Florence Nightingale and Responsibility for Healthcare in the Home

The focus for this article is the approach taken by the famous British nurse and public health reformer Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) to responsibility for care, with particular reference to healthcare as practised in the home. It begins by examining Nightingale’s involvement as a young woman in ‘Lady Bountiful’ style upper-class charitable health visiting in the period before 1850. It goes on to consider the district nursing model designed by Nightingale and William Rathbone in the 1860s as an attempt to adapt this localised model of charitable care to the demands of industrial Victorian cities. The final section broadens the lens to examine Nightingale’s views on religious vocations in care work and the state’s expanding role in regulating the nursing profession. Nightingale’s ideal vision of care combined multiple elements: attachment to a local community, a sense of religious vocation, and the scalability and fundraising of national or governmental organizations.

Early Franciscans in England: Sickness, Healing and Salvation

From their first arrival in England in 1224, the Franciscans were concerned with the treatment of ill-health for both practical and spiritual reasons. Many brothers fell sick, and their illnesses required both interpretation and treatment. Some friars practised healing on their brethren and on lay patients. This article will focus on the question of the relationship between the religious vocation of the friars and the exigencies of sickness. Little evidence survives in England in the form of administrative records. But two early Franciscan writings (Tractatus de adventu fratrum minorum in Angliam, and the letters of Adam Marsh OFM, d. 1259) throw significant light on attitudes to illness and practical responses.

Jarena Lee

Chapter 3 presents the life, spiritual awakening, and preaching ministry of Jarena Lee. Beginning with a contextual description of the early United States of America, when freedom and equality were declared for all but were actually reserved exclusively for white men, this chapter narrates a black woman preacher’s fight against racial inequality and gender discrimination. Lee’s powerful experience of divine call enabled her to face her own doubts and confront the institutional obstacles toward accepting her religious vocation. The chapter sheds light on her resolve to do the work of evangelism as an unlicensed itinerant preacher. Through an analysis of the private rhetoric of her spiritual autobiography, The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, this chapter reveals the tactics that Lee used in claiming her call and using her voice to construct a narrative to persuade others of the veracity of her divine call.

A Saint’s Origins

This chapter traces the origins of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. The site of Bernard's birth is a hill on the outskirts of Dijon, the capital of Burgundy. He was the third of seven children born to Tescelin Sorus and Aleth of Montbard. Bernard's father and brothers took their place in the world in order to serve secular lords, especially the Duke of Burgundy. Later in life, Bernard seems to have shown no aversion to the military persuasion. He helped invent a way of life that combined monasticism and knighthood. Praying at night and fighting during the day became, thanks to Bernard, a commendable religious vocation. Bernard's attachment to knights, in the hope of their becoming monks, is also shown in a story about how some young knights found their way to Clairvaux. Meanwhile, the story of Bernard's participation in the mystery of Christ's birth indicates that as a child he took part with great intensity in the liturgical year and made Christian symbols an integral part of his life.

Friendship, Family, and Community

Friendship, family, and community were central to the ways in which members of religious communities understood and negotiated their relationships with one another and with the societies around them. In many respects the religious vocation was defined in relation to these concepts, all of which were, in different ways and at different times, treated by contemporary monks and nuns as subjects for spiritual, ethical, or political thought. The same themes have been approached by historians from a range of analytical perspectives which relate to broader scholarly agendas, including the histories of emotions, social capital, trust, and networks. This chapter considers these three subjects in relation to the history of the religious orders and describes some emerging themes. While varied, they all reflect to some degree a longer-term change from the histories of individual institutions to the study of religious communities as embedded in the societies and cultures of premodern Europe.

Tragical Conscience

This chapter investigates yet another frontier of tragical mimesis in early Christian literary culture: the retraining of the Christian moral conscience to envision human existence in its graphically and concretely tragic dimension. Christians were to be educated in sustained awareness that they were a part of the same “vanity” to which all of creation had been subjected, a crucial discipline of which was the sympathetic contemplation of specific groups in their social and cultural foreground that lived under a seemingly constant tragic yoke. The bulk of the chapter concentrates on four such groups consistently brought to Christians’ attention, particularly by episcopal preachers. First were the indigent and diseased, whose suffering played out a tragedy into which all Christians were being called as dramatis personae engaging Christ himself through the poor. Second were social parasites, society’s “tragic comics” whose antics and theatrics in striving to make a living from more fortunate patrons tested Christians’ ability to overcome revulsion with compassion. Third were married people and ascetics/monastics: marrieds because the institution of marriage was a symbol of the tragic vulnerability and volatility of even the most intimate of human relationships, and ascetics/monastics because their religious vocation parodied both the tragedy and the comedy of human existence. Fourth were “unbelieving” Jews, long conceived in Christian eyes as the bearers of the tragic legacy of rejection of Jesus as the Christ.

A Question of Identity: Vocation, Professionalization, and Atla Membership

“Who are we as theology librarians, and what does involvement in Atla mean to us? Does serving as a theology librarian signify an exercise in religious vocation and is our association a faith-based organization with professional dimensions? Or are we librarians in a professional association concerned with content in theology and religious studies?” There are different responses to this query, and these differences can lead to tension as theology and religious studies librarians with diverse perspectives work together to build a shared future in Atla. The panelists—representing different faith traditions, institutional settings, educational and professional backgrounds, and perspectives on their work as librarians—reflect on their roles as theology and religious studies librarians with regard to three guiding prompts: (1) What is your sense of vocation and identity as a librarian? (2) How does Atla function for you, in terms of spiritual formation and/or professional development? and (3) What are your expectations from Atla?

Una sacra aventura en tierras que se volvían santas: Diego de Ocaña, O.S.H., 1599-1608

En el presente ensayo, profundizo en las principales fuentes que sirvieron de inspiración a la relación manuscrita, ilustrada y sin título escrita por Diego de Ocaña, un recolector de limosnas ofrecidas a la advocación milagrosa de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de Extremadura, en la comarca de las Villuercas (España). El manuscrito es ahora conocido como Relación del viaje de fray Diego de Ocaña por el Nuevo Mundo (1599-1608). Sea porque tuvo una difusión limitada y permaneció inédito por largo tiempo, o porque se ha considerado de forma fragmentaria o de forma marginal respecto del canon de crónicas por la razón que sea, lo cierto es que su estudio en conjunto sigue en pañales. Se sabe bien que Ocaña era letrado, y se había señalado correctamente que resultaba crucial para la interpretación de su manuscrito apreciar la familiaridad más que evidente que revelaba su escritura con respecto de las novelas de caballería, con obras como la Araucana de Ercilla y con cronistas como Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Pero más allá de las citas directas (que son pocas, tanto en el caso de Ocaña como en otros autores contemporáneos), en general, se ha subestimado la amplia cultura letrada de Ocaña. Lo más extraño de todo, dada su vocación religiosa, es que se hayan ignorado sus influencias de orden más espiritual. En este ensayo indago que hay otra clase de textos que estuvieron a su alcance y eran lectura habitual de sus principales destinatarios, textos en los cuales resultan esenciales las ideas y los asuntos profundamente sacros y elevados. Y me pregunto qué tanto habían orientado y conectado esas lecturas la manera como Ocaña contempla, imagina y describe las tierras las gentes y las realidades americanas, especialmente aquellas que él y sus compañeros necesitaban que fueren sacras y admirables. Sugiero finalmente que una inspiración fundamental para que Diego de Ocaña se presentase a sí mismo como peregrino y cronista piadoso reside en algunas relaciones tardo medievales de peregrinaciones a Tierra Santa así como relatos de viajes piadosos de la temprana edad moderna, caracterizados todos ellos por la riqueza y refinamiento de una tradición discursiva que se recrea constantemente. Abstract In the present essay, I delve into one of the fundamental inspirations behind an untitled, illustrated manuscript by Diego de Ocaña, an alms-collector travelling on behalf of the miraculous advocation of Our Lady of Guadalupe de Extremadura in the Villuercas mountains: the manuscript now known as the Relación del viaje de fray Diego de Ocaña por el Nuevo Mundo (1599-1608). Because the manuscript did not circulate widely and long remained unpublished, and because it has usually been fragmentarily employed if not marginalized from the chronicling canon for one reason or another, study of its whole remains in its infancy. It has long been known that Ocaña was a reader; and it has been correctly proposed that the appreciation of Ocaña’s evident familiarity with certain romances de caballería, with Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana and with cronistas such as Alvár Núñez Cabeza de Vaca would be crucial to interpreting his manuscript. But, beyond direct citations (which are few, both in Ocaña’s case and by other contemporary authors), the broader readerliness of Diego de Ocaña has been underestimated. Most oddly of all given his religious vocation, his more spiritual influences have been neglected. I ask in this essay what other kinds of texts in which matters and things deemed sacred and notable were central, were available to him and expected by his principal readers. I ask how such readings may have focussed and enabled Ocaña’s ways of seeing, imagining and portraying American lands, people, and phenomena, especially those which he and others needed to be sacred and notable. I suggest that a fundamental inspiration for Diego de Ocaña’s presentation of himself as a sacred adventurer and reporter lay in the richly honed, and thus highly re-generative, repertoires offered by late medieval and early modern accounts of pilgrimages to the Holy Land and related sacred journeys.