Negotiated Lives: Third Order Women Religious and Their Communities in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Italy

Lehtsalu, Liise

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Year:: 2017
Contributor:: Lehtsalu, Liise (creator); Castiglione, Caroline (Advisor); Cook, Harold (Reader); Lincoln, Evelyn (Reader); Brown University. Department of History (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: Social history; History; Monasticism and religious orders; Italy; women's history; Italy--Bologna; Italy--Bergamo; Third Order Regular of St. Francis; Carmelites; Servites; Early modern history
Extent:: xii, 370 p.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0HM56WZ

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Abstract:: This dissertation examines the social history of women’s third order monastic communities in early modern Italy. First third order communities emerged in the thirteenth century, when lay people sought to combine monastic contemplation with active engagement in society. According to current scholarship, the Council of Trent (1545-63) crushed women’s third order communities in Italy by forcing monastic enclosure upon women religious and severing their active engagement in society, politics, and economy. In this dissertation, I examine the daily operations of six third order communities and the social functions of third order women religious in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Bergamo and Bologna. No two third order communities were alike, even if they belonged to the same religious order or were located in the same town. Every third order community had a unique institutional history. Despite such institutional differences, clear similarities emerge between the social and the economic activities of third order women religious in Bergamo and Bologna. Women of middling ranks entered third order communities as both women religious and boarders. Third order communities represented an alternative to marriage and monacization, offering a third way that permitted women to integrate and participate actively in their local neighborhoods and towns. For boarders, third order communities represented a place where to spend a stage of their life course, as a girl in education, a woman waiting to marry, a wife seeking separation, or a widow needing care. Third order communities were central to the lived experiences in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian towns, the lived female experience in particular. This dissertation enriches our understanding of the reach and impact of monastic institutions in early modern Italy and highlights institutional and social continuities between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Rathern than disapprearing or transforming in the aftermath of the Council of Trent, third order communities emerge as key institutions in early modern society, opening up a new window on society and economy in early modern Italy.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2017

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Rights: In Copyright
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Lehtsalu, Liise, "Negotiated Lives: Third Order Women Religious and Their Communities in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Italy" (2017). History Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0HM56WZ

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Theses and Dissertations for the History department.
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