"Enfranchis’d Soules": Religious and Emotional Capital in Early Modern Devotional Epistles

• In Event: To the Reader: Early Modern Print’s Epistolary Relationships

Abstract

Although humanism expanded access to education for upper-class women, printed books reveal conflicting approaches to marketing and selling texts for women. Devotional writing offered unique access cultural capital while arguably circumscribing women’s social value to their (silent) piety or their role as wives, mothers, and daughters. In this essay I argue that such emotional capital could nonetheless be an advantageous asset, significant in particular for middle-class women and their families. Addresses to the reader and dedications to female patrons helped frame devotional reading as a way for women readers to increase their social capital, fashioning reading as a valuable contribution to the English nation and a productive counterpart to traditional domestic roles. While there are problematic issues surrounding the role of male editors in shaping of women’s work, I suggest that marketing strategies could open up new spaces for women’s social and political participation in the public sphere.

Author

• Andie Silva, York College, CUNY