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 women’s 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 women—including Christina Rossetti, 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.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.

Christiana de Groot is Professor of Religion at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She is the author of The Alien in Israelite Law (JSOT Press). Marion Ann Taylor is 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 Women of Genesis (Baylor University Press) and the author of The Old Testament in the Old Princeton School (1812-1929) (Edwin Mellen Press).