English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400-1700

New Kingdoms of Womanhood

Alexandra Verini (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

XIII, 223 Seiten

2022
Springer International Publishing (Verlag)
978-3-031-00916-7 (ISBN)

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English Women's Spiritual Utopias, 1400-1700: New Kingdoms of Womanhood uncovers a tradition of women's utopianism that extends back to medieval women's monasticism, overturning accounts of utopia that trace its origins solely to Thomas More. As enclosed spaces in which women wielded authority that was unavailable to them in the outside world, medieval and early modern convents were self-consciously engaged in reworking pre-existing cultural heritage to project desired proto-feminist futures. The utopianism developed within the English convent percolated outwards to unenclosed women's spiritual communities such as Mary Ward's Institute of the Blessed Virgin and the Ferrar family at Little Gidding. Convent-based utopianism further acted as an unrecognized influence on the first English women's literary utopias by authors such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell. Collectively, these female communities forged a mode of utopia that drew on the past to imagine new possibilities for themselves as well as for their larger religious and political communities. Tracking utopianism from the convent to the literary page over a period of 300 years, New Kingdoms writes a new history of medieval and early modern women's intellectual work and expands the concept of utopia itself.

lt;p>Alexandra Verini is Assistant Professor of English at Ashoka University. She has published articles in leading journals and collections of essays on women's writing, friendship, and utopia. She leads the digital project earlywomenwriters.com and co-leads the research project Gender in Medieval Women's Mysticism, which has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Chapter 1: Mirrors of our Lady: Utopia in the Medieval Convent.- Chapter 2: These Most Afflicted Sisters: Old and New Futures in Exiled English Convents.- Chapter 3: Not Yet: Aspirational Women's Communities Beyond the Convent.- Chapter 4: Convents of Pleasure: English Women's Literary Utopias.

Verini has produced a book that is a highly pleasurable, as well as a highly informative read. In the breadth of its approach and its subject matter, English Women s Spiritual Utopias is a truly interdisciplinary book, one that will appeal to scholars encountering medieval and early modern utopia for the first time, as well as established researchers in the field. (Chloë Houston, Early Modern Women Journal, Vol. 19 (02), 2025)

Erscheinungsdatum	15.06.2022
Reihe/Serie	The New Middle Ages
Zusatzinfo	XIII, 223 p. 6 illus.
Verlagsort	Cham
Sprache	englisch
Maße	148 x 210 mm
Gewicht	428 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
Schlagworte	English convents • Margaret Cavendish • monastic traditions • Thomas More • Utopianism • women's Catholic communities • women's utopian writing
ISBN-10	3-031-00916-9 / 3031009169
ISBN-13	978-3-031-00916-7 / 9783031009167
Zustand	Neuware