D'Monte and Pohl 2000

D'Monté, Rebecca and Nicole Pohl, eds. Female Communities 1600-1800: Literary Visions and Cultural Realities. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.

Introduction, by Rebecca D'Monté and Nicole Pohl (1-27)

"there is in fact a distinct and continuous dialogue between some fictional visions of communities in these two centuries and the actual creation of communities and women's networks" (3)

imagined communities, virtual communities (imagined through shared convictions), communities made up of bodies of individuals in a specific social or ideological body

"The communities and networks in the period under investigation actively confront women's legal disenfranchisement within marriage an doffer alternatives which are imagined as companionate and egalitarian relationships between women. As proprietors they reclaim civic status which is denied to them by common law and convention." (8)

3. 'Come to Live a Preaching Life': Female Comunity in Seventeenth-Century Radical Sects, by Elaine Hobby (76-92)

"Something that becomes clear if we read around in these still neglected revolutionary pamphlets is that radical women, building in part on their experiences of shared imprisonment, developed an intellectual community that can sometimes be glimpsed through their published works, as they pick up on and expand one another's use of imagery and argument." (87)