ABSTRACT
Religious belief, theological institutions and their help-meet, biblical exegesis, were central to both personal and public identities for early modern Europeans, whether Catholic, Anglican, Baptist, Brownist or Quaker, man or woman. Two crucial intellectual and political revolutions had a continuing impact throughout this period in England both on the ideology of womanhood and on women’s actual lives: humanism and the Reformation. Each emphasised a radical restructuring of moral and public life, focusing, for example, on the re-evaluation of chaste marriage, rather than virginity, as central to salvation, and also on the family as a unit of ethical education for an individual’s role in life. This had a dual impact on women: it placed them within the domestic and private sphere, but it also gave them a significant function as educator and moral counsellor within the home, and as partner to their husband within a Christian marriage. Another specific focus was the emphasis on the New Testament, particularly the Pauline epistles, which advocated a spiritual life and spiritual equality between men and women, both in the eyes of God and in terms of their eventual salvation (pp. 37-9). But depending on the exegesis of preachers or commentators, they also advocated womanly submission and bodily inferiority (pp. 11-18). For many women this was a source of hope and an opportunity for individualism: for others it meant postponing independence to the after-life.
