Communities of religious women in the diocese of Bamberg in the later Middle Ages

Historians have identified a "women's religious movement" in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This dissertation documents the spread of women's religious communities in the diocese of Bamberg and the social classes of the women involved.;In 1100, the diocese had no women's religious communities; by 1500, it had nine women's monasteries and numerous informal women's communities. Women's monasteries were founded primarily in 1280-1295 and 1340-1356, later than in more urbanized dioceses. A proliferation of informal religious communities preceded both periods of monastery foundation. Monasteries grew rapidly after foundation, but declined from the late fourteenth century. In the late fifteenth century, convents which participated successfully in monastic reform grew rapidly; others continued to shrink.;Of the 1031 medieval nuns identified in the diocese of Bamberg, the earliest were noble; non-noble women first appeared in new urban convents in the mid-thirteenth century. By the early- and mid-fourteenth century more than half the identified nuns were not noble. Convents' location, religious order, and the social class of their founder and secular lord, all affected their social composition, but most choir nuns were noble or patrician. Lay sisters were mostly lower-class. Beguines in informal communities were mostly middle- or lower-class, especially after 1350.;Women's monastic communities were always enclosed, while men's religious orders offered more variety of lifestyle; but men also joined enclosed communities and women also developed forms of religious life, as beguines and tertiaries, which did not require enclosure. Before 1200, men's religious foundations outnumbered women's by ten to one. After 1200 foundations of new religious communities for men and women were more evenly balanced, with the peak for both in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. However, men's formal religious communities still outnumbered women's by two and a half to one in 1500, so this growth was not exclusively a "women's movement.".