Workshops: Faiths

Workshop 27: Women, Religion,
and Early Modern Reading Practices

Conveners:

• Jane Donawerth, English, University of Maryland
• Elizabeth Goldsmith, French, Boston University
• Ana Maria Kothe, Comparative Literature, University of Puerto Rico
  

Since Margaret Hannay's early volume, Silent but for the Word, we have understood that religion often authorized women to speak and write despite cultural ideology requiring their silence. In this workshop we further explored early modern women's reading practices, asking how faith or institutionalized religion affected them. What did women read in religious contexts? How did they read religious texts? How did religion as personal faith or institution affect their reading practices?

We suggested that there were many different ways that women were literate, many different reading practices available to women in the Renaissance. Thus we also organized this workshop to compare three different countries and contexts for women's reading: Spain, France, and England; convents, epistolary communities, and Protestantism.

Professor Kothe discussed the hispanic convent as an intellectual reading community, concentrating on Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz's "Carta Atenagórica" and a newly discovered letter, "Carta de Seraphina de Christo." In Catholic Spain, as long as one nun was technically literate, the other members could "read" the texts she would read aloud to them. Through these "textual communities" in the convent women were able to speak and to question religious notions during the Counter-Reformation in Spain and its colonies. As women re-read religious subjects in radical ways, to what extent was their reading enabled by the space of the convent or contained and limited by this same space?

Professor Goldsmith discussed women's "communities of readers" as formed primarily by epistolary contacts in seventeenth-century France. Emphasizing the correspondence of Jeanne des Anges, she examined how letter writing/reading and conversation shaped the particular way in which French women began to publish and circulate their life stories. For women in religion, as well as women in salon culture, the practice of life-writing is connected to new ideas about the importance of retreat, silent prayer, private "conversations with God," with oneself, or with an intimate correspondent. What connections might be made, then, between these women and the more often discussed salonnières?

Professor Donawerth discussed the biblical reading of Margaret Fell as revealed in the quotations in her pamphlets. By comparing her quotations with translations, we see that she generally quotes the King James Version, but that she is reading other translations comparatively, occasionally borrowing a word or phrase from the Geneva glosses or the Coverdale Bible. In addition, her wording suggests quotation from memory. Her text betrays the characteristics of oral transmission: transposed phrases, changed verb forms, changed prepositions, repetitious phrases dropped, but accurate on main words and the gist of the passage. How does memorization of large portions of religious texts, then, affect Quaker women's reading practices? What do other writings reveal about Protestant women's reading of the bible?

After introductions we each spoke about five minutes on the particular context we chose (20 minutes). Then we broke into small groups, each looking at a different piece of writing by a woman and its implications for reading (20 minutes); writings (with translations) included will be by Sor Juana, Marcia Belisarda, Mar a Lusia de Carvajal, Marie de l'Incarnation, Jeanne Guyon, Jeanne des Anges, Margaret Fell, Anne Lok, and Mary Sidney countess of Pembroke. After discussion in small groups, we rejoined as a whole group, reporting our conclusions, and asking further questions. How do women's practices of reading vary from culture to culture, context to context? What do the writings we've examined tell us about women's literacy? How does religion enforce or break down limits on women's education or independence of mind? How does gender affect the boundary between orality and literacy for women?