Experiência e ideais de vida religiosa em mosteiros portugueses clarianos, nos séculos XVII e XVIII

Abstract

This article is concerned with models of religious practice, human profiles and experience that emerge from writings on Franciscan women's monastic life in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Portugal. The behaviour regarded as exemplary by the cloistered women, in chronicles of monasteries and in counselling texts addressed to the sisters, is compared with prescriptions from the rules conceived under Church control. We consider that the differences between the models created by the nuns and the more institutional paradigm that is found in Church regulations express the particular forms of interpretation, by the sisters, of the rules to which they were submitted.