In August, the University of Pennsylvania Press will release “Clare of Assisi and the Thirteenth-Century Church
Religious Women, Rules, and Resistance,” by Catherine M. Mooney (Boston College). The publisher’s description follows:
In a work based on a meticulous analysis of sources, many of them previously unexplored, Catherine M. Mooney upends the received account of Clare of Assisi’s 
founding of the Order of San Damiano, or Poor Clares. Mooney offers instead a stark counternarrative: Clare, her sisters of San Damiano, and their allies struggled against a papal program bent on regimenting, enriching, and enclosing religious women in the thirteenth century, a program that proved largely successful.
Mooney demonstrates that Clare (1194-1253) established a single community that was soon cajoled, perhaps even coerced, into joining an order previously founded by the papacy. Artfully renaming it after Clare’s San Damiano with Clare as its putative mother, Pope Gregory IX enhanced his order’s cachet by associating it also with Read more
