First published in France, where it was awarded the Prix Chateaubriand, this masterful new biography of Francis is now available in English In this towering work, Andre Vauchez draws on the vast body of scholarship on Francis of Assisi produced over the past forty years as well on as his own expertise in medieval hagiography to tell the most comprehensive and authoritative version of Francis's life and afterlife published in the past half century. After a detailed and yet engaging reconstruction of Francis's life and work, Vauchez focuses on the myriad texts-hagiographies, chronicles, sermons, personal testimonies, etc.-of writers who recorded aspects of Francis's life and movement as they remembered them, and used those remembrances to construct a portrait of Francis relevant to their concerns. We see varying versions of his life reflected in the work of Machiavelli, Luther, Voltaire, German and English romantics, pre-Raphaelites, Italian nationalists, and Mussolini, and discover how peace activists, ecologists, or interreligious dialogists have used his example to promote their various causes. Particularly noteworthy is the attention Vauchez pays to Francis's own writings, which strangely enough have been largely overlooked by later interpreters. The product of a lifetime of study, this book reveals a historian at the height of his powers.

During the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther took the biblical maxim "be fruitful and multiply" and used it within the realm of marriage as the cornerstone of his new Christian community. By denying the spiritual superiority of celibacy and introducing new tenets regarding gender, marriage, chastity, and religious life, Luther challenged one of the key expressions of Catholicism--monastic life. Yet many religious living in cloistered communities, particularly women, refused to accept these new terms and successfully opposed the new Protestant culture.
Focusing primarily on a group of Dominican nuns in Strasbourg, Germany, Amy Leonard's "Nails in the Wall" outlines the century-long battle between these nuns and the Protestant city council. Using their charm, wealth, and political and social connections, the nuns were able to sustain their Catholic practices. Leonard's in-depth archival research uncovers letters about and records of the nuns' struggle to maintain their religious beliefs and way of life in the face of Protestant reforms. She tells the story of how they worked privately to keep Catholicism alive--continuing to pray in Latin, smuggling in priests to celebrate Mass, and secretly professing scores of novices to ensure the survival of their convents. This fascinating and heartening study shows that, far from passively allowing the Protestants to dismantle their belief system, the women of the Strasbourg convents were active participants in the battle over their vocation and independence.

Although an ascetic ideal of leadership had both classical and biblical roots, it found particularly fertile soil in the monastic fervor of the fourth through sixth centuries. Church officials were increasingly recruited from monastic communities, and the monk-bishop became the dominant model of ecclesiastical leadership in the Eastern Roman Empire and Byzantium. In an interesting paradox, Andrea Sterk explains that "from the world-rejecting monasteries and desert hermitages of the east came many of the most powerful leaders in the church and civil society as a whole."

Sterk explores the social, political, intellectual, and theological grounding for this development. Focusing on four foundational figures--Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and John Chrysostom--she traces the emergence of a new ideal of ecclesiastical leadership: the merging of ascetic and episcopal authority embodied in the monk-bishop. She also studies church histories, legislation, and popular ascetic and hagiographical literature to show how the ideal spread and why it eventually triumphed. The image of a monastic bishop became the convention in the Christian east.

"Renouncing the World Yet Leading the Church" brings new understanding of asceticism, leadership, and the church in late antiquity.

A French historian and curator of the manuscript department at the Bibliotheque Nationale, Benjamin Guerard (1797-1854) made a considerable contribution to the study of medieval French cathedrals and monasteries. Having studied at Dijon, Guerard became a banker in Paris, before studying at the Ecole royales des chartes where he trained as an archivist. He was a founding member of the Societe de l'histoire de France, and this publication was part of the society's first series of documents inedits. Guerard was elected to the Academie des inscriptions et belles-lettres and became the director of the Ecole des chartes in 1848. This collection of the medieval charters of the Abbey of Saint-Pere at Chartres was published in Paris in 1840. Volume 1 contains the Prolegomena describing the founding of the abbey, the size of its demesne, its feudal rights, and official structure.

A French historian and curator of the manuscript department at the Bibliotheque Nationale, Benjamin Guerard (1797-1854) made a considerable contribution to the study of medieval French cathedrals and monasteries. Having studied at Dijon, Guerard became a banker in Paris, before studying at the Ecole royales des chartes where he trained as an archivist. He was a founding member of the Societe de l'histoire de France, and this publication was part of the society's first series of documents inedits. Guerard was elected to the Academie des inscriptions et belles-lettres and became the director of the Ecole des chartes in 1848. This collection of the medieval charters of the Abbey of Saint-Pere at Chartres was published in Paris in 1840. Volume 2 contains Guerard's transcriptions of the charters, dating from the twelfth to the mid-fifteenth centuries.

The Cartulaire de l'Abbaye de Noyers, first edited in 1872, remains a vital source for the political, economic and cultural history of this important Benedictine foundation in Anjou. Its 661 charters, ranging in date from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, attest to numerous central events in the life of the abbey, including its foundation and the election of its abbots. They also provide a wealth of information concerning the foundation's properties and possessions, its benefactors and its tenants. Each charter is carefully annotated to reflect differences among the extant evidence, and two full indices of personal and geographic names aid in searching. Appended here as well is a short life of St Gratian. This reissued edition makes this valuable resource once again widely available to scholars of medieval monastic and political history.

Australian Jesuit Tom O'Hara has written a number of books in Jesuit spirituality. He has many years experience in the practice of the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius through directing retreats This book is his most detailed examination of the Exercises and connects with many writers in the Jesuit tradition and a comprehensive understanding of St Ignatius' life.

The Lost Abbey of Eynsham will be of interest not just to local historians but to those with an interest in the development of monasticism and medieval art and architecture, particularly the Romanesque. Eynsham was one of the few religious foundations in England in continuous use from the late Saxon period to the Dissolution. Its first Benedictine Abbot was the internationally renowned scholar and teacher, Aelfric, and it was frequently visited by medieval kings given its close proximity to the royal hunting lodge of Woodstock. Hugh of Avalon, later canonised, was appointed Bishop of Lincoln at a royal council at Eynsham in 1186. Shortly afterwards the abbey achieved fame with the Vision of the Monk of Eynsham which is said to have influenced Dante. Its reputation was further enhanced when Eynsham acquired an important relic, the arm of St Andrew in 1240. In the later Middle Ages, the abbey went into decline and was beset by scandal. It surrendered to the Crown in 1538 and the huge structure was gradually demolished and pillaged for its building materials. Now, nothing remains in situ above ground. This book aims to rescue this important abbey from obscurity by summarising its history and examining the material remains of Eynsham Abbey, most of which have never been published before.

Blacks of the Rosary tells the story of the Afro-Brazilian communities that developed within lay religious brotherhoods dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary in Minas Gerais. It shows how these brotherhoods functioned as a social space in which Africans and their descendants could rebuild a communal identity based on a shared history of an African past and an ongoing devotional practice, thereby giving rise to enduring transnational cultures that have survived to the present day. In exploring this intersection of community, identity, and memory, the book probes the Portuguese and African contributions to the brotherhoods in Part One. Part Two traces the changes and continuities within the organizations from the early eighteenth century to the end of the Brazilian Empire, and the book concludes in Part Three with discussion of the twentieth-century brotherhoods and narratives of the participants in brotherhood festivals in the 1990s. In a larger sense, the book serves as a case study through which readers can examine the strategies that Afro-Brazilians used to create viable communities in order to confront the asymmetry of power inherent in the slave societies of the Americas and their economic and social marginalization in the twentieth century.

The 1950s and 60s were times of extraordinary social and political change across North America that re-drew the boundaries between traditional and progressive, conservative and liberal. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the history of Catholic nuns. During these two decades, nuns boldly experimented with their role in the church, removing their habits, rejecting the cloister, and fighting for social justice. The media quickly took to their cause and dubbed them 'the new nuns,' modern exemplars of liberated but sexually contained womanhood. With Visual Habits, Rebecca Sullivan brings this unexamined history of nuns to the fore, revisiting the intersection of three distinct movements - the Second Vatican Council, the second wave of feminism, and the sexual revolution - to explore the pivotal role nuns played in revamping cultural expectations of femininity and feminism. From The Nun's Story to The Flying Nun to The Singing Nun, nuns were a major presence in the mainstream media. Charting their evolving representation in film and television, popular music, magazines, and girls' literature, Sullivan discusses these images in the context of the period's seemingly unlimited potential for social change. In the process, she delivers a rich cultural analysis of a topic too long ignored.

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.

This book continues Brother Tom-Nicholas' series on the lives of the saints. As in his first book, Calling All Saints, Brother Tom reveals how saints weren't stained-glass superhumans on pedestals, but hard-working men and women who did small things in a great way for the love of God. "I also wanted to write a book for all those who think organised religion is an absolute con... but just might be willing to read funny stories that sneak in a moral about following Christ. May these little stories give you the hope, the courage and the inspiration to try and become the hero or heroine that God knows you can be."

At the age of forty-five, unfit and overweight, Clark Berge, a professed Franciscan friar, took up running. In his younger life he had struggled with alcoholism and with his sexual identity. Running became cathartic not just for his body, but for making peace with the lingering shame of a troubled past, facing unresolved questions and coming to a fuller acceptance of who he was. As the elected leader of a worldwide religious community, the opportunity to run in widely differing urban and wild places -the English countryside, wide South African and Australian landscapes, busy cities and remote Pacific islands - opened up larger spiritual insights into the nature of religious life, social activism, contemplation, life on the margins, solitude and community, fear and fortitude, simplicity and living in harmony with creation, and coming in last in his first marathon. This unique memoir of running and religion explores Christian spirituality with a disarming honesty and depth.

What is genuine church growth? Is it, at heart, the numerical growth of regular congregations or are there other dimensions and, if so, what are they? How can we learn from other contexts in order to properly inform our understanding of what we mean by church growth? Mara is one of the most marginalised regions in Tanzania, which in turn is a country in the most marginalised continent on the planet, and yet, Spencer argues, the church in the region has exhibited remarkable growth. Looking beyond the usual dimensions of church growth discourse, Stephen Spencer weaves in his own experience in Tanzania, finding in that wholly different context an approach to church growth which might entirely change the discourse in the global north.

The Society of St John the Evangelist, otherwise known as the Cowley Fathers, was the first men's religious order to be founded in the Church of England since the Reformation, as a result of the spread and influence of the Oxford Movement and its Anglo-Catholic spirituality in the 19th century. Established in Oxford in 1866, its charismatic founder, Richard Meux Benson worked closely with American priests and just four years later a congregation was founded in Massachusetts that flourishes to this day. The charism of the order embraced high regard of theology with practical service, fostered by an emphasis on prayer and personal holiness. Cowley, a poor and rapidly expanding village on the outskirts of Oxford, provided ample opportunity for service. At its height, the English congregation had houses in Oxford (now St Stephen's House) and Westminster where figures such as C S Lewis sought spiritual direction. Now no longer operating as a community in Britain, this definitive and comprehensive history records its significant contribution to Anglicanism then and now.

Corrymeela - a Christian community committed to reconciliation, is bounded by bells. Twice a day - morning and evening - a large bell sounds out over the site. This is a call to attention, a call to pause, a space to reflect on God, self, neighbour, stranger. Between the Bells recounts the varied experiences of many whose lives have been changed by their visit to Corrymeela, and the changes they have effected in others. Narrated by the former Centre Director of the Corrymeela Community, it is full of wild and beautiful and funny stories that linger in the heart. Each story shows an aspect of the reconciliation journey, and captures various encounters - sad, challenging, inspiring, strange - that roam from the epic to the everyday. Between the Bells considers these key questions: - What needs reconciled in the 21st Century? - What has religion to offer in a positive way to Northern Ireland, for its people, for society? - How can we better understand conflict in order to build positive relations, improve communication, and nurture individuals, communities and society?

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.

If you liked Call the Midwife, you will love Kicking the Habit! What makes a fun-loving teenager turn her back on a life of parties, boys and fun, to become a nun in a French convent? And what later leads her to abandon the religious life, to return to the big wide world and later marry? At the age of 18, Eleanor Stewart goes to France to enter a convent. After four years of struggling with the religious life, she becomes a nun, and then trains as a midwife in a large inner-city hospital in Liverpool. While Beatlemania grips the nation, she attempts to coordinate the reclusive demands of the religious life with the drama, excitement and occasional tragedy of the hospital world. Written with honesty and affection, this is a wonderful and intimate portrait of convent and hospital life.

Medieval anchorites willingly embraced the most extreme form of solitude known to the medieval world, so they might forge a closer connection with God. Yet to be physically enclosed within the same four walls for life required strength far beyond most medieval Christians. This book explores the English anchoritic guides which were written, revised and translated, throughout the Middle Ages, to enable recluses to come to terms with the enormity of their choices. The book explores five centuries of the guides' negotiations of four anchoritic ideals: enclosure, solitude, chastity and orthodoxy, and of two vital anchoritic spiritual practices: asceticism and contemplative experience. It explodes the myth of the anchorhold as solitary death-cell, revealing it as the site of potential intellectual exchange and spiritual growth.

The medieval historian who revealed "The Real History Behind the Da Vinci Code" uncloaks the Templars.
In the year 1119, these noblemen found their calling as protectors of the faithful on a dangerous pilgrimage to newly conquered Jerusalem. Now, historian Sharan Newman elucidates the mysteries and misconceptions of the Templars, from their true first founding and role in the Crusades to more modern intrigues, including:
- Were they devout knights or secret heretics?
- Did they leave behind a fantastic treasure-hidden to this day?
- How did they come to be associated with the Holy Grail?
- Did they come to America before the time of Columbus?
- Does the order still exist?

This book tells the fascinating story of Robert of Arbrissel (ca. 1045-1116). Robert was a parish priest, longtime student, reformer, hermit, wandering preacher, and, most famously, founder of the abbey of Fontevraud. There men and women joined together in a monastic life organized so that women ruled men and men served women, according to the founder's plan. As Jacques Dalarun shows in this biography, however, Fontevraud was for Robert only one stopping point in a restless and lifelong journey in search of salvation that took place in roads, forests, towns, and monasteries across France. Hard as the travel was, the spiritual search was more agonizing still. Consumed with a sense of his own sinfulness, sexual and otherwise, Robert lived out penance however he could. The many women who gathered in his wake became partners in his religious quest, and his frequent contact with them was, paradoxically, a centerpiece of his penitential regime. At Fontevraud, he encouraged others to adopt the practice of intense contact with and indeed subservience to women. This reversal of the standard gender hierarchy in the midst of the ongoing battle with sexual temptation has baffled and even enraged observers during Robert's lifetime and ever since. Vividly narrating the course of Robert's life and his relationships with others along the way, the author hews closely to medieval sources, in particular two letters to Robert critical of his nonconformity and his relations with women, along with two admiring accounts written within a few years of his death. This translation by Bruce L. Venarde preserves the novelistic character of the original while updating and augmenting it with full notes, a bibliography, and an introduction both to the book and to scholarly interpretations of Robert in the past two decades. A new preface by Jacques Dalarun completes the reworking of the first full-length biography of Robert of Arbrissel available in English.

In the uniquely urban atmosphere of the twelth and thirteenth centuries in Northern Italy, the conflict between the evolving commercially-based society and anti-commercial religious dogma created a need among the laity for new spiritual responses with which to justify their changing experience. The Humiliati represent one such lay group who chose to disown all worldly goods but remain within their community and work towards its social and moral improvement.
Very few works have dealt singularly with the Humiliati, and none have delved specifically into the role of women in the movement. This book examines the contribution of women to the Humiliati movement, providing original archival evidence which indicates that women dominated the groups' membership. These findings have implications for both women's spirituality and women's work, correcting the received opinion that the patriarchical nature of Italian society and of the Church limited the institutional options available to women. It also suggests that women found innovative ways to participate in the increasingly restrictive textile industry of the region. This work provides a glimpse at the novel ways in which in medieval Italy women were able to satisfy their spiritual and economic needs within the confines of a male dominated Church and society.

A comprehensive examination of the enigma of the Templars and their lost treasure based on original source documents.
- Considers the possibility that the medieval castle of Gisors hides the Templar treasure.
- Examines all the evidence for a secret order within the Templars, whose heretical ideology brought down the wrath of King Philip of France.
When French King Philip the Fair ordered the arrest of the Knights Templars and the confiscation of their property in 1307, the Templars were one of the most powerful forces in Europe, answerable only to the Pope. It was also one of the richest, despite its knights' vow of poverty. Yet not a penny of their immense treasure was ever found. The hunt for this lost treasure has centered on a number of locations, among which is the medieval city of Gisors, a site on the Normandy and French border that is honeycombed with complex underground passageways and chambers. Mysteriously, all attempts to discover what may be concealed in these subterranean corridors are rigorously discouraged by contemporary authorities.
The enigma of the treasure is but one of the many unsolved mysteries concerning this order that continues to haunt our imaginations. Who were these "poor knights of Christ" who made denial of Jesus a requirement of acceptance into the order? What were their true purposes and what was the nature of their secret that drew the wrath of the king of France down on their heads? Was there really a treasure and, if so, what was it--material wealth or something more powerful, such as the Holy Grail or the secret to the philosopher's stone? Was there a secret order within the order that authorized the heretical practices for which they were condemned? In a search for answers to these and other questions, Celtic and medieval scholar Jean Markale goes back to original source documents in an attempt to clear away the baseless assumptions that have sprung up about the Templars and to shine new light on their activities.

Medievalists have long taught that highly emotional Christian devotion, often called 'affective piety', appeared in Europe after the twelfth century and was primarily practiced by communities of mendicants, lay people and women. Emotional monasticism challenges this view. The first study of affective piety in an eleventh-century monastic context, it traces the early history of affective devotion through the life and works of the earliest known writer of emotional prayers, John of Fecamp, abbot of the Norman monastery of Fecamp from 1028-78. Exposing the early medieval monastic roots of later medieval affective piety, the book casts a new light on the devotional life of monks in Europe before the twelfth century and redefines how medievalists should teach the history of Christianity. -- .

In this unprecedented introduction to Byzantine monasticism, based on the Conway Lectures she delivered at the University of Notre Dame in 2014, Alice-Mary Talbot surveys the various forms of monastic life in the Byzantine Empire between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. It includes chapters on male monastic communities (mostly cenobitic, but some idiorrhythmic in late Byzantium), nuns and nunneries, hermits and holy mountains, and a final chapter on alternative forms of monasticism, including recluses, stylites, wandering monks, holy fools, nuns disguised as monks, and unaffiliated monks and nuns. This original monograph does not attempt to be a history of Byzantine monasticism but rather emphasizes the multiplicity of ways in which Byzantine men and women could devote their lives to service to God, with an emphasis on the tension between the two basic modes of monastic life, cenobitic and eremitic. It stresses the individual character of each Byzantine monastic community in contrast to the monastic orders of the Western medieval world, and yet at the same time demonstrates that there were more connections between certain groups of monasteries than previously realized. The most original sections include an in-depth analysis of the challenges facing hermits in the wilderness, and special attention to enclosed monks (recluses) and urban monks and nuns who lived independently outside of monastic complexes. Throughout, Talbot highlights some of the distinctions between the monastic life of men and women, and makes comparisons of Byzantine monasticism with its Western medieval counterpart.