Recovering Nineteenth-Century Women Interpreters of the Bible

Women have been thoughtful readers and interpreters of scripture throughout the ages, yet the standard history of biblical interpretation includes few womens voices. To introduce readers to this untapped source for the history of biblical interpretation, this volume analyzes forgotten works from the nineteenth century written by womenincluding Christina Rossetti, Florence Nightingale, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among othersfrom various faith backgrounds, countries, and social classes engaging contemporary biblical scholarship. Due to their exclusion from the academy, womens interpretive writings addressed primarily a nonscholarly audience and were written in a variety of genres: novels and poetry, catechisms, manuals for Bible study, and commentaries on the books of the Bible. To recover these nineteenth-century women interpreters of the Bible, each essay in this volume locates a female author in her historical, ecclesiastical, and interpretive context, focusing on particular biblical passages to clarify an authors contributions as well as to explore how her reading of the text was shaped by her experience as a woman. The contributors are Amanda Benckhuysen, Elizabeth Davis, Christiana de Groot, Rebecca G. S. Idestrom, Donna Kerfoot, Bernon P. Lee, Marion Taylor, Heather Weir, and Lissa M. Wray Beal.