Inventive in its approach and provocative in its analysis, this study offers fresh readings of the arguments and practices of four seventeenth-century Euro-American women: Anne Bradstreet, Anne Hutchinson, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Marie de l'Incarnation. Tamara Harvey here compares functionalist treatments of the body by these women, offering a new way to think of corporeality as a device in literary and religious expressions of modesty by women. In doing so, Harvey explores the engagement of these women in ongoing religious, political, scientific and social debates that would have been understood by the authors' contemporaries in both Europe and America.

Contents: Introduction: Modesty's charge: feminist functionalism and 17th-century feminist theory; 'Now sisters … impart your usefulnesse, and force': Anne Bradstreet's feminist functionalism; 'Cuerpo luminoso': body and soul in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's Promero Sueño; 'I doe not thinke the body that dyes shall rise agayne': Anne Hutchinson's mortalism as feminist functionalism; Femmes fortes: mysticism and the female apostolate of Marie de l'Incarnation; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

About the Author: Tamara Harvey is Assistant Professor of English at George Mason University, USA

Reviews: 'Using the early modern definition of modesty as “keeping due measure,” Tamara Harvey investigates, in creative and novel ways, the involvement of four early American women in the religious, philosophical, and medical debates of their day. Rather than be confined by a symbolic body that viewed women as weak and ineffectual, these women utilized a functional body – all aspects of which could be put to effective use – to act and write as full participants in public discourse, expressing a “feminist functionalism.” Harvey’s innovative approach proffers scholars with a new method to interrogate corporeality within the literary and religious works of early modern women.'
Janet Moore Lindman, Rowan University, USA

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Introduction

Index