Writing Religious Rules as an Interactive Process: Dominican Penitent Women and the Making of Their "Regula"

Abstract

Medieval women's roles in the production of religious rules (regulae or formulae vitae) have attracted little scholarly attention, for historians have traditionally viewed the creation of such rules as a strictly clerical undertaking. This perspective has underlined churchmen's normative powers and thus overlooked women's numerous direct and indirect ways of being involved in the writing of religious rules and related documents. While some religious women wrote rules for their communities, 1 many others contributed indirectly but importantly by petitioning clergymen to write rules for their communities or by sponsoring such productions. Religious women also exercised indirect power by modifying existing rules for their particular needs and sometimes even by choosing to ignore legislation that did not meet their demands. 2

On Manuscripts, Prints and Blessed Transformations: Caterina da Siena’s Legenda maior as a Model of Sainthood in Premodern Castile

“…To sum up, the data from these approaches to the texts included in the post-incunabulum do not confirm a Carthusian or Dominican origin of the codex used by the Castilian translator. However, the data do locate the text of the Legenda maior together with the lives of Vanna and Margherita in the context of Caffarini's first campaign of dissemination, in which he was trying to use Raimondo da Capua's text together with other texts about Dominican women of virtue to support the legalization of the Third Order Regular (Lehmijoki-Gardner 2004;Nocentini 2005, pp. 95-96 and, about its function, p. 98;Zarri 2013, p. 71), in which the Carthusian monasteries played an important role as well (Hamburger and Signori 2013, p. 5).…”

De beatas a monjas dominicas: el proceso de constitución del monasterio de Santa Catalina de Sena de Zamora a finales del siglo XV

“…GRAÑA CID, 42/2 (Madrid, 2012. 22 Sobre la vida terciaria dominicana, véase: LEHMIJOKI-GARDNER, 1999;79/3 (Cambridge, 2004);2009. WEHRLI-JOHNS, 2001.…”

“…LEHMIJOKI-GARDNER, 79/3 (2004, Cambridge;2009). 34 Así parece ser en el caso italiano, en el que los primeros monasterios de terciarias dominicas surgen en la década de los noventa del siglo XV (LEHMIJOKI-GARDNER, 1999: muchas de las mujeres que decidieron ser terciarias lo hicieron en sus propias casas, disfrutando de una vida como penitentes. Sin embargo, en el momento en el que dichas mujeres deseaban experimentar la vida en común, con frecuencia debían pasar a formar parte de los monasterios femeninos de dominicas tradicionales.…”

Catherine of Siena's Advice to Religious Women

“…Lehmijoki-Gardner (2004) has also drawn attention to the way in which Dominican women and not just the friars promoted the authority of Dominican saintly women as patrons(Lehmijoki-Gardner, 2007). On the question of Catherine's religious status and its hagiographical representation, see also.…”