Abstract
It is tempting to argue for a distinct female voice in medieval and early-modern religious works by women and to read their texts in light of feminist notions of écriture féminine or womanspeak.1 It would be unwise, however, to give credence to any simplistic account of “feminine writing” in devotional works of the period, for textual production involves a complex process of different and conflicting determinants. Gender is only one of the factors that affect the workings of the spiritual imagination. Nevertheless, many female religious writers in medieval and early-modern Britain operated within an aesthetic of opposition, writing against essentialist concepts of “woman” as a static cultural category—inherently disruptive, spiritually inadequate, physically inferior, and inclined to the bestial.2 A rhetoric of resistance that exposed gender as a social construct surfaced in their writings, challenging the exclusion of women from the discursive formations of philosophy and religion that defined and transmitted “truth.” Ironically, medieval and early-modern women most often discovered their identity and authority in the very discourse of religion that was regularly employed by the clergy and laity to render them secondary, even soul-less, beings. Though a “foundational discourse,” religion was not a monolithic language that spoke “with only one voice” (Hinds 7); medieval and earlymodern women could employ sacred discourse to promote the notion of the self as a fluid process rather than a fixed object, rereading the scripture to invest the dynamic female body and soul with spiritual and material, private and public, worth.
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© 2006 Allyson Jule and Bettina Tate Pedersen
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Nelson, H.F. (2006). Nascent Christian Feminism in Medieval and Early-Modern Britain. In: Jule, A., Pedersen, B.T. (eds) Being Feminist, Being Christian. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403983107_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403983107_8
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