Bilinkoff, Jodi (Fellow, 1999-00)
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022
From the publisher's description:
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.
Subjects: History; Religion; Catholicism; Early Modern Period; Hagiography; Priests; Women