西欧修女院的特色及其近代早期变革

Probing into the Identity of Europen Nunneries and Their Reform in the Early Modern Age

中世纪的西欧修女院,是一种带有浓厚贵族气息、充满强烈宗教韵味的特殊群体。其强大的政治权利、独立的经济实力、高深的文化修养、严格的等级划分、矛盾的情感世界表明,它绝不是一个单纯意义上的修道团体,而是一个集宗教性与世俗性、封闭性与开放性、依赖性与独立性、等级性与平等性、内在性与外化性于一体的特殊群体。至近代早期,国家意识产生、资本生产方式确立、宗教趋于分裂、科学得以发展。在社会迅速发展的冲击下,修女院内部矛盾不断激化,最终导致了其变革运动的爆发。面对变革,修女们根据各自不同的情况选择了不同的道路,相当一部分修女顺应潮流,勇敢地走出了修女院。

Medieval nunneries were special communities with noble and religious charm. They had never been pure monastic communities due to strong politics, independent economy, deep culture, rigid order and paradoxical feel. They were special communities of both religion and secularity, both closing and opening, both dependence and independence, both hierarchy and equality, both internality and externality. In the early modern age, the national consciousness sprouted, the capitalism established, religion divided, science developed. Under the impaction of social development, these contradictions of nunneries were intensified to induce the eruption of the reform. Confronted with the reform, nuns had made different choice with their different situations,some returned secular society.