This panel examines theopoetic discourses pertaining to the creation of bodies and identities in early modernity, from the making of babies to the constitution of community and the crafting of public personas. The panel brings together emerging and established scholars working in the areas of English and French literature and culture history and different religious confessional contexts who will present research on the intertwining of spiritual and political discourses in early modernity through the lens of theopoetics, an emerging field and practice centered on the phenomenology of creative and spiritual experience and on questions of self-fashioning and self-expression. This panel promises to advance our understanding of women, creativity, and spiritual and political life in early modernity.

The first paper in the panel, “Early Modern Women’s Reproductive Bodies as Divine Self-Shaping in Paradise Lost,” examines the protagonist Sin in Milton’s epic, revealing how the female figure reflects early modern reproductive anxieties, birthing experiences, and religious ideas concerning women’s embodied experiences of maternity and how the Protestant Reformation impacted the phenomenological experience of pregnant women, who once but no longer identified with the model of the Virgin Mary and the meaning of her life and experience as virgin annunciate and mother, that is, as a woman whose womb was the site of divine creation porous to the cosmic influences of God and the created world. The speaker, Kallie Comardelle, is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Delaware. She works on women’s bodies, reproduction, and the womb in the historical context of early modern English social, cultural, and political life.

The second paper in the panel, “Politics as a Creative Act in Thomas Starkey’s Dialogue,” examines religious experience, creative action, and political engagement in Thomas Starkey’s humanist Dialogue between Lupset and Pole. Demonstrating how Starkey distinguished himself from contemporaries by likening religious experience to political life in the Dialogue, this paper reveals how he reimagined the notion of “to common” and put forth a vision of creativity as an interpersonal phenomenon. The speaker, Brent Dawson, is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon. He is a scholar of English Renaissance literature who works on spiritual and political topics. is first book, Equality of Flesh, interrogates ideas of equality based in common matter, and his current book-in-progress, Drift, examines practices of meditation, especially those evident in the genres of poetry and essay, and gives an account of a mind embedded in a material world.

The third paper in the panel, “Making Lady Philosophy – Anne de France’s Self-Fashioning in Les Enseignements,” examines the household manual of the first sister regent in French monarchical history, Anne de France (1461-1522), which aimed at instructing her daughter in the art of acquiring political power through spiritual self-cultivation. It demonstrates how Anne devised a royal ideology that could accommodate (by circumventing) Salic Law for women to assert sovereignty through their connection to the divine. The speaker, Daksha Shankar Sthipam, is a PhD candidate in French at Emory University. Her dissertation on women's leadership in early modern French literature and history examines strategies noblewomen deploy to acquire and consolidate power.

This panel will take the form of three fifteen-minute paper presentations followed by a discussion.