AA. VV. - Womens Networks of Spiritual Promotion in the Peninsular Kingdoms (13th-16th Centuries)

Ircvm-Medieval Cultures

Womens Networks

of Spiritual Promotion in the Peninsular Kingdoms
( th -16 th Centuries )

ed. by Blanca Gar

viella

2013 Viella s.r.l. - Ircvm

All rights reserved

First published: 2013

ISBN 978-88-6728-015-5 (printed book)

ISBN 978-88-6728-126-8 (e-book)

Previously published as Redes femeninas de promocin espiritual
en los Reinos Peninsulares (s. XIII-XVI) , ed. Blanca Gar

Copyright 2013 - Viella, Roma

Translated by PangurBn, SL - www. pangurbansl.com

Blanca Gar

Introduction

It seems impossible to gather in the same book such diverse essays. From the 13 th to the 16 th century; Cistercian and mendicant female monasteries, Hieronymite, Augustinian and Carmelite nuns; the experiences of beguines, emparedadas, beatas or female tertiaries; houses of poverty sustained by women and frequented by both men and women; the frustrated attempts of Ignatian women, queens who found, refound or promote; or, in turn, bourgeoises and female aristocrats. A multiform landscape appears throughout both a geography and a history no less multiple and diverse: Catalonia, Languedoc, Valencia, Castile, Naples, Portugal, peninsular worlds or worlds politically related to the Iberian Peninsula. Each case seems unique. Nonetheless, this book intends to show exactly the opposite. It intends to show the pattern, the intertwining networks forming the thick and closely woven fabric of so many moments and experiences.

The starting point for this research is the ascertainment of a major change in the spirituality paradigm of the last centuries of the European Middle Ages. It is a well-known change; many things have been written about it, and we currently know that it was accompanied by at least two very important elements of renewal: urbanisation and the feminisation of religious life. Hence, the question regarding the role of women in the new forms of expression and organisation of the sacred from the 13 th century on makes total sense within studies focussed on understanding the religious phenomenon in the Middle Ages. The pages of this book are written within the general framework of that question. Their aim, however, is more specific. It is about investigating the penetration, evolution and changes of the new forms of female monastic and religious life in a delimited space: the peninsular realms. And it is chiefly about doing it whilst trying to establish the connection between those new spaces of female spirituality and the strategies, wishes and potentialities of women who, within or outside them, by themselves or in connivance with others (whether men or women), but also together with their husbands, brothers or relatives, promoted the creation, strengthening or reformation of those spaces.

In order to do so, it is important to be able to study in depth the foundation and existence of specific spaces. The knowledge already gained by the historiography of monastic movements in the peninsular Middle Ages is, of course, behind our study. The existing works on peninsular nunneries are copious and their number grows even larger every day, but they are not yet enough. Consequently, one of our priorities is expanding them by means of specific or comparative studies, accessing new sources of information, especially monastic archives, and carrying out analyses that contribute, for their part, to new questions and new investigations. It was for that reason that we thought useful settling a combined and collective gaze on the different faces of a polyhedron of peninsular spaces and times in order to rethink them from the point of view of their female promoters and the relational networks that sustained their projects.

Accordingly, this study revolves around two axes: female spiritual promotion and relational networks. We understand promotion, in the broadest sense of the term, as any activity implying the existence of initiatives capable of setting the conditions, upgrade, improve or support the achievement of something concrete, in this case female medieval spaces of spirituality. We understand network as the fabric of relationships of kinship, affinity, affection, authority, etc., through which that activity of spiritual promotion flows and becomes real. The result of analysing the ensemble according to these two axes allows us, or so we think, to isolate several characteristics of a general nature, to establish a chronology and to observe similarities and divergences among the peninsular realms.

The first remarkable aspect of many of the contributions in this book is the repeated ascertainment of the importance of promotions fostered by women or groups of women who live a non-regulated religious life, be they beatas, emparedadas or beguines, in many different senses and for many different chronologies. or, in the study by Merc Gras, the case of Estefania de Rocabert and her companions, who finally would profess as Carmelites.

All of these foundational processes, as well as many others not studied here, allow us, despite their differences, to glimpse the existence of a vast and early movement, maybe not too visible and still fairly unknown, of non-regulated religious life in the cities; a movement that at least for the 13 th century has not been granted the attention it deserves, as compared with cities of Northern Europe or Italy, for some of the geographies of the peninsular realms. Nevertheless, it seems we could currently maintain that, at the same rate the new religiosity models penetrated the cities of those peninsular realms, a considerable amount of proposals and movements of a beguinal nature sprouted, there as well as in the whole West, which lacked, or almost, an institutional structure and are wherefore poorly documented; those proposals become instead visible at the same instant the convent starts its activity. It could even be assumed that the absence of direct informations in the 13 th century is in many cases offset by news of their existence within the foundational projects of, especially but not only, mendicant convents. On the other hand we should recall that a common spirit, or at least a similar one, unites in this century, in the north as well as in the south, beguines, Cistercian and Dominican nuns, Clarisses and several other pauperistic, apostolic or charitable projects. The cumulative study of scattered data on these women, whose yearning precedes and sustains formalised spaces of female religiosity, aids greatly in understanding how those informal models of evangelical life sprouted spontaneously in the peninsular territories with the impetus of groups of women. Models that, at least in the beginning, were well received by secular and ecclesiastical powers and became regulated afterwards in the form of convents.