Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing - Hardcover

Femke Molekamp should be congratulated with particular warmth for her detective work in this area, which has definitely enlarged the body of evidence on which future scholars can draw. (Alison Shell, The Times Literary Supplement)

Collectively Molekamp's study adds to our knowledge about the cultural place of the Bible in early modern England, contributing to the scholarly conversations around this broad topic. (William E. Smith III, Clio)

Women and the Bible in Early Modern England provides an account of the uniquely important role of the Bible in the development of female interpretative and literary agency, as well as in the expression of female subjectivity in early modern England. In the later sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth century women's religious writing diversified in genre and entered increasingly into a public literary sphere. Femke Molekamp shows that the Bible was at the heart of female reading culture, and that women can be seen to have participated in multiple modes of reading it, which, in turn, fostered various kinds of literary writing.