La libertad femenina en las instituciones religiosas medievales

Abstract

I set out from the difficulty in women's historiography of deciding whether the monastic life and the feminine dedication to the spititual life that is not regulated should be interpreted as attempts at liberation or as forms of oppression of women by men. I understand that this difficulty of interpretation is not ideological but rather of the symbolic order. I propose that, when general history is written, sexual difference should be taken methodologically into account; that is to say, the relationships of the sexes as well as the relationships between the sexes. The relatioship of the sexes is the relationship of each one of the sexes with their own infinite: two infinites that philosophy abstracts into "human identity"; an identity that thus turns out to be one, whilst the sexes are always and only two. When sexual difference is taken into account, women's history contains, besides oppression-liberation, forms of feminine freedom that enrich the telling of historical experience.