History

In a 1973 comic book titled Archie’s Clean Slate, comic icon Archie Andrews took the form of an anthropomorphic lion to explain to his pre-teen readership that “any place that doesn’t worship God will become a jungle!” In this and other titles in the widely-distributed Spire Christian Comics series, cartoonist Al Hartley presented to his readership an evangelicalism quite different than that which would burst onto the United States political scene at the end of the 1970s. While that later movement was characterized by a reactionary politics, the evangelicalism of Spire Christian Comics evidences a deep (if sometimes naive) concern with the psycho-spiritual well-being of its audience. This concern takes the form of an injunction to be filled with Jesus Christ; consequently, a diverse range of activities and ideologies - ranging from Nazism to narcissism, communism to consumerism, pills to pornography - are all presented as means of false fulfillment, occupying a space in the human person that is properly filled only by Christ. These comics provide insight into evangelical political motivations in the 1970s and early 1980s, which, I suggest, were characterized by a religious system that understood social problems in terms of personal psycho-spiritual disorder, rather than as structural problems within societies or governments.

(SCN) maintain a vibrant presence in ministry in the US. This article presents an overview of their co-foundress, Catherine Spalding, and shows Mother Catherine to be the creative, mission-driven, and articulate leader that is still very much in need in today's society. If you all have hearts as devoted to the interests of the Community as mine is, there would truly be but one common interest, and self would be laid aside.-No one should be anxious to appear as having done more, nor others less. Our Community must be the centre from which all our good works must emanate and in the name of the Community all must be done.-Then let none of us be ambitious as to who does more or who does less. God will judge it all hereafter.

BEFORE the renewal of religious life that has occupied much of the last quarter-century, many congregations of Catholic sisters incorporated "shrouding" into their profession ceremonies.1 After taking the traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, newly-professed ...

Barbara Welter concludes her pathbreaking article, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860,” by declaring that “[Various forces in their lives] … called forth responses from woman, which differed from those she was trained to believe were hers by nature and divine decree. The very perfection of True Womanhood, moreover, carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction. For if woman was so very little less than the angels, she should surely take a more active part in running the world, especially since men were making such a hash of things” [174]. Traditionally, in both Welter’s original work and the many efforts that have subsequently followed, the living out of “True Womanhood” and the creative subversion it unintentionally inspired have been understood almost exclusively in either secular or Protestant contexts. This article explores the role of Catholic education by sisters in both reinforcing and undermining Victorian gender roles, and specifically analyzes the contribution...

At the heart of Garnett and Harris's anthology is the exploration of how religious experiences inform migrants' self-identity and their engagement with the "secular" public sphere of the urban landscapes in which they settle. The common thread that weaves through the various chapters is that the public spheres of today's modern cities are vibrant spaces in which ongoing negotiations of socio-religious identities take place, within a community, between various communities, and always in relation to the political. The collection adds to the work of scholars (Ammerman, Knott, McGuire, Orsi, Tweed, V asquez, and Vertovec) in the areas of lived religion, sociology of religion, social anthropology, and religion in the public sphere, as well as migration, identity, spatial, and urban studies. It provides ethnographic analyses that speak to the spatial-political components necessitating the navigation of the politics of difference/recognition within the public realm. This text is an important anthology of nineteen chapters intended for academics, researchers, and graduate students, presenting case studies from around the globe. Three chapters set the stage by offering a theoretical overview of past assumptions within the academy that have framed some past analyses: Western liberal Christian values, normative social-science models, and the construction of the categories of analysis itself. Aside from the introductory and concluding chapters, the three theoretical and sixteen research essays are grouped into four thematic sections: linguistic, spatial, generational and gender, and finally public policy, a section that explores local relationships against the backdrop of global economic and political forces post-9/11. An international group of scholars from Australia, Canada, China, Europe, Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States contribute to the various essays resulting in a rich tapestry of "on the ground" research through which the central theme of the anthology weaves: to think historically about the "ways in which religious constructions of identity and ways of imagining the world have engaged with the contingencies and pluralism of migrational life in the modern city" with an eye to "de-familiarize and challenge settled assumptions" about categories such as migrants/settled, religious/secular, and modernist/traditionalist within the modern cityscape.

This article provides a detailed analysis of the Regula Donati, a seventh-century rule for nuns which was influenced by the Columbanian (or “Hiberno-Frankish”) monastic movement. The rule combines elements of the Regula Benedicti, Caesarius’s Regula ad virgines and the Rules ascribed to Columbanus. I show that a close comparison of the original texts with Donatus’s “revision” provides a wealth of information about everyday life in early medieval monasteries (e.g., the role of writing and literacy, manual labor, and clothing) and also reveals fundamental shifts in spirituality and monastic theology, particularly a shift from concepts of discipline based on obedience, humility, prohibition, punishment, and enclosure towards a system that is based on knowledge, control, permission, and the practice of confession and penance. The text of the Regula Donati has traditionally been dismissed as a mere compilation of older monastic rules, yet Donatus succeeds in producing an entirely new and innovative monastic program through conscious omissions, rearrangement of his material, and subtle shifts in terminology.

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What do a rnonastery and an airplane have in cornrnon? Both are closed cornmunities; rhere is no way out (at !east after the plane has started). Both are regulaced by rules different from those followed in the world outside. In both cases there is a clear sense of hierarchy and a common goal. Entering a monastery should bring us doser to paradise; a plane should bring us to sorne sort of holiday paradise (if not, we end up at a conference). There are, however, also sorne differences: a plane trip usually cakes a couple of hours, which makes bearable the rules imposed on us, the enforced asceticism, and the spatial limitations (which, of course, depend on the airline). Entering a monastery means committing oneself to living a restricted !ife in a closed communiry for the rest of one's earthly existence, and this individual commitment is only a short episode in the long !ife of an instirution thar is organized and endowed with the purpose of existing un til the end of time 1 • The sociologist Airlie Hochschild uses the example of flight attendanrs ro exemplify her mode! of whac she calls ,emotion work" and ,emotion management". Insread of assuming thar destructive emotions and their ourward expression simply have ro be suppressed, she investigates how in many work-spheres positive feelings are shaped by a conscious and strictly regulated ourward acting. For Hochschild, the relation berween feeling and acting is not a one-way road. Certain behavior-imposed and self-imposed-evokes feelings, nor only on chose within one's surrounding, but also within the one who aces. Flight attendants are trained to smile in orcier to shape ·a pleasanr atmosphere and to create happiness, which eventually affects themselves and brings them into a stace of happiness, which !ases as long as the specifie constellation, but inevitably creates painful tensions berween the artificial yet 1 This article is basd on a profound revision of an essay published several years ago: Albrecht DIEM, Van liefde, vrees en zwijgen. Emoties en ,emotioneel beleid' in vroegmiddeleeuwse kloosters. Groniek. Historisch Tijdschrift 173 (2006) 409-423; many ideas broughr forward in this ,,try our" needed to be modified and refined. -The following abbreviations will be used: RBen = Regula Benedicri, ed. Jean NEUPVILLE-Adalbert DE VoGÜÉ (SC 181-182, Paris 1971); RCaeV = Caesarius of Arles, Regula ad virgines, ed. Adalbert DE VoGÜÉ-Joël CouRREAu (SC 345, Paris 1988) 170-272; RMag = Regula Magistri, ed. Adalbert DE VoGüÉ (SC 105-106, Paris 1965}; Rcui =Regula cuiusdam ad virgines (also called Regula Waldeberci), ed. Jacques-Paul MIGNE (PL 88, Paris 1862) 1051-1070; quotations from tbe Rcui are based on a forthcoming new edition. 1 would like to thank Barbara Rosenwcin for her commems and suggestions and for allowing me to work with her forrhcoming article on ,Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions", and William Roberts for in: Christina Lutter (ed.), Funktionsräume, Wahrnehmungsräume, Gefühlsräume. Mittelalterliche Lebensformen zwischen Kloster und Hof, Vienna/Munich: Böhlau/ Oldenbourg 2011, pp. 17-39.

This article provides an extensive analysis of the Regula Donati, a rule for nuns written around 650. It compares the Rule with the Regula Benedicti in order to gain insights into monastic life and practice in 7th-century Francia and and into the spirituality and monastic theology within the 'Hiberno-Frankish' monastic movement. It discusses monastic concepts of space, the body, confession, discipline and hierarchy.

This article suggests to view monasticism as a sequence of 'unisex-experiments' and to reflect on the fact that the medieval world developed monastic ideals that were to a large extent applicable equally to women and men. Furthermore, it analyzes the different textual techniques to describe female religious life as a mere variant of a male model. It contrasts this marginalization of the female 'variant' with an archeology of concepts of religious life, which shows that a lot of central aspects of medieval religious life (of women and men) had its roots not in desert father asceticism but in the tradition of urban praying virgins and widows. The 'first medieval monk' was, in fact, a religious woman.

This article discusses the role of the (re-)foundation of Saint-Maurice d’Agaune in 515 for the creation of a post-Roman Burgundian identity. Bishop Maximus of Geneva and the Burgundian king Sigismund established on an Roman martyr shrine a new type of monastery in which monks recruited from the Burgundian court and from local episcopal sees were supposed to pray incessantly in support of the King and the Burgundian Kingdom. The foundation of Saint-Maurice marked the transition from a Kingdom of Burgundians to a Burgundian Kingdom. The monastery became the prototype of a ‘royal monastery’. The establishment of this new type of monastery and the removal of the monastic community that already existed at the shrine of Maurice and his Theban Legion met strong resistance. The Vita Patrum Iurensium can be read as manifesto against the establishment of Saint-Maurice.

This article provides a close reading of the monastic rules of Bishop Caesarius of Arles and his successor Aurelianus.  Aurelianus died in 551, less than ten years after Caesarius. His Rule, which exists in two versions for a male and a female community, was largely inspired by Caesarius’ Rules. Nevertheless, subtle changes, re-arrangements and semantic shifts indicate that both bishops had a fundamentally different notion of the role, function and theological basis of monastic life. Caesarius’ Rules can still be seen as products of the world of Late Antiquity; Aureluans’ Rules are in many regards ‘early medieval’.
A comparison of the male and female version of Aurelianus’ Rule shows that only the smaller part of the alterations and omissions in the female version are motivated by gender differences. Most of them can be explained by the different legal status of his foundations. Aurelianus pursued a profoundly non-gendered monastic ideal, which was, however, deeply inspired by Caesarius female monastic model.