Beguines are trendy: many websites and novels are dedicated to them. But who were they? Their rediscovery created an upheaval in the long-accepted binary scheme of the female condition in the past: the convent or the house, aut virum aut murum. The beguines were, in fact, only the tip of the iceberg of non-cloistered female religious life. The works of Gabriella Zarri about the “terzo stato” in the 1990s demonstrated the importance of this third way of religious celibacy outside religious enclosure. The non-cloistered sisters represented a perpetually changing reality throughout Western Christendom, and the multiplication of female congregations in the nineteenth century was based in large part on this phenomenon, long ignored by historiography. In fact, these sisters were probably much more numerous than cloistered nuns, but they have been the subject of very few studies.

The research project Sorores, supported by the École française de Rome and the Casa de Velazquez of Madrid, is planning a series of panels for the upcoming RSA conference in Chicago (21-23 March 2024) about women who publicly lived non-cloistered religious lives in Europe and the colonies between 1400 and 1800. This year, we are focusing on the issues of the integration of communities or informal groups of non-cloistered religious women in their local social context. While names as beguines, tertiary sisters, or religious families as Ursulines are used to describe and englobe various communities of non-cloistered religious women, this categorization could be reductive and could hid the peculiarities of every group. How groups of non-cloistered religious women were integrated in their social and urban context, and how did they interact with it? How this local context influenced the shapes, rules, and activities of these groups of non-cloistered religious women?

We are looking to case study that will explore these questions through the following topics:

• Local communities: structures, rules and activities
• Local context of communities: connections and exchanges with the social and urban fabric
• Reciprocal influences between communities and their surrounding 
• The social role and presence of non-cloistered religious women in cities
• Isolated communities
• The influence of natural environment on communities
• Roman Church and its norms
• Community (Societies, Third Order, Dimesse…) vs individual (bizzoche, monache di casa…) experiences
• Permanency and mutation throughout long time periods 
• Relations with ecclesiastical and secular authorities
• Sources and methodology

We specifically invite papers that will present either a new case study of non-cloistered religious women or revisit an already-known group in the light of their immediate context. Papers should be 15-20 minutes. 

Please email your abstract by August 5, 2023, to Isabel Harvey (harvey.isabel@uqam.ca), with your full name, current affiliation, and email address; a paper title (15-word maximum), and an abstract (150-word maximum).