Negotiating Feminism and Faith in the Lives and Works of Late Medieval and Early Modern Women (Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World)

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 1 Table of Contents 8 Acknowledgements 12 1. Feminism and Faith in the Lives and Works of Late Medieval and Early Modern Women: An Introduction 14 Holly Faith Nelson and Adrea Johnson 14 Scriptural Exegesis and the Feminist Sisterhood 42 2. Teresa de Cartagena’s Feminist Rhetoric and Theology 44 Gladys Robalino 44 3. Feminism and Italian Sacred Writings: A Growing Space for Female Authorship, 1500–1600 58 Clara Stella 58 4. Shaftesbury, Women Writers, and Deism 84 Michael Behrens 84 Female Freedom and Agency through Religious Enclosure 106 5. Mère Angélique Arnauld and the Paradoxes of Women’s Enclosure 108 Natasha Duquette 108 6. “Nothing but a Union with God”: Queer Religiosity in Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies 126 Megan Cole 126 Gender Equality through the Language of Faith 142 7. “A Plant in God’s House”: Botanical Metaphors in Early Modern Women’s Poetry 144 Felicity Sheehy 144 8. The Christian Housewife and Midwife: Healthcare and Women’s Authority in Early Modern Almanacs and Manuals 164 Melissa Kleinschmidt 164 Feminist Indirection and Disruption in the Religious Sphere 182 9. The Rhetoric and Aesthetic of Indirection: Women, Religion, and Power in the Works of Margaret Cavendish 184 Holly Faith Nelson and Sharon Alker 184 10. Grief, Commemoration, and the Poetics of Disruption in the Works of Frances Norton 210 Nicole Garret 210 The Feminist Potential and Parameters of Religious Belief 230 11. Anne Dowriche and Elizabeth Cary as Writers of Early Modern History 232 Rachel M. De Smith Roberts 232 12. Both Enabling and Limiting: Religion as a Sponsor of Feminism in the Eighteenth-Century Labouring-Class Verses of Collier, Leapor, and Yearsley 256 Steve Van-Hagen 256 The Call For Female Liberty through the Language of Religion Beyond the Borders of Europe 278 13. “Freer than Any Ladys in the Universe”: Theologies of Liberty and Legalism in the Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 280 Jordan Hall 280 14. “I Find No Curse in the Gospel of Christ”: Private Judgment and the Gendering of Church Discipline in the Early American Republic 304 S. Spencer Wells 304 Bibliography 320 Index 344 List of Figures 10 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. 215 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. 221 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.29 222