Description
Book SynopsisIllustrates the complex ways in which biblical women’s narratives could be reimagined for a variety of rhetorical and religious purposes
Trade Review'This is a splendid collection of essays and an important contribution to both feminist historiography of the Renaissance and the place of the Bible in the intellectual culture of the era. It should find a ready readership across a number of interlocking interests - literary, feminist, historical, theological, and political theory.'
Kevin Killeen, University of York, Renaissance Quarterly Volume LXIX, No. 2
'It contains fourteen chapters which together constitute an impressive wealth of expertise on the topic of the Bible and its reception in early modern English society....A broad yet focused collection, containing enough material to offer something new to all readers, Biblical Women in Early Modern Literary Culture 1550-1700 should certainly live up to its editors' hope for it.'
Robert F. W. Smith, The Journal of Northern Renaissance
‘This ambitious and scholarly collection of essays addresses the complex, often contradictory, and sometimes strikingly counterintuitive ways that biblical women characters were analysed, interpreted, and appropriated in early modern discourses.’
Anne Russell, Wilfrid Laurier University, Renaissance and Reformation 39.2 Spring 2016
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Table of ContentsIntroduction: Discovering biblical women in Early Modern literary culture – Victoria Brownlee and Laura Gallagher
PART I: Women and feminine archetypes of the Old Testament
2. Overview: reading Old Testament women in Early Modern England, 1550–1700 – Victoria Brownlee and Laura Gallagher
3. A ‘Paraditian Creature’: Eve and her unsuspecting garden in seventeenth century literature – Elizabeth Hodgson
4. Christian liberty and female rule: exegesis and political controversy in the 1550s – Adrian Streete
5. Wives, fears and foreskins: Early Modern reproach of Zipporah and Michal – Michele Osherow
6. The politics of female supplication in the Book of Esther – Alison Thorne
7. Gender and the inculcation of virtue: the Book of Proverbs in action – Danielle Clarke
PART II: Women and feminine archetypes of the New Testament
8. Overview: reading New Testament women in Early Modern England, 1550–1700 – Victoria Brownlee and Laura Gallagher
9. Christ’s tears and maternal cannibalism in Early Modern London – Beatrice Groves
10. Mary of recusants and reform: literary memory and defloration – Thomas Rist
11. Stabat mater dolorosa: imagining Mary’s grief at the cross – Laura Gallagher
12. St Helena of Britain in the land of the Magdalene: all’s well that ends well – Lisa Hopkins
13. Imagining the enemy: protestant readings of the whore of babylon in Early Modern England, c.1580–1625 – Victoria Brownlee
14. Afterword – Dympna Callaghan
Index
