Within Walls

What different mechanisms did women religious use to interpret the communal and individual aspects of enclosure throughout history? To what extent was enclosure a pivotal creative feature of Christian spiritual, social and cultural life? How did social and political contexts shape nuns and beatas’ strategies for accepting or rejecting strict enclosure?

Within Walls explores the diverse experiences of enclosure within female Christian spiritualities as a crucial concept for truly understanding the history of women religious. It primarily aims to show the different ways in which women religious lived, assumed, negotiated and forged enclosure in its material and symbolic dimensions. From the New Testament era to the late sixteenth century and from the Holy Land and Egypt to Western Europe and colonial Mexico, the book explores the changing meanings and uses of the confined life given to and performed by women religious in Christianity.

The case studies of the experience of enclosure presented in this volume—from the strategies of seclusion of early Christian anchoresses to the plethora of voices of Mediaeval and Early Modern female communities and the authority wielded by individual nuns, pilgrims, prioresses, reformers and mystics—argue forcefully that there was by no means only a single form of enclosure in female Christian religious life. Instead, inspired by Philip Sheldrake’s interpretation of sacred spaces as polyphonic, we stress the multivocality and multilocality of the term. From an interdisciplinary perspective that embraces microhistory, human geography, the cultural analysis of materiality, literary studies, feminist and gender studies, indigenous methodologies, art studies, postcolonial anthropology and the philosophy of religion and spirituality, this book provides fresh perspectives on how we view one of the most intricate dimensions of religious life in history.

List of illustrations
Contributors
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Potentiality of Clausura: From the Confined Place to Spaces of Enclosure by Julia Lewandowska and Araceli Rosillo-Luque

(Part I) Enclosure, Society and Ecclesiastical Power
The Origin of Double Monasteries: Gender Parallel Leadership in the Liturgy by Ally Kateusz
The Ambivalent Enclosure: Iberian Nuns and the Dynamics of Authority (Sixth to Tenth Centuries) by Araceli Rosillo-Luque
Behind the Cloister Wall: The Power of Female Enclosure in the Middle Ages by Silvia Carraro
Enclosure and the English Fonteraudine Nuns of Amesbury, Nuneaton, and Westwood Priories by Joyce Beelman
Enclosure & Reform: St Colette of Corbie and the Reform of the Poor Clares by Anna Campbell

(Part II) Enclosure, Spaces and Textualities
Virgines et Cubiculua. (En)closed Women in Late Antiquity. The Origins of Female Monasticism by Lorena Garri-Catchot
A Fixed Point in Time: Enclosed Textuality in the Anchorhold by Brenna Duperron
Following in Their Footsteps: Virtual Pilgrimage, Women on Pilgrimage, and Navigating Enclosure in Mid to Late Medieval Europe by Pelia Werth
De Linnage Muit' Alt (…) e Gran Crerizía’. Gendered Spaces, Material Culture, and Enclosure in Iberian Female Monasteries and Beyond by Mercedes Pérez-Vidal
‘Cell of One’s Own’: The Notion of Female Enclosure in the Teresian Reform in Spain by Julia Lewandowska

Sources and Bibliography