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Renowned in her day for her scholarship and eloquence, Isotta Nogarola (1418-66) remained one of the most famous women of the Italian Renaissance for centuries after her death. And because she was one of the first women to carve out a place for herself in the male-dominated republic of letters, Nogarola served as a crucial role model for generations of aspiring female artists and writers.

This volume presents English translations of all of Nogarola's extant works and highlights just how daring and original her convictions were. In her letters and orations, Nogarola elegantly synthesized Greco-Roman thought with biblical teachings. And striding across the stage in public, she lectured the Veronese citizenry on everything from history and religion to politics and morality. But the most influential of Nogarola's works was a performance piece, Dialogue on Adam and Eve, in which she discussed the relative sinfulness of Adam and Eve—thereby opening up a centuries-long debate in Europe on gender and the nature of woman and establishing herself as an important figure in Western intellectual history. This book will be a must read for teachers and students of Women's Studies as well as of Renaissance literature and history.

Bringing together scholars from literary, historical, and religious studies,Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religioninterrogates the seemingly obvious category of “religion.” This collection argues that any application of religion engages in complex and relatively modern historical processes. In considering the various ways that nineteenth-century religion was constructed, commodified, and practiced, contributors to this volume “speak” to each other, finding interdisciplinary links and resonances across a range of texts and contexts.
 
The participle in its title—Constructing—acknowledges that any articulation of nineteenth-century religion is never just a work of the past: scholars also actively construct religion as their disciplinary assumptions (and indeed personal and lived investments) shape their research and findings. Constructing Nineteenth­Century Religion newly analyzes the diverse ways in which religion was debated and deployed in a wide range of nineteenth­century texts and contexts. While focusing primarily on nineteenth­century Britain, the collection also contributes to the increasingly transnational and transcultural outlook of postsecular studies, drawing connections between Britain and the United States, continental Europe, and colonial India.
 

In Creating a Human World, Trappist monk and scholar Ernest Daniel Carrere explores what it means to be fully human, to live in a shared world, and to resist the easy tendency to flee reality and seek pleasure in material pursuits. To do so he examines the writings of three great modern thinkers—Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, and Søren Kierkegaard—and proposes a new reading of their work in light of his own understanding of New Testament teachings.

Carrere elucidates the paradoxical spiritual truth that salvation lies not in an escape from humanity, but in embracing it.  An interdisciplinary tour de force, this book will appeal to anyone interested in philosophy, psychology, religion, or cultural anthropology.