Introduction: Discovering biblical women in Early Modern literary culture – Victoria Brownlee and Laura Gallagher
PART I: Women and feminine archetypes of the Old Testament
2. Overview: reading Old Testament women in Early Modern England, 1550–1700 – Victoria Brownlee and Laura Gallagher
3. A ‘Paraditian Creature’: Eve and her unsuspecting garden in seventeenth century literature – Elizabeth Hodgson
4. Christian liberty and female rule: exegesis and political controversy in the 1550s – Adrian Streete
5. Wives, fears and foreskins: Early Modern reproach of Zipporah and Michal – Michele Osherow
6. The politics of female supplication in the Book of Esther – Alison Thorne
7. Gender and the inculcation of virtue: the Book of Proverbs in action – Danielle Clarke
PART II: Women and feminine archetypes of the New Testament
8. Overview: reading New Testament women in Early Modern England, 1550–1700 – Victoria Brownlee and Laura Gallagher
9. Christ’s tears and maternal cannibalism in Early Modern London – Beatrice Groves
10. Mary of recusants and reform: literary memory and defloration – Thomas Rist
11. Stabat mater dolorosa: imagining Mary’s grief at the cross – Laura Gallagher
12. St Helena of Britain in the land of the Magdalene: all’s well that ends well – Lisa Hopkins
13. Imagining the enemy: protestant readings of the whore of babylon in Early Modern England, c.1580–1625 – Victoria Brownlee
14. Afterword – Dympna Callaghan
Index

At once pervasive and marginal, appealing and repellent, exemplary and atypical, the Bible’s women provoke an assortment of readings across early modern literature. This volume of essays considers how biblical women were read, appropriated and debated by a range of confessionally diverse writers working across a wide range of genres between 1550 and 1700. Exploring popularly appropriated biblical women who appear in texts for varied audiences, the contributors reveal how women from the Old and New Testaments exhibit an ideological power that frequently exceeds, both in scope and substance, their associated scriptural records.

The essays in Biblical women in early modern literary culture, 1550–1700 draw attention to the complex ways in which biblical women’s narratives could be reimagined for a variety of rhetorical and religious purposes. What they reveal is that there is no uniformity in early modern readings of biblical women; instead, Scripture’s female figures are fluidly negotiated and diversely redeployed to offer (conflicting) comments on issues including female authority, women’s speech, motherhood and sexuality. But the invocation of the Bible’s women in gendered debates sits, many contributors suggests, alongside their multifarious deployment in discourses on monarchy and doctrine, discussions of travel and grief and disputes over confessional politics.

As each essay focuses on early modern readings of a particular biblical woman, or archetype of biblical femininity, the volume as a whole illuminates the rich ideological currency of the Bible’s women among mothers and political theorists, clergy and dramatists, and poets and conduct writers. What this book makes clear is that the names, images and narratives of the Bible’s women are persistently difficult to evade.