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This book considers how biblical women were read, appropriated and debated in a wide range of early modern texts. It traverses a range of genres and examines literature written by a variety of confessionally diverse writers. By considering literature intended for assorted audiences, the book showcases the diverse contexts in which the Bible's women were deployed, and illuminates the transferability of biblical appreciation across apparent religious divisions. The book has been split into two sections. Part One considers women and feminine archetypes of the Old Testament, and the chapters gathered in Part Two address the New Testament. This structure reflects the division of Scripture in early modern Bibles and speaks to the contemporary method of reading the Bible from the Old Testament to the New Testament. In spite of this division, the chapters regularly make cross references between the two Testaments highlighting how, in line with the conventions of early modern exegesis, they were understood to exist in a reciprocal relationship. Within each section, the chapters are broadly organised according to the sequential appearance of the women/feminine archetypes in the Bible. The biblical women studied extend from Eve in Genesis to the Whore of Babylon in Revelation. The chapters vary between those that examine dominant trends in appropriation to those that consider appropriations of a particular interest group or individual.
itself. He created a kind of prose fiction that was not only new but came to define the shape the future novel was to take. He was the first professional Elizabethan playwright to see a succession of plays into print. He created characters, phrases and literary forms that dominated contemporary writing. He deserves more space in these debates than he has so far been given. Early modern literary culture was defined
, testifying to the multiplicity of biblical appropriation in England from 1550–1700. For as Biblical Women in Early Modern Literary Culture demonstrates, mothers and poets, dramatists and politicians, as well as sermonisers and biblical commentators, read, applied and re-imagined the narratives of the Bible’s women, and often in markedly different ways. Although many of us might struggle to
they reflect in miniature many of this volume’s key themes, especially the inextricable connection between misogyny and exegesis in early modern England and between the various confessional certainties about women’s virtues and vices and women’s own attempts to interpret biblical women. Biblical Women in Early Modern Literary Culture, 1550–1700 explores the multiple
much closer to [eighteenth-century] contemporaries than they do to Shakespeare’s’. 13 Despite his centrality to early modern literary culture, then, Lyly is now a largely forgotten figure, confined to the periphery of the canon. Even Stanley Wells, a major advocate for Shakespeare’s contemporaries, describes early modern drama as ‘poetic and rhetorical because this was
early modern literary culture see Andy Kesson, John Lyly and Early Modern Authorship (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). 15 Richard Sugg, Murder after Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), p
Nahoum-Grappe, ‘Le boire et l’ivresse dans la pensée sociale sous l’ancien régime en France (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles)’, in Histoire et alcool (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), pp. 76–7; James Nicholls, The Politics of Alcohol: A History of the Drink Question in England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), p. 68; Mark Hailwood, ‘“It puts good reason into brains”: Popular understandings of the effects of alcohol in seventeenth-century England’, Brewery History , 150 (2013), 48–9; Cathy Shrank, ‘Beastly metamorphoses: losing control in early modern literary culture
Romanticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 46 Earle, Epistolary Selves, p. 1. 47 H. Dragstra, S. Ottway and H. Wilcox (eds), Betraying Our Selves: Forms of self-representation in early modern English texts (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 11. 48 ‘Scribal publication’, or the circulation of hand-written texts, was an established part of early modern literary culture and a channel through which the work of many women writers reached its audience. For an earlier history of this practice, see J. Stevenson, ‘Women Writing and Scribal Publication in the Sixteenth
criticism, it does not seem to have been part of the semantics of early modern literary culture. And the two instances of its use, between Harvey and Nashe and then Blount, are highly ambiguous: there is no evidence whatsoever that they use the word with the meaning that modern literary critics now ascribe to it, that of a particular prose style incorporating certain stylistic
question is Lady Anne Bacon and the letter was appended to her translation of John Jewel’s Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, published in 1564. At first sight, Parker’s dedicatory epistle portrays the translation as a semi-private manuscript work by a woman, which only accidentally found its way into print. Anne’s agency as a writer seeking a public forum is therefore denied. Such an interpretation would accord with past scholarship on female religious translations, and the genre has often been considered as evidence of the silencing of women in early modern literary