Heresy trials and English women writers, 1400-1670 / Genelle Gertz.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gertz, Genelle, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Trials (Heresy)--Great Britain--History.

Trials (Heresy).

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

English literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 258 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Other Title:

Heresy Trials & English Women Writers, 1400-1670

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Introduction : articulating women

Belief papers and the literary genres of heresy trial

Confessing Margery Kempe, 1413-1438

Recanting and rewriting Anne Askew, 1540-1546

Sanctifying ploughmens' daughters and butchers' wives : the interrogations of Alice Driver, Elizabeth Young, Agnes Prest and Margaret Clitherow, 1555-1586

Exporting inquisition : Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers at Malta, 1659-1663

Conclusion : visionaries, non-conformists and the history of women's trial writing.

Notes:

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

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-107-23057-8

1-139-50813-X

1-280-77405-3

9786613684820

1-139-51775-9

1-139-06199-2

1-139-51517-9

1-139-51425-3

1-139-51682-5

1-139-51868-2

OCLC:

796803891