01262nam a2200133   4500008003900000020001700039245007900056210006900135260003700204300001300241520080600254100002501060856004301085       2018                          d  a97815017159400aDark Age Nunneries. The Ambiguous Identity of Female Monasticism, 800-10500 aDark Age Nunneries The Ambiguous Identity of Female Monasticism   aIthacabCornell University Press  aXIII+3093 aIn Dark Age Nunneries, Steven Vanderputten dismantles the common view of women religious between 800 and 1050 as disempowered or even disinterested witnesses to their own lives. It is based on a study of primary sources from forty female monastic communities in Lotharingia—a politically and culturally diverse region that boasted an extraordinarily high number of such institutions. Vanderputten highlights the attempts by women religious and their leaders, as well as the clerics and the laymen and -women sympathetic to their cause, to construct localized narratives of self, preserve or expand their agency as religious communities, and remain involved in shaping the attitudes and behaviors of the laity amid changing contexts and expectations on the part of the Church and secular authorities.1 aVanderputten, Steven  uhttp://contactgroepsignum.eu/node/4879