Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter 1
2. Table of Contents 7
3. List of Figures 9
4. Acknowledgements 11
5. 1. Feminism and Faith in the Lives and Works of Late Medieval and Early Modern Women: An Introduction 13
6. Scriptural Exegesis and the Feminist Sisterhood
7. 2. Teresa de Cartagena’s Feminist Rhetoric and Theology 43
8. 3. Feminism and Italian Sacred Writings : A Growing Space for Female Authorship, 1500–1600 57
9. 4. Shaftesbury, Women Writers, and Deism 83
10. Female Freedom and Agency through Religious Enclosure
11. 5. Mère Angélique Arnauld and the Paradoxes of Women’s Enclosure 107
12. 6. “Nothing but a Union with God” : Queer Religiosity in Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies 125
13. Gender Equality through the Language of Faith
14. 7. “A Plant in God’s House” : Botanical Metaphors in Early Modern Women’s Poetry 143
15. 8. The Christian Housewife and Midwife : Healthcare and Women’s Authority in Early Modern Almanacs and Manuals 163
16. Feminist Indirection and Disruption in the Religious Sphere
17. 9. The Rhetoric and Aesthetic of Indirection : Women, Religion, and Power in the Works of Margaret Cavendish 183
18. 10. Grief, Commemoration, and the Poetics of Disruption in the Works of Frances Norton 209
19. The Feminist Potential and Parameters of Religious Belief
20. 11. Anne Dowriche and Elizabeth Cary as Writers of Early Modern History 231
21. 12. Both Enabling and Limiting: Religion as a Sponsor of Feminism in the Eighteenth-Century Labouring-Class Verses of Collier, Leapor, and Yearsley 255
22. The Call For Female Liberty through the Language of Religion Beyond the Borders of Europe
23. 13. “Freer than Any Ladys in the Universe”: Theologies of Liberty and Legalism in the Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 279
24. 14. “I Find No Curse in the Gospel of Christ” : Private Judgment and the Gendering of Church Discipline in the Early American Republic 303
25. Bibliography 319
26. Index 343