This article argues that Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises (1548) promoted the organizational cohesion of the Society of Jesus during a period of rapid expansion by creating a standard Jesuit language for spiritual experience. This linguistic standardization sought to overcome the hyperparticularity of Ignatian spirituality, which is rooted in the individual affect, in order to render...
Birth of a Martyr
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Hosokawa Tama Gracia perished in 1600 under mysterious circumstances. She was a noblewoman married to a powerful daimyo, the daughter of a traitor, and a Kirishitan convert during the “Christian Century” in Japan. In life, she was both dutifully subservient and tenaciously bold. In death, she was fodder for propaganda, and in the hands of both European and Japanese writers, her life story was...
Monastic Reform and State-Building
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Between 1491 and 1589, three abbesses from the House of Bourbon-Vendôme reformed Fontevraud’s extensive monastic network and made the order a Gallican bastion during the French Wars of Religion. The reform effectively centralized Fontevraud’s administration, significantly expanded abbatial power, and established the Bourbon-Vendômes as the sole patrons of the vast network. During the Wars of...
Lady Vanishes
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This article centers on the career of one sixteenth-century Chinese official, Lin Jun, to connect several religious phenomena of Ming times (1368–1644). The well-known mutual toleration, even syncretism, among Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and the popular religion (referred to by Voltaire) is only one side of Ming religious life. During the high Ming in particular, zealous Confucian ...
Late Medieval City and Its Peri-Urban Sacred Landscape
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At the heart of this article are two eyewitness accounts of the religious life of pre-Reformation Biberach an der Riß in Upper Swabia. Written between ca. 1531 and 1545 by two brothers who had remained Roman Catholic while their home city had converted to Protestantism, the two reports provide a virtually unparalleled glimpse into the material and visual culture of a small Imperial Free City...
Perserverance of Eagle-Jaguar Military Ethos
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Traditional scholarship on pre-and postconquest Central Mexico describes an institution of elite warriors commonly called eagle or jaguar “knights.” These works heavily rely on a small set of Spanish chronicles in which the authors (primarily religious officials) crafted ideas of indigenous military orders to make indigenous culture comprehensible for their Spanish readers. Eagle and jaguar...