Any visitor to Belgium or the Netherlands is immediately struck by the number of convents and beguinages (begijnhoven) in both major cities and small towns. Their number and location in urban centres suggests that the women who inhabited them once held a prominent role. Despite leaving a visible mark on cities in Europe, much of the story of these women - known variously as beguines, tertiaries, klopjes, recluses, and anchoresses - remains to be told. Instead of aspiring to live as traditional religious, they transcended normative assumptions about religion and gender and had a very real impact on their religious and secular worlds. The sources for their tale are often fragmentary and difficult to interpret. However, careful scrutiny allows their voices to be heard. Drawing on an array of sources including religious rules, sermons, hagiographic vitae, and rapiaria, Fictive Orders and Feminine Religious Identities traces the story of pious laywomen between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. It both emphasizes the innovative roles of women who transcended established forms of institutional religious life and reveals the ways in which historiographical habits have obscured the dynamic and fluid nature of their histories. By highlighting the development of irregular and extraregular communities and tracing the threads of monasticisation that wove their way around pious laywomen, this book draws attention to the vibrant and dynamic culture of feminine lay piety that persisted from the later middle ages onwards.

Fictive Orders and Feminine Religious Identities traces the story of pious laywomen in Europe from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, examining the ways these women were active and engaged in their social and intellectual worlds, while also tracing the formation of modern perceptions about gender roles and the reasons why they persisted.

Histories of the German Dominican order have long presented a grand narrative of its origin, fall, and renewal: a Golden Age at the order's founding in the thirteenth century, a decline of Dominican learning and spirituality in the fourteenth, and a vibrant renewal of monastic devotion by Dominican "Observants" in the fifteenth. Dominican nuns are presumed to have moved through a parallel arc, losing their high level of literacy in Latin over the course of the fourteenth century. However, unlike the male Dominican friars, the nuns are thought never to have regained their Latinity, instead channeling their spiritual renewal into mystical experiences and vernacular devotional literature. In Ruling the Spirit, Claire Taylor Jones revises this conventional narrative by arguing for a continuous history of the nuns' liturgical piety. Dominican women did not lose their piety and literacy in the fifteenth century, as is commonly believed, but instead were urged to reframe their devotion around the observance of the Divine Office. Jones grounds her research in the fifteenth-century liturgical library of St. Katherine's in Nuremberg, which was reformed to Observance in 1428 and grew to be one of the most significant convents in Germany, not least for its library. Many of the manuscripts owned by the convent are didactic texts, written by friars for Dominican sisters from the fourteenth through the fifteenth century. With remarkable continuity across genres and centuries, this literature urges the Dominican nuns to resume enclosure in their convents and the strict observance of the Divine Office, and posits ecstatic experience as an incentive for such devotion. Jones thus rereads the "sisterbooks," vernacular narratives of Dominican women, long interpreted as evidence of mystical hysteria, as encouragement for nuns to maintain obedience to liturgical practice. She concludes that Observant friars viewed the Divine Office as the means by which Observant women would define their communities, reform the terms of Observant devotion, and carry the order into the future.

An introduction to the Rules and Customaries of the main religious Orders in Medieval Europe: Benedictine, Cistercian, Carthusian, Augustinian, Premonstratensian, Templar, Hospitaller, Teutonic, Dominican, Franciscan, and Carmelite.

Today we associate the Renaissance with painting, sculpture, and architecture—the “major” arts. Yet contemporaries often held the “minor” arts—gem-studded goldwork, richly embellished armor, splendid tapestries and embroideries, music, and ephemeral multi-media spectacles—in much higher esteem. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, was typical of the Italian nobility: she bequeathed to her children precious stone vases mounted in gold, engraved gems, ivories, and antique bronzes and marbles; her favorite ladies-in-waiting, by contrast, received mere paintings. Renaissance patrons and observers extolled finely wrought luxury artifacts for their exquisite craftsmanship and the symbolic capital of their components; paintings and sculptures in modest materials, although discussed by some literati, were of lesser consequence. This book endeavors to return to the mainstream material long marginalized as a result of historical and ideological biases of the intervening centuries. The author analyzes how luxury arts went from being lofty markers of ascendancy and discernment in the Renaissance to being dismissed as “decorative” or “minor” arts—extravagant trinkets of the rich unworthy of the status of Art. Then, by re-examining the objects themselves and their uses in their day, she shows how sumptuous creations constructed the world and taste of Renaissance women and men.

"[This] magnificent critical survey, with its inherent respect for both the 'Westt's mainstream high culture' and the 'radically changing world' of the 1990s, offers a new breakthrough for lay and scholarly readers alike....Allows readers to grasp the big picture of Western culture for the first time." SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE Here are the great minds of Western civilization and their pivotal ideas, from Plato to Hegel, from Augustine to Nietzsche, from Copernicus to Freud. Richard Tarnas performs the near-miracle of describing profound philosophical concepts simply but without simplifying them. Ten years in the making and already hailed as a classic, THE PASSION OF THE WESERN MIND is truly a complete liberal education in a single volume.

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.