English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500-1625

'This excellent collection breaks new ground, admirably theorizing early modern women's agency in religious communities and intertextual prose genres.' Margaret P. Hannay, Siena College, USA and author of Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth '... the essays are thought provoking and valuable, offering a new understanding of how early-modern women used writing to engage with religion... Recommended.' Choice 'Taken together, these essays confirm Patricia Phillipy's eloquent statement, "Spirituality is a social undertaking, intimately bound to conversation, conference, and debate". This collection also offers important techniques of analysis of women's prayers, a genre often neglected because its reliance on scripture would seem to detract from authorial creativity... these essays provide useful techniques for reading women's religious writing that will influence future work.' Renaissance Quarterly 'The scholarship collected here rests on detailed archival work, careful historicizing of textual production, and close attention to textual sources. The volume will be required reading for all those who work on early modern women’s religious literature, and will be valued not least for its focus on style and language. As well as telling us much about the works discussed and their social and religious contexts, these essays show that the history of the book has its part to play in developing methodologies for the study of early modern women’s religious writing.' SHARP News 'A wonderful collection, English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500-1625, will appeal to both historians and literary critics of early modern women and religiosity. I highly recommend it.' Renaissance Studies ’...[This book] admirably fulfils its historical and theoretical briefs, restoring attention to little discussed texts, recovering the contexts that explain them, and reinstating the literary and critical frameworks that shape them. White and her contributors should therefore be congratul