…not received, but that look interesting. One more affordable than the other.

First, Nuns: A History of Convent Life by Silvia Evangelisti. The book covers a limited, but very important stage in religious life: from the late 15th through the beginning of the 18th century, a period of great transition for religious women, not only because of external events, but also because of the development of non-enclosed groups of religious women. I heard the author interviewed on Vatican Radio – she is a Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. My kind of book. (Featured on the same mp3 program was a heartbreaking story about an orphanage in Bethlehem. Not heartbreaking because of the good work being done, because it is done, but because of the account of the severe restrictions placed on adoption of orphaned and abandoned children in the Palestinian territories. All abandoned babies are presumed to be and declared as Muslim, and therefore no one but Muslims may adopt them and international adoptions just don’t happen. It is one more element in a miserable situation.)

Secondly, The Feast of Corpus Christi , edited and introduced by three scholars and published by Pennsylvania State University Press. The book description:

The feast of Corpus Christi, one of the most solemn feasts of the Latin Church, can be traced to the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and its resolution of disputes over the nature of the Eucharist. The feast was first celebrated in Liège in 1246, thanks largely to the efforts of a religious woman, Juliana of Mont Cornillon, who not only popularized the feast, but also wrote key elements of an original office.

This volume presents for the first time a complete set of source materials germane to the study of the feast of Corpus Christi. In addition to the multiple versions of the original Latin liturgy, a set of poems in Old French, and their English translations, the book includes complete transcriptions of the music associated with the feast. An introductory essay lays out the historical context for understanding the initiation and reception of the feast.