Edited and translated by Frederick S. Paxton (NHC Fellow, 2006–07) Around the year 840, Liutbirga, the adopted daughter of a noble Saxon widow, asked to be walled into a cell in a church at one of the family's cloisters for religious women. She spent the last thirty years of her life in her cell, doing … Continued
By Brenda Meehan (NHC Fellow, 1989–90) From the widow Tuchkova, hermit Anastasiia, and peasant Matrona Naumova, to the aristocratic Aleksandra Shmakova and the Abbess Taisiia, each of these diverse women craved and created environments that combined monastic solitude with a community of like-minded women. "Rich and poor, middle-aged and young…out of the pain at the … Continued
By Sharon T. Strocchia (NHC Fellow, 1998–99; 2015–16) The 15th century was a time of dramatic and decisive change for nuns and nunneries in Florence. In the course of that century, the city’s convents evolved from small, semiautonomous communities to large civic institutions. By 1552, roughly one in eight Florentine women lived in a religious … Continued
By K. J. P. Lowe (NHC Fellow, 2000–01) This well-illustrated book analyses convent culture in sixteenth-century Italy through the medium of three unpublished nuns' chronicles. The book uses a comparative methodology of 'connected differences' to examine the intellectual and imaginative achievement of the nuns, and to investigate how they fashioned and preserved individual and convent … Continued
By Roger Stalley (NHC Fellow, 1985–86) An Account of the White Monks from 1142 to 1540.