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The Council of Trent's mandate to women's religious lives consisted of an insistence on the rules of enclosure. The Second Vatican Council mandated religious worship to examine every aspect of women's lives in order to discard outmoded customs and practices in light of the needs of their times. This chapter explores the complexities and results of these two movements for renewal, focusing on the situations prior to the councils, the conciliar mandates, their implementation, and their short- and long-term effects.

Religious women in early medieval Ireland have begun to receive attention only recently. This book examines whether there were different grades or sorts of religious women, the extent to which they were creatures of their families' political ambition, and how often, if ever, they were strictly enclosed. It also explores whether women under vows ever continued to control wealth, whether powerful abbesses owed their power to royal or noble status rather than ex officio, whether the number of female houses declined over time, whether female houses were more vulnerable to dissolution than male ones, and whether double houses were anything other than nunneries with male workers attached. First, the academic historiography of early medieval nuns is discussed, along with popular perceptions and non-specialist historiography on early Irish holy women, modern Celtic Christianity movement, and modern pagans, especially those who practice a revived druidism.

The ideal starting point of a study of religious women in early medieval Ireland is the native society into which Christianity obtruded: the pagan religion, the status of women, and the roles of female religious professionals. Against such a background, the following can be more fully appreciated: the powers religious women enjoyed, the strictures they had to follow, the way secular society regarded them, and how their nunneries were treated. This procedure, which has been extremely valuable in the study of early Christianity in the late antique world and in Germanic areas, is well-nigh impossible for Ireland because the sources are so limited. This chapter discusses Saint Patrick's encouragement of women to contravene social authority and his views on virgins, women in the monastic vocation in the 5th and 6th centuries, the issues of permanence and lapses among women, participation of religious virgins in missionary activities, and widows and deaconesses.

There were many women in early Ireland following a monastic life, yet only four women's foundations survived as major monasteries over a long period: Kildare, Killeedy, Killevy, and Clonbroney. It is not just the martyrologies (calendars) in which the myriad names of holy nuns appear; they are also found in hundreds in the corpus of so-called genealogical texts of the saints. Virtually unmentioned in the voluminous scholarly literature of Irish monasticism is the fact that many male monasteries had nuns in their familiae. Nuns who were at a men's monastery include those who were within the administrative structure and who were physically within its bounds or locale. This chapter looks at monasteries at which women were reported only as temporary members, that is to say, students. This is because there would have been a constant female presence, transient though it may have been. This chapter also looks at nuns in local churches and religious women on family property.

Chapter 6 considers the impact of western movement on northern Virginia's Quaker women. Migration disrupted economic bonds forged by Quaker merchants and farmers and produced a growing gender imbalance as single male Friends moved west. In response, more women-buoyed by Friends' belief in gender spiritual equality-took on positions of responsibility within the local, quarterly, and yearly meetings, and more women attended and became teachers of Quaker schools. By the 1860s Quaker women demanded full gender equality within the meetings. At the same time, women's social networks and association building helped sustain the bonds of northern Virginia's Quaker community. Still, Quaker women could not escape entirely the pervasive gender and racial values of the region, which limited their social activism and shaped relations with their black domestic servants.

This chapter discusses the rise of the vernaculars and changing role of Latin in medieval Europe. It presents the evidence for nuns and other religious women as poets in Latin. It also examines different varieties of religious life for medieval women, and the implications of these different lifestyles for access to Latin literacy. It discusses women and the exercise of authority in medieval Europe (notably by Norman royal ladies): early arguments for the Latin education of noblewomen. The chapter includes specific sections on surviving anonymous Latin verse in women's voices, rotuli (memorial rolls) as evidence for convent literacy, Baudri of Bourgeuil's circle of educated women, particularly Constantia, women Latinists in northern Europe, especially Hildegard of Bingen, the nuns of Helfta, the love-verses from Regensburg, and Willetrudis's Versus de Susanna: it is argued that this last may have been written at Wilton.

This essay examines the practice of channeling — exemplified by the Ramtha School of Enlightenment — as a unique opportunity for asserting feminine spirituality. School founder J. Z. Knight channels Ramtha, a 35,000-year-old warrior and a survivor of a cataclysmic destruction on Lemuria who fled to Atlantis for safety. Knight is placed in the context of women who utilize charismatic leadership to build bridges to the divine. The eclecticism of the Ramtha school is considered, with its use of gnosticism and quantum physics, and its focus on personal transformation; the school is placed within the modern New Age subculture that itself attempts a gender-equal construction. Finally, the controversy of gender is used to analyze society’s validation of women who channel the divine and advocate an immanent God.

Bren Murphy offers a look at the history of Catholic women religious in the United States. These women, argues Murphy, were the religious and cultural figures most responsible for protecting, promoting, and passing on the principles of democracy, the importance of culture, and the Catholic faith to both immigrants and citizens in the United States. Through social activism, community service, and education (to name but a few of their accomplishments), women religious have been responsible for passing on the Catholic faith and for imparting notions of democratic citizenship and civility to both the immigrant populations and citizens whom they serve. Murphy suggests that good Catholics have become good democratic citizens because of the efforts of women religious. At the same time, however, Murphy notes that the relationships between women religious in the United States and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church have been—in spite of the tremendous impact women religious have had on the processes of civil discourse and democratization—both fairly uncivil and decidedly undemocratic.

This chapter explores the significance of the revival of women’s religious orders on Anglican sexual politics. It compares the revival of the order of deaconesses with that of the sisterhoods, or nuns. Both movements utilized Victorian notions of social motherhood to enable middle-class women to expand their sphere of activity, often free from direct male authority. Deaconess’s ancient genealogy and sacral ambiguity, the unresolved question of their place in Holy Orders, meant that they grew less rapidly than the sisterhoods. It also, however, meant that they posed a much more substantial challenge to Anglican sexual metaphysics.

This chapter opens in the 1230s and traces the origins and development of the women's religious movement in Champagne. The earliest documents for the Cistercian convents of Champagne expose the shape and impulses of a women's religious movement at work within the region decades before these women became Cistercian nuns. Throughout the county communities of religious women assembled as penitents and Filles-Dieu in service to the poor and sick. Some were perhaps reformed prostitutes, laboring under the weight of worldly sins, of luxuria and pride, who forged a new religious identity. Others offered care to the sick and poor. The Filles-Dieu and religious women of northern France and Champagne were part of a broader religious impulse to engage in a spiritual life initially outside of institutional definitions, customs, and limitations. The appeal of this type of spirituality was significant, particularly to members of the urban bourgeoisie, to lesser knights, and to secular canons, who became the first patrons of many of these communities.

This chapter examines how issues of gender and sexuality are intertwined with religious history in America. Growing out of church history, the study of American religion through the 1970s largely focused on the intellectual history of Protestantism. Scholars examined theological writings authored almost exclusively by men, while they often overlooked how women not only shaped this religious thought, but also participated in devotional activities of their own. Since the 1980s, new studies devoted to analyzing the construction of gender and the history of sexuality in American religion have supplemented, extended, and even challenged the history of religious women. These three areas of analytic focus—women, gender, and sexuality—have substantially revised how we think about religion in America. This chapter traces the development of these categories out of women's history and highlights key themes from the colonial and revolutionary periods up to the nineteenth century. It also looks at modernizing women and masculine religion at the turn of the twentieth century and concludes by assessing the status of women in the modern era.

Chapter one examines the spiritual and community life of the Sisters of Mercy from 1846 to 1929. It explores how the founding charism of Catharine McAuley was transported to the United States and found resonance among Irish and a growing American Catholic female population in the Midwest. In addition, this chapter discusses the expectations for Catholic women in this period and what motivated women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to enter a religious congregation like the Sisters of Mercy.

This chapter addresses how female communities were reformed as Cistercian convents and sets this process within the broader context of the formation of new monastic orders founded during the thirteenth century. For Popes Innocent III and Gregory IX, the Cistercian order was a model of administration that offered a compelling framework for regulation, possessing as it did a uniform customary that was already widely circulated and adopted throughout its many houses. A flurry of legislation generated within the order between 1200 and 1228 articulated what affiliation entailed for women and how Cistercian nuns were defined. Yet in many cases communities of Cistercian nuns continued to practice a life in accordance with the vita apostolica, living in small convents and committed to poverty and charity to an extent that was often at odds with the administrative rigors of the order.

This chapter examines how devotion and theology centered on the world's re-creation developed in the twelfth century, using the Speculum virginum as a starting point. The Speculum virginum (Mirror of Virgins) is a document that sheds light into the lives of religious women in the twelfth century. Written around the year 1140, this text was designed to teach male pastors how to train religious women in Scripture, virtue, elements of theology, and monastic life. The chapter first situates the Speculum virginum within twelfth-century monastic reform efforts in the Rhineland and the pastoral care, or cura monialium (care of nuns) received by religious women from men during the period. It then considers how the author of the Speculum virginum fashions his own ideals of enclosure, virginity, and speculation. It also shows how the Speculum virginum introduced into women's communities a reformed sense of positive affirmation in speculation, training religious eyes to see the divine imprint in the material world.

Chapter two examines how the Sisters of Mercy lived their religion and sought to incorporate their founding charism in their works of mercy throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Sisters of Mercy, as defined by Catherine McAuley, were not constrained by the religious rule of cloister or enclosure, and consequently went out into the world in ways that other women religious, both Catholic and Protestant, could not. As the Mercys spread throughout Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, performing similar but not identical ministries, they built a network of parish schools, academies, hospitals, homes for women, orphanages, and other ministries that sprung from a common foundress, spirit, and purpose. By the early twentieth century, Mercys from Chicago South, Chicago West, Aurora, Ottawa, Milwaukee, Janesville, Davenport, and Iowa City, faced with changes to religious life directed by the Vatican and conscious of the needs of their local foundations and communities, discussed consolidating the disparate locations into one Province.

Chapter six examines the legacy of the Sister Formation Conference and Renewal on how sisters saw their ministry, their local community living, and their identity as women religious in the late 1960s through 1980s. This chapter contains sections concentrating on ministry, community living, and efforts to redefine or rearticulate Mercy religious identity. Case studies and examples illustrate how sisters investigated new ministry choices or reinterpreted existing ministries as well as how they experimented with small group living and the reactions to these experiences. Finally, the chapter explores how the changes to ministry and living opened discussion about how Mercys saw themselves and their spirituality in relation to one another and their place within the Catholic Church (among both hierarchy and laity).

Chapter seven examines the nature of religious life following the tumultuous decades of renewal. This chapter explores how the community lived and worked as the meaning of religious life shifted. In a post-Vatican II world and Church, women religious have reinvented or reimagined their places in society and in the Catholic Church (among hierarchy and laity). This chapter looks at how Sisters of Mercy lived from the 1980s to 2008, what diverse ministries drew their focus, and how they came together as one. This chapter also deals with the consequences of a shrinking Mercy community population due to low entrance levels and aging. Lastly, it examines the motivations and process of the merger into West Midwest in 2008.

This introductory chapter first describes a process of institutionalization that was taking place throughout Europe during the first decades of the thirteenth century: the reform of protean and dynamic religious movements into monastic orders. It then sets out the book's purpose, which is to understand the shape of this movement in its earliest forms and to analyze how it was transformed into an institutional framework: to trace the creation of Cistercian nuns. Between the turn of the thirteenth century and 1244, roughly forty Cistercian convents were founded in northern France, half of which fell within the region of Champagne. The impetus for their foundation came initially from women in the laity. The remainder of the chapter traces the history of women in the Cistercian order followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.