Jo Ann Kay McNamara was Professor of History at Hunter College and at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
[A] mammoth study...[and an] engrossing and challenging work...Ms.
McNamara gives us a history of women's rights--and the lack of
them--by focusing on women religious since the birth of
Christ...[It is] a magnificent achievement...Ms. McNamara has made
an inspiring chronicle of [nuns'] struggles.
*New York Times Book Review*
[An] extraordinary book...In her preface, McNamara affectingly
declares: 'Like Voltaire, I have grown up to be a secular humanist,
yet, like him, I must concede that all I am I owe to my Catholic
education.' It has served her--and her readers, including this
one--very well.
*New Republic*
[An] erudite but impassioned study.
*Financial Times*
[An] ambitious and energetic book.
*New York Review of Books*
Jo Ann Kay McNamara's massive, definitive history of Catholic nuns
in the West is accessible and fascinating, thoroughly cohesive and
told with the authority of the historian and the charm of the
storyteller. While historians will appreciate McNamara's
scholarship...and her brilliant achievement in synthesizing so much
history, the lay reader can easily enjoy the work as popular
literature...For nuns have always had to fight.. They have been
reviled as witches, as virgins, as whores. Even their very history
was long silenced, not 'important' enough to record. The convent
has always been a way to seek spiritual fulfillment, but it has
never been a perfect refuge. Nuns have always had to adapt to
changes in the landscapes of politics, class and culture. They have
produced sinners and saints as well as ordinary women doing good
works. Most of all, they have endured. And in Sisters in Arms, they
prove to be a...compelling [subject].
*Newsday*
Sisters in Arms is undoubtedly the definitive work on nuns. The
book...covers 2,000 years of Catholic women's search for holiness
in the celibate life. Jo Ann Kay McNamara parades seekers from Mary
Magdalen to Sister Mary Theresa Kane, and she does it with a
scholar's eye for detail, a Catholic's nostalgia, and a raconteur's
penchant for entertainment...Century by century McNamara presents
them: women from Galilee (who supported the 'little band of
vagabonds'), deaconesses, hermits, sanctimonials, canonesses,
conversae, beguines, anchorites, abbesses, witches and mystics.
Stealthily, we enter the sacred and secluded halls of Quedlinberg,
Bingen, Amesbury, the Paraclete and glimpse (only just) the
occupants. But those glimpses are titillating and make us want to
keep on reading.
*Washington Post Book World*
Women will be heartened to discover pioneers in their fight for
autonomy and enlightened by McNamara's analysis of their
struggles.
*Women's Review of Books*
[McNamara's] topic has both vast dimensions and profound
implications.
*National Catholic Reporter*
[A] sweeping and scholarly work...[that's] fascinating and
carefully researched...Sisters in Arms is likely to be for some
time the definitive history of Catholic religious women in the
West.
*America*
The meaning of female monasticism has reflected, in predictable as
well as surprising ways, the position of women in the
world...[T]his book provides an excellent angle from which to
observe that position.
*Boston Sunday Globe*
McNamara's work...is a learned and readable history of religious
women which begins historically with female discipleship in the New
Testament era and ends with some contemporary reflections on female
religious orders today...The precise merit of this highly
accessible historical study rests in the author's keen appreciation
that the Christian tradition, though organic, is not
monodirectional...McNamara raises many historical questions that
remain pertinent today...[T]he strong historical narrative and the
rich panorama of persons...give shape and power to Sisters in Arms.
I know of no other book of such comprehensive scope. It deserves a
wide readership for what it tells us about women in the Christian
tradition generally and in the ascetic/religious/vowed world in
particular.
*Commonweal*
McNamara's impressive volume reads the long history of Christianity
against the grain...She has rendered a set of rattling good stories
about women over the long haul...The vast territory covered by this
book inspires admiration...McNamara is an insightful interpreter of
texts whose rhetorical flourish lets us see the heroism at the
heart of the female religious vocation. She gathers together in one
volume an impressive array of women forgotten or deliberately
erased from history...and creates a coherent narrative of struggle
forward from the earliest days of Christianity to the present.
*Philadelphia Inquirer*
Sisters in Arms...is fascinating to read...[It] presents a powerful
story of dedication and struggle.
*Times Literary Supplement*
In a book which is written to be read by interested general readers
as much as scholars, McNamara not only brings into view all the
best-known nuns from 2000 years of Christian history--from Mary
Magdalen and Thecla through Bridget of Kildare and Hilda of Bingen
to Thérèse of Lisieux and Mary Theresa Kane--but also gives
glimpses of thousands of unnamed nuns...[They] make up a richly
described and impressively researched tableau of mystics and bad
apples, pragmatists and adventurers, the docile and the daring.
*Catholic Herald*
[McNamara's] knowledge of nuns is encyclopaedic...The story [told
in this book] is...fascinating. Professor McNamara may be a secular
humanist but she has the generosity to recognise that Christianity
transformed the status of women in the Western world.
*Daily Telegraph*
McNamara has done us a tremendous service in bringing our
foremothers' struggle for spiritual riches into view.
*Toronto Globe and Mail*
Original sources and archives are excavated [here] to find the
hidden story of women who, voluntarily and involuntarily, took the
veil. Ms McNamara has achieved a balance between impressive
academic research (there are over one thousand detailed references)
and a book for the general readership that gives Catholic
sisterhood a distinct historical identity. The extent and variety
of sisterhood revealed by Ms McNamara's research is staggering.
*Irish Times*
[A] remarkable story--truly of epic proportions...The book is a
tour de force...No book in the library has told the whole rich
story [of Catholic nuns] as soundly and intelligently as this one
does; and for that Jo Ann Kay McNamara deserves our undying
gratitude.
*Catholic Book Club*
Sisters in Arms, which is attracting high praise from reviewers, is
a remarkable work, in the judgment of Sister Karen Kennelly,
president of Mount St. Mary's College in California...She calls the
book 'a unique effort to lay out the comprehensive picture of the
history of religious life for women'...Dr. [Mary Martin] McLaughlin
[a medieval historian formerly of Vassar College] calls the book
'groundbreaking in certain of its aspects, certainly in its scope,'
and she praises its economic analysis and use of family
histories.
*Chronicle of Higher Education*
[An] exhausting, fascinating, tragic and admirable history of
Catholic women in religious orders over 2000 years...When the
institutional church remains hostile to feminism, and secular
feminists tend to see religion as unrelieved oppression of women,
it is a genuine service to have compiled this record of the iron
will, society-building achievements, and fertile influence of these
determined, inspired women--women whose faith cracked open a space,
however small, for responsibility for the direction of their own
minds, bodies, and spirits.
*Baltimore Sun*
A rich tumble of anecdotes, stories, examples and testimonials,
presented in a vigorous and engaging writing style with a certain
staccato rhythm, clothes the understructure of serious scholarship.
McNamara's strength is in dealing with the early and high Middle
Ages. She explains clearly the logic of various social and
particularly economic structures which more often than not
determined whether a young woman would enter a convent (willingly
or otherwise) and just what the range of options were for the
individual and for the community...[The book is] a masterwork of
recovered history, finely detailed and assessed with a knowing and
worldly-wise eye.
*Louvain Studies*
McNamara's fascinating guide through the lives and work of Catholic
nuns over the last two thousand years reveals both the successes
and failures of these women who have played such significant roles
in the history of the Catholic church.
*Publishers Weekly*
McNamara...knows how to make complex issues clear for a general
audience. Throughout her ambitious narrative she pays close
attention to the scholarly literature. But she does not allow the
apparatus of scholarship to banish her own feminist point of view,
or to overwhelm the story. What comes across most strongly in
Sisters in Arms is the extraordinary tenacity of religious
commitment women have made to the Church over the centuries, and
the great difficulties they have faced in expressing a female point
of view within an institution dominated by men...Readers...will be
rewarded with vivid reminders of the many ways that the problem of
gender has been dealt with throughout Western history. More than a
history of nuns, Sisters in Arms is a survey of how the Roman
Catholic tradition has confronted the ever-present question of how
to conceptualize the relationship between men and women.
*Kirkus Reviews*
To narrate two millennia of history in a single volume that is both
comprehensive and accessible is no easy task, but McNamara succeeds
admirably...A readably and compelling account of institutions and
structures that have defined and been defined by women in the Roman
Catholic Church from its origins.
*Booklist*
A scholarly and sweeping review of early apostolic, medieval, and
modern religious women.
*Library Journal*
Sisters in Arms has received great acclaim in the secular press,
and makes a splendid contribution to the history of Catholic nuns
and sisters. In a single volume she has drawn together the fruits
of decades of research and comprehensive documentation, but in a
way which makes for compulsive reading rather than boring
narrative. Her overarching theme is the way in which male clerics
tried to shape and control the lives of ecclesial women religious,
much as husbands used their legal rights to control the lives of
their wives and children...The treatment of women religious during
the upheavals of the European reformations makes poignant
reading...[A] splendidly incivisive account of women religious
within the Christian tradition.
*The Way [UK]*
[A] mammoth study...[and an] engrossing and challenging work...Ms.
McNamara gives us a history of women's rights--and the lack of
them--by focusing on women religious since the birth of
Christ...[It is] a magnificent achievement...Ms. McNamara has made
an inspiring chronicle of [nuns'] struggles. -- Antonia Fraser *
New York Times Book Review *
[An] extraordinary book...In her preface, McNamara affectingly
declares: 'Like Voltaire, I have grown up to be a secular humanist,
yet, like him, I must concede that all I am I owe to my Catholic
education.' It has served her--and her readers, including this
one--very well. -- Jaroslav Pelikan * New Republic *
[An] erudite but impassioned study. -- Karen Armstrong * Financial
Times *
[An] ambitious and energetic book. -- Fiona McCarthy * New York
Review of Books *
Jo Ann Kay McNamara's massive, definitive history of Catholic nuns
in the West is accessible and fascinating, thoroughly cohesive and
told with the authority of the historian and the charm of the
storyteller. While historians will appreciate McNamara's
scholarship...and her brilliant achievement in synthesizing so much
history, the lay reader can easily enjoy the work as popular
literature...For nuns have always had to fight.. They have been
reviled as witches, as virgins, as whores. Even their very history
was long silenced, not 'important' enough to record. The convent
has always been a way to seek spiritual fulfillment, but it has
never been a perfect refuge. Nuns have always had to adapt to
changes in the landscapes of politics, class and culture. They have
produced sinners and saints as well as ordinary women doing good
works. Most of all, they have endured. And in Sisters in
Arms, they prove to be a...compelling [subject]. -- Sandra
Scofield * Newsday *
Sisters in Arms is undoubtedly the definitive work on nuns.
The book...covers 2,000 years of Catholic women's search for
holiness in the celibate life. Jo Ann Kay McNamara parades seekers
from Mary Magdalen to Sister Mary Theresa Kane, and she does it
with a scholar's eye for detail, a Catholic's nostalgia, and a
raconteur's penchant for entertainment...Century by century
McNamara presents them: women from Galilee (who supported the
'little band of vagabonds'), deaconesses, hermits, sanctimonials,
canonesses, conversae, beguines, anchorites, abbesses, witches and
mystics. Stealthily, we enter the sacred and secluded halls of
Quedlinberg, Bingen, Amesbury, the Paraclete and glimpse (only
just) the occupants. But those glimpses are titillating and make us
want to keep on reading. -- Elizabeth McNamer * Washington Post
Book World *
Women will be heartened to discover pioneers in their fight for
autonomy and enlightened by McNamara's analysis of their struggles.
-- Carole Slade * Women's Review of Books *
[McNamara's] topic has both vast dimensions and profound
implications. -- Karen M. Kennelly * National Catholic Reporter
*
[A] sweeping and scholarly work...[that's] fascinating and
carefully researched...Sisters in Arms is likely to be for
some time the definitive history of Catholic religious women in the
West. -- Mary N. MacDonald * America *
The meaning of female monasticism has reflected, in predictable as
well as surprising ways, the position of women in the
world...[T]his book provides an excellent angle from which to
observe that position. -- Katherine A. Powers * Boston Sunday Globe
*
McNamara's work...is a learned and readable history of religious
women which begins historically with female discipleship in the New
Testament era and ends with some contemporary reflections on female
religious orders today...The precise merit of this highly
accessible historical study rests in the author's keen appreciation
that the Christian tradition, though organic, is not
monodirectional...McNamara raises many historical questions that
remain pertinent today...[T]he strong historical narrative and the
rich panorama of persons...give shape and power to Sisters in
Arms. I know of no other book of such comprehensive scope. It
deserves a wide readership for what it tells us about women in the
Christian tradition generally and in the ascetic/religious/vowed
world in particular. -- Lawrence S. Cunningham * Commonweal *
McNamara's impressive volume reads the long history of Christianity
against the grain...She has rendered a set of rattling good stories
about women over the long haul...The vast territory covered by this
book inspires admiration...McNamara is an insightful interpreter of
texts whose rhetorical flourish lets us see the heroism at the
heart of the female religious vocation. She gathers together in one
volume an impressive array of women forgotten or deliberately
erased from history...and creates a coherent narrative of struggle
forward from the earliest days of Christianity to the present. --
Mary Jo Weaver * Philadelphia Inquirer *
Sisters in Arms...is fascinating to read...[It] presents a
powerful story of dedication and struggle. -- Sally Thompson *
Times Literary Supplement *
In a book which is written to be read by interested general readers
as much as scholars, McNamara not only brings into view all the
best-known nuns from 2000 years of Christian history--from Mary
Magdalen and Thecla through Bridget of Kildare and Hilda of Bingen
to Therese of Lisieux and Mary Theresa Kane--but also gives
glimpses of thousands of unnamed nuns...[They] make up a richly
described and impressively researched tableau of mystics and bad
apples, pragmatists and adventurers, the docile and the daring. --
Susan O'Brien * Catholic Herald *
[McNamara's] knowledge of nuns is encyclopaedic...The story [told
in this book] is...fascinating. Professor McNamara may be a secular
humanist but she has the generosity to recognise that Christianity
transformed the status of women in the Western world. -- John
Keegan * Daily Telegraph *
McNamara has done us a tremendous service in bringing our
foremothers' struggle for spiritual riches into view. -- Linda
Cahill * Toronto Globe and Mail *
Original sources and archives are excavated [here] to find the
hidden story of women who, voluntarily and involuntarily, took the
veil. Ms McNamara has achieved a balance between impressive
academic research (there are over one thousand detailed references)
and a book for the general readership that gives Catholic
sisterhood a distinct historical identity. The extent and variety
of sisterhood revealed by Ms McNamara's research is staggering. --
Gina Menzies * Irish Times *
[A] remarkable story--truly of epic proportions...The book is a
tour de force...No book in the library has told the whole
rich story [of Catholic nuns] as soundly and intelligently as this
one does; and for that Jo Ann Kay McNamara deserves our undying
gratitude. * Catholic Book Club *
Sisters in Arms, which is attracting high praise from
reviewers, is a remarkable work, in the judgment of Sister Karen
Kennelly, president of Mount St. Mary's College in California...She
calls the book 'a unique effort to lay out the comprehensive
picture of the history of religious life for women'...Dr. [Mary
Martin] McLaughlin [a medieval historian formerly of Vassar
College] calls the book 'groundbreaking in certain of its aspects,
certainly in its scope,' and she praises its economic analysis and
use of family histories. -- Peter Monaghan * Chronicle of Higher
Education *
[An] exhausting, fascinating, tragic and admirable history of
Catholic women in religious orders over 2000 years...When the
institutional church remains hostile to feminism, and secular
feminists tend to see religion as unrelieved oppression of women,
it is a genuine service to have compiled this record of the iron
will, society-building achievements, and fertile influence of these
determined, inspired women--women whose faith cracked open a space,
however small, for responsibility for the direction of their own
minds, bodies, and spirits. -- Alane Salierno Mason * Baltimore Sun
*
A rich tumble of anecdotes, stories, examples and testimonials,
presented in a vigorous and engaging writing style with a certain
staccato rhythm, clothes the understructure of serious scholarship.
McNamara's strength is in dealing with the early and high Middle
Ages. She explains clearly the logic of various social and
particularly economic structures which more often than not
determined whether a young woman would enter a convent (willingly
or otherwise) and just what the range of options were for the
individual and for the community...[The book is] a masterwork of
recovered history, finely detailed and assessed with a knowing and
worldly-wise eye. -- Susan K. Roll * Louvain Studies *
McNamara's fascinating guide through the lives and work of Catholic
nuns over the last two thousand years reveals both the successes
and failures of these women who have played such significant roles
in the history of the Catholic church. * Publishers Weekly *
McNamara...knows how to make complex issues clear for a general
audience. Throughout her ambitious narrative she pays close
attention to the scholarly literature. But she does not allow the
apparatus of scholarship to banish her own feminist point of view,
or to overwhelm the story. What comes across most strongly in
Sisters in Arms is the extraordinary tenacity of religious
commitment women have made to the Church over the centuries, and
the great difficulties they have faced in expressing a female point
of view within an institution dominated by men...Readers...will be
rewarded with vivid reminders of the many ways that the problem of
gender has been dealt with throughout Western history. More than a
history of nuns, Sisters in Arms is a survey of how the
Roman Catholic tradition has confronted the ever-present question
of how to conceptualize the relationship between men and women. *
Kirkus Reviews *
To narrate two millennia of history in a single volume that is both
comprehensive and accessible is no easy task, but McNamara succeeds
admirably...A readably and compelling account of institutions and
structures that have defined and been defined by women in the Roman
Catholic Church from its origins. * Booklist *
A scholarly and sweeping review of early apostolic, medieval, and
modern religious women. * Library Journal *
Sisters in Arms has received great acclaim in the secular
press, and makes a splendid contribution to the history of Catholic
nuns and sisters. In a single volume she has drawn together the
fruits of decades of research and comprehensive documentation, but
in a way which makes for compulsive reading rather than boring
narrative. Her overarching theme is the way in which male clerics
tried to shape and control the lives of ecclesial women religious,
much as husbands used their legal rights to control the lives of
their wives and children...The treatment of women religious during
the upheavals of the European reformations makes poignant
reading...[A] splendidly incivisive account of women religious
within the Christian tradition. -- Judith Lancaster * The Way [UK]
*
While the Roman Catholic church has continued to oppose the ordination of women to the priesthood, the history of the church is filled with chronicles of women who have been instrumental in transmitting the religious teachings of the church as well as in performing acts of charity under the auspices of the church. Although women in the church were denied access to positions of religious authority traditionally held by men, many of these women gathered themselves into religious orders where they could express their devotion to God and church through teaching, missionary activity, social activism and prayer. McNamara traces the development of women's pursuit of spiritual fulfillment and religious vocation from the Apostolic Age through the Middle Ages to the modern world. Throughout this wide-ranging narrative, we are introduced to women like Paul's companion, Thecla, who baptised herself in preparation for her martyrdom, and Sister Mary Theresa Kane, who in 1979 publicly petitioned the pope to ordain women. McNamara's fascinating guide through the lives and work of Catholic nuns over the last two thousand years reveals both the successes and failures of these women who have played such significant roles in the history of the Catholic church. (Sept.)
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