The Deeds of the abbots of St Albans records the history of one of the most important abbeys in England, closely linked to the royal family and home to a school of distinguished chroniclers, including Matthew Paris and Thomas Walsingham. It offers many insights into the life of the monastery, its buildings and its role as a maker of books, and covers the period from the Conquest to the mid-fifteenth century.

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.

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.

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.

The Asketikon of St Basil the Great comprises a new English translation and studies which re-examine the emergence of monasticism in Asia Minor. The Regula Basilii, translated by Rufinus from Basil's Small Asketikon, is closely compared with the Greek text of the longer edition, as a means to tracing the development of ideas. Silvas concludes that the antecedents of the monastic community of the Great Asketikon are best sought not in some kind of sub-orthodox modus vivendi of male and female ascetics living together and increasingly curbed by an emerging neo-Nicene orthodoxy less favourable to women ('homoiousian asceticism'), but in the local domestic ascetic movement in Anatolia as typified in the developments at Annisa under the leadership of Makrina.

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.

First published in 1905, these two volumes together reproduced the text of Rawlinson MS. B 408 from the Bodleian Library in two parts. They consist of a preface followed the full Middle English text with glosses. The initial section of the manuscript is slightly older and consists of prefixed liturgical pieces such as the Articles of Excommunication. This follows the common historical practice of combining manuscripts to encourage their preservation. The remainder of the text presents the reader with the Register of the Estates of Godstow Abbey. The manuscript was initially created as a translation of the Latin register in order to allow the nuns, who were literate in English but not Latin, to manage their own estates. This manuscript was, at the time of publication, the only known complete English-language cartulary made for a monastic house. It holds significant implications not only for the status, linguistic development and usage of the English language, but also for women's history in the church and their socioeconomic agency, along with the ability of language to both restrict and open doors. The text includes its own introduction in which the founding of the Abbey by Dame Edyve of Winchester, first Abbess of Godstow, is recounted, followed by deeds relating to the local area.

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."

Edition of documents from a Gilbertine "double house" of monks and nuns reveals much about religious life at the time. Alvingham Priory (founded in 1155), situated just to the north-east of Louth in Lincolnshire, was one of the famous Gilbertine houses of the county: double houses of monks and nuns following the rule of St Gilbert of Sempringham.Its cartulary, created circa 1264, contains over 1,300 entries. Most are copies of charters granting lands, property, rents and privileges, but it also includes genealogies of benefactors, valuations of the priory's property, memoranda and accounts of disputes. Many documents record the names of those who entered the community as nuns or canons, or who were associating themselves with it by requests for confraternity or burial, throwing light on the way inwhich local families interacted with the priory and with each other. Meanwhile, the details of lands granted to the priory provide information about local land-holders, field- and place-names, farming practices and the various activities which supported the religious community. Although its holdings were scattered across north-east Lincolnshire, from Conesby to Boston and from Lincoln to Saltfleetby, much of the priory's property was located in the low-lying lands east of Louth, and its charters demonstrate the importance of the area's waterways, bridges, ditches and banks, not just as geographical boundaries but as resources to be exploited, maintained and, importantly, to be shared in a harmonious way by the local community, religious and lay. The documents are presented here with introduction and notes. Jill Redford gained her PhD at the University of York and is assistant archivist tothe Company of Merchant Adventurers of the City of York.

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 is the first English translation of Dom Jean Mabillon's treatise that defends the propriety of study and research as an occupation for monks, and lays out a course of studies for young Benedictines training to be scholars. In the 1680s the strict Trappist reformer, Armand-Jean de Rance, published books condemning scholarship as a suitable occupation for monks. Mabillon belonged to the Maurists, a group of French Benedictines who were already launched on a 150-year odyssey of collecting, editing, and publishing critical editions of the church Fathers, the classics of early French literature and history, the annals of the Benedictine order from its beginnings, and critically vetted lives of Benedictine saints. Mabillon refuted Rance's claims, but transformed the debate by writing a masterful survey of authors and works with which monastic scholars should be familiar: pagan classics, the writings of early Christianity, and important publications of the 16th and 17th centuries on topics ranging from biblical scholarship to belles lettres to civil and canon law to books about books. Mabillon includes a "list of difficulties met with in reading the councils, the Fathers, and church history" that presents problems in a non-dogmatic, open-ended way. This edition includes a translator's introduction, suggestions for further reading on the monastic studies controversy, all Mabillon's marginal notes, a bibliography of all published works mentioned in the text, and an index."

The Book of St Gilbert was written by a canon of the Order of Sempringham and is presented here in its first, full, critical edition. It contains all the documents of the canonization process of St Gilbert and his life, including a dossier of letters concerning a major crisis of his rule, the revolt of the lay brothers; a detailed account of the canonization process; and two collections of his miracles. The book is especially revealing of the procedures of canonization at a crucial stage in its formation and provides a central body of material for the history of the Order in its first sixty years.

This is a groundbreaking study of the relationship between Christianity and collective violence in late nineteenth century China. Using American Baptist and English Presbyterian examples in the Guangdong province, the book examines the scale of Chinese conversions, the creation of Christian villages and the power relations between Christians, non-Christians and between different Christian denominations.
The spread of Christianity needs to be understood in the context of intense violence within and between villages and lineages, and patterns of conversion often following the lines of existing communal divisions.
This book is based on a very comprehensive foundation of data and the Protestant missionary and Chinese archival materials are supplemented with fieldwork data that were collected in several Christian villages.

Cloistered in an Italian library, leafing through dusty sixteenth-century manuscripts, historian P. Renée Baernstein stumbled on a mystery: The nuns of San Paolo, a vital part of community life in Milan, always busy with missionary or charity work, were suddenly in 1552 forced by the Inquisition to remain behind the thick stone walls of the convent.
An absorbing work of historical reconstruction, A Convent Tale paints a rich portrait of remarkable women forced to change, adapt and survive in the Counter-reformation world of Renaissance Italy. Baernstein traces how the nuns, stripped of their mission to transform Milan into a New Jerusalem, redirected their energies to securing their own families' political gain and status in the community.

In Desiring Life, Norvene Vest brings the insights of Benedict s Rule to the wisdom tradition. Desiring Life is the third book in her series on Benedictine spirituality for people living in the world today. Vest asks questions of pressing concern today, such as: What is the good life we seek? How can we learn to live with integrity and compassion, despite the growing gap between public ethics and narrow self-interest? How can we live fully and well? What sort of people should we as Christians try to be? In sections on wisdom, virtue, and ethics Vest describes these contemporary questions and addresses them through passages from Benedict s Rule. Through the recovery of insights from the past, Vest believes, we can draw closer to the heart of our desire for life in all its fullness union with God.

This book depicts the lives of female monks within a monastery located in upper Egypt in the period 385-464 CE. During this period the monastery was headed by a monk named Shenoute; twelve of his letters to the women under his care survive. Despite various technical textual difficulties, Krawiec is able to use the letters to reconstruct a series of quarrels and events in the life of the White Monastery and to discern some of the key patterns in the participants' relationships to one another within the world as they perceived it. She begins by describing the monks' daily routine and discovers that the monastery's culture was based on uniformity, in both material goods and emotional support, for all the monks, regardless of background. The female monks' relationship with Shenoute constructed and exerted his authority in these conditions, and investigates the degree to which the women accepted it.

There is no published account of the history of religious women in England before the Norman Conquest. Yet, female saints and abbesses, such as Hild of Whitby or Edith of Wilton, are among the most celebrated women recorded in Anglo-Saxon sources and their stories are of popular interest. This book offers the first general and critical assessment of female religious communities in early medieval England. It transforms our understanding of the different modes of religious vocation and institutional provision and thereby gives early medieval women's history a new foundation.

A detailed investigation into the mysterious group of monks, the Celi De, who flourished in early medieval Ireland. The Celi De [`clients of God'], sometimes referred to as the Culdees, comprise the group of monks who first appeared in Ireland in the eighth century in association with St Mael Ruain of Tallaght. Although influential and important in the development of the monastic tradition in Ireland, they have been neglected in general histories. This book offers an investigation into the movement. Proceeding from an examination of ascetic practice and theory in earlymedieval Ireland, followed by a fresh look at the evidence most often cited in support of the prevailing theory of celi De identity, the author challenges the orthodox opinion that they were an order or movement intent uponmonastic reform at a time of declining religious discipline. At the heart of the book is a manuscript-centred critical evaluation of the large corpus of putative celi De texts, offered as a means for establishing a more comprehensive assessment of who and what celi De were. Dr Follett argues that they are properly understood as the self-identified members of the personal retinue of God, in whose service they distinguished themselves from other monks and monastic communities in their personal devotion, pastoral care, Sunday observance, and other matters. A catalogue of celi De texts with manuscript references is provided in an appendix. WESTLEY FOLLETT is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Translation (and text) of colloquies gives vivid picture of Anglo-Saxon monastic education. The monk Aelfric Bata is the only identifiable graduate of the school of Aelfric `Grammaticus', the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon homilist whose Grammar, Glossary and Colloquyformed part of an educational plan for English boys. Bata's Colloquies, Latin conversations set in a monastic school, open a door into the world of Anglo-Saxon monasticism, revealing the details of daily activities: rising and dressing, studying the day's lesson, eating, bathing and tonsuring. Oblates ask a master's help in reading, bargain for a manuscript-copying job, obtain help in sharpening a pen. One colloquy depicts a flyting between master and student, who exchange graphic scatologicalinsults. Combining the spare diction of his teacher Aelfric with the ornate glossematic vocabulary of Aldhelm, Aelfric Bata creates a cloistered world where comedy, invective, sermon and poetic recitation mix. The Colloquiesare presented with an English translation, glosses and full notes. Dr SCOTT GWARA teaches in the Department of English at the University of South Carolina: Professor DAVID PORTER teaches in the Department of English at SouthernUniversity, Baton Rouge.

From Elizabeth I's refoundation of the collegiate church to reforms and improvements attempted and achieved in the early years of James I's reign. The completion of Dr Knighton's edition of the first chapter minute book of Westminster Abbey records in detail Elizabeth I's refoundation of the collegiate church, including regulatio for preaching, the school and the library; the chapter's own housing is a continuing issue. Predominantly, however, the acts document the chapter's estate management: lease particulars shed light on the population of early modern Westminster and London. Favours sought by queen and courtiers are recorded, the exercise of the dean and chapter's ecclesiastical patronage is registered. At the end of the period the abbey was home to some of the most eminent churchmen and scholars of the day, Andrewes, Bancroft, Camden and Hakluyt among them. Reforms and improvements attempted and achieved in the early years of James I's reign conclude the volume. Index to both vols.CHARLES KNIGHTON gained his Ph.D. from Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Christians of all denominations are looking today to the ancient discipline of a rule of life to strengthen their sense of living in Christ and participating in a wider community. For the first time the brothers of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist are making their rule-completely rewritten and revised-available to the church at large. The book is composed of 49 short chapters that develop classical monastic themes of hospitality, poverty, celibacy, and obedience, exploring what these might mean to men and women living at the end of the millennium. And because this is a modern rule, it provides guidance and reflection in less traditional areas, too-leadership, conflict, the use and abuse of authority, work, the need for rest and silence, vocation, and fellowship with the poor. Therefore it has much to teach Christians in other kinds of communities, including the family, the parish, and the workplace. Concluding chapters give suggestions for meditating on the Rule and for its use as an aid to discernment and spiritual growth for prayer groups and parish life committees.

As the oldest of the military religious orders and the one with an unexpected and dramatic downfall, the knighthood of the Templars continues to fascinate academics and students as well as the public at large. A collection of fifteen chapters accompanied by a historical introduction, The Templars: The Rise, Fall, and Legacy of a Military Religious Order recounts and analyzes this community's rise and establishment in both the crusader states of the eastern Mediterranean and the countries of western Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, reflects on the proceedings launched against it and its subsequent fall (1307-1314), and explores its medieval and post-medieval legacy, including an assessment of current research pertaining to the Templars and suggestions for future explorations. Showcasing a wide range of methodological approaches and primary source materials, this volume unites historical, art-historical, theological, archaeological, and historiographical perspectives, and it features the work and voices of scholars from various academic generations who reside in eight different countries (Israel, France, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, and the United States of America).