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This book explores the intersections between local community, women's work, and religious reform in early modern northern Spain. The book illuminates the lives of these uncloistered religious women, who took no vows and were free to leave the religious life if they chose. Their vocation afforded them considerably more autonomy and, in some ways, liberty, than nuns or wives. The book recovers the surprising ubiquity of seroras, with every Basque parish church employing at least one. Their central position in local religious life revises how we think about the social and religious limitations placed on early modern women. By situating the seroras within the social dynamics and devotional life of their communities, the book reconceives of female religious life and the opportunities it could provide. It also shows how these devout laywomen were instrumental in the process of negotiated reform during the Counter-Reformation.

Courting Sanctity traces the shifting relationship between holy women and the French royal court across the long thirteenth century. It argues that during the reign of Louis IX (r. 1226-70) holy women were central to the rise of the Capetian self-presentation as uniquely favored by God, that such women’s influence was questioned and reshaped under Philip III (r. 1270-85), and that would-be holy women were increasingly assumed to pose physical, spiritual, and political threats by the death of Philip IV (r. 1285-1314). Six holy women lie at the heart of the analysis. The saintly reputations of Isabelle of France and Douceline of Digne helped to crystalize the Capetians’ claims of divine favor by 1260. In the 1270s, the French court faced a crisis that centered on the testimony of Elizabeth of Spalbeek, a visionary holy woman from the Low Countries. After 1300, the arrests of Paupertas of Metz, Margueronne of Bellevillette, and Marguerite Porete formed key links in the chain of attacks launched by Philip IV against supposed spiritual dangers threatening the most Christian kingdom of France.

Two hundred years after canon law prohibited clerical marriage, parish priests in the late medieval period continued to form unions with women that were marriage all but in name. This book uses evidence from archives in four Catalan dioceses to show that maintaining a family with a domestic partner was not only a custom entrenched in Catalan clerical culture but also an essential component of priestly masculine identity, one that extended to the carrying of weapons and use of violence to resolve disputes and seek revenge, to intimidate other men, and to maintain their status and authority in the community. From unpublished episcopal visitation records and internal diocesan documents, the book reconstructs the personal lives and careers of Catalan parish priests to better understand the professional identity and masculinity of churchmen who made up the proletariat of the largest institution across Europe. These untapped sources reveal the extent to which parish clergy were embedded in their communities, particularly their kinship ties to villagers and their often contentious interactions with male parishioners and clerical colleagues. The book highlights a clerical culture that embraced violence and illuminates how the parish church could become a battleground in which rivalries among clerics took place and young clerics learned from senior clergymen to meld the lay masculine ideals that were a part of their everyday culture with the privilege and authority of their profession.

This book traces a major line in the history of theology and the philosophy of religion down the “slippery slope” of secularization. At the same time, it points to the persistence of a tradition that grew out of the Reformation and continues in the mostly Protestant philosophical reflection on whether and how faith can be justified by reason. The book posits that faith and reason have long been locked in mutual engagement in which they productively challenge each other as partners in an ongoing dialogue. Although in the secularized West the death of God is said to be fundamental to the modern condition, our current post-modernity is often characterized as a “postsecular” time. This means not only that we are experiencing a broad-based “return of religion” but also, and more important for his argument, that we are now able to recognize the role of religion within the history of modernity. Emphasizing that, thanks to the logos located “in the beginning,” the death of God is part of the inner logic of the Christian tradition, the book argues that this same strand of reasoning also ensures that God will always “return” (often in new forms). Neither a defense of atheism nor a call to belief, the book explores the long history of their interaction in modern religious and philosophical thought.

This book analyzes the ideas of a prominent twentieth century reformer, Haji Abdullah Malik Abdul Karim Amrullah, more commonly known as Hamka. It employs the term “cosmopolitan reform” to describe Hamka’s attempts at harmonizing the many streams of Islamic and Western thought and his diagnoses as well as solutions to the various challenges facing Muslims in the Malay world. Among the major themes explored in this book are questions concerning reason and revelation, moderation and extremism, social justice, the state of women in society, Sufism in the modern age as well as the importance of history in reforming the minds of modern Muslims. This book shows that Hamka demonstrated intellectual openness and inclusiveness towards a whole range of thoughts and philosophies to develop his own imaginary and vocabulary of reform. This attests to his cosmopolitan outlook and his unique ability to function as a conduit for varying Islamic and secular groups that were opposing one another in his lifetime.

The idea of punishment after death—whereby the souls of the wicked are consigned to hell—emerged out of beliefs found across the Mediterranean, from ancient Egypt to Zoroastrian Persia, and became fundamental to the Abrahamic religions. Once hell achieved doctrinal expression in the New Testament, the Talmud, and the Qur’ān, thinkers began to question hell’s eternity, and to consider possible alternatives—hell’s rivals. Some imagined outright escape, others periodic but temporary relief within the torments. One option, including Purgatory and, in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the Middle State, was to consider the punishments to be temporary and purifying. Despite these moral and theological hesitations, the idea of hell has remained a historical and theological force until the present. This book examines an array of sources from within and beyond the three Abrahamic faiths—including theology, chronicles, legal charters, edifying tales, and narratives of near-death experiences—to analyze the origins and evolution of belief in hell. Key social institutions, including slavery, capital punishment, and monarchy, also affected the afterlife beliefs of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Reflection on hell encouraged a stigmatization of “the other” that in turn emphasized the differences between these religions. Yet, despite these rivalries, each community proclaimed eternal punishment and answered related challenges to it in similar terms. For all that divided them, they agreed on the need for—and fact of—hell.

Tracing Amish settlement in New York from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, this book draws on more than thirty years of participant-observation, interviews, and archival research to introduce the Amish to their non-Amish neighbors. In the last decade, New York State has had the fastest-growing Amish population, and this book highlights the diversity of Amish settlement there and the contribution of New York's Amish to the state's rich cultural heritage. This second edition updates settlement areas to acknowledge recently established communities and to demonstrate the impact of growth, schism, and migration on existing settlements. In addition, chapters treating external and internal challenges to Amish settlement and the challenges Amish settlement poses to neighboring non-Amish communities have been updated, and a new chapter looks to the future of New York's Amish. All maps have been updated, and a new map showing all of New York's Amish communities has been added.

Was religious practice in ancient Rome cultic and hostile to individual expression? Or was there, rather, considerable latitude for individual initiative and creativity? This book demonstrates that it was a lived religion with individual appropriations evident at the heart of such rituals as praying, dedicating, making vows, and reading. The book dismantles previous approaches that depicted religious practice as uniform and static. Juxtaposing very different, strategic, and even subversive forms of individuality with traditions, their normative claims, and their institutional protections, this text highlights the dynamic character of Rome's religious institutions and traditions. In the view expressed in this book, lived ancient religion is as much about variations or even outright deviance as it is about attempts and failures to establish or change rules and roles and to communicate them via priesthoods, practices related to images or classified as magic, and literary practices. The text analyzes observations of religious experience by contemporary authors including Propertius, Ovid, and the author of the “Shepherd of Hermas.” These authors, in very different ways, reflect on individual appropriation of religion among their contemporaries, and they offer these reflections to their readership or audiences. The book also concentrates on the ways in which literary texts and inscriptions informed the practice of rituals.

Islamic schools, or madrasas, have been accused of radicalizing Muslims and participating, either actively or passively, in terrorist networks since the events of 9/11. In Pakistan, the 2007 siege by government forces of Islamabad's Red Mosque and its madrasa complex, whose imam and students staged an armed resistance against the state for its support of the “war on terror,” reinforced concerns about madrasas' role in regional and global jihad. By 2006 madrasas registered with Pakistan's five regulatory boards for religious schools enrolled over one million male and 200,000 female students. This book explores the network of Pakistani madrasas. It maps the choices and decisions confronted by students, teachers, parents, and clerics and explains why available choices make participation in jihad appear at times a viable course of action. The book shows that beliefs are rational and that religious believers look to maximize utility in ways not captured by classical rational choice. The book applies analytical tools from the New Institutional Economics to explain apparent contradictions in the madrasa system—for example, how thousands of young Pakistani women now demand the national adoption of traditional sharia law, despite its highly restrictive limits on female agency, and do so from their location in Islamic schools for girls that were founded only a generation ago.