Negotiating Feminism and Faith in the Lives and Works of Late Medieval and Early Modern Women

Holly Faith Nelson, Ph.D., is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Gender Studies Institute at Trinity Western University. Her work on women’s writing, gender and literature, and religion and literature has appeared in a wide range of journals and essay collections over the past two decades Adrea Johnson, Ph.D., specializes in women’s religious writing of the long nineteenth century. She also holds an M.A. in Theology from Regent College. Her article on the hymnologist John Mason Neale appeared in Crux. She currently teaches at the University of the Fraser Valley and Regent College.

Acknowledgements
List of Figures
1. Feminism and Faith in the Lives and Works of Late Medieval and Early Modern Women: An Introduction - Holly Faith Nelson and Adrea Johnson
Scriptural Exegesis and the Feminist Sisterhood
2. Teresa de Cartagena’s Feminist Rhetoric and Theology - Gladys Robalino
3. Feminism and Italian Sacred Writings: A Growing Space for Female Authorship, 1500–1600 - Clara Stella
4. Shaftesbury, Women Writers, and Deism - Michael Behrens
Female Freedom and Agency through Religious Enclosure
5. Mère Angélique Arnauld and the Paradoxes of Women’s Enclosure - Natasha Duquette
6. “Nothing but a Union with God”: Queer Religiosity in Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies - Megan Cole
Gender Equality through the Language of Faith
7. “A Plant in God’s House”: Botanical Metaphors in Early Modern Women’s Poetry - Felicity Sheehy
8. The Christian Housewife and Midwife: Healthcare and Women’s Authority in Early Modern Almanacs and Manuals - Melissa Kleinschmidt
Feminist Indirection and Disruption in the Religious Sphere
9. The Rhetoric and Aesthetic of Indirection: Women, Religion, and Power in the Works of Margaret Cavendish - Holly Faith Nelson and Sharon Alker
10. Grief, Commemoration, and the Poetics of Disruption in the Works of Frances Norton - Nicole Garret
The Feminist Potential and Parameters of Religious Belief
11. Anne Dowriche and Elizabeth Cary as Writers of Early Modern History - Rachel M. De Smith Roberts
12. Both Enabling and Limiting: Religion as a Sponsor of Feminism in the Eighteenth-Century Labouring-Class Verses of Collier, Leapor, and Yearsley - Steve Van-Hagen
The Call for Female Liberty through the Language of Religion beyond the Borders of Europe
13. “Freer than any Ladys in the universe”: Theologies of Liberty and Legalism in the Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu - Jordan Hall
14. “I Find No Curse in the Gospel of Christ”: Private Judgment and the Gendering of Church Discipline in the Early American Republic - Spencer Wells
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index