ABSTRACT
The mediation of the biographies corresponds to that built into Catholic worship, with priests intervening between English women and readers as they did between them and God. Although Catholic women in post–Reformation England do not seem, to have produced a body of autobiographical writings comparable to that of their Protestant counterparts, they did figure significantly as the subjects, consumers, and much more rarely the authors of a large body of biographical writing. These texts have attracted surprisingly little critical attention, in part because the access they offer to women’s voices, experiences, or self-representations is so obviously mediated. To the extent that writers drew on saints’ lives, they turned to saints who posed the most useful models for post-Reformation English women, and texts available in English in new translations and versions. Women also played important roles as the harborers of secret presses, as translators and scribes, and as disseminators, conservators, importers or smugglers, sellers, and consumers of Catholic texts.
