ABSTRACT
Religious devotion was a key element of women's lives in the early modern period. Elegaic writing is well represented among women's writing in the Renaissance period, to the extent that it threatens to become an all-inclusive category. As the authors have seen, the biblical text lay at the heart of poetic attempts to express the divine, irrespective of the sex of the writer, and echoes and refractions of it are threaded through the majority of texts of this period, both prose and verse, and from various genres. It doesn't go quite as far as making a pro-resistance argument as the authors have seen, the Sidney Psalter didn't need to make its political statements overt - but it is certainly admonitory in the proper tradition of panegyric poetry. Hiving off 'spiritual' or religio.
