At once pervasive and marginal, appealing and repellent, exemplary and atypical, the women of the Bible provoke an assortment of readings across early modern literature. Biblical women in early modern literary culture, 15501700 draws attention to the complex ways in which biblical womens narratives could be reimagined for a variety of rhetorical and religious purposes. Considering a confessionally diverse range of writers, working across a variety of genres, this volume reveals how women from the Old and New Testaments exhibit an ideological power that frequently exceeds, both in scope and substance, their associated scriptural records. The essays explore how the Bibles women are fluidly negotiated and diversely redeployed to offer (conflicting) comment on issues including female authority, speech and sexuality, and in discussions of doctrine, confessional politics, exploration and grief. As it explores the rich ideological currency of the Bibles women in early modern culture, this volume demonstrates that the Bibles women are persistently difficult to evade.

Victoria Brownlee is Irish Research Council Fellow in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College, DublinLaura Gallagher is a Postdoctoral Teaching Assistant in the School of English at Queens University, Belfast, and a Learning Development Assistant at the universitys Learning Development Service

Introduction: Discovering biblical women in Early Modern literary culture Victoria Brownlee and Laura Gallagher PART I: Women and feminine archetypes of the Old Testament2. Overview: reading Old Testament women in Early Modern England, 15501700 Victoria Brownlee and Laura Gallagher 3. A Paraditian Creature: Eve and her unsuspecting garden in seventeenth century literature Elizabeth Hodgson 4. Christian liberty and female rule: exegesis and political controversy in the 1550s Adrian Streete5. Wives, fears and foreskins: Early Modern reproach of Zipporah and Michal Michele Osherow 6. The politics of female supplication in the Book of Esther Alison Thorne 7. Gender and the inculcation of virtue: the Book of Proverbs in action Danielle Clarke PART II: Women and feminine archetypes of the New Testament8. Overview: reading New Testament women in Early Modern England, 15501700 Victoria Brownlee and Laura Gallagher 9. Christs tears and maternal cannibalism in Early Modern London Beatrice Groves10. Mary of recusants and reform: literary memory and defloration Thomas Rist11. Stabat mater dolorosa: imagining Marys grief at the cross Laura Gallagher12. St Helena of Britain in the land of the Magdalene: alls well that ends well Lisa Hopkins 13. Imagining the enemy: protestant readings of the whore of babylon in Early Modern England, c.15801625 Victoria Brownlee14. Afterword Dympna CallaghanIndex