Perhaps the most effective and powerful research tool on the web to search information on women religious communities of the Middle Ages comes from the Department of History at The University of Southern California, titled Matrix. The purpose of the site is, in their own words …
Our goal is to document the participation of Christian women in the religion and society of medieval Europe.
In particular, we aim to:
- Collect and make available all existing data about all professional Christian women in Europe between 400 and 1600 C.E.
- Investigate and promote new ways of understanding the lives and leadership of religious women in premodern Europe.
- Design new methods for publishing historical information about women.
- Publish innovative research about women, gender, and religion.
And they do it very well indeed. Easy to navigate, and organized by broad, intuitive categories, such as documentation of women’s communities of the period, examination of significant persons, an impressive collection of primary sources as well as secondary sources, high quality images, and a very helpful glossary of monastic terms from the period.
Anyone interested in the topic of women’s religious communities of the period from 400 – 1600 AD should begin here.