A bew interpretation of the role of the visual arts in the spiritual lives of women in late medieval monastic communities. The Visual and the Visionary adds a new dimension to the study of female spirituality, with its nuanced account of the changing roles of images in medieval monasticism from the twelfth century to the Reformation. In nine essays embracing the histories of art, religion, and literature, Jeffrey Hamburger explores the interrelationships between the visual arts and female spirituality in the context of the cura monialium, the pastoral care of nuns. Used as instruments of instruction and inspiration, images occupied a central place in debates over devotional practice, monastic reform, and mystical expression. Far from supplementing a history of art from which they have been excluded, the images made by and for women shaped that history decisively by defining novel modes of religious expression, above all, the relationship between sight and subjectivity. With this book, the study of female piety and artistic patronage becomes an integral part of the general history of medieval art and spirituality.

Impelling Spirit is a book about Jesuit spirituality as seen in its origins. As such it responds to the challenge of Vatican II that the appropriate renewal of religious life demands a return to the sources of Christian life and the spirit and aims of the founders of an institute. The instrument the author employs is a 1539 document Ignatius and his companions drafted for Pope Paul III as an apostolic letter addressed to themselves; this document - long neglected and largely unknown - clearly reveals how they understood themselves and their way of life. It demonstrates that the spirit and aims of the Society, though radical in 1539, were also deeply rooted in the Christian tradition.

Now available in paperback, Tracy K'Meyer's book is a thoughtful and engaging portrait of Koinonia Farm, an interracial Christian cooperative founded in 1942 by two white Baptist ministers in southwest Georgia. The farm was begun as an expression of radical southern Protestantism, and its interracial nature made it a beacon to early civil rights activists, who rallied to its defense and helped it survive attacks from the Ku Klux Klan and others.

Based on over fifty interviews with current and former Koinonia members, K'Meyer's book provides a history, of the farm during its period of greatest influence. K'Meyer outlines the conceptual flaws that have troubled the community, but she finds that Koinonia's enduring effect as a social movement -- including Millard Fuller's founding of Habitat for Humanity, prompted by a 1965 visit to the farm -- is far more meaningful than its internal conflicts. For anyone in search of a hardy strain of Christian progressivism in the Bible Belt, reading K'Meyer's book is an inspiring and intellectually fulfilling experience in its own right.

John Buchanan, pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, challenges the church to have an impact on the community at large. Drawing from his experience at Fourth Presbyterian, he explores the specific ways the church intersects the life of the community. He vigorously affirms the Reformed tradition's unique strengths and heritage, as well as its ongoing relevance in today's world. To Buchanan, mainline churches have an obligation to be in the world, and their effectiveness requires that they not abandon their traditions. Churches need to steer a course that allows them both the ability to maintain a singular way in the world and a creative response to questions of meaning, hope, vocation, and values.

This book offers a comprehensive panorama of modern Roman Catholic ecclesiology as it springs from the vision proclaimed by the Second Vatican Council in Lumen Gentium. The author's central thesis is an ecclesiology built around the notion of communio: all members of the Church should be able to carry out their respective responsibilities toward the Church at all levels (pastors, bishops, the entire Church). The Church needs the honest experiences of the faithful in the world in order to recognize and to meet the demands of the times by drawing on its ongoing tradition together with the work of the Holy Spirit. From this emerges the need to re re-think of the universal Church as a community of local churches. Questions concerning the scriptural basis for the Church are handled in an exegetical section. Next a systematic treatment deals with the nature of the Church, its structures (communities and offices; the structure of its offices), and the Church's duties (evangelization; the relations between Church and society). Dr. Garijo-Guembe emphasizes the systematic description of important moments in the history of dogma. From this foundation the author takes up questions directed by the Orthodox and the Churches of Reformation toward the Roman Catholic Church and attempts to answer them.. A rich bibliography-international in its authorship and ecumenical in their confessional backgrounds-rounds off each chapter.

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 early history of Christianity. The publication of this book finally ensures the availability of all three major collections which constitute the work, edited and translated into English. Richer in Tales than the 'Alphabetic' collection to which this is an appendix (both to be dated c.AD 500), the 'Anonymous' collection presented in this volume furnishes almost as much material for the study of the late antique world from which the monk sought to escape as it does for the monastic endeavour itself. More material continued to be added well into the seventh century and so the spread and gradual evolution of monasticism are illustrated here over a period of about two and a half centuries.

First translation into English of the medieval German Leben der Graefen Iolanda, making it accessible to a wider audience. Brother Hermann was a cleric in the region of Luxembourg in the last quarter of the thirteenth century; evidence from his Life of the Countess Yolanda suggests that he was a Dominican with, perhaps surprisingly, knowledge of the Middle High German courtly epic and the poetry of other contemporaries such as Walther von der Vogelweide. The Life, written shortly after Yolanda's death in 1283, concentrates on her struggle from childhood to free herself from secular society, principally by avoiding a contracted marriage, and to enter the cloister of Marienthal, of which she became Prioress. Although Brother Hermann's epic is hagiographic in tone, the fact that he wrote itin German, not based on a Latin vita suggests that he did not regard Yolanda as a candidate for sainthood; his heroine's attempts to find fulfillment have a strong contemporary resonance. Professor Lawson's translation, thefirst ever into English prose, makes this work accessible to a more general readership.

Writing shortly after Aelred of Rievaulx died on 12 January 1167, Walter Daniel, his secretary and fellow monk, has created the picture of Aelred which endures to this day. We come to know a man of 'charity and astonishing sanctity', an ailing abbot whose monks sat chatting around his bed. Only in passing do we glimpse the ambitious young steward at the court of King David of Scotland, the ecclesiastical diplomat and political counselor who moved easily in royal and episcopal circles, or the canny property manager who guided his monasteries to prosperity. From Walter's pen we have a gentle, loving, ascetic abbot who offered spiritual guidance to his monks through conversation and to a wider audience through the treatises he composed, and who died a holy death. The reaction the Life provoked suggest that some contemporaries outside Rievaulx entertained a different picture of the abbot of Rievaulx. Whether motivated by simple dislike, by envy, or by dissatisfaction at a hastily informal 'canonization', the critics stung the indignant Walter to response. Perhaps they, like Walter, viewed as irreconcilable and struggled to keep apart two worlds which Aelred himself integrated and brought together.

A.G. Dickens is the most eminent English historian of the Reformation. His books and articles have illuminated both the history and the historiography of the Reformation in England and in Germany. Late Monasticism and the Reformation contains an edition of a poignant chronicle from the eve of the Reformation and a new collection of essays. The first part of the book is a reprint of his edition of The Chronicle of Butley Priory, only previously available in a small privately financed edition which has long been out of print. The last English monastic chronicle, it extends from the early years of the sixteenth century up to the Dissolution. Besides giving an intimate portrait of the community at Butley, it reveals many details concerning the local history and personalities of Suffolk during that period. The second part contains the most important essays published by A.G. Dickens since his Reformation Studies (1982). Their themes concern such areas of current interest as the strength and geographical distribution of English Protestantism before 1558; the place of anticlericalism in the English Reformation; and Luther as a humanist. Also included are some local studies including essays on the early Protestants of Northamptonshire and on the mock battle of 1554 fought by London schoolboys over religion.

These essays by six scholars of international standing - David Ford, Colin Gunton, Daniel Hardy, Werner Jeanrond, Richard Roberts, and Christoph Schw

When Edward Sorin left France in 1841 to lead the first band of missionaries sent by the Congregation of Holy Cross to the New World, the rule of the young community required him to keep and send back to France an annual account of the significant events in the life and work of the men and women on the American mission. Chronicles of Notre Dame du Lac contains this running account of the history of the University of Notre Dame--from its foundation in 1842 through the end of the Civil War--written by the man honored as its founder and whose vision for this now world-famous Catholic university is still invoked today. Through crippling snow storms, devastating fires, and epidemics of cholera and typhoid, the men and women of Holy Cross persisted in their mission to build a college on "this property [that] was then known as St. Mary of the Lakes ... half a league from South Bend; one league from the northern boundary of Indiana; about twelve leagues from Lake Michigan." With warmth and humor Sorin discusses their humble beginnings, "A single room was placed at the service of the priests, and the Sisters had to themselves the ground floor below the chapel, where they spent nearly two years. Except for the fact that there was only one window, and in consequence of the close atmosphere there was a large stock of lice and bed bugs, they were, as they say in America, pretty comfortable." Sorin's judgments of people and events are recorded with a blunt frankness, including his conflicts with various bishops and his own superior general back in France. If his biases are revealed in these chronicles, so, too, is his commitment to the projects that shaped his life and work.

Between the deep valley which contains the Jordan river and the Dead Sea, and the hill country of Judea, in which Jerusalem and Bethlehem are situated, lies a narrow stretch of desert which evokes memories of great Biblical ascetics - Elijah and John the Baptist. The empty landscape and scriptural associations drew Christian ascetics in the third century. The new edition of this work by Cyril of Scythopolis provides perhaps our best source of information on the Palestinian monastic movement from AD 400-600. He gives a history not only of holy monks, but also of the Palestinian Church at the height of its power and prestige.

Monasteries are one of the few types of communities that have been able to exist without the family. In this intimate, first-hand study of the daily life in a Trappist monastery, Hillery concludes that what binds this unusual and highly successful community together is its emphases on freedom and agape love. "The Monastery" reintegrates sociology with its allied disciplines in an attempt to understand the monastery on its own terms, and at the same time link that with sociology. Hillery delves into the history, the importance of the Rule of Benedict, the strictness of the Trappist interpretation, and the significance of the Second Vatican Council. Throughout, he uses a holistic anthropological approach.

The work begins with a detailed sociological analysis of freedom, love, and community. Other topics include ways in which candidates enter the monastery, their relation to their families, economic activities, politics, prayer, asceticism, recreation, illness, death, and deviance. Comparisons are made with nine of the other eleven Trappist monasteries in the United States. Anthropologists and sociologists, especially those interested in community, comparative analysis, and religion are challenged by "The Monastery" to move beyond the arbitrary limits they have placed on themselves, which maintain that all knowledge must be capable of being physically perceived and statistically measured.

'I have plucked the finest flowers of the unmown meadow and worked them into a row which I now offer to you', wrote John Moschos as he began his tales of the holy men of seventh-century Palestine and Egypt. This translation offers readers contemporary insights into the spirituality of the desert.

The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis has been called `the greatest of all medieval chronicles'. Written in Normandy between 1114 and 1141, it is a detailed history of the Norman people and their conquests, full of vivid, often penetrating portraits of the lives and characters of kings and queens, lords and bishops, simple knights, and humble villagers. The chronicle gives a unique, authentic picture of feudal society during a period of rapid change in church and state which saw the emergence of the Anglo-Norman realm, the spread of new forms of monasticism, and the launching of the Crusades. Published in 1968, volume II of Marjorie Chibnall's six-volume edition of the Ecclesiastical History is now available for the first time in paperback. `a superbly edited Latin text and a unique English translation of the work of a major historian' American Historical Review `Mrs Chibnall is giving us ... her edition of a classical medieval text which will itself become a classic of medieval scholarship.' Times Literary Supplement

In the half century since its first publication in English, this small book has become a classic of medieval theology. Directing his attention to 'perhaps the most neglected aspect' of Cistercian mysticism, the great French medievalist and philosopher Etienne Gilson directs attention to 'that part of [Bernard's] theology on which his mysticism rests', his 'systematics'.Cistercian Publications brings this important book back into print in celebration of the nine-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Saint Bernard, hoping that new generations of scholars will find it food for thought and further research.

For some thirty years Eric Dean, as a layman, husband, parent, Presbyterian minister, Lafollette Professor of Humanities at Wabash College, and as an ecumenical oblate of a Benedictine abbey has reflected on and put into practice the Rule of St. Benedict. In Saint Benedict for the Laity he comments on how the Rule "has important things to say even to those of us who - because we are already committed to lives in the secular sphere - can never think of a monastic vocation. The rule can speak to us of values which, even apart from the daily structures of monastic life, are relevant to our own lives in 'the outside world.' "

Three times longer than the Rule of Saint Benedict and in parts identical to it, the "Regula Magistri "encompasses the entire existence, material and spiritual, of the monastic community and its members. First English translation.

C. Ellis Nelson has collaborated with and collected the works of ten leaders experienced in congregational affairs to design and produce a resource that helps ministers and lay leaders understand the dynamics of congregations. The result is an engaging collection that will help pastors and church leaders invigorate their congregations.

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.

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