in recent years. Neglected within this scholarship, however, is sustained discussion of linguistic encounter within these often fraught transcultural and transnational interactions. This article breaks new ground by exploring the linguistic experiences of religious exiles in English convents founded in the Low Countries. Most women within English communities in exile were linguistically challenged; focusing on the creative ways these women subsequently negotiated language barriers sheds new light on female language acquisition and encounter during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nuns in New Spain were celebrated with music and elaborate rituals when they took the habit and professed in a convent. These grandiose profession ceremonies drew in a host of urban citizens to the convent churches. Indeed, "more girls are smitten by the ceremony, than anything else," remarked Fanny Calderón, wife of a Spanish ambassador who lived in Mexico City in the early 1840s, confirming that the iconic festivity endured well into the nineteenth century after Mexico's independence. This article on nuns' professions is framed within the Order of the Immaculate Conception (Conceptionists). One of the largest extant collections of Novohispanic convent music comes from the Conceptionist community of the Santísima Trinidad, founded in seventeenth-century Puebla. The manuscripts are preserved at Centro Nacional de Investigación, Documentación e Información Musical "Carlos Chávez" in Mexico City, and they contain profession villancicos. My research on Conceptionist ritual books and biographies of noteworthy nuns allows me to place the villancicos within the wider context of Conceptionist devotion, convent race relations, and artistic patronage. The texts for the villancicos present women as the main subject of the compositions, which adorned a spectacular ritual also centered on women. The profession ceremony is, therefore, a valuable source to begin understanding Novohispanic women's contribution to music making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on transnational encounter has predominantly focused on men's cross-cultural interactions. This article breaks new ground by exploring women's roles in similar forms of linguistic and power negotiation within the context of English convents founded in Europe during the seventeenth century. Moreover, recent scholarship on English convents has so far remained silent on the question of how these women negotiated the language barriers that many of them faced. This article proposes an answer by examining the correspondence sent in the 1620s from the English Benedictine convent in Brussels. These letters reveal the changing ways in which English nuns relied on both male and female translators to communicate. In so doing, this article expands existing scholarly understanding of epistolary and literary culture by exploring the authorial strategies employed in the convent, which afforded the nuns a sense of authority over their texts. The letters were vital avenues for the women to express dissent, and raise concerns over the way their community was governed. Finally, despite being enclosed institutions, English convents in exile were not monoglot spaces but porous sites of multi-lingual encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is based on the case study of Sr Asklipiodata, a Jewish convert to Christianity, who became a member of the monastic community in one of Kiev's Orthodox convents in the second half of the eighteenth century. It explores the ways in which the non-communal way of life in Eastern Orthodox convents impacted both upon the praxis of monastic existence within the convent walls, and relations with the secular world without. Parallel to this consideration of a lasting centrality of property ownership in Orthodox female monasticism, the article addresses the largely neglected question of Jewish assimilation in the Russian Empire prior to the Partitions of Poland (1772–93), which brought the sizeable Jewish population of the Commonwealth's eastern borderlands into close contact with the Russian state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From the Counter-Reformation to the present, women in a variety of contexts of colonization, decolonization, and slavery crossed the threshold from missionary congregation to missionary workforce to live in Catholic religious community. Comparative, transnational analysis provides insights from a variety of angles into the myriad local factors that fashioned their understandings of the relationship between the spiritual and material benefits so gained. Their experiences were uneven, shaped by the race, gender, and status politics of each ecclesiastical and secular context, by their usefulness to the wider missionary project and the state, and by shifts in ecclesiastical rulings that were prompted by changes in the Vatican’s temporal status. In the later twentieth century, some became activists and advocates, using their symbolic power to work in the interests of women and poor people, and to reform the patriarchy at the core of the church. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In their published memoirs of the Peninsular War, a surprising number of British officers mentioned visits to Portuguese convents and openly confessed to having flirted with the sisters – occasionally to the point of outright seduction – and abandoned them when the regiment moved on. This seems like a very negative self-fashioning to modern readers, but can best be understood in the context of the political and cultural climate in which these memoirs were produced. This article argues that officers' descriptions of convent visiting and their professions of sympathy for cloistered women revealed the influence of gothic, erotic, romantic, and travel literature on military life writing. Their depiction of nuns differed from nuns’ portrayal by common soldiers due to its infusion with masculine ideals of chivalry and sensibility. Elite memoirists saw no need to justify their abandonment of nuns because they viewed it in light of other literary accounts of soldiers who broke nuns’ hearts. At the same time, they contrasted themselves with the barbarism of the French, believing themselves to be far more compassionate and tolerant of Catholic strictures. Officers’ portrayals of Portuguese sisters can thus also be seen as an expression of Britons’ sense of their relationship with Portugal in the war. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Population ageing occurs in all industrialised societies and is the demographic phenomenon that currently gets the highest attention from scientists, policy makers and the general public. The main aim of this paper is to broaden our understanding of its societal consequences, such as ageism and intergenerational solidarity. Our study is based on the 2008 investigation of attitudes towards population ageing and older people in seven European countries of Schoenmaeckers et al. We replicate their analysis in a specific human subpopulation in which the process of population ageing started earlier and is much more advanced than in the general societies: the members of Catholic orders. The study compares the attitudes of 148 nuns and monks from three Bavarian monasteries to those of the western German general population using descriptive and multivariate analyses in the context of the debate around population ageing in Germany. We discuss the specific characteristics of order members that might influence their attitudes and also take a brief look at their views on possible political strategies to solve the problems connected with the demographic changes. Our results confirm the findings of Schoenmaeckers et al. and reveal that worldly and monastic populations show an identical basic pattern of a positive attitude towards older people while at the same time considering population ageing a worrisome development. However, order members evaluate older people's abilities and their role in society more positively. This result gives rise to the optimistic perspective that in an aged population the younger and older generations can build a well-functioning society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In early modern Italy the entry of a woman into a nunnery was celebrated with lyric poems composed by male friends and would-be friends of the woman's family, and, on occasion, by the woman herself. This genre of occasional verse marking nuns' vestition and profession ceremonies has generally been overlooked by scholars, despite the considerable attention paid to early modern nuns in recent decades. Many of these poems were printed and served a public function, demonstrating how convents were embedded within early modern cultural networks. The poems, replete with Petrarchan tropes, anagrams, and play on the women's names, illustrate the adaptability of secular literary modes in the wake of the Council of Trent. Rare poems by the women themselves--generally more private works that survive only in manuscript--go beyond the limits of the genre and offer a sometimes surprisingly intimate glimpse of how these women artfully responded to their own experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes approaching the singularity of nuns' careers during the military dictatorship of Argentina. The author posits that the double condition of being women and being nuns gave such women a comparative advantage in the face of state repression. The author reconstructs a typical course of action based on a meaningful selection of interviews and life histories of nuns from different congregations in order to analyze their repertories of strategies in different contexts of state repression. To conclude, the author exposes four types of strategies that combine visibility and agency and that enabled nuns to avoid situations of state repression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article complements existing scholarship on religious transformation in Guatemala's western highlands by focusing on the important and often overlooked role played by Maryknoll women religious. The Maryknoll Sisters' hospital in Jacaltenango in the department of Huehuetenango became the center of a medical program that included eighteen clinics, a nursing school, a midwifery program, and a health promoters program. Mayas selectively embraced Maryknoll Sisters' medicine and actively sought opportunities to disseminate it. Even as Maya health promoters and midwives introduced "Western" preventative and curative medicine and promoted a Romanized practice of Catholicism, they transformed the Maryknoll Sisters' medical programs to parallel an existing Maya leadership composed of chimanes and midwives responsible for rituals of faith and healing. Mayas appropriated, interpreted, and synthesized Maya and Catholic religious concepts and practices with Maya and Western health-care practices and beliefs. By incorporating Maryknoll women religious and their medical programs into studies of religious transformation in Guatemala's western highlands, we gain new insight into this process of change and into the central role that women played in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The statutes of the Gilbertine order, established by Gilbert of Sempringham in the second half of the twelfth century, underwent modification during the following century as a consequence of two legatine visitations, in 1238 and 1267. This paper examines these new regulations in the context of growing episcopal concern for the internal discipline of nunneries and considers the possible inter-relationships between the `self-regulating' and internally-disciplined Gilbertine order and the synodal legislation of reforming bishops and their episcopal visitation of non-Gilbertine nunneries, particularly in Yorkshire. It suggests that the visitation by Ottobuono Fieschi of the Gilbertines in 1267 and his legatine council of London in 1268 informed the outcomes of both, leading to a convergence of Gilbertine legislation with the wider legislation that applied to all nunneries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The chanson de nonne presents stereotypical images of young women whose bodies and voices are trapped within the confines of a nunnery. Close examination of the architectural metaphors used to describe virginity and chastity in the Middle Ages allows comparisons to be made between the structures - metaphorical, musical and textual - that held ficti- tious nuns within the frame of the clerical imagination at the centre of thirteenth-century motet production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1855 the sisters of St André in Tournai (Belgium) openly revolted against their bishop by sending a delegation to the pope. It was the high point of a conflict that had been simmering since 1850, and would continue to reverberate until 1886. This case study illustrates the religious, social and gender fault-lines opened by modernity between authoritarian bishops and a new generation of self-conscious religious women active in society. The field of tension provided Vatican diplomacy with the opportunity for an unprecedented affirmation of its mediating role. The affair of St. André was one of the first occasions on which the Curia was directly confronted with ultramontane feminism, and it nearly defines the margins within which the Holy See was hammering out a matrix for the Romanisation and 'standardisation' of religious women. At the price of 'following the beaten track' to Rome, the second sex could sufficiently escape the grip of the first estate to operate a silent revolution in education, charity and devotion during the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThe Gilbertine Order, a monastic community for both sexes founded by Gilbert of Sempringham, attracted the attention of contemporaries because of the close proximity of the men and women who made up its members. Although Gilbertine canons, nuns, lay brothers and lay sisters were strictly separated by gender, the possibility of scandal aroused the suspicion of twelfth-century observers. Modern scholars seem to share the same fascination, even as this applies to the musical history of the order. Many Gilbertine scholars assume that the nuns of the Order of Sempringham did not participate musically in Mass or the Office, lest the canons of the Order fall into sin at the sound of their alluring, feminine voices. This article re-examines the texts that have prompted such assumptions, including the Gilbertine Institutiones, two papal bulls directed at the Order, and works by John Capgrave, John of Salisbury, Gerald of Wales and Nigel de Longchamps. The reassessment of these texts provides evidence that the Gilbertine nuns did sing in worship, albeit in a restricted fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with several tales in Giovanni Boccaccio`s Decameron, the early fourteenth-century Florentine painter Buonamico Buffalmacco was often portrayed as a carefree, funloving trickster. As this paper demonstrates, that image has obscured the deeper significance that Buffalmacco and his works held for Giorgio Vasari in the second edition of The Lives of the Artists (1568). That significance is especially apparent in his account of the eccentric painter and his dealings with the nuns of Faenza. In two humorous anecdotes about the nuns and Buffalmacco, Vasari poetically reveals the aesthetic and theological significance of the painter's an. In spite of Buffalmacco`s less-than-diligent character, Vasari praises his ability to "transubstantiate "paint, an ability that placed him among the primi lumi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the meaning of material culture in early modern Italian convents. Although nuns were required to give up private property rights and embrace religious poverty, many of them brought into the convent a vast range of material objects and goods for their personal use. These goods could also be given away, exchanged, or lent to others within the monastic community and even outside it. By exploring the circulation of objects, money, and goods, we get an interesting picture of how female monastic institutions worked internally and interacted with the city. We also gain a better understanding of the role of objects in articulating religious discipline and regulating the networks of interpersonal relations within cloistered communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports the relationships between nuns and male clergy in early modern Venice, Italy. Violation of conventual enclosure; Blockage of the links between nuns and the world outside the cloister; Promotion of heterosocial engagement in enclosing nature of celibate desire.

Discusses the ways in which 15th-century nuns financed, shaped and used works of arts and architecture at the Benedictine convent of San Zaccaria in Venice, Italy. Involvement in two major episodes of building and decoration in the 15th century; Contributing factors to the nuns' outrage and disillusionment during the period; Imposition of radical reforms on the nuns' communities during the period.

Presents a study which focuses attention on the women recorded in the eleventh- and thirteenth-century charter, and survey material of the abbey of Holy Trinity in Caen, Normandy. Activities of the abesses on behalf of the convent; Contribution of the role of the principal women involved in the first half-century of the abbey's history; Differences to be produced from studies of nunneries in this period as opposed to monasteries.

Focuses on the Poor Clare nuns and their roles in the visual arts in Italy during the fifteenth century. Visual arts as vehicles of communication for nuns; Description of Poor Clare nuns; Vows of chastity and poverty; Examples of nuns' depictions in art.

The author talks about solemn vows in religious life. He cites the lack of debate on monks, nuns and priests released from their vows. He mentions Catholic views on the indissolubility of marriage, laicization and celibacy. He notes that the thousands of men and women who have been released by the Catholic Church from their bond with Christ invites reflection on how to deal with the survivors of failed marriages.