1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910784315203321

Autore

Gillespie Katharine

Titolo

Domesticity and dissent in the seventeenth-century : English women writers and the public sphere / / Katharine Gillespie [[electronic resource]]

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cambridge : , : Cambridge University Press, , 2004

ISBN

1-107-14822-7

1-280-45795-3

0-511-18586-3

0-511-18503-0

0-511-18770-X

0-511-31374-8

0-511-48358-9

0-511-18677-0

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xii, 272 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)

Disciplina

820.9/358

Soggetti

English literature - Early modern, 1500-1700 - History and criticism

Literature and history - Great Britain - History - 17th century

English literature - Puritan authors - History and criticism

English literature - Women authors - History and criticism

Dissenters, Religious - England - History - 17th century

Women and literature - England - History - 17th century

Puritan women - England - Intellectual life

Dissenters, Religious, in literature

Great Britain History Civil War, 1642-1649 Literature and the war

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

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

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Sabrina versus the state -- "Born of the mother's seed" : liberalism, feminism, and religious separatism -- A hammer in her hand : Katherine Chidley and Anna Trapnel separate church from state -- Cure for a diseased head : divorce and contract in the prophesies of Elizabeth Poole -- The unquenchable smoking flax : Sarah Wight, Anne



Wentworth, and the "rise" of the sovereign individual -- Improving God's estate : pastoral servitude and the free market in the writings of Mary Cary.

Sommario/riassunto

In Domesticity and Dissent Katharine Gillespie examines writings by seventeenth-century English Puritan women who fought for religious freedom. Seeking the right to preach and prophesy, women such as Katherine Chidley, Anna Trapnel, Elizabeth Poole, and Anne Wentworth envisioned the modern political principles of toleration, the separation of Church from state, privacy, and individualism. Gillespie argues that their sermons, prophesies, and petitions illustrate the fact that these liberal theories did not originate only with such well-known male thinkers as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. Rather, they emerged also from a group of determined female religious dissenters who used the Bible to reassess traditional definitions of womanhood, public speech and religious and political authority. Gillespie takes the 'pamphlet literatures' of the seventeenth century as important subjects for analysis, and her study contributes to the important scholarship on the revolutionary writings that emerged during the volatile years of the mid-seventeenth-century Civil War in England.