Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Alexandra Verini, "English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400-1700: New Kingdoms of Womanhood" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
Description: English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400-1700: New Kingdoms of Womanhood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) uncovers a tradition of women’s utopianism that extends back to medieval women’s monasticism, overturning accounts of utopia that trace its origins solely to Thomas More. As enclosed spaces in which women wielded authority that was unavailable to them in the outside world, medieval and early modern convents were self-consciously engaged in reworking pre-existing cultural heritage to project desired proto-feminist futures. The utopianism developed within the English convent percolated outwards to unenclosed women's spiritual communities such as Mary Ward's Institute of the Blessed Virgin and the F...