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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.
A People's Church brings together a distinguished international group of historians to provide a sweeping introduction to Christian religious life and institutions in medieval Italy. Each essay treats a single theme as broadly as possible, highlighting both the unique aspects of medieval Christianity on the Italian peninsula and the beliefs and practices it shared with other Christian societies. Because of its long tradition of communal self-governance, Christianity in medieval Italy, perhaps more than anywhere else, was truly a "people's church." At the same time, its exceptional urban wealth and literacy rates, along with its rich and varied intellectual and artistic culture, led to divers...
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This volume of essays covers themes which are central to the work of Brenda Bolton as a scholar and teacher: Innocent III, the city of Rome, the medieval Church and the urban context of the Italian peninsula in the late Middle Ages.
Provides new translations of Clare's writings and related primary sources, as well as previously unpublished documents.
Clare of Assisi: Life, Writings and Spirituality examines Clare not merely as an obedient footnote to the friars, but as a Franciscan founder in her own right who kept primitive Franciscan ideals alive into the middle of the thirteenth century and transposed them into a woman s key. Bringing together the best of international research, the text examines Clare s importance within the early Franciscan milieu and her contribution to the thirteenth-century women's movement. It studies the radicalism of Clare's Franciscan choice, her life within the Monastery of San Damiano, her politicking with Agnes of Prague for the privilege of poverty," and her uniqueness among other women in Gregory IX's Damianite ordo. Following this historical study are critical translations and literary analyses of Clare's four letters to Agnes of Prague as well as a new translation and commentary on Clare s Forma Vitae."
Historical biography has a mixed reputation: at its best it can reveal much not only about an individual, but the wider context of their life and society; at worst it can result in a narrowly focused work of hagiography or condemnation. Yet in spite of its sometimes inferior status amongst academics, biography has remained a popular genre, and in recent years has developed into new and intriguing areas. As the essays in this volume reveal, scholars from an array of different disciplines have embraced what biography can offer them, expanding the remit of biography from people to things, tracing the 'life' of their chosen object from creation to use to disposal to rediscovery. The increasing c...