Catholic writers traditionally approach the laity through the sacraments rather than the Word. Nonetheless, three devotional genres - meditation, hagiography and catechism - recognize that effective written appeals to a reader can be made using rhetoric. This thesis analyses such rhetoric, in recusant devotional texts published by secret presses between 1580 and 1603. Most detailed examinations of Catholic works think of rhetoric as emasculating the virile yet chaste prose of a 'shining band of martyrs'. This thesis proposes that the rules of rhetoric are used to empower the reader of these works by Grafting a new character in him. Meditations act as deliberative orations, swaying the reader's will. They use amplificatio and memoria to produce matter and to dwell on it. Late sixteenth-century translations of continental meditation manuals by Granada, Scupoli, Estella and Loarte provide a theory of meditation for the English works studied: rosary texts by John Bucke, Thomas Worthington and Henry Garnet; several anonymous collections of meditations and prayers; contemplations on Scriptural stories by Robert Southwell, I.C., C.N. and Robert Chambers. In the second section, saints' lives are read as rhetorical examples which support this deliberative discourse, rather than as blazons, innocent of intent on the reader. Hagiographies by Worthington, Robert Persons, William Alien and Thorns Alfield reflect images of what a martyr or saint should do, not what he did. The last chapters show how catechisms recreate these idealized images in the reader by acting as dramatic scripts for him. Repetition through rhetoric dissolves the element of theatre, allowing the reader to absorb these rules for life. Once again, Elizabethan translations of foreign catechisms by Granada, Bellarmine and Canisius are used to illuminate English catechisms by Persons, Southwell and Lawrence Vaux.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2008. / "Graduate Program in Literatures in English." Includes bibliographical references (p. 219-234).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2006. / Thesis directed by Jill Mann and Jesse Lander for the Department of English. "November 2006." "This dissertation provides a new edition of the Mirror to Devout People, which survives in two manuscripts: Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame, MS 67 (ND) and Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg.1.6 (C)"--Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 324-335) and index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2010. / Thesis directed by Susannah Monta for the Department of English. "July 2010." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 348-364).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wyoming, 2007. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Sept. 24, 2007). Includes bibliographical references (p. 67-70).

This thesis outlines two distinct modes of early sixteenth-century devotional practice (image-based and text-oriented), which in the context of the English reformation are increasingly represented as antithetical to one another, as Protestants champion the vernacular Bible and creed-based Christianity, while suppressing "idolatrous" images and traditional practices. Women readers, who tend to be vernacular readers, figure prominently in the religious controversy, and come to represent both the distinctives of Protestantism and anxieties around vernacular readership and hermeneutic agency. The vernacular woman reader stands in direct opposition to the priestly authority of masculine, Latin clerical culture; accordingly she is both rhetorically useful to the Protestant cause and a locus of cultural instability. I then turn to consider female Tudor translators as reading women, and translation itself (rather than a type of "feminine" writing) as a form of meditative or proclamatory reading. While translation has a traditional association with the meditative devotional reader, the religious controversy makes possible a more public and polemically motivated sort of translation by women, which, however, remains framed largely in terms of personal devotional activity. As the number of literate women grows throughout the century, translation (with reading) is also increasingly represented as a means of keeping women out of trouble, a development which reflects the growing acceptance of the Protestant contention that a good woman is a reading woman. The epistolary culture of the persecuted Marian Protestant community illustrates the construction of a community of readers in the Protestant language of spiritual family, and the role of the reading woman in sustaining that community. My concluding chapter outlines the continuing construction of a textual community of exemplary foremothers, a tradition of "godly, learned women," in which the virtuous woman reader is expected to participate. This distinctly Protestant pattern of literate female piety, alongside a growing number of women readers in Elizabethan England, increasingly shapes cultural ideals of female virtue.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2002. / Advisor: Sylvia Bowerbank. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 337-353). Also available via World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2002. / Advisor: Sylvia Bowerbank. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 337-353). Also available via World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2005. / Thesis directed by Maura Nolan for the Department of English. "July 2005." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 344-368).

This thesis outlines two distinct modes of early sixteenth-century devotional practice (image-based and text-oriented), which in the context of the English reformation are increasingly represented as antithetical to one another, as Protestants champion the vernacular Bible and creed-based Christianity, while suppressing "idolatrous" images and traditional practices. Women readers, who tend to be vernacular readers, figure prominently in the religious controversy, and come to represent both the distinctives of Protestantism and anxieties around vernacular readership and hermeneutic agency. The vernacular woman reader stands in direct opposition to the priestly authority of masculine, Latin clerical culture; accordingly she is both rhetorically useful to the Protestant cause and a locus of cultural instability. I then turn to consider female Tudor translators as reading women, and translation itself (rather than a type of "feminine" writing) as a form of meditative or proclamatory reading. While translation has a traditional association with the meditative devotional reader, the religious controversy makes possible a more public and polemically motivated sort of translation by women, which, however, remains framed largely in terms of personal devotional activity. As the number of literate women grows throughout the century, translation (with reading) is also increasingly represented as a means of keeping women out of trouble, a development which reflects the growing acceptance of the Protestant contention that a good woman is a reading woman. The epistolary culture of the persecuted Marian Protestant community illustrates the construction of a community of readers in the Protestant language of spiritual family, and the role of the reading woman in sustaining that community. My concluding chapter outlines the continuing construction of a textual community of exemplary foremothers, a tradition of "godly, learned women," in which the virtuous woman reader is expected to participate. This distinctly Protestant pattern of literate female piety, alongside a growing number of women readers in Elizabethan England, increasingly shapes cultural ideals of female virtue. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate