Religious Orders And Religious Identity Formation Ca 1420 1620

This volume deals with the transformative force of Observant reforms during the long fifteenth century, and with the massive literary output by Observant religious, leading to encompassing models of religious perfection that had an effect far into the sixteenth century.

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.

In this volume, specialists from different fields present case studies of text-image relationships in the religious field (1400-1700) with a methodological and/or theoretical dimension.

In Educating the Catholic People, Salomoni offers a new perspective on the pedagogical, institutional, and political innovations introduced in Italy by religious teaching congregations between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

For over a thousand years, monks, nuns, canons, friars, and others under religious vows stood at the pinnacle of Western European society. For their ascetic sacrifices, their learning, piety, and expertise, they were accorded positions of power and influence, and a wide range of legal, financial and social privileges. As such they present an important opportunity to consider the nature and dynamics of an "elite" in medieval culture. Using medieval religious life as their interpretive lens, the essays of this volume seek to uncover the essential markers of elite status. They explore how those under vows claimed and manifested elite status in complex spiritual, temporal, and social combinations. They explore the workings of elite status from day to day, across region and locale - who earned recognition and how, whether through specific achievements or the deployment of specific capacities; who recognized, conferred, or helped maintain elite status, how and why; how elite status could be redefined, contested or rejected. The essays also seek to understand how medieval European religious elites compared to those found in other cultures and settings, from Syria and South Asia to the early modern transatlantic world.

The impetus of religious reform between ca. 1380-1520, which expressed itself in a variety of Observant initiatives in many religious orders all over Europe, and also brought forth the Devotio moderna movement in the late medieval Low Countries, had considerable repercussions for the production of a wide range of religious texts, and the embrace of other forms of cultural production (scribal activities, liturgical innovations, art, music, religious architecture). At the same time, the very impetus of reform within late medieval religious orders and the wish to return to a more modest religious lifestyle in accordance with monastic and mendicant rules, and ultimately with the commands of Christ in the Gospel, made it difficult to wholeheartedly embrace the material consequences of learning, literary and artistic prowess, as the very pursuit of such pursuits ran against basic demands of evangelical poverty and humility. This volume explores how this tension was negotiated in various Observant and Devotio moderna contexts, and how communities connected with these movements instrumentalized various types of writing, learning, and other forms of cultural expression to further the cause of religious reform, defend it against order-internal and external criticism, to shape recognizable reform identities for themselves, and to transform religious life in society as a whole.

Transnational Catholicism in Tudor England details the relationship between transnational mobility and the development of Tudor Catholicism. Almost two hundred Catholics felt compelled to exile themselves from England rather than conform with the religious reformations inaugurated by Henry VIII and Edward VI. Frederick E. Smith explores how these émigrés' physical mobility reconfigured their relationships with the men and women they left behind, and how it forced them to develop new relationships with individuals they encountered abroad. It analyses how the experiences of mobility and displacement catalysed a shift in their religious identities, in some ways broadening but in others narrowing their understandings of what it meant to be 'Catholic'. The author examines the role of these émigrés as agents of religious exchange, circulating new doctrinal and devotional ideas throughout western Europe and forging new connections between them. By focussing particularly upon those individuals who subsequently returned to their homeland during Mary I's Catholic counter-reformation, the study also explores the lasting legacies of these émigrés' displacement and mobility, both for the émigrés themselves as they grappled with the difficulties of re-integration, but also for the broader development of English Catholicism. In this way, Transnational Catholicism in Tudor England deepens our understanding of the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which exile shapes religio-political identities, but also underlines the importance of international mobility as a crucial factor in the development of English Catholicism and the wider European Catholic Church over the mid sixteenth century.

In In the Mirror of the Prodigal Son: The Pastoral Uses of a Biblical Narrative (c. 1200-1550) Pietro Delcorno reconstructs how this biblical parable became, particularly through preaching, a key master narrative in shaping religious identity in medieval and Reformation Europe.