Religions Webinar | Women's Religious Life in the Early Modern Period: Rethinking Concepts, Challenging Paradigms
the chair
Religions Webinar
Women's Religious Life in the Early Modern Period: Rethinking Concepts, Challenging Paradigms
Dear Colleagues,
It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to this session dedicated to the presentation of our Special Issue, Women in the Christian Tradition: Paradigms and Expressions of Religious Life in Early Modern Western Contexts.
This initiative seeks to reconsider the presumed homogeneity and fixed, monolithic character often attributed to women’s consecrated lives in the wake of the Council of Trent and the Counter Reformation. Instead, it highlights the polyhedral — and at times ambiguous — forms and expressions that women’s religious lives effectively assumed across Western Europe and its colonial territories during the early modern period.
With this volume, our aim is to foster a wide-ranging reflection on this diversity: one that challenges canonically defined boundaries and seemingly definitive paradigms of religious life, addressing institutional configurations, charism and spiritual models, material culture, and the relationship with the secular world, while also advancing our understanding of the lived experiences within women’s religious communities — a sphere still insufficiently known and often mythologised, whose study enriches, in turn, the broader field of women’s history.
I thank you all for being here, and I look forward with great anticipation to the discussion that this Special Issue will, I trust, help to open.
Date: 21 October 2026
Time: 11:30 (CEST) | 10:30 (WEST) | 15:30 (CST Asia)
Webinar ID: 853 4018 5150
Webinar Secretariat: religions@mdpi.com
Meet Our Chair
Autonomous University of Lisbon, Portugal;Maria Luísa Jacquinet is a university lecturer, researcher, and consultant in Historical Heritage. She holds a doctorate in History, specializing in Art History, from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra, where she also completed her undergraduate degree in the same field. She has additionally trained in Museology, Heritage Studies, and Cultural Heritage Law. She has taken part in national and international projects concerning the religious history of the Early Modern and Contemporary periods, during her time as a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Theology of the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) and a fellow of the Research Infrastructure on Religious Studies (ReIReS), as well as of the Durham Residential Research Library (DRRL). In recent years, her work has focused on the fields of Christian spirituality and the monastic and conventual history of Portugal.
Meet Our Speakers
Évora University, Portugal;Antónia Fialho Conde (CIÊNCIA ID: 5811-DF13-3CD0; Scopus Author ID: 56001670400) is Professor (HDR) at the Department of History of the University of Évora, where she teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the areas of History and Heritage. She is an integrated member of the research center CIDEHUS (and collaborates with other national and international centers, such as LEM-CERCOR—Laboratoire d’Études sur les Monothéismes—Centre Européen de Recherche sur les Communautés, Congrégations et Ordres Religieux, CEHR, EIDOLA –Materiality Cognition and History of Religions), and she is the local coordinator of the Master Erasmus Mundus TPTI (Téchniques, Patrimoine, Territoires de l'Industrie: Histoire, Valorization, Didactique—Universities of Évora, Paris 1- Sorbonne and Padua). Her research interests lie in the History of Portugal (Early Modern Period), in the History of female Cistercian monasticism, and in Historical–Cultural Heritage and Material Culture (modern period), areas where she has published several works, directed and collaborated in nationally and internationally funded research projects, and supervised theses and dissertations.
University of Porto, Portugal;Doctor of Literary, Cultural and Interartistic Studies from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto. She is a researcher at the Centre for Transdisciplinary Research Culture, Space and Memory (CITCEM). She is also a member of the National Group for the Discussion of Horizon Europe (GNAD) and of the advisory committee of the International Congress Soror Mariana Alcoforado (Lisbon/Beja). Her research focuses on the study of the cultural activities of Portuguese female convents in the Early Modern Period, with particular emphasis on convent libraries, the practices of reading and writing, musical activities, and religious practices.
