Synopses & Reviews
This collection of scholarly essays examines the effects of reforms in religion on the gender and religious identity of women during the English reformations from Henry VIII's earliest iterations in the 1530s to filmic representations of reforming women in the last two centuries. As a whole, the authors offer a cross-section of contributions, influences, and activities by women in matters of faith in early modern England, focusing on women's creative undoings and reimaginings during a long period of reform in religion and the ramifications of these activities well beyond their own time. The essays explore the inspirations for and expressions of women's actions whether those actions were ultimately intended to serve the conservative or evangelical cause and provide a sample of the consequences and contradictions inherent in women's reimagining of religious and gender boundaries as these manifested internally in the individual woman to effect a renegotiation of her own gender and religious identity.
Synopsis
Catholic or Protestant, recusant or godly rebel, early modern women reinvented their spiritual and gendered spaces during the reformations in religion in England during the sixteenth century and beyond. These essays explore the ways in which some Englishwomen struggled to erase, rewrite, or reimagine their religious and gender identities. Contributors explore the inspirations for and expressions of women's actions whether those actions were ultimately intended to serve the conservative or evangelical cause and provide a sample of the consequences and contradictions inherent in women's reimagining of religious and gender boundaries.
About the Author
Julie A. Chappell is Professor of English at Tarleton State University, USA. She is the editor/translator of The Prose Alexander of Robert Thornton: The Middle English Text with a Modern English Translation; the co-editor, with Kamille Stone Stanton, of Transatlantic Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century and Spectacle, Sex, and Property in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture; and the author of Perilous Passages: The Book of Margery Kempe 1534-1934.
Kaley A. Kramer is Lecturer in Literature at York St. John University, UK, where she teaches modules on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing, Gothic literature, and literary theory. She has published on Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, and Sophia Lee.
Table of Contents
Introduction; Julie A. Chappell
1. "To the Illustrious Queen": Katherine of Aragon and Early Modern Book Dedications; Valerie Schutte
2. 'Rather a Strong and Constant Man': Margaret Pole and the Problem of Women's Independence; Janice Liedl
3. Religious Intent and the Art of Courteous Pleasantry: A Few Letters from Englishwomen to Heinrich Bullinger (1543-1562); Rebecca A. Giselbrecht
4. Elizabeth Cary and Intersections of Catholicism and Gender in Early Modern England; Lisa McClain
5. Eleanor Davies and the New Jerusalem; Amanda L. Capern
6. The Failure of Godly Womanhood: Religious and Gender Identity in the Life of Lady Elizabeth Delaval; Sharon L. Arnoult
7. Haunting History: Women, Catholicism, and the Writing of National History in Sophia Lee's The Recess; Kaley A. Kramer
8. Stripped of Their Altars: Film, Faith, and Tudor Royal Women from the Silent Era to the Twenty-First Century, 1895-2014; William B. Robison