Within Walls: Experience of Enclosure in Christian Female Spiritualities (from Late Antiquity to Early Modern Period)

What different mechanisms did women religious use to interpret the communal and individual aspects of enclosure throughout history? To what extent was enclosure a pivotal creative feature of Christian spiritual, social and cultural life? How did social and political contexts shape nuns and beatas' strategies for accepting or rejecting strict enclosure? Within Walls explores the diverse experiences of enclosure within female Christian spiritualities as a crucial concept for truly understanding the history of women religious. It primarily aims to show the different ways in which women religious lived, assumed, negotiated and forged enclosure in its material and symbolic dimensions. From the New Testament era to the late sixteenth century and from the Holy Land and Egypt to Western Europe and colonial Mexico, the book explores the changing meanings and uses of the confined life given to and performed by women religious in Christianity. The case studies of the experience of enclosure presented in this volume-from the strategies of seclusion of early Christian anchoresses to the plethora of voices of Mediaeval and Early Modern female communities and the authority wielded by individual nuns, pilgrims, prioresses, reformers and mystics-argue forcefully that there was by no means only a single form of enclosure in female Christian religious life. Instead, inspired by Philip Sheldrake's interpretation of sacred spaces as polyphonic, we stress the multivocality and multilocality of the term. From an interdisciplinary perspective that embraces microhistory, human geography, the cultural analysis of materiality, literary studies, feminist and gender studies, indigenous methodologies, art studies, postcolonial anthropology and the philosophy of religion and spirituality, this book provides fresh perspectives on how we view one of the most intricate dimensions of religious life in history.