Biblical women in early modern literary culture, 1550–1700

Biblical women in early modern literary culture, 1550–1700 PDF Author: Victoria Brownlee
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526110628
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
At once pervasive and marginal, appealing and repellent, exemplary and atypical, the women of the Bible provoke an assortment of readings across early modern literature. Biblical women in early modern literary culture, 1550–1700 draws attention to the complex ways in which biblical women’s narratives could be reimagined for a variety of rhetorical and religious purposes. Considering a confessionally diverse range of writers, working across a variety of genres, this volume reveals how women from the Old and New Testaments exhibit an ideological power that frequently exceeds, both in scope and substance, their associated scriptural records. The essays explore how the Bible’s women are fluidly negotiated and diversely redeployed to offer (conflicting) comment on issues including female authority, speech and sexuality, and in discussions of doctrine, confessional politics, exploration and grief. As it explores the rich ideological currency of the Bible’s women in early modern culture, this volume demonstrates that the Bible’s women are persistently difficult to evade.

Biblical women in early modern literary culture, 1550–1700

Biblical women in early modern literary culture, 1550–1700 PDF Author: Victoria Brownlee
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526110628
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Get Book

Book Description
At once pervasive and marginal, appealing and repellent, exemplary and atypical, the women of the Bible provoke an assortment of readings across early modern literature. Biblical women in early modern literary culture, 1550–1700 draws attention to the complex ways in which biblical women’s narratives could be reimagined for a variety of rhetorical and religious purposes. Considering a confessionally diverse range of writers, working across a variety of genres, this volume reveals how women from the Old and New Testaments exhibit an ideological power that frequently exceeds, both in scope and substance, their associated scriptural records. The essays explore how the Bible’s women are fluidly negotiated and diversely redeployed to offer (conflicting) comment on issues including female authority, speech and sexuality, and in discussions of doctrine, confessional politics, exploration and grief. As it explores the rich ideological currency of the Bible’s women in early modern culture, this volume demonstrates that the Bible’s women are persistently difficult to evade.

Women (Re)Writing Milton

Women (Re)Writing Milton PDF Author: Mandy Green
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000375811
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
This volume of essays reconfigures the reception history of Milton and his works by bringing to the fore women reading, writing, and rewriting Milton, bringing together in conversation a range of voices from diverse historical, cultural, religious, and social contexts across the globe and through the centuries. The book encompasses a rich range of different literary genres, artistic media, and academic disciplines and draws on the research of established Milton scholars and new Miltonists. Like the female authors and artists whom they explore, the contributors take up a variety of standpoints. As well as revisiting the work of established figures, the volume brings new female creative artists, new subjects, and new approaches to the study of Milton.

The Political Bible in Early Modern England

The Political Bible in Early Modern England PDF Author: Kevin Killeen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107107970
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
This book explores the Bible as a political document in seventeenth-century England, revealing how it provided a key language of political debate.

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 PDF Author: Elizabeth Scott-Baumann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192604732
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 897

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 brings together new work by scholars across the globe, from some of the founding figures in early modern women's writing to those early in their careers and defining the field now. It investigates how and where women gained access to education, how they developed their literary voice through varied genres including poetry, drama, and letters, and how women cultivated domestic and technical forms of knowledge from recipes and needlework to medicines and secret codes. Chapters investigate the ways in which women's writing was an integral part of the intellectual culture of the period, engaging with male writers and traditions, while also revealing the ways in which women's lives and writings were often distinctly different, from women prophetesses to queens, widows, and servants. It explores the intersections of women writing in English with those writing in French, Spanish, Latin, and Greek, in Europe and in New England, and argues for an archipelagic understanding of women's writing in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England. Finally, it reflects on—and challenges—the methodologies which have developed in, and with, the field: book and manuscript history, editing, digital analysis, premodern critical race studies, network theory, queer theory, and feminist theory. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 captures the most innovative work on early modern women's writing in English at present.

Early Modern Women's Complaint

Early Modern Women's Complaint PDF Author: Sarah C. E. Ross
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030429466
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
This collection examines early modern women’s contribution to the culturally central mode of complaint. Complaint has largely been understood as male-authored, yet, as this collection shows, early modern women used complaint across a surprising variety of forms from the early-Tudor period to the late-seventeenth century. They were some of the mode’s first writers, most influential patrons, and most innovative contributors. Together, these new essays illuminate early modern women’s participation in one of the most powerful rhetorical modes in the English Renaissance, one which gave voice to political, religious and erotic protest and loss across a diverse range of texts. This volume interrogates new texts (closet drama, song, manuscript-based religious and political lyrics), new authors (Dorothy Shirley, Scots satirical writers, Hester Pulter, Mary Rowlandson), and new versions of complaint (biblical, satirical, legal, and vernacular). Its essays pay specific attention to politics, form, and transmission from complaint’s first circulation up to recent digital representations of its texts. Bringing together an international group of experts in early modern women’s writing and in complaint literature more broadly, this collection explores women’s role in the formation of the mode and in doing so reconfigures our understanding of complaint in Renaissance culture and thought.

Women and the Bible in Early Modern England

Women and the Bible in Early Modern England PDF Author: Femke Molekamp
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199665400
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
A study of English women's religious reading and writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England, 1558-1625

Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England, 1558-1625 PDF Author: Victoria Brownlee
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198812485
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
The Bible had a profound impact on early modern culture, and bible-reading shaped the period's drama, poetry, and life-writings, as well as sermons and biblical commentaries. This volume provides an account of the how the Bible was read and applied in early modern England. It maps the connection between these readings and various forms of writing and argues that literary writings bear the hallmarks of the period's dominant exegetical practices, and do interpretative work. Tracing the impact of biblical reading across a range of genres and writers, the discussion demonstrates that literary reimaginings of, and allusions to, the Bible were common, varied, and ideologically evocative. The book explores how a series of popularly interpreted biblical narratives were recapitulated in the work of a diverse selection of writers, some of whom remain relatively unknown. In early modern England, the figures of Solomon, Job, and Christ's mother, Mary, and the books of Song of Songs and Revelation, are enmeshed in different ways with contemporary concerns, and their usage illustrates how the Bible's narratives could be turned to a fascinating array of debates. In showing the multifarious contexts in which biblical narratives were deployed, this book argues that Protestant interpretative practices contribute to, and problematize, literary constructions of a range of theological, political, and social debates.

The Medieval and Early Modern Garden in Britain

The Medieval and Early Modern Garden in Britain PDF Author: Patricia Skinner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351051407
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
What was a "garden" in medieval and early modern British culture and how was it imagined? How did it change as Europe opened up to the wider world from the 16th century onwards? In a series of fresh approaches to these questions, the contributors offer chapters that identify and discuss newly-discovered pre-modern garden spaces in archaeology and archival sources, recognize a gendered language of the garden in fictional descriptions ("fictional" here being taken to mean any written text, regardless of its purpose), and offer new analysis of the uses to which gardens - real and imagined - might be put. Chapters investigate the definitions, forms and functions of physical gardens; explore how the material space of the garden was gendered as a secluded space for women, and as a place of recreation; examine the centrality of garden imagery in medieval Christian culture; and trace the development of garden motifs in the literary and artistic imagination to convey the sense of enclosure, transformation and release. The book uniquely underlines the current environmental "turn" in the humanities, and increasingly recognizes the value of exploring human interaction with the landscapes of the past as a route to health and well-being in the present.

A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle

A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle PDF Author: Jennifer Lillian Lodine-Chaffey
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817321322
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
"A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle provides a new perspective on the representations of women on the scaffold, focusing on how female victims and those writing about them constructed meaning from the ritual. A significant part of the execution spectacle-one used to assess the victim's proper acceptance of death and godly repentance-was the final speech offered at the foot of the gallows or before the pyre. To ensure that their words on the scaffold held value for audiences, women adopted conventionally gendered language and positioned themselves as subservient and modest. Just as important as their words, though, were the depictions of women's bodies. Drawing on a wide range of genres, from accounts of martyrdom to dramatic works, this study explores not only the words of women executed in Tudor and Stuart England, but also the ways that writers represented female bodies as markers of penitence or deviance. The reception of women's speeches, Jennifer Lodine-Chaffey argues, depended on their performances of accepted female behaviors and words as well as physical signs of interior regeneration. Indeed, when women presented themselves or were represented as behaving in stereotypically feminine and virtuous ways, they were able to offer limited critiques of their fraught positions in society. The first part of this study investigates the early modern execution, including the behavioral expectations for condemned individuals, the medieval tradition that shaped the ritual, and the gender specific ways English authorities legislated and carried out women's executions. Depictions of the female body are the focus of the second part of the book. The executed woman's body, Lodine-Chaffey contends, functioned as a text, scrutinized by witnesses and readers for markers of innocence or guilt. These signs, though, were related not just to early modern ideas about female modesty and weakness, but also to the developing martyrdom tradition, which linked bodies and behavior to inner spiritual states. While many representations of women focused on physical traits and behaviors coded as godly, other accounts highlighted the grotesque and bestial attributes of women deemed unrepentant or evil. Part Three considers the rhetorical strategies used by women and their authors, highlighting the ways that women positioned themselves as stereotypically weak in order to defuse criticism of their speeches and navigate their positions in society, even when awaiting death on the scaffold. The greater focus on the words and bodies of women facing execution during this period, Lodine-Chaffey argues, became a catalyst for a more thorough interest in and understanding of women's roles not just as criminals but as subjects"--

The Destruction of Jerusalem in Early Modern English Literature

The Destruction of Jerusalem in Early Modern English Literature PDF Author: Beatrice Groves
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110711327X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
This book argues that the destruction of Jerusalem is a key explanatory trope for early modern texts.