Domesticity and dissent in the seventeenth-century
Subtitle: English women writers and the public sphere
By: Katharine Gillespie.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2004
Place of publication: Cambridge, UK; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 272
Subjects: English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism; Literature and history -- Great Britain -- History -- 17th century; English literature -- Puritan authors -- History and criticism; English literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism; Dissenters, Religious -- England -- History -- 17th century; Women and literature -- England -- History -- 17th century; Puritan women -- England -- Intellectual life; Dissenters, Religious, in literature; Great Britain -- History -- Civil War, 1642-1649 -- Literature and the war
Other titles: Domesticity and dissent in the 17th-century
Description: "In Domesticity and Dissent Katharine Gillespie examines writings by seventeenth-century English Puritan women who fought for religious, freedom. Seeking the right to preach and prophesy, women such as Katherine Childley, Anna Trapnel, Elizabeth Poole, and Anne Wentworth envisioned the modern political principles of toleration, the separation of church from state, privacy, and individualism. Gillespie argues that their sermons, prophecies, and petitions illustrate the fact that these liberal theories did not originate only with such well-known male thinkers as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. Rather, they emerged also from a group of determined female religious dissenters who used the Bible to reassess traditional definitions of womanhood, public speech, and religious and political authority. Gillespie takes the "pamphlet literatures" of the seventeenth century as important subjects for analysis, and her book contributes to the growing scholarship on the revolutionary writings that emerged during the volatile years of the mid-seventeenth-century civil war in England."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.