Ordering Women's Lives: Penitentials and Nunnery Rules in the Early Medieval West FROM THE PUBLISHER
The book will be a cross-disciplinary study involving both early medieval history (c. fifth to eleventh centuries) and women's studies. It will be a study of written texts which were created with the purpose of controlling the behaviour of women. Sources such as monastic rules, penitentials, secular and canon law, saints' lives and tracts will provide the basis of my research. These texts will be studied in their social and historical contexts, with special focus on writers, readers, audiences, patrons, and their social groups. The audiences reached will be a key issue to establish as these would have been at least partially indicative of the effectiveness of these normative texts: for instance, private letters could only affect the behaviour of an individual or her religious community, while penitentials were meant to influence behaviour right down to the parish level. I expect the book to be limited geographically to Britain, Ireland, France and Germany, but may extend it to include Spain and Italy.
Author Biography: Julie Ann Smith, Department of History, Massey University, New Zealand.
SYNOPSIS
Smith summarizes the rules imposed on women in the early Middle Ages (mainly in Anglo-Saxon England) as these are expressed in penitentials (guides to help priests impose penance) and nunnery rules. The volume is useful in its thematic organization which groups together the rules, their history, and the reasoning behind them. The main subjects of the penitentials include the rules of claustration, expectations concerning women's sexuality, and magic (Smith devotes 40 pages to this). A history of nunnery rules is given for Columbanian monasticism, the eighth-century Benedictine movement, and tenth-century reform movement, followed by a detailed breakdown of the rules themselves. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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