The subject of this volume, presented by its editors as a collective monograph, is monastic and secular female religious life and the activities of these women in the world, despite the stricter enclosure imposed by the Council of Trent. The geographical scope of the volume comprises the territories known as Central Europe or East Central Europe, best defined in cultural rather than geographical terms with an emphasis on their common features. In actual fact, the volume offers uneven coverage of the region it aims to explore as most texts focus on Austria, Bavaria, and the Tirol with occasional forays into Bohemia. The chronological scope of the volume comprises the “long eighteenth century,” which appears to coincide loosely with Habsburg control of much of the region. The richness of the developments in religious life justifies the choice: The first half of the century witnessed a growth in monastic establishments in the area. Locally founded convents, both secular and regular, as well as those that emerged and spread under external influence, acted as important mediators in the process of cultural transmission. The suppression of these convents marked the second half of the century.
The volume explores the life of these orders between post-Tridentine reforms and the large-scale expansion of the new, charitably active congregations of the nineteenth century. Its main purpose is to offer in-depth analysis of the interconnection between regular and secular life and the exercise and negotiation of power within the convent and between the monastery and the world outside. The volume achieves coherence by exploring these issues and questions within the same conceptual framework. It draws on promising but fragmentary local research and on the work of scholars whom the authors in this collection use as interpretative models, such as Derek Beales, Silvia Evangelisti, June L. Mechan, Sandra Cavallo, and Barbara Diefendorf.
The volume is valuable because it makes accessible Eastern and Central European research not readily available in Western languages. It affords systematic scholarly attention to the religious landscape of Central Europe and provides significant incentive for further comparative studies of female religious cultures. The volume fills a gap in existing literature at a time when monastic history has made a comeback. Research on religious orders has been a significant part of medieval studies and of the confessional era, whereas the eighteenth century has remained a less explored area between the well-researched earlier and later periods.
The editors of the volume make a distinction between regular clergy (living in convents) and those religious figures who did not live in cloisters and had more active and socially useful lives. The editors propose the concepts of “cooperative piety” and “fluidity” as particularly apt for discussing the lives of women in convents as well as those living on the outside. Such concepts allow a more inclusive approach to studying religious life of a broader spectrum of people. Although contributors appeal to classical categories of sociocultural difference—gender, social standing, ethnicity, and generation—they also provide an incentive to think beyond strict categorization when approaching female religious cultures.
Methodologically, the volume succumbs to the lure of the interdisciplinary (most obvious in the use of visual and material evidence), as well as to the appeal of the comparative approach, although one feels that case studies have been chosen on the basis of the availability of sources (ego-documents, such as letters and diaries and chronicles). Most of the chapters of this volume meet the challenges set out by the editors as far as their chosen subjects are concerned, although many of the essays remain steadfastly descriptive. Work opportunities gained or lost by individual female religious figures are explored alongside collective identities. Political and social elites supported these foundations at a time of increasing anti-monastic sentiment and in the context of the greater appeal of the monastic ideal to a broader social spectrum. Construction, maintenance, and modification of convents are discussed together with the breeching of the boundaries by various means such as correspondence and distribution of medicine. The exercise and negotiation of power attracts interest from several authors.
Although the volume brings together contributors from Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Great Britain, a look at the list of authors makes this reviewer wonder if this is a predominantly feminine field and whether interest in female religious orders has remained a somewhat gendered issue.
