Queen as King traces the origins of San Isidoro in Leon as a royal monastic complex, following its progress as the site changed from a small eleventh-century palatine chapel housed in a double monastery to a great twelfth-century pilgrimage church served by Augustinian canons. Its most groundbreaking contribution to the history of art is the recovery of the lost patronage of Queen Urraca (reigned 1109-1126). Urraca maintained yet subverted her family's tradition of patronage on the site: to understand her history is to hold the key to the art and architecture of San Isidoro. This new...

ThErEse Martin wanted "to accomplish the most heroic deeds" for Christ; she wanted to be a saint, a prophet, a martyr, a Doctor of the Church, a missionary. "I would be a light unto souls; I would travel to every land to preach Your name, O my Beloved," she wrote. "I would spread the Gospel to the ends of the earth, even to the most distant isles."

In time, ThErEse would achieve all of those things, despite the fact that she died at the age of twenty-four after spending nine years as a cloistered Carmelite nun. The autobiography that was published after her death, Story of a...