Notes on Contributors
Aitor Boada-Benito
is a member of the Institute for Religious Studies at the Complutense University of Madrid, where he earned his Ph.D. in 2024. He specializes in the study of sainthood in Late Antiquity and serves as Section Editor for the journal Open Theology (De Gruyter Brill).
Esther Borrego Gutiérrez
is Professor of Spanish literature at the Complutense University of Madrid, where she has been teaching for more than 25 years. She has directed 15 doctoral theses and currently has 7 in progress under her supervision, as well as 30 dissertations, DEAs and Masterâs Final Projects. She has published around twenty books (monographs, critical editions and coordination of collective volumes) and more than ninety research papers) on Golden Age theatre, the relationships between music and literature, courtly celebrations, hagiography and literature and, particularly in recent years, Teresa de Jesús and her legacy in Carmelite writers of the 16th and 17th centuries. She directs the National Research Project âMulier fortis, mulier docta. Hibridismo literario y resistencia en las comunidades carmelitas posteresianas (siglos XVI y XVII)â, 2021â2025, ref. PID2020-114810GB-I00, formed by 23 researchers from national and international universities. https://carmelitasescritoras.es/.
Matilde Casas Olea
is Associate Professor of Greek Philology at the University of Granada (Spain). She holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Philology and Indo-European Linguistics. She has been Principal Investigator of research projects and published monographs and articles on the cultural and literary relationships between the Slavs and Byzantium. In recent years, she has focused on the various expressions of Greek and Medieval Slavic âChristian epicâ, its intertextual relationships with hagiographic literature, the processes of interlinguistic and intralinguistic transformation, as well as its contexts of production and diffusion.
Patricia Cañizares Ferriz
is Associate Professor of Latin Philology at the Complutense University of Madrid and director of the Complutense research group Manipulus (âLatin literature in extracts: florilegia, anthologies and collections of the Middle Ages and the Renaissanceâ). She has conducted extensive research into the circulation of classical and medieval literature at the end of the Middle Ages in florilegia and collections of exempla. She has focused her research on the history of the transmission of texts in the Middle Ages, with special reference to the Latin exemplum and its development to vernacular literatures, as well as the reception of the Latin literary miracle in the Iberian Peninsula in the late Middle Ages.
Chiara Coletti
is Associate Professor of Modern History at Università degli studi di Perugia. She has worked on the history of ecclesiastical institutions and religious sensibility between the 16th and 19th centuries and on the history of society and welfare in the modern age, topics on which she has published several essays, edited miscellaneous volumes and published some monographs. More recently she has also been interested in the history of interspecies relations. Her most recent works include Cum tucte le tue creature. La natura e i suoi regni tra idea e rappresentazione (secoli XVIâXX),(edited with Paolo Capitanucci, Stefania Petrillo, and Alessandro Serra) Guida Editori, Naples, 2024; Iconismi, lettere ardenti e Bambini di cera. Chiara Isabella Fornari âanima viatriceâ nelle inquietudini religiose del Settecento, Guida Editori, Naples 2020.
MarÃa Victoria Curto Hernández
holds a Ph.D. Cum Laude and Extraordinary Prize in Spanish Literature from the Complutense University of Madrid (2022), with a thesis entitled Music, dance and theatricality in the female mystical and visionary experience at the end of the Middle Ages: the cases of MarÃa de Santo Domingo and Juana de la Cruz in their European context. She also has a degree in piano and lyrical singing. She has taught at several Spanish universities and carried out research stays in London, Florence, Paris and North Carolina. During 2023 and 2024, she worked as a postdoctoral professor-researcher at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona. She currently works as a volunteer and editor at the Sakya Paramita Monastery, where she delves into the study of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy.
Ana Rita Gonçalves Soares
is Lecturer in Romance Studies at the Complutense University of Madrid. She holds a Ph.D. (with distinction) in Literary Studies from the same university, where she was engaged as a Pre-doctoral Fellow Researcher between 2016 and 2021. She also received a degree in âEuropean Languages and Literaturesâ (University of Minho) and completed two Masterâs degrees from the University of Santiago de Compostela: âLiterary and Cultural Studiesâ and âEuropean Medieval Studiesâ. Together with Dr. Rebeca SanmartÃn Bastida, she currently co-edits the âCatalogue of Living Saintsâ, an online wiki catalogue developed by the Research Project âCatalogue of Living Saints (Final Stage): Towards the first model of Counter-reformation female sanctityâ and funded by the Spanish Government. In addition, she has been a Visiting Scholar at several European universities including the University of Cambridge, the University of London and the University of Lisbon. Her line of work mostly deals with contemporary literary medievalism.
Julia Lewandowska
is Associate Professor at the Faculty of âArtes Liberalesâ, University of Warsaw. She is a specialist of female conventual culture of the Spanish Golden Ages, which she approaches from an interdisciplinary perspective (literary studies, cultural studies, history of religion, philosophy). Currently she is the principal investigator of the research project: The Mother Tongue: Textuality, Authority and Community in the Post-Teresian Reform Female Monasticism (c.1560â1700) (University of Warsaw â Polish National Science Centre) and a Research Fellow in two research projects by the Spanish National Research Centre CSIC (Madrid) and UNED University (Madrid). She has published numerous articles and book chapters on Renaissance and Baroque female conventual literary culture, theology, rhetoric and history of thought in international journals as Studia Aurea; Womenâs Writing; Temas Americanistas; Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez; Romanische Forschungen, and with publishers as Brepols, Iberoamericana, Renacimiento, Cambridge Scholar Publishing, J.B. Metzler, Peter Lang, among others. Her book Escritoras monjas. Autoridad y autorÃa en la escritura conventual femenina de los Siglos de Oro (Iberoamericana/ Vervuert 2019) has been recognised by the Victoria Urbano Prize (2020) and by the Polish Association of Hispanists (2019â2020) as the best monograph in History, Cultural Studies and Literary Studies. Since 2021 she is general co- editor of the Brepols Publishers book series Women in Christianity. A Cultural History of Women Religious from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period.
Sonia Madrid Medrano
is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Classics at Complutense University of Madrid. She completed her Ph.D. in Latin Philology with honours in 2017 at said University, with a research project that accomplished the critical edition of the medieval Latin text Liber philosophorum moralium antiquorum. With the financial aid of a national grant, she carried out part of her doctoral research in Rome, London and Wolverhampton. She also holds a bachelorâs degree in English studies (UCM) and a masterâs degree in Medieval Studies (International Federation of Medieval Studies, Rome). Her main research interests focus on Late-Antique and Medieval epigraphic and literary texts, chiefly about women, female figures and/or feminine representations. Her approach to these texts comprehends textual and epigraphic editions as well as literary analyses leaning on agency and womenâs identities. She has published several chapters, as well as articles in scholarly journals, on these subjects. She is a member of the Spanish Society of Classical Studies (SEEC), and the Institute of Feminist Studies at Complutense University.
Massimo Rondolino
is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Carroll University in Wisconsin, USA. His scholarship focuses on the comparative cross-cultural study of hagiographical narratives and religious communitiesâ dynamics of legitimation. He is a strong advocate for trans-disciplinary equitable collaboration, in research as well as in teaching. He helped integrate this principle into the American Academy of Religionâs Comparative Hagiology Seminar, of which he is a co-founder, and established it as the guiding ethos of Carroll Universityâs Honors Program, which he directed until 2023.
Enrique Santos Marinas
is Associate Professor of Slavic Philology at the Institute for Religious Studies (IUCR) of the University Complutense of Madrid (2013âpresent), and Deanâs Delegate for Traineeships of the Faculty of Philology UCM (2020âpresent). He is co-author of Rituals in Slavic Pre-Christian Religion: Festivals, Banqueting, and Divination (ARC Humanities Press, 2023), and recently he collaborated in a collective work on the Sources for the Study of the Slavic pre-Christian Religion (Brill, 2021). His interests are very diverse, mainly the sources on Slavic Pre-Christian Religion, the Christianization of the Slavs, and Medieval Slavonic Literature.