Religious Life of women and power relations in The Order of Preachers: considerations about the Jordan of Saxony epistolary

Abstract

Between 1221 and 1236, Jordan of Saxony, the general master of the Order of Friars Preachers, and Diana Andaló, nun of the monastery of St. Agnes in Bologna, were frequent correspondents. From the exchange of epistles that characterized their friendship, only a few dozen letters written by the friar reached us. In them we can see the growth of the Order in those early years of its institution, its gradual organization as well as the policy of the master in relation to women's religious life, among allusions to the details of everyday life of a religious in the thirteenth century. It is in this documentary corpus that we support ourselves to comprehend the power relations which guided the process of institutionalization of the newly created Order of Friars Preachers, specially the affiliation of women's houses to the Order, a subject on which the friars oscillated between resistance and acceptance, because of the material and administrative implications that such an association meant. We will focus, in the discursive analysis, in three cards - two sent to Diana, and one sent to the provincial of Lombardy, Stephen of Spain - to understand the issues involved in the formation of a women's branch of the Order. We can conclude that this specific discussion comprehended a much bigger cenary of internal disputes for the control of the Order.