Clare of Assisi and the Thirteenth-Century Church: Religious Women, Rules, and Resistance

by Catherine M. Mooney

In a work based on a meticulous analysis of sources, many of them previously unexplored, Catherine M. Mooney upends the received account of Clare of Assisi's founding of the Order of San Damiano, or Poor Clares. Mooney offers instead a stark Clare, her sisters of San Damiano, and their allies struggled against a papal program bent on regimenting, enriching, and enclosing religious women in the thirteenth century, a program that proved largely successful.
Mooney demonstrates that Clare (1194-1253) established a single community that was soon cajoled, perhaps even coerced, into joining an order previously founded by the papacy. Artfully renaming it after Clare's San Damiano with Clare as its putative mother, Pope Gregory IX enhanced his order's cachet by associating it also with Clare's famous friend, Francis of Assisi. Mooney traces how Clare and her allies in other houses attempted to follow Francis's directives rather than the pope's, divested themselves of property against the pope's orders, and organized in an attempt to change papal rule; and she shows how, after Francis's death, the women's relationships with the Franciscans themselves grew similarly fraught. Clare's pursuit of her vision proved at the time of her death, she newly identified her community as the Order of Poor Sisters and allied it unambiguously with Francis and his friars.
Overturning another myth, Mooney reveals how only in the late nineteenth century did Clare come to be known as the sole author of a rule she had written collaboratively with others. Throughout, the story of Clare and her sisters emerges as a chapter in the long history of women who tried to define their religious identities within a Church more committed to unity and conformity than to diversity and difference.

Genres: Religion, History

312 pages, ebook

Published August 10, 2016

About the author

Catherine Mooney holds a B.A. in History from Saint Louis University; an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School; an M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. in medieval history from Yale University. She has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she was also co-coordinator of the Gender Studies program, and at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2009 she was awarded a research fellowship and served as visiting professor of Franciscan Studies at the Franciscan Institute in St. Bonaventure, New York. She has served on the boards of the Society for Medieval Feminist Studies and Monastic Matrix. While living in rural Argentina during its military dictatorship and “Dirty War,” she worked as a human rights advocate and taught in a seminary for campesino catechists and base community leaders. In addition to teaching and lecturing in universities and at scholarly conferences, she offers presentations and workshops in various pastoral venues and is active in several human rights efforts.

Dr. Mooney's work has received support from the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation.

Reviews

[Dawna Richardson · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the title suggests, this is a book about Clare of Assisi and her ongoing struggle to have some autonomy for her community of sisters in Assisi.

The author goes into great detail about the history of the rules of life and the prized Privilege of Poverty Clare held to over decades and through a succession of popes. ...

And it’s amazingly interesting! It is eye opening in the place of women in the 13th century church and all they had to contend with. I learned a lot through reading this text—but it was always easy to read and very enjoyable

[Ella]

Read for Primary Tutorial: Medieval Female Mystics

[Mills College Library]

271.97302 M8186 2016