Recovering Nineteenth-Century Women Interpreters of the Bible


Book Description

Women have been thoughtful readers and interpreters of scripture throughout the ages, yet the usual history of biblical interpretation includes few women’s voices. To introduce readers to this untapped source for the history of biblical interpretation, this volume presents forgotten works from the nineteenth century written by women—including Grace Aguilar, Florence Nightingale, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others—from various faith backgrounds, countries, and social classes engaging contemporary biblical scholarship. Due to their exclusion from the academy, women’s interpretive writings addressed primarily a nonscholarly audience and were written in a variety of genres: novels and poetry, catechisms, manuals for Bible study, and commentaries on the books of the Bible. To recover these nineteenth-century women interpreters of the Bible, each essay in this volume locates a female author in her historical, ecclesiastical, and interpretive context, focusing on particular biblical passages to clarify an author’s contributions as well as to explore how her reading of the text was shaped by her experience as a woman.







Faith and Feminism in Nineteenth-Century Religious Communities


Book Description

Explore a diversity of feminist readings of the Bible This latest volume in the Bible and Women series is concerned with documenting, through word and image, both well-known and largely unknown women and their relationship to the Bible from the period of the late eighteenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth century. The essays in this collection illustrate the broad range of treatment of the Holy Scripture. Paul Chilcote, Marion Ann Taylor, Christiana de Groot, Elizabeth M. Davis, and Pamela S. Nadell offer perspectives on the Anglo-American sphere during this period. Marina Cacchi, Adriano Valerio, Inmaculada Blasco Herranz, and Alexei Klutschewski and Eva Maria Synek illuminate the areas of southern and eastern Europe. Angela Berlis, Ruth Albrecht, Doris Brodbeck, Ute Gause, and Michaela Sohn-Kronthaler examine women from the German-speaking world and their texts. Bernhard Schneider, Magda Motté, Katharina Büttner-Kirschner, and Elfriede Wiltschnigg treat the subject area of religious literature and art. Features Insight into how women participated in academic exegesis and applied biblical figures as models for structuring their own lives Exploration of genres used by women, including letters, diaries, autobiographical records, stories, novels, songs, poems, and specialized exegetical treatises and commentaries on individual books of the Bible Detailed analyses of women’s interpretations ranging from those that sought to confirm traditions to those that challenged them