Roman Women: Female Religious, the Papacy, and a Growing Dominican Order

Abstract

This article reassesses the growth of the Dominican Order in early-thirteenth-century Rome by exploring the transformation of the dilapidated church of San Sisto into a universal convent for all Roman religious women—a project first envisioned by Pope Innocent III and later achieved by Pope Honorius III (with the help of Dominic of Caleruega). Cecilia of Rome’s Miracula beati Dominici is one of the few sources to describe San Sisto’s origins. But, while scholars have long depended on the Miracula to document the creation of this convent, that text has also become a source for the equation between the culture of Rome’s female religious and notions of decline and degradation. By pairing Cecilia’s memories with extant charter evidence from her former convent, this article argues that efforts to regular-ize and contain what was a varied female religious experience ultimately served to give both Roman religious women and Dominican friars more concrete institutional identities: identities that equated good female religious life with enclosure and the new religious order of preachers with growth of the institutional church. Finally, the article argues that the new religious foundation at San Sisto expanded the papacy’s political and financial authority in Rome.