Crown and Veil

This book is as rare and finely crafted as the lives of the women it celebrates. Crown and Veil is the product of an outstanding international collaboration of scholars, and it offers an introduction to a world hitherto only glimpsed in its complexity and richness. Every aspect of the nuns' social, institutional, artistic, liturgical, economic, and spiritual life is brought into play. The book is as beautiful as it is comprehensive. -- Rachel Fulton, The University of Chicago This welcome volume, which assembles the most up-to-date international scholarship in a highly accessible form, illuminates the many facets of female monastic life in the Middle Ages. The convent emerges as a complex and appealing place that offered women unparalleled opportunities, not only to forge intimate relationships with the divine and each other but also to assert themselves politically, to develop strong literary voices, and to cultivate visual arts of extraordinary inventiveness and beauty. -- Jacqueline E. Jung, Yale University Crown and Veil challenges the typical image of the female monastery as a place of quiet and seclusion. At the same time, it reminds us that, although medieval culture and education are most often discussed with respect to male monastic houses, women's communities were no less active as cultural custodians. Most important, the book stands as an entirely unique achievement in the history of women's engagement in the religious life during the medieval period. While particular aspects of women's religious lives, visual culture, and engagement with the written word have been explored in individual studies, there is no other work that draws together the disparate theoretical, historical, and visual threads that together composed women's religious lives during the period. -- Fiona Griffiths, New York University

A survey of female monasticism that begins with the first communities of Late Antiquity and ends with the Reformation. It focuses on the visual culture of female monasticism in the European Middle Ages.Crown and Veil offers a broad introduction to the history and visual culture of female monasticism in the Middle Ages, from the earliest communities of Late Antiquity to the Reformation. Scholars from numerous disciplines offer a wide range of perspectives not to be found in any other single book on the subject, placing the art, architecture, literature, liturgy, religious practices, and economic foundations of these communities within a wide historical and cultural context. Long considered marginal to mainstream history, nuns and canonesses in fact had a profound influence on medieval culture. Revered and admired as models of piety, they commanded considerable prestige and exercised a significant degree of political power. Whether acting as producers or patrons of art, nuns were widely celebrated for their imaginative accomplishments. Focusing on the visual culture of female monastic communities in the German Empire, Frankish Gaul, Langobard Italy, and Anglo-Saxon England, this volume underscores the richness of largely unfamiliar material and its role in shaping distinctive forms of religious life.