This book presents a comparative approach to the role of women in religious and monastic life in Europe and the Americas during the medieval and early modern periods. The contributors inquire into differences and similarities, continuities and discontinuities of women’s agency inside and outside the convent. The volume challenges traditional chronological and regional limitations such as those between the Middle Ages and the Modern era and stresses the transatlantic exchange of models between Europe and the Americas.

Mercedes Pérez Vidal holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Oviedo. She has been post doc fellow at the UNAM, at the University of Padua, and at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.

"Introduction," by Mercedes Pérez Vidal

Chapter 1. "Dominican Women. Dominican Identity for Women during the First Centuries of the Order of Preachers (1200-1500)," by Sylvie Duval

Chapter 2. "Being in Touch with the Outside. Economic Exchanges of the Observant Dominican Convent St. Catherine in St. Gall (Switzerland)," by Claudia Sutter

Chapter 3. "Beyond the Wall. Nuns, Power, Celebrations, and Sex in Late Medieval Galicia," by Miguel García Fernández

Chapter 4. "Reform and Reforms in Dominican Nunneries in Spain and Latin America," by Mercedes Pérez Vidal

Chapter 5. "Transatlantic Ties: The Circulation of Objects, Books, and Ideas in Mid-Seventeenth Century Mexican Nunneries," by Doris Bieñko de Peralta

Chapter 6. "Estefania de San Joseph and Esperanza de San Alberto: Dual Discourse in the Lives of Two Exemplary Afro-Women Religious in Early Modern Spanish-America," by Valérie Benoist

Chapter 7. "Le monachisme bourbonien et la fabrication de l'autorité au féminin à Fontevraud au XVIIᵉ siècle," by Annalena Müller