Patriarchal Negotiations: Women, Writing and Religion 1640-1660
Publisher
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Women were prominent in the Lollard movement in the fifteenth century, but it
is only in the mid-seventeenth century that women begin to produce theological texts
which contribute to the controversy over popular religious expression and women's part
in religious culture. After 1640 women began to publish on a number of theological
issues and in a wide range of genres: prose polemic, prophecy, autobiography and
spiritual meditation. Subject to widespread criticism, they quickly had to fashion a
rhetoric of justification with which to defend their intervention in print and pacify male
critics. This thesis shows that they achieved this in two ways: by producing a literature
which complied with the expectations of masculine theological culture and by
manipulating these assumptions so as to create space for a female symbolic language of
piety.
They developed a literary self-consciousness which depends on the idea of
subjectivity as a gendered experience and they often resisted their detractors by valorising
denigrated forms of female subjectivity and pursuing theological conclusions irrespective
of normative ideas of gender. Women did not engage in theological debate in isolation,
however. They often intervened as committed members of religious sects and thus
deserve to be read as representatives of corporate and communal theologies.
In contrast to earlier studies which have sought to recover neglected women
writers as early feminists, without reading their work historically, this thesis seeks to
uncover the social and the theological rather than the authorial origin of much early
modem women's writing and to measure its engagement with early modem debates on
women and religious culture. It seeks to challenge the increasingly dominant view of
early modem women writers which invests them with too modem an authorial presence,
by reconstituting the seventeenth-century debates which gave rise to their work and by
bringing modem French feminist perspectives to bear on a period largely untouched by
theoretical approaches to literature. To this end it proceeds by way of several close
readings of women who wrote as women and as Baptists, Independents, Levellers,
Presbyterians and Quakers.
Authors
Ward Lowery, Nicholas J. L.Collections
- Theses [4495]