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While numerous Thai male Buddhist monastics have been deeply and widely revered for their perceived attainment of full awakening/arahant-ship, the same recognition for Thai female practitioners together with the concomitant phenomena of veneration remain very limited, with only a few notable exceptions. Given the scarcity of acknowledged Thai female Buddhist arahants in comparison to the number of widely venerated male Thai arahants, it is unsurprising that while numerous sacred sites across the country are dedicated to male practitioners of modern Thai Buddhism, equivalent places for the veneration of female Buddhist practitioners are exceedingly rare. The Mae Chi Kaew Stūpa stands out due to its unique purpose: it was built for the memory and veneration of a female arahant of modern Thai Buddhism. Unlike most similar monuments dedicated to male monastic practitioners of modern Thai Buddhism who are believed to have achieved full awakening, this memorial is an unambiguous articulation of women’s potential to realise the summum bonum of Theravada Buddhist soteriology in current times. As we will show in this paper, the Mae Chi Kaew Stūpa has been strategically promoted as a religious tourism site across multiple levels: international, national, provincial, and local. Thus, our research focuses on the question of how tourism may help to effectively spread the message of what the Buddhist Studies scholar Alan Sponberg in relation to early Buddhism termed “soteriological inclusiveness.” Drawing on sustained ethnographic work at the Mae Chi Kaew Stūpa in Thailand’s northeastern province of Mukdahan, this paper aims to examine the interface between modern tourism and Thai Buddhist religiosity.

Initiated in Burgundy in the early fifteenth century by Colette of Corbie (1381–1447), the Colettine reforms soon expanded to eastern Iberia, reaching Portugal by the end of the century. In this paper I show how the context in which the first Colettine convents were founded in Portugal – a time when Clarissan reform was struggling to take the first steps in this territory and Colette's endeavours were still a novelty – was reflected in the efforts developed by these communities and their patrons to promote a Colettine identity through the translation and use of a set of normative and para-normative texts, which would become the Colettines' textual support in Portugal. I also demonstrate that these efforts were accompanied by the promotion of Colette of Corbie's figure and sanctity through art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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At the present stage of the development of historical science in Russia, the interest in the role of the Church in the life of society remains unchanged. Much attention is paid to the history of individual monasteries and the activities of the clergy in the field of public service; their contribution to socio-political and spiritual life of the country is studied. The interest in the history of monasteries is primarily due to the fact that throughout the history of Russia, after the adoption of Christianity, they acted as one of the most important social and political institutions of the state and society. In Russian historiography, there are few studies devoted to the nuns of monasteries, but the existing ones are addressed to the nuns of noble origin or the abbesses of the oldest female monasteries. The current situation is explained by the state of the source base and the specifics of the problem being raised. The activities of women in the system of church organization of the Russian Orthodox Church were poorly reflected in any written sources. Since the personalities of the abbesses are considered the key figure of the monastery, when analyzing the history of the Black Sea Mary Magdalene Convent, the article focuses on the role of the abbesses in the development of the monastic economy, charitable and educational activities. Based on this, the authors of the article, based on the collected extensive archival material and the material of the Caucasian Diocesan Gazette, analyzed the contribution of individual abbesses to the development of the Black Sea Convent. The authors substantiate the conclusion that unlike the well-known closeness of traditional Russian Orthodox monasteries in Central Russia, Caucasian monasteries remained open to the world even at the beginning of the XX century, which was a great merit of their abbesses and the diocesan leadership of the Caucasian (Stavropol) diocese.

The importance of landscape has long been recognized within monastic studies, both as an economic and spiritual resource. This paper focuses on the surrounding landscape of a single monastic site, that is Kirkjubæjarklaustur on Síða (south Iceland), one of the two female monasteries established in Medieval Iceland. Through written sources, legends, and placenames, the aim of this paper is to reconstruct the biography of the landscape from before the founding of the monastery to after the Reformation. In particular, the paper considers how the perceived sacredness of the site of Kirkjubæjarklaustur may have been shaped by stories of Christian settlers prior to the monastic foundation and how the monastic memory informed the way in which the landscape was experienced after the Reformation and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study aims at providing an overview of the everyday life of Russian nuns in Palestine after World War II. This research encompassed the following tasks: to analyze the range of ego-documents available today, characterizing the everyday life and internal motivation of women in choosing the church jurisdiction; to identify, on the basis of written sources, the most active supporters of the Moscow Patriarchate to examine the nuns’ activity as information agents of the Russian Orthodox Church and Soviet government; to characterize the actors influencing the everyday life of the Russian nuns in the context of the creation of the state of Israel and new borders dividing the Holy Land; to present the motives and instruments of influence employed by the representatives of both secular and church diplomacies in respect to the women leading a monastic life; to describe consequences of inclu-ding the nuns into the sphere of interest of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR; to show the specific role of “Russian women” in the context of the struggle for securing positions of the USSR and the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in the region. The sources for the study were prodused by the state (correspondence between the state authorities, meeting notes) and from the religious actors (letters of nuns to the church authorities, reports of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission, memoirs of the clergy). By combining the methods of micro-history and history of the everyday life with the political history of the Cold War, the study examines the agency of the nuns — a category of women traditionally unnoticeable in the political history. Due to the specificity of the sources, the study focuses exclusively on a group of the nuns of the Holy Land who came under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate. The majority of the Russian-speaking population of Palestine in the mid-1940s were women in the status of monastic residents (nuns and novices) and pilgrims, and in the 1940s–1950s, they were drawn into the geopolitical combinations of the Soviet Union. The Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem, staffed with representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, becomes a key institution of influence in the region. This article shows how elderly nuns became an object of close attention and even funding by the Soviet state. The everyday life of the nuns became directly dependent on the activities of the Soviet agencies and Soviet-Israeli relations after the arrival of the Soviet state representatives. At the same time, the nuns became key participants in the inter-jurisdictional conflicts and began to act as agents of influence in the region. The study analyzes numerous ego-documents created by the nuns themselves from the collection of the Council on the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church under the USSR Council of Ministers. The study shows how nuns positioned themselves as leading a monastic life in the written correspondence with the ROC authorities and staff of the Soviet MFA. The instances of influence of different secular authorities on the development of the female monasticism presented here point to promising research avenues for future reconstruction of the history of women in the Holy Land based on archival materials from state departments, alternative sources should also be found. The study focused on the life of el-derly Russian nuns in the Holy Land and showed their activity in the context of the geopolitical transformations in the Near East in the 1940s–1950s.

Under the Observant reforms –a pan-European movement that aimed to reform Christianity by enforcing observance of its pristine ideals– the reformist environment in late medieval Portugal contributed to the formation of a number of new convents, most of them female. Especially in the case of the Dominicans – analysed here – the majority of the new convents stemmed from lay religious communities of women experiencing gradual processes of institutionalisation. As will be analysed in this paper, in accordance with the Observants’ strategy of using text and image to promote their reformist ideals, the surviving accounts and artworks produced and commissioned in these newly Observant communities reflect their efforts to shape, and embrace, a Dominican and Observant identity.

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The text seeks to decode the meaning of the closed eyes used in New Spain portraits of religious women who professed votes under strict orders, especially in the 18th century. With this objective we glimpse the female spirituality Catholicism had during the Baroque period. We explore the monastic culture of the discalced nuns and the reading of them as perfect spiritual life beings. In the center of a stratified society such as the colonial, this concept dispensed inputs for the family honour. Upon this base we locate the paradox where these nuns were allocated by the closed eyes portraits: dead to the world but reproductive of their own social order.

The charism of care inspired the foundation of various medieval religious orders, the Order of St John of Jerusalem being the most renowned of these. This article uses a case study of a female Hospitaller convent in Bargota in the kingdom of Navarre, to examine to what extent the charism of hospitality influenced the Order's decision-making. By identifying the factors lying behind the foundation of the convent in the early fourteenth century and its dissolution a century later, it contributes to the discussion on the relevance of female Hospitaller monasticism in the Late Middle Ages and argues that the Order sustained the convent as long as the women's care-worthiness outweighed the burden of cura monialium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Interview with Monica Della Volpe (Fondazione Monasteri) by Luigi Bartolomei.

The question of what held functionally differentiated societies together was one of the key concerns that drove the nascent social sciences in the late nineteenth century. Whereas the term society did not imply personal attachment, the idea of community, by contrast, was thought to be rooted in belonging and togetherness, and hence in emotions. In the social world of medieval monasticism community and society were interwoven in myriad ways. Over time, the lines that connected them, both discursively and praxeologically, shifted in unison with changes to their ascribed meanings. My study is divided into three parts, in each of which practices of commemorating the dead are connected to issues of gender and kinship. In the first section, I will focus on the Revelations of Gertrud the Great, in order to draw attention to the eschatological and anthropological foundations of memorial practice. The second section will focus on anniversary endowments that are documented in monastic charters and seek to establish the extent to which they offered leeway to tailor commemoration. The third section will focus on the same question, but use a single necrology as a starting point. The chronological focus will rest primarily, but not solely, on the fourteenth century, which in many respects marks a turning point in the history of the ever-changing, always gendered relationship between the individual, community and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Reformation England, English women who desired to live a contemplative life were forced to flee to France or to the Spanish Netherlands. Almost fifty years later, in 1609 they created the first English Poor Clares convent dedicated specifically to English women and submitted to the Tridentine Reformation. The Council of Trent promulgated new decrees that created a new model spiritual perfection for women, insisting on the ideal of claustration and submission to male authority. Does the particular situation of the English nuns influence the establishment of this new ideal of contemplative life?Within their new convents, the English Poor Clares manage cleverly to reconcile the constraints imposed by religious authorities and the daily organization of catholic revival. Nevertheless, these women will negotiate the nature of their jurisdiction to the Papacy when they feel their spiritual or temporal good is threatened. In this negotiation process, the English Poor Clares put their exiled status forward and welcome it as a distinct element of their religious identity.

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The Observant reforms marked the religious landscape of late medieval Europe, changing the Church as a whole and initiating a wave of reforms and the foundation of convents in all the major religious orders. Recent studies devoted to the subject have revealed the pluralities of the movement in each territory and congregation and alerted scholars to the necessity of studies that go beyond the official accounts of reform produced by the Observants within a propagandistic agenda. Centring on the spread of Observance in the Dominican province of Portugal—for which the main reference remains early modern chronicles, based on the accounts of the reformers—this paper seeks to bring new insights to the dynamics and agents behind the spread of this reform among the Portuguese Dominicans, in particular the female branch of the order, in which proliferation was deeply connected with the reformative politics of the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory essay consists of two parts. The first is a contextualisation of the overall pur- pose of the monographic section, as well as a general summary of the questions, issues and themes which we were proposing to debate. The second part is an Appendix, which sets out the guidelines of the database MedItaNunC, which supported some of the research, and now provides not only a large percentage of the source material, but also a methodology about the connections which can be made through the information brought together. The essay looks at the historiography of the subject, including the recent wealth of research published from the perspective of gender studies in this area, and the way in which the Italian material fits into it. It also explains the chosen chronology, and the geographical spread used in the volume, and the important input of archaeology, which has helped propose new questions. Lastly, it sets out the three core themes which run through the other papers in the volume: the links between female monasteries and the city elites, the history of the monasteries concerned in the light of both their foundation and hagiographical myths, their material culture, and their ideological place in the cityscape, and finally, the attempt to identify the difference, if any, between female and male monastic houses. It is hoped that the collection will provide a first panorama of female monasticism across the multiplicity of Italian political and cultural landscape.

This Monographic Section proposes to study female monasteries in Italy in the period 700 to 1100, focusing on comparing and contrasting those in cities covering northern, central and southern Italy (Brescia, Venice, Verona, Ravenna, Rome, Benevento and Naples). Key elements of this comparison are the links of nuns and abbesses with the most powerful royal and aristocratic families in the area, and the way in which these contributed to the power and wealth of the relative houses. Examining these, as well as the role of the nuns in the memorialisation and representation of these families through prayers, relics, and patrimonies, will also lead to a comparison between various monastic traditions (Lombard, Frankish Carolingian, post Byzantine, Roman) in different areas, and to the identification of specific features of these in their associations with the contemporary elites.

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Responding to and building upon José Cabezón's groundbreaking work, Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism (2017), this essay challenges a hermeneutic that capitulates to the androcentrism and misogyny of classical South Asian Buddhist views on female sexuality by suggesting avenues for 'reading against the grain' in search of alternative gynocentric views. In particular, it points to glimpses of a female sexuality that is relational, active, and creative in premodern South Asian Buddhist sources, especially vinaya. It also argues that a full and balanced treatment of sexual violence against women is an essential component of any comprehensive study of sexuality in classical South Asian Buddhism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Reti Medievali is the property of Firenze University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Reti Medievali is the property of Firenze University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Reti Medievali is the property of Firenze University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Reti Medievali is the property of Firenze University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Reti Medievali is the property of Firenze University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Scholars have been studying images produced by nuns in the late Middle Ages, paying special attention to the illumination of devotional texts where the absence of models gave rise to non-canonical images, closely related to a visually centred piety. Among the manuscripts from the scriptorium of Aveiro, some liturgical books stand noticeably outside canonical models because of their illuminations, although they otherwise are in accord with normative precepts. Considering the rigour and standardisation to which liturgical manuscripts were subject, to analyse these images solely as a product of the nature of female piety seems simplistic. The role of the cura monialium in the community’s spiritual and temporal autonomy, especially where art is concerned, needs further analysis in order to understand the background to these images. Aveiro’s illuminations were informed by a complex visual culture where the nuns’ voice was intertwined with the cura monialium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, several studies on female monasticism have shown that even the abbesses of some monasteries exercised a large personal power. With reference to the well-known monastery of Santa Giulia in Brescia, this essay examines a small group of public documents to help define the contribution of women in the monastic world in the 13th century. Subject of the documents are two abbesses, Mabilia and Armelina Confalonieri, and the jurisdiction they exercised over the dependent chapels of San Daniele and San Zenone. The solemn forms, the production mechanisms and the authentication through their own seal allow us to recognize the progressive intent of defining and representing the abbesses' authority and power also through the construction of documents with peculiar characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The election of the abbots in the Byzantine monasteries is a fundamental moment: in the Justinian legislation there are very precise indications that govern the choice of the guides of the monastic communities. Starting from the studies of Krausmüller, who has focused on the rituals of the election of the abbots, the present essay aims to better know and focus on the dynamics of election, in the female monasteries, of the leadership figures, but sometimes catching criticism of the discernment of the elders in cases where the abbots do not prove up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1221 and 1236, Jordan of Saxony, the general master of the Order of Friars Preachers, and Diana Andaló, nun of the monastery of St. Agnes in Bologna, were frequent correspondents. From the exchange of epistles that characterized their friendship, only a few dozen letters written by the friar reached us. In them we can see the growth of the Order in those early years of its institution, its gradual organization as well as the policy of the master in relation to women's religious life, among allusions to the details of everyday life of a religious in the thirteenth century. It is in this documentary corpus that we support ourselves to comprehend the power relations which guided the process of institutionalization of the newly created Order of Friars Preachers, specially the affiliation of women's houses, a subject on which the friars oscillated between resistance and acceptance, because of the material and administrative implications that such an association meant. We will focus, in the discursive analysis, in three cards - two sent to Diana, and one sent to the provincial of Lombardy, Stephen of Spain - to understand the issues involved in the formation of a women's branch of the Order. We can conclude that this specific discussion comprehended a much bigger cenary of internal disputes for the control of the Order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Resulta poco frecuente en la actualidad, en cuanto a la investigación de las ideas e itinerarios intelectuales, la de la circulación de las ideas religiosas en conexión con los medios sociales y las relaciones de poder en la Modernidad Temprana. En este caso se intentará analizar a la luz de los nuevos estudios acerca de la identidad de la monarquía católica de los Habsburgo, de los procesos inquisitoriales, del nacimiento de un nuevo individualismo, de los contrastes entre una cultura teológica refinada, siempre atenta a la aparición de indicios de desviación de la ortodoxia y de las creencias religiosas arcaicas, de rivalidades interiores y exteriores a la congregación conventual, los conflictos que darán origen a la intervención del Santo Oficio en el monasterio de San Plácido, en la primera mitad del siglo XVII. Se utilizará para ello la correspondencia formal (cartas) entre los inculpados y de los mismos con altos personajes, testimonios y memoriales.In the current history of ideas and intellectual itineraries, it is very rare to find studies on the circulation of religious ideas associated to social environments and power relations in early modernity. This paper analyzes the conflicts that prompted the intervention of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in the monastery of St. Placid in the early seventeenth century. The authors locate this analysis at the intersection of the new studies on the Catholic identity of the Habsburg monarchy, the inquisitional trials, the birth of a novel individualism, the contrasts between a refined theological culture --always on the lookout for any signs of deviation from orthodoxy-- and ancient religious beliefs, and lastly, the internal and external rivalries of the conventual community. The research is based on the official correspondence (letters) between the accused, and between them and high-ranking figures, testimonies, and memorials.

This article examines the evolving modes of piety performed and written by cloistered women at the St. Katharinental Convent in Diessenhofen, Switzerland, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in their St. Katharinental Sister Book, a collection of quasi-hagiographic vitae composed by the sisters themselves. The article argues that the changing ways the vitae exhibit and encourage piety evidence the effect of the fifteenth-century Observant reform on the cloister. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the „Theutberga Gospels“, a ninth-century gospelbook recently sold at auction at Christie’s in London, in light of questions about literate practices, ritual scripting and aristocratic patronage of female religious communities in Lotharingia between the middle decades of the ninth century and the beginning of the eleventh. While an estate list entered into the manuscript c. 1000 likely refers to property management at the abbey of Remiremont, an ordination ritual for abbesses entered roughly a century earlier reveals significant efforts to revise the representation of abbatial office in a transitional phase of that institution’s existence. These observations invite re-interpretation of traditional assumptions about how the manuscript should be located in mid-ninth-century patronage networks. Appended to the article are editions of the estate list and the ordination ritual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses aspects of medieval feminine religious life, comparing the Vita Sancti Frutuosi (VSF), written in Latin in the 7th Century, and the version of this text in archaic Portuguese, within the Flos Sanctorum (FS) of the UNB, in a single manuscript dating from the 14th Century. Our aim is, from the analysis of the sections that tell the relationship of Fructuoso with the nun Benedita, to identify and discuss the similarities and particularities between the narratives. Despite they present the same plot, the VSF aims to emphasize the superiority of Christianity and legitimize the monastic life, while the FS's version wins organizing character of the feminine religious life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the geopolitical manoeuvres of the comital House of Flanders, especially of Countess Clemence of Burgundy, to consolidate comital influence and power in the border region of western Flanders, specifically in the area of Bourbourg. By analysing and mapping the shifting patterns of interaction between alliances of both secular and ecclesiastical stakeholders in the charters issued for the abbey of Bourbourg, a female house, during the first decades of the twelfth century, it argues that the foundation and patronage of Bourbourg were engineered to create a symbolic and geo-strategic key site where the interests of the counts of Flanders and their local representatives, the abbot of Saint-Bertin, and members of the local elite converged, and alliances balanced each other. Moreover, through an anthropological approach in which the charters are also considered within the supra-institutional context of the reform movement, this study offers new insights into the dynamic role of Countess Clemence as a promoter and benefactor of Bourbourg Abbey, and also as a manager of her personal network of allies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The subject matter of this paper is a review of the key moments of the foundation and daily life at the female monastery within the church St. Archangel Michael in Berovo. The female monastic life in the monastery is an activity which has been taking place continuously for more than one and a half century. The religious services in this monastery besides the nuns from Berovo are attended by the nuns from the monastery of Veljusa. The monastery is open for visitors. They can also use the library of the monastery, which keeps the memory of enlightening work of Joakim Krchovski, the founder of the first cell school. Life in the monastery takes place following the hesychastic typikon (svetogorski), although it has an urban location and it is much visited. The monastery functions as an intensive hesychasm, hesychasterion. Inside the church, there is a small chapel dedicated to St. Gregory Palamas and Elder Joseph the Hesychast. Religious services and liturgies are held every day in the monastery. The monastery is headed by an abbess. The functioning of the monastery is organized by duties, which are called obediences. The specific characteristic of this monastery is the preparation of food products which are traditional for this region, as well as the creation of mosaics. Although MOC - OA is not recognized by the orthodox churches throughout the world, the nuns at this monastery have frequent communication with the nuns who are not from their immediate vicinity, but from Romania and Greece. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper problematizes certain topics related to female monasticism in the Serbian Orthodox Church. Since the mere phenomenon of female monasticism and the practice present in this region are very rich, we were inclined to focus on specific aspects of the monastic life: the identity of nuns and the relation towards marriage and family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]