When the Church's Gender Mattered: Ecclesia in Trans-Reformation England

This dissertation challenges core assumptions about post-Reformation English religious identity by examining the significance and function of Ecclesia—the feminine personification of the church—in late medieval and early modern English texts. English Protestant clerics, far from opposing a masculine Protestantism to a feminized Catholicism, eschewing devotion to feminine aspects of the divine, or shunning the church as mediatrix of salvation, persistently cultivated enduring bonds with Ecclesia. I combine the methods of literary analysis with the interests of historical theology in order to demonstrate that these invocations of the feminine church are not mere survivals of an apostolic or patristic trope, but innovative revivals of Ecclesia's distinctive role in late medieval reformist texts. I argue that in sources spanning the late-fourteenth to early-seventeenth centuries—and encompassing canonical poetry, speculative dialogue, and expository and polemical prose—the gendered church heightens the affective stakes and does the ideological work so crucial to reformist ecclesiology: Ecclesia facilitates impassioned attachments to the institution she destabilizes. My project surveys this palliative deployment of gender in texts that critique but remain obliquely committed to a given church. Medieval writers such as Langland, Wyclif, Marguerite Porete's translator, an anonymous gospel exegete, and Margery Kempe all use gender to differentiate the sacred and idealized church from the church of earthly materials, and to dramatize Ecclesia's plight at ignoble clerical hands. As these authors desire and identify with the feminine church, they re-negotiate and qualify their membership in the church unreformed. Comparably, Reformation controversialists ranging from puritan sympathizer Andrew Willet to archbishop William Laud—and including poets Spenser, Donne, and Herbert—represent loyalty to the Church of England as utter devotion to a feminized ecclesiological figure, a solace in their impatience with the pace and priorities of reform. I also incorporate writings by recusant Catholics who encourage unreserved fidelity to the feminine church in the absence of an institutional home. Through sustained attention to one poetic device in the context of ecclesiastical politics, I establish the primacy of Ecclesia's gender in preparing Trans-Reformation Christians to reconcile their reformist aspirations to an otherwise disappointing or outright hostile manifestation of church.