Franciscans in sixteenth-century New Spain were deeply ambivalent about their mission work. Fray Juan de ZumA!rraga, the first archbishop of Mexico, begged the king to find someone else to do his job
As a subculture, cloistered monastic nuns live hidden from public view by choice. Once a woman joins the cloister and makes final vows, she is almost never seen and her voice is not heard; her story i
Troncelliti affords Assisi the greatest respect, but reminds us that the Church made Francis a famous saint with a spectacular canonization at the same time it ignored Francis's original and revolutio
Francis of Assisi: The Life is an elegant and accessible biography of one of Catholicism's most beloved saints. Originally published as Part 1 of Francis of Assisi: A New Biography by Augustine Thomps
In 1598, the first English convent was established in Brussels and was to be followed by a further 21 enclosed convents across Flanders and France with more than 4,000 women entering them over a 200-y
In the years from 1534, when Henry VIII became head of the English church until the end of Mary Tudor's reign in 1558, the forms of English religious life evolved quickly and in complex ways. At the heart of these changes stood the country's professed religious men and women, whose institutional homes were closed between 1535 and 1540. Records of their reading and writing offer a remarkable view of these turbulent times. The responses to religious change of friars, anchorites, monks and nuns from London and the surrounding regions are shown through chronicles, devotional texts, and letters. What becomes apparent is the variety of positions that English religious men and women took up at the Reformation and the accommodations that they reached, both spiritual and practical. Of particular interest are the extraordinary letters of Margaret Vernon, head of four nunneries and personal friend of Thomas Cromwell.
This volume contains fifteen studies by John O'Malley that press forward the trajectory he launched with The First Jesuits (1993). The chapters deal, for instance, with the historigraphy of the Socie
The Tales and Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Apophthegmata Patrum) are a key source of evidence for the practice and theory respectively of eremitic monasticism, a significant phenomenon within the ea
This study examines the post-medieval reception of Vienna's women's monastic institutions as historical icons of the medieval past. Over time, the eight major women's convents of Vienna become linked
To Overcome Oneself offers a novel retelling of the emergence of the Western concept of "modern self," demonstrating how the struggle to forge a self was enmeshed in early modern Catholic missionary
The Salvadoran priest Rutilio Grande, SJ, was killed in a hall of bullets on March 12, 1977, along with two passengers in the car he drove. The impact of this killing transformed his friend and archbi
Offering a comprehensive analysis of newly-uncovered manuscripts from two English convents near Antwerp, this study gives unprecedented insight into the role of the senses in enclosed religious commun
The history of monastic institutions in the Middle Ages may at first appear remarkably uniform and predictable. Medieval commentators and modern scholars have observed how monasteries of the tenth to
Light in the Shoe Shop offers readers a unique and intimate glance into the day-to-day experience of living the cloistered life in feminine mode. In her cobbler’s contemplations”no metaphor here: the
"For generations of American Catholics, the face of their church was, quite literally, a woman's face. McGuinness recovers the compelling story of these sisters and puts them back at the center of Ame
St. Francis of Assisi is one of the best-known and best-loved of all the saints. This classic work puts the him in the context of his historical setting and his spiritual influences. Inspired by a de
