Domesticity and dissent in the seventeenth-century : English women writers and the public sphere / Katharine Gillespie.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gillespie, Katharine, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

English literature.

Literature and history--Great Britain--History--17th century.

Literature and history.

English literature--Puritan authors--History and criticism.

English literature--Women authors--History and criticism.

Dissenters, Religious--England--History--17th century.

Dissenters, Religious.

Women and literature--England--History--17th century.

Women and literature.

Puritan women--England--Intellectual life.

Puritan women.

Dissenters, Religious, in literature.

Great Britain--History--Civil War, 1642-1649--Literature and the war.

Great Britain.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 272 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Other Title:

Domesticity & Dissent in the Seventeenth Century

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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 Chidley, 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, prophesies, 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 study contributes to the important scholarship on the revolutionary writings that emerged during the volatile years of the mid-seventeenth-century Civil War in England.

Contents:

Sabrina versus the state

"Born of the mother's seed" : liberalism, feminism, and religious separatism

A hammer in her hand : Katherine Chidley and Anna Trapnel separate church from state

Cure for a diseased head : divorce and contract in the prophesies of Elizabeth Poole

The unquenchable smoking flax : Sarah Wight, Anne Wentworth, and the "rise" of the sovereign individual

Improving God's estate : pastoral servitude and the free market in the writings of Mary Cary.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-107-14822-7

1-280-45795-3

0-511-18586-3

0-511-18503-0

0-511-18770-X

0-511-31374-8

0-511-48358-9

0-511-18677-0

OCLC:

489558665