Describes the English Catholic nuns trained by Florence Nightingale to tend to the wounded during the Crimean War, including their struggles to work in poor military hospitals and their dedication to their faith.

In her ground-breaking new study, Katie Bugyis offers a new history of communities of Benedictine nuns in England from 900 to 1225. By applying innovative paleographical, codicological, and textual analyses to their surviving liturgical books, Bugyis recovers a treasure trove of unexamined evidence for understanding these women's lives and the liturgical and pastoral ministries they performed. She examines the duties and responsibilities of their chief monastic officers--abbesses, prioresses, cantors, and sacristans--highlighting three of the ministries vital to their practice-liturgically reading the gospel, hearing confessions, and offering intercessory prayers for others. Where previous scholarship has argued that the various reforms of the central Middle Ages effectively relegated nuns to complete dependency on the sacramental ministrations of priests, Bugyis shows that, in fact, these women continued to exercise primary control over their spiritual care. Essential to this argument is the discovery that the production of the liturgical books used in these communities was carried out by female scribes, copyists, correctors, and creators of texts, attesting to the agency and creativity that nuns exercised in the care they extended to themselves and those who sought their hospitality, counsel, instruction, healing, forgiveness, and intercession.

This rich history chronicles the prominent role of Catholic women religious in establishing the hospitals at the core of New York City's extensive Catholic medical network. Beginning with the opening of St. Vincent's Hospital in 1849, Bernadette McCauley relates how determined and pragmatic women of faith worked over the next eighty years to place the Catholic Church in the mainstream of American medicine. Exploring the differences and similarities between Catholic hospitals and other hospitals, McCauley describes the particular cultural sensibility and management style that informed Catholic health care and gauges the ultimate success of Catholic efforts. Visionary sisters established, managed, and staffed the hospitals, and they sat on hospital boards and served as administrators at a time when women rarely occupied positions of leadership in business. McCauley illustrates how they at once embraced the world of God and the world of man, playing an unheralded role in the development of the modern hospital while serving the daily needs of New York's immigrant poor. Encompassing such issues as immigration, the education of nurses and doctors, hospital care and organization, and the role of women in the Catholic church, this extensive study is a valuable resource for scholars and students in the history of medicine, history of nursing, American religion, and women's history.

In Acts of Care, Sara Ritchey recovers women's healthcare work by identifying previously overlooked tools of care: healing prayers, birthing indulgences, medical blessings, liturgical images, and penitential practices. Ritchey demonstrates that women in premodern Europe were both deeply engaged with and highly knowledgeable about health, the body, and therapeutic practices, but their critical role in medieval healthcare has been obscured because scholars have erroneously regarded the evidence of their activities as religious rather than medical. The sources for identifying the scope of medieval women's health knowledge and healthcare practice, Ritchey argues, are not found in academic medical treatises. Rather, she follows fragile traces detectable in liturgy, miracles, poetry, hagiographic narratives, meditations, sacred objects, and the daily behaviors that constituted the world, as well as in testaments and land transactions from hospitals and leprosaria established and staffed by beguines and Cistercian nuns. Through its surprising use of alternate sources, Acts of Care reconstructs the vital caregiving practices of religious women in the southern Low Countries, reconnecting women's therapeutic authority into the everyday world of late medieval healthcare. Thanks to generous funding from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.

Identifying nuns as the first feminists and sweeping in its scope and insight, "Sisters" reveals the treasure of spiritual capital that religious women have invested in America. 25 photos.

In the nineteenth century, more than a third of American hospitals were established and run by women with religious vocations. In Say Little, Do Much, Sioban Nelson casts light on the work of these women's religious communities. According to Nelson, the popular view that nursing invented itself in the second half of the nineteenth century is historically inaccurate and dismissive of the major advances in the care of the sick as a serious and skilled activity, an activity that originated in seventeenth-century France with Vincent de Paul's Daughters of Charity. In this comparative, contextual, and critical work, Nelson demonstrates how modern nursing developed from the complex interplay of the Catholic emancipation in Britain and Ireland, the resurgence of the Irish Church, the Irish diaspora, and the mass migrations of the German, Italian, and Polish Catholic communities to the previously Protestant strongholds of North America and mainland Britain. In particular, Nelson follows the nursing Daughters of Charity through the French Revolution and the Second Empire, documenting the relationship that developed between the French nursing orders and the Irish Catholic Church during this period. This relationship, she argues, was to have major significance for the development of nursing in the English-speaking world.

This title addresses the issue of women in the mediaeval church and their role in the rise of reform movements in the 13th century.