Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence
Title | Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence PDF eBook |
Author | Sharon T. Strocchia |
Publisher | Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM |
Pages | 281 |
Release | 2009-10-19 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0801898625 |
An analysis of Renaissance Florentine convents and their influence on the city’s social, economic, and political history. The 15th century was a time of dramatic and decisive change for nuns and nunneries in Florence. That century saw the city’s convents evolve from small, semiautonomous communities to large civic institutions. By 1552, roughly one in eight Florentine women lived in a religious community. Historian Sharon T. Strocchia analyzes this stunning growth of female monasticism, revealing the important roles these women and institutions played in the social, economic, and political history of Renaissance Florence. It became common practice during this time for unmarried women in elite society to enter convents. This unprecedented concentration of highly educated and well-connected women transformed convents into sites of great patronage and social and political influence. As their economic influence also grew, convents found new ways of supporting themselves; they established schools, produced manuscripts, and manufactured textiles. Using previously untapped archival materials, Strocchia shows how convents shaped one of the principal cities of Renaissance Europe. She demonstrates the importance of nuns and nunneries to the booming Florentine textile industry and shows the contributions that ordinary nuns made to Florentine life in their roles as scribes, stewards, artisans, teachers, and community leaders. In doing so, Strocchia argues that the ideals and institutions that defined Florence were influenced in great part by the city’s powerful female monastics. Winner, Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize, American Catholic Historical Association “Strocchia examines the complex interrelationships between Florentine nuns and the laity, the secular government, and the religious hierarchy. The author skillfully analyzes extensive archival and printed sources.” —Choice
Nuns and Nunneries
Title | Nuns and Nunneries PDF eBook |
Author | Nuns |
Publisher | |
Pages | 366 |
Release | 1852 |
Genre | Convents |
ISBN |
Medieval English Nunneries C. 1275 to 1535
Title | Medieval English Nunneries C. 1275 to 1535 PDF eBook |
Author | Eileen Power |
Publisher | |
Pages | 770 |
Release | 1922 |
Genre | Convents |
ISBN |
Medieval English Nunneries
Title | Medieval English Nunneries PDF eBook |
Author | Eileen Power |
Publisher | CUP Archive |
Pages | 768 |
Release | |
Genre | |
ISBN |
Nuns Behaving Badly
Title | Nuns Behaving Badly PDF eBook |
Author | Craig A. Monson |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Pages | 258 |
Release | 2010-11-15 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0226534626 |
Witchcraft. Arson. Going AWOL. Some nuns in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy strayed far from the paradigms of monastic life. Cloistered in convents, subjected to stifling hierarchy, repressed, and occasionally persecuted by their male superiors, these women circumvented authority in sometimes extraordinary ways. But tales of their transgressions have long been buried in the Vatican Secret Archive. That is, until now. In Nuns Behaving Badly, Craig A. Monson resurrects forgotten tales and restores to life the long-silent voices of these cloistered heroines. Here we meet nuns who dared speak out about physical assault and sexual impropriety (some real, some imagined). Others were only guilty of misjudgment or defacing valuable artwork that offended their sensibilities. But what unites the women and their stories is the challenges they faced: these were women trying to find their way within the Catholicism of their day and through the strict limits it imposed on them. Monson introduces us to women who were occasionally desperate to flee cloistered life, as when an entire community conspired to torch their convent and be set free. But more often, he shows us nuns just trying to live their lives. When they were crossed—by powerful priests who claimed to know what was best for them—bad behavior could escalate from mere troublemaking to open confrontation. In resurrecting these long-forgotten tales and trials, Monson also draws attention to the predicament of modern religious women, whose “misbehavior”—seeking ordination as priests or refusing to give up their endowments to pay for priestly wrongdoing in their own archdioceses—continues even today. The nuns of early modern Italy, Monson shows, set the standard for religious transgression in their own age—and beyond.
Nuns
Title | Nuns PDF eBook |
Author | Silvia Evangelisti |
Publisher | OUP Oxford |
Pages | 312 |
Release | 2008-09-11 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 0191579904 |
Cloistered and inaccessible 'brides of Christ'? Or socially engaged women, active in the outside world to a degree impossible for their secular sisters? Nuns tells the fascinating stories of the women who have lived in religious communities since the dawn of the modern age - their ideals and achievements, frustrations and failures, and their attempts to reach out to the society around them. Drawing particularly on the nuns' own words, Silvia Evangelisti explores how they came to the cloister, how they responded to monastic discipline, and how they pursued their spiritual, intellectual, and missionary activities. The book looks not only at the individual stories of outstanding historical figures such as Teresa of Avila but also at the wider picture of convent life - what it symbolized to contemporaries, how it reflected and related to the world beyond the cloister, and what it means in the world today.
William Faulkner and the Tangible Past
Title | William Faulkner and the Tangible Past PDF eBook |
Author | Thomas S. Hines |
Publisher | Univ of California Press |
Pages | 206 |
Release | 1996-01-01 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9780520202931 |
"This jewel of a book is a great pleasure to read. In point of fact, it is not a book one reads but savors."--Narciso G. Menocal, author of Architecture as Nature