Writing Habits

Jaime Goodrich is professor of English at Wayne State University. She is author of Faithful Translators: Authorship, Gender, and Religion in Early Modern England and editor of Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts.

“Goodrich presents by far the most cohesive account of the six English Benedictine convents that were founded in France and Flanders following the Dissolution, arguing that the need to create a new English monasticism offers a privileged space for us to investigate community formation. Her rigorous analysis of administrative, spiritual, polemical, and historical/life writing (grounded on over 1,000 surviving manuscripts and books) breaks new ground in the depth and breadth of its analysis and in its advancing of a feminist philosophical practice for early modern women’s writing.”- Marie-Louise Coolahan, author of Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland;“Writing Habits makes a compelling case that these recovered texts are not simply of documentary interest but indeed are voices we need to listen to, speaking eloquently across time about many of the current spiritual questions that continue to engage us today. Using ‘strategic presentism,’ Goodrich seeks to bridge the gap between a historicist focus on material textual production and a philosophical perspective in a work of importance to those studying early modern women writers, cultural historians, and modern theories of the nature of community.”- Margaret J. M. Ezell, author of The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 5, 1645–1714: The Later Seventeenth Century;“Writing Habits offers a trifecta of timely and welcome scholarly interventions. Goodrich demonstrates with finesse and precision how the dialogic and communitarian ethics of Martin Buber refines the critical vocabularies associated with the ‘turn to religion’ in early modern literary studies, even as it also enlarges the methodological equipment associated with feminist philosophical investments in the field and archivally driven assessments of early modern women’s writing. These three lines of thought converge in Goodrich’s expert scrutiny of the rich archive of materials documenting the writing genres and tactics used by early modern exiled English Benedictine convent communities to maintain a sense of communitarian and religious integrity in the face of internal as well as external challenges. The resulting picture fulfills the book’s promise to disclose new perspectives on the supple cultural and religious grammar of early modern women’s writing as exhibited in the diasporic career of the English Benedictines. Beyond that, Writing Habits models how the act of ‘thinking with’ from a Buberian vantage point opens unimagined vistas on forgotten or neglected materials from the early modern period. The inroads gained here speak powerfully to contemporary feminist investments in cultivating a posture of attunement to theoretical perspectives and matters of moment that may be found germinating in the discursive texture of long-marginalized writings.”- Lowell Gallagher, author of Sodomscapes: Hospitality in the Flesh