Religiosae Mulieres e Mendicanti nella Lombardia bassomedievale

The paper will consider the different forms of women’s religious life ' sine regula ' in the Lombardy between the 13th and 15th centuries. Jacques of Vitry attests to the wide dissemination in this area of the female component of the Humiliati (like synonym of religiosae mulieres ). These women found her institutionalization into the Order of the Humiliati and sometimes, wanting to be assisted by the friars of the mendicant Orders, they merged with the forms of regular life related to their orders. Particularly in Milan the presence of the Dominican Sisters was remarkable, with nine houses at the beginning of the 14th century, a phenomenon facilitated by the fact that they had previously assumed the rule of s. Augustine, the same followed by the friars. By the 15th century the yearnings of renewal connected with the Osservanza, especially the Franciscan Observance, led the religious to look in the rule of s. Chiara an original path of reform, sometimes even at odds with the Friars Minor, as show the case of the monastery of St. Lucia in Foligno.