Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England

This study challenges critical assumptions about the role of religion in shaping women's experiences of authorship.

Erica Longfellow (Author)

9780521837583, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 September 2004

252 pages
23.6 x 16 x 2 cm, 0.55 kg

"Refusing critical tendencies to read religion as a code for something else, Longfellow seeks instead to recuperate the historical primacy of religious thought within every mode of Renaissance discourse. Longfellow's study is highly successful in charting just how such theological considerations position early modern Englishwomen as active negotiators of gender norms and involved participants within a broad spectrum of social and cultural debates." Renaissance Quarterly Megan Matchinske, UNC Chapel Hill

This study challenges critical assumptions about the role of religion in shaping women's experiences of authorship. Feminist critics have frequently been uncomfortable with the fact that conservative religious beliefs created opportunities for women to write with independent agency. The seventeenth-century Protestant women discussed in this book range across the religio-political and social spectrums and yet all display an affinity with modern feminist theologians. Rather than being victims of a patriarchal gender ideology, Lady Anne Southwell, Anna Trapnel and Lucy Hutchinson, among others, were both active negotiators of gender and active participants in wider theological debates. By placing women's religious writing in a broad theological and socio-political context, Erica Longfellow challenges traditional critical assumptions about the role of gender in shaping religion and politics and the role of women in defining gender and thus influencing religion and politics.

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Note on transcription and citation
Introduction
1. 'Blockish Adams' on mystical marriage
2. Ecce homo: the spectacle of Christ's passion in Salve deus rex judæorum
3. Serpents and doves: Lady Anne Southwell and the new Adam
4. Public worship and private thanks in Eliza's babes
5. Anna Trapnel 'sings of her Lover'
6. The transfiguration of Colonel Hutchinson in Lucy Hutchinson's elegies
Conclusion
Bibliography
Indexes.

Subject Areas: Protestantism & Protestant Churches [HRCC9], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]