Fiona Griffiths
Crown and Veil challenges the typical image of the female monastery as a place of quiet and seclusion. At the same time, it reminds us that, although medieval culture and education are most often discussed with respect to male monastic houses, women's communities were no less active as cultural custodians. Most important, the book stands as an entirely unique achievement in the history of women's engagement in the religious life during the medieval period. While particular aspects of women's religious lives, visual culture, and engagement with the written word have been explored in individual studies, there is no other work that draws together the disparate theoretical, historical, and visual threads that together composed women's religious lives during the period.
— Fiona Griffiths, New York University
Rachel Fulton
This book is as rare and finely crafted as the lives of the women it celebrates. Crown and Veil is the product of an outstanding international collaboration of scholars, and it offers an introduction to a world hitherto only glimpsed in its complexity and richness. Every aspect of the nuns' social, institutional, artistic, liturgical, economic, and spiritual life is brought into play. The book is as beautiful as it is comprehensive.
Jacqueline E. Jung
This welcome volume, which assembles the most up-to-date international scholarship in a highly accessible form, illuminates the many facets of female monastic life in the Middle Ages. The convent emerges as a complex and appealing place that offered women unparalleled opportunities, not only to forge intimate relationships with the divine and each other but also to assert themselves politically, to develop strong literary voices, and to cultivate visual arts of extraordinary inventiveness and beauty.
— Jacqueline E. Jung, Yale University
Rachel Fulton
This book is as rare and finely crafted as the lives of the women it celebrates. Crown and Veil is the product of an outstanding international collaboration of scholars, and it offers an introduction to a world hitherto only glimpsed in its complexity and richness. Every aspect of the nuns' social, institutional, artistic, liturgical, economic, and spiritual life is brought into play. The book is as beautiful as it is comprehensive.
— Rachel Fulton, The University of Chicago
