CALL FOR PAPERS Early Modern Women, Religion, and the Body 22-23 July 2014, Loughborough University
CALL FOR PAPERS
Early Modern Women, Religion, and the Body
22-23 July 2014, Loughborough University
Plenary speakers: Professor Mary Fissell (Johns Hopkins)
and Dr Katharine Hodgkin (University of East London)
With public lecture by Alison Weir (evening of 22 July,
Martin Hall
Theatre): ‘“The Prince expected in due season”: The
Queen’s First Duty’
This two-day conference will explore the response of
early modern texts to the relationship between religion and female bodily
health. Scholars have long observed that understandings of the flesh and the
spirit were inextricably intertwined in the early modern period, and that
women’s writings or writings about women often explored this complex
relationship.
For instance, how did early modern women understand pain,
illness, and health in a religious framework, and was this different to the
understanding of those around them? Did women believe that their bodies were
sinful? And were male and female religious experiences different because they
took place in different bodies?
We invite proposals that address the relationship between
religion and health, and the spirit and flesh, with a focus on female
experience in any genre in print or manuscript. Genres might include medical,
literary, religious, autobiographical, instructive, and rhetorical writings.
Topics might include, but are not limited to
Methods of recording or maintaining bodily and spiritual
health The function of religion/faith in physiological changes (e.g.
pregnancy/childbirth/nursing/menstruation)
Illness, providence, and interpretation
Suffering as part of religious experience and conversion
Spiritual melancholy, madness, demonic possession, or witchcraft The physical
effects of prophesising/preaching Chastity and religious life Spiritual and
physical births/reproductive tropes Ensoulment and pregnancy The miraculous or
martyred female body The body and sin Uses of the Bible in medical treatises
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers, complete
panels, or roundtable discussions. Suggestions for discussions on pedagogical
approaches to teaching the above topics are also welcome.
Please send abstracts of 300 words for 20-minute papers,
or longer proposals for panels or roundtables, to Rachel Adcock, Sara Read, and
Anna Warzycha at emwomen@lboro.ac.uk
by 31st January 2014.
Dr Sara Read
Lecturer in English and Renaissance Society Post-Doctoral
Fellow Department of English and Drama Loughborough University
LE11 3TU
My new monograph _Menstruation and the Female Body in
Early Modern England_ is to be published September
or
Notes and Queries article
‘An Expected Gift’: Literary Resumption of Marital
Intimacy from Donne to Updike', published April 13, available here: