Paperback: The Ávila of Saint Teresa provides both a fascinating account of social and religious change in one important Castilian city and a historical analysis of the life and work of the religious mystic Saint Teresa of Jesus.
Jodi Bilinkoff's rich socioeconomic history of sixteenth-century Ávila illuminates the conditions that helped to shape the religious reforms for which the city's most famous citizen is celebrated.
Bilinkoff takes as her subject the period during which Ávila became a centre of intense religious activity and the home of a number of influential mystics and religious reformers. During this time, she notes, urban expansion and increased economic opportunity fostered the social and political aspirations of a new "middle class" of merchants, professionals, and minor clerics. This group supported the creation of religious institutions that fostered such values as individual spiritual revitalization, religious poverty, and apostolic service to the urban community. According to Bilinkoff, these reform movements provided an alternative to the traditional, dynastic style of spirituality expressed by the ruling elite, and profoundly influenced Saint Teresa in her renewal of Carmelite monastic life.
A focal point of the book is the controversy surrounding Teresa's foundation of a new convent in August 1562. Seeking to discover why people in Ávila strenuously opposed this ostensibly innocent act and to reveal what distinguished Teresa's convent from the many others in the city, Bilinkoff offers a detailed examination of the social meaning of religious institutions in Ávila.
Historians of early modern Europe, especially those concerned with the history of religious culture, urban history, and women's history, specialists in religious studies, and other readers interested in the life of Saint Teresa or in the history of Catholicism will welcome The Avila of Saint Teresa.
First published by Cornell University Press in 1989, this new edition of The Ávila of Saint Teresa includes a new introduction by the author.
About the author: Dr Jodi Bilinkoff is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her research interests include religion, gender, life-writing, and the construction of memory in early modern Europe, particularly Spain. After working for many years on women in Catholic culture, more recently she has turned her attention to masculine identity, especially male clerical identity.
In her current research project, she engages all these issues by examining the life, afterlife, and legacy of St John of the Cross (1542-1591). Her book-in-progress, John of the Cross: The History, Mystery, and Memory of a Spanish Saint, will not be a conventional biography, but rather, a critical study of the manifold, at times, conflicting meanings this intriguing figure has held for individuals and communities, both during and after his lifetime.
She is also the author of Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450-1750 (2005).
That sounds interesting. Thanks.
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