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Although Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway are now recognized as the most significant female natural philosophers, or scientific thinkers, in seventeenth-century England, Viscountess Conway would have been troubled to find herself associated with the notorious Duchess of Newcastle. Unlike Cavendish, Conway neither sought public attention through publication nor presented herself as an authority on the old or the “New Science.” Among Conway’s correspondence, we find two letters from Henry More, the Oxford philosopher and theologian, that mock the scientific exploits of Cavendish.1 No doubt, Conway would also have scoffed at Cavendish’s attempts to style herself as a “great Philosopher” (237). Conway, unlike Cavendish, was readily inclined to cloak herself in the language of humility, often reminding More that she was not worthy of his good opinion of her. And yet, while Cavendish was making every effort to situate herself within the “gentlemanly culture” of the “New Science,” with little success, Conway managed to negotiate a place for herself within it without being perceived as a threat.2

It is tempting to argue for a distinct female voice in medieval and early-modern religious works by women and to read their texts in light of feminist notions of ecriture feminine or womanspeak.1 It would be unwise, however, to give credence to any simplistic account of “feminine writing” in devotional works of the period, for textual production involves a complex process of different and conflicting determinants. Gender is only one of the factors that affect the workings of the spiritual imagination. Nevertheless, many female religious writers in medieval and early-modern Britain operated within an aesthetic of opposition, writing against essentialist concepts of “woman” as a static cultural category—inherently disruptive, spiritually inadequate, physically inferior, and inclined to the bestial.2 A rhetoric of resistance that exposed gender as a social construct surfaced in their writings, challenging the exclusion of women from the discursive formations of philosophy and religion that defined and transmitted “truth.” Ironically, medieval and early-modern women most often discovered their identity and authority in the very discourse of religion that was regularly employed by the clergy and laity to render them secondary, even soul-less, beings. Though a “foundational discourse,” religion was not a monolithic language that spoke “with only one voice” (Hinds 7); medieval and earlymodern women could employ sacred discourse to promote the notion of the self as a fluid process rather than a fixed object, rereading the scripture to invest the dynamic female body and soul with spiritual and material, private and public, worth.