English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500-1625

Micheline White is Associate Professor of English Literature at Carleton University, Canada. She is the editor of Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700: Volume 3: Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer (2009), and has published articles on Tudor women and religious writing.

'This excellent collection breaks new ground, admirably theorizing early modern women's agency in religious communities and intertextual prose genres.' Margaret P. Hannay, Siena College, USA and author of Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth '... the essays are thought provoking and valuable, offering a new understanding of how early-modern women used writing to engage with religion... Recommended.' Choice 'Taken together, these essays confirm Patricia Phillipy's eloquent statement, "Spirituality is a social undertaking, intimately bound to conversation, conference, and debate". This collection also offers important techniques of analysis of women's prayers, a genre often neglected because its reliance on scripture would seem to detract from authorial creativity... these essays provide useful techniques for reading women's religious writing that will influence future work.' Renaissance Quarterly 'The scholarship collected here rests on detailed archival work, careful historicizing of textual production, and close attention to textual sources. The volume will be required reading for all those who work on early modern women’s religious literature, and will be valued not least for its focus on style and language. As well as telling us much about the works discussed and their social and religious contexts, these essays show that the history of the book has its part to play in developing methodologies for the study of early modern women’s religious writing.' SHARP News 'A wonderful collection, English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500-1625, will appeal to both historians and literary critics of early modern women and religiosity. I highly recommend it.' Renaissance Studies ’...[This book] admirably fulfils its historical and theoretical briefs, restoring attention to little discussed texts, recovering the contexts that explain them, and reinstating the literary and critical frameworks that shape them. White and her contributors should therefore be congratul

• Contents: Introduction: women, religious communities, intertextual prose genres, and textual production, Micheline White; Part I Women and Religious Communities: Living stones: Lady Elizabeth Russell and the art of sacred conversation, Patricia Phillippy; 'Theise dearest offrings of my heart': the sacrifice of praise in Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke's Psalmes, Mary Trull; Anne Dacre Howard, Countess of Arundel, and Catholic patronage, Susannah Brietz Monta; 'Ensigne-bearers of Saint Clare': Elizabeth Evelinge's early translations of the restoration of English Franciscanism, Jaime Goodrich; Lady Anne Clifford and the uses of Christian warfare, Julie Crawford. Part II Reading Intertextual Prose Genres: Prospecting for common ground in devotion: Queen Katherine Parr's personal prayerbook, Janel Mueller; 'Halff a scrypture woman': heteroglossia and female authorial agency in prayers by Lady Elizabeth Tyrwhit, Anne Lock, and Anne Wheathill, Susan M. Felch; Authority, scripture, and typography in Lady Grace Mildmay's manuscript meditations, Kate Narveson; Lady Margaret Beaufort's translations as mirrors of practical piety, Brenda M. Hosington; 'Neither bitterly nor brablingly': Lady Anne Cooke Bacon's translation of Bishop Jewel's Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, Patricia Demers; Works cited; Index.