The ascetic vocation of the women who remained in the world and did not join a monastic community never bore one single name. The categorization of a woman as devota, dicata, sacra, professa, sanctimonialis, puella, virgo, vidua, famula, or ancilla could equally refer to a woman enclosed in a monastery and to a woman devoted to God who continued to live in her home. Indeed, these terms in no way reflect the form and the degree of ascetic life which these women adopted, and which can be reconstructed only through a handful of contextual and prosopographical elements. The absence of precise terminology, in combination with the multiplicity of the terms used, is no doubt linked to the diversity of possible situations and the difficulty of clearly sanctioning—or even the reluctance to sanction—the place and function of these women within the Church.