Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World
Devout laywomen raise a number of provocative questions about gender and religion in the early modern world. How did some groups or individuals evade the Tridentine legislation that required third order women to take solemn vows and observe active and passive enclosure? How did their attempts to exercise a female apostolate (albeit with varying degrees of success and assertiveness) destabilize hierarchies of class and gender? To the extent that their beliefs and practices diverged from approved doctrine and rituals, what insights can they provide into the tensions between official religion and lay religiosity?
Addressing these and many other questions, Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World reflects new directions in gender history, offering a more nuanced approach to the paradigm of woman as the prototypical disciplined subject of church-state power.
Alison Weber is Professor of Spanish with a joint appointment in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia, USA.
Women and Gender in the Early Modern World
Series Editors:
Allyson Poska, The University of Mary Washington, USA and Abby Zanger
The study of women and gender offers some of the most vital and innovative challenges to current scholarship on the early modern period. For more than a decade now, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World has served as a forum for presenting fresh ideas and original approaches to the field. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in scope, this series strives to reach beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa.
Titles in the series include:
Female Intimacies in Seventeenth-Century French Literature
Marianne Legault
The Senses in Religious Communities, 16001800
Nicky Hallett
Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomens Life Writing
Julie A. Eckerle
Learning and Literacy in Female Hands, 15201698
Elizabeth Mazzola
Medieval and Renaissance Lactations
Edited by Jutta Gisela Sperling
Isabella dEste and Francesco Gonzaga
Sarah D.P. Cockram
Early Modern Habsburg Women
Edited by Anne J. Cruz and Maria Galli Stampino
Picturing the Pregnant Magdalene in Northern Art, 14301550
Penny Howell Jolly
Art, Gender and Religious Devotion in Grand Ducal Tuscany
Alice E. Sanger
Staging Women and the SoulBody Dynamic in Early Modern England
Sarah E. Johnson
A Rulers Consort in Early Modern Germany
Judith P. Aikin
The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France
Domna C. Stanton
Representing Judith in Early Modern French Literature
Kathleen M. Llewellyn
Gender and Song in Early Modern England
Edited by Leslie C. Dunn and Katherine R. Larson
Autobiographical Writing by Early Modern Hispanic Women
Elizabeth Teresa Howe
Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France
Cathy McClive
Baptist Womens Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 16401680
Rachel Adcock
Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France
Edited by Lewis Seifert and Rebecca Wilkin
Rethinking Gaspara Stampa in the Canon of Renaissance Poetry
Edited by Unn Falkeid and Aileen A. Feng
Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England
Edited by Karen Bamford and Naomi J. Miller
Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World
Edited by Alison Weber
First published 2016
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Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane is Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Morris. She is the author of A History of Medieval Heresy and Inquisition (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011) and co-editor of Labels and Libels: Naming Beguines in Northern Medieval Europe (Brepols, 2014). She has published numerous essays on lay religious women, heresy, and religious culture in the Middle Ages, and is currently completing a monograph on beguine communities in medieval and early modern Germany.
Susan Dinan is Professor of History and Dean of the Pforzheimer Honors College at Pace University. She is the author of Women and Poor Relief in Seventeenth-Century France: The Early History of the Daughters of Charity (Ashgate, 2006) and co-editor with Debra Meyers of Women and Religion in Old and New Worlds (Routledge, 2001).
Jessica Fowler completed her Ph.D. in 2015 at the University of California, Davis, under the direction of Andrs Resendez. Her dissertation is entitled Illuminating the Empire: The Dissemination of the Spanish Inquisition and the Heresy of Alumbradismo, 15251600. She is currently working at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientficas in Madrid with the European Research Councilfunded project Conversion, Overlapping Religiosities, Polemics and Interaction: Iberia and Beyond (CORPI).
Maria Laura Giordano is Professor of Modern History at the Universitat Abat Olib-CEU of Barcelona. Her publications include
