The book investigates the aesthetic theology embedded in the Franciscan artistic tradition. The novelty of the approach is in applying concepts gleaned from Franciscan textual sources to create a deeper understanding of how art in all its sensual forms was foundational to the Franciscan milieu. Chapters range from studies of statements about aesthetics and the arts in theological textual sources to examples of visual, auditory, and tactile arts communicating theological ideas found in text...

A pioneering studo of the ar of the Franciscan order that shows how Francisan theological, liturgical, pastoral and missionary strategies were formulated and implemented visually, not by works but by images, bu using contextualizaiton and introducing gender and culture specific visual traits

**A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year"This book resees its subject with rare clarity and power as a painter for the 21st century." —Hilary Spurling, New York Times Book Review**Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) lived the darkest and most dangerous life of any of the great painters. This commanding biography explores Caravaggio’s staggering artistic achievements, his volatile perso...

A true, never-before-told story—discovered in a secret Vatican archive—of sex, poison, and lesbian initiation rites in a nineteenth-century convent.In 1858, a German princess, recently inducted into the convent of Sant’Ambrogio in Rome, wrote a frantic letter to her cousin, a confidant of the Pope, claiming that she was being abused and feared for her life. What the subsequent investigation by the Church’s Inquisition uncovered were the extraordinary secrets of San...

Vitruvian Man is the world's most famous drawing, by one of the world's most famous artists. The image - named after a Roman architect and engineer, Vitruvius - has become visual shorthand for artistic genius and scientific inquiry, and yet nobody knows anything about it. In Da Vinci's Ghost, critically acclaimed historian Toby Lester examines the forces that converged in 1490 to turn an idea that had been around for centuries into this iconic image, bringing the ghost of an unknown Leonar...

A "delightful" tour of Rome's St. Agnes Outside the Walls, examining the stories, rituals, and architecture of this seventeen-hundred-year-old building ( The Christian Science Monitor).In The Geometry of Love, acclaimed author Margaret Visser, the preeminent "anthropologist of everyday life," takes on the living history of the ancient church of St. Agnes. Examining every facet of the building, from windows to catacombs, Visser takes readers on a me...

The small village of Rennes-le-Chateau has been the center of an enigma ever since a century ago a local village priest, Berenger Sauniere, spent millions of dollars on decorating the church and surrounding buildings. For decades – despite claims to the contrary by some authors – no-one has been able to explain where Sauniere got the money to pay for the extravagant building works, which have attracted millions of visitors to this small hilltop village – or why he constructed them! The his...

"I recommend this book strongly to anyone serious about understanding Francis of Assisi. I admire the clarity and brevity of the writing. With decisiveness, Thompson cuts through the conflicting medieval accounts of each event in Francis' life, adjusts for the hagiographers' spin and creates a credible chronology out of the blurry dates. His knowledge of medieval Italy allows him to provide insightful explanations of the legal, liturgical, and ecclesiastical practices of the time."...

The Meditation Prayer on Mary Immaculate is one of Padre Pio’s few published writings, penned before he was forbidden by the Church to publish or to engage in correspondence—this for fear a cult would arise around him. Here we encounter a profound spiritual penetration into the mystery of Mary’s unique and sublime role in our salvation. Though brief, it can be read over and over with great benefit since it is –just as the title suggests—both a meditation and a prayer on the meaning of Mary...

"Ingrid D. Rowland brings before us today the pieces of an extraordinary sixteenth-century life . . . This is intellectual biography at its best." —Peter N. Miller, The New RepublicGiordano Bruno is one of the great figures of early modern Europe, and one of the least understood. Ingrid D. Rowland's pathbreaking life of Bruno establishes him once and for all as a peer of Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Galileo, a thinker whose vision of the world prefigures ours...

In this updated edition of his classic account, Charles Nauert charts the rise of humanism as the distinctive culture of the social, political and intellectual elites in Renaissance Europe. He traces humanism's emergence in the unique social and cultural conditions of fourteenth-century Italy and its gradual diffusion throughout the rest of Europe. He shows how, despite its elitist origins, humanism became a major force in the popular culture and fine arts of the fifteenth and sixteenth ce...

Religion and liberty are often thought to be mutual enemies: if religion has a natural ally, it is authoritarianism--not republicanism or democracy. But in this book, Maurizio Viroli, a leading historian of republican political thought, challenges this conventional wisdom. He argues that political emancipation and the defense of political liberty have always required the self-sacrifice of people with religious sentiments and a religious devotion to liberty. This is particularly the case wh...