A Resounding God: Acoustic Representations of the Divine in Early Modern Women’s Spiritual Writing

The central position of religion in forging early modern identities has been widely recognized as a space for dispute, politics, information, and control. For spiritual women in particular, whether as members of religious orders, mystics, churchgoers, sectaries, wives, andmothers, religion could also bring edification and self-knowledge when they expressed their faith in writing. Since late medieval Christianity (1200–1450), mystical theology regarded highly emotional reactions to religion as evidence of divine presence, usually triggered by a series of devotional practices eliciting an affective response to episodes of Jesus’s life in the Bible through visualization and mental concentration. These practices did not disappear with the Reformation, although it brought a reformulation of the ways in which the body and the senses engaged with the physical world to foster spiritual awareness. The idea that early Protestants rejected ritual and the cult of images in order to give precedence to the word of God—according to the doctrine of sola scriptura—is now nuanced by scholarship that recognizes that religious experience was largely mediated by sensorial discourses, spanning the traditional divide between Reformed, Catholic, and Orthodox strands of Christian faith. An oral response to reading Scripture or