Micheline White, Jaime Goodrich
Hardback
February 2027 • ISBN 978-1-64453-453-3 • $140.00
Paperback
February 2027 • ISBN 978-1-64453-452-6 • $49.95
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Series
Early Modern Feminisms
Women and Communal Worship advances our understanding of early modern women by uncovering and analyzing Christian women’s engagement with liturgical and communal worship between 1500 and 1750. The Protestant attack on the medieval liturgy was at the heart of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, but women’s contributions to those momentous changes have been largely overlooked as scholars have focused on women’s private devotional practices and texts. This collection of essays demonstrates that communal worship was vital to women of all confessional stripes. Although they could not generally lead the liturgy, women shaped public devotion in important ways, whether at the level of the local congregation, the household chapel, the convent, the court, or the national church. Communal worship is thus a key site for examining women’s textual, literary, social, and political agency.
About the Editors
Micheline White is a professor in the College of the Humanities and the Departments of English and History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is the editor of English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625 (2011) and Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England: Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney, and Aemilia Lanyer (2009), and coeditor of Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Reading, Ownership, Circulation (2018).
Jaime Goodrich is chair and professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She has previously published two monographs, Faithful Translators: Authorship, Gender, and Religion in Early Modern England (2014) and Writing Habits: Historicism, Philosophy, and English Benedictine Convents, 1600–1800 (2021), and is finishing a coedited edition of documents related to spiritual controversies among seventeenth-century English Benedictine nuns.