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

One happy day, in the midst of writing to her fiancee, her hand stopped writing unbidden; then it continued by itself, etching the words which would change her life forever: '...but there's no point now, as I am going to be a nun.'That bolt from the blue set events in motion that caused Shirley to lose her mother and sisters, her husband to be, her horses, her parties and life of ease. Within months, Shirley had become Sister Agatha. But her faith in her choice never faltered, despite years of great difficulty when her Convent was close to bankruptcy. Her belief took her to London to knock on Sir Paul Getty's door to secure the money to ensure her community would not lose their home...and getting it. Now eighty-five, she looks back on an incredible life of love, loss and belief. This is at once a deeply poignant tale of doomed romance, and a heart-warming story of taking a leap of faith and finding a meaning in life beyond the wealth and comfort she was born into.Whether a believer or not, Sister Agatha's momentous life will touch and inspire, whilst reminding us that it is perhaps better to accept that not everything in the world is yet explained.

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.

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.

One day in 1917, while cooking dinner at home in Manhattan, Margaret Reilly (1884-1937) felt a sharp pain over her heart and claimed to see a crucifix emerging in blood on her skin. Four years later, Reilly entered the convent of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in Peekskill, New York, where, known as Sister Mary of the Crown of Thorns, she spent most of her life gravely ill and possibly exhibiting Christ's wounds. In this portrait of Sister Thorn, Paula M. Kane scrutinizes the responses to this American stigmatic's experiences and illustrates the surprising presence of mystical phenomena in twentieth-century American Catholicism. Drawing on accounts by clerical authorities, ordinary Catholics, doctors, and journalists - as well as on medicine, anthropology, and gender studies - Kane explores American Catholic mysticism, setting it in the context of life after World War I and showing the war's impact on American Christianity. Sister Thorn's life, she reveals, marks the beginning of a transition among Catholics from a devotional, Old World piety to a newly confident role in American society.

13- & 14c- documents illuminate religious, social, and economic history of the period. This second volume of the charters of the Benedictine priory of Eye, a cell of the Abbey of Bernay in Normandy, comprises an introduction to the charters and completes the text of the thirteenth-century cartulary edited in the first volume, together with certain other charters from a fourteenth-century rental and custumary and the very few original deeds which survive. As well as being of interest to those studying ecclesiastical and social history, the charters are important in casting light on the history of the `honor' of Eye itself, in particular the succession of its lords in the twelfth century. Interesting links can be made to earlier volumes in the Suffolk Chartersseries. As an alien priory in the centre of an `honor', Eye has affinities with Stoke by Clare, and the evidence which the charters of Eye provide for local history and genealogy is all the more comprehensive in the light of other charters, particularly those of Sibton, Leiston and Blythburgh. VIVIEN BROWNworked on Eye priory material with her husband, R. Allen Brown, the initiator and first General editor of the series.

Isle of the Saints recreates the harsh yet richly spiritual world of medieval Irish monks on the Christian frontier of barbarian Europe. Lisa Bitel draws on accounts of saints' lives written between 800 and 1200 to explain, from the monks' own perspective, the social networks that bound them to one another and to their secular neighbors.

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 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.

Cartulary of one of the earliest houses of Augustian canons to be established in the diocese of Norwich. The priory of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Blythburgh was one of the earliest of the many houses of Augustinian canons established in the diocese of Norwich; the beginnings of conventual life most likely date from the mid-12th century.

The Henry Bradshaw Society was established in 1890 in commemoration of Henry Bradshaw, University Librarian in Cambridge and a distinguished authority on early medieval manuscripts and liturgies, who died in 1886. The Society was founded for the editing of rare liturgical texts'; its principal focus is on the Western (Latin) Church and its rites, and on the medieval period in particular, from the sixth century to the sixteenth (in effect, from the earliest surviving Christian books until the Reformation). Liturgy was at the heart of Christian worship, and during the medieval period the Christian Church was at the heart of Western society. Study of medieval Christianity in its manifold aspects - historical, ecclesiastical, spiritual, sociological - inevitably involves study of its rites, and for that reason Henry Bradshaw Society publications have become standard source-books for an understanding of all aspects of the middle ages. Moreover, many of the Society's publications have been facsimile editions, and these facsimiles have become cornerstones of the science of palaeography. The society was founded for the editing of rare liturgical texts; its principal focus is on the Western (Latin) Church and its rites, and on the medieval period in particular, from the sixth century to the Reformation. Study of medieval Christianity - at the heart of Western society - inevitably involves study of its rites, and the society's publications are essential to an understanding of all aspects (historical, ecclesiastical, spiritual, sociological) of the middle ages.

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.

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?

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.

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.

"Caner draws together traditions, episodes, and groups from across the geographical expanse of the Roman Empire (the Syrian Orient, North Africa, Constantinople), to present the wandering monk as a figure around whom the ecclesiastical battle for authority fought between bishops and ascetics took on acute articulations. By focusing on religious practices rather than doctrinal teachings, Caner is able to weave together hitherto separate discussions to reveal a larger pattern of profound change in late antique Christian culture, as different models of monasticism competed for economic and political power in urban centers. This is very important work. It makes major contributions to our understanding of early Christian asceticism, the emergence of monasticism as an institution within church and society, and church-state relations in the later Roman Empire."--Susan Ashbrook Harvey, author of Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus and the "Lives of the Eastern Saints.

"Caner has cut through to the heart of central issues in the study of early Christian asceticism: social stability, economic self-sufficiency, and the reliability of the sources at our disposal. Those who were apparently unstable and dependent, the wanderers and beggars of his title, occupy the foreground of his account; but his chief argument is that they have to be placed in a broader social and historical context that softens the edges of their idiosyncrasy, and that we have to be careful not to take at face value the exaggerated categories of mutually belligerent parties in the church. . . . The second half of the work begins by tackling the "Messalian" movement--asking whether it is appropriate to talk of a"movement" in so distinctive a way. The supposedly typical "Messalian" inclination--an inclination to dramatic indigence in the service of continuous prayer--seems less sui generis, when placed alongside more moderate forms of ascetic dedication. We are warned, therefore, not to accept too readily the paradigms of heresy-hunters like Epiphanius. Caner's account marks an important step forward in our understanding of such patterns of ascetic behavior. Caner also ventures upon an equally fresh and welcome investigation of what lay behind the contentious attitudes of John Chrysostom and Nilus of Ancyra, and then--perhaps even more exciting--explains how the whole study transforms our understanding of the maelstrom of politics that impinged upon religious debate between the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon. We are thus brought to realize how eagerly and disruptively ascetic rivals struggled to attract and retain the patronage of the Christian elite, even to the imperial level."--Philip Rousseau, author of "Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt, and "Basil of Caesarea

On the periphery of the Roman empire, the sixth-century desert city of Gaza served as a crossroads between Palestine and Egypt. The nearby village of Tawatha was home to the thriving monastery of Abbot Seridos and the renowned anchorites Barsanuphius, known to the people as the Great Old Man, and his disciple John. The laity of the area looked to the monks for spiritual leadership, as did their brother monks, bishops, and religious leaders from as far away as Jerusalem and Constantinople. Having adopted a life of physical isolation, the monks communicated with others by letters, offering guidance in such matters as treatment of slaves, distribution of alms, interpretation of visions, and social relations with pagans and Jews. This extraordinary correspondence opens a window into the spiritual world of the desert monastery and the lay community it served. In Disciples of the Desert, Jennifer Hevelone-Harper uses a careful study of the letters to reveal fascinating insights into the monastic community and sixth-century Christian spirituality. Hevelone-Harper explains the network of spiritual authority that was created to lead the monastic community and discusses how monastic leaders responded to challenges to authority, appointed successors, and chose and mentored disciples. She reveals the immense love that Abbot Seridos, Barsanuphius, and John had for their fellow monastics and for the lay community in Tawatha, Gaza, and beyond.

"I assume that historical sources can convey human feeling, even though it is fruitless to psychologize individual friends or to reach complete explanations about their motives. I simply accept that because medieval Christians believed in friendship and felt the need for it, some of them both practiced and lived out friendships." from the new Introduction

Human beings have always formed personal friendships. Some cultures have left behind the evidence of philosophical discussion; some have provided only private or semipublic letters. By comparing these, one discerns the effect exercised by the society in which the writers lived, its opportunities, and its restrictions. The cloistered monks of medieval Europe, who have bequeathed a rich literary legacy on the subject, have always had to take into account the overwhelming fact of community. Brian Patrick McGuire finds that in seeking friends and friendship, medieval men and women sought self-knowledge, the enjoyment of life, the commitment of community, and the experience of God.

First published in 1988, Friendship and Community has been widely debated, inspiring the current interest among medievalists in the subject of friendship. It has also informed other fields within medieval history, including monasticism, spirituality, psychology, and the relationship between self and community. In a new introduction to the Cornell edition, McGuire surveys the critical reaction to the original edition and subsequent research on the subject of medieval friendship."

Recorded during a seven-month stay in a Trappist monastery in Genesee, New York, Henri Nouwen's record of his spiritual journey is an insightful and compassionate inspiration to all who seek to know themselves better.

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?

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.

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.

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.