New approaches to understanding religious women's involvement in monastic reform, demonstrating how women's experiences were more ambiguous and multi-layered than previously assumed. Over the last two decades, scholarship has presented a more nuanced view of women's attitude to and agency in medieval monastic reform, challenging the idea that they were, by and large, unwilling to accept or were necessarily hostile towards reform initiatives. Rather, it has shown that they actively participated in debates about the ideas and structures that shaped their religious lives, whether rejecting, embracing, or adapting to calls for "reform" contingent on their circumstances. Nevertheless, fundamental questions regarding the gendered nature of religious reform are ripe for further examination. This book brings together innovative research from a range of disciplines to re-evaluate and enlarge our knowledge of women's involvement in spiritual and institutional change in female monastic communities over the period c. 1000 - c. 1500. Contributors revise conventional narratives about women and monastic reform, and earlier assumptions of reform as negative or irrelevant for women. Drawing on a diverse array of visual, material and textual sources, it presents "snapshots" of reform from western Europe, stretching from Ireland to Iberia. Case-studies focussing on a number of different topics, from tenth-century female saints' lives to fifteenth-century liturgical books, from the tenth-century Leominster prayerbook to archaeological remains in Ireland, from embroideries and tapestries to the rebellious nuns of Sainte-Croix in Poitiers, offer a critical reappraisal of how monastic women (and their male associates) reflected, individually and collectively, on their spiritual ideals and institutional forms.

German Description: Das Papsttum und die vita religiosa, die Welt der Kloster und Orden, sind die beiden einzigen institutionellen Lebensformen des Mittelalters, die fur sich eine eigene universelle Geltung beanspruchen konnten. Durch die Ausbildung komplexer kommunikativer Strukturen und innovativer Organisationsformen nahmen beide vor allem seit dem 12. und 13. Jahrhundert Anteil an der Grundlegung eines "Kulturraums Europa." Vor diesem Hintergrund stand der analytische Vergleich von Papsttum und vita religiosa als aufeinander bezogene Kommunikationssysteme im Mittelpunkt zweier Tagungen am Deutsch-Italienischen Zentrum fur Europaische Exzellenz der Villa Vigoni, deren Ergebnisse nun in einer zweibandigen Publikation vorliegen. Die Beitrage des zweiten Bandes widmen sich der Rolle der romischen Kurie bei der uberregionalen Vermittlung religioser Normen und kultureller Werte als universal gedachte Ordnungsvorstellungen und fragen zugleich nach dem Anteil der religiosen Orden an diesen Vermittlungsprozessen. English Description: The papacy and the vita religiosa, the world of cloisters and religious orders, were the two sole institutional forms of life in the Middle Ages, which could claim for themselves a universal validity. Through the formation of complex communicative structures and innovative forms of organization both accepted, from the twelfth century on, a part in the foundation of a European cultural space. Against this background stands the analytical comparison of papacy and vita religiosa as correlative systems of communication at the center of two meetings at the German-Italian Center for European Excellent at the Villa Vigoni (Deutsch-Italienischen Zentrum fur Europaische Exzellenz), whose conclusions are now available in a two volume publication. The studies offered in the two volumes are concerned with the role of the Roman curia in the trans-regional arbitration of religious norms and cultural values as universal perceptions of order and, at the same time, inquire about the part of religious orders in these processes of arbitration."