Women, Sainthood, and Power explores the life stories of an international gallery of female saints from the wide-angle lens of several intellectual disciplines and the close-up view afforded by keenly observed fine points of character. Oliva M. Espín combines multidisciplinary scholarly research with a novelist’s eye for detail to create vivid portraits of saints in their times and places. Using her own memories, Espín argues that there are lessons to learn today from the lives of these exceptional women. This book is recommended for scholars and students of psychology, religious studies, gender and women’s studies, history, cultural studies, and ethnic studies.

Analyzing the renowned Saint Birgitta of Sweden from the perspectives of power, authority, and gender, this probing study investigates how Birgitta went about establishing her influence during the first ten years of her career as a living saint, in 1340–1349.

In Women, Men, and Spiritual Power, John Coakley explores male-authored narratives of the lives of Catherine of Siena, Hildegard of Bingen, Angela of Foligno, and six other female prophets or mystics of the late Middle Ages. His readings reveal the complex personal and literary relationships between these women and the clerics who wrote about them. Coakley's work also undermines simplistic characterizations of male control over women, offering an important contribution to medieval religious history. Coakley shows that these male-female relationships were marked by a fundamental tension between power and fascination: the priests and monks were supposed to hold authority over the women entrusted to their care, but they often switched roles, as the men became captivated with the women's spiritual gifts. In narratives of such women, the male authors reflect directly on the relationship between the women's powers and their own. Coakley argues that they viewed these relationships as gendered partnerships that brought together female mystical power and male ecclesiastical authority without placing one above the other. Women, Men, and Spiritual Power chronicles a wide-ranging experiment in the balance of formal and informal powers, in which it was assumed to be thoroughly imaginable for both sorts of authority, in their distinctly gendered terms, to coexist and build on each other. The men's writings reflect an extended moment in western Christianity when clerics had enough confidence in their authority to actually question its limits. After about 1400, however, clerics underwent a crisis of confidence, and such a questioning of institutional power was no longer considered safe. Instead of seeing women as partners, their revelatory powers began to be viewed as evidence of witchcraft.

Kateri Tekakwitha is the first North American Indian to be canonized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. Indian Pilgrims examines Saint Kateri's influence and role as a powerful feminine figure who inspires decolonizing activism in contemporary Indigenous peoples' lives.

Power in medieval society has traditionally been ascribed to figures of public authority--violent knights and conflicting sovereigns who altered the surface of civic life through the exercise of law and force. The wives and consorts of these powerful men have generally been viewed as decorative attendants, while common women were presumed to have had no power or consequence. Reassessing the conventional definition of power that has shaped such portrayals, Women and Power in the Middle Ages reveals the varied manifestations of female power in the medieval household and community--from the cultural power wielded by the wives of Venetian patriarchs to the economic power of English peasant women and the religious power of female saints. Among the specific topics addresses are Griselda's manipulation of silence as power in Chaucer's "The Clerk's Tale"; the extensive networks of influence devised by Lady Honor Lisle; and the role of medieval women book owners as arbiters of lay piety and ambassadors of culture. In every case, the essays seek to transcend simple polarities of public and private, male and female, in order to provide a more realistic analysis of the workings of power in feudal society.

Ewing examines the competing forces behind the formation of a modern western subjectivity in the context of Sufi religious meanings and practices in Pakistan.

Presents stories and commentaries on women saints from the Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Jewish, Islamic, and Christian traditions.