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

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... g 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. © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521837588 -Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England Erica Longfellow Frontmatter More information © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521837588 -Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England Erica Longfellow Frontmatter More information published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge The Pitt