Caroline Walker Bynum

Catherine M. Mooney

"These studies . . . not only illuminate the past with a fierce and probing light but also raise, with nuance and power, fundamental issues of interpretation and method."—from the Foreword, by Caroline Walker Bynum Female saints, mystics, and visionaries have been much studied in recent years. Relatively little attention has been paid, however, to the ways in which their experiences and voices were mediated by the men who often composed their vitae, served as their editors and scribes, or otherwise encouraged, protected, and collaborated with the women in their writing projects. What strategies can be employed to discern and distinguish the voices of these high and late medieval women from those of their scribes and confessors? In those rare cases where we have both the women's own writings and writings about them by their male contemporaries, how do the women's self-portrayals diverge from the male portrayals of them? Finally, to what extent are these portrayals of sanctity by the saints and their contemporaries influenced not so much by gender as by genre? Catherine Mooney brings together a distinguished group of contributors who explore these and other issues as they relate to seven holy women and their male interpreters and one male saint who claims to incorporate the words of a female follower in an account of his own life.

Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters

Gendered Voices

In a work based on a meticulous analysis of sources, many of them previously unexplored, Catherine M. Mooney upends the received account of Clare of Assisi's founding of the Order of San Damiano, or Poor Clares. Mooney offers instead a stark counternarrative: Clare, her sisters of San Damiano, and their allies struggled against a papal program bent on regimenting, enriching, and enclosing religious women in the thirteenth century, a program that proved largely successful. Mooney demonstrates that Clare (1194-1253) established a single community that was soon cajoled, perhaps even coerced, into joining an order previously founded by the papacy. Artfully renaming it after Clare's San Damiano with Clare as its putative mother, Pope Gregory IX enhanced his order's cachet by associating it also with Clare's famous friend, Francis of Assisi. Mooney traces how Clare and her allies in other houses attempted to follow Francis's directives rather than the pope's, divested themselves of property against the pope's orders, and organized in an attempt to change papal rule; and she shows how, after Francis's death, the women's relationships with the Franciscans themselves grew similarly fraught. Clare's pursuit of her vision proved relentless: at the time of her death, she newly identified her community as the Order of Poor Sisters and allied it unambiguously with Francis and his friars. Overturning another myth, Mooney reveals how only in the late nineteenth century did Clare come to be known as the sole author of a rule she had written collaboratively with others. Throughout, the story of Clare and her sisters emerges as a chapter in the long history of women who tried to define their religious identities within a Church more committed to unity and conformity than to diversity and difference.

Religious Women, Rules, and Resistance

Clare of Assisi and the Thirteenth-Century Church

Philippine Duchesne has a message for today's world in which the rich seem to be growing richer and the poor to be growing poorer. It is a message of justice and love for all people. It was for this conviction that Philippine, a Religious of the Sacred Heart missionary, became the fourth United States saint in 1988. This book is a bold historical biography of a remarkable woman who struggled her entire life to enflesh God's love and care in human situations. It opens with a critical discussion and forthright examination of how class, gender, and race have been influential factors in the selection of saints, and then details Philippine's life with its many failures and many achievements. It shows how this wealthy woman who belonged to a politically prominent French family decided to dedicate her life and gifts to the poor. It examines her difficulties as Sacred Heart's first missionary in the new world and it tells how this courageous pioneer woman provided free education for those who had long been denied the privilege--young women, the poor, and native Americans. This eminently readable biography provides a clear and scholarly assessment of Duchesne's religious and social world that is ideal for students and professors of U.S. church history. It raises important questions about women, the poor, and marginalized groups in Duchesne's time that are still pertinent to ask today.

A Woman with the Poor

Philippine Duchesne

"These studies . . . not only illuminate the past with a fierce and probing light but also raise, with nuance and power, fundamental issues of interpretation and method."—from the Foreword by Caroline Walker Bynum Female saints, mystics, and visionaries have been much studied in recent years. Relatively little attention has been paid, however, to the ways in which their experiences and voices were mediated by the men who often composed their vitae, served as their editors and scribes, or otherwise encouraged, protected, and collaborated with the women in their writing projects. What strategies can be employed to discern and distinguish the voices of these high and late medieval women from those of their scribes and confessors? In those rare cases where we have both the women's own writings and writings about them by their male contemporaries, how do the women's self-portrayals diverge from the male portrayals of them? Finally, to what extent are these portrayals of sanctity by the saints and their contemporaries influenced not so much by gender as by genre? Catherine Mooney brings together a distinguished group of contributors who explore these and other issues as they relate to seven holy women and their male interpreters and one male saint who claims to incorporate the words of a female follower in an account of his own life.

Catherine M. Mooney

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