%0 Journal Article
%T Nightingale Discourse and ¡°Author-ity¡±
%A Janet L. Larson
%J Authorship
%D 2012
%I Ghent University
%X This essay considers current discourses circulated by what I call the Spiritual School of Nightingale production that enlarge her authority through religious authorship. Since the 1990s, this School¡¯s distinctive populist and academic wings have been bringing out editions of her (mostly) unpublished manuscripts on religion along with their own commentaries, which construct Nightingale as a deeply spiritual author and inspirational role model by reading her writings as proofs of the ¡°faith [. . .] central to her life, work, and thought,¡± rather than as textual evidences that require nonpartisan sifting. This School, which is positioned to take over Nightingale studies, can be credited with reviving interest in her work; and religious ideas could hardly have been more important for her sense of vocation. Despite the value of these efforts, especially the recently-arrived Collected Works, taking her equivocal writing about ¡°faith¡± on faith of their own is problematic because it generally forecloses probing more deeply into what else these expressions might have meant or been intended to signify. What this School¡¯s under- and over-readings miss, I argue, is the tangled ¡°more is less¡± problem with the exalted terms of Nightingale¡¯s self-authoring and the high discourses of ¡°author-ity¡± that she adopted in writing on religious subjects.
%K Florence Nightingale
%K self-fashioning
%K authority
%K religious authorship
%U http://ojs.ugent.be/authorship/article/view/769/767