This wide-ranging transnational collection theorizes how late medieval and early modern Western women critically and creatively negotiated their faith and feminism, taking into account intersecting factors such as class, culture, confessional stance, institutional affiliation, ethnicity, dis/ability, geography, and historical circumstance. It presents thirteen original case studies on the diversity, complexity, and subtlety of the intersection of faith and feminism in the lives and works of twenty-two women writers over a 350-year period in six nations. Along the way, it interrogates the accuracy of the view that monotheistic religions only constrict and oppress women, stifling their agency, autonomy, and authority.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1. Feminism and Faith in the Lives and Works of Late Medieval and Early Modern Women: An Introduction
- Holly Faith Nelson and Adrea Johnson
- Scriptural Exegesis and the Feminist Sisterhood
- 2. Teresa de Cartagena’s Feminist Rhetoric and Theology
- 3. Feminism and Italian Sacred Writings: A Growing Space for Female Authorship, 1500–1600
- 4. Shaftesbury, Women Writers, and Deism
- Female Freedom and Agency through Religious Enclosure
- 5. Mère Angélique Arnauld and the Paradoxes of Women’s Enclosure
- 6. “Nothing but a Union with God”: Queer Religiosity in Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies
- Gender Equality through the Language of Faith
- 7. “A Plant in God’s House”: Botanical Metaphors in Early Modern Women’s Poetry
- 8. The Christian Housewife and Midwife: Healthcare and Women’s Authority in Early Modern Almanacs and Manuals
- Feminist Indirection and Disruption in the Religious Sphere
- 9. The Rhetoric and Aesthetic of Indirection: Women, Religion, and Power in the Works of Margaret Cavendish
- Holly Faith Nelson and Sharon Alker
- 10. Grief, Commemoration, and the Poetics of Disruption in the Works of Frances Norton
- The Feminist Potential and Parameters of Religious Belief
- 11. Anne Dowriche and Elizabeth Cary as Writers of Early Modern History
- Rachel M. De Smith Roberts
- 12. Both Enabling and Limiting: Religion as a Sponsor of Feminism in the Eighteenth-Century Labouring-Class Verses of Collier, Leapor, and Yearsley
- The Call For Female Liberty through the Language of Religion Beyond the Borders of Europe
- 13. “Freer than Any Ladys in the Universe”: Theologies of Liberty and Legalism in the Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
- 14. “I Find No Curse in the Gospel of Christ”: Private Judgment and the Gendering of Church Discipline in the Early American Republic
- Bibliography
- Index
- List of Figures
- Figure 1. “The Lady Grace Gethin” copper engraving of the Gethin Monument by James Cole (1723). Courtesy of the Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University.
- Figure 2. “In All Estates I Have Learned to Be Contented,” in Frances Norton, The Applause of Virtue (1705). Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.
- Figure 3. “The Christian Lives To Day As If He Shall Ne’er See To Morrow Saith Tertul,” Frontispiece, Frances Norton, Memento Mori (1705). Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.29
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