Brides of Christ
Women and monasticism in medieval and early modern Ireland
Martin Browne OSB, Tracy Collins, Bronagh Ann McShane & Colmán Ó Clabaigh OSB, editors
“Brides of Christ is a readable and fascinating book and makes available information about the lives of women religious in Ireland (and on the Continent) otherwise inaccessible to many … The learning, scholarship, and linguistic skills of these essayists are prodigious and exacting. This book is beautifully produced and generously illustrated ... Brides of Christ is an important contribution to the history of monasticism in general and of women’s monastic communities in the medieval Irish church in particular. It will interest medievalists who study architecture, painting, and manuscript production and the relationships among monastic communities. Bishop Dwyer’s conclusion articulates my own: the book reminds us that ‘the remaining effect of those who have gone before us is seen in and through how women and men of faith live in the world today’.” Bonnie Thurston, CSQ 59.1 (2024)
"Brides of Christ is a collection of essays discussing the entire spectrum of holy women in Ireland during the medieval and early modern periods - not just nuns, the eponymous 'brides of Christ'. Academic in tone and subject, this is a very welcome addition to the literature, helping to fill a major lacuna, as historians' focus has traditionally been on male religious orders." History Ireland, November-December 2023
“Female monasticism provided a place for women to be spiritual leaders, and to live outside of direct male authority. It is therefore important to any comprehensive history of women. This book, bringing together the fruits of a virtual conference in 2021, provides an excellent survey of women’s communities in Ireland, as well as the problems in studying them given the paucity of sources … The volume is exceptionally well-produced, on heavy paper with a section of colour plates as well as black and white illustrations in each chapter. It may be read as an introduction to the subject, as a collection of detailed scholarship on various aspects, and as a programme for further research. Anyone interested in medieval and early modern Irish women’s history will certainly want to read it, but those interested in other time periods, or in other regions of Europe, will learn a great deal from it as well.” Professor Ruth Mazo Karras, Women's History Association of Ireland
“The various contributors to this volume are all experts in their respective specialist fields of monastic study and this is a work to be savoured by academics, but also to be greatly enjoyed by the interested and well-informed general reader. Just to glance at the list of contributors reveals the breadth of scholarship contained within this extremely elegant and handsome volume [It is] a book which is a pleasure to hold and a treasure to explore, whatever one’s degree of expertise in the subject matter here contained ... This is such an important work; it brings before us those Christian women the external circumstances of whose lives were so very different from ours today, and yet who are united to us by the even closer bonds of faith, hope and love of the Risen Christ and who can be an example and an inspiration to Christians of the twenty first century, even for those not called to the monastic vocation. They knew the same contours of the land, they prayed and worshipped in many of the same places, they recognised many of the same saints, they used the same formulae of prayers, even if not always in the same tongue. They are our sisters in the faith and this book brings them alive for us today.” Patricia Rumsey, The Irish Catholic
“The strength of this volume is in its recognition of interior lives behind its subjects’ deeds; it benefits in this regard from the contributions of present-day Religious (Brides of Christ originated in a conference at Glenstal Abbey). We cannot know how these women thought and felt but good scholarship can glean something from the marks their thoughts and feelings left on the world, like astronomers identifying invisible planets from the shadows they cast.” Patrick Hudson, The Tablet, 25 November, 2023
“Brides of Christ is a very attractive hardbound volume with fourteen beautiful color illustrations and maps, as well as other monochrome images … it will be valuable for researchers now and in the future … for those seeking detailed analysis of this broad spectrum of religious life in medieval Ireland, Brides of Christ is to be recommended.” Colleen Maura McGrane, O.S.B., American Benedictine Review
