European history from 1480 to 1570 was a period of turbulent change, political upheaval, profound moral questioning, and urgent philosophical speculation. This book explores the intriguing role of the almost-forgotten Congregation of Benedictine monks of Italy and southern France in the events of these tumultuous years. From archival and published records, the picture emerges of a closely-knit order of humanist scholars whose religious and philosophical studies later put them in a unique position to understand the Reformers. The book also casts light on the monks' fascinating reaction to the Reformation, as they poured out a stream of academic books, tracts, sermons, and poems in their attempt to heal the deepening rift between Rome and the Reformers. Critized and misunderstood by all sides, the Congregation gradually fell into decline until it was finally suppressed under the Napoleanic invasions.

Traces the growth of the Hare Krishna movement in the U.S., describes the experiences of individual followers, and analyzes recruitment patterns, activities, and leadership of the movement.

The first two volumes make available all the existing pre-Reformation charter material, the third consists of an introduction and index. Taken together the three volumes illuminate the social and economic as well as the ecclesiastical organisation of the Suffolk-Essex border in the 12th and 13th Centuries.

Covers aspects of the history of both Leiston Abbey and Butley Priory but is chiefly concerned with Leiston as the better documented and less investigated of the two. Butley Priory was a house of Augustinian canons, Leiston Abbey a foundation for Premonstratensian canons. This volume is largely an edition of the Leiston cartulary and although the introduction covers aspects of the history of both houses, it is chiefly concerned with Leiston as the better documented and less investigated of the two.

The book presents a Cistersian Experience in Medieval Denmark.

The life of the great Cistercian, St. Bernard, was translated into Portuguese from the first three books of Sancti Bernardi Vita Prima at Alcobaca. The surviving fifteenth-century manuscript constitutes an important example of the scholarship of that famous monastic center.

Classic work of ecclesiastical history, exercising original and independent judgement. Volume II also available.

For many American Catholics in the twentieth-century the face of the Church was a woman's face. After the Second World War, as increasing numbers of baby boomers flooded Catholic classrooms, the Church actively recruited tens of thousands of young women as teaching sisters. In Into Silence and Servitude Brian Titley delves into the experiences of young women who entered Catholic religious sisterhoods at this time. The Church favoured nuns as teachers because their wageless labour made education more affordable in what was the world's largest private school system. Focusing on the Church's recruitment methods Titley examines the idea of a religious vocation, the school settings in which nuns were recruited, and the tactics of persuasion directed at both suitable girls and their parents. The author describes how young women entered religious life and how they negotiated the sequence of convent "formation stages," each with unique challenges respecting decorum, autonomy, personal relations, work, and study. Although expulsions and withdrawals punctuated each formation stage, the number of nuns nationwide continued to grow until it reached a pinnacle in 1965, the same year that Catholic schools achieved their highest enrolment. Based on extensive archival research, memoirs, oral history, and rare Church publications, Into Silence and Servitude presents a compelling narrative that opens a window on little-known aspects of America's convent system.

In the course of their investigations into Leonardo da Vinci and the Turin Shroud, Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince found clues in the work of the great Renaissance artist that pointed to the existence of a secret underground religion. More clues were found in a twentieth-century London church. These were the beginnings of a quest through time and space that led the authors into the mysterious world of secret societies and such bodies as the Freemasons, the Knights Templar and the Cathars and finally back to the ideas and beliefs of the first century AD and a devastating new view of the real character and motives of the founder of Christianity and the roles of John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene. They reveal nothing less than a secret history, preserved through the centuries but encoded in works of art and even in the great Gothic cathedrals, whose revelation could shake the foundations of the Chruch.

The first in-depth examination of the texts produced in English Benedictine convents between 1600 and 1800. After Catholicism became illegal in England during the sixteenth century, Englishwomen established more than twenty convents on the Continent that attracted thousands of nuns and served as vital centers of Catholic piety until the French Revolution. Today more than 1,000 manuscripts and books produced by, and for, the Benedictine convents are extant in European archives. Writing Habits: Historicism, Philosophy, and English Benedictine Convents, 1600-1800 provides the first substantive analysis of these works in order to examine how members of one religious order used textual production to address a major dilemma experienced by every English convent on the Continent: How could English nuns cultivate a cloistered identity when the Protestant Reformation had swept away nearly all vestiges of English monasticism? Drawing on an innovative blend of methodologies, Jaime Goodrich contends that the Benedictines instilled a collective sense of spirituality through writings that created multiple overlapping communities, ranging from the earthly society of the convent to the transhistorical network of the Catholic Church. Because God resides at the heart of these communities, Goodrich draws on the works of Martin Buber, a twentieth-century Jewish philosopher who theorized that human community forms a circle, with each member acting as a radius leading toward the common center of God. Buber's thought, especially his conception of the I-You framework for personal and spiritual relationships, illuminates a fourfold set of affiliations central to Benedictine textual production: between the nuns themselves, between the individual nun and God, between the convent and God, and between the convent and the Catholic public sphere. By evoking these relationships, the major genres of convent writing-administrative texts, spiritual works, history and life writing, and controversial tracts-functioned as tools for creating community and approaching God. Through this Buberian reading of the cloister, Writing Habits recovers the works of Benedictine nuns and establishes their broader relevance to literary history and critical theory.

The congregation is a distinctly American religious structure, and is often overlooked in traditional studies of religion. But one cannot understand American religion without understanding the congregation.Volume 1: "Portraits of Twelve Religious Communities" chronicles the founding, growth, and development of congregations that represent the diverse and complex reality of American local religious cultures. The contributors explore multiple issues, from the fate of American Protestantism to the rise of charismatic revivalism.Volume 2: "New Perspectives in the Study of Congregations" builds upon those historical studies, and addresses three crucial questions: Where is the congregation located on the broader map of American cultural and religious life? What are congregations' distinctive qualities, tasks, and roles in American culture? And, what patterns of leadership characterize congregations in America?These essays are an indispensable tool for understanding American congregations and American religion as a whole.

This is the first book-length study of children in one of the birthplaces of early Christian monasticism, Egypt. Although comprised of men and women who had renounced sex and family, the monasteries of late antiquity raised children, educated them, and expected them to carry on their monastic lineage and legacies into the future. Children within monasteries existed in a liminal space, simultaneously vulnerable to the whims and abuses of adults and also cherished as potential future monastic prodigies. Caroline T. Schroeder examines diverse sources - letters, rules, saints' lives, art, and documentary evidence - to probe these paradoxes. In doing so, she demonstrates how early Egyptian monasteries provided an intergenerational continuity of social, cultural, and economic capital while also contesting the traditional family's claims to these forms of social continuity.

To understand the life and thought of Thomas Merton, one must understand him as a monk. After introducing his vocation and entrance into the Trappist order, this book highlights some of his basic spiritual presuppositions. Relying primarily on Merton's writing, Bonnie B. Thurston surveys his thought on fundamental aspects of monastic formation and spirituality, particularly obedience, silence, solitude, and prayer. She also addresses some of the temptations and popular misunderstandings surrounding monastic life. Accessible and conversational in style, the book suggests how monastic spirituality is relevant, not only for all Christians, but also for serious spiritual seekers.

This bilingual volume (Latin text with English translation) is the second in the series presenting hagiographical narratives from medieval Central Europe. It contains the most important hagiographical corpus of medieval Hungarian history: that of Saint Margaret (1242-1270), daughter of King Bela IV, who lived her life as a Dominican nun. Margaret's cult started immediately after her death and the demand to examine her sanctity was first formulated in 1272. The canonization process recommenced in 1276, followed by further initiatives across the centuries. Margaret was eventually canonized only in 1943. Besides the full Latin text and the English translation of her oldest legend, written between 1272 and 1275, this volume contains the acts of the 110 testimonies of the papal investigation concerning her sainthood, recorded between July and October 1276 and prepared from existing source editions. In addition, the editors include a series of recently discovered documents, including a petition by the bishop of Varad (Oradea) to promote the cause, and the notarial records of a set of miracles that occurred at Margaret's grave in the second half of the fifteenth century. The book ends with a selected bibliography of Saint Margaret and of her hagiography.

Following the so called "Arab Spring" the world's attention has been drawn to the presence of significant minority religious groups within the predominantly Islamic Middle East. Of these minorities Christians are by far the largest, comprising over 10% of the population in Syria and as much as 40% in Lebanon. The largest single group of Christians are the Arabic-speaking Orthodox. This work fills a major lacuna in the scholarship of wider Christian history and more specifically that of lived religion within the Ottoman empire. Beginning with a survey of the Christian community during the first nine hundred years of Muslim rule, the author traces the evolution of Arab Orthodox Christian society from its roots in the Hellenistic culture of the Byzantine Empire to a distinctly Syro-Palestinian identity. There follows a detailed examination of this multi-faceted community, from the Ottoman conquest of Syria, Palestine and Egypt in 1516 to the Egyptian invasion of Syria in 1831. The author draws on archaeological evidence and previously unpublished primary sources uncovered in Russian archives and Middle Eastern monastic libraries to present a vivid and compelling account of this vital but little-known spiritual and political culture, situating it within a complex network of relations reaching throughout the Mediterranean, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe. The work is made more accessible to a non-specialist reader by the addition of a glossary, whilst the scholar will benefit from a detailed bibliography of both primary and secondary sources. A foreword has been contributed to this first English language edition by the Patriarch of Antioch, John X. It contextualizes the history found in this work within the ongoing struggle to preserve the ancient Christian cultures of the Arabic speaking peoples from extinction within their ancestral homeland.

Forty papers link the study of the military orders' cultural life and output with their involvement in political and social conflicts during the medieval and early modern period. Divided into two volumes, focusing on the Eastern Mediterranean and Europe respectively, the collection brings together the most up-to-date research by experts from fifteen countries on a kaleidoscope of relevant themes and issues, thus offering a broad-ranging and at the same time very detailed study of the subject.

In recent years scholars in a range of disciplines have begun to re-evaluate the history of the Society of Jesus. Approaching the subject with new questions and methods, they have reconsidered the importance of the Society in many sectors, including those related to the sciences and the arts. They have also looked at the Jesuits as emblematic of certain traits of early modern Europeans, especially as those Europeans interacted with 'the Other' in Asia and the Americas. Originating in an international conference held at Boston College in 1997, the thirty-five essays here reflect this new historiographical trend. Focusing on the Old Society- the Society before its suppression in 1773 by papal edict- they examine the worldwide Jesuit undertaking in such fields as music, art, architecture, devotional writing, mathematics, physics, astronomy, natural history, public performance, and education, and they give special attention to the Jesuits' interaction with non-European cultures, in North and South America, China, India, and the Philippines. A picture emerges not only of the individual Jesuit, who might be missionary, diplomat, architect, and playwright over the course of his life in the Society, but also of the immense and many-faceted Jesuit enterprise as forming a kind of 'cultural ecosystem'. The Jesuits of the Old Society liked to think they had a way of proceeding special to themselves. The question, Was there a Jesuit style, a Jesuit corporate culture? is the thread that runs through this interdisciplinary collection of studies.

Around the turn of the first millennium AD, there emerged in the former Carolingian Empire a generation of abbots that came to be remembered as one of the most influential in the history of Western monasticism. In this book Steven Vanderputten reevaluates the historical significance of this generation of monastic leaders through an in-depth study of one of its most prominent figures, Richard of Saint-Vanne. During his lifetime, Richard (d. 1046) served as abbot of numerous monasteries, which gained him a reputation as a highly successful administrator and reformer of monastic discipline. As Vanderputten shows, however, a more complex view of Richard's career, spirituality, and motivations enables us to better evaluate his achievements as church leader and reformer.Vanderputten analyzes various accounts of Richard's life, contemporary sources that are revealing of his worldview and self-conception, and the evidence relating to his actions as a monastic reformer and as a promoter of conversion. Richard himself conceived of his life as an evolving commentary on a wide range of issues relating to individual spirituality, monastic discipline, and religious leadership. This commentary, which combined highly conservative and revolutionary elements, reached far beyond the walls of the monastery and concerned many of the issues that would divide the church and its subjects in the later eleventh century.

The most complete overview and assessment of Mormon village studies available, this volume extends the canon twofold. First, it presents a rich composite view of nineteenth-century Mormon life in the West as seen by qualified observers who did not just pass through but stopped and studied. Second, it connects that early protoethnography to scholarly Mormon village studies in the twentieth century, showing their proper context in the thriving field of community studies. Based mostly on nine famous travellers' accounts of life among the Mormons, including Richard Burton, Elizabeth Kane, Howard Stansbury, John Gunnison, and Julius Benchley-Bahr's volume introduces these talented observers, summarises and analyses their observation, and constructs a holistic overview of Mormon village life. He concludes by tracing the rise and continuity of Mormon village studies in the twentieth century, beginning with Lowry Nelson's 1923 research in Escalante, Utah. Over the following three decades, the genre expanded beyond Nelson and his students, becoming more sophisticated and interdisciplinary; by the mid-1950s it was a subfield within the respected arena of community studies. Researchers continued to study Mormon communities in the following decades and into the twenty-first century.

The friars represented a remarkable innovation in medieval religious life. Founded in the early 13th century, the Franciscans and Dominicans seemed a perfect solution to the Church's troubles in confronting rapid changes in society. They attracted considerable enthusiastic support, especially from the papacy, to which they answered directly. In their first two hundred years, membership grew at an astonishing rate, and they became counsellors to princes and kings, they receiving an almost endless stream of donations and gifts. Yet there were those who were not so enamored of them, who believed the adulation was misguided or even dangerous, and who saw in the friars' actions only hypocrisy, deceit, greed, and even, signs of the end of the world. In the mid-13th century, writings appeared denouncing and mocking the friars, and calling for their abolition. Their French and English opponents were among the most vocal, leaving a vivid record of condemnation. From harsh theological criticism and outrage at the Inquisition, to vulgar stories and bathroom humor, these are their stories.

Between 1600 and 1800 around 4,000 Catholic women left England for a life of exile in the convents of France, Flanders, Portugal and America. These closed communities offered religious contemplation and safety, but also provided an environment of concentrated female intellectualism. The nuns' writings from this time form a unique resource.

Over the last few decades, within the Christian Church and in broader society, there has been an explosion of interestin the benefits and fruits of monastic spirituality and culture, both in its historical and contemporary contexts. Even where people have given up on the institutional churches, monasticism retains an integrity and magnetic appeal. This timely book explores what it is that makes monastic spirituality so attractive to so many people and how it can be incorporated into an individual's everyday life in practical ways. Chapters include: The appeal of monasticism; Different varieties of monastic experience; Monastic spirituality and personal development; Monastic spirituality and relationships; Monastic spirituality and work; Monastic spirituality and community living; Achieving balance; and Working out a rule of life.

Praised in The Atlantic Monthly as an "engrossing narrative," Nuns tells the fascinating stories of the women who have lived in religious communities during some of the most tumultuous years in European history. Drawing particularly on the nuns' own words, Silvia Evangelisti reveals their ideals and achievements, frustrations and failures, and their attempts to reach out to the society around them. She explores how they came to the cloister, how they responded to monastic discipline, and how they pursued their spiritual, intellectual, and missionary activities. Indeed, nuns often found a way to contribute to their communities by creating charities and schools, while a few exceptional women made names for themselves for their artistic talents or for establishing new convents. This book features the individual stories of some of the most outstanding historical figures, including Teresa of Avila, who set up over seventeen new convents. Evangelisti shows how these women were able to overcome some of the restrictions placed on women in their societies at large. In doing so, she provides a fascinating and rarely seen glimpse into their intriguing world.

Between 350 and 850 Constantinople emerged as both the greatest city of the Mediterranean world and a monastic centre of unparalleled importance. Drawing upon a wide range of sources, including a rich body of hagiographical evidence, this study documents the historical relationship between the city and its monks during this crucial formative period. Monks and nuns played a key role from the beginning. In 350 their numbers were few, yet their impact on local politics and the church was significant. By 850 their presence was felt everywhere - from the world of the imperial court and church, to the local economy, elite culture, social services and popular piety. This dramatic rise in the influence of local monasticism was the result of its impressive numerical growth over time, and hard-won success in adapting the singular call of the monastic life to the challenges of the great medieval metropolis and imperial capital.

Evagrius Ponticus was the most prolific writer of the Christian Desert Fathers. This book is a study of his life, works, and theology. It gives particular attention to his little-studied exegetical treatises, especially the Scholia on Psalms, as well as his better-known works, in order to present a more balanced picture of Evagrius the monk. The practice of psalmody in Northern Egyptian monastic communities of the late fourth century is explored, as is Evagrius' understanding of psalmody's healing properties, and his recommendation of memorized scripture as a spiritual weapon against temptation. Further chapters discuss Evagrius' model of spiritual progress and his use of medical terminology and theory; the logoi of providence and judgement and their use in Christian contemplation; and Evagrius' controversial Christology and his work, the Kephalaia Gnostica.