Rules, Customs, and Constitutions within the Medieval Order of Poor Clares

Abstract

This volume addresses the nature and quality of the lives of monks and canons in Western Europe during the middle ages and the early modern period. Building on the collaborative spirit of recent work on medieval religion, it includes studies by historians of the religious orders, liturgy and ritual as well as archaeologists and architectural historians. Several studies combine the interpretation of texts, most particularly customaries and rules, with the analysis of architecture. The volume sheds new and exciting light on monastic daily life in all its dimensions from the liturgical and the quotidian to the spatial and architectural. Carolyn Marino Malone is Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (USA). She specializes in French Romanesque and English Gothic architecture and sculpture. Her most recent book, is Saint-Bénigne de Dijon en l’an mil, “totius Galliae basilicis mirabiliorem”: Interprétation politique, liturgique et théologique, Disciplina monastica, 5 (Turnhout, 2009). Clark Maines is Professor of Art History and Archaeology and Kenan Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut (USA). He specializes in the study of monasticism from architecture in its structural and ritual dimensions to technology and monastic domains. His most recent book, co-written with Sheila Bonde, is Saint-Jean-des-Vignes in Soissons, Approaches to its Architecture, Archaeology and History, Bibliotheca Victorina, XV (Turnhout, 2003).