Search results for ""Author Anne E. Lester""

In Creating Cistercian Nuns, Anne E. Lester addresses a central issue in the history of the medieval church: the role of women in the rise of the religious reform movement of the thirteenth century. Focusing on the county of Champagne in France, Lester reconstructs the history of the women’s religious movement and its institutionalization within the Cistercian order. The common picture of the early Cistercian order is that it was unreceptive to religious women. Male Cistercian leaders often avoided institutional oversight of communities of nuns, preferring instead to cultivate informal relationships of spiritual advice and guidance with religious women. As a result, scholars believed that women who wished to live a life of service and poverty were more likely to join one of the other reforming orders rather than the Cistercians. As Lester shows, however, this picture is deeply flawed. Between 1220 and 1240 the Cistercian order incorporated small independent communities of religious women in unprecedented numbers. Moreover, the order not only accommodated women but also responded to their interpretations of apostolic piety, even as it defined and determined what constituted Cistercian nuns in terms of dress, privileges, and liturgical practice. Lester reconstructs the lived experiences of these women, integrating their ideals and practices into the broader religious and social developments of the thirteenth century—including the crusade movement, penitential piety, the care of lepers, and the reform agenda of the Fourth Lateran Council. The book closes by addressing the reasons for the subsequent decline of Cistercian convents in the fourteenth century. Based on extensive analysis of unpublished archives, Creating Cistercian Nuns will force scholars to revise their understanding of the women’s religious movement as it unfolded during the thirteenth century.

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Between Orders and Heresy foregrounds the dynamic, creative, and diverse late medieval religious landscapes that flourished within the spaces of social and ecclesiastical structures. This collection reconsiders the arguments put forward in Herbert Grundmann’s monumental book, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages, and challenges his traditional interpretive binary, recognized as the shared origins of many medieval religious movements. The contributors explore the social relationships fostered between secular clergy members, including parish priests, local canons, and aristocratic confessors, and examine the ways in which laypeople inspired and engaged in devotion beyond religious orders. Each essay in the volume considers a major theme in medieval religious history, such as the implementation of apostolic ideals, pastoral relationships, crusade connections, vernacular traditions, and reform. Organized to historicize and challenge the deeply embedded historiographical tendencies that have long distorted the complex dynamics of the late medieval world, Between Orders and Heresy is a major assessment of medieval religious belief and activity beyond and between the binary of orders and heresies

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A series which is a model of its kind. Edmund King, History The wide-ranging articles collected here represent the cutting edge of recent Anglo-Norman scholarship. Topics include English kingship, legends of the Battle of Bouvines, ideas of empire, the practicalities of child kingship, and female rulership in Brittany. The volume continues in its proud tradition of source analysis: there are studies of northern French urban franchises, and Norman charters and a logistical take on the making of the Domesday Book, while narrative sources are represented in the vernacular by a study of Herman of Valenciennes' Bible and in Latin by the historiography of Robert of Torigni and Ralph Niger. Further contributions focus on the twelfth-century ecclesiastical officers Abbot Peter the Venerable and Archbishop Thomas Becket, and the volume is completed with an analysis of the concept of economic resources with respect to Normandy. Contributors: Mathieu Arnoux, JamesBarnaby, Dominique Barthelemy, Thomas Bisson, Scott G. Bruce, Francis Gingras, Frédérique Lachaud, Anne E. Lester, C.P. Lewis, Amy Livingstone, Fanny Madeline, Nicholas Vincent, Emily Ward

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