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A new book jointly edited by Prof. Marion Taylor of Wycliffe College has just been released by Brill as volume 38 in the SBL Symposium Series.

Recovering Nineteenth-Century Women Interpreters of the Bible 

Christiana de Groot and Marion Ann Taylor, editors. ISBN 9781589832206. 256 pages. Paper $34.95.

Women have been thoughtful readers and interpreters of scripture throughout the ages, yet the standard history of biblical interpretation includes few women’s voices. To introduce readers to this untapped source for the history of biblical interpretation, this volume analyzes forgotten works from the nineteenth century written by women—including Christina Rossetti, Florence Nightingale, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others—from various faith backgrounds, countries, and social classes engaging contemporary biblical scholarship. Due to their exclusion from the academy, women’s interpretive writings addressed primarily a non-scholarly audience and were written in a variety of genres: novels and poetry, catechisms, manuals for Bible study, and commentaries on the books of the Bible. To recover these nineteenth-century women interpreters of the Bible, each essay in this volume locates a female author in her historical, ecclesiastical, and interpretive context, focusing on particular biblical passages to clarify an author’s contributions as well as to explore how her reading of the text was shaped by her experience as a woman.

Included also as contributors are a number of former and current Wycliffe College graduates students: Amanda Benckhuysen (completing her Ph.D. at Wycliffe College), Elizabeth Davis (TST Ph.D. student), Rebecca G. S. Idestrom (M.Rel. from Wycliffe College), Donna Kerfoot (Th.M. from Wycliffe College, currently a Th.D. candidate at Trinity College), Bernon P. Lee (Ph.D. from Wycliffe College), Heather Weir (completing Th.D. at Wycliffe College), and Lissa M. Wray Beal (Ph.D. at Wycliffe College).