Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450-1750 (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Few readers of his classic biography of Martin Luther can forget Roland Bainton's vivid account of his protagonist's struggle with the sacrament of penance..." (more)
Key Phrases: muger fuerte, other clerical promoters, santidad controvertida, Juan Bautista, Claude Martin, Teresa of Avila (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

In early modern Catholic Europe and its colonies priests frequently developed close relationships with pious women, serving as their spiritual directors during their lives, and their biographers after their deaths. In this richly illustrated book, Jodi Bilinkoff explores the ways in which clerics related to those female penitents whom they determined were spiritually gifted, and how they conveyed the live stories of these women to readers. The resulting popular literatures of hagiography and spiritual autobiography produced hundreds of texts designed to establish models of behavior for the Catholic faithful in the period between the advent of printing and the beginning of the modern age.

Bilinkoff finds that confessional relations and the texts that document them reveal much about gender and social values. She uses life narratives, primarily from Spain, but also from France, Italy, Portugal, Spanish America, and French Canada, to examine the ways in which clerics presented female penitents as exemplary, and how they constructed their own identities around their interactions with exceptional women. These multilayered texts, she suggests, offer compelling accounts of individuals caught up in the pursuit of holiness, and provide a key to understanding the resilience of Catholic culture in an age of religious change and conflict.

From the Inside Flap

"Related Lives contributes to our understanding of early modern Catholicism by exploring the complex relationship between the priests who took on the role of confessor or spiritual director to pious women and their female penitents. Jodi Bilinkoff provides a comprehensive view of the actual practice of confession, the confessor-penitent relationship, and the exploitation of this relationship in the crafting of pious biographies for the edification of other early modern Catholics."—Barbara B. Diefendorf, Boston University

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 200 pages
• Publisher: Cornell University Press (October 6, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801442516
• ISBN-13: 978-0801442513
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: No customer reviews yet. Be the first.
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,870,070 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)