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Nineteenth-century female congregation founders could achieve levels of autonomy, power and prestige that were beyond reach for most women of their time. With a subject hidden for a long time behind a curtain of modesty and mystery, this book recounts the fascinating but ambiguous life stories of four Belgian religious women. A close reading of their personal writings unveils their conflicted existence: ambitious, engaged, and bold on the one hand, suffering and isolated on the other, they were both victims and promotors of a nineteenth-century ideal of female submission. As religious and social entrepreneurs these women played an influential role in the revival of the church and the development of education, health care and social provisions in modern Belgium. But, equally well, they were bound to rigid gender patterns and adherents of an ultramontane church ideology that fundamentally distrusted modern society.
Case studies upon the use of concepts like feminization and masculinization in relation to christianity. Since the 1970s the feminization thesis has become a powerful trope in the rewriting of the social history of Christendom. However, this 'thesis' has triggered some vehement debates, given that men have continued to dominate the churches, and the churches themselves have reacted to the association of religion and femininity, often formulated by their critics, by explicitly focusing their appeal to men. In this book the authors critically reflect upon the use of concepts like feminization and masculinization in relation to Christianity.
Developments in church-state relationships in Northern Europe between 1780 and 1920 had a substantial impact on reformist ideas, projects, and movements within the churches. To what extent did church and state mutually influence each other?
Sacred architecture as reality and metaphor in secularised Western society Christian monasteries and convents, built throughout Europe for the best part of 1,500 years, are now at a crossroads. This study attempts to understand the sacred architecture of monasteries as a process of the tangible and symbolic organisation of space and time for religious communities. Despite the weight of seemingly immutable monastic tradition, architecture has contributed to developing specific religious identities and played a fundamental part in the reformation of different forms of religious life according to the changing needs of society. The cloister is the focal point of this book because it is both architecture, a physically built reality, and a metaphor for the religious life that takes place within it. Life Inside the Cloister also addresses the afterlife and heritagisation of monastic architecture in secularised Western society.
In his encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), Pope Leo XIII expressed the conviction that the renewed study of the philosophical legacy of Saint Thomas Aquinas would help Catholics to engage in a dialogue with secular modernity while maintaining respect for Church doctrine and tradition. As a result, the neo-scholastic framework dominated Catholic intellectual production for nearly a century thereafter. This volume assesses the societal impact of the Thomist revival movement, with particular attention to the juridical dimension of this epistemic community. Contributions from different disciplinary backgrounds offer a multifaceted and in-depth analysis of many different networks and protagonists o...
How churches in Northern Europe reinvented their role as providers of social relief Charity is a word that fits well in the history of religion and churches, whereas the concept of social reform seems to belong more to the vocabulary of the modern welfare states. Christian charity found itself, during the long nineteenth century, within the maelstrom of social turmoil. In this context of social unrest, although charity managed to confirm its relevance, it was also subjected to fierce criticism, as well as to substitute state-run forms of social care and insurance. The history of the welfare states remained all too blind to religion. This fourth volume in the series ‘Dynamics of Religious R...
The challenges of post-war recovery from social and political reform to architectural design In the months and years immediately following the First World War, the many (European) countries that had formed its battleground were confronted with daunting challenges. These challenges varied according to the countries' earlier role and degree of involvement in the war but were without exception enormous. The contributors to this book analyse how this was not only a matter of rebuilding ravaged cities and destroyed infrastructure, but also of repairing people’s damaged bodies and upended daily lives, and rethinking and reforming societal, economic and political structures. These processes took ...
Living with History focuses on a particular aspect of heritage preservation in the twentieth century: destruction and postwar reconstruction in Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, and The Netherlands. This book establishes a status quaestionis for the historiography of wartime and postwar preservation, and sets these particular developments in preservation history in the context of the general evolution of architecture and urbanism. The authors investigate the specific role of conservationists and heritage institutions and administrations in the overall reconstruction and examine the part played by architects and planners in heritage preservation.
Europe in the nineteenth century saw spectacular growth in the size and number of cities and in the proportion of the population living in urban areas. Many contemporaries thought that this social revolution would bring about an equally dramatic change in religious life. This book, written by an international team of specialists, provides an authoritative account of religious change, both at the institutional and popular level, in Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox cities, in seven European countries.