ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to reclaim its spot in intellectual, artistic, social and political history. It attempts to bridge the interests of historians of the Enlightenment, religion, literature and gender. The book offers with its panorama of women's biographies a revisionist and creative contribution to historiography in the hope of being a multiplier for further research. It talks about an alleged feminization of religion, used to describe eighteenth- and nineteenth-century developments. The book focuses on forms of piety women and men shared, and rejects the simple identification of religiously committed women writers with Romanticism, as the examples of Josepha Amar and Caroline Pichler demonstrate. It highlights the importance of the Sporck sisters and others in increasing the flow of information to Catholic and Protestant readers and also in making them acquainted with a non-confessional form of Christianity.
