Early Modern Women and Religion

In the early modern period, religion provided a crucial framework for comprehending the world. Much as modern individuals typically understand their existence through scientific paradigms that originate in the Enlightenment, so early modern people in Western Europe made sense of their lives through the Judeo-Christian tradition. As the Reformation and Counter-Reformation showed, however, religious truth was subject to debates that resulted in social upheaval. This entry will demonstrate that early modern women writers both responded to and reshaped their religious contexts by writing texts that participated in the cultural ferment of their eras.