A fascinating glimpse into the history of sexual perversions and diversions including fetishism, cross-dressing, 'effeminate' men and 'masculinized' women, sodomy, tribadism, masturbation, necrophilia, rape, paedophilia, flagellation, and sado-masochism, asking how these sexual inclinations were viewed at a particular time in history.

Many in Victorian England harbored deep suspicion of convent life. In addition to looking at anti-Catholicism and the fear of both Anglican and Catholic sisterhoods that were established during the nineteenth century, this work explores the prejudice that existed against women in Victorian England who joined sisterhoods and worked in orphanages and in education and were committed to social work among the urban poor. Women, according to some of these critics, should remain passive in matters of religion. Nuns, however, did play an important role in many areas of life in nineteenth-century England and faced hostility from many who felt threatened and challenged by members of female religious orders. The accomplishments of the nineteenth-century nuns and the opposition they overcame should serve as both an example and encouragement to all men and women committed to the Gospel.

Volumes for 1898-1968 include a directory of publishers.

Throughout his prodigious theological and ecclesiastical career, Joseph Ratzinger advanced a rich and nuanced theology of Revelation, reflecting at length on the nature, unity, and interrelationship of Scripture and Tradition, on their native ecclesial context, and on their transformative, Christ-centered purpose and aim. Ratzinger’s many writings in this area are marked not only by an unwavering fidelity to divinely revealed truth, but also by sensitivity to the difficulties of its interpretation, to the dynamics of historical progress and regress, and to the needs of the Church and the world within the modern era. In Revelation, Hermeneutics, and Doctrinal Development in Joseph Ratzinger, Mauro Gagliardi offers a penetrating diachronic study of Ratzinger’s thought on these foundational themes. Beginning with his 1955 Habilitationsschrift on St. Bonaventure’s understanding of Revelation and continuing in his works of the conciliar and post-conciliar periods through those of his episcopacy and later pontificate, Gagliardi traces Ratzinger’s vision of Scripture and Tradition, of the Magisterium and theology, and of faith and its transmission today. By turns critical and appreciative, Gagliardi elucidates the German theologian’s teaching on Revelation in depth, exploring its underlying hermeneutic commitments, and, in the book’s final chapter, elaborating its implications for the question of the development of doctrine, a topic of both longstanding and pressing importance within Catholic theology and Christian thought.