Description
Book SynopsisIn 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...
Trade ReviewJodi Bilinkoff has written a gem of a book: a fluent and succinct study of the relations between male confessors and women dedicated to spirituality in early modern Europe and the New World.... It would be the ideal introduction to a course devoted to a set of individual lives and a fine component for courses in gender history.... The book chronicles the evolution of a particular kind of pleasureful and rewarding friendship and collaboration, as an elaborate symbiosis develops between the spiritual women and the male confessor-scribe-promoters, who live through them and gain a kind of reflected fame and sanctity.... The book is valuable not only for its long view, but also for its geographical breadth, including much of the Catholic heartland in Europe (Spain, Italy, France, Portugal) as well as Spanish and French colonies in the New World.
* Sixteenth Century Journal *
This study illuminates the rich and compelling nature of the dynamic between male confessors and their female penitents, thereby adding tremendous dimension to our understanding of Catholic devotion in this period.
* Renaissance Quarterly *
