AGOSTINIANE, MONACHE. — They trace their origin back to St. Augustine. In the fourth century, there already existed in Africa consecrated virgins who received the sacred veil from the bishop, but each lived in her own house. St. Augustine wished them to be gathered into monasteries, subject to the common life and placed under a rule and a superior. Some of his nieces lived in one of these monasteries, and his sister was superior there for many years; in another lived the benefactress of Alipio and Augustine, St. Melania (v.) the Younger. The Vandal persecution under Hunneric, and later, in the year 700, that of the Saracens, brought martyrdom to many Augustinian virgins and completely suppressed the monasteries which Augustine, at his death, had left to the Church “full of virgins,” according to the testimony of Possidius, as well as those which his disciple bishops had established, following his example, throughout Africa.
That many monasteries of A. also arose in Europe at a later period is proved by numerous manuscripts dating from before 1400 that contain St. Augustine’s rule adapted for nuns. All these monasteries were subject to the jurisdiction of the bishops, and only in 1401 did Boniface IX grant the Hermits of St. Augustine the faculty of establishing communities of nuns with the habit, rule, and privileges of their order, as had already been granted to the Friars Minor and the Preachers. In the constitutions of the Hermit Order of St. Augustine, published by the prior general Taddeo Perusino in 1581, there appears for the first time a section entitled: De cura ac regimine Monialium Nostri Sacri Ordinis, in order to give the nuns a certain uniformity of life and to apply to them the new provisions of the Council of Trent. This demonstrates that in the sixteenth century there existed monasteries of nuns founded by the Augustinian religious, or transferred from the jurisdiction of the bishops to that of the Order of St. Augustine.
Today, after the various suppressions, of the very numerous monasteries of enclosure of Augustinian nuns only 134 remain: all under the jurisdiction of the bishops, except that of St. Rita in Cascia.
Among the Augustinian nuns, St. Chiara da Montefalco (v.), St. Rita da Cascia (v.), and Blessed Giuliana da Liegi or da Monte Cornelio, who died in 1258 and promoted the institution of the feast of Corpus Domini, are celebrated.