How did women’s and men’s religious communities cooperate, compete, and negotiate authority? “Ora et collabora” (Munich, 23–25 June 2027) invites contributions exploring these relationships across Europe, c. 1300–1700. Bringing medieval and early modern perspectives into dialogue, the conference examines how pastoral care, material resources, knowledge exchange, and everyday practices shaped influence, dependence, and resistance within religious networks.
Ora et collabora. Women’s and Men’s Religious Communities between Cooperation, Competition, and Control (c. 1300–1700)
Scholarship still frequently examines religious communities either from the internal perspective of individual women’s and men’s houses or as the objects of institutional programmes pursued by predominantly male authorities. Although recent work in the history of religious orders, gender history, and religious history has highlighted the agency of religious women and the importance of wider networks, relationships between women’s and men’s communities have rarely been analysed systematically and comparatively as a constitutive element of religious life. The cura monialium—the pastoral and sacramental care of communities of religious women—formed one of the most persistent institutional links across gender boundaries. It brought nuns and canonesses into regular contact with confessors, chaplains, preachers, provosts, visitators, and male superiors. Yet these relationships cannot be reduced to a one-directional exercise of male authority: women’s communities negotiated the provision of pastoral care, shaped the activities of their spiritual advisers, mobilised competing authorities, and could appropriate, modify, or resist external demands.
A relational perspective reveals more broadly that religious life did not unfold within clearly bounded institutions. Nuns, monks, canonesses, canons, sisters, brothers, and female and male tertiaries exchanged books, knowledge, and liturgical models; administered property; mediated legal transactions; and mobilised social and political networks. Abbesses negotiated with provosts and visitators; women’s houses collaborated with male communities without simply adopting their ideas; and confessors, preachers, and religious superiors acted simultaneously as supporters, intermediaries, and agents of control.
The conference examines these interactions as relational configurations shaped by cooperation, competition, and control. Cooperation is understood neither as harmonious nor as equal action, but as a means of negotiating power, resources, and religious authority. It could expand the scope for action while simultaneously generating dependencies and reinforcing hierarchies. Conflict, refusal, and competition were therefore not necessarily the opposite of cooperation, but could form part of the same relational configuration. Moreover, neither women nor men constituted homogeneous groups: office, social status, age, education, social background, and clerical standing all shaped their respective opportunities for action. The conference consequently asks not merely whether religious women and men interacted, but under what conditions they established relationships, who could determine their terms, and how influence, dependence, and resistance operated in practice.
Particular attention will be paid to the practices, media, and infrastructures underpinning these relationships: pastoral care and visitation; education and the transmission of knowledge; property administration and labour; writing and book production; liturgy and music; law and political mediation; and space, mobility, and the movement of individuals. The conference also foregrounds the challenges posed by the surviving evidence. Normative and administrative records frequently privilege offices occupied by men and institutional perspectives, while letters, accounts, manuscripts, liturgical books, works of art, and architectural evidence may disclose other forms of shared or competing agency. These sources are themselves perspectival, however, and may reproduce social hierarchies and forms of exclusion.
Adopting a comparative European perspective, the conference traces these constellations from the 14th to 17th century and examines continuities, ruptures, and transformations across the conventional divide around 1500. Contributions addressing all European regions are welcome. We particularly encourage studies that situate local cases within transregional contexts or bring medieval and early modern developments into dialogue. The conference seeks to develop a relational history of religious communities that understands monasteries, convents, collegiate foundations, and other forms of religious life as nodes within material, spiritual, legal, and social networks.
Possible Topics and Questions
- Cura monialium, pastoral care, and authority: Confession, preaching, sacramental provision, visitation, spiritual direction, and the reciprocal influence of pastoral agents and women’s communities.
- Forms of relationship and agency: Cooperation, competition, control, dependence, negotiation, and resistance; the scope for action available to abbesses, prioresses, provosts, confessors, visitators, and religious superiors.
- Institutions, law, and economies: Affiliation with religious orders and institutional incorporation; landed property, credit, labour, and provisioning; ecclesiastical and secular courts; and the strategic use of privileges, statutes, and customary law.
- Books, knowledge, liturgy, and transmission: Manuscript and book production, the exchange of exemplars and texts, translation, print, libraries, education, music, prayer, commemoration, and the circulation of religious and administrative knowledge.
- Spaces, mobility, and networks: Shared or separately used spaces, architectural change, travel, messengers, visitations, personnel exchanges, flight, exile, and new foundations.
- Inequalities and external actors: The intersections of gender, office, age, education, social background, and clerical status, as well as the roles played by families, courts, towns, patrons, confraternities, and domestic personnel.
- Bodies, emotions, and everyday life: Clothing, diet, labour, health, care, trust, friendship, fear, mistrust, and the embodied or emotional dimensions of cooperation and conflict.
- Reform, Reformation, and confessional transformation: Competing conceptions of reform and good religious order; observance movements; selective appropriation, delay, failure, and unintended consequences; and the reconfiguration of relationships during the Reformation, Catholic reform, Protestant reorganisation, and confessionalisation.
- Interpretation and memory: The retrospective construction, commemoration, or deliberate omission of relationships, conflicts, and transformations in chronicles, necrologies, works of art, archives, and institutional narratives.
Methodological Approaches
We particularly welcome relational, gender-historical, economic, legal, knowledge-historical, emotional, bodily, and material approaches. We also encourage contributions that combine different types of sources, reflect on asymmetries in the surviving evidence, or use network analysis and spatial methods to reconstruct relationships that have hitherto remained largely invisible.
Publication
The organisers intend to publish the outcomes of the conference as a peer-reviewed journal issue. A more detailed publication schedule will be circulated in due course.
Travel funding
Applications for external funding are currently in preparation with the aim of covering participants’ travel and accommodation costs. Reimbursement cannot yet be guaranteed and will depend on the outcome of these applications.