Clarissan Reform, Miraculous Objects, and Shared Devotions

Abstract

The religious landscape of late medieval Portugal was marked by a call to reform the mendicants that strongly impacted female religious communities and opened ways to more severe approaches to professed life, such as those practiced by the Colettine Clarisses. Bound to a life of enclosure and evangelical poverty, Colettine nuns were simultaneously segregated from their urban communities and in need of their support to survive. Focusing on the promotion of sacred objects and of the figure of Colette of Corbie as strategies of legitimization employed by these convents, this chapter aims to analyse how the establishment of shared devotions between the nuns and their urban communities contributed to the acceptance of these communities and, consequently, attracted and maintained lay support of their convents.