ABSTRACT
As this telegraphic introduction suggests, scholarship on Catholic women’s religious writing has undergone a sea change in the past 20 years. This can be attributed to the convergence of several trends: a critique of canon formation; a return to historical contextualization after a period of theoretical abstraction; a tendency to decentre aesthetic judgment; and an interest in gender’s effect on writing. The realities of a post-9/11 world have also rendered religious belief a more urgent object of inquiry. As a consequence, recent decades have witnessed a burgeoning number of editions, translations and studies on women and religion.
