Perspectives On Women's Religious Activities

Special Issue Journal of Early Modern History

Proposing activity as a useful category of analysis, Perspectives On Women’s Religious Activities, a special issue of Journal of Early Modern History, considers Catholic and Protestant women in Europe and the Americas in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The issue is co-edited by Dr Sarah Moran (Art History).

Dr. Sarah Moran
Dr Sarah Moran

The issue examines women in religious communities, which include both monastic communities as well as confessional communities. A close analysis of the social, economic, and cultural actions of these women religious challenges historiographical assumptions about monastic cloister and domestic space in the early modern period. In fact, the issue revisits monastic and domestic spaces to reveal them as stages for previously unexamined activity. This cross-denominational and transnational special issue highlights new spheres of women’s religious activity and raises new questions for the study of early modern women’s lives and their capacity to act in early modern society, economy, and culture.