This book considers the development of female religious life between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages, and 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 organisation, 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 aim of the volume is to provide 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.