The Sex Lives of Saints

This is another book I found very useful in my work on early modern attitudes towards suffering. Virgina Burrus, The Sex Lives of Saints (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), discusses the saints of the early Christian period, but it got me thinking about how the accounts of these saints were received in the early modern period. Her treatment of a passage from Saint Jerome prompted me to conduct a survey of translations of that passage into various European languages during the early modern period. The fact that they all, to some extent, censored the original passage proved very useful to my thesis. The Catholic Historical Review contains a good review of this work.