Handbook of Women Biblical Interpreters by Marion Ann Taylor

Author:Marion Ann Taylor [Marion Ann Taylor, Agnes Choi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL006680, REL006080, REL108020, Women Biblical scholars, Bible—Criticism—interpretation—etc.—History
ISBN: 9781441238672
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group

Jameson, Anna Brownell (1794–1860)

Anna Brownell Jameson, a Protestant Irish-born Englishwoman, was educated at home, where she excelled at languages, sketching, and teaching. At age sixteen, in an attempt to assist her family financially and advance socially, she became a governess to the sons of the Marquis of Winchester, who belonged to one of England’s great noble families. In 1819 Anna accepted a post as governess with the Rowles family, whom she accompanied to the Continent, and later as governess for the Littleton family, with whom she stayed until her marriage.

In 1825 Anna married Robert Sympson Jameson, who eventually became Upper Canada’s first vice chancellor and first speaker of the legislature after the union of Upper and Lower Canada. Their relationship was unstable from the beginning. It deteriorated further while he was away as a colonial administrator in the West Indies, where he turned to drinking to dull his homesickness. He returned home in 1833 but soon left to become attorney general of Upper Canada, while she remained in England and immersed herself in her intense friendships, travel, and highly successful writing career. In 1836 she joined her husband in frontier Toronto, where he had built an impressive house for her, but she found the situation unbearable and left in 1837. They were officially separated soon afterward. He died in 1854, probably owing to his intemperate lifestyle, leaving nothing to Anna in his will. After traveling, lecturing, and writing for several more years, she died in London on March 17, 1860.

Jameson published travel volumes, such as Diary of an Ennuyeé (1826), Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad (1834), and Winter Studies and Rambles in Canada (1838); works on queens and consorts in British history, such as Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns (1831) and Memoirs of the Beauties of the Court of Charles II (1831); volumes of literary criticism, such as Shakespeare’s Heroines: Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical and Historical; and one work that decried the low status of mothers and governesses, The Relative Social Position of Mothers and Governesses (1846). Her interpretations of Scripture are found in The Poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art (1848), Legends of the Monastic Orders (1850), Legends of the Madonna (1852), and The History of Our Lord, which was published posthumously in 1864. These works later comprised a series that came to be known as Sacred and Legendary Art. The series was so popular that it was reissued repeatedly in England and the United States.

Jameson arranged the content of these volumes according to significant people or heavenly beings found in the biblical text, citing biblical and postbiblical legends about them as seen through the history of art. In essence, her work is a kind of reception history: she surveyed the ways that people had made sense of traditions about these figures and made their stories meaningful for the time in which they lived. She also commented on persons of significance within the Christian tradition (e.g., virgin patronesses, Greek martyrs) but not in Scripture.

Jameson’s method of

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