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Beyond the Church: Women’s Spiritual Experience at Home and in the Community 1600–1900

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Anthony Fletcher
Anthony Fletcher*
Affiliation:
University of Essex
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Extract

The Christian tradition has been elaborated and developed over many centuries in the context of gender, which provides the bedrock and framework of social order, powerfully influencing men and women’s conduct of every aspect of their daily lives. The dynamic relationship between gender and religious experience – a relationship that may at times channel, control, confine, or liberate – is bound to be complex for the historian to unravel. This paper attempts the beginning of such an unravelling, albeit confined to the experience of women and to England. It focuses upon 1600 to 1900, to argue that the effective gender system – the patriarchy – of this period was being revised by men in a radical way which had major implications for the possibilities open for women to find the space they needed for their spirituality. We cannot of course speak of patriarchy as something given and permanent in Western Christendom, only of patriarchies; for, if we take the term to refer to men’s institutionalized dominance over women and children in the family and the subordination of women outside it, men were bound to need constantly to adapt and adjust their means of achieving this end over the centuries. The objective here is as follows: the paper begins by exploring how the meaning of gender and therefore the patriarchal system was revised between 1600 and 1900; it will then offer an outline, with illustrative examples, of the patterns of women’s spirituality in that period. It starts with the home and within the home with the privacy of the closet, besides the family world of the hall and parlour. It will also look at some women who, through visions or prophecy, sought a national platform.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 34: Gender and Christian Religion , 1998 , pp. 187 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1998

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References

1 For an account of this process over the period from 1500–1800 sec my Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500 to 1800 (London, 1995).

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