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‘Love's Interest’: Agency and Identity in a Seventeenth‐Century Nun's Letters
Author(s) -
Pfannebecker Mareile
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00309.x
Subject(s) - context (archaeology) , religiosity , literature , agency (philosophy) , power (physics) , identity (music) , history , early modern english , classics , art , sociology , psychology , aesthetics , social science , archaeology , quantum mechanics , social psychology , physics
This essay won the 2005 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Seventeenth Century Section. In studies of seventeenth‐century women's writing, emphasis has recently shifted from the more traditional literary canon to investigations of ‘non‐literary’ manuscript text. As James Daybell notes, the vast majority of texts authored by early modern women are letters (161). Many of these letters explicitly engage with religious matters or are pervaded by the religiosity of the speaker. Winefrid Thimelby, a recusant Englishwoman who became a nun and lived at an English convent in France throughout much of the Civil War and Restoration, is one of these letter‐writers. In this paper, I argue that not despite, but because of her religious seclusion, Thimelby's letters facilitate her engagement in power relations outside convent walls. In this context, the self‐construction of the letter‐writer is examined with reference to Stephen Greenblatt's notion of self‐fashioning.