This book charts the emergence of women‎'‎s writing from the procedures of heresy trials and recovers a tradition of women‎'‎s trial narratives from the late Middle Ages to the seventeenth century‎.‎ Analyzing the interrogations of Margery Kempe‎,‎ Anne Askew‎,‎ Marian Protestant women‎,‎ Margaret Clitherow and Quakers Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers‎,‎ the book examines the complex dynamics of women‎'‎s writing‎,‎ preaching and authorship under religious persecution and censorship‎.‎ Archival sources illuminate not only the literary choices women made‎,‎ showing how they wrote to justify their teaching even when their authority was questioned‎,‎ but also their complex relationship with male interrogators‎.‎ Women‎'‎s speech was paradoxically encouraged and constrained‎,‎ and male editors preserved their writing while shaping it to their own interests‎.‎ This book challenges conventional distinctions between historical and literary forms while identifying a new tradition of women‎'‎s writing across Catholic‎,‎ Protestant and Sectarian comm‎.‎‎.‎‎.‎