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The Nuns of Sant' Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal
Hubert Wolf
€ 30.99
€ 22.24
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Description for The Nuns of Sant' Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal
Hardcover. .
Discovered in a secret Vatican archive, this is the true, never-before-told story of poison, murder, and lesbian initiation rites in a nineteenth century convent. In 1858, Katherina von Hohenzollern, a German princess recently inducted into the convent of Sant'Ambrogio in Rome, wrote a frantic letter to her cousin, a confidant of the Pope, claiming that she was being abused and feared for her life. The subsequent investigation by the Church's Inquisition uncovered the extraordinary secrets of Sant'Ambrogio and the illicit behavior of the convent's beautiful young mistress, Maria Luissa. What emerges through the fog of centuries is a sex scandal of ecclesiastical proportions, skillfully brought to light and vividly reconstructed in scholarly detail by one of the world's leading papal historians. Offering a broad historical background on female mystics and the cult of the Virgin Mary, and drawing upon written testimony and original documents, Hubert Wolf tells an incredible story of deception, heresy, seduction, and murder in the heart of the Catholic Church.
Product Details
Publisher
OUP Oxford
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2012
Condition
New
Number of Pages
496
Place of Publication
Oxford, United Kingdom
ISBN
9780198732198
SKU
V9780198732198
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 4 to 8 working days
Ref
99-5
About Hubert Wolf
Hubert Wolf is Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Muenster in Germany, and has been awarded a number or prizes, including the Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Communicator Prize, and the Gutenberg Prize. An internationally renowned scholar of the history of the papacy, his other books include Pope and Devil: The Vatican's Archives and the Third Reich.
Reviews for The Nuns of Sant' Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal
a masterly telling of a 19th-century scandalanalysed in a consummate way by Hubert Wolf
Metro, Iain Pears
Wolf's absorbing unravelling of the Inquisition trial convincingly recovers a lost world of rancidly overheated religiosity, rendered toxic by the force of a monstrous ego. It also opens a disturbing window on a closed ecclesiastical establishment in which unquestioning support for authority might excuse almost anything. To that extent, it can stand as a salutary tract for the times.
Guardian
astonishing story
History Today
an extraordinary and fascinating book
New Shiny Books
microhistory at its best
Tablet
It has taken Hubert Wolf's... skill as a historian to retell their story and let his readers contemplate a moving case study of the crimes, follies and tragedies of humankind.
Literary Review
Wolf has not only provided us with a fascinating narrative that is compulsive reading, but also with an illuminating insight into the high politics of the papacy in one of the most crucial periods in its history.
English Historical Review
Makes for fairly amazing reading ... Wolf has not held anything back. The result is an account that reads a bit like a crime novel.
Chris Clark, University of Cambridge
an extremely intriguing retelling of events, and Wolf's highly structured narrative unpicks the trial in meticulous detail. He assesses the characters with unbiased opinion and does not stray into speculation or theory, using direct transcriptions from the trial to leave it up to the reader to form their own judgement ... the story is told expertly, and Wolf deals with the diverse layers of intrigue in a systematic yet compelling style.
Ms Sara Charles, Reviews in History
Metro, Iain Pears
Wolf's absorbing unravelling of the Inquisition trial convincingly recovers a lost world of rancidly overheated religiosity, rendered toxic by the force of a monstrous ego. It also opens a disturbing window on a closed ecclesiastical establishment in which unquestioning support for authority might excuse almost anything. To that extent, it can stand as a salutary tract for the times.
Guardian
astonishing story
History Today
an extraordinary and fascinating book
New Shiny Books
microhistory at its best
Tablet
It has taken Hubert Wolf's... skill as a historian to retell their story and let his readers contemplate a moving case study of the crimes, follies and tragedies of humankind.
Literary Review
Wolf has not only provided us with a fascinating narrative that is compulsive reading, but also with an illuminating insight into the high politics of the papacy in one of the most crucial periods in its history.
English Historical Review
Makes for fairly amazing reading ... Wolf has not held anything back. The result is an account that reads a bit like a crime novel.
Chris Clark, University of Cambridge
an extremely intriguing retelling of events, and Wolf's highly structured narrative unpicks the trial in meticulous detail. He assesses the characters with unbiased opinion and does not stray into speculation or theory, using direct transcriptions from the trial to leave it up to the reader to form their own judgement ... the story is told expertly, and Wolf deals with the diverse layers of intrigue in a systematic yet compelling style.
Ms Sara Charles, Reviews in History