"Thousands and Thousands of Lovers": Sense of Community Among the Nuns of Helfta

FAIN: FB-55205-10

Anna Harrison
Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles, CA 90045-2650)

Working with the largest collection of female-authored writings of the thirteenth century, my book examines the religious significance of community to the Cistercian nuns of Helfta, in Saxony. I ask how the nuns imagined the relationship between a person's spiritual progress and her membership in community. I attend to notions of community both among and between the living and the dead, taking up basic questions about whom the nuns counted as members of their community and whom they excluded; about their understanding of the reciprocal obligations of their community's members; and about tensions and conflicts within community to which they gave vent. I comb the Helfta literature for what its production reveals about writing as a communal spiritual practice that creates community. My study contributes to the history of ideas about community, to the study of female intellectual achievement, and to investigations into women as custodians and creators of spirituality.

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Thousands and Thousands of Lovers: Sense of Community Among the Nuns of Helfta (Book)
Title: Thousands and Thousands of Lovers: Sense of Community Among the Nuns of Helfta
Author: Anna Harrison
Abstract: Thousands and Thousands of Lovers examines the spiritual significance of community to the Cistercian nuns of Helfta--a concern that lies at the heart of the monastery's literature. Focusing on a woefully understudied resource and the largest body of female-authored writings in the thirteenth-century, this book offers insight into the religious preoccupations of a theologically expert and intellectual vibrant cloister to reveal a subtle interplay between communal practice and private piety, other-directed attention and inward religious impulse. It considers the nuns' attitudes toward community among themselves and with their household members, with the priests who served them--or neglected to do so--and with souls in purgatory and the saints.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: http://https://litpress.org/Products/CS289P/Thousands-and-Thousands-of-Lovers
Primary URL Description: publisher's website
Publisher: Cistercian Publications
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780879072896
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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