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Hardback

£60.00

Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199541713
Number of Pages: 322
Published: 19/05/2011
Width: 14.9 cm
Height: 22.2 cm
It takes a strong woman to secure bookish remembrance in future times; to see her life becoming a life. David Wallace explores the lives of four Catholic women - Dorothea of Montau (1347-1394) and Margery Kempe of Lynn (c. 1373-c. 1440); Mary Ward of Yorkshire (1585-1645) and Elizabeth Cary of Drury Lane (c. 1585-1639) and and the fate of their writings. All four shock, surprise, and court historical danger. Dorothea of Montau punishes her body and spends all day in church; eight of her nine neglected children die. Kempe, mother of fourteen, empties whole churches with a piercing cry learned at Jerusalem. Ward, living holily but un-immured, is denounced as an Amazon, a chattering hussy, an Apostolic Virago, and a galloping girl. Cary, having left her husband torturing Catholics in Dublin castle, converts to Roman Catholicism in Irish stables in London. Each of these women is mulier fortis, a strong woman: had she been otherwise, Wallace argues, her life would never have been written. The earliest texts of these lives are mostly near-contemporaneous with the women they represent, but their public reappearances have been partial and episodic, with their own complex histories. The lives of these strong women continue to be rewritten long after this premodern period. Incipient European war determines what Kempe must represent between her first discovery in 1934 and full publication in 1940. Dorothea of Montau, first promoted to counter eastern paganism, becomes a bastion against Bolshevism in the 1930s; her cult's meaning is fought out between Günter Grass and Josef Ratzinger. Cary's Catholic daughters, Benedictine nuns, must write of their mother as if she were a saint. Ward's work is not yet done: her followers, having won the right not to be enclosed, must now enter the closed spaces of Roman clerical power.

David Wallace (Judith Rodin Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania)

David Wallace studied for a BA (1976) in English and Related Literature at York and for a Ph.D. at St Edmund's College, Cambridge. Following a Research Fellowship at Cambridge (1981-3) and a Mellon Fellowship at Stanford (1984-5), he taught at the University of Texas at Austin (1985-91) and then at the University of Minnesota, where he was Professor of English and Frenzel Chair in Liberal Arts (1991-6). He has been Judith Rodin Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania since 1996, with stints as Visiting Professor at King's College, Cambridge, Melbourne University, Princeton University, and Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He has done extensive work for BBC radio, with documentary features on Bede, Malory, Margery Kempe, and John Leland. He is currently editing what will be the first literary history of Europe, 1348-1418, for OUP: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~dwallace/regeneration/

Wallace's groundbreaking and fascinating work will be of interest to feminist scholars, historians, and all those concerned with the premodern female experience, and the evolution of Catholicism in England and Europe. * Katherine Heavey, Renaissance Quarterly * This quirky, digressive, utterly absorbing book is indeed the story of four women's lives and lives-as well as a reception history, a meditation on the power of place, a feminist tribute, an introduction to Hanseatic trade and the Teutonic Order, a travel guide to Danzig, and a reflection on "the perennial genius of the Catholic Church for persecuting its own" (168) ... Few books in this field are so richly and widely erudite, yet such irresistible page-turners. Wallace's prose sparkles ... making Strong Women a must not just for church historians and literary scholars, but for anyone who enjoys a rollicking good read. * Barbara Newman, Speculum * this is a unique and fascinating work, one that looks at familiar (and not so familiar) texts in new ways. * Marta Cobb, The Seventeeth Century *

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