 | Recovering Nineteenth-Century Women Interpreters of the Bible Women have been thoughtful readers and interpreters of scripture throughout the ages, yet the usual history of biblical interpretation includes few women's voices. To introduce readers to this untapped source for the history of biblical interpretation, this volume presents forgotten works from the nineteenth century written by women--including Grace Aguilar, Florence Nightingale, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others--from various faith backgrounds, countries, and social classes engaging contemporary biblical scholarship. Due to their exclusion from the academy, women's 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 author's contributions as well as to explore how her reading of the text was shaped by her experience as a woman. Christiana de Groot is Professor of Religion at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She is the author of The Alien in Israelite Law (1991). Marion Ann Taylor is Associate Professor of Old Testament at Wycliffe College, The University of Toronto. She is the co-editor of Let Her Speak for Herself: Nineteenth-Century Women Writing on the Women of Genesis (2006) and the author of The Old Testament in the Old Princeton School (1812-1929) (1992). |
