Women and Communal Worship advances our understanding of early modern women by uncovering and analyzing Christian women’s engagement with liturgical and communal worship between 1500 and 1750. The Protestant attack on the medieval liturgy was at the heart of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, but women’s contributions to those momentous changes have been largely overlooked as scholars have focused on women’s private devotional practices and texts. This collection of essays demonstrates that communal worship was vital to women of all confessional stripes. Although they could not generally lead the liturgy, women shaped public devotion in important ways, whether at the level of the local congregation, the household chapel, the convent, the court, or the national church. Communal worship is thus a key site for examining women’s textual, literary, social, and political agency.

MICHELINE WHITE is Professor in the College of the Humanities and the Departments of English and History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is the editor of English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625 (2011) and Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England: Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney, and Aemilia Lanyer (2009), and coeditor of Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Reading, Ownership, Circulation (2018).

JAMIE GOODRICH is chair and professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She has previously published two monographs, Faithful Translators: Authorship, Gender, and Religion in Early Modern England (2014) and Writing Habits: Historicism, Philosophy, and English Benedictine Convents, 1600–1800 (2021), and is finishing a coedited edition of documents related to spiritual controversies among seventeenth-century English Benedictine nuns.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Liturgy Matters: Christian Women and Communal Worship in the Early Modern Era, Micheline White and Jaime Goodrich

Part I Liturgy and Performance: Bodies, Objects, Spaces, and Voices

Chapter 1: Royal and Elite Laywomen’s Contributions to the Performance of the Mass: Catherine of Aragon’s Missal and Book of Hours, Micheline White
Chapter 2: 1566: Mary Stuart, the Baptism of James VI, and the Spectacle of Religious Affiliation, Rosalind Smith
Chapter 3: Catholic Laywomen and the Liturgy in Sixteenth-Century England: The Brome Sisters of Boarstall House, Paula McQuade
Chapter 4: Lady Anne Clifford: Protecting and Enabling Church of England Liturgical and Communal Worship in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England, Jessica L. Malay
Chapter 5: From Benedict to Butler: Liturgy and Performativity in Early Modern English Convents, Jaime Goodrich

Part II Communal Worship and Writing: Agency, Community, and Identity

Chapter 6: Anne Wheathill’s “Just Account”: Using the Gifts of Grace in Corporate Worship, Susan M. Felch
Chapter 7: “To Suffer Satan’s Buffets”: Temptation and Public Worship in the Diary of Margaret Hoby, Katharine Landers
Chapter 8: Thanksgiving versus Purification: Women’s Agency and Authority in the Debate over the Churching of Women, Elizabeth Sharrett
Chapter 9: Living the Liturgy: Lady Anne Halkett and the Book of Common Prayer in Scotland (1650–1699), Suzanne Trill
Chapter 10: Mystic Trance, Rhymed Speech, and the Poetics of Liturgical Form: Elizabeth Barton and Anna Trapnel, Genelle Gertz

Afterword: Of Silence and Souls in Liturgical Worship, Susan Wabuda

Contributors

Index