Overview

In Dark Age Nunneries, Steven Vanderputten dismantles the common view of women religious between 800 and 1050 as disempowered or even disinterested witnesses to their own lives. It is based on a study of primary sources from forty female monastic communities in Lotharingia-a politically and culturally diverse region that boasted an extraordinarily high number of such institutions. Vanderputten highlights the attempts by women religious and their leaders, as well as the clerics and the laymen and -women sympathetic to their cause, to construct localized narratives of self, preserve or expand their agency as religious communities, and remain involved in shaping the attitudes and behaviors of the laity amid changing contexts and expectations on the part of the Church and secular authorities. Rather than a ""dark age"" in which female monasticism withered under such factors as the assertion of male religious authority, the secularization of its institutions, and the precipitous decline of their intellectual and spiritual life, Vanderputten finds that the post-Carolingian period witnessed a remarkable adaptability among these women. Through texts, objects, archaeological remains, and iconography, Dark Age Nunneries offers scholars of religion, medieval history, and gender studies new ways to understand the experience of women of faith within the Church and across society during this era.

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9781501715945

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Reviews

Dark Age Nunneries is top-of-the-line work by one of the world's greatest experts on medieval monasticism. I have no doubt that it will be received as fundamental in the field of women's monasticism in the central Middle Ages and become the go-to book on the subject for scholars of all linguistic or national backgrounds in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. --Walter P. Simons, Professor of History at Dartmouth College Dark Age Nunneries is a thought-provoking and paradigm-changing book. By reimagining the very 'ambiguity' of female monastic communities as a strength, Steven Vanderputten's book allows us to look at the scant sources for female monasticism in this period with new clarity and insight and, in doing so, changes the way that we think about religious practice in the central Middle Ages. --Scott G. Bruce, Professor of History, University of Colorado Boulder

Author Information

Steven Vanderputten is Professor in the History of the Early and Central Middle Ages at Ghent University. He is the author of Monastic Reform as Process and Imagining Religious Leadership in the Middle Ages.

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