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282 Edward Rainbowe’s final testimony to the greatness of his subject, Lady Anne Clifford, is that a “History” is more appropriate than a “Sermon” to honor “this great wise Woman; who while she lived was the Honour of her Sex and Age.”1 I concur. In what follows I illustrate how a literary-historical study of sermons enables recovery of the lives, experiences, and thoughts of early modern women, and I initiate interpretive methodologies for doing so. After the Reformation sermons became perhaps the most significant official expression of the English church’s values and authority. Their increased importance was due to several factors: vernacular translations of scripture, increased patronage of an educated clergy, increased liturgical prominence of sermons, emphasis on sermons as conduits of grace, and, at least in part, the proliferation of religious controversy. It has generally been assumed, however, that even as the priesthood of all believers raised women’s status as men’s spiritual equals, women were excluded from this emerging religious culture because of the Pauline scriptural injunction against women’s public speaking and teaching and its concomitant social enforcement within a patriarchal society.2 The corollary of this assumption is that with regard to sermons, women exercised largely passive roles within a domestic context: hearing, copying, memorizing, and repeating sermons for the instruction of children and servants and reading them privately to foster personal and domestic religious devotion. Such assumptions are no longer tenable, especially if we reimagine this scholarly field by examining how women participated in the religious, political , and literary culture enlarged by vernacular preaching: first, as subjects , but then as patrons, consumers, and preachers of sermons.3 We can Jeanne Shami Reading Funeral Sermons for Early Modern English Women Some Literary and Historiographical Challenges 11 Reading Funeral Sermons for Early Modern English Women 283 think of these four categories as occupying a spectrum ranging from women as subjects of discourse, particularly in marriage and funeral sermons , on the one end, to women as agents of discourse, or preachers, at the other end, particularly through the records of Quaker women, who occupied public roles and wielded the authority of biblical interpretation normally accorded to preachers. Both of these areas raise complex questions of terminology and methodology and have been treated extensively in the secondary literature. At present the most elusive area is the middle ground of this spectrum: women as patrons of preachers and women as collectors, consumers, and transmitters of particular religious cultures. In this essay I survey briefly these four areas of study but focus primarily on historiographical and literary problems created within just one of these fields: women as represented in sermons, primarily those preached at funerals. It is a truism that women preachers were not part of mainstream religious culture, although they flourished briefly (despite vociferous opposition ) among radical, nonconforming, and marginal groups during the 1640s and 1650s in England and as missionaries to Ireland, Barbados, and Massachusetts and (in the case of Mary Fisher) to the sultan of Turkey himself.4 The Quakers were the most advanced supporters of women preachers, in theory and practice, applying the term preaching not only to women who expounded scriptures in public but also to “a general class of activity which consisted of any voicing of religious opinion—in print, in the church or congregation, in the company of others anywhere, and even in the home in disagreement with one’s husband.”5 Margaret Fell Fox’s Women’s Speaking Justified (1646), a theoretical justification of women’s public speaking, tackles the question of such speech head on; however, no sermons by Fox survive to illustrate this tract’s “stunning self-assurance about her own ability to preach, theologize, or adjudicate equally with men, a real sense of herself as an equal that is very rare even in the most active seventeenth-century women.”6 By the end of the seventeenth century , even Quakerism was less open to female participation; the women’s meetings declined, and “women preachers seemed unnatural even to women.”7 Those who persisted in their preaching activities endured constant surveillance, were imprisoned, fined, ducked, put in the stocks, searched for signs of witchcraft, whipped, attacked, beaten to death, threatened with butcher knives, and led through the streets with iron bridles, the latter punishment normally reserved for scolds who undermined their husbands’ authority. In extreme cases they were transported to Jamaica for their intransigence.8 Despite a period of intense...

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