This volume examines women’s prophetic writing as the literary and historical outcome of a discourse of social transformation that conflates religious consciousness, political democratization, and gender identity. Drawing on a substantial corpus that integrates insightful readings of both household names and lesser-known authors, it identifies the key aspects that define prophetic writing by women in the seventeenth century and interprets each case study as being representative of a form of textual activism that blurs the boundaries between private and public. Contextualizing seventeenth-century prophecy in relation to its religious antecedents and its ramifications towards the eighteenth century, the book broadens discussions about how historicized readings, print culture, and gender concerns enhance our literary understanding of prophetic texts within the canon of early modern women’s writing. Seventeenth-century women prophets were imbued with a spiritual energy that forced them to articulate a message of their own. By virtue of discovering the power of language and communication, and by defending their word against the aggression of authorities, women gained a better sense of themselves as individuals with their own views. Since prophecy cannot be properly studied in isolation as a literary genre or as a historical phenomenon only, this book conflates religion, politics, and gender in the historical and literary appreciation of the prophetic text in the Renaissance. As such it will be of interest to scholars and students working in early modern literature and culture, social history, religious writing, and gender.
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The Value of Milton
$2,025 -
Desires of Credit in Early Modern Theory and Drama: Commerce, Poesy, and the Profitable Imagination
$6,748 -
Two Early Modern Marriage Sermons: Henry Smith’s a Preparative to Marriage 1591 and William Whately’s a Bride-bush 1623
$6,748 -
Futile Pleasures: Early Modern Literature and the Limits of Utility
$4,500 -
Skepticism and Belief in Early Modern England: The Reformation of Moral Value
$6,300 -
Milton in the Arab-Muslim World
$6,300 -
Petrarchism at Work: Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare
$2,475 -
Staging Blackness and Performing Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century German Drama
$6,748 -
A Fig for Fortune by Anthony Copley: A Catholic Response to the Faerie Queene
$4,950 -
Sir John Denham (1614/15–1669) Reassessed: The State’s Poet
$6,748 -
A History of Modern French Literature: From the Sixteenth Century to the Twentieth Century
$2,248 -
Adam in Seventeenth Century Political Writing in England and New England
$6,300 -
Futile Pleasures: Early Modern Literature and the Limits of Utility
$1,260 -
Women and Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal
$6,748 -
What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution
$1,123 -
Mountain Aesthetics in Early Modern Latin Literature
$6,300 -
Milton, Materialism, and Embodiment: One First Matter All
$3,150 -
Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine De Medici
$6,748 -
Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science
$3,150 -
Spenserian Allegory and Elizabethan Biblical Exegesis: A Context for the Faerie Queene
$4,950