Dark Age Nunneries

Abstract

The two-and-a-half centuries between 800 and 1050 are commonly viewed as a 'dark age' in the history of women's monasticism. Dark, in the sense that the realities of life in and around the cloister are difficult to access: the primary evidence is extremely fragmented; the context is ill-understood; and scholars’ findings are scattered across a multitude of case studies. But dark also in the sense that, according to the dominant academic narrative, women's monasticism suffered from the catastrophic disempowerment of its members, the progressive ‘secularization’ of its institutions, and - barring a few exceptions - the precipitous decline of intellectual and spiritual life. Based on a study of forty institutions in Lotharingia – a multi-lingual, politically and culturally diverse region in the heart of Western Europe – this book dismantles the common view of women religious in this period as the disempowered, at times even disinterested, witnesses to their own lives. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, it highlights their attempts - and those of the men and women sympathetic to their cause - to construct localized narratives of self, nurture beneficial relations with their environment, and remain involved in shaping the attitudes and behaviors of the laity.

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