Spirituality and Monasticism, East and West – serie

This book offers the first analysis of female monasticism across the last three centuries of the Byzantine empire using Social Network Analysis (SNA). The present study analyzes and reconstructs the networks of Byzantine female monasteries as well as the geographical and spatial dimensions of monastic life, art, and literary production. Moreover, it reconstructs and represents the networks of specific female monastic individuals, female involvement in ecclesiastical controversies, and the complexity of patronage.

This book presents a comparative approach to the role of women in religious and monastic life in Europe and the Americas during the medieval and early modern periods. The contributors inquire into differences and similarities, continuities and discontinuities of women’s agency inside and outside the convent. The volume challenges traditional chronological and regional limitations such as those between the Middle Ages and the Modern era and stresses the transatlantic exchange of models between Europe and the Americas.

This book explores the dimensions of medieval monastic meditation, prayer, and contemplation in the heyday of Benedictine and Cistercian spiritual writing, the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Mancia aims to answer the following questions: What did extra-liturgical prayer and meditation look like for medieval monks and nuns in western medieval Europe? When, where, and how was it practised? Was there a set way to engage with monastic meditation, or were there a variety of medieval monastic meditative experiences in the eleventh and twelfth centuries? What did monks and nuns perceive as the limitations of monastic prayer and meditation, and how did they understand their own imperfections and failures to perform "perfect" devotion? What extra-textual tools—art, manuscripts, diagrams, spaces—did monks and nuns rely upon to stimulate their practices of meditation? What does monastic meditation reveal about the emotional lives of Benedictine and Cistercian monks and nuns in the high Middle Ages? And, finally, what does the monastic struggle to pursue a prayerful Christian life have to teach the secular world of the twenty-first century?

Tiron was a reformed Benedictine congregation founded ca. 1109 by Bernard of Abbeville. Though little known to medieval and religious historians, this in-depth study shows how it expanded from obscurity in the forests of the Perche to become an international congregation with headquarters in Chartres and Paris and abbeys and priories in France and the British Isles. After famine drove craftsmen to his monastery, Bernard sold their wares to survive, and the congregation become noted for building, crafts, education, and horse-breeding. Tiron preceded the Cistercians in Britain and traded in rising towns, and by 1147 it had a centrally-controlled network of riverine and coastal properties connecting its production hubs with towns and ports. Its expansion prefigured the Angevin trading zone and the French nation. Subsequently Tiron endured wartime ravages, funded illustrious commendatory abbots, and merged with the Congregation of Saint-Maur, before closing in 1792.

This volume comparatively explores how members of “monastic” communities, broadly understood, developed practical strategies for the construction of identity across a range of religious traditions in the greater regions of premodern Europe and Asia. In particular, it seeks to understand how the production, distribution, and reception of hagiographic material (written, visual, and performative) served as a tool for the implementation of “monastic” dynamics of legitimation. This is accomplished by pursuing and developing a two-fold approach. At an empirical level, the volume expands our scholarly understanding of the cross-cultural processes that characterize religious communities’ notions of identity. At a meta-level, it furthers a re-evaluation of our taxonomy as it challenges established notions of categories such as “monk/monastic” and “hagiography.”

This book presents a comparative approach to the role of women in religious and monastic life in Europe and the Americas during the medieval and early modern periods. The contributors inquire into differences and similarities, continuities and discontinuities of women’s agency inside and outside the convent. The volume challenges traditional chronological and regional limitations such as those between the Middle Ages and the Modern era and stresses the transatlantic exchange of models between Europe and the Americas.