Female Piety Research Articles

Writing Sacred Histories in Late Ottoman Egypt: Zaynab Fawwāz and Qadriyya Kāmil’s Descriptions of Early Islam

Abstract This article studies contrasting notions of historiography in Zaynab Fawwāz and Qadriyya Kāmil’s biographical dictionaries. It begins by offering an overview on these authors’ vitas and delves into the historiographical practices that concerned Ottoman intellectuals in the late nineteenth century. It analyses Fawwāz’s dictionary, al-Durr al-manthūr fī ṭabaqāt rabbāt al-khudūr (1894), which reveals a feminist understanding of Islam as situated within an Arab and pan-Ottoman environment as well as the large arch of Abrahamic monotheism. By highlighting specific figures over others, Fawwāz produces a historical narrative that transcends religious and sectarian divides. The article then introduces Kāmil’s Shahīrāt al-nisāʾ fī l-ʿālam al-islāmī (1924) which depicts a conceptually narrower Islam, shaped by the geo-political circumstances of the early twentieth century. The biographies of the Muslim foremothers Kāmil presents offer normative templates of female piety but are not completely subsumed by the category of gender either. Throughout, the article points to how both authors engage the rules of the biographical genre, arguing that the ways they adhere to or break with its tradition indicate a desire to create new forms of moral and communal belonging.

Grappling With Gender, Religion, and Higher Education in the South: Mary Sharp College from Its Founding Through the Civil War

This article offers a case study of how regional, gender, and religious ideals collided at one Tennessee women’s college during the antebellum and Civil War eras. Mary Sharp College, founded by Baptists in 185, strongly advocated for women’s education that equaled the contemporary men’s institutions. Local factors relating to religion and education contributed to the creation of Mary Sharp College. Tennessee Baptists founded the college as a replacement for more informal education of women and made the school the first women’s college in the U.S. to require Latin and Greek. Two key early figures tied to college, the Vermont-born Graves brothers. James Robinson Graves, a Baptist pastor and editor of The Tennessee Baptist, provided advertising for the college; Zuinglius Calvin Graves, a Baptist educator, gave it direction. J. R. and Z. C. Graves combined southern identity, gender ideology, and Baptist piety to produce a unique form of higher education for women. Although the Graves brothers saw the home and family as the proper place for southern white women, they still believed in the necessity of a rigorous education. Mary Sharp built up faith and southern character in women and prepared them for their chief service to society: motherhood. When the Civil War came, despite their own northern connections and divided loyalties in Tennessee, the Graves brothers and their college fully supported the Confederacy. Despite the college’s supposedly secure location, an occupation by the Union army led the school to close in 1863 and remain closed until 1866, when it reopened as a much weaker school but as one firmly committed both to educated female piety and to the “Lost Cause.”

The Economics of Female Piety in Early Sufism

This paper examines the economics of female piety between the third/ninth and sixth/twelfth centuries. It traces Sufi approaches to poverty and working for a living (kasb) as well as kasb’s intersection with marriage and women. Rereading Sufi and non-Sufi biographies and historiographies reveals that there were wealthy women who initiated marriage with renowned Sufis to gain spiritual blessings, and others who financially supported their husbands. While the piety of male Sufis was usually asserted through material poverty, the piety of female mystics was asserted through wealth and almsgiving. This paper examines this piety through different female kinships—whether mothers, wives or sisters. Similar to the spousal support of wives for their husbands, sisters very often acted as an impressive backup system for their Sufi brothers. Mothers, however, effected a great socio-religious impact through the cherished principles of a mother’s right to control her son and a son’s duty to venerate his mother. This devotion was often constraining financially and Sufis needed to pay attention to the financial implications while still pursuing progress on the Sufi path.

Działalność dobroczynna kobiet w gminach żydowskich w Rzeczypospolitej w XVI–XVIII wieku

Charitable Activities of Women in Jewish Communities in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth Between the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Centuries Charity was an important form of social activity of women in Jewish communities in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, it was also a manifestation of female piety. Charity is also an area—despite a clear distinction between gender and related social roles—where cooperation between men and women can be observed. Women were involved in charities as community officials, associates or members of charity brotherhoods, as well as acting individually. However, their activities were always largely subordinated and overshadowed by activities of men, and acting within the framework of community structures, they were subject to the regulations and control of men. It is also noticeable that women’s charitable work was less formalized than that of men, which was probably due to the fact that women were less mobile and relied on family and neighborly contacts in their activities.

Male body and Catholic piety in early modern Spain

Features of embodied female piety adduced from late medieval texts are now established categories of interpretation for religious experience in the early modern period. These include intense Eucharistic devotion in relationship to food culture, extreme food manipulation and exaggerated violence against the physical self. However, evidence from documents by and about early modern religious men indicates that male and female ascetic piety had more in common than not during this period. Strategies of backgrounding or masking those practices when carried out by men made them less visible in comparison to those practised by women, due to gender inflections in religious politics.

Piety, fashion and festivity in a modest fashion shopping mall in Istanbul

This article studies a new shopping and entertainment centre in Istanbul, Zeruj Port, founded and run by young Muslim female entrepreneurs who specialize in Islamic modest fashion. Based on an ethnographic enquiry, the article analyses how female Muslim entrepreneurs in this unique women-themed mall develop new forms of Islamic fashion and leisure, thereby giving a new meaning to female piety in contemporary Turkey. Female Muslim entrepreneurs have emerged as the new tastemakers in the market, seeking to accommodate western trends in fashion and leisure without making major concessions to the consumer market, but also without completely conforming to the dominant Islamic discourses on fashion and leisure. These pious female entrepreneurs achieve this using reconciliation strategies based on notions of individualism. However, the article discusses cases where these young female actors do not so easily challenge Islamic rules of propriety regarding fashion and leisure. Thus, the article concludes that the fashion and leisure performances of female Muslim entrepreneurs subversively accommodate existing regimes of truth about female piety.

Intention as the Bridge Between the Ideal and Contingent: Rabea Basri and the Women of the Tablighi Jamaʿat

The itinerant men of the Tablighi Jamaʿat, an Islamic reform movement that urges its followers to travel in the path of Allah, have drawn the attention of journalists and scholars alike. Dressed in loose trousers that expose his ankles, a long, flowing beard and a duffel bag slung over his shoulders, the Tablighi man has been the subject of countless inquiries. The heightened visibility of the proselytizing men in public spaces and in the media has taken attention away from the fact that the Tablighi Jamaʿat is as much a movement of women seeking to fashion a pious self. The unintended consequence of this bias is that while public meetings of the Jamaʿat, especially the annual gathering of men in Raiwind (Pakistan), Dhaka (Bangladesh), and Bhopal (India), draw a lot of attention, an equally, if not more, important site of Tablighi self-fashioning, namely the home where women convene for the weekly ijtima (meeting), is barely considered a topic worthy of study. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among the women of the Jamaʿat conducted in Bombay (Mumbai) between 2011 and 2012, this paper will make a case for foregrounding the domestic space—in all its articulations, imaginations and contestations—in the study of the Jamaʿat. Framing the Tablighi Jamaʿat as a piety movement rooted in the domestic opens the intellectual space to theorize about modern female piety as a balancing act between the ideal and the contingent. It also allows us, as this paper demonstrates, to tease out the role of intention (niyat) in the fashioning of the pious female self.

‘Make Your House like a Temple’: Gender, Space and Domestic Devotion in Medieval Florence

This article will discuss domestic devotions by framing them in terms of devotions carried out in the home, defined by its opposition to ecclesiastical, consecrated space. It will examine how women, considered the laity par excellence through their inability to ever attain sacerdotal authority, were advised spiritually by mendicant friars on how to lead a Christian life according to their status as wives, widows or virgins. It will look at the devotional literature that was widespread in mercantile homes and the devotional images designed to move the soul. This discussion will attempt to show the tensions between ecclesiastical and domestic spaces; between the clergy and the laity, and between the corporeal and spiritual worlds of late medieval devotion. It will argue that, despite clerical unease with the female and domestic space, the importance accorded to female piety by the mendicant orders at the close of the Middle Ages was such that women were entrusted with key educational roles in the family, even leading to the astonishing affirmation of them as ‘preachers’ within the borders of their households.

What Is a Woman? Enclosure and Female Piety in Chaucer's The Knight's Tale

What Is a Woman?Enclosure and Female Piety in Chaucer's The Knight's Tale Roberta Magnani and Liz Herbert McAvoy Early responses to Geoffrey Chaucer's works and his position in the burgeoning canon of English literature cast him as a patriarchal foundational figure and literary production as an exclusively patrilineal genealogy.1 Chaucer-the-Father thus validates the authorial agency of his literary "sons," and this masculinist way of accounting for canon formation as a father-to-son "straight" trajectory has endured to the present day. Indeed, women's wider intellectual agency and its influence have been largely overlooked. This article, therefore, aims to begin such a process of reparation and posit the profound cultural relevance that women's intellectual practices had on the canon—and on Chaucer, in particular. Accounting for the role of female-coded forms of literacy would derail the conveniently linear patriarchal paradigms on which traditional criticism is founded. Recuperating the centrality of the feminine would unseat male dominance over the canon and demand, at best, its total dismantling and reconstruction, or, at the very least, a concerted interrogation and repudiation of its hegemonic validity. In other words, a radical revisioning of canon formation is made possible by positioning women as queering agents. Recentering "woman" as category and unpacking the question "What is a woman?" in capacious ways extricate it from binary epistemologies. As Sara Ahmed asserts, the queer deviates [End Page 311] from the "straight" lines of heteronormativity founded on an ineluctable patrilinear progression that, through marriage (so central to the narrative and ideology of medieval romance) and reproduction, trace a teleological sequence from birth to death.2 "Woman" reorients the epistemologies of the canon. Far from being marginal, the bodily and the excessive are celebrated for their salvific and generative power; in fact, they turn out to be the shared vocabulary harnessed by the intellectual fathers of medieval culture. We will focus on romance, a genre that is markedly invested in reproducing heteronormative structures couched in a narrative of apparent male subservience to a superior lady, and will demonstrate the extent to which widespread female-coded discourses of spirituality and literacy are profoundly embedded in the modes of writing that Chaucer deploys and the epistemologies he inhabits. The Booke of Gostlye Grace, the Middle English translation of the Liber specialis gratiae produced at the Benedictine nunnery of Helfta in northern Germany under the spiritual direction of the visionary nun Mechthild of Hackeborn (d. 1298), will serve as our case study because of its exemplarity; the centrality of Mechthild to the mystical tradition; and the wide circulation of her writing across Europe, both in Latin and in multiple vernacular translations. We are not interested in assimilating Mechthild into a patrilineal genealogy, however: quite the opposite. Nor do we claim any direct influence of Mechthild upon Chaucer, although that is entirely possible. For our purposes, Mechthild functions as an example of the importance and ubiquitous quality of women's literacy and spirituality that saturate the narrative fabric of Chaucer's texts—The Knight's Tale in particular—and that become ostensible in the Amazonian women populating the tale, and the tropes of enclosure and flourishing associated with them, but embedded in non-binary ways in the narrative as a whole. While there is evidence that the book attributed to Mechthild had, indeed, reached England at the time Chaucer was writing the Canterbury Tales, we cannot know for certain whether he was familiar with it, but there is evidence of her widespread renown during the fourteenth century.3 Instead [End Page 312] of claiming direct influence upon Chaucer, we harness Mechthild's spiritual and literary authority as a model for queering traditional theological discourse predicated upon feminine modes of literacy, which, rather than linear, hierarchical, paternal and filial, are collaborative and entangled; as such, they serve as ideal tools for a wider examination of issues such as the discursive elision of gender nonconformity and queer cultural agency.4 And we contend that what is defined as the literary canon, here exemplified by the works of one of its fathers, was profoundly influenced by (and participated in) this model—but in ways that...

Women during the English Reformations: Renegotiating Gender and Religious Identity ed. by Julie A. Chappell and Kaley A. Kramer

Reviewed by: Women during the English Reformations: Renegotiating Gender and Religious Identity ed. by Julie A. Chappell and Kaley A. Kramer Jaime Goodrich Women during the English Reformations: Renegotiating Gender and Religious Identity. Edited by Julie A. Chappell and Kaley A. Kramer. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2014. Pp. ix, 198. $95.00. ISBN 978-1-137-47473-5.) Recent scholarship on the English Reformation has been revitalized by a new focus on the intersection between gender and piety. Yet while critics have generally treated Catholic and Protestant women separately, this collection of essays edited by Julie A. Chappell and Kaley A. Kramer is a welcome exception to the rule. By presenting six case studies of women with diverse religious beliefs, Women during the English Reformations offers a tantalizing glimpse of how female agency operated across confessional lines in early modern England. The first three chapters explore the cultural significance of female piety during the Henrician and mid-Tudor eras. Drawing attention to printed books that were dedicated to Tudor royal women, Valerie Schutte deftly explains the perplexing [End Page 367] lack of English translations of Erasmus's Institution of Christian Matrimony by noting the book's relevance to the divorce proceedings of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon. In the standout chapter that follows, Janice Liedl considers the autonomy of Margaret Pole, one of the most powerful women of the early Henrician period. Liedl cogently demonstrates that Pole's femininity was not a sufficient defense to avoid execution for treason, despite her attempts to use gender stereotypes as a means of self-protection. Rebecca A. Giselbrecht then surveys thirteen letters sent to the Swiss reformer Heinrich Bullinger by women such as Jane Grey and the Belgian wife of John Hooper, revealing that these women drew on their familial connections and reformed piety to participate in an international Protestant network. Chapters four through six shift to the seventeenth century, investigating how women gained personal and political agency by negotiating the competing demands of gender and religion. Lisa McClain argues that Elizabeth Cary, largely known as the first Englishwoman to write an original play, developed "an alternative model of Catholic womanhood" (p. 69). Probing the differences in Cary's portrayal of marriage before and after her conversion to Catholicism in the 1620s, McClain provocatively contends that tensions between faith and femininity helped reshape English culture. In a particularly accomplished essay, Amanda L. Capern explores how Eleanor Davies similarly balanced gender and piety in order to achieve political agency within her prophecies. By identifying strands of Calvinist theology within Davies's inscrutable writings, Capern illuminates the political relevance of these texts to the social upheaval of the Stuart era and Civil Wars. Sharon L. Arnoult then examines the way that Elizabeth Delaval's meditations depict godly femininity, offering a compelling analysis of how one woman's search for worldly fulfillment clashed with gender stereotypes informed by religion. In a somewhat puzzling twist, the final chapters focus on later representations of early modern women's responses to the Reformation. Kaley A. Kramer discusses the representation of Mary Stuart's fictional daughters in Sophia Lee's The Recess (1783–1785), locating later myths about Catholics within a space between historiography and hagiography. Finally, in a survey of Tudor royal women on screen, William A. Robison provides ample evidence that film and television shows distort history by ignoring or misrepresenting the religious views of these influential women. The intended readers of this volume would seem to be scholars working on early modern history, literature, and religion. This audience will find much of interest in the volume's initial six case studies, which offer a useful introduction to several lesser-known women whose responses to the English Reformation deserve further consideration. [End Page 368] Jaime Goodrich Wayne State University Copyright © 2019 The Catholic University of America Press

Female Piety and the Invention of American Puritanism. Bryce Traister.

<i>Female Piety and the Invention of American Puritanism</i>. Bryce Traister.

Autonomy and the cura monialium in female monastic art: the fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts from the Dominican monastery of Jesus of Aveiro

ABSTRACTScholars have been studying images produced by nuns in the late Middle Ages, paying special attention to the illumination of devotional texts where the absence of models gave rise to non-canonical images, closely related to a visually centred piety. Among the manuscripts from the scriptorium of Aveiro, some liturgical books stand noticeably outside canonical models because of their illuminations, although they otherwise are in accord with normative precepts. Considering the rigour and standardisation to which liturgical manuscripts were subject, to analyse these images solely as a product of the nature of female piety seems simplistic. The role of the cura monialium in the community’s spiritual and temporal autonomy, especially where art is concerned, needs further analysis in order to understand the background to these images. Aveiro’s illuminations were informed by a complex visual culture where the nuns’ voice was intertwined with the cura monialium.

Female Piety and the Invention of American Puritanism by Bryce Traister

Reviewed by: Female Piety and the Invention of American Puritanism by Bryce Traister Zach Hutchins (bio) Female Piety and the Invention of American Puritanism bryce traister Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016 232 pp. As Bryce Traister rightly notes, an increasingly secular academy now relates to American Puritanism primarily from the perspective of disavowal, rejecting the efforts of John Winthrop and his contemporaries to regulate civic and social life according to the dictates of the Bible as bigoted and narrow-minded. In an exceptionally ambitious book, Traister works to renegotiate our relation to Puritanism, arguing that the seeds of American secularism were sown by the same preachers and magistrates now caricatured as ecclesiastical oppressors and that we might recognize the discourse of dissent and liberty characteristic of modern society in both their language and the language of the women who argued with them. To that end, he presents the New England Way "as both a story of profound and controlling American religiosity and an equally American story of religious tolerance and secularism" (20). [End Page 602] But the New England Way of Traister is very much not the brand of American Puritanism served up by prior generations, which looked to the sermons of John Cotton, Thomas Shepard, John Eliot, and other ministers as the best sources on Puritan thought and culture. Instead, Traister reads the records of five events as indicative of the ways in which radical female piety shaped American Puritanism: Anne Hutchinson's trial, the Quaker invasion of the 1650s and 1660s, the Halfway Covenant of 1662, Mary Rowlandson's captivity, and the Salem witch trials. Christian theology has long placed believers in a feminine position, characterizing the church and its members as the bride of Christ, but Traister suggests that New England Puritans adopted a more radically feminized piety than many other Protestant sects and makes the development of this deeply gendered theology, through key moments when women challenged or questioned their ecclesiastical leaders, central to his secularist thesis. In the five episodes he treats, Traister contends that the feminized piety of seventeenth-century New England Puritans "articulated and helped to imagine categories of personhood, cultural politics (including feminism), psychological realism, and even natural rights discourse we characteristically associate with 'modernity,' 'secularism,' and 'Enlightenment.' By reading the feminine back into Puritanism, we will also be reading religion forward into secularism" (11). Three projects—reading these five key events, tracing the evolution of a feminized piety, and searching for the influence of American Puritanism on modern secularism and postsecularism—are interwoven into a single thesis. Brilliant insights are scattered throughout Traister's work, and it should be required reading for those investigating the texts or historical moments he treats as well as those with an interest in the role of gender in early American literature and theology. Among these many fine moments is a close reading of Rowlandson's Narrative centered on a passage in which Rowlandson compares her desire to look back toward her own town of Lancaster with the desire of Lot's wife to look back toward Sodom. This comparison, Traister notes, positions Lancaster (and New England more generally) as a latter-day Sodom, separating Rowlandson's experience of providential punishment from that of the larger society to which she belongs and establishing her spiritual autonomy. Traister concludes, "Her implied criticism of New England establishes the sovereignty of Mary Rowlandson not just as an author-recorder of her own experiences, but [End Page 603] as a person claiming a personal religious experience independent of New England's spiritual discipline" (154). In a text for which Increase Mather supplied the preface and in which "a more intrusive Matherian presence" has long been suspected, Traister's reading is delightfully subversive, empowering readers to hear Rowlandson speaking to and against the ministerial culture with which her Narrative has long been identified (133). This insight and similarly innovative readings throughout his book should meaningfully shape the ways in which we discuss and teach the texts that Traister examines. However, the larger claims that Traister links together in his introduction and conclusion are more provocative than persuasive. Enough evidence is presented that his claims with respect to American Puritanism, female...

Female Piety and the Invention of American PuritanismCast Down: Abjection in America, 1700–1850

Female Piety and the Invention of American PuritanismCast Down: Abjection in America, 1700–1850

Though We Must Suffer, We Must Not Rebel’: The Calvinist Framework of Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World

According to Barbara Welter, religion or piety was at the heart of a “true” woman’s cardinal attributes. This “peculiar susceptibility” to religion, reportedly bestowed upon women by God Himself, blessed them with an intrinsic virtuosity and, in so doing, appointed them as the bastions of morality within the domestic realm. This emphasis on religion stemmed from the revivalist movement that spread throughout the Unites States in the antebellum decades. The movement, known as the Second Great Awakening, was particularly successful at converting women, and at involving them in pastoral activities, including preaching. In this way, it laid the groundwork for the creation of a culture of female piety that unlocked the production of a literature infused with theology. In that respect, one the most popular writers of the era was Susan Warner, the author of The Wide, Wide World . The novel, published in 1850, stands out in the genre for the magnitude and scope of the religious aspect and, above all, for the doctrines espoused by the writer. Warner depicts the circumstances surrounding the protagonist’s ordeal through orphanhood and subsequent adoption exclusively through the lens of a stern Calvinist approach – a notable exception in the genre, which was characterized mainly by Unitarian writers, who employed fiction to undermine Calvinism and to promote their doctrines of choice. The immense popularity of Warner’s novel offers ample evidence that Puritan influence persisted in the country with undiminished strength.

Alexandra Barratt,Anne Bulkeley and her Book: Fashioning Female Piety in Early Tudor England.

Alexandra Barratt,<i>Anne Bulkeley and her Book: Fashioning Female Piety in Early Tudor England</i>.

LANGXIAN'S DILEMMA OVER THE CULT OF MARTYRDOM AND FILIAL PIETY: A WORLD OF EMPTINESS IN “THE SIEGE OF YANGZHOU”

Ming vernacular stories are filled with images of martyrdom. The authors of these stories typically present positive images of suicide that support the neo-Confucian valorization of martyrdom for the sake of female chastity, filial piety, and political loyalty. In “The Siege of Yangzhou” and within the entire late-Ming Shi dian tou collection, the author Langxian rejected the dominant cultural ideal of martyrdom as sublime. Langxian expanded his text from previous versions of the same story, and through the ruptures and puzzling narrative discontinuities introduced into his rewriting of the text an undermining of the moral value of the protagonist's gruesome martyrdom. This story is an ironic deflation of female martyrdom that goes against the current view of Langxian as a conservative adherent of neo-Confucian ideology.

Female piety and the Catholic reformation in France. By Jennifer Hillman. (Religious Cultures in the Modern World, 17.) Pp. xiii + 222 incl. 8 figs and 2 tables. London–Brookfield, Vt: Pickering &amp; Chatto, 2014. £60. 978 1 84893 490 0

Female piety and the Catholic reformation in France. By Jennifer Hillman. (Religious Cultures in the Modern World, 17.) Pp. xiii + 222 incl. 8 figs and 2 tables. London–Brookfield, Vt: Pickering &amp; Chatto, 2014. £60. 978 1 84893 490 0 - Volume 66 Issue 4

Being Woman in the Land of Shari‘a: Politics of the Female Body, Piety, and Resistance in Langsa, Aceh

&lt;p&gt;This study investigates the dynamic of institutionalization of Shari’a in Aceh, which focuses on analysis of the patterns of Langsa women’s resistance against religious leaders and state interpretations of the dress standards in the public space. This matter emerged because the implementation of Shari’a has been supported by local people, but the standard of Islamic dress that should be applied is still debatable among various groups in Aceh that have varied understandings and different religious visions. The regulation of dress code has been an issue for religious leaders, intellectuals, and Moslem activists. The resistance of Langsa women against the politics of body discipline could be open and secret. To analyze the forms of women’s resistance, the researcher applied James C. Scott’s hidden transcripts theory. Inspired by this theoretical framework, the researcher found that Langsa women, intellectuals, and religious leaders expressed their resistance over how women should dress in public space. In collecting the data, the researcher used observation, in-depth interviews, and focus group discussions. Accordingly, the research shows how Langsa women express their resistance towards religious hegemony and state interpretation of Islam.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;[Tulisan ini membahas dinamika pelembagaan syariat Islam di Aceh dengan fokus resistensi tersembunyi perempuan Langsa terhadap penafsiran elite agama dan pemerintah perihal pembakuan standar pakaian di ruang publik. Meskipun implementasi syariat Islam Aceh mendapat dukungan masyarakat setempat, tetapi ketika sebuah tafsir tertentu tentang pakaian Islami dibakukan dalam regulasi (Qanun), muncul perdebatan dari sebagian muslim yang berpola pemikiran dan visi keagamaan berbeda. Bukan hanya perdebatan di kalangan elite agama, intelektual, maupun aktivis, perempuan di berbagai daerah di Aceh pun mengekspresikan resistensi, baik secara terbuka maupun tersembunyi. Peneliti menggunakan teori hidden transcripts sebagaimana dikemukakan James C. Scott untuk menganalisa resistensi tersebut. Data dikumpulkan melalui observasi, wawancara mendalam, serta diskusi kelompok terfokus (FGD). Penelitian ini memperlihatkan bagaimana perempuan Langsa mengekspresikan resistensi tersembunyi atas hegemoni elite agama dan pemerintah dalam menafsirkan Islam].&lt;/p&gt;

Imitatio Christi: The Poetics of Piety in Early Modern England by Nandra Perry (review)

Reviewed by: Imitatio Christi: The Poetics of Piety in Early Modern England by Nandra Perry Rebecca Huffman Nandra Perry, Imitatio Christi: The Poetics of Piety in Early Modern England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2014) 288 pp. Nandra Perry’s holistic approach to literary and religious imitatio from Sidney to Milton persuasively explores questions and categories of embodiment, kingship, private/public spheres, and the instability of language while also, in a most worthwhile step, seeking “to move more freely across the period, gender, generic, and confessional boundaries that often delimit treatments of early modern English piety” (11). This wide methodological lens enables Perry to draw together an ideologically diverse group of texts for case studies, all connected back to Sidney, to determine what good imitatio means in varying contexts and how it adapts over the course of this period. Perry engages questions of imitatio’s literariness alongside its religious purposes and tensions to work through its role in a variety of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century orthodoxies and heterodoxies. In the introduction, she uses Erasmus’s writings on the subject to set out a debate that will remain prominent throughout the book: what differentiates imitatio from mimicry, or worse, idolatry? In the range of ideologies in the chapters that follow, this hazard is a shared motivator in developing models of good imitatio. Beginning with Sidney’s 1580 Defense of Poesy and Thomas Roger’s translation of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, Perry suggests that Rogers develops a Protestant form of imitatio Christi that is especially connected to Sidney’s vision of imitatio’s literary qualities. Both Rogers and Sidney imagine Protestantism on a transnational scale, where Rogers in his translation of Kempis foregrounds the experience and presence of the Word. In place of Kempis’s culminating depiction of the Eucharist, Rogers offers the Word as the Protestant community’s sustenance. Rogers must also deal with the inherent fallibility of human words and human imitatio in relation to the sacred Word as well as “language’s seemingly irredeemable fleshliness” (56). In this reading, Rogers grounds good imitatio in the text and in reading, where despite its fallibilities language could connect to the sacred. While Roger’s long career and the chapter’s subsequent exploration of his later writings show how his work on imitatio played out in an increasingly factionalized English Protestantism rather than his hoped-for transnational Protestant community, Sidney’s short career is succeeded by his own Protestant martyrology; here, Sidney’s martyred body and “personal imitatio Christi is the best measure of the distance and difference separating his innovating model of poetic imitation from” modern models of Shuger or Habermas. Perry contends that Sidney’s body marks both an end and a beginning in the period studied in this volume, where the instability of words and physical bodies would eventually close down “the dream of an organic connection between language and the sacred body visible” (63). The second chapter moves into more heterodox territory as it delves into notions of Christian eloquence and tensions surrounding the instability of language with the writings and Life of Elizabeth Tanfield Cary. Here and in the [End Page 280] following chapter, Perry’s movement across conventional boundaries is especially rewarding. Perry examines the ways in which The Tragedy of Mariam and The Lady Falkland: Her Life by One of Her Daughters offer other kinds of bodies (beyond Sidney’s male, aristocratic body) for discussions of incarnational poetics. Reading Mariam’s confrontation with Herod as a Reformation confrontation between believer and magistrate shows models of female piety that align with the meekness and stoicism advocated for and by Catholic martyrs. Intervening in scholarship that draws clear parallels between Cary herself and Mariam, Perry suggests that instead Graphina, whose privatized “silent speech” offers the kind of exemplum that sustained Catholicism in England more effectively than martyrdom, is a more fitting model. From Graphina to Cary herself and subsequently to the daughter who authored her biography, “the Life explores the epistemological and expressive outer limits of this cross-confessional, post-Reformation vision of imitatio Christi” (96). The final two chapters turn to kingship and one body’s imitatio in particular: Charles I in...