In The Life and Afterlife of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, Kenneth Baxter Wolf offers a study and translation of the testimony given by witnesses at the canonization hearings of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, who died in 1231 in Marburg, Germany, at the age of twenty-four. The bulk of the depositions were taken from people who claimed to have been healed by the intercession of this new saint. Their descriptions of their maladies and their efforts to secure relief at Elizabeth's shrine in Marburg provide the modern reader not only with a detailed, inside look at the genesis of a saint's cult, but also with an unusually clear window into the lives and hopes of ordinary people living in Germany at the time.
Beyond testimony about her miracles, the papal commissioners also heard witnesses speak to the holiness of Elizabeth's life. Four women who knew Elizabeth from her arrival at the Wartburg castle in Thuringia as the future wife of Landgrave Ludwig IV to her death as a caregiver in the hospital that she founded in Marburg provide vivid vignettes about her life. Together with the testimony of Elizabeth's confessor and guardian, Conrad of Marburg, they capture in words the Hungarian princess's tireless, creative efforts to "cure" her life of privilege with its opposite: a life of voluntary deprivation and direct service to the poor and sick.

Eulogius (d. 859), a priest living under Islamic rule in Cordoba, is our principal source for the so-called "Cordoban martyrs' movement" (850-859), in the course of which forty-eight Christians were decapitated for religious offenses against Islam. The majority of the victims were condemned for blasphemy, having deliberately flouted proscriptions against public expressions of disrespect for Muhammad. Interestingly enough, the Cordoban Christian community was not of one mind when it came to interpreting such provocative acts. While some were inclined to embrace the executed Christians as martyrs of the classic Roman type, others criticized them as self-immolators whose unprovoked outbursts only complicated the working relationship between the Christian community and the Muslim authorities. The writings of Eulogius, which were designed to record the deaths and present them as legitimate martyrdoms, allow both for the reconstruction of Christian life under Muslim rule and an appreciation for the range of Christian attitudes toward Islam in ninth-century al-Spain. They also capture Eulogius' self-conscious effort to construct a saint cult despite the absence of wide support for the "martyrs." This is the first complete rendering of Eulogius' writings into English, and will be a valuable resource for historians and theologians alike.

Paul Alvarus wrote the Indiculus luminosus in 854 in response to the executions of a number of Córdoban Christians, beginning with the monk Isaac in 851, who had denounced Muhammad in public. The first half of the treatise offers an extended apologia in defence of the militant actions of these spontaneous blasphemers. In the second half, Alvarus argues at length, on the basis of key passages in Daniel and Job, that Muhammad was a precursor to Antichrist. Alvarus undertook this exegetical project not only to create a context within which the actions of the Córdoban blasphemers would make sense, but to criticize the Córdoban Christian leadership at the time for being too cosy with the local Islamic rulers. While Alvarus relied on Jerome’s Commentary on Daniel and Gregory’s Moralia in Iob, he transcended them, offering a truly novel exegesis. In the process, he shed important light on the nature of Christian life under Islamic rule and demonstrated a surprisingly deep knowledge of Islam. The Indiculus luminosus is the perfect complement to the writings of his friend, Eulogius, who may in fact have encouraged Alvarus to undertake this task.

Saint Francis of Assisi is arguably the most attractive saint ever produced by the Catholic Church. The unusually high regard with which he is held has served to insulate him from any real criticism of the kind of sanctity that he embodied: sanctity based first and foremost on his deliberate pursuit of poverty. In this book, Kenneth Baxter Wolf takes a fresh look at Francis and the idea of voluntary poverty as a basis for Christian perfection. Wolf's point of departure is a series of simple but hitherto unasked questions about the precise nature of Francis's poverty: How did he go about transforming himself from a rich man to a poor one? How successful was this transformation? How did his self-imposed poverty compare to the involuntary poverty of those he met in and around Assisi? What did poor people of this type get out of their contact with Francis? What did Francis get out of his contact with them? Wolf finds that while Francis's conception of poverty as a spiritual discipline may have opened the door to salvation for wealthy Christians like himself, it effectively precluded the idea that the poor could use their own involuntary poverty as a path to heaven. Based on a thorough reconsideration of the earliest biographies of the saint, as well as Francis's own writings, Wolf's work sheds important new light on the inherent ironies of poverty as a spiritual discipline and its relationship to poverty as a socio-economic affliction.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Originally published in 1988, this book offers an important insight into the so-called 'martyrdom movement' that occurred in Cordoba in the 850s. It includes a biographical treatment of the ninth-century Cordoban priest Eulogius, who witnessed and recorded the martyrdoms of over forty Christians at the hands of Muslim authorities. Eulogius' hagiographical task was complicated by the fact that many of the Christians in Cordoba at the time resented the provocative actions of the martyrs that led to their executions, claiming that their public denunciations of Islam were inappropriate given the relative tolerance of the emir. This book will be of value to scholars and others with an interest in the history of Muslim Spain, the history of Muslim-Christian interaction, and historical ideas of sanctity.

Eulogius (d. 859), a priest living under Islamic rule in Cordoba, is our principal source for the so-called "Cordoban martyrs' movement" (850-859), in the course of which forty-eight Christians were decapitated for religious offenses against Islam. The majority of the victims were condemned for blasphemy, having deliberately flouted proscriptions against public expressions of disrespect for Muhammad. Interestingly enough, the Cordoban Christian community was not of one mind when it came to interpreting such provocative acts. While some were inclined to embrace the executed Christians as martyrs of the classic Roman type, others criticized them as self-immolators whose unprovoked outbursts only complicated the working relationship between the Christian community and the Muslim authorities. The writings of Eulogius, which were designed to record the deaths and present them as legitimate martyrdoms, allow both for the reconstruction of Christian life under Muslim rule and an appreciation for the range of Christian attitudes toward Islam in ninth-century al-Spain. They also capture Eulogius' self-conscious effort to construct a saint cult despite the absence of wide support for the "martyrs." This is the first complete rendering of Eulogius' writings into English, and will be a valuable resource for historians and theologians alike.

From the perspective of the Hispano-Romans, the Visigoths who invaded Spain in the mid-fifth century were heretical barbarians. But Leovigild's military success and Reccared's conversion to Catholic Christianity led to more positive assessments of the Gothic role in Iberian history. John of Biclaro (c.590) and Isidore of Seville (c.625) authored histories that projected the Gothic achievements back on to their uncertain beginnings, transforming them from antagonists of the Roman Empire to protagonists of a new, independent Chistianity in Spain.