This article explores several texts from what Arnold Hunt dubs “art-of-hearing literature,” works that informed early modern readers how to listen to sermons. Written by clergy, these texts stress that listeners can be spiritually transformed by listening properly to a sermon and thus opening their souls to grace. This article argues, however, that these works not only suggest that lay...
Teaching Ignition Spirituality
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Traditional studies of the role of the body in the spiritual practices of Counter-Reformation Italy have focused primarily on methods of degrading the body, such as fasting and self-flagellation, which early modern practitioners believed would bring the soul nearer to the divine. This study of the performance of the verse hagiographies of the Florentine educator Eleonora Ramirez di Montalvo (...
“Into that Geere the Rope”
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This article explores cultural, social, political, and theatrical manipulations of the halter (or noose) in the early modern period. It begins with a consideration of what an investigation of the halter might hope to achieve, via E. P. Thompson’s analysis of the object’s symbolism in later wife sales. It then explores the ambivalent symbolic properties of the halter in mid-sixteenth-century...
Wayward Priest of Atondo
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As bishops sought to introduce the decrees of the Council of Trent, they encountered mixed reactions and degrees of helpfulness from localities. In Navarre, parishes embraced certain aspects of reform, while rejecting others. As they utilized the expanded Tridentine-era diocesan courts, local communities effectively pushed for a vision of reform on their own terms. This article examines the...