The Ladies of Zamora - Couverture rigide

Linehan, Peter

 
9780719050442: The Ladies of Zamora

Synopsis

"The ladies of Zamora" is the story of a convent of nuns in a thirteenth-century Spanish city, their battles with the bishop, the altogether friendlier relationship with the local Dominican friars and the consequences further afield of their activities. Based on unpublished records of the enquiry into the affair, it brings into sharp focus a number of usually unrelated aspects of the age: the tensions between the mendicant orders and the local ecclesiastical authorities: thirteenth-century religiosity, female religiosity in particular and collusion in high places; both in Castile and at the papal curia. Beyond the tale it tells of nuns observed in flagrante at the convent gate, cornered by tumescent friars in the convent infirmary and oven, giving their prioress the evil eye and threatening their bishop with stout sticks, this account lays bare the realities of life within and beyond the cloister in the later years of the century of Christian Spain's greatest achievements at the expense of Spanish Islam. Not since Montaillou have the exploits of a single medieval community been laid bare in this way.

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Présentation de l'éditeur

[Linehan] paints a vivid and compelling picture of a community whose members found themselves caught up in larger conflicts of authority within the Church and between Church and State. . . . A fine example of the way in which study of the local and the particular opens out on to the wider perspectives of Castilian history and the problems a Church as a whole faced with the rise of the mendicant Orders.-Colin Thompson, Times Literary Supplement"Using exciting archival material about a moral scandal in a convent of Dominican nuns in thirteenth-century Spain, Peter Linehan has produced a fascinating study of problems in the turbulent world of religion and the difficulties facing women trying to make their way in a patriarchal society. What might have been a mere anecdote turns out to be a first-rate in-depth study that sensationally exposes the manners and philosophy of an entire community-as exemplified by the ladies of Zamora."-Jacques Le Goff"The Ladies of Zamora is a lovely book, solidly based on first-hand investigations of documents in Spanish archives. Linehan's prose is disciplined, graceful, and clear, and his scholarship is absolutely first-class."-James A. Brundage, University of KansasThe Ladies of Zamora tells the remarkable story of a scandal that occured in a Spanish convent during the thirteenth century. Peter Linehan, the foremost expert on medieval Spain, expertly sets forth the details of the affair and shows how the effects were felt not just in Spain but throughout Europe, even as far as the papal curia.Established in 1264 by two wealthy sisters, the convent of Las Dueñas soon became the focus of a bitter jurisdictional struggle between the bishop of Zamora and the local Dominican friars to whose order a faction of the sisters hoped to have their convent incorporated. In 1279, the bishop visited the convent and interrogated thirty of the sisters. The records of this inquiry, hitherto unpublished, provide the documentary basis for this book, and the

Biographie de l'auteur

Peter Linehan is Fellow and Tutor of St John's College, Cambridge. He is the author of, most recently, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain.

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