Biography

Mary Harvey Doyno received her PhD from Columbia University and has taught at Princeton, Stanford, and Sacramento State University. Her research focuses on sanctity, lay religion, and religious authority in late medieval and early modern Italy. Her work has appeared in Past & Present, Common Knowledge and Speculum. Her monograph, The Lay Saint: Charity and Charismatic Authority in Medieval Italy, 1150-1350, was published by Cornell University Press in 2019.

Project Summary

Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries the institutional Church worked to award religious women the kinds of concrete institutional status that had long eluded them. But by creating religious orders specific to women, drafting rules to organize those communities, and finally, awarding a variety of privileges giving critical stamps of approval and, as a result, protection to such orders, male Church authorities solidified women as an institutionally “real” population at the same time as they constructed norms that divided religious women into binary categories of “good” or “bad/corrupt.” This increasingly identified the only path towards the “good” life for religious women as the adoption of a strictly cloistered existence. Making Women Real argues that the Church’s simultaneous work to recognize and subjugate women’s religious status was a crucial factor in the expansion and solidification of its institutional authority.