Women and Religion in the Atlantic Age, 1550-1900 by Emily Clark Mary Laven

Author:Emily Clark, Mary Laven [Emily Clark, Mary Laven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472403506
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2014-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

I also observed them exceedingly subtle in hiding their rancour and malice. Though their words and behaviour were gilded over with specious shows of friendship built upon holiness and sanctity, they were ever privately biting and devouring one another. In short, I observed that those who made the most glaring appearances, were in reality, the least observers of religion, and those who appeared greatest Saints proved greatest Devils.138

Both Ann and Elizabeth developed their religious perspectives in the context of face-to-face encounters with other people, encounters that rendered it impossible for them to think of religion as at all distinct from those who practised it. Inevitably, then, even Elizabeth retained the belief that her mother was a good Christian, although she had been a life-long Anglican, while Ann was intimately acquainted with Quakers who were models of piety (such as her grandmother) as well as those who, in her view were not (most obviously, her Aunt Bathsheba). The movement of people within the Atlantic World made it impossible for either woman to insulate herself from those of other faiths, even assuming that this is what she wanted. The evidence of their dealings with others led both Ann and Elizabeth to understand that no religion had a monopoly on goodness, and that, ultimately, religion was a matter for individual conscience and choice.

Few people recorded in passing their experiments among various faiths in British America and the ecumenical perspectives that underpinned such experimentation; even fewer did so in any detail. That two women should be among the few in the Atlantic World who did so, and particularly women with so much in common, is not a reflection of literary formulae, for these journals are formulaic only in the most superficial sense. Their experiences suggest how such behaviour may be interpreted through the lens of gender. Both turned to religion amidst the emotional crisis and depression that disproportionately affects women. Women who lacked power within their own churches at the very least had the power to steer their own spiritual lives, and perhaps to raise their status, as Elizabeth and Ann did, by formal conversion. Women’s lives as part of broad female social networks may have exposed them more to the gentle power of persuasion by those of other faiths: Elizabeth, for example, resisted the blandishments of her husband and male priests, but was sympathetic to the quiet ministrations of women’s examples. The same was true of Ann. Clearly, there was a gendered angle to the ways in which they conducted their religious lives.

The fact that Elizabeth Ashbridge and Ann Bolton were women, however, does not signal that such behaviour was peculiar to women. More likely, it suggests that it was more common amongst those whose religious practices were unlikely to draw much attention, and whose investment as members of a particular church was less than, say, a Presbyterian church elder, or an Anglican vestryman. Certainly, young women such as Elizabeth and Ann were more likely to be cast among the powerless than the prominent.

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