Focus on works written by women from various faith backgrounds, countries and social classes, including Christina Rossetti, Florence Nightingale, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Mary Cornwallis, Catherine McAuley, Mary Anne SchimmelPenninck, Josephine Butler, Elizabeth Rundle Charles, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Wordsworth, Annie Besant and Etty Woosnam. Due to their exclusion from the academy, women’s interpretive writings addressed primarily a nonscholarly audience and were written in a variety of genres: novels, poetry, catechisms, manuals for Bible study and commentaries on the books of the Bible. Each essay locates a female author in her historical, ecclesiastical and interpretive context, focusing on particular biblical passages.