Women, Gender and Radical Religion in Early Modern Europe

This collection of twelve new essays explores the role of women and gender in a broad range of ‘radical’ religious movements of the post-Reformation. Organized into three themed divisions, the first examines the activism of female Quakers in their public performances as preachers and petitioners, in their global travels, and in their domestic lives; the second examines early modern prophetesses and their radical revisions of scripture, gender, body, and voice; and the third concerns women who, in diverse ways, crossed boundaries, including the confessional boundaries of Europe. A strength of this volume is its comparative re-examination of the term ‘radical’. German Anabaptists are discussed alongside unorthodox nuns with the aim of understanding how gender factors into innovative and oppositional religion.

Contributors include: Sarah Apetrei, Naomi Baker, Sylvia Brown, Ruth Connolly, Pamela Ellis, Jose Manuel Gonzalez, Julie Hirst, Stephen A. Kent, Marion Kobelt-Groch, Bo Karen Lee, Kirilka Stavreva, and Sheila Wright.