English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500-1625 (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World)

Annotation Contributing to the growing interest in early modern women and religion, this essay collection advances scholarship by introducing readers to recently recovered or little-studied texts and by offering new paradigms for the analysis of women's religious literary activities. Contributors underscore the fact that women had complex, multi-dimensional relationships to the religio-political order, acting as activists for specific causes but also departing from confessional norms in creative ways and engaging in intra-as well as extra-confessional conflict. The volume thus includes essays that reflect on the complex dynamics of religious culture itself and that illuminate the importance of women's engagement with Catholicism throughout the period. The collection also highlights the vitality of neglected intertextual genres such as prayers, meditations, and translations, and it focuses attention on diverse forms of textual production such as literary writing, patronage, epistolary exchanges, public reading, and epitaphs. Collectively, English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500-1625 offers a comprehensive treatment of the historical, literary, and methodological issues preoccupying scholars of women and religious writing Introduction: women, religious communities, prose genres, and textual production / Micheline White Living stones: Lady Elizabeth Russell and the art of sacred conversation / Patricia Phillippy Theise dearest offrings of my heart: the sacrifice of praise in Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke's Psalmes / Mary Trull Anne Dacre Howard, Countess of Arundel, and Catholic patronage / Susannah Brietz Monta Ensigne-bearers of Saint Clare: Elizabeth Evelinge's early translations and the restoration of England franciscanism / Jaime Goodrich Lady Anne Clifford and the uses of Christian warfare / Julie Crawford Prospecting for common ground in devotion: Queen Katherine parr's personal prayerbook / Janel Mueller "Halff a scrypture woman": heteroglossia and female authorial agency in prayers by Lady Elizabeth Tyrwhit, Anne Lock, and Anne Wheathill / Susan M. Felch Authority, scripture, and typography in Lady Grace Mildmay's manuscript meditations / Kate Narveson Lady Margaret Beaufort's translations as mirrors as practical piety / Brenda M. Hosington "Nether bitterly nor brablingly": Lady Anne Cooke Bacon's translation of Bishop Jewel's Apologia ecclesiae anglicanae / Patricia Demers. Focusing on Tudor and Jacobean women's religious literary activities, this volume explores the complex ways in which texts, authors and patrons responded to key religious, political, social and literary developments. The collection highlights the vitality of neglected genres such as prayers, meditations and translations, and it stresses the importance of women's engagement with both Catholic and Reformed religion during the period