1500–1800

Abstract

both the pope and the Benedictine Order to wrestle control over convents and their resources from the Roman urban elite, this process also allowed the nuns to claim a privileged relationship with the papacy (Mary Harvey Donyo, ‘Roman women: female religious, the papacy, and a growing Dominican order’, Speculum, 97 (2022), 1040–72). Rachel Delman, finally, shows that the English town of Stamford also knew a ‘prominent female culture’ of religiosity in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Taking the powerful noblewoman Margaret Beaufort (mother of King Henry VII) as a starting point, Delman exposes a vibrant network of rich urban women that oscillated between the town of Stamford and Beaufort’s household at Collyweston in Northamptonshire. Lady Beaufort functioned as a conduit within this network, as did the guild of St Katherine and other urban anchoresses in Stamford (Rachel Delman, ‘The vowesses, the anchoresses and the aldermen’s wives: Lady Margaret Beaufort and the devout society of late medieval Stamford’, Urban History, 49 (2022), 248–64).