Early modern women and affective devotional reading

Abstract

The devotional life of early modern women was marked by reading practices that were often meditative and affective, in the pursuit of divine inspiration. Early modern medicine, and philosophical theories of the passions, regarded women as particularly susceptible to excesses of passion, while conduct literature was anxious that women subdue sensuous appetites during devotional practice. There emerges, in the relation of passion discourse to female devotional reading, a tension between neo-Stoic concerns to eliminate the disruptive effect of passions upon the body and the mind, and Augustinian advocacy of well-oriented passions in devotional practice. A comparison of representations of female religious reading practices in exemplary literature, female autobiography and poetry reveals women negotiating relationships between desire and inspiration in their devotional reading practices, and achieving a passionate mysticism that challenged representation. In this way affective female reading, if successfully regulated, could be identified with special receptivity to grace.

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