Crusader Castles of the Teutonic Knights (2) - The stone castles of Latvia and Estonia 1185-1560

In Creating Cistercian Nuns, Anne E. Lester addresses a central issue in the history of the medieval church: the role of women in the rise of the religious reform movement of the thirteenth century. Focusing on the county of Champagne in France, Lester reconstructs the history of the women's religious movement and its institutionalization within the Cistercian order.

The common picture of the early Cistercian order is that it was unreceptive to religious women. Male Cistercian leaders often avoided institutional oversight of communities of nuns, preferring instead to cultivate informal relationships of spiritual advice and guidance with religious women. As a result, scholars believed that women who wished to live a life of service and poverty were more likely to join one of the other reforming orders rather than the Cistercians. As Lester shows, however, this picture is deeply flawed. Between 1220 and 1240 the Cistercian order incorporated small independent communities of religious women in unprecedented numbers. Moreover, the order not only accommodated women but also responded to their interpretations of apostolic piety, even as it defined and determined what constituted Cistercian nuns in terms of dress, privileges, and liturgical practice. Lester reconstructs the lived experiences of these women, integrating their ideals and practices into the broader religious and social developments of the thirteenth century-including the crusade movement, penitential piety, the care of lepers, and the reform agenda of the Fourth Lateran Council. The book closes by addressing the reasons for the subsequent decline of Cistercian convents in the fourteenth century. Based on extensive analysis of unpublished archives, Creating Cistercian Nuns will force scholars to revise their understanding of the women's religious movement as it unfolded during the thirteenth century.

'O day so ardently desired! O time of times the most memorable! O deed before all other deeds!'

The fall of Jerusalem in the summer of 1099 to an exhausted and starving army of Western European soldiers was one of the most extraordinary events of the Middle Ages.It was both the climax of a great wave of visionary Christian fervour and the beginning of what proved to be a futile and abortive attempt to implant a new European kingdom in an overwhelmingly Muslim world.The legacy of these events continues to be argued over more than nine centuries later.This remarkable collection of first-hand accounts brings to life the First Crusade in all its cruelty and strangeness.

They took good care of their bastards at the expense of the Church. Some children were made priests as young as age seven, and cardinals by age thirteen. They bestowed on them the benefices of churches and towns with incomes that made them rich.

Learn how Sergius III (904911) obtained the papacy by murder, and instituted a reign known as "the rule of the harlots."

Read how John XII (953963) made the St. John Latern "as if it were a brothel." He defiled virgins "even on the tombs of the apostles Peter and Paul. Women were afraid to enter St. Peter's Basilica for fear of being raped by the pope."

Boniface III (12941303) said, "to enjoy oneself and lie with women and boys is no more of a sin that rubbing ones hands together." He called Jesus Christ a hypocrite.