Reconsidering early modern English spiritual autobiography. Quaker women's self-writings in 17th-century England

This thesis examines the development of Quaker women’s self-representation in autobiographical writing in the early Quaker movement. It investigates the collective and communitarian value of women Friends’ autobiographical writing, as well as the theory that Quaker women authors had created a distinctive literary space by the end of the 17th century. The sources informing this research are a set of Quaker self-writings by Quaker women, belonging to different textual genres and written between the 1650s and 1690s. Quaker women’s self-writings are compared to contemporary samples of Quaker men’s self-writings to assess the degree of difference between women’s and men’s stylistic choices. The analysis of the texts was conducted using a hybrid methodology that cross-pollinates two different methodologies. The analytic tools provided by the New Historicist current of literary criticism have been integrated through the approach offered by the semiotics of culture. The New Historicist method was applied to explore the texts considering their cultural context and to highlight the individual specificities of each text. Cultural semiotics was applied to offer a broader perspective on the texts as a collective body; it enabled us to detect the culturally relevant use of paratext in the analysed works and closely follow the development of Quaker women’s self-writing throughout the years. According to the analyses conducted in this study, the development of women Friends’ autobiographical space appears to be interrelated with the women authors’ perceptions of men Friends’ support. In the context of what these women authors represent as a cooperative environment, their self-writings appear to be accepted, written and circulated as educational and identity-shaping texts indispensable for the survival of the movement. The study of seventeenth-century Quaker women’s self-writing constitutes a valid point of departure for a reconsideration of early modern Quaker spiritual autobiography as a collective and collaborative genre where the importance of an individual’s life is brought to light by emphasising its interdependence with others.