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Author: P. Renee Baernstein
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136694609
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
Power often operates in strange and surprising ways. With A Convent Tale, Renee Baernstein uncovers some of the nuanced methods cloistered women devised to exert their agency. In the tradition of Simon Schama and Steven Ozment, Baernstein uses the compelling story of a single clan, the Sfondrati, to refashion our understanding of the early modern period. Showing the nuns as neither helpless victims nor valiant rebels, but reasonable beings maneuvering as best they could within limits set by class, gender and culture. Baernstein writes against the tendency to depict women as inactive pawns, and shows that even within the convent walls, nuns were empowered by ties with their (often earthly) families and actively involved in the politics of the period. Both a major contribution to scholarship on gender, family and religion in early modern Europe, and a colorful well-told tale of Renaissance intrigue, A Convent Tale is sure to attract a wide range of academic and general readers.
Author: P. Renee Baernstein
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136694609
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316
Get Book Here
Book Description
Power often operates in strange and surprising ways. With A Convent Tale, Renee Baernstein uncovers some of the nuanced methods cloistered women devised to exert their agency. In the tradition of Simon Schama and Steven Ozment, Baernstein uses the compelling story of a single clan, the Sfondrati, to refashion our understanding of the early modern period. Showing the nuns as neither helpless victims nor valiant rebels, but reasonable beings maneuvering as best they could within limits set by class, gender and culture. Baernstein writes against the tendency to depict women as inactive pawns, and shows that even within the convent walls, nuns were empowered by ties with their (often earthly) families and actively involved in the politics of the period. Both a major contribution to scholarship on gender, family and religion in early modern Europe, and a colorful well-told tale of Renaissance intrigue, A Convent Tale is sure to attract a wide range of academic and general readers.
Author: Stephanie Kirk
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813063744
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251
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Book Description
"A valuable and logical step in the progression of critical studies on convent writing. . . . We have moved from seeing women writers as working at the margins to seeing them as writing subjects."—Latin American Research Review "Consider[s] nuns not as merely secular or religious writers, but through the lens of interdisciplinary study, as multifaceted historical agents. . . . The importance of the kind of innovative theoretical work undertaken by this text . . . cannot be over-emphasized, and will offer a both provocative and illuminating read to scholars in a broad range of disciplines."—Journal of International Women’s Studies "Kirk reconstructs aspects of the lives of colonial nuns through close-up readings of select manuscripts and, additionally, of published primary sources. . . . A lively and provocative addition to the literature on colonial Mexico that offers new insights into the dynamics of religious community."—Bulletin of Latin American Research "A thought-provoking contribution to our understanding of community-building among colonial Latin American women."—A Contracorriente "A timely scholarly contribution to the field of gender and religion. . . . Presents a fresh look at convent literature by specifically analyzing alliances, friendships, and communities."—Colonial Latin American Historical Review "An interesting and ambitious study of the discourses associated with convent life in Mexico."—Catholic Historical Review
Author: Rebecca Theresa Reed
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 9781557531346
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
Rebecca Reed and Maria Monk may not be well-known authors today, but these women were publishing sensations in nineteenth-century America. Their lurid tales of life in two North American convents, one in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and the other in Montreal, Canada, sold more than one-half million copies. Reed escaped from the Ursuline convent in Charlestown in 1832. Her dramatic renditions of Roman Catholic ritual practice helped spark a night of violence that resulted in the convent being burned to the ground by an angry mob. Reed's published narrative, Six Months in a Convent, appeared just as the trials of the rioters were ending in 1835, and became an instant literary success. Monk's supporters capitalized on the lucrative market in anti-Catholic literature, by bringing out the pseudo-pornographic Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in 1836. Monk, who claimed her infant daughter had been fathered by a Catholic priest, was in fact a Montreal prostitute rather than a nun. She enjoyed the life of a literary star in New York before her hoax was uncovered. These two narratives are now available for the first time in a single paperback edition. Nancy Lusignan Schultz's introduction provides a fascinating glimpse into the history, development, and marketing of these phenomenal best-sellers. The convent tales by Reed and Monk are classics that must be read by those interested in American studies, popular culture, social and religious history, literature, and women's studies.
Author: Craig A. Monson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226534626
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
Witchcraft. Arson. Going AWOL. Some nuns in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy strayed far from the paradigms of monastic life. Cloistered in convents, subjected to stifling hierarchy, repressed, and occasionally persecuted by their male superiors, these women circumvented authority in sometimes extraordinary ways. But tales of their transgressions have long been buried in the Vatican Secret Archive. That is, until now. In Nuns Behaving Badly, Craig A. Monson resurrects forgotten tales and restores to life the long-silent voices of these cloistered heroines. Here we meet nuns who dared speak out about physical assault and sexual impropriety (some real, some imagined). Others were only guilty of misjudgment or defacing valuable artwork that offended their sensibilities. But what unites the women and their stories is the challenges they faced: these were women trying to find their way within the Catholicism of their day and through the strict limits it imposed on them. Monson introduces us to women who were occasionally desperate to flee cloistered life, as when an entire community conspired to torch their convent and be set free. But more often, he shows us nuns just trying to live their lives. When they were crossed—by powerful priests who claimed to know what was best for them—bad behavior could escalate from mere troublemaking to open confrontation. In resurrecting these long-forgotten tales and trials, Monson also draws attention to the predicament of modern religious women, whose “misbehavior”—seeking ordination as priests or refusing to give up their endowments to pay for priestly wrongdoing in their own archdioceses—continues even today. The nuns of early modern Italy, Monson shows, set the standard for religious transgression in their own age—and beyond.
Author: Margaret Frazer
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 110165144X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
Unholy passions and demonic deaths... In the fair autumn of Our Lord's grace 1431, the nuns of England's St. Frideswide's prepare for the simply ceremonies in which the saintly novice Thomasine will take her holy vows. But their quiet lives of beauty and prayer are thrown into chaos by the merciless arrival of Lady Ermentrude Fenner and her retinue of lusty men, sinful women, and baying hounds. The hard-drinking dowager even keeps a pet monkey for her amusement. She demands wine, a feast.... And her niece, the angelic Thomasine. The lady desires to enrich herself and her reputation by arranging a marriage for the devout novice. She cares nothing for the panic and despair she leaves behind her. But all her cruel and cunning schemes are brought to a sudden end with strange and most unnatural murder. As suspicious eyes turn on the pious Thomasine, it falls to Sister Frevisse, hosteler of the priory and amateur detective, to unravel the webs of unholy passion and dark intrigue that entangle the novice and prove her innocence...or condemn her.
Author: Cassandra L. Yacovazzi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019088102X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 349
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Book Description
Just five weeks after its publication in January 1836, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, billed as an escaped nun's shocking exposé of convent life, had already sold more than 20,000 copies. The book detailed gothic-style horror stories of licentious priests and abusive mothers superior, tortured nuns and novices, and infanticide. By the time the book was revealed to be a fiction and the author, Maria Monk, an imposter, it had already become one of the nineteenth century's best-selling books. In antebellum America only one book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, outsold it. The success of Monk's book was no fluke, but rather a part of a larger phenomenon of anti-Catholic propaganda, riots, and nativist politics. The secrecy of convents stood as an oblique justification for suspicion of Catholics and the campaigns against them, which were intimately connected with cultural concerns regarding reform, religion, immigration, and, in particular, the role of women in the Republic. At a time when the term "female virtue" pervaded popular rhetoric, the image of the veiled nun represented a threat to the established American ideal of womanhood. Unable to marry, she was instead a captive of a foreign foe, a fallen woman, a white slave, and a foolish virgin. In the first half of the nineteenth century, ministers, vigilantes, politicians, and writers--male and female--forged this image of the nun, locking arms against convents. The result was a far-reaching antebellum movement that would shape perceptions of nuns, and women more broadly, in America.
Author: Indu Sundaresan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416586180
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
Now in paperback, internationally bestselling author Indu Sundaresan presents a poignant collection of contemporary short stories about the challenges and consequences faced by women in Indian life today. Like Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, Indu Sundaresan’s In the Convent of Little Flowers gives readers an eloquent and illuminating collection of stories about contemporary Indian life, exploring the cutting-edge issues that surround the clash between ancient tradition and modernity. In the collection’s title story, a young woman adopted by an American family in Seattle receives a letter from Sister Mary Theresa, a nun at the Convent of Little Flowers in Chennai, where she stayed as a child. Unbeknownst to the Indian woman, the nun is her biological mother’s sister. In another story, the grandmother of an Indian journalist begs her grandson to intervene and stop a young widow from being burned alive. And when a teenaged daughter bears a child out of wedlock, her entire family is thrown into turmoil. With their lush prose, vividly rendered settings, and complex characters, these and the other stories in this elegant collection bring readers into the experience of Indian women at home and abroad, where modernity offers them lives their grandmothers could never dream of, while at the same time taking away parts of their history. With a delicate touch, Indu Sundaresan weaves the pieces of the conflict together, presenting a nuanced and unforgettable tapestry.
Author: Candace Robb
Publisher: Diversion Publishing Corp.
ISBN: 1626819777
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 420
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Book Description
“Engrossing . . . Imbued with the flavor of English medieval life, Robb’s story melds true events with fiction to create a gripping historical mystery” (Publishers Weekly). When young nun Joanna Calverley dies of a fever in the town of Beverley in the summer of 1365, she is buried quickly for fear of the plague. But a year later, Archbishop Thoresby learns of a woman who has arrived in York claiming to be the resurrected nun, talking of relic-trading and miracles. And death seems to ride in her wake. The archbishop sends Owen Archer to retrace the woman’s journey, an investigation that leads him across the north from Leeds to Beverley to Scarborough. Along the way he encounters Geoffrey Chaucer, a spy for the king of England, who believes there is a connection between the nun’s troubles, renegade mercenaries, and the powerful Percy family. Back in York, however, Owen’s wife, Lucie, pregnant with their first child, has won the confidence of the mysterious nun and realizes that there are secrets hidden in the woman’s seemingly mad ramblings . . . Based on an enigmatic entry in the records of Clementhorpe Nunnery, this authentic, gripping mystery conjures a fourteenth century ripe with forbidden passions and political intrigue. “[Robb] lives up to the standard set by master medievalist Ellis Peters.” —Booklist
Author: J. Peakman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230244688
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
A fascinating glimpse into the history of sexual perversions and diversions including fetishism, cross-dressing, 'effeminate' men and 'masculinized' women, sodomy, tribadism, masturbation, necrophilia, rape, paedophilia, flagellation, and sado-masochism, asking how these sexual inclinations were viewed at a particular time in history.
Author: Barbara B. Diefendorf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190282606
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
From Penitence to Charity radically revises our understanding of women's place in the institutional and spiritual revival known as the Catholic Reformation. Focusing on Paris, where fifty new religious congregations for women were established in as many years, it examines women's active role as founders and patrons of religious communities, as spiritual leaders within these communities, and as organizers of innovative forms of charitable assistance to the poor. Rejecting the too common view that the Catholic Reformation was a male-dominated movement whose principal impact on women was to control and confine them, the book shows how pious women played an instrumental role, working alongside--and sometimes in advance of--male reformers. At the same time, it establishes a new understanding of the chronology and character of France's Catholic Reformation by locating the movement's origins in a penitential spirituality rooted in the agonies of religious war. It argues that a powerful desire to appease the wrath of God through acts of heroic asceticism born of the wars did not subside with peace but, rather, found new outlets in the creation of austere, contemplative convents. Admiration for saintly ascetics prompted new vocations, and convents multiplied, as pious laywomen rushed to fund houses where, enjoying the special rights accorded founders, they might enter the cloister and participate in convent life. Penitential enthusiasm inevitably waned, while new social and economic tensions encouraged women to direct their piety toward different ends. By the 1630s, charitable service was supplanting penitential asceticism as the dominant spiritual mode. Capitalizing on the Council of Trent's call to catechize an ignorant laity, pious women founded innovative new congregations to aid less favored members of their sex and established lay confraternities to serve society's outcasts and the poor. Their efforts to provide war relief during the Fronde in particular deserve recognition.
