Many in Victorian England harbored deep suspicion of convent life. In addition to looking at anti-Catholicism and the fear of both Anglican and Catholic sisterhoods that were established during the nineteenth century, this work explores the prejudice that existed against women in Victorian England who joined sisterhoods and worked in orphanages and in education and were committed to social work among the urban poor. Women, according to some of these critics, should remain passive in matters of religion. Nuns, however, did play an important role in many areas of life in nineteenth-century England and faced hostility from many who felt threatened and challenged by members of female religious orders. The accomplishments of the nineteenth-century nuns and the opposition they overcame should serve as both an example and encouragement to all men and women committed to the Gospel.

According to the current scholarly consensus, the apocalypse of 2 Baruch, written after the Fall of Jerusalem, either rejected the concept of the Land of Israel as a place of salvation or regarded it as of minor importance. Inspired by the perspective of Critical Spatial Theory, this book discusses the presuppositions behind this consensus with regard to the spatial epistemology it assumes, and explores the conception of the Land as a broad redemptive category. The result is a fresh portrait of the vitality of the Land-theme in the first centuries of the common era and a new perspective on the spatial imagination of 2 Baruch.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.