The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350-1700

Back Cover

ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, and James Simpson, Series Editors “In five interwoven chapters, Nancy Bradley Warren expands upon her distinguished previous work to explore the enduring symbolic and political importance of women’s religious models in the ‘secular’ as well as the ‘religious’ realms. By highlighting the interrelation of religious and political themes in a diverse group of women’s lives and writings, Warren brilliantly demonstrates how women shaped cultural connections between England and the Continent during these tumultuous centuries.” —Nicole Rice, St. John’s University “A pioneering cross-period, cross-confessional, transnational study of religious Englishwomen and their extraordinary physical-textual corpus. Highly recommended.” —David Wallace, University of Pennsylvania In The Embodied Word, Nancy Bradley Warren expands on the topic of female spirituality, first explored in her book Women of God and Arms, to encompass broad issues of religion, gender, and historical periodization. Through her analyses of the variety of ways in which medieval spirituality was deliberately and actively carried forward to the early modern period, Warren underscores both continuities and revisions that challenge conventional distinctions between medieval and early modern culture. Drawing on the philosophical writings of Stanley Cavell and Karl Morrison, Warren illuminates a number of medieval and early modern texts, including St. Birgitta of Sweden’s Revelations , St. Catherine of Siena’s Dialogue, Julian of Norwich’s Showings, devotional anthologies created by early modern English nuns in exile, the prophetic and autobiographical texts of Anna Trapnel, and the writings of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza. Nancy Bradley Warren is professor of English at Florida State University. She is the author of Women of God and Arms: Female Spirituality and Political Conflict, 1380–1600 and Spiritual Economies: Female Monasticism in Later Medieval England. University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, IN 46556 undpress.nd.edu ...