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9780813230191 Academic Inspection Copy

The Profession of Widowhood

Widows, Pastoral Care, and Medieval Models of Holiness
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The Profession of Widowhood explores how the idea of 'true' widowhood was central to pre-modern ideas concerning marriage and of female identity more generally. The medieval figure of the Christian vere vidua or "good" widow evolved from and reinforced ancient social and religious sensibilities of chastity, loyalty and grief as gendered 'work.' ......
"The Profession of Widowhood is grounded in the most recent scholarship and provides a thorough discussion of the evolution of the ideal of pious widowhood within Western Christian Europe from the late antique period through the early modern period."--Sharon Farmer, University of California Santa Barbara"Katherine Clark Walter's The Profession of Widowhood represents women after spousal loss across a broad swath of the Christian past from antiquity to early modernity. Her work explores the spiritual meaning and lived experience of a social and religious category neglected in prior scholarship. This author investigates gender, marital status, and celibacy as overlapping frames of women's lives, offering a compelling contribution to the study of women in historical cultures."--Carol Neel, Colorado College "Medieval widows are the most visible group of medieval women and have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. For contemporaries, these unmarried women with sexual experience constituted a potentially disruptive and problematic population. They received special attention from the church, including the opportunity to take vows of chastity that often allowed more freedom than nuns enjoyed but required abstinence and clerical oversight. Katherine Clark Walter gathers together many scattered hints on the vocation of religious widowhood from hagiography, sermon literature, liturgical manuscripts, and canon law. She clearly outlines the theological and cultural issues for widows who sought to adopt a religious life rather than remarrying. This study will be fundamental reading for scholars seeking to understand the church's complex relationship with widows, and with women, during the Middle Ages."--Susan M. Steuer, Western Michigan University
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