The Spiritual Lives and Manuscript Cultures of Eighteenth-Century English Women: Writing Religious Communities
Cynthia Aalders
Published:
2024
Online ISBN:
9780191983559
Print ISBN:
9780198872283
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The Spiritual Lives and Manuscript Cultures of Eighteenth-Century English Women: Writing Religious Communities
Cynthia Aalders
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Cynthia Aalders
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33–81
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Published:
May 2024
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Aalders, Cynthia, 'The Encouragement of Spiritual Friends', The Spiritual Lives and Manuscript Cultures of Eighteenth-Century English Women: Writing Religious Communities (
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Abstract
Through a rich variety of spiritual friendship, enacted within intra-generational relationships, women used letters, diaries, and other life writings to learn religious belief and life together. Taking a broad view of friendship, this chapter notes the porous relational boundaries between friends and siblings and observes the possibilities for spiritual friendship between women as well as between women and men. It focuses on the mutuality of such relationships and considers literary interactions as conversations, a term that highlights the personal and interactive nature of such encounters. Friends often turned to each other in distressing circ*mstances, when various cultural voices urged their resignation to illness or death. More than a cultural trope, resignation was a religious directive, and is here analysed as a subject of conversation between spiritual friends of various denominational commitments. When analysed as acts of spiritual friendship, women’s literary interactions illuminate one of the hidden ways in which women constituted religious communities, for these informal literary encounters helped women not only to think through religious ideas and personal faith commitments, but to articulate what they believed, and so guide friends’ responses to suffering within religious communities.
Keywords: friendship, sibling, letter, diary, poetry, conversation, resignation
Subject
European History
Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
The Spiritual Lives and Manuscript Cultures of Eighteenth-Century English Women: Writing Religious Communities. Cynthia Aalders, Oxford University Press. © Cynthia Aalders 2024. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198872283.003.0002
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