Beyond the Cloister : : Catholic Englishwomen and Early Modern Literary Culture / / Jenna Lay.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2016
• VerfasserIn: Lay, Jenna,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2016]; ©2016
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (256 p.)

Representations of Catholic women appear with surprising frequency in the literature of post-Reformation England. Playwrights and poets from William Shakespeare to Andrew Marvell invoke the figure of the nun to powerful and often perplexing effect, and works that never directly address female Catholicism, such as Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander, share a discourse with contemporary debates regarding the status of recusant women. Catholic Englishwomen, whether living in convents on the European continent or as recusants in their own country, contributed to these debates, but even as their writings addressed the central religious and political issues of their time, their contributions were effaced and now are largely forgotten. Exploring the writings of Catholic women in conversation with those of Shakespeare, Marvell, Marlowe, Donne, and other canonical authors, Beyond the Cloister shows that nuns and recusants were centrally important to the development of English literature.The defining narratives of early modern England cast nuns as the relics of an unenlightened past and equated Catholic femininity with the dangerous charms of the Whore of Babylon. With careful attention to literary figurations of Catholic femininity and to the vibrant manuscript culture in the English convents, Jenna Lay reveals a far more complex reality. Through their use of tropes, figures, generic patterns, and literary allusions, Catholic women produced politically incendiary and rhetorically powerful lyrics, prayers, polemics, and hagiographies. Drawing on the insights of religious studies, historical formalism, and feminist criticism, Beyond the Cloister offers a reassessment of crucial decades in the development of English literary history.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Note on Spelling and Punctuation -- Introduction. Gender, Religion, and English Literary History -- 1. Fractured Discourse: Recusant Women and Forms of Virginity -- 2. To the Nunnery: Enclosure and Polemic in the English Convents in Exile -- 3. A Game of Her Own: The Reformation of Obedience -- 4. Cloisters and Country Houses: Women’s Literary Communities -- Epilogue. Failures of Literary History -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Acknowledgments