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. Feminist critics have frequently been uncomfortable with the fact that conservative religious and political 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 Sothwell, 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, alongside it, the role of women in defining gender and thus influencing religion and politics.

• A thorough and important study of early modern women’s contributions to theology and religious writing • Early modern women’s writing is studied more and more, but remains a subject of very few monographs • Longfellow contextualises early modern religious writings by women, providing new readings of Aemilia Lanyer, Anna Trapnel and others

Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Notes on transcription and citation; Introduction; 1. ‘Blockish Adams’ on mystical marriage; 2. Ecce homo: the spectacle of Christ’s passion in Salve deus rex judaeorum; 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; Index; Index to scripture passages.

\'… a considerable feat of scholarship\'. Times Literary Supplement