Heresy trials and English women writers, 1400-1670
By: Genelle Gertz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Cambridge
Language: eng
Number of pages: 258
ISBN-13: 9781107017054
Subjects: Women authors; English literature; LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; History and criticism; Trials (Heresy); History
Description: "This book charts the emergence of women's writing from the procedures of heresy trials and recovers a tradition of women's trial narratives from the late Middle Ages to the seventeenth century. Analyzing the interrogations of Margery Kempe, Anne Askew, Marian Protestant women, Margaret Clitherow and Quakers Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, the book examines the complex dynamics of women's writing, preaching and authorship under religious persecution and censorship. Archival sources illuminate not only the literary choices women made, showing how they wrote to justify their teaching even when their authority was questioned, but also their complex relationship with male interrogators. Women's speech was paradoxically encouraged and constrained, and male editors preserved their writing while shaping it to their own interests. This book challenges conventional distinctions between historical and literary forms while identifying a new tradition of women's writing across Catholic, Protestant and Sectarian communities and the medieval/early modern divide"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Introduction: articulating women: trial narratives and women's writing in late medieval and early modern England; 1. 'Belief papers and the literary genres of heresy trial'; 2. 'Confessing Margery Kempe, 1413-1438'; 3. 'Recanting and rewriting Anne Askew, 1540-1546'; 4. 'Sanctifying ploughmans' daughters and butchers' wives: the interrogations of Alice Driver, Elizabeth Young, Agnes Prest and Margaret Clitherow, 1555-1586'; 5. 'Exporting inquisition: Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers at Malta, 1659-1663'; Conclusion: visionaries, non-conformists and the history of women's trial writing.