Clare of Assisi and the Thirteenth-Century Church : Religious Women, Rules, and Resistance / Catherine M. Mooney.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mooney, Catherine M., Author.

Series:

Middle Ages series.

The Middle Ages Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Clare, of Assisi, Saint, 1194-1253.

Clare.

Poor Clares--History.

Poor Clares.

Monasticism and religious orders for women.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (313 pages).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2016]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Some Notes on Usage

Preface

Introduction. Religious Women in the Thirteenth- Century Church

Chapter 1. Clare’s Childhood and Conversion to Religious life, 1193 to 1211

Chapter 2. The early Dan Damiano: A house of Penitents, 1211 to ca. 1216

Chapter 3. The house of Penitents Becomes a Monastery, ca. 1211 to 1228

Chapter 4. Turning Point: Negotiating San Damiano’s singularity, ca. 1226 to 1230

Chapter 5. Clare’s letters to Agnes of Prague, ca. 1234 to 1238

Chapter 6. Contested Rules, late 1230s to ca. 1246

Chapter 7. Innocent IV’s Forma Vitae and its Aftermath, 1247 to 1250

Chapter 8. The 1253 Forma Vitae, ca. 1250 to 1253

Chapter 9. Clare’s last Words, ca. 1253

Appendix A. innocent IV, Cum dilecto filio, 28 October 1248

Appendix B. Rainaldo of Jenne, Etsi ea, 27 June 1250

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jul 2020)

ISBN:

9780812292923

0812292928

OCLC:

956951861