Women, men and Christ crucified

Abstract

Despite frequent claims to the contrary, Passion piety maintained a significant presence within English devotion throughout the sixteenth century. This article centres on several female contributors to evangelical Passion devotion, including Katherine Parr and Elizabeth Tyrwhit. Moving beyond essentialized notions of gendered authorship, the study offers a comparative, historicizing perspective on women's Passion writings, situating female-authored works within their wider contemporary devotional contexts. An argument is advanced for the fluidity and open-endedness of the early landscape of reform, uncovering the surprising continuities which shaped reformed spirituality and revealing a level of confessional interplay at variance with polarized models of Catholic and Protestant devotion.