Becoming a New Self: Practices of Belief in Early Modern Catholicism. Moshe Sluhovsky. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. xii + 216 pp. $45.
stantially advances our knowledge of the place of such devotions in the daily lives of students and masters. Previous studies on the topic by Astrik Gabriel and Elisabeth Pellegrin explore the statutes of the Collège de Hubant, while Courtenay adds information from other colleges. His discussion of the role of women is important, showing how they served as founders for colleges, making prayers and special masses in their honor obligations within the community. Courtenay also spends time investigating how women were educated at the time period, and their crucial place in trades, offering the Parisian book-production community, with its ties to the university, as an example. The author’s use of seals as primary evidence for the development of devotions to the Virgin Mary is a welcome addition to a growing body of literature on iconographic representations in the university—more specifically, the work of Charlotte Bauer, who has shown how seals were also used to promote group identities within the nations. Astrik Gabriel hinted at the idea of the nations as confraternal structures in his 1966 book, but Courtenay expands on this discussion, with details concerning their requirements for attending services, saying prayers, and the use of music in those services. Analyses of the plainchant used in religious devotions falls outside the scope of this study, but the book is an excellent resource that helps to contextualize the few existing manuscripts containing music for services celebrated within the colleges. Courtenay’s work shows how the University of Paris functioned as a complex ecosystem, where founders posthumously reaped the rewards of the ongoing charitable act of endowing an educational or religious institution, while the living benefited from the financial and spiritual opportunities this provided. The author sums this up neatly at the end of the book in the following way: “Chapel services transformed an educational community into a religious community in which current fellows participated in actions that linked the living with the dead, scholars in the church militant with scholars in the church triumphant” (136). Courtenay’s tone throughout the book is one that is easy to read. The result is a significant addition to the academic literature on the subject, written in such a way as to appeal to students and scholars alike.