Inventive in its approach and provocative in its analysis, this study offers fresh readings of the arguments and practices of four seventeenth-century Euro-American women: Anne Bradstreet, Anne Hutchinson, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Marie de l'Incarnation. Tamara Harvey here compares functionalist treatments of the body by these women, offering a new way to think of corporeality as a device in literary and religious expressions of modesty by women. In doing so, Harvey explores the engagement of these women in ongoing religious, political, scientific and social debates that would have been understood by the authors' contemporaries in both Europe and America.