Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
Spirituality, Gender, and the Self in Renaissance Italy : Angela Merici and the Company of St. Ursula (1474-1540), Paperback / softback Book

Spirituality, Gender, and the Self in Renaissance Italy : Angela Merici and the Company of St. Ursula (1474-1540) Paperback / softback

Paperback / softback

Item not Available

Description

Angela Merici (1474-1540), like other mystic women such as Catherine of Siena, was considered a ""santa viva"" - a living saint - by virtue of her mysticism, sacred knowledge, human qualities, and participation in civic life.

However, Angela's originality and genius reside above all in the foundation of the Company of St.

Ursula. It is there that she put her theology into practice and translated her spiritual ideas and experience into a defined model of religious life for women. ""Spirituality, Gender, and the Self in Renaissance Italy"" places St.

Angela Merici and her Company of St. Ursula in historical and religious context and examines them from a variety of perspectives: institutional, social, spiritual, and cultural.

By analyzing Merici's spirituality, the book contributes to two fields of research that have been particularly rich and contentious: women's religious life and early modern Catholicism.

The Company of St. Ursula, long mistaken for a charitable or educational confraternity, proposed a form of consecration for women outside the convent, similar to that lived by late medieval women such as the beguines and the tertiaries.

Merici's ideal of spiritual life - inward-looking, a-institutional, democratic, public, and transcendent - codified into a religious rule the ""irregular"" features of the female approach to the sacred.

It offered women the possibility of living beyond the limits imposed on them.

Furthermore, Merici's spirituality is compared with a vast array of religious practices promoted by important religious thinkers of her time, such as Battista da Crema, Erasmus of Rotterdam, and Ignatius Loyola.

The book seeks to understand the historical significance of spirituality by linking religious models with relevant aspects of Renaissance society and culture.

In particular, the author examines the forms of relationship with God and perfection in relation to a Renaissance notion of the ""self"" and in connection with gender concepts.

Methodologically, the application of historical, literary, cultural, and anthropological concepts to the subject leads to a rich cross-fertilization of theoretical approaches.

Information

£38.50

Item not Available
Item not Available
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information