Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World

Alison Weber is Professor of Spanish with a joint appointment in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia, USA.

List of Illustrations

Contributors

A Note on Texts and Translations

Introduction Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern Catholic World: The Historiographic Challenge

Alison Weber

PART I Service

1 Community, Conflict, and Local Authority: The Basque Seroras

Amanda Scott

2 The Company of St. Ursula in Italy in Counter-Reformation Italy

Querciolo Mazzonis

3 Nursing as a Vocation or a Profession? Women’s Status and the Meaning of Healing in Early Modern France and England

Susan Dinan

Part II Perceptions of Holiness

4 Historicizing the Beatas: The Figures behind Reformation and Counter-Reformation Conflicts

María Laura Giordano

5 Ecco la santa! Printed Italian Biographies of Devout Laywomen, Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries

Anne Jacobson Schutte

6 Flying in Formation: Subjectivity and Collectivity in Luisa de Melgarejo de Soto’s Mystical Practices

Stacey Schlau

7 Illuminated Islands: Luisa de los Reyes and the Inquisition in Manila

Jessica Fowler

PART III Confessional Crossings

8 Elastic Institutions: Beguine Communities in Early Modern Germany

Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane

9 Neither Nun nor Laywoman: Entering Lutheran Convents during the Reformation of Female Religious Communities in the Duchy of Braunschweig, 1542-1655

Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer

10 Marina de Saavedra: A Devout Laywomen on a Confessional Frontier (Zamora, 1558-1559)

Doris Moreno Martínez

11 Devout Recusant Women, Advice Manuals, and the Creation of Holy Households "under Siege"

Ellen A. Macek

PART IV Alliances

12 Convent Alternatives for Rich and Poor Girls in Seventeenth-Century Florence: The Lay Conservatories of Eleonora Ramirez di Montalvo (1602-59)

Jennifer Haraguchi

13 Anne Line: Vowed Laywoman, Recusant Martyr, and Elizabethan Saint

Robert E. Scully, S. J.

14 Letters, Books, and Relics: Material and Spiritual Networks in the Life of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (1564-1614)

María J. Pando-Canteli

15 Women Apostles in Early Modern Japan, 1549-1650

Haruko Nawata Ward

16 Jesuit Apologias for Laywomen’s Spirituality

Alison Weber

Glossary

Index