Catechisms and Women's Writing in Seventeenth-Century England

Description

Catechisms and Women's Writing in Seventeenth-Century England is a study of early modern women's literary use of catechizing. Paula McQuade examines original works composed by women - both in manuscript and print, as well as women's copying and redacting of catechisms - and construction of these materials from other sources. By studying female catechists, McQuade shows how early modern women used the power and authority granted to them as mothers to teach religious doctrine, to demonstrate their linguistic skills, to engage sympathetically with Catholic devotional texts, and to comment on matters of contemporary religious and political import - activities that many scholars have considered the sole prerogative of clergymen. This book addresses the question of women's literary production in early modern England, demonstrating that reading and writing of catechisms were crucial sites of women's literary engagements during this time.

Paula McQuade received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1998. The recipient of a 1996 Charlotte Newcombe Fellowship, McQuade is the author of multiple articles on early modern women and gender. Her article on the female catechist Dorothy Burch was selected as the best article published in 2010 by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women Writers. She is also the recipient of an Excellence in Teaching Award from DePaul University, Chicago.

'... Paula McQuade's delightful book, a work of literary scholarship which is not only for literary scholars. Like many of her authors - women whose humanity she never forgets - her professed aims are modest: to add half-a-dozen more minor entries to the emerging canon of early modern women's writing in English, and in the process to persuade us that catechesis deserves to be taken seriously as a literary genre. As it happens, the significance of her work extends a little further than that.' Alec Ryrie, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History