Heresy Trials and English Women Writers, 1400–1670
Author(s): Genelle Gertz (Author)
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication Date: 14 Jun. 2012
Language: English
Print length: 270 pages
ISBN-10: 9781107017054
ISBN-13: 110701705X
Book Description
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.
Editorial Reviews
Review
‘Gertz beautifully illuminates the literary qualities of Askew’s writing … Heresy Trials and English Women Writers, 1400–1670 is a stimulating and interesting book.’ Journal of the Northern Renaissance
‘Heresy Trials and English Women Writers, 1400–1670 is a compelling account of heresy trials, and a valuable addition to current scholarship on trial narratives, the history of women’s preaching, women’s autobiographical writing and biographical writings of women.’ Nora King, The History of Women Religious of Britain and Ireland
‘A learned, crisply written book … Gertz offers a nuanced map of how belief and resistance helped to generate writing.’ Renaissance Quarterly
‘Gertz’s book succeeds in its stated goal: to recover a history of women’s preaching before the seventeenth century. More importantly, perhaps, she also makes an argument for reading women’s preaching and religious writing cross-confessionallyand comparatively.’ Courtney E. Rydel, Recusant History
‘All of the case studies are full of rich detail and carefully researched contextual information that are impossible to capture in a short review. Specialists interested in early women writers, women and religion, heresy, trial narratives, biography, and autobiography will find much to learn from and to inspire them … The [book has a] bold thesis, impressive scholarship, and ambitious chronology.’ Tim Stretton, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal
Book Description
This book charts the emergence of women’s writing from the procedures of heresy trials and recovers a tradition of women’s trial narratives.
About the Author
Genelle Gertz is Associate Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, Virginia and teaches courses on medieval and early modern literature.
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