Female Theology and Exegesis: Suzanne Habert's Study Library (Paris, 1631)
Théologie et exégèse au féminin : la bibliothèque d’étude de Suzanne Habert (Paris, 1631)
Résumé
Although some learned lay people might have owned theological and doctrinal books in sixteenth-century France, women's access to such scholarly knowledge was the exception. Notarial acts signed by S. Habert (1559-1633) reveal that women had access to the Greek Bible and treatises of an exegetic, neo-scholastic, and controversial nature. We shed light on the local context in which women had some religious authority, and the male judgements about the fact that a woman could have the knowledge of a director or a preacher during the post-Tridentine period.