Women are an essential element in church history. Just as Deborah, Esther, and the New Testament Marys helped shape Bible history, so the women of the Reformed church have helped to make its history great. In Reformation Women , Rebecca Vandoodewaard introduces readers to twelve sixteenth-century women who are not as well known today as contemporaries like Katie Luther and Lady Jane Grey. Providing an example to Christians today of strong service to Christ and His church, these influential, godly women were devoted to Reformation truth, in many cases provided support for their husbands, practiced hospitality, and stewarded their intellectual abilities. Their strength and bravery will inspire you, and your understanding of church history will become richer as you learn how God used them to further the Reformation through their work and influence. Table of Contents: Anna Reinhard Anna Adlischweiler Katharina Schutz Margarethe Blaurer Marguerite de Navarre Jeanne d’Albret Charlotte Arbaleste Charlotte de Bourbon Louise de Coligny Catherine Willoughby Renee of Ferrara Olympia Morata

This title establishes the radical currents of thought shaping Renaissance poetry: civic humanism and apocalyptic Protestantism. The author shows how Elizabethan poets like Sidney and Spenser, often seen as conservative monarchists, responded powerfully if sometimes ambivalently to radical ideas.

Exploring Edmund Spenser's writings within the historical and aesthetic context of colonial agricultural reform in Ireland, his adopted home, this study demonstrates how Irish events and influences operate in far more of Spenser's work than previously suspected. Thomas Herron explores Spenser's relation to contemporary English poets and polemicists in Munster, such as Sir Walter Raleigh, Ralph Birkenshaw and Parr Lane, as well as heretofore neglected Irish material in Elizabethan pageantry in the 1590s, such as the famously elaborate state performances at Elvetham and Rycote. New light is shed here on the Irish significance of both the earlier and later Books of The Fairie Queene. Herron examines in depth Spenser's adaptation of the paradigm of the laboring artist for empire found in Virgil's Georgics, which Herron weaves explicitly with Spenser's experience as an administrator, property owner and planter in Ireland. Taking in history, religion, geography, classics and colonial studies, as well as early modern literature and Irish studies, this book constitutes a valuable addition to Spenser scholarship.