2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

The papers in this panel will examine how women - and some men - re-made religion in late 19^th- and early 20^th- century Britain. Seth Koven examines the theology of feminist and lay minister, Maude Royden, which reconfigured God as Friend, and gave sex a sense of sacramental goodness. He traces the roots of this theological shift from God as Father to God as Friend, and towards a sense of sacramental bond between people across social boundaries, back to the mid-late nineteenth century, in the work of F.D. Maurice and Edward Carpenter. Jane Shaw takes the example of Adela Curtis who combined American New Thought, meditation practices, late nineteenth-century Anglican biblical scholarship, vegetarianism, and a desire for self-sufficiency, to create two innovative religious communities. These communities, mostly composed of women, were outside the boundaries of any institutional church, and appealed to those who were disillusioned with religion, but longed for a spiritual life. Lisa Cody looks at several female scholars – Charlotte Moberly, Eleanor Jourdain and Gertrude Atherton – who understood the practice of spiritualism, and related occult practices, to be a means of knowing the dead subjects of their scholarship, and the men (Arthur Conan Doyle) who practiced the same means of ‘knowing’ but critiqued the women for it.

These papers will show the ways in which women creatively took existing religious ideas and practices and made them their own - in the formation of new theologies, communities and practices of scholarship. Ellen Ross will chair and comment on the papers.