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Women's letters, literature and conscience in sixteenth‐century England

Early modern letters have long been utilized for the light they shed on the religious consciences of women. In his seminal work, Patrick Collinson outlined the ‘confessional’ nature of women's correspondence with reformation preachers such as John Knox, Edward Dering, Thomas Cartwright and Thomas Wilcox. Traditional studies have approached letters as historical documents, reliable depositories of facts there to be picked clean by the assiduous scholar. Approached as ‘literary’ texts, however, reading letters from the perspectives of genre, rhetoric and epistolary conventions, erodes (but does not entirely erase) simple notions of individual subjectivity, and letters as ‘windows on men's souls’: religious self‐representation instead appears as conscious, strategic, fluctuating and contested. Perhaps surprisingly given the religious turmoil of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, women's everyday correspondence, by its very nature pragmatic, registers little concerning religion. The epistolary representation of religious conscience it will, therefore, be argued in this essay most clearly emerges through situations of conflict or social negotiation. The essay will seek to explore the ways in which women constructed religious selves in correspondence by examining letters produced in a range of situations and performing a variety of functions. These include letters from women writing to extricate themselves or husbands and family from accusations of recusancy; letters of maternal rebuke chiding sons for lack of piety or irreligious behaviour; letters of religious nonconformists which were ‘scribally’ published or printed for posterity; and women's correspondence with male confessors.