This book considers the development of female religious life between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages. It is the first general study to address this earlier period. Chapters range widely over major themes associated with spiritual ideas and social functions, normative structures and spatial organization, forms of communal life, economic foundations, and social relationships. Along with these, "evolutionary" aspects - including charismatic beginnings and the activity of founders in relation to institutionalization, but also the effects of crises, reformation, and transformation - are examined in chronologically-broad and geographically-diverse settings, based on the analysis of significant phenomena and examples. The book provides a comparative approach, which will allow a better understanding of the dynamics, complexities, and differentiations in women's religious life, as well as their cultural importance and - in relation to the male religious - occasionally ambivalent status. (Series: Vita regularis - Ordnungen und Deutungen religiosen Lebens im Mittelalter. Abhandlungen - Vol. 47)