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2 results

Early Christian Women

Early Christian Women
  • Dawn LaValle Norman
  • Published online:
    04 August 2022
    Print publication:
    18 August 2022
  • In this Element the author argues that genre deeply affects how early Christian female philosophers are characterized across different works. The included case studies are three women who feature in both narrative and dialogic texts: Thecla, Macrina the Younger and Monica. Based on these examples, the author demonstrates that the narrative sources tend to eschew secular education, while the dialogic sources are open to displays of secular knowledge. Philosophy was not only seen as a way of life, but sometimes also as a mode of educated argumentation. The author further argues that these female philosophers were held up in their femininity as models for imitation by both women and men.

  • 20 - On the margins of religious life: hermits and recluses, penitents and tertiaries, beguines and beghards

  • from PART V - CHRISTIAN LIFE IN MOVEMENT
  • Edited by Miri Rubin, Queen Mary University of London, Walter Simons, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Christianity
    Published online:
    28 March 2010
    Print publication:
    02 July 2009, pp 309-323

  • Summary

    This chapter examines a diverse but important group of people who defy easy categorisation yet were all loosely associated with religious life. As hermits and recluses, lay 'penitents', beguines and beghards, their status was ambiguous, straddling the border between the lay and monastic categories of society. Antecedents to this way of life reach far back, to the sacred widowhood of early Christian women, for instance, and hermits stood of course at the basis of monasticism itself. By the fourteenth century, when male eremitical life began to decline, female solitaries had become a common sight in many cities and towns, primarily those of the Low Countries, England, France and Germany. Groups of 'brothers and sisters of penitence' in the Romagna adopted common customs known as the Memoriale Propositi in 1221. The natural tension between institutional and informal sources of power has always been a creative source of reflection and rejuvenation in Christian religious life.