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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/14955 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Willems, Katherine Elizabeth |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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