Workshops: Faiths

Workshop 26: Radical Maternities:
Spiritual Motherhood and Female Visionaries in
France and England

Conveners:

• Sylvia Brown (E), University of Alberta
• Cynthia Cupples (Hu), Stanford University
• Julie Hirst (WS), York University
  

Our workshop explored the social and symbolic uses of maternity in the forging of 'radical' religious positions and practices. Our discussion focused on maternal languages and practices in writings by and about three women visionaries: the French visionary Marie Teyssonnier (ca. 1576-1648) and two late seventeenth-century women associated with an English sect known as the 'Philadelphians,' Jane Lead and Anne Bathurst.

Our reading package included extracts from the writings of all three women, as well as from secondary material by literary critics and historians. The shape of our discussion was determined by participants' initial responses to the readings, but we hoped to consider, among other questions, how female visionaries creatively use motherhood or the language of motherhood to reinvent their religious identity or practice. Is such a reinvention per se radical? Do the discourses of maternity, as used by visionaries and women prophets, subvert 'normal' social relations or gender roles, or do they reinforce them? Do these women actively deploy spiritual maternity to forge dissenting or oppositional positions for themselves? Or, on the contrary, do we find spiritual maternity associated with unworldly or apolitical mysticism?