This book is the first to explore the archaeology of female monasticism in medieval Ireland, primarily from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. Nuns are known from history, but this book considers their archaeology and upstanding architecture through perspectives such as gender and landscape. It discusses the archaeological remains associated with female monasticism in Ireland as it is currently understood and offers insights into how these religious communities might have lived and interacted with their local communities.

A major study of women and the medieval Irish church, this book includes ground-breaking investigations of medieval nunneries in Ireland, their personnel, patrons, buildings and estates and their strategies for ensuring the productivity of their resources. The author argues for the existence of close ties between the supposedly cloistered nuns and the surrounding lay communities. Medieval women not among the small number who actually joined nunneries channelled their pious energies towards such activities as patronage of local churches and monasteries, pilgrimage and requests for papal and Episcopal privileges. These pious activities are examined in detail and placed within their European context. This exploration into a previously neglected aspect of the history of monastic and church life in medieval Ireland is aÃ?Â?Ã?Â?major contribution to the history of women in Ireland and Europe.

Throughout the long history of Irish monasticism, the experience of women monastics has, until recently, been relatively sidelined. A desire to redress this inspired the decision in 2021 to dedicate the Fifth Glenstal History Conference to exploring the various ways in which women responded to the monastic and ascetic vocation in Medieval and Early Modern Ireland. Whether as practitioners or as patrons, women found creative and dynamic ways to pursue their calling as 'Brides of Christ' between the fifth and the seventeenth centuries, often in the face of tremendous difficulties and challenges. Their lives of prayer and service are sometimes hard to glimpse but the combined interdisciplinary perspectives of these essays brings them into sharper focus. The collection also demonstrates the current vitality of research on this topic and includes contributions by both established and emerging scholars. The volume is dedicated to Dr Dagmar Ó Riain Raedel in recognition of her outstanding contribution to Irish and European medieval history and, in particular, to the study of medieval Irish-German monastic relations.

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.

Monasticism, in all of its variations, was a feature of almost every landscape in the medieval West. So ubiquitous were religious women and men throughout the Middle Ages that all medievalists encounter monasticism in their intellectual worlds. While there is enormous interest in medieval monasticism among Anglophone scholars, language is often a barrier to accessing some of the most important and groundbreaking research emerging from Europe. The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West offers a comprehensive treatment of medieval monasticism, from Late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. The essays, specially commissioned for this volume and written by an international team of scholars, with contributors from Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, cover a range of topics and themes and represent the most up-to-date discoveries on this topic.

There has long been a tendency among monastic historians to ignore or marginalize female participation in monastic life, but recent scholarship has begun to redress the balance, and the great contributions made by women to the religious life of the Middle Ages are now attracting increasing attention. This interdisciplinary volume draws together scholars from Spain, Italy, France, the Low Countries, Germany, Transylvania, Scandinavia, and the British Isles, and offers new insights into the history, art history, and material culture, and the religiosity and culture of medieval religious women. The different chapters within this book take a comparative approach to the emergence and spread of female monastic communities across different geographical, political, and economic settings, comparing and contrasting houses that ranged from rich, powerful royal abbeys to small, subsistence priories on the margins of society, and exploring the artistic achievements, the interaction with neighbours and secular and ecclesiastical authorities, and the spiritual lives that were led by their inhabitants. The contributors to this volume address issues as diverse as patronage and relationships with the outside world, organizational structures, the nature of Cistercian observance and identity among female houses, and the role of male authority, and in doing so, they seek to shed light on the divergences and commonalities upon which the female religious life was based.

"This volume of essays, which includes papers first given at a conference of the Irish Association for Research in Women's History, represents a fresh approach to the discussion of the position of women in Ireland in the Middle Ages: it attempts to set the experience of Irish women into a wider, European context. This comparative approach makes it possible to shake off the image of isolation and idiosyncrasy that has for too long clung to many aspects of medieval Irish society, and especially to the subjects of women and marriage." "A secondary theme of the volume is the extent to which women, in Ireland and outside, were able to take the initiative and make their interests and wishes count in the societies in which they lived. A number of the essays discuss the sources for the history of women and use them in new ways to recover what is possible of the lives and experiences of medieval women." "A combination of essays by established academics and younger scholars, covering literary topics as well as political, social and legal conditions as they affected women, the volume presents the results of recent research and represents very much the 'cutting edge' of scholarly work on medieval women, especially, but not exclusively, in Ireland."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Sacred Sisters focuses on five saints: the four female Irish saints who have extant medieval biographies (Darerca, Brigid, Íte, and Samthann), and Patrick, whose writings -- fifth-century Ireland's sole surviving texts -- attest to the centrality of women in Irish Christianity's development. Women served as leaders and teachers, perhaps even as bishops and priests, and men and women worked together in a variety of arrangements as well as independently. Previous studies of gender in medieval Ireland have emphasized sexism and sex-segregated celibacy, dismissing abundant evidence of alternative approaches throughout the sources, including in the Lives of Ireland's female saints. Sacred Sisters places these generally marginalized texts at its center, exploring their portraits of empowered, authoritative, compassionate women who exemplified an accepting and affirming ethics of gender and sexuality that would be unusual in many mainstream Christian movements in the present day, let alone in the Middle Ages.

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