Additions to the Index Of Middle English Verse: Unpublished Verse ‘Longinus’ and ‘Job’ Charms in British Library, MS Sloane 2187 (original) (raw)
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Church History and Religious Culture, 2014
Examining recent claims that the early modern Bible served as an empowering force for women, the article draws evidence from English sermons designed for quotidinal lay instruction--such as the late medieval sermons of Festial, the sixteenth-century Tudor Homilies, and the seventeenth-century sermons of William Gouge and Benjamin Keach. As didactic religious texts written and delivered by men but also heard and read by women, sermons reveal how preachers rhetorically shaped women's agency. Late medieval sermons include women specifically in scripture and authorize women through biblical role models as actively participating within the church. Conversely, early modern sermons were less likely to add women into scripture and. more likely to use scripture to limit women by there domestic identities. Thus, through their approaches to Biblical texts, medieval preachers present women as more visible and active agents whereas early modern. preachers present women as less visible and more limited in their roles--thereby presenting a more complex story of how the Bible affected women across the Reformation.