ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that early modern women provide at least three genres of theodical arguments that are unique in various ways: Virtue Accounts, Natural Balance Accounts and Transmuted Accounts. The theodical project of these women to draw a line from concrete suffering to each persons own transformative actions in the world resonates with some contemporary philosophy of religion. Moral evil as these women thought of it is inseparable from concrete suffering in society and in the home, and so any theodical arguments they would give would relate to atrocious harm. Virtue accounts evaluate the problem of evil along with considerations of completion and virtue; natural balance accounts provide an all-things-considered perspective that does not require that this is the best-of-all-possible worlds. The natural balance account need not altogether deny, then, that God has created a world in which there is more good than evil, as long as the content of Gods.
