Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century: English Women Writers and the Public Sphere

by Katharine Gillespie

Overview

Katharine Gillespie examines writings by seventeenth-century English Puritan women who fought for religious freedom. Seeking the right to preach and prophesy, Katherine Chidley, Anna Trapnel, Elizabeth Poole, and Anne Wentworth envisioned the modern political principles of toleration and the separation of church from state, as well as the issues of privacy and individualism. Gillespie's analysis of "pamphlet literatures" of the seventeenth century contributes to the scholarship on revolutionary writings that emerged during the volatile years of England's mid-seventeenth-century Civil War.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521120227
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	09/24/2009
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Katharine Gillespie is Assistant Professor of seventeenth-century transatlantic and early modern women's literature at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She has published articles in Genders, Bunyan Studies, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, and Symbiosis.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Sabrina versus the state; 1. 'Born of the Mother's seed': Liberalism, feminism, and religious separatism; 2. A hammer in her hand: Katherine Chidley and Anna Trapnel separate church from state; 3. Cure for a diseased head: divorce and contract in the prophesies of Elizabeth Poole; 4. The unquenchable smoking flax: Sarah Wight, Anne Wentworth, and the 'rise' of the sovereign individual; 5. Improving God's estate: preaching and the possessive economy in the writings of Mary Cary.

Editorial Reviews

"...a stylishly written, intellectually lively book that contributes significantly to our understanding of midcentury religious and political radicalism; it is a welcome addition to the study of early modern women writers." - Gina Hausknecht, Coe College

From the Publisher