Women and the Word in the Earlier Middle Ages
Janet L. Nelson
It is a characteristic merit of Richard Southern—recently voted the historians’ historian in The Observer —that as long ago 1970, Western Society and Church , he devoted some luminous pages to ‘the influence women religious life’. Though these nestle chapter called ‘Fringe orders anti-orders’, twenty years such labels were not pejorative. Southern made emblematic what could be pendulum-swing theory medieval history. First came primitive, earlier age improvization individual effort, spiritual warriors local initiatives; central period saw ‘a drive towards increasingly well-defined universal forms organization’ an hierarchy order; then, fourteenth fifteenth centuries, back swung pendulum complexity confusion, experiment, ‘small, humble, shadowy organizations’.
Studies in Church History