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Study and edition of a key text of French vernacular theology that had a significant impact in English translation.00The 'Abbaye du Saint Esprit' was a successful work of vernacular spiritual advice for women, surviving in sixteen manuscripts and a widely copied Middle English translation. Unlike many other didactic religious texts, it offers few prescriptions for behaviour; rather, it instructs the reader to build a convent of virtues in her conscience and uses the allegorical structure of the building and its inhabitants to arrange brief teachings on prayer and virtuous practice. Between its genesis in the last quarter of the thirteenth century to its final development towards the end of the fifteenth, it was reworked several times for new audiences of women both lay and cloistered, bourgeois and aristocratic. The examination of these successive adaptations offers insights into the growth of lay religious culture, the participation of women in new religious movements, and the use and transformation of twelfth and early thirteenth-century monastic formation literature for new audiences.00This book also offers, for the first time, editions of all the French versions of the Abbaye and a modern English translation of the earliest version.

248-055.2 --- 248-055.2 Vrouwen en spiritualiteit --- Vrouwen en spiritualiteit --- Women and religion --- Church history --- Women --- History --- Religious life --- Women and religion - History - To 1500 - Sources --- Church history - Middle Ages, 600-1500 - Sources --- Women - Religious life - History - To 1500 - Sources