Heresy Trials and English Women Writers, 1400–1670

This book charts the emergence of women's writing from the procedures of heresy trials and recovers a tradition of women's trial narratives.

Genelle Gertz (Author)

9781107017054, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 June 2012

270 pages
23.4 x 16 x 1.8 cm, 0.53 kg

'All of the case studies are full of rich detail and carefully researched contextual information that are impossible to capture in a short review. Specialists interested in early women writers, women and religion, heresy, trial narratives, biography, and autobiography will find much to learn from and to inspire them … The [book has a] bold thesis, impressive scholarship, and ambitious chronology.' Tim Stretton, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal

This book charts the emergence of women's writing from the procedures of heresy trials and recovers a tradition of women's trial narratives from the late Middle Ages to the seventeenth century. Analyzing the interrogations of Margery Kempe, Anne Askew, Marian Protestant women, Margaret Clitherow and Quakers Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, the book examines the complex dynamics of women's writing, preaching and authorship under religious persecution and censorship. Archival sources illuminate not only the literary choices women made, showing how they wrote to justify their teaching even when their authority was questioned, but also their complex relationship with male interrogators. Women's speech was paradoxically encouraged and constrained, and male editors preserved their writing while shaping it to their own interests. This book challenges conventional distinctions between historical and literary forms while identifying a new tradition of women's writing across Catholic, Protestant and Sectarian communities and the medieval/early modern divide.

Introduction: articulating women
1. 'Belief papers and the literary genres of heresy trial'
2. 'Confessing Margery Kempe, 1413–38'
3. 'Recanting and rewriting Anne Askew, 1540–6'
4. 'Sanctifying ploughmans' daughters and butchers' wives: the interrogations of Alice Driver, Elizabeth Young, Agnes Prest and Margaret Clitherow, 1555–86'
5. 'Exporting inquisition: Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers at Malta, 1659–63'
Conclusion: visionaries, non-conformists and the history of women's trial writing.

Subject Areas: Church history [HRCC2], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB]