Bodies of Crystal, Houses of Glass: Observing Reform and Improving Piety in the St. Katharinental Sister Book

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the evolving modes of piety performed and written by cloistered women at the St. Katharinental Convent in Diessenhofen, Switzerland, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in their St. Katharinental Sister Book, a collection of quasi-hagiographic vitae composed by the sisters themselves. The article argues that the changing ways the vitae exhibit and encourage piety evidence the effect of the fifteenth-century Observant reform on the cloister.