In Order and Disorder: The Poor Clares between Foundation and Reform, Bert Roest provides an up-to-date and comprehensive history of the Poor Clares from their early beginnings until the sixteenth century.

In Order and Disorder: The Poor Clares between Foundation and Reform, Bert Roest provides an up-to-date and comprehensive history of the Poor Clares from their early beginnings until the sixteenth century. With recourse to the available secondary literature and a wealth of primary sources, this book shows how the early history of the Poor Clares cannot be reduced to Franciscan initiatives, and that the institutionalization of the order was characterized by prolonged conflicts and a series of important papal interventions. The work also provides insight in the expansion of the order, the complexities of religious reforms, and the significant cultural production of the women involved.

This book investigates the impact of the dissolution of the monasteries on women religious and examines their survival in the following decades, showing how, despite the state's official proscription of vocation living, religious vocation options for women continued in less formal ways. McShane explores the experiences of Irish women who travelled to the Continent in pursuit of formal religious vocational formation, covering both those accommodated in English and European continental convents' and those in the Irish convents established in Spanish Flanders and the Iberian Peninsula. Further, this book discusses the revival of religious establishments for women in Ireland from 1629 and outlines the links between these new convents and the Irish foundations abroad. Overall, this study provides a rich picture of Irish women religious during a period of unprecedented change and upheaval.

Francis of Assisi's reported reception of the stigmata on Mount La Verna in 1224 is almost universally considered to be the first documented account of an individual miraculously and physically receiving the five wounds of Christ. The early thirteenth-century appearance of this miracle, however, is not as unexpected as it first seems. Interpretations of Galatians 6:17--I bear the marks of the Lord Jesus Christ in my body--had been circulating since the early Middle Ages in biblical commentaries. These works perceived those with the stigmata as metaphorical representations of martyrs bearing the marks of persecution in order to spread the teaching of Christ in the face of resistance. By the seventh century, the meaning of Galatians 6:17 had been appropriated by bishops and priests as a sign or mark of Christ that they received invisibly at their ordination. Priests and bishops came to be compared to soldiers of Christ, who bore the brand (stigmata) of God on their bodies, just like Roman soldiers who were branded with the name of their emperor. By the early twelfth century, crusaders were said to bear the actual marks of the passion in death and even sometimes as they entered into battle. The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe traces the birth and evolution of religious stigmata and particularly of stigmatic theology, as understood through the ensemble of theological discussions and devotional practices. Carolyn Muessig assesses the role stigmatics played in medieval and early modern religious culture, and the way their contemporaries reacted to them. The period studied covers the dominant discourse of stigmatic theology: that is, from Peter Damian's eleventh-century theological writings to 1630 when the papacy officially recognised the authenticity of Catherine of Siena's stigmata.

This volume deals with the transformative force of Observant reforms during the long fifteenth century, and with the massive literary output by Observant religious, a token of a profound pastoral professionalization that provided religious and lay people alike with encompassing models of religious perfection, as well as with new tools to shape their religious identity. The essays in this work contend that these models and tools had an ongoing effect far into the sixteenth century (on all sides of the emerging confessional divide). At the same time, the controversies surrounding Observant reforms resulted in new sensibilities with regard to religious practices and religious nomenclature, which would fuel many of the early sixteenth-century controversies. Contributors are Michele Camaioni, Anna Campbell, Fabrizio Conti, Anna Dlabačová, Sylvie Duval, Koen Goudriaan, Emily Michelson, Alison More, Bert Roest, Anne Thayer, Johanneke Uphoff, Alessandro Vanoli, Ludovic Viallet, and Martina Wehrli-Johns.

The Observant reform of the religious orders remains one of the most important yet understudied religious movements of the later Middle Ages. This volume provides scholars with a current, synthetic introduction to the field, and suggests new avenues for future scholarship.

An introduction to the Rules and Customaries of the main religious Orders in Medieval Europe: Benedictine, Cistercian, Carthusian, Augustinian, Premonstratensian, Templar, Hospitaller, Teutonic, Dominican, Franciscan, and Carmelite.