DEVOTIONAL DISCOURSE AND FEMALE AUTHORSHIP: FROM THE STEELE CIRCLE TO MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

The article brings into discussion the case of a few exceptional women who wrote, published, and became popular in the Age of Reason as poets, critics, and activists. They were considered as Nonconformist because they belonged to the Baptist or Unitarian Church and did not follow the mainstream Church of England views. On the other hand, the end of the eighteenth century witnessed the rise of Romantic aesthetics and of a number of nature poets. The questions this article attempts to answer refer both to the influence of the Biblical discourse on a group of women’s literary and non-literary productions and to the way in which the emerging Romantic aesthetics also impacted their work. How did devotional poetry go along Romantic principles and feminist views? Anne Steele’s and Mary Steele’s poetry, Mary Scott’s and Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist agenda will be highlighted in the analysis.

TOWARDS AN INTERPRETATION OF THE PHENOMENA OF DEMON POSSESSED/DEMONIZED CHRISTIANS

In the pre-modern world people generally believed in the supernatural. Individuals and culture as a whole believed in the existence of God (or gods), angels, and demons. The visible world owed its existence and meaning to a spiritual realm beyond the senses. However, such worldviews began to die with the coming of Enlightenment of 17th and 18th centuries. The age of reason, scientific thinking, and human autonomy that characterized the Enlightenment brought to being the so-called natural religion. The result was the disappearance of immanent God (Deism) and the rejection of the socalled “excluded middle” – the unseen world of spirits, and the supernatural. Such attitude may well be summarized in Rudolf Bultmann’ famous statement: “It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discovers, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament worlds of spirits and miracles.”

Science and Social Reform in the Age of Reason

The idea of progress, the creation of the social sciences, and the cause of social reform became entangled with the power of reason-based natural science to reveal reality. This was coordinate with the spread of Newtonianism, an eclectic fusion of the physics of Newton, Descartes, and Leibniz. Although that physics was deterministic, the creators of the social sciences—sociology, economics, political science, and psychology—supported platforms of reason-based reforms of society, challenging authority and tradition-based social institutions that empowered the Church, monarchy, and aristocracy. A number of dramatic events reinforced the idea that scientific reasoning revealed truths about reality, which seemed to confirm the connection between Newtonian physics and reality. Meanwhile, opposition to the hegemony of reason in human affairs emerged in the form of a nascent Romantic movement whose champions, most notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, held that feeling and will, rather than reason, were central to human affairs.