Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England

Abstract

This study challenges critical assumptions about the role of religion in shaping women's experiences of authorship. Feminist critics have frequently been uncomfortable with the fact that conservative religious and political beliefs created opportunities for women to write with independent agency. The seventeenth-century Protestant women discussed in this book range across the religio-political and social spectrums and yet all display an affinity with modern feminist theologians. Rather than being victims of a patriarchal gender ideology, Lady Anne Southwell, Anna Trapnel and Lucy Hutchinson, among others, were both active negotiators of gender and active participants in wider theological debates. By placing women's religious writing in a broad theological and socio-political context, Erica Longfellow challenges traditional critical assumptions about the role of gender in shaping religion and politics, and the role of women in defining gender and thus influencing religion and politics. erica longfellow is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Kingston University. She is co-coordinator of the Performing History project in association with Hampton Court Royal Palace, which aims to reproduce early modern dramatic performances in historical settings.

Positioning Patronage: Lanyer'sSalve Deus Rex Judæorumand the Countess of Cumberland in Time and Place

“…Erica Longfellow convincingly argues that Lanyer sought patronage not just for herself but also for her husband, who was also actively pursuing patrons in London. 100 Also in 1611, Margaret Russell was preparing to retire even further from London, to her jointure estates in Westmorland. She wrote to Francis Russell, her nephew: "my intended journey into Westmorland from London was stay'd in 1611 meerly by the persuasion of my son in law the Earl of Dorset."…”

“Domestick Adam” versus “Adventrous Eve”: Arguments about Gardening in Milton's Eden

“…Her garden is "a place of liberating selfenclosure," in which Trapnel "can escape from human intercourse for personal conversation with God." 75 This, though, is not the form of retreat with which Eve associates Eden. Although she says that Eden's "happie Walks and Shades" are "Fit haunt of Gods" (11.270-71), she does not suggest any instance of it being associated for her with contact with the Father himself.…”

Speculation and Multiple Dedications in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum

“…The dedications tend toward hyperbole at times, but, as Erica Longfellow has suggested, they are no more exaggerated than other seventeenth-century patronage poems. 13 Complete copies of the book contain nine dedications to individuals, including Queen Anne; Princess Elizabeth; Lady Arbella Stuart; Susan Bertie, Countess of Kent; Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Lucy Harrington Russell, Countess of Bedford; Margaret Russell Clifford, Countess of Cumberland; Katherine Howard, Countess of Suffolk; and Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset and Montgomery. It also includes a dedicatory poem addressed "To all vertuous Ladies in generall" and a prose epistle "To the Vertuous Reader."…”