The Souls of Purgatory PDF Download

Author: Ursula de Jesús
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 9780826328281
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
This translation of part of the diary of a 17th century Peruvian mystic includes the convent life of slaves and former slaves and baroque Catholic spiritual experiences from the perspective of a woman of color.

Author: Stephen Haliczer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190287519
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
One day in 1599, in the Spanish village of Saria, seven-year-old Maria Angela Astorch fell ill and died after gorging herself on unripened almonds. Maria's sister Isabel, a nun, came to view the body with her mother superior, an ecstatic mystic and visionary named Maria Angela Serafina. Overcome by the sight of the dead girl's innocent face, Serafina began to pray fervently for the return of the child's soul to her body. Entering a trance, she had a vision in which the Virgin Mary gave her a sign. At once little Maria Angela started to show signs of life. A moment later she scrambled to the ground and was soon restored to perfect health. During the Counter-Reformation, the Church was confronted by an extraordinary upsurge of feminine religious enthusiasm like that of Serafina. Inspired by new translations of the lives of the saints, devout women all over Catholic Europe sought to imitate these "athletes of Christ" through extremes of self-abnegation, physical mortification, and devotion. As in the Middle Ages, such women's piety often took the form of ecstatic visions, revelations, voices and stigmata. Stephen Haliczer offers a comprehensive portrait of women's mysticism in Golden Age Spain, where this enthusiasm was nearly a mass movement. The Church's response, he shows, was welcoming but wary, and the Inquisition took on the task of winnowing out frauds and imposters. Haliczer draws on fifteen cases brought by the Inquisition against women accused of "feigned sanctity," and on more than two dozen biographies and autobiographies. The key to acceptance, he finds, lay in the orthodoxy of the woman's visions and revelations. He concludes that mysticism offered women a way to transcend, though not to disrupt, the control of the male-dominated Church.

Author: Magnus Lundberg
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789150624434
Category : Latin America
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The author explores the relationship between contemplative and apostolic aspects of religious life in accounts by and about religious women in the Spanish Indies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Author: Francisco de Osuna
Publisher: Paulist Press
ISBN: 9780809121458
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 644

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Book Description
Francisco de Osuna (c. 1492-c. 1540) Spanish Franciscan and mystic, wrote a series of maxims as a practical guide for recollection. These were arranged into a series of Spiritual Alphabets, this being the third.

Author: Stephen Haliczer
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195148630
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Using case-studies and biographies, the author examines women's mysticism in 16th- and 17th-century Spain and investigates the spiritual forces that provided women with a way to transcend the control of the male-dominated Catholic Church.

Author: James M. Córdova
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292753179
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
In the eighteenth century, New Spaniards (colonial Mexicans) so lauded their nuns that they developed a local tradition of visually opulent portraits, called monjas coronadas or “crowned nuns,” that picture their subjects in regal trappings at the moment of their religious profession and in death. This study identifies these portraits as markers of a vibrant and changing society that fused together indigenous and Euro-Christian traditions and ritual practices to construct a new and complex religious identity that was unique to New Spain. To discover why crowned-nun portraits, and especially the profession portrait, were in such demand in New Spain, this book offers a pioneering interpretation of these works as significant visual contributions to a local counter-colonial discourse. James M. Córdova demonstrates that the portraits were a response to the Spanish crown’s project to modify and modernize colonial society—a series of reforms instituted by the Bourbon monarchs that threatened many nuns’ religious identities in New Spain. His analysis of the portraits’ rhetorical devices, which visually combined Euro-Christian and Mesoamerican notions of the sacred, shows how they promoted local religious and cultural values as well as client-patron relations, all of which were under scrutiny by the colonial Church. Combining visual evidence from images of the “crowned nun” with a discussion of the nuns’ actual roles in society, Córdova reveals that nuns found their greatest agency as Christ’s brides, a title through which they could, and did, challenge the Church’s authority when they found it intolerable.

Author: Teresa of Avila
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
ISBN: 0872209075
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
"The Book of Her Life" is the spiritual autobiography of a Counter Reformation mystic and monastic reformer of sixteenth century Spain. Introduction by Jodi Bilinkoff.

Author: María de San José Salazar
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226734625
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
María de San José Salazar (1548-1603) took the veil as a Discalced ("barefoot") Carmelite nun in 1571, becoming one of Teresa of Avila's most important collaborators in religious reform and serving as prioress of the Seville and Lisbon convents. Within the parameters of the strict Catholic Reformation in Spain, María fiercely defended women's rights to define their own spiritual experience and to teach, inspire, and lead other women in reforming their church. María wrote this book as a defense of the Discalced practice of setting aside two hours each day for conversation, music, and staging of religious plays. Casting the book in the form of a dialogue, María demonstrates through fictional conversations among a group of nuns during their hours of recreation how women could serve as very effective spiritual teachers for each other. The book includes one of the first biographical portraits of Teresa and Maria's personal account of the troubled founding of the Discalced convent at Seville, as well as her tribulations as an Inquisitional suspect. Rich in allusions to women's affective relationships in the early modern convent, Book for the Hour of Recreation also serves as an example of how a woman might write when relatively free of clerical censorship and expectations. A detailed introduction and notes by Alison Weber provide historical and biographical context for Amanda Powell's fluid translation.

Author: St Teresa of Avila
Publisher: Cosimo, Inc.
ISBN: 1605206148
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
The works of Spanish nun SAINT TERESA OF AVILA (1515-1582) rank among the most extraordinary mystical writings of Roman Catholicism and among the classics of all religious traditions... and her own life story is considered one of the finest autobiographies in any language. From her carefree childhood through her life as an ascetic Carmelite nun, from her visions of Satan through her worship of God, this is her passionate yet earthy retelling of her struggles with temptation, her work founding and ruling convents, and her devotion to God. Hailed by those seeking spiritual succor as one of the most accessible guides to achieving a closer relationship to God through prayer, this extraordinary book remains a commanding entry to numinous Christianity.

Author: William Thomas Walsh
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1365203417
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
This book is on the Inquisition, particularly the Spanish Inquisition as opposed to the Roman Inquisition in the years following the Spanish Reconquista. Walsh delves into the Inquisition, its practice, purpose, history and personalities. The Inquisition was not a bloodthirsty BDSM fest gone wild. It was a reasoned response to infiltration of the Catholic Church by enemies of the Christian Faith who pretended to be Christians in order to pervert worship, doctrine and weaken Christendom. Anyone wishing to understand the Inquisition would to well to read Characters and learn of the heroes of the Faith, Cardinal Ximenes, Torquemada, and others who fought the good fight for Jesus Christ and his Church, After reading Characters, you will never look at the Inquisition in the same way.