The first full-length study of sixteenth-century Spanish attitudes towards death and the afterlife.

This I can say to you, Dear Reader, is a story of love and marriage beyond the wonders that make of life a grand and incomprehensible mystery. Explain if you can, how a young, innocent Catholic girl in Madrid would become the wife of a naive, Protestant American traveler stopping-over in Madrid en route to Tehran, Iran. Explain if you can, how the Bishop of Madrid would condescend to grant a special dispensation for the first mixed Protestant-Catholic wedding to be held in a Catholic Church in Francos Spain in 1960. These matters can only be attributed to fate, chance, or the intervention of the Divine Hand. Nevertheless, those days and that adventure were as pure and fresh and exciting as only a youthful romantic can imagine. Those days I would like to hold on to. Those days I would like to tuck away in this book so that I can say: Look at our days, Dear Reader, days so bright and beautiful that I have kept to show to you so that you can see that we too loved life and treasured the moments that made up our days."

Gender and Exemplarity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain gathers a series of studies on the interplay between gender, sanctity and exemplarity in regard to literary production in the Iberian peninsula. The first section examines how women were con¬strued as saintly examples through narratives, mostly composed by male writers; the second focuses on the use made of exemplary life-accounts by women writers in order to fashion their own social identity and their role as authors. The volume includes studies on relevant models (Mary Magdalen, Virgin Mary, living saints), means of transmission, sponsorship and agency (reading circles, print, patronage), and female writers (Leonor López de Córdoba, Isabel de Villena, Teresa of Ávila) involved in creating textual exemplars for women. Contributors are: Pablo Acosta-García, Andrew M. Beresford, Jimena Gamba Corradine, Ryan D. Giles, María Morrás, Lesley K. Twomey, Roa Vidal Doval, and Christopher van Ginhoven Rey.

Soon after his popular A Travel Guide to Heaven was published, bestselling author Anthony DeStefano recognized that children also have many questions about heaven. In celebration of the tenth anniversary of that book, Anthony wrote this fun-filled, action story about a little boy named Joey who gets to take a whirlwind tour of heaven with his guardian angel, Gabby. Artist Erwin Madrid’s stunning illustrations bring the story to life, showing heaven to be a place where everyone is happy, the animals all get along, and God’s glory is more amazing than anything Joey had ever seen in his whole life. This long-awaited children’s edition will quickly become a favorite for the reader and the child alike. Imagine the comfort and peace children will experience when they hear about this incredible place God has prepared for them.