Dataset of Powerful Piety. Practices of Female Abbatial Authority in Medieval Europe (c. 1200-1450)

This data set formed the basis of the research project <b>"Powerful Piety. Practices of Female Abbatial Authority in Medieval Europe (c. 1200-1450)"</b> which revises historiographical notions of female agency through a social history of nunneries and their practices of regal and feudal authority. Based on the data collected and evaluated for convents located in today's Switzerland, Germany and France, the project reveals late medieval nunneries as powerful religious, political, and economic institutions. On a societal level, this project shows that aristocratic abbesses who practiced feudal and even regal authority were an omnipresent sight in medieval Europe. From an economic history perspective, the project sheds light on the long-term strategies and economic adaptations of select convents that allowed them to exist for many centuries in dynamically changing economic settings. The database contains the information taken from several thousand charters of the women convents of Buchau, Notre-Dame de Soissons, Fraumünster of Zurich, and Klingental of Basel. The database is sorted by Excel sheets dealing with persons, institutions, regalia and rights, conflicts, incomes, credits, memoria and possessions of the respective institutions. It is sorted by main IDs of the respective categories.