Betwixt and Between: Non-Cloistered Religious Women in Late Medieval Rome

Abstract This article examines eleven communities of non-cloistered religious women in fifteenth-century Rome. These women, known as bizzoche , created a shared identity through their choice of clothing, which did not conform with their elite status, and their acts of piety, such as Eucharistic adoration and service to the poor. Such practices share similarities with the beguines in northern Europe, beatas in Spain and the Americas, and others, pointing to a broader women’s religious movement that transcended geographic space. However, scholarship often examines such communities of non-cloistered religious women in isolation, obscuring such connections. This article seeks to illuminate some of these commonalities and argues that late medieval, non-cloistered religious women across Europe used habit and pious practices to form a shared identity and navigate the gender- and class-based restrictions on publicly practicing their religion.