The Collected Letters Of St Teresa Of Avila Vol 1 1546 1577

This book contains Letters from 1546 to 1577. Includes Introductions, Endnotes, Biographical Sketches and Index.

Contains Letters from 1578 to 1582 Includes Biographical Sketches, Sources for the Biographical Sketches and Index. More Information This second and final volume of St. Teresa's correspondence begins with the year 1578, a most troubling time for Teresa. A keen observer of the reality around her as well as within, Teresa in these letters focuses light on many of the struggles in both the Carmelite order and the church of sixteenth-century Spain. She introduces us to major personalities who have left their mark on history. Through her letters historians gain a better knowledge of the chronology of events in Teresa's life and how she related to the diverse people she had dealings with. A number of everyday particulars that compilers and editors of those times considered unimportant are today prized. Her worries, her troubles and triumphs, her expressions of sadness and joy, are all present here. With a compelling spontaneity, these letters disclose a Teresa in a complex variety of circumstances. The extraordinary gifts of grace bestowed by God on this Spanish Madre fortified her for a demanding ministry of service which entailed heavy responsibilities and that drew her contemplative soul into a whirl of activities. Because of the limited means of travel and communication in the sixteenth century, the organization of a reform like hers, with its unavoidable business matters, had to be dealt with chiefly through correspondence, a chafing duty that became one of Teresa's greatest trials. She often repeated that letter-writing was her biggest burden, a wearisome task that cost her more than all the miserable roads and bad weather experienced on her journeys through Spain. With its endnotes, biographical sketches, and above all, fresh translation, this second volume of Teresa's Collected Letters opens again another door into the fascinating world of this saint, one of the greatest women history has known.

Contains Letters from 1546 to 1577Includes Introductions, Endnotes, and Biographical Sketches.St. Teresa of Avila wrote candidly the story of both her life and her work as foundress in two books: the Life and the Foundations. Despite her openness in them, she wrote with the knowledge they would be read by her censors. Her letters, then, exhibit even more striking candor, offering many details that were not meant for the public. In these letters we walk with Teresa year by year, day by day -- even hour by hour sometimes. Her worries, her troubles and triumphs, her expressions of sadness and joy pervade these pages. Without question we have before us a rich collection, showing a heart magnanimously open to others, communicating with them on many levels, pouring itself out to family members and religious, to friends, theologians, advisors, and to the nobility and business people. Difficult as writing a book was for Teresa, she preferred it to letter-writing, a drudgery that cost her more than all the pitiful roads and sorry weather experienced on her journey through Spain. What proved painful for her has proved a treasure for us, a collection of letters that scholars consider unparalleled in Spanish literature.

Gaspara Stampa was lauded for her singing during her lifetime, but her success and critical reputation as a poet emerged only after her verse was republished in the early eighteenth century. Her poetry runs the gamut of human emotion, ranging from ecstasy over a consummated love affair to despair at its end. While these tormented works and their multiple male addressees have led to speculation that Stampa may have been one of Venice’s famous courtesans, they can also be read as a rebuttal of typical assumptions about women's roles. Championed by Rainer Maria Rilke, among others, she has more recently been celebrated by feminist scholars for her distinctive and original voice and her challenge to convention. This is a translation of Stampa into English.

During the oppressive reign of Louis XIV, Gabrielle Suchon (1632–1703) was the most forceful female voice in France, advocating women’s freedom and self-determination, access to knowledge, and assertion of authority. This volume collects Suchon’s writing from two works—Treatise on Ethics and Politics (1693) and On the Celibate Life Freely Chosen; or, Life without Commitments (1700)—and demonstrates her to be an original philosophical and moral thinker and writer. Suchon argues that both women and men have inherently similar intellectual, corporeal, and spiritual capacities, which entitle them equally to essentially human prerogatives, and she displays her breadth of knowledge as she harnesses evidence from biblical, classical, patristic, and contemporary secular sources to bolster her claim. Forgotten over the centuries, these writings have been gaining increasing attention from feminist historians, students of philosophy, and scholars of seventeenth-century French literature and culture. This translation, from Domna C. Stanton and Rebecca M. Wilkin, marks the first time these works will appear in English.

Read by Protestants and Catholics alike, Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg (1633–94) was the foremost German woman poet and writer in the seventeenth-century German-speaking world. Privileged by her social station and education, she published a large body of religious writings under her own name to a reception unequaled by any other German woman during her lifetime. But once the popularity of devotional writings as a genre waned, Catharina’s works went largely unread until scholars devoted renewed attention to them in the twentieth century. For this volume, Lynne Tatlock translates for the first time into English three of the thirty-six meditations, restoring Catharina to her rightful place in print. These meditations foreground women in the life of Jesus Christ—including accounts of women at the Incarnation and the Tomb—and in Scripture in general. Tatlock’s selections give the modern reader a sense of the structure and nature of Catharina’s devotional writings, highlighting the alternative they offer to the male-centered view of early modern literary and cultural production during her day, and redefining the role of women in Christian history.

In 1401, Christine de Pizan (1365a 1430?) wrote a letter to the provost of Lille criticizing the highly popular 'Romance of the Rose' for its unwarranted misogynistic depictions of women. Here, Hult collects debate documents, letters and excerpts from other works of Pizan, including one from 'City of Ladiesa' her major defense of women.

In response to a growing interest, among historians as well as literary critics, in women's use of the epistolary genre, Women's Letters Across Europe, 1400-1700: Form and Persuasion analyzes persuasive techniques in the personal correspondence of late medieval and early modern women. It includes studies of well-known women (Isabella d'Este, Teresa of Avila, Marguerite de Navarre, Catherine de Medicis), of those less-known (Alessandra Macigni Strozzi, Louise de Coligny, Glikl of Hameln, Argula von Grumbach, Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, Anna Maria von Schurman, Barbara of Brandenburg ) and of others virtually unknown to history (prosperous women like Elizabeth Stonor and Cornelia Collonello and pauper women seeking poor relief in Tours). Comprehensive in scope, Women's Letters Across Europe, 1400-1700 looks at women from England, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands, and from various levels of society, encompassing the nobility, the gentry, the middle class, and the poor. Each of the essayists considers letters both as historical documents giving insights into women's lives, and as texts in which variations on epistolary forms are used for specific persuasive purposes. The authors of the essays analyze their subjects' capabilities and limitations as letter writers and the techniques they used to influence correspondents, setting these observations in the framework of the women's particular 'stories.' Taken together, the essays and the letter writers discussed therein illustrate in new ways how far from silenced many early modern women were, how they were able to adopt and adapt strategies from the epistolary conventions available to them, and how they could have an impact on their worlds through their letters.