El monestir de Santa Maria de Valldaura, un espai de dones

This article seeks to act as a summary of the PhD thesis “Convent Life in Medieval Catalonia: Santa Maria de Valldaura (1241-1399)”. (El monestir de Santa Maria de Valldaura, un espai de dones, p.41). An attempt to approach the history of a small Cistercian women’s monastery situated in the town of Olvan, in the region of Berguedà. I have tried to highlight the main phases or the important moments that the monastery went through after its hermitic origins dated around the year 1006; its becoming the community of the Cistercian Order in 1241; the different attempts of the Order and the Papacy to impose the cloistered life onto the nuns and the definitive transfer to the town of Manresa. I do not talk of a patrimonial study nor the different spiritual, religious and social movements that we might find in those times, but rather, above all, I want to express the excitement, the history of a group of women of different ages and situations who would look for and find a space of their own, a common space, spiritual and free and the happenings that they lived through in order to conserve it. As is also my experience, as a researcher, from the present, at the moment of studying them.