Abstract
Women have always participated in intellectual reflections about religion. They, like men, wanted to understand the complexities of religious notions and many desired to contribute to debates which constructed points of theology. Many women who wrote texts concerned with religion did participate in shaping how religious notions were understood and applied by demonstrating their own interpretations in their writing. Both lay and religious women, Catholic and Calvinist, produced a range of spiritual and devotional texts over the course of the sixteenth century in manuscript and printed forms. This chapter is not concerned with assessing whether women’s opinions conformed to orthodox confessional ideas, but focuses instead on how women’s religious writings and speech engaged with religious ideas over the century, and what forums they used to do so.
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Notes
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See list of publications in Susan Broomhall, Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002, appendix 1.
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Ferguson, entry on Anne de Marquets in The Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature, (ed.) E. Martin Sartori, Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 1999, pp. 344–6.
As well as H. Fournier, ‘La voix textuelle des Sonnets spirìtuels de Anne de Marquets’, Etudes littéraires, 20, 2, 1987, 77–92.
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Ibid., pp. 84–7. See also P. Sommers, ‘Gendered Readings of The Book of Judith: Guillaume du Bartas and Gabrielle de Coignard’, Romance Quarterly, 48, 4, 2001, 211–20.
T. C. Cave, Devotional Poetry in France, c. 1570–1613, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1969, p. 86.
Ferguson, ‘The Feminisation of Devotion: Gabrielle de Coignard, Anne de Marquets, and François de Sales’, in Women’s Writings in the French Renaissance: Proceedings of the Fifth Cambridge French Renaissance Colloquium, 7–9 July 1997, (eds) P. Ford and G. Jondorf, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 187–206.
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See also C. Randall, ‘Shouting down Abraham: How Sixteenth-century Huguenot Women Found Their Voice’, Renaissance Quarterly, 50, 1997, 411–42. See Broomhall and Winn’s comparative study of the memoirs and testaments of Arbaleste and Burlamacchi in ‘The Problematics of Self-Representation in Early Modern Women’s Memoirs’, Tangence, forthcoming.
On Duplessis-Mornay’s political career, see Hugues Daussy, Les Huguenots et le roi. Le combat politique de Philippe Duplessis-Mornay (1572–1600), Geneva, Droz, 2002.
On Protestant memoir writing, see N. Kuperty-Tsur, Se dire à la Renaissance: Les Mémoires au XVIe siècle, Paris, J. Vrin, 1997, p. 39.
Généalogie de Messieurs du Laurens, descrite par moy Jeanne du Laurens, veufve à M. Gleyse, & couchée nayvement en ces termes, BM d’Aix, ms 843. Citations from the edition of Une famille au XVIe siècle, (ed.) C. de Ribbe, Paris, Joseph Albanel, 1868.
On early modern historiography, see D. R. Kelley, ‘History as a Calling: The Case of La Popelinière’, in Renaissance: Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, (eds) A. Molho and J. A. Tedeschi, Florence, G. C. Sansoni, 1971, pp. 771–89.
On women’s history writing, see Mary Spongberg, Writing Women’s History since the Renaissance, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
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© 2006 Susan Broomhall
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Broomhall, S. (2006). Religious Knowledge. In: Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230501508_4
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