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

by Jodi Bilinkoff

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501721007
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	07/05/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
File size:	187 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jodi Bilinkoff is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is the author of The Avila of St. Teresa, also from Cornell, and coeditor of Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, 1500-1800.

What People are Saying About This

Barbara B. Diefendorf

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.

Thomas Tentler

Jodi Bilinkoff knows the rules of confession and its place in a complex and historically conditioned religious landscape. But with a critical eye and an informed empathy (and without romanticizing) she takes us beyond the routine and into the heart of deeply personal relationships. We are introduced to a special segment of the spiritual elites: doctors of souls with authorial ambitions and the exemplary women who inspired them. We learn how they found each other, and why it matters in many ways to historians. Our cultural stereotypes about Catholic Europe between 1450 and 1750 are subjected to a learned and thoroughly enjoyable revision by Bilinkoff's penetrating analysis of these related lives.

Carlos M. N. Eire

Related Lives is marvelous, indispensable reading. With her fresh approach to the process of saint-making in early modern Spain, Jodi Bilinkoff sheds abundant light on the ways in which the pursuit of holiness and the pursuit of fame could intertwine, and on how female monastics and their male spiritual directors came to depend on one another. As she did in The Avila of Saint Teresa, Bilinkoff once again lays bare the very earthly social fabric of Spanish religiosity without losing sight of what mattered most to the individuals being studied.

Wietse de Boer

In this lucid and elegant volume, Jodi Bilinkoff probes the depths of an uncommon friendship—the intensely personal ties forged by pious women and their confessors across the early-modern Catholic world. Related Lives is the absorbing account of how and why, amidst the strictures of Counter-Reformation society, many such relationships flourished, were molded into exemplary tales, and thus entered the bloodstream of a new religious culture.

Editorial Reviews

Jodi 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

"Related Lives is marvelous, indispensable reading. With her fresh approach to the process of saint-making in early modern Spain, Jodi Bilinkoff sheds abundant light on the ways in which the pursuit of holiness and the pursuit of fame could intertwine, and on how female monastics and their male spiritual directors came to depend on one another. As she did in The Avila of Saint Teresa, Bilinkoff once again lays bare the very earthly social fabric of Spanish religiosity without losing sight of what mattered most to the individuals being studied."

Carlos M. N. Eire

"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

"Jodi Bilinkoff knows the rules of confession and its place in a complex and historically conditioned religious landscape. But with a critical eye and an informed empathy (and without romanticizing) she takes us beyond the routine and into the heart of deeply personal relationships. We are introduced to a special segment of the spiritual elites: doctors of souls with authorial ambitions and the exemplary women who inspired them. We learn how they found each other, and why it matters in many ways to historians. Our cultural stereotypes about Catholic Europe between 1450 and 1750 are subjected to a learned and thoroughly enjoyable revision by Bilinkoff's penetrating analysis of these related lives."

Thomas Tentler

"In this lucid and elegant volume, Jodi Bilinkoff probes the depths of an uncommon friendship—the intensely personal ties forged by pious women and their confessors across the early-modern Catholic world. Related Lives is the absorbing account of how and why, amidst the strictures of Counter-Reformation society, many such relationships flourished, were molded into exemplary tales, and thus entered the bloodstream of a new religious culture."

Wietse de Boer