ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book demonstrates women from different social classes, religious factions, and kinship networks used literary texts to respond to such a religiopolitical matrix in different ways. It illuminates the varied ways in which gender and class inflected women's involvement in religious communities. The chapter focuses on Margaret Beaufort, Katherine Parr, Anne Howard, and Elizabeth Evelinge, and these studies demonstrate that Eucharistic devotion, traditional Catholic prayers and meditations, militant recusancy, and monastic culture provided rich contexts for women's literary activities. It also focuses on prayers and prayer books and in analyzing women's important contributions to their literary and political development. The chapter explores powerful women who developed idiosyncratic perspectives on doctrinal questions even while working in heated confessional environments. It explores women's responses to religious communities and changing norms.
