ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates Florence Nightingale’s vision of a religion feminized and reconfigured in such a way as to legitimate and foreshadow her own transgressive incursion into the public sphere. She offers a radical diagnosis of the fragmented contemporary spiritual and cultural condition, relating the fractures and fissures of modernity to the material conditions of women’s lives. The sexual economy of ‘separate spheres’ is similarly unsettled by her abrupt analogies between religious history and the contemporary social position of women. She identifies the age as one of fragmentation, one in which ‘atheism and indifference are man and wife’. Her language is strikingly corporeal, particularly in her representation of female suffering. She brings a sense of calm and peace to the poorly-governed household of the nation, as is signified in the many contemporary portrayals of ‘the Lady with the Lamp’ at Scutari.
