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Author Bilinkoff, Jodi, 1955-

Title Related lives : confessors and their female penitents, 1450-1750 / Jodi Bilinkoff
Published Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 2005

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Description 1 online resource
Contents Cover; RELATED LIVES; Title; Copyright; CONTENTS; LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS; PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS; Introduction; 1. Spiritual Directions; 2. How to Be a Counter-Reformation Hagiographer; 3. Whose Life Is This Anyway?; 4. Soul Mates; 5. Reading Habits; Conclusion; NOTES; SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY; INDEX
Summary 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
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 164-175) and index
Subject Confession -- Catholic Church -- History
Monastic and religious life of women -- History.
Confessors -- History
Spiritual directors -- History
Penitents -- History
Christian hagiography -- History
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Gender Studies.
Christian hagiography
Confession -- Catholic Church
Confessors
Monastic and religious life of women
Penitents
Spiritual directors
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2005013287
ISBN 9781501721007
1501721003
0801442516
9780801442513