Best known today as a fine composer, the twelfth-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen was also a religious leader and visionary, a poet, naturalist and writer of medical treatises. Despite her cloistered life she had strong, often controversial views on sex, love and marriage too - a woman astonishing in her own age, whose book of apocalyptic visions, Scivias, would alone have been enough to ensure her lasting fame. In this classic and highly praised biography - first published by Headline in 2001 - distinguished writer and journalist, Fiona Maddocks, draws on Hildegard's prolific writings to paint a portrait of her extraordinary life against the turbulent medieval background of crusade and schism, scientific discovery and cultural revolution. The great intellectual gifts and forceful character that emerge make her as fascinating as any figure in the Middle Ages. More than 800 years after her death, Pope Benedict XVI has made Hildegard a Saint and a Doctor of the Church (one of only four women). Fiona Maddocks has provided a short new preface to cover these tributes to an extraordinary and exceptional woman.

The Cistercian Order in Medieval Europe offers an accessible and engaging history of the Order from its beginnings in the twelfth century through to the early sixteenth century. Unlike most other existing volumes on this subject it gives a nuanced analysis of the late medieval Cistercian experience as well as the early years of the Order. Jamroziak argues that the story of the Cistercian Order in the Middle Ages was not one of a 'Golden Age' followed by decline, nor was the true 'Cistercian spirit' exclusively embedded in the early texts to remain unchanged for centuries. Instead she shows how the Order functioned and changed over time as an international organisation, held together by a novel 'management system'; from Estonia in the east to Portugal in the west, and from Norway to Italy. The ability to adapt and respond to these very different social and economic conditions is what made the Cistercians so successful. This book draws upon a wide range of primary sources, as well as scholarly literature in several languages, to explore the following key areas: the degree of centralisation versus local specificity how much the contact between monastic communities and lay people changed over time how the concept of reform was central to the Medieval history of the Cistercian Order This book will appeal to anyone interested in Medieval history and the Medieval Church more generally as well as those with a particular interest in monasticism.

Offering a comprehensive analysis of newly-uncovered manuscripts from two English convents near Antwerp, this study gives unprecedented insight into the role of the senses in enclosed religious communities during the period 1600-1800. It draws on a range of previously unpublished writings-chronicles, confessions, letters, poetry, personal testimony of various kinds-to explore and challenge assumptions about sensory origins. Author Nicky Hallett undertakes an interdisciplinary investigation of a range of documents compiled by English nuns in exile in northern Europe. She analyzes vivid accounts they left of the spaces they inhabited and of their sensory architecture: the smells of corridors, of diseased and dying bodies, the sights and sounds of civic and community life, its textures and tastes; their understanding of it in the light of devotional discipline. This is material culture in the raw, providing access to a well-defined locale and the conditions that shaped sensory experience and understanding. Hallett examines the relationships between somatic and religious enclosure, and the role of the senses in devotional discipline and practice, considering the ways in which the women adapted to the austerities of convent life after childhoods in domestic households. She considers the enduring effects of habitus, in Bourdieu's terms the residue of socialised subjectivity which was (or was not) transferred to a contemplative career. To this discussion, she injects literary and cultural comparisons, considering inter alia how writers of fiction, and of domestic and devotional conduct books, represent the senses, and how the nuns' own reading shaped their personal knowledge. The Senses in Religious Communities, 1600-1800 opens fresh comparative perspectives on the Catholic domestic household as well as the convent, and on relationships between English and European philosophy, rhetorical, medical and devotional discourse.

An analysis and study of Caroline script from 200 years of ecclesiastical and secular records reveals important historical detail relating to late Anglo-Saxon England. Caroline minuscule script was adopted in England in the mid-tenth century in imitation of Continental usage. A badge of ecclesiastical reform, it was practised in Benedictine scriptoria but was also taken up by members of the royal writing office; the chancery occupied an important place in the pioneering of calligraphic fashions. During its approximately two-century history in England, Caroline script developed a number of forms, in part reflecting different tendencies within the Reform-cause. The Rule of St Benedict was focal for this movement. In the aftermath of the final Scandinavian conquest of England [AD1016] a Canterbury master-scribe created the form ofCaroline writing which was to become a mark of Englishness and outlive the Norman Conquest. In the closing chapter its inventor's career is discussed and his achievement assessed. This volume offers analysis of manuscript evidenceas a basis for the cultural and ecclesiastical history of late Anglo-Saxon England. David N. Dumville is professor of History and Palaeography at the University of Aberdeen

This book examines the influence of the monastic tradition beyond the Reformation. Where the built monastic environment had been dissolved, desire for the spiritual benefits of monastic living still echoed within theological and spiritual writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a virtual exegetical template. The volume considers how the writings of monastic authors were appropriated in post-Reformation movements by those seeking a more fervent spiritual life, and how the concept of an internal cloister of monastic/ascetic spirituality influenced several Anglican writers during the Restoration. There is a careful examination of the monastic influence upon the Wesleys and the foundation and rise of Methodism. Drawing on a range of primary sources, the book will be of particular interest to scholars of monastic and Methodist history, and to those engaged in researching ecclesiology and in ecumenical dialogues.

The book recognizes the achievements by a nineteenth-century community of women religious, the Grey Nuns of Lewiston, Maine. The founding of their hospital was significant in its time as the first hospital in that factory city; and is significant today if one desires a more accurate and inclusive history of women and healthcare in America. The fact that this community lived in a hostile, Protestant-dominated, industrial environment while submerged in a French-Canadian Catholic world of ethnicity, tradition and paternalism makes their accomplishments more compelling.

This book is a study of the life, monastic writings, and spiritual theology of John Cassian (c., 360-435). His Institutes and Conferences are a remarkable synthesis of earlier monastic traditions, especially those of fourth-century Egypt, informed throughout by Cassian's awareness of the particular needs of the Latin monastic movement he was helping to shape. Sometimes portrayed as simply an advocate of the sophisticated spiritual theology of Evagrius of Ponticus (360-435), Cassian was actually a theologian of keen insight, realism, and creativity. His teaching on sexuality is unique in early monastic literature in both its breadth and its depth, and his integration of biblical interpretation with the ways of prayer and teaching on ecstatic prayer are of fundamental importance for the western monastic tradition. The only Latin writer included in the classic Greek collections of monastic sayings, Cassian was the major spiritual influence on both the Rule of the Master and the Rule of Benedict, as well as the source for Gregory the Great's teaching on capital sins and compunction.
Columba Stewart's book is the first major study of Cassian to be published in twenty years. It begins by establishing Cassian's credibility as a teacher on the basis of his own experience as a monk and his familiarity with the fundamental literary sources. Stewart then turns to Cassian's spiritual theology, paying particular attention to Cassian's view of the monastic journey in eschatological perspective, his teaching on continence and chastity, the Christological basis of biblical interpretation and prayer, his method of unceasing prayer, and his integration of ecstatic experience with an Evagrian theology of prayer.

Scholarly interest and popular interest in the military orders show no sign of abating. This volume records the proceedings of the fifth conference in 2009, and, like the earlier volumes in the series, is essential reading for everyone interested in the progress of research into these powerful institutions.

This book explores Cassian's use of scripture in the Conferences, especially its biblical models to convey his understanding of the desert ideal to the monastic communities of Gaul. Cassian intended the scriptures and, implicitly, the Conferences to be the voices of authority and orthodoxy in the Gallic environment. He interprets familiar biblical characters in unfamiliar ways that exemplify his ideal. By imitating their actions the monk enters a seamless lineage of authority stretching back to Abraham. This book demonstrates how the scriptures functioned as a dynamic force in the lives of Christian monks in the fourth and fifth centuries, emphasizes the importance of Cassian in the development of the western monastic tradition, and offers an alternative to the sometimes problematic descriptions of patristic exegesis as "allegory" or "typology". Cassian has been described as little more than a provider of information about Egyptian monasticism, but a careful reading of his work reveals a sophisticated agenda to define and institutionalize orthodox monasticism in the Latin West.

The Order of the Knights Templar, whose original purpose was to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land, was first given its own Rule in 1129, formalising the exceptional combination of soldier and monk. This translation of Henri de Curzon's 1886 edition of the French Rule is derived from the three extant medieval manuscripts.

Both monastic rule and military manual, the Rule is a unique document and an important historical source. It comprises the Primitive Rule, Hierarchical Statutes, Penances, Conventual Life, the Holding of Ordinary Chapters, Further Details on Penances, and Reception into the Order. There are details of clothing, armour and equipment; instructions on conduct while on campaign; information on the daily life of members of the order and on the discipline which made it a formidable fighting force. The Rule evolved over almost 150 years of the Order's history, and is thus a dynamic piece of work, showing how the Templars adapted to political change and formulated their disciplinary code.

An introduction gives the historical background to the Rule and summarises the various sections. An appendix by MATTHEW BENNETT discusses the military implications.

Focusing on the Dominican Order's activities in southeastern Poland from the canonisation of the Polish Dominican St Hyacinth (1594) to the outbreak of Bogdan Chmielnicki's Cossack revolt (1648-54) this book reveals the renovation and popularity of the pre-existing Mendicant culture of piety in the period following the Council of Trent (1545-64). In so doing, it questions both western and Polish scholarship regarding the role of the Society of Jesus, and the changes within Catholicism associated with it across Europe in the early modern period. By grounding the rivalry between Dominicans and Jesuits in patronage, politics, preaching, and the practices of piety, the study provides a holistic explanation of the reasons for Dominican expansion, the ways in which Catholicisation proceeded in a consensual political system, and suggests a corrective to the long-standing Jesuit-centred model of religious renewal. Whilst engaging with existing research regarding the post-Reformation formation of religious denominations, the book significantly expands the debate by stressing the friars' continuity with the medieval past, and demonstrating their importance in the articulation of Catholic-noble identity. Consequently, the monograph opens up new vistas on the history of the Counter-Reformation, Polish-Lithuanian noble identity, and the nature of religious renewal in a multi-ethnic and multi-denominational state.

The Life of Christiana of Markyate gives an exceptionally vivid account of the struggles of a young girl, vowed at an early age to celibacy, to escape the matrimonial snares set by her parents and her friends. She was born of well-to-do burgesses of Huntingdon in the opening years of the twelfth century, who succeeded in betrothing her to a local nobleman. But the marriage was not consummated, and eventually she escaped, became a recluse and a nun, and the prioress of a small community at Markyate in Hertfordshire, under the patronage of the abbot and monks of St Albans, who made the famous St Albans' Psalter for her. The Life, written by one of her chaplains largely from her own reminiscences, was discovered, or rediscovered, by C.H. Talbot in a Cotton Manuscript in the British Library. First published by the Clarendon Press in 1959, it is now reissued. It is one of the remarkable discoveries of our time, and a classic of historical literature.

Blending history and architecture with literary analysis, this ground-breaking study explores the convent's place in the early modern imagination. The author brackets her account between two pivotal events: the Council of Trent imposing strict enclosure on cloistered nuns, and the French Revolution expelling them from their cloisters two centuries later. In the intervening time, women within convent walls were both captives and refugees from an outside world dominated by patriarchal power and discourses. Yet despite locks and bars, the cloister remained "porous" to privileged visitors. Others could catch a glimpse of veiled nuns through the elaborate grills separating cloistered space from the church, provoking imaginative accounts of convent life. Not surprisingly, the figure of the confined religious woman represents an intensified object of desire in male-authored narrative. The convent also spurred "feminutopian" discourses composed by women: convents become safe houses for those fleeing bad marriages or trying to construct an ideal, pastoral life, as a counter model to the male-dominated court or household. Recent criticism has identified certain privileged spaces that early modern women made their own: the ruelle, the salon, the hearth of fairy tale-telling. Woshinsky's book definitively adds the convent to this list.

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive account of the emergence of monasticism from its roots in late antiquity and its transition to the early medieval West. Beginning with the search for individual perfection in the context of the religious and social climate of fourth-century Egypt, it traces the adoption and transformation of monastic ideas and practices first by the elites of the Western Roman Empire and later by the royalty and aristocracy of the so-called 'barbarian' kingdoms, including the Franks and Anglo-Saxons. It tracks the development of monastic rules and includes sections on female asceticism and monasticism, on Irish monasticism and its influence, and the developing theology of afterlife and intercession. This unique work is based on a detailed consideration of the texts, their use and adaptation, and is the first treatment of the subject to draw together social and religious approaches. The book offers a number of original perspectives on major issues and controversies.

Much has been written about the Knights Templar in recent years. A leading specialist in the history of this legendary medieval order now writes a full account of the Knights of the Order of the Temple of Solomon, to give them their full title, bringing the latest findings to a general audience. Putting many of the myths finally to rest, Nicholson recounts a new history of these storm troopers of the papacy, founded during the crusades but who got so rich and influential that they challenged the power of kings.

This book examines the contribution of women to the Humiliati movement, providing original archival evidence indicating that women dominated the group's membership. These findings have implications for both women's spirituality and women's work, correcting the received opinion that the patriarchal nature of Italian society and of the church limited the institutional options available to women. It also suggests that women found innovative ways to participate in the increasingly restrictive textile industry of the region. This work provides a glimpse at the novel ways in which women in medieval Italy were able to satisfy their spiritual and economic needs within the confines of a male-dominated church and society.

This volume of twelve interdisciplinary essays addresses the multifaceted nature of female religious identity in early modern Europe. By dismantling the boundaries between the academic disciplines of history, art history, musicology and literary studies it offers new cross-cultural readings essential to a more comprehensive understanding of the complexity of female spirituality in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Utilising a wide range of archival material, encompassing art, architecture, writings and music commissioned or produced by nuns, the volume's main emphasis is on the limitations and potentials created by the boundaries of the convent. Each chapter explores how the personal and national circumstances in which the women lived affected the formation of their spirituality and the assertion of their social and political authority. Consisting of four sections each dealing with different parts of Europe and discussing issues of spiritual and social identity such as 'Femininity and Sanctity', 'Convent Theatre and Music-Making', 'Spiritual Directorship' and 'Community and Conflict', this compelling collection offers a significant addition to a thriving new field of study.

In the last two decades there has been an explosion of scholarly interest in the Military Orders. With a history stretching from the early twelfth century to the present day, they were among the richest and most powerful orders of the church in medieval Europe. They founded their own states in Prussia and on the Mediterranean islands of Rhodes and Malta. They are of concern to historians of the Church, art and architecture, government, agriculture, estate management, banking, medicine and warfare, and of the expansion of Europe overseas. The conferences on their history, which have been organized in London every four years, have attracted leading scholars from all over the world. The present volume records the proceedings of the Fourth Conference in 2005 and is essential reading for those interested in the progress of research on these extraordinary institutions. The twenty-seven papers published here represent a selection of those delivered at the conference. Architecture, archaeology and the part which the orders played in Europe are well represented, along with work on northern and eastern Europe. Four papers deal specifically with military or naval matters, while another four deal with the spiritual life of the brothers and sisters. Family relationships represent a growing field of interest. The majority of the papers focus on the Hospitallers, but the volume includes studies on the Templars and the Teutonic Order, as well as the Portuguese military orders.

"From Monastery to Hospital "traces the origin of the late Roman hospital to the earliest groups of Christian monastics. Often characterized as holy men and miracle-workers who transformed late antique spirituality, monks held an equally significant impact on the development of medicine in Late Antiquity. Andrew Crislip illuminates the innovative approaches to health care within the earliest monasteries that provided the model for the greatest medical achievement of Late Antiquity: the hospital.

"From Monastery to Hospital "draws on some of the most vibrant areas of scholarship of the ancient world, including asceticism, the study of the body, history of the family, and the history of medicine. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of early Christianity, Roman History, the history of medicine, and Catholic, Coptic, and Eastern Orthodox history and theology. It will also be of interest to the broader field of history of Christianity, especially with its connections to charitable traditions in the church through the modern period.

Andrew Crislip is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Hawaii.

The rise of the mendicant orders in the later Middle Ages coincided with rapid and dramatic shifts in the visual arts. The mendicants were prolific patrons, relying on artworks to instruct and impress their diverse lay congregations. Churches and chapels were built, and new images and iconographies developed to propagate mendicant cults. But how should the two phenomena be related? How much were these orders actively responsible for artistic change, and how much did they simply benefit from it? To explore these questions, Art and the Augustinian Order in Early Renaissance Italy looks at art in the formative period of the Augustinian Hermits, an order with a particularly difficult relation to art. As a first detailed study of visual culture in the Augustinian order, this book will be a basic resource, making available previously inaccessible material, discussing both well-known and more neglected artworks, and engaging with fundamental methodological questions for pre-modern art and church history, from the creation of religious iconographies to the role of gender in art.

This book presents an invaluable selection of sermons and theological treatises of the twelfth century author, Isaac of Stella. The English born abbot of the French Cistercian monastery of Stella on the Isle of Re is one of the most inspiring, yet equally elusive, representatives of the great twelfth-century Cistercian Renaissance more widely associated with the person of Bernard of Clairvaux. The astonishing spiritual and intellectual depth of Isaac's surviving writings makes him a valuable read for anyone aiming to receive a complete picture of the intellectual heritage of the Middle Ages.Of the twenty-five sermons by Isaac presented in this volume, ten are made available here in an English translation for the first time. These are accompanied with two new studies examining Isaac of Stella's work from an historical, literary as well as theological perspective."

The 1950s and 60s were times of extraordinary social and political change across North America that re-drew the boundaries between traditional and progressive, conservative and liberal. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the history of Catholic nuns. During these two decades, nuns boldly experimented with their role in the church, removing their habits, rejecting the cloister, and fighting for social justice. The media quickly took to their cause and dubbed them 'the new nuns,' modern exemplars of liberated but sexually contained womanhood. With Visual Habits, Rebecca Sullivan brings this unexamined history of nuns to the fore, revisiting the intersection of three distinct movements - the Second Vatican Council, the second wave of feminism, and the sexual revolution - to explore the pivotal role nuns played in revamping cultural expectations of femininity and feminism. From The Nun's Story to The Flying Nun to The Singing Nun, nuns were a major presence in the mainstream media. Charting their evolving representation in film and television, popular music, magazines, and girls' literature, Sullivan discusses these images in the context of the period's seemingly unlimited potential for social change. In the process, she delivers a rich cultural analysis of a topic too long ignored.

The book recognizes the achievements by a nineteenth-century community of women religious, the Grey Nuns of Lewiston, Maine. The founding of their hospital was significant in its time as the first hospital in that factory city; and is significant today if one desires a more accurate and inclusive history of women and healthcare in America. The fact that this community lived in a hostile, Protestant-dominated, industrial environment while submerged in a French-Canadian Catholic world of ethnicity, tradition and paternalism makes their accomplishments more compelling.

The Knights Templar, part monastic order, part military force, lived by a firm code, or rule, which exists in differing versions. This Spanish version is a follow-up to J.M. Upton-Ward's highly successful edition of the French Rule. The introduction to this Catalan Rule, Barcelona Archivo de la Corona de Aragon, Cartes Reales, MS 3344, discusses the content, language and dating of the manuscript. It also provides background information derived from the French Rule (which the reader may require for a fuller appreciation of the text - see author note below) on the circumstances of the Knights Templar. There is a brief description of the provincial organisation of the Order with particular reference to the houses in Aragon, where it is most likely that the manuscript was used; a summary of clauses; and a concordance with de Curzon's 1886 edition of the French Rule. Compared to de Curzon's edition, the Barcelona text is incomplete, but it contains important clauses not found in other manuscripts. A partial transcription claiming to represent all the clauses without equivalents in de Curzon's edition was published in 1889, but it omitted several clauses now published here for the first time. Footnotes to the English translation elucidate the text; give biographical information on the named officers of the Order where possible; and indicate significant differences compared with the French Rule. J. M. UPTON-WARD edited and translated The Rule of the Templars (Boydell & Brewer 1998), now available in paperback.