The Spiritual Lives and Manuscript Cultures of Eighteenth-Century English Women: Writing Religious Communities

The Spiritual Lives and Manuscript Cultures of Eighteenth-Century English Women explores the vital and unexplored ways in which women’s life writings acted to undergird, guide, and indeed shape religious communities. Through an exploration of various significant but understudied personal relationships- including mentorship by older women, spiritual friendship, and care for nonbiological children-the book demonstrates the multiple ways in which women were active in writing religious communities. The women discussed here belonged to communities that habitually communicated through personal writing. At the same time, their acts of writing were creative acts, powerful to build and shape religious communities: these women wrote religious community.

The book consists of a series of interweaving case studies and focuses on Catherine Talbot (1721-70), Anne Steele (1717-78), and Ann Bolton (1743-1822), and on their literary interactions with friends and family. Considered together, these subjects and sources allow comparison across denomination, for Talbot was Anglican, Steele a Baptist, and Bolton a Methodist. Further, it considers women’s life writings as spiritual legacy, as manuscripts were preserved by female friends and family members and continued to function in religious communities after the death of their authors. Various strands of enquiry weave through the book: questions of gender and religion, themselves inflected by denomination; themes related to life writings and manuscript cultures; and the interplay between the writer as individual and her relationships and communal affiliations. The result is a variegated and highly textured account of eighteenth-century women’s spiritual and writing lives.

Cynthia Aalders, Director of the John Richard Allison Library and Assistant Professor of the History of Christianity, Regent College

Cynthia Aalders is Associate Professor of the History of Christianity and Director of the John Richard Allison Library at Regent College. A graduate of the University of Oxford’s doctoral program in history, she is the author of To Express the Ineffable: The Hymns and Spirituality of Anne Steele and numerous book chapters and articles. She has taught and spoken widely to international audiences on the history of women’s theological and literary contributions to diverse cultures. Her current research explores the religious lives of eighteenth-century children.