, 2

ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN RENAISSANCE

LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Women’s Prophetic Writings 2 q

in Seventeenth-Century Britain
Carme Font
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2022 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/womenspropheticw0000font
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Women’s Prophetic Writings
in Seventeenth-Century Britain

This study examines women’s prophetic writings in seventeenth-century

Britain as the literary outcome of a discourse of social transformation
that integrates religious conscience, political participation, and gender
identity. The following pages approach prophecy as a culture, a lan-
guage, and a catalyst for collective change as the individual prophet con-
ceptualized it.
While the corpus of prophetic writing continues to grow as the re-
sult of archival research, this monograph complements our particu-
lar knowledge of women’s prophecy in the seventeenth century with a
global assessment of what makes speech prophetic in the first place, and
what are the differences and similarities between texts that fall into the
prophetic mode. These disparities and commonalities stand out in the
radical language of prophecy as well as in the way it creates an authorial
center. Examining how authorship is represented in several configura-
tions of prophetic delivery, such as essays on prophecy, poetic prophecy,
spiritual autobiography, and election narratives, the different chapters
consider why prophecy peaked in the years of the civil wars and how it
evolved toward the eighteenth century. The analyses extrapolate the pe-
culiarities of each case study as being representative of a form of textu-
ally based activism that enabled women to gain a deeper understanding
of themselves as creators of independent meaning, empowering them as
individuals, citizens, and believers.

Carme Font is Lecturer in English Literature at Universitat Autonoma

de Barcelona, Spain. She is also Research Associate at the UCLA Center
for Medieval & Renaissance Studies. She has published articles on early
modern women’s writing, and co-edited Mightier than the Spoon is the
Pen: Economic Imperatives for Women’s Writing in Europe Before 1800.
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35 Women’s Prophetic Writings in Seventeenth-Century Britain

Carme Font
 Women’s Prophetic Writings
in Seventeenth-Century
Britain

Carme Font

Routledge -
Taylor & Fra
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 2017
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
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© 2017 Carme Font
The right of Carme Font to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
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the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Font, Carme, author.
Title: Women’s prophetic writings in seventeenth-century
Britain / by Carme Font.
Description: New York: Routledge, 2017. | Series: Routledge
studies in Renaissance literature and culture | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016055538
Subjects: LCSH: English literature—Women authors—History
and criticism. |Women and religion—England—History—17th
century. | Prophecy—Social aspects—England—History—17th
century. | Prophecy—Christianity—History—17th century. |
Feminism—England—History—17th century. | Women’s
rights—England—History—17th century. |Women and
literature—England—History—17th century. | Religion
and literature—England—History—17th century. |
Reformation—England.
Classification: LCC PR111 .F66 20171 DDC
820.9/928709032—dc23
LC record available at https://Iccn.loc.gow/2016055538
ISBN: 978-1-138-64692-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-62523-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
Contents

List of figures Vii

Textual note ix
Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: The culture of prophecy in the English

Reformation 1

PART I
Politicum a7

1 Prophetic politics and revolutionary spirit ao

2 Women’s prophetic ministry 44
3 Confronting Parliament with the word: The case
for Elizabeth Poole 56
4 Politically incorrect prophecy 83

PART II
Protean feminisms 91

5 Prophecy and personal conscience 93

6 Exposing the prophetic word 104
7 The prophetic poetry of Anna Trapnel 114
8 Obstat sexus 139
vi Contents

PART III
In-communications

9 Prophetic word vision: Lady Eleanor Davies

and textual bi-location
10 The soul’s flight of Jane Lead
11 Prophecy and the transmutation of suffering
12 Prophetic activism

Conclusion: Old sectaries, new prophetesses

Bibliography 223
Index 247
List of figures

hel Title page. Hilgard, a Nunne. A Strange Prophecie

against Bishops, Prelates, and All other Priests, 1641.
Reproduced by kind permission of the Huntington
Library, San Marino, California.
a8 Frontispiece. Elizabeth Warren, A Warning-Peece
from Heaven, against the Sins of the Times, 1649.
The British Library, E.581[5] © The British
Library Board. 47
ae Letter. Lady Eleanor Davies to her daughter
Lucy Hastings, 9 April 1637. Reproduced by kind
permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino,
California. 167
Printed letter and signature, Katherine Evans and
Sarah Cheevers. A True Account of the Great
Tryals and Cruel Sufferings, 1663. Reproduced
by kind permission of the Houghton Library,
Harvard University. 1s
Title page. Rebecca Travers (R.T.) This is for all or
any of those (by what name or title soever they be
distinguished) that resist the Spirit, 1664. Reproduced
by kind permission of the Houghton Library,
Harvard University. 202
Cel Ann Yerbury, Some Reflections on Death (1730).
With kind permission of The William Andrews Clark
Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles. 220
i ——

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Textual note

All quotations from primary sources retain the original spelling and
syntax (except for ‘u’/‘v’ and ‘i’/‘j’), as well as the original capitals and
italics. Unless otherwise indicated, biblical quotations are from the King
James Bible.
Acknowledgments

I am indebted to many individuals and institutions for their kind

support in the completion of this book. The Agéncia de Gestié d’Ajuts
Universitaris 1 de Recerca funded the early days of this project, as
well as the Chawton House Library, coinciding with the latest phase
of my dissertation research. On a postdoctoral level, I must thank the
Houghton Library at Harvard University for its generous support with
a Katharine F. Pantzer Jr. Fellowship in Descriptive Bibliography. It was
likewise a privilege to be awarded a short-term grant at the William
Andrews Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles from the UCLA Center
for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies. My heartfelt thanks to the UCLA
Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies (CMRS), and in parti-
cular its Director Massimo Ciavolella, for the ongoing appointment of
Research Associate at the CMRS.
It was not easy to combine my teaching responsibilities at Universitat
Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB) with seminars and research trips to the
UK and the US while immersed in the writing of this book, but Erasmus
bursaries and the welcoming disposition of the Department of Filologia
Anglesa i de Germanistica at UAB has made things possible. On the
home university front, my greatest debt is to Joan Curbet, whose sound
mentorship and wealth of knowledge is and will always be a source of
inspiration. I am thankful to my departmental literature colleagues, in
particular Professor Andrew Monnickendam, for guidance and com-
panionship. Special thanks to Francisco Borge, Rossend Arqués, Beatriz
Ferris, José Enrique Ruiz-Doménec at IEM, David Owen, and Meri
Torras for their interest in various aspects of my work.
I am most grateful to scholars, colleagues, and friends overseas who
have offered encouragement, advice, or critical engagement at diverse
points of my research as it was gradually taking book shape. I benefitted
enormously from the insights of Elaine Hobby, Catie Gill, and Suzanne
Trill, and the constructive exchanges with Barbara Shuger and Susan
Staves mean much more to me than I can possibly express here. I wish
to thank Suzan van Dijk at the Huygens Instituut, Julia Flanders and
the WWP at Northeastern University, and Gina Luria Walker at the
New School in New York for their collaborative spirit and opportunities
xii Acknowledgments
for sharing my work in different venues and conferences. My gratitude
as well to Diana Henderson and Marina Leslie for inviting me to
their seminar on Women and Culture in the Early Modern World at
Harvard University; and to Professor Tom Conley for my presentation
at Harvard’s Early Modern Seminar. Many thanks to Séverine Génieys-
Kirk at University of Edinburgh and Professor Maria Jesus Lorenzo-
Modia at Universidade da Corufia for their stimulating conferences.
The unfailing assistance of librarians, curators, and archivists at seve-
ral institutions, in particular the British Library, the Chawton House
Library, the Bodleian Library, the Houghton Library, the William
Andrews Clark Memorial Library, the Huntington Library, the
Biblioteca Nacional (BNE), and the Biblioteca de Catalunya has been
a blessing of exemplariness. My special thanks to Scott Jacobs at the
Clark and to John Overholt and Monique Duhaime at the Houghton
for making me feel at home. I am extremely grateful to editors Elizabeth
Levine and Michelle Salyga at Routledge, as well as Assunta Petrone’s
production team, for their commitment to this project and sharp eye. I
must acknowledge the encouragement and sensible critique of the two
anonymous readers who set me on the right track.
Earlier versions of excerpts in Parts 1 and 3 in this book have pre-
viously appeared in “‘I have written the things which I did hear, see,
tasted and handled’: Selfhood and Voice in Katherine Evans’ and
Sarah Cheevers’ A Short Relation of their Sufferings (1662)”, SEDERI,
Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renais-
sance Studies 20 (2010):27-54; and in “‘Foretelling the Judgements of
God’: Authorship and the Prophetic Voice in Elizabeth Poole’s A Vision
(1648)”, Journal of English Studies 11 (2013):97-112. Both reproduced
here with permission.
Ona personal note, I wish to thank Ben and Phyllis in London for their
fellowship and hospitality; Evan Baker in Los Angeles for our mutual
friendship; and Esther Cuso in Barcelona for her encouragement. Finally,
I am ever deeply grateful to my family, the Fonts, the Londners, and my
sister Marta. And I owe a colossal debt of gratitude to my husband, Uri
Londner. This book is dedicated to him.
Introduction
The culture of prophecy
in the English Reformation

The subject matter of this book reaches beyond the confines of the
spiritual, the political, and the literary domains in the early modern
world. The concept of ‘prophetic speech’ and its evolution within a spe-
cific religious and cultural context in the seventeenth century compels
us to go beyond traditional notions of faith and fiction. The women
writers examined in this study did not consider themselves creative au-
thors in the modern sense of the term, nor were they motivated in the
main by aesthetic considerations. Their writings sought to command
attention to a spiritual rejuvenation of the country and, in some cases,
thwart governmental action. The religious zeal of these women moved
them to challenge the political and social structures of their time, while
establishing forms of authority for themselves in a male-dominated so-
ciety. A short tract by Mary Adams conveyed a sense of national emer-
gency when she mentioned that “it rise often in my heart to write, even
a warning, that the inhabitants might hear” so that the English nation
could avoid its ruin after the
numerous warnings God had sent over the
last decade. The judgements of the Lord had been “signified” to Adams
“by visions, as it hath laid
with very much weight upon my Spirit”.!
The Quaker Dewans Morey announced a time of physical and spiritual
“famine at hand” in which true spiritual seekers would diligently look
for “the heavenly bread, the heavenly clothing, the heavenly food for
your souls, without which ye will become the most miserable nation
under the sun”.* The Baptist Anne Wentworth did not hesitate in go-
ing public to solve a private matter: when the leaders of her congrega-
tion refused to help her overcome almost two decades of marital abuse,
Anne decided to leave her husband and declared the reasons for doing
so in her prophecies, thus confronting fellow Baptists who tried to dis-
credit her to avoid a black spot on the group’s reputation. Wentworth’s
sincere and graphic account was meant to disclose the contradictions
between the “tender mercies of God” and the cruelty of man when she
claimed that her case would not be brought to an end without “com-
ing into the publick view of the World”. Despite her reluctance to “be
seen in any publick way”, she felt “constrained now, & thrust out by
the mighty power of God, who overpowers me”.> The spiritedness of
2 Introduction

Adams, Morey and Wentworth captures nicely the gist of the present
study: the fact that the fuzzy contours of private spirituality and public
exposure for women prophets articulated a language of their own. A re-
current object of analysis in the following chapters is the relationship
between the religious tenor of the prophetic text and its ‘lay’ content,
which often appealed to political change, individual conscience, and a
greater awareness of gender bias. The prophetic mission and its public
function in seventeenth-century Britain could also entail the self in re-
lation to a community of faith. The Quaker Sarah Blackborow invited
“all people” to come to the light of Christ in the world, especially minis-
ters and teachers of the people who “preach for hire, and persecute and
throw into prison”. Blackborow pointed at the inner prison of all those
who lived away from the spirit, and fashioned herself as a harbinger of
love that provided wisdom and liberation.’ The light of the spirit, which
is “one in the male and the female”, brings with it an understanding of
the scriptures as well as the “Spirit of Prophesie” which is “a gift in the
true Church of God”.?
These and many other episodes throughout this book share a core
attribute that legitimizes prophecy: the sense of a direct, intimate
communication with the “Spirit”. Its private receiving and absorption
informs the self and is at the core of the self. The self therefore feels em-
boldened to reach out and speak, and in so doing, prophecies reveal the
differences in form and substance that emerge out of their underlying
biblical subtext. Prophecy by seventeenth-century women mostly took
place within dissenting religious communities with their own radical
and religious agenda. Fifth Monarchists, Baptists, Familists, Quakers,
Independents, Ranters, Levellers, Seekers, among others, did not con-
form to Church of England’s practice—which they saw as too reminis-
cent of Catholic ecclesiastical usage—and were weary of Presbyterian
organization, particularly in the years of the Civil War and the Inter-
regnum. But the woman prophet could also find herself in a position of
individual prominence, even isolated in her reception and delivery of the
voice of the Spirit.
The present study seeks to examine prophetic writing in seventeenth-
century Britain as the literary outcome of a discourse of social transfor-
mation that integrates religious conscience, political participation, and
gender identity. Although the corpus of prophetic writing is identified
by early modernists and continues to grow as the result of archival re-
search, this monograph complements our particular knowledge of pro-
phetic writing in the seventeenth century with a global assessment of
what makes speech prophetic in the first place, and what are the differ-
ences and similarities between texts which fall into the prophetic mode.
These disparities and commonalities stand out in the radical language
of prophecy as well as in the way it creates an authorial center. Examin-
ing how authorship is represented in several configurations of prophetic
 Introduction 3
delivery, such as essays on prophecy, poetic prophecy, spiritual autobio-
graphy, and election narratives, the following pages consider why proph-
ecy peaked in the years of the civil wars and how it evolved toward the
eighteenth century. The analyses extrapolate the peculiarities of each
case study as being representative of a form of textually based activism
that enabled women to gain a deeper understanding of themselves as cre-
ators of independent meaning that empowered them as individuals, citi-
zens, and believers—irrespective of whether that meaning was eagerly
welcomed or not. Despite the fact that there were also men who pro-
duced written prophecies in the same period,° female prophecy stands
out as a particular genre that is gendered: the prophetess’ realization
that she was being read and listened to often had a dignifying effect on
her as a woman by holding her responsible for the content of her pro-
phetic delivery. Prophecies could thus be porous to women’s viewpoints
and particular circumstances. The prophetic text by women may or may
not speak of change; it is change itself and a form of activism even when
it does not lead to a paradigm shift. The following pages then approach
prophecy as a culture, a language, and a catalyst for collective transfor-
mation as the particular prophet conceptualized it.
The very nature of seventeenth-century prophetic writing by women
invited the structure and the concept of this book. Even though it has
been almost forty years since women’s prophetic voices have been grad-
ually emerging from the archives thanks to the pioneering work of femi-
nist literary historians, social historians, and historians of religion, this
volume contributes to the wider picture of women’s prophecy by taking
as a starting point the interplay of its four main constituents: religion,
politics, gender, and language. Individual case studies of women’s proph-
ecy are often included in anthologies of early modern women’s writing
and surveyed in monographs or edited volumes devoted to a thematic
thread, be that devotional poetry by women or the historical analy-
sis of a specific congregation. Prophecies are also inserted in general
anthologies of women’s poetry.’ This fluidity of prophetic texts, which
makes them a nice fit as curious specimens of women’s writing and in-
vites discussions about the limits of the canon, has not left much criti-
cal space for appreciating the contribution of prophecy as a narrative.
What makes women’s speech prophetic? In our efforts to discriminate
between the facts and the fiction of these texts, we have tended to privi-
lege a single category of analysis at much the expense of others. Thus we
have read sectarian prophecy within its particular religious and histo-
rical parameters as an early example of the construction of pre-modern
female selfhoods; we have focused on manifestations of gender inequal-
ity, political statements, and, less so, economic disparity. The texts of
prophetesses lend themselves well to these kinds of single-themed foci.
By gathering a number of well-known and other less familiar prophets
with different religious leanings, my approach seeks to fine-tune our
4 Introduction

definition of prophetic discourse as a narrative that is articulated on

the premise of its religions persuasion, its political concerns, and its
gender awareness.

Defining seventeenth-century prophecy

Diane Purkiss defined prophecy as “any utterance produced by God
through human agency”.® The following pages qualify this widely ac-
cepted definition by integrating particular features of seventeenth-
century prophesying, such as the prophetess’ degree of conviction that
her words are truthful by dint of their divine inspiration, and that her
message renders a community service. The public exposure of prophecy
and its various degrees of implicit moral superiority are not in fact differ-
ent from earlier conceptions of prophetic speech that go from advice or
reproach to fierce admonition. Laura Nasrallah defines ancient proph-
ecy, including dreams, visions, and oracles as part of the same basic
phenomenon, “the communication of the divine with the human”.? Jan
Wojcik and Raymond-Jean Frontain understood the prophetic voice in
wider terms: “Prophets have at least two voices: their own and the au-
thority for whom they speak, be it God or some source that is not divine
but is equally compelling: a value, a program, a way of life”.!°
Prophecy stands apart from invocatory forms of spirituality, such as
the prayer, the sermon, or the psalm, in that the authority for acting as
an unmediated agent of the divine is already extant. Even when pro-
phetic speech is presented as a song, an exhortation, or a meditation,
as it often does following the songs of Biblical women prophets such as
Deborah, its spiritual prerogative derives from a present and prescient
agent of the divine rather than a latent or absent divinity which is in-
voked. Stemming from a second generation of Protestant readers, proph-
ecy entered the eighteenth century with a stronger sense of the power of
the written and spoken word as being potentially transformative for the
individual conscience and the common good. In this analysis, prophecy
emerges as both a genre and a process of authorial attribution that left
a heritage of empowerment of individual agency, particularly in women.
As custodians of the word of God mediated by humans, prophets were
co-creators of a discourse that could elicit a non-religious response.
Authors-mediators could also and gradually blur God’s unambiguous
presence to keep themselves and the word in the text.
Viewing seventeenth-century prophecy both as a language and a
religious culture (a radical language that conveys meaning beyond its
religious rhetoric and content) allows us to understand the potential of
the prophetic message to transform its social milieu. John Milton’s pro-
phetic authority was predicated on his vatic poetic prowess, whereas
his contemporary women sectaries resorted to prophetic eloquence to
create various degrees of biblical poetics.!! Even though Dewans Morey
 Introduction 5§
and Lady Eleanor Davies turned to the prophetic genre in their writ-
ing, the style of the former was more reiterative and transparent than
Davies’ convoluted and psychologically intense Ecriture féminine. Since
dissenting movements endorsed prophetic authority by women on reli-
gious grounds, women found themselves in an unprecedented juncture
that favored their speech by feminizing its mode of production. The fol-
lowing chapters respond to the ways in which public exposure and di-
vine agency converged in the prophetic genre and developed an authorial
awareness that re-created form and content.
Early modern prophecies share significant traits with ancient biblical
prophecy. A key feature of the prophetic books in the Old Testament is
that they speak of the present as well as the future: biblical prophets often
link the two together, suggesting that the future is the result of present
mischief and that events to come are the direct consequence of contempo-
rary political and social unrest. Old Testament prophets often advocate
a particular way of living or an ethical position. The common element
binding them all is their defence of and respect for the Law of God, and
their presentation of that Law as the necessary basis for the establishment
or improvement of the political system. Among these ancient prophets, we
find oracles denouncing the sin and apostasy of Israel and Judah in books
such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and Hosea, all of which include visions
or predictions of national doom usually at the hands of foreign powers.
Prophets customarily assign impending disasters to the sins of the
community they address, urging the faithful to repent before it is too
late. At the same time, the prophet’s attitude is always oriented toward
the justification of God’s wrath, the restoration of the kingdom or
Christ, and his long-term designs for humanity. The prophet’s warn-
ings are generally coupled with her faith in an apocalyptic future, in
which God’s justice will prevail. She is convinced of the righteousness
of God’s ways and seeks to justify them before an audience that is of-
ten uncomprehending or unresponsive. As John Barton noted, one chief
concern of the prophets is theodicy, the justification of God’s ways with
his world.!? In order to create a coherent theodicy, the prophet-exegete
must display his or her best rhetorical skills. For Thomas Aquinas and
his analysis of the causes of prophecy in Summa Theologica, the pro-
phetic gift is a vision at the service of others, and a kind of knowledge
impressed under the form of teaching on the prophet’s intellect by divine
revelation. He quotes Jerome in explicating the inevitability of truth in
prophecy, since by virtue of being a gift of grace it is also a seal o
divine foreknowledge and no falsehood can possibly come out of i
As we shall see, several women prophets insisted on the truthfulness of
their speech based on this ineffable prerogative on causes and effects.
Prophecy is different from prognostication because it states that which
is present to divine foreknowledge. Hence it can create expectations.
A ‘strange prophecy’ by a nun called Hilgard prophesized in 1558 that
6 Introduction
both “King and People” would join in the reformed churches of Britain
“with a religious consent” to cast bishops out of the Church. Her mes-
sage, “prophetically declared”, announced that it would come to pass in
1641, 1642, and 1643. It was duly published in 1641 with a preface that
explained the nature of prophetic revelation and its relation to humanity,
who often does not heed God’s advice to its own risk and peril: “When
God will shew his displeasure and indignation, and intendeth to bring to
passe some great act, that all creatures doe prophecy herefore and give
warning, although it helpe but little”.!4

| 7/
A {trange Prophecie,
AGAINST

BISHOPS
PREIL ATES 48D 40
other Priefls, which have not kept the faith-
full Order of Priefbood ;And alfo againit the
Tranfgreffors of Righteoufnefle
in thefe Times.
Together with the Downe-fall and deftruction of
Poperie, andthe Ruine of Remes Monarchall and
Tyramnicall Geverament.

Prophetically declared, that in the yeares

1641, 1642,and 1643. The reformed Churches in thefe
Wefterne Iflands, fhould (both King and People)
joyne with a religious confent to avolifh
them out of che Church.

Written by Hitearv a. Nunne, 1558.

and fince preferved by anAntiquaryinthis —— -
Kingdome, and now publifhed for the
infiruéion of the Church ef
England.
O46 ae

Deusen
OG 4 Soe

LONDON, Printed
forJoba Thoma. 1641.

Figure I.1 Title page. Hilgard, a Nunne. A Strange Prophecie against Bishops,
Prelates, and All other Priests, 1641. Reproduced by kind permission
of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
 Introduction 7
Prophecy is also described in Romans 12:6 as a gift of grace, and
II Pet.1:20 claims that “it came not in old time by the will of man: but
holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost”. Women
could receive the gift of prophecy, as accounted for in Old Testament
precedents (Deborah in Judges 4:4, Miriam in Exodus 15:20) even though
they could not preach according to the Pauline injunctions that women
should keep silent in the churches (1 Corinthians 14:34). In the following
case studies we will see how both prophetic speech and interpretation
belong to women. The gift of prophecy is an exception to the Pauline rule
of women’s silence, in which speaking does not pose a challenge to their
moral standing. The Quaker Margaret Fell in her Women’s Speaking
Justified famously challenged the Pauline injunction in claiming that it
could not apply to women who had received the spirit of God.!> Michele
Osherow has analyzed the speech of three emblematic prophetesses of
the Old Testament and shown their influence in Protestant literature of
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England,!® which in turn invites an
inquiry about the depth and scope of biblical working knowledge of radi-
cal women and prophetesses in particular.'” Christina Berg and Philippa
Berry focused almost exclusively on the rhetorical strategies employed
by prophetesses, considering that they “represented their own sexual-
ity within a discursive medium where an explicitly political content was
subsumed within a highly personalized mode of expression”.!® We may
also go beyond the study of religious rhetoric and look at the representa-
tions of both the textual and the physical bodies. Any faithful recreation
of biblical speech on the part of the prophetess could be seen as a sign
of having received the gift of inspiration, and so women’s speech was
equivalent to one form or another of prophetic writing.
Prophecy can be said to subsume most genres and describe as well the
more familiar kind of prediction that we now think of as ‘prophecy’.
Virtually all religious writing by women, with the capability to inter-
polate and modify its own textual culture, conformed to this definition.
Their writing was in this sense ‘prophetic’, and the consequent status of
its authors as ‘prophets’ was significant for the representations of their
own selves, the justifications for their writing, and their relationship to
religious discourse.!? Female prophetic voices within and without the
texts were perceived as being sanctioned by a supreme power, but the
authority they mustered could be regarded as fully exceptional. Femi-
nist readings of prophetic writings have tended to correlate the intrin-
sic authority in the text with various degrees of women’s impact in the
public arena in print. But distinctions between what constitutes social
impact, through acceptance or rejection, might be less relevant than
recognizing than many prophecies were printed with an intention to
address an audience larger than a religious congregation and its sym-
pathizers. Even when operating under the assumption that prophecy
entailed the truth, some women saw their authority as prophets chal-
lenged when they were rejected on account of the substantive content of
8 Introduction

their messages. Sometimes we find the opposite case: a prophetess was

disqualified on moral grounds for having produced a message that did
not conform to a particular political or religious agenda or format. If
we consider prophecy not as a standardized product of its own time, but
as an individualized discourse that enhances authorial self-awareness
and moves across genres from the autobiographical to the valedictory,
the moralistic or the miscellany, then we are better equipped to see the
various degrees in which women modified a message they owned. This
process of textual individualization by women prophets constitutes lit-
erary value, which may go from a simple customizing to a full imagi-
native recreation. Sarah Apetrei has alerted us precisely on the paradox
of “the woman in history” who loses part of her intellectual agency
when her creative input is subordinated to the range of sources and re-
sponses which shape its meaning.?? While treating women prophets in
isolation from their cultural and textual environments would provide
an incomplete picture of their intellectual agency, viewing them only in
relationship to a set of themes may diminish its original potential. Thus
prophecy could simultaneously threaten and confirm, for instance, ex-
isting notions about the submissive nature of women.
A woman addressing her political adversaries in public was more of
an exception than the norm. But she could also be regarded as being
particularly suited to this role, since her supposed biological nature as
a ‘vessel’ and a ‘recipient’ of the seed and authority of the male, as well
as her subservient social role, enabled her to act as a perfect channel for
God’s idiom. Phyllis Mack has shown that the characterisation of female
visionaries as empty vessels cannot be simply termed as misogyny, since
becoming a void to accept the divine spirit is a mark of divine authority.
At the same time, prophesying implied a deconstruction of human lan-
guage to articulate a grammar of one’s own.*! The supposedly natural
emotionalism of women made them fit for the expression of spiritual
values. Prophetic writing would thus appear as being intimately related
to the feminine because it required from the prophet a passive capability
to echo the Word. The articulation of a new language had less to do
with finding a means to express the unknown or foretelling the future
than with interpreting the word of God. Both aspects had been present
in ancient prophecy as well, but the crafting of a discourse of one’s own
gained especial significance in the seventeenth century. This was in part
due to the meaning that Puritan theology ascribed to ‘prophecy’ as being
an exegesis of Scripture, and the importance of sermons in a consistently
analytical approach to the experience of the soul. Tim Thornton has
explored the ways in which non-Biblical prophecy from Tudor England
well into the seventeenth century interacted with a political oral and
manuscript tradition that compelled the attention of the ruling elites,
even though it was not exclusively under their control because prophecy
employed a “political grammar” accessible to non-elite classes.2* Even
 Introduction 9
the prophecies of Mother Shipton, printed for the first time in 1641, eight
decades after her death, made an explicit reference to her “lowness” as
a condition that can befall the powerful.”° Her “prophesie” was printed
together with others by “Sybilla”, “Merlin”, or “Ignatius Loyola”, the
latter prophesying the government of a “Scot” king after “E. is dead”
and great “alterations in religion” that will be apparent when “you see a
Spaniard a Protestant to be”.24 Whether prophets weave their messages
from the Bible or from current events, prophecy’s main piece of evidence
is language since, as this book contends, the word convinces the audi-
ence of the prophet’s authority and inspiration. The Church of Ireland
bishop Jeremy Taylor in his Discourse on the Liberty of Prophesying
(1647) defended toleration on the grounds of prophesying, since as the
holy Scripture was the “repository of divine truths and the great rule of
Faith to which all sects or Christians doe appeale for probation of their
severall opinions”, then there is a “necessity to conserve the liberty of
prophesying and interpreting scripture”.*> Interpretation of the word
and its many “tropes, metonymies, ironies and hyperboles” is a gift
of inspiration that illuminates the mind and fosters religious diversity
based on interpretation of one’s faith.
John Smith in his Select Discourses (1660) sought to differentiate bet-
ween the “true prophetical spirit and enthusiastical impostures”, the
former being the result of receiving and processing a “Revealed truth”
through the mind and the imagination, whereas the latter is a misuse of
a gift of enthusiasm or prophecy when “fancy” rules over the “rational
mind”.?° While Smith, through his abundant referencing to Maimon-
ides and Hebraic sources, acknowledges the importance of the prophet
in interpreting his message with a Scriptural commentary that can be
“useful”,~” he concedes that “the Scripture frequently accommodates
itself to vulgar apprehension, and speaks of things in the greatest way
of condescension”.2® The truth contained in the message, and not its
means of delivery, the social class or the gender of the prophet, was
the seal of prophecy for Smith. Women prophets who came into serious
conflict with institutional power often did so on the grounds of the con-
tent of their messages and not of their female sex. When such a conflict
arose, then sex was used derogatively to discredit the prophet’s message.
We find persuasive references to the suitability of prophetic speech for
women in several of the religious debates of the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury, even at the level of small-scale religious communities. Katherine
Chidley, in her impassioned justification of independent churches to
refute Thomas Edwards’ Gangraena and support toleration, vindi-
cates that the “Spirits of the prophets” must be subject to the Prophets-
particular congregations, and not as “to all in a Province or Nation,
and not to Synods”.*” But her call for spiritual independence is predi-
cated on personal conscience rather than sectarian rhetoric. Chidley
comments on the authority that God has given to husbands, fathers,
10 Introduction

and masters over wives, children, and servants, as she quotes Corinthi-
ans again to justify her claim that a non-believer husband cannot exert
his authority over a believer wife. “It is true he hath authority over her
in bodily and civill respects, but not to be a Lord over her conscience”,
since “Christ the king of kings” reigns over our consciousness.°” This
discussion famously stemmed from St Paul’s remarks in his First Epistle
to the Corinthians, where he stated that “every woman that prayeth or
prophesieth with her head uncovered disgraces her head”.?! The Pauline
injunction that women should not minister had long been an issue of
debate among defenders and detractors of women’s public speaking.°? It
was frequently invoked in the intellectually minded Querelle de Femmes
debates that had originated during the Middle Ages in several parts of
the Continent, revolving around women’s moral and intellectual equal-
ity or inferiority. The tropes of the Querelle about the worthless and
deceiving nature of women, substantiated by Biblical female types, trig-
gered controversy in Jacobean England with the publication of Joseph
Swetnam’s The Araignment of Lewd, idle, froward, and unconstant
women (1615) and its responses, notably Rachel Speght’s A Mouzell for
Melastomus (1617) and Constantia Munda’s The Worming of a Mad
Dog (1617), both deploying an assertive and scholarly informed defense
of women and their right to learning, which Jane Anger had already
anticipated in her Protection for Women (1589). Despite the argumen-
tative force of these texts, they failed to mobilize women’s energies to-
ward a growing expression of their personal and civic rights.** Texts
defending the moral status of women within a patriarchal model or
at the margins of it in the Middle Ages well into the early seventeenth
century did not bring forth significant change and have attracted less
critical attention. Next to household names such as Christine de Pizan
with her explicit moral and intellectual defence of women in The Book
of the City of Ladies (c. 1405), ‘cases’ for women could be included in
the fictions of Chaucer or Bocaccio following previous classical models
of illustrious women.>4 Or these could come as a formal retort, such as
the defence of the Lollard Walter Brut in his trial for heresy, in which
he alleged, after providing several examples of Biblical prophetesses,
that “whoever is fit to prophesy is fit to instruct, since to prophesy is to
make public”.*> Brut’s main line of argument went beyond the right of
women to prophesy as stated in the Bible. On account of Proverbs 4:3,
where mothers (or wisdom) instruct children, women were also entitled
to teach and instruct because they could prophesy. The one thousand
pages of The Monument of Matrones (1582) by the compiler Thomas
Bentley provided pious instruction for women—including prayers for
Queen Elizabeth—and a biographical dictionary of biblical women, but
the tenor of Samuel Torshell’s semi-obscure The Woman’s Glorie (1650)
was less patronizing. This Church of England clergyman from London
argued for women’s eminence and included a translation of Anna Maria
 Introduction 11
van Schurman’s letter to the French Huguenot theologian Andreas Rivet
about female education. Women’s participation in “civill or publicke of-
fices, especially in these times” was also defended by Tornshell, but he
acknowledged that this might prove problematic because many “think it
is sufficient studie for women to handle the needle”.*®
Women who assumed a prophetic role learned to go beyond the bound-
aries of religious propriety by speaking in public locations. Ecclesiastical
authorities could forbid them to talk in the established churches, but
they could not prevent them from preaching in the streets of London, in
taverns, and in other public meeting places. What preoccupied political
and religious authorities was not so much women acting as speakers,
but rather their capacity to alter public order with messages that were
inimical to mainstream governmental policy.>”
The radicalism of these writers would thus partly lie not only in the
form and content of their works but in the resolution with which some of
them labored on the material aspects of their texts, both in their own con-
gregations and outside of them. Julie Crawford, following on Margaret
Ezell’s argument that printed texts represent only a fraction of the ways
in which women participated in literary culture, has taken this concept
further proposing a definition of women’s literature in the early modern
period that includes women supporting writers and women as readers.°°
Kimberly Anne Coles views seventeenth-century prophecy as a social
and class phenomenon in which politics and religion became the subject
of popular literature. She argues that the rise in the number of women
writing brought with it a decline in the social rank of writing practi-
tioners.*’ The status of their dissent changed, too, and women could
be vocal advocates for the abolition of class and gender hierarchies, not
simply ‘promoters’ of dissent in broad and unruly terms. Cole further
notes that, while critical theory and methodology have neglected the
production of the “literate non-elite”, this same methodology has failed
to recognise the pressures of popular and polemic writing on elite cul-
ture.*° This is a valid point to make since the study of radical writing has
tended to look at prophetic texts within its own sectarian parameters,
missing broader but relevant considerations about the significance of the
prophetic genre as cultural marker beyond the new historicist concept of
‘culture as text’ and object. When the prophetic voice explains everyday
events by virtue of God’s reason, it does so by creating a narrative in
which religious and personal consciences converge in ways which both
reflect and create culture. Cole maintains that “women’s religious writ-
ings did not remain relevant beyond a particular cultural movement”,’!
although the same could be said of poetry that did not circulate beyond
its elite circle. The need to look beyond those parameters of group and
class resonates in the following pages for the sake of understanding the
influence of prophecy as a language and an activist discourse that tra-
verses social classes and religious persuasions.
12 Introduction

The display of an individual voice, however clouded by political con-

flict or religious rhetoric, was the foundation on which a woman writing
prophecy based her authority. She often conflated the spoken word, the
written text, and the printing medium as being part of the same pro-
phetic event. It is also in this aspect that prophecy blurs the boundaries
between the public and the private. In a recent study, Jason Peacey gath-
ers quantitative evidence about the tendency in the seventeenth century
to express “private business” in print, be that to promote a local interest,
an ideology, or political cause. In this “democratization of authorship’,
as he calls it, print was an increasingly important part of public life.42
People who might otherwise remain unheard, and whose “aims did not
necessarily involve entering the commercial market of print and ideas,”
found themselves in a public arena of cultural exchange and even dispu-
tation.*> The reasons for this ‘spreading out’ have usually been attributed
to the ease of censorship in 1640 and the debates generated by religious
and political turmoil. However, the latest findings of Peacey resonate
with a more precise definition of seventeenth-century prophecy—that of
a private spiritual occurrence that understands its delivery beyond the
speech act and the written word. Peacey provides data about print runs
and prices: 400 copies of a pamphlet by Thomas Grimes, at a cost of £1,
and at a rate of £1 5s per ream, would be ready within 24 hours.*4
For Nigel Smith, the transfer of printing powers from royal mono-
poly to a myriad of larger and smaller printing businesses impinged on
the relationship between a writer and his or her text, producing a “lay
religious authorship on an unprecedented scale”.4> Women’s use of the
printing press is also important for Lois Schwoerer because it positions
them in a public space outside of government that enabled women to
comment on its policies and actions as well as those of religious insti-
tutions (whether the Anglican Church or dissenting groups themselves).
Schwoerer has a point in further arguing on the limits of women’s politi-
cal participation since it was not based on the exercise of political power,
“and came in the form of petitioning or haranguing”.*°
But it is also the case that women’s active political agency—sometimes
staged in government locations—allowed them a direct involvement as
opinion-makers. At the same time, viewing authorship as a matter of
opportunity may favor an overhistoricized vision of prophecy and pre-
clude its assessment beyond a market phenomenon. It would be some-
thing like today’s equivalent to the vogue of self-publishing in commercial
digital platforms. Does direct access to getting your work published and
exposed democratize culture or does it contribute to make it even more
elitist, creating a qualitative divide between the authors who use the regu-
lar channels of printing and those who self-publish? The accessibility of
seventeenth-century printing, mostly ‘privately’ through networks of larger
and smaller radical printers, also informs the definition of seventeenth-
century prophecy as an act of private affirmation in the public arena.
 Introduction 13
The woman prophet and the religious culture
of seventeenth-century Britain
The civil wars of the 1640s, the execution of Charles I in 1649,
Cromwell’s Protectorate, and the Restoration in 1660 were all political
and historical events that articulated themselves through the language of
religion. The King was head of state but also a defender of the faith lead-
ing the Church of England by divine mandate. In his inaugural speech
of the Barebones Parliament in 1653, Oliver Cromwell quoted Daniel
and Revelation extensively, and was hailed by some members, especially
Fifth Monarchists, as the “second Moses”.*” Hilary Hinds suggested
that “it is confusing, not to say profoundly misleading, to try to separate
and compartmentalise the discourses of religion and politics; they were
one and the same”.4® The main issues at stake revolved around God’s
plan for the world: what kind of society was closest to His will? Was
it strictly hierarchical or one in which only meritocratic distinctions of
a spiritual nature mattered? The multiple factions within the political
elite, from Royalists to conservative Puritans such as Thomas Edwards
and his Gangranea (1646) to John Milton’s intellectual Republicanism,
gave an answer to these questions that was markedly different from that
of the dissenter religious groups flourishing in the middle years of the
seventeenth century.*? One of their common denominators was their
insistence that the state powers—including the monarchy—should not
have a say in ecclesiastical matters, as well as their stress on the spiritual
equality of all human beings. Some of these movements, particularly the
Fifth Monarchists, had their origins in the millenarian ideas circulating
in the 1640s predicting the second coming of Christ and the establish-
ment of the New Jerusalem on earth—specifically, in England. The work
of the biblical scholar Joseph Mede (1586-1638), and in particular his
eschatology and review of early church belief, was deeply influential in
English millenarian thought with his The Key of the Revelation (1643),
originally written in Latin.°? The millenarian zeal favored prophecy, as
well as the reading and interpreting of the scriptures as a historical guide
to understanding present and future events. It made individuals account-
able for their own individual salvation and that of the community to
which they belonged, and defended (even as a basis for political action
and regicide) a literal interpretation of the biblical prophecies of Daniel
and Revelation.°! But Protestantism was not the earliest exposure of
women to preaching and visionary discourses of social and ecclesiastical
reform. At the end of the fourteenth century in early Tudor England,
the Lollard movement gathered men and women who followed the lead
of John Wycliffe. He sought to efface distinctions between laity and
clergy, promoted Bible reading (including reduced vernacular versions
circulating in manuscript) and was not opposed to female preaching.°?
Lollards, followers of friar Girolamo Savonarola in Renaissance Italy,
14 Introduction

or Cathar and Waldensian ‘heretics’ in France, Spain, and Germany did

not shun from an active female presence in their ranks.°? The beguines,
a northern European movement that gathered laywomen and took
solemn vows outside monastic discipline, were devoted to poverty alle-
viation and preached against corruption.°* The French mystic and be-
guine Marguerite Porete (c. 1248-1310) was burnt at the stake for heresy
in Paris when she refused to recant her views on soul union with God,
which she described in her work The Mirror of Simple Souls. Similarly,
the Spanish Beatas of the early sixteenth century were active participants
in the Observant reform of religious orders outside monastic enclosure,
and despite the accounts of troubled relationships of alumbradas with
Catholic authorities for their suspected Lutheranism, women such as
Maria de Santo Domingo (c. 1485-1524), born with a prophetic gift,
were entrusted with church initiatives under the auspices of Cardinal
Cisneros for Dominican reform and observance.*°
After the Act of Uniformity of 1559, Catholics who refused to attend
the services of the Anglican Church or failed to comply with its legislation
were fined and risked losing their property. Recusant males were more
prone than women to comply, for example, by attending church services,
but women were more reluctant to do so.°° Mary Ward (1585-1645),
a nun froma family of recusants who founded the Institute of the Blessed
Virgin Mary modeled on Jesuit congregations, was chiefly concerned
with female education and evangelization. She experienced visions about
her mission and for some time faced the antagonism of Vatican officials,
who denied Ward the approval of her institute and imprisoned her for
nine weeks. Eventually, Pope Urban VIII cleared Ward of the charge of
heresy and allowed her to settle in Rome, years after houses and schools
inspired in her mission had flourished in the continent.°” After having
kept a “house” in London with the intention to make it a school, her
hopes for a Catholic turn in England definitely vanished at the end of
her life as she witnessed the events of the Civil War.°® Ward’s case is
illustrative of the ‘silent reform’ that many recusants endured in a non-
confrontational manner, being active participants in the whole narrative
of the English long Reformation in non-obstructive ways which have
been countenanced by post-revisionist examinations of English Protes-
tant history.°?
Since the beginning of the sixteenth century, women in England had
already been exposed to a religious discourse that invited them to ex-
press themselves in writing. Humanism had championed the education
of females, and although in actual practice it excluded them from formal
and higher education, it allowed women from large sections of the mid-
dle and upper classes to become familiar with the Bible and the Psalms.
Joachim de Fiore’s concept of the Bible as a historical prophetic narrative
that finds continuity through the creative abilities of poets had appealed
to Christian movements dealing with spiritual and ecclesiastical reform
 Introduction 15
since the later Middle Ages, so that poetic creativity was put to the ser-
vice of the prophetic tradition of David’s Psalms to interpret the sacred
text into “edifying ethical and spiritual precepts for the present”.©? Philip
Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert’s translation of the Psalms would thus
be an exercise in prophetic poetry that followed on a Joachimic tradition
as it recasts its own ideological space. In her survey of early modern
women’s cultures of reading, Femke Molekamp has demonstrated a con-
nection between the act of reading and writing that allowed women,
including ‘sectaries’, to use the text of scriptures to support the expres-
sion of their particular religious identities. The “cultural matrices” of
these practices could be carried out in private or in family or ideologi-
cal networks, allowing women to participate “in education, in activist
interventions in the public sphere, and in the development of literary
agency”.°! Women who conformed with Anglican practices were no ex-
ception either, as the case of Lady Pakington shows with her rewriting
of prayers for the Church of England in the early 1640s, a practice that
is still understudied and that Judith Maltby has termed “Prayer Book
Protestantism”. In her view, it would account in part for the “durable
commitment to the Prayer Book demonstrated during the 1640s and
1650s”, just before its major revision in 1662.°* Another study by Kate
Narveson follows the same track of “how readers become writers” and
emphasizes the paradoxical relation that is textually delineated when a
woman writer subordinates her voice to Scripture while establishing the
divine authority of her works.®? Kevin Sharpe qualifies a similar position
by defending that the study of reception of great narratives elucidates the
relationship of cultural and political change and “brings the history of
reading to where it belongs: at the centre of all histories, of History”,
which would explain that “disputes about the meaning of Scripture were
ideological and political disagreements”.** Prophetic writing, more than
any other mode of scriptural interpretative culture by women, produced
texts that ranged across devotional meditations to a political message
with a sense of rendering a public service.
As well as taking care of the religious upbringing of their children,
Protestant women often participated in parish meetings or conventi-
cles where passages of the Bible were discussed—a conventicle being a
small and unofficial gathering of laypeople with the aim of discussing
religious issues in an informal manner. An Alice Colins appears men-
tioned in The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe (1563) for her good
memory and because she was sent for whenever a “conventicle of men”
met at Burford, where she would recite “unto them the declaration of
the Ten Commandments, and the Epistles of Peter and James”.°° By the
beginning of the Jacobean era, the conventiclers who attended these
meetings had interiorised the Protestant notion of reading the Scrip-
ture as the safest path to individual conscience and spiritual growth.
Throughout the first half of the seventeenth century, small towns and
16 Introduction

villages often held preaching or prophesying festivals, in which one or

more preachers typically gathered in the market square and discussed
several biblical passages in such a dynamic way that they performed
one after another to the delight of their followers. Women were not
allowed to preach at these gatherings, but they made up a large part of
the public. Doreen Rosman emphasized the centrality of oral culture
in the spread of Protestant thought, specifying that, for the first and
subsequent generations of Reformed believers, “oral communication
possessed a power it has since lost, and there was reason to believe that
the pulpit was an effective agent of change”.°° Some individuals attri-
buted their conversion to Protestantism to the words of charismatic
clergymen.
The study of Scripture at home and in parish gatherings made women
more proficient in reading the sacred texts and commenting on them.
Data on late sixteenth- and early seventeenth- century education indi-
cate that female literacy was lower than that of males in all social strata.
David Cressy reckoned that nine-tenths of women were illiterate at the
time of the Civil War, compared with two-thirds of men.°” However,
the concept of “literacy” in this period did not imply a complete mas-
tery of written language: since writing was often taught separately from
reading, it was quite possible that a person could not spell his or her
name—the usual proof for written competence—but was rather fluent
in reading. For the bulk of the population, reading skills and the rudi-
ments of writing and mathematics were taught at home and in the par-
ish churches, which in turn emphasized contact with the parables and
stories in the Bible. Most cultural historians of the Reformation concur
that religion was itself gendered, and that men and women expressed it
differently through their use of language and their social habits.°° In this
regard, the practice of piety and charity epitomized the highest ideal of
the religious woman, particularly in the middle and elite classes: since
women were believed to be emotional and more susceptible to holiness,
piety was regarded as a space of virtue in which they could excel. Acts
of charity, in a strictly Protestant context, could not be pinpointed as a
key to personal salvation. Grace in both the Lutheran and Calvinist tra-
ditions ran independently from the actions of men and women. Still, the
practice of good deeds had retained its prestige since the days of Catho-
licism, and it could also be seen, from a strictly Puritan perspective, as
a sign of election in itself. As Diane Willen reminds us, “piety suggested
spiritual egalitarianism, and, despite the patriarchal nature of church
and society, it could be a source of self-expression and of influence”.
Women were expected to express their piety by looking after their child-
ren and educating them in routines of religious practice, providing for
other neighbors or the sick, engaging in acts of charity whenever possi-
ble and managing the household frugally, while leaving the rest to their
husbands’ authority.
 Introduction 17
It is possible to identify a pattern in the ordinary lives of women
prophets where traditional family roles are, simultaneously, preserved
and transgressed, especially when husband and wife share the same line
of religious fervor, and even in those cases in which that fervor is not ex-
perienced with the same intensity. Historians Patricia Crawford and Sara
Mendelson remind us that “we cannot explain female diversity by posi-
ting that women automatically aligned themselves with the views of hus-
bands, fathers, or other male family members. On the contrary, there are
numerous instances of women who felt constrained to choose between
a divided allegiance, when family loyalties pointed in one direction and
their own inner convictions in another”.’? What matters is not so much
whether women with solid religious and political convictions eventually
sacrificed either their ideas or their families. They could be both mis-
sionaries of God and wives, and enjoy a richer family life for that. They
could negotiate the public and the domestic spaces if one of them offered
resistance to the other. Or they could choose one over the other, some-
times risking their physical well-being and their status of respectability
as married women. But, even in these cases, they were entitled to choose
based on a fresh notion of their individual identity, a relational “core
self” that was “in interaction with the divine but also with the human”,”!
Prophetic writings by women endorsed by male or female editor-
printers have caught scholarly attention not so much for the fact itself—
since there were some women publishers at that time,’* and many tracts
written by men were also endorsed—but for the content and signification
of this “authentication”, which, as Teresa Feroli noted, sought to counter
cultural stereotypes that equated women’s published words with sexual
impropriety.’’ Almost invariably, the introductory texts by male editors
refer to the modesty of the endorsee, sometimes hinting at her lower
class membership (a fact that occasionally strengthens her grassroots
political message against the “tyranny” of the rich political elite), as
much as at her socially and biologically inferior condition as a woman.
While the act of endorsement reduced women to the status of dependent
individuals, it also guaranteed their being allowed to speak and appear
before the public as individuals capable of addressing a wide audience
and transforming divine statements into words. Margaret J.M. Ezell
considers that seventeenth-century prophecy provides an interesting lo-
cus of literary study because, as opposed to political pamphlets or the
genre of drama, it allows us to perceive the nature of the public sphere
as well as the “persistence of important elements of oral and handwrit-
ten culture which shaped both the form and content of the printed pro-
ducts”.”4 Thus, the zeal toward faithfully transcribing and interpreting
the words of God reveal the mental attitudes with which women related
to the printed word and their own concept of authorship.
In his study of inventories by several booksellers within 1500-1700,
Adam Fox estimated that the market for printed works had diversified
18 Introduction
notably since the sixteenth century. By choosing only two of the exam-
ples that Fox provides, we learn that in ten months during 1520 the items
on sale by the Oxford bookseller John Dorne were almost exclusively
limited to theological tracts or classical texts (and he actually sold some
1,850 items). In stark contrast, in 1644 John Awdley of Hull had a list of
nearly one thousand volumes offered for sale, which included a wide vari-
ety of pamphlets, political tracts, surreptitious copies of plays, and ‘small
books’ to cater for a wide popular readership. According to Fox, the
proliferation of printed works during the political breakdown of the mid-
seventeenth century is revealed by the surviving collection of the London
stationer, George Thomason, “which amounted to a huge assortment of
14,942 pamphlets and 7,216 newspapers by the early 1660s”.” In his
analysis of pamphlet literature, Joad Raymond considers that pamphlets
were the pre-eminent model of public speech in the seventeenth century.”°
Elaine Hobby estimated that between 300 and 400 women wrote in the
period from 1640 and 1700,’ and that over one-half of these writers
set down tracts of a religious and political nature. Historian Mary Prior
published in 1985 a checklist of 651 works divided among 293 women
authors.’® Phyllis Mack documented the existence of some 300 active
female writers in the 1640 and 1650s devoted exclusively to religious
writing.’” Many of these materials were never reproduced in print at all
or were eventually published as independent tracts, but there is clear evi-
dence that in the period between 1640 and 1660 at least SO of these
women together managed to publish over 150 treatises, an overwhelming
majority of which were devoted to religious matters.
The energy and vigor of prophetic writings tended to weaken with
the Restoration in 1660. Mendelson and Crawford argue that “women’s
exclusion from the political realm became one of the defining conditions
for normality once order had been restored”.®° This is why, in their view,
even the most meritorious female actions of the Civil War years did not
carry over into the structures of ordinary life in the Restoration period.
Several millenarian sects gradually withdrew from the public sphere, re-
ducing their activities until they died away, but this did not necessarily
mean a waste of women’s energies in writing within a congregation or
outside of it. Quakers and a few Baptist groups turned indoors and culti-
vated “epistles”, “warnings”, and “conversion narratives” for the proper
conduct of young women, which combined a prophetic urge to interpret
life events as an example of God’s plan with an increasing slant toward
establishing formal education for women.®!
Phyllis Mack in her seminal study that theorized women’s spiri-
tuality in seventeenth-century England, taking as particular object
of study the Quaker community, “pleaded for the soul as a category
of historical analysis”.°* Female mysticism in England and Europe is
well-covered territory for Medievalists and historians of antiquity,®*
and seventeenth-century prophecy shared with earlier mystics a need for
 Introduction 19
making manifest the designs of God, which often implied the articula-
tion of a new language. While acknowledging the heritage of mysticism
in seventeenth-century prophets in their zeal to become “empty vessels”
that receive the Spirit, Mack highlighted the centrality of the social mes-
sage of these prophets as well as their public authority. According to her
analysis, prophecy is both a transcendental and a social phenomenon
that forces us to go beyond dualistic conceptions of class and gender,
and places the female mystical body in a state of public scrutiny. Diane
Watt, defining female prophecy across the medieval and early modern
periods, established that mystical, visionary, and devotional texts al-
lowed women to “intervene in religious and political discourses of their
times”.®4 Hilary Hinds, through a post-structuralist Feminist perspec-
tive, makes a case for avoiding strict ahistoricism if we want to fill in the
discontinuities in the study of the category of “women”, and hence her
caveat that prophecy and “forms of women’s writing from the radical
sects cannot be understood outside the very specific contexts of their
production”.®> Susan Wiseman, scrutinizing “the ways in which we can
find women’s relationships to politics in early modern texts”,°° makes
a distinction between the political message of women writers and the
representation of their activism. She interrogates how political thought
was conceptualized or imagined by women, rather than discussing its
actual impiementation. By analyzing texts from a literary perspective,
Wiseman illuminated political issues and languages that help understand
women’s relationship with politics in terms of its referents. Mack recov-
ers the body for the Puritan female mystic-prophet, since it is flooded
by a divine essence that moves the woman towards a visionary expe-
rience. I qualify this definition by arguing a recovery of the ‘word’ as
being an intrinsic part of that body. By virtue of discovering the power
of language (the word) and communication (the public sphere), and by
defending this word against the aggression of authorities, women gained
a better sense of themselves as individuals with their own views.
These perspectives do not necessarily imply a reconsideration of
the abstract dimension of the public sphere as Jiirgen Habermas and
post-Habermasians have understood it. But they welcome a deeper ana-
lysis of the categories of public and private in line with feminist criticism
of the public space, as Ann Hughes has done in highlighting the political
repercussions of private acts of early modern petitioners and prophets,
such as Katherine Chidley, who considered attacks to the honesty of
householders as an example of the oppression of the regime.®” Nancy
Fraser, in her feminist critic of the Habermasian public space, rightly sig-
nalled its “gender-blindness” in assuming that women could enter public
discourse and raise certain issues to light when there was a systemic
distortion of women’s will and nature in seventeenth-century culture.*®
While I essentially concur with this analysis, which surely has greater
and complex theoretical repercussions in the field of critical social studies
20 Introduction

and the history of gender as an analytic category, prophetic speech war-

rants more critical attention to its capability to integrate women’s con-
cerns in its textual space: from marital abuse to patterns of freedom of
movement, decision making, personal dignity, learning, and also, direct
political participation.
My working concept of the public sphere is Habermasian in its conceptu-
alization of a locus for public debate and exposure that is participative—
even when this participation is more nominal than effective. It adds to
Hughes’ notion that women’s religious writing was influential as rhetoric
as well as a social occurrence that blurred the boundaries between pri-
vate and public, and even between men and women—since engagement
in the public arena exposes both of them to ridicule and disrepute.
Throughout this book, we shall see examples of how women prophets
managed the intensity of their messages: when the angry Lady Eleanor
Davies wrote letters to her daughter, her tone was far more subdued than
the one she assumed in her prophecies because she was able to make a
distinction between her private communications and her public textual-
ity. Ultimately, as Kevin Sharpe nicely captured, the tensions at the heart
of Protestantism concern the authority of the word and its exposition,
“between the community of the visible church and the elect, between
clerical authority and the freedom of the godly, and between conscience
and obedience”.®”
Viewing feminism as essentially a secular movement, Hilda Smith
considered that religious discourses in the seventeenth century, despite
their activism, were not likely to trigger the kind of political or ‘emanci-
patory self-consciousness’ in the mind frames of early modern women.
For Smith, the fact that prophetesses spoke very little about their situa-
tion outside of the religious ideologies and sects that were active between
1640 and 1670 invalidates any possibility of independent feminist wis-
dom, understood as a form of thought concerning itself seriously with
the social condition of women.” This might be the case if we look for
discourses about the ‘plight’ of women in these texts, but far less so if
we recognize the evolving signs of this ‘emancipatory self-consciousness’
in women’s own independent and not so scarce accounts of how they
saw and understood the world—regardless of their degree of sectarian
involvement.
Studies on ‘gendered writing’ in a variety of early modern texts have
been useful to articulate the relationship between the female body and
the construction of an authorial self when that body—physically or in
the medium of the printed message—is exposed. Most of these inter-
pretations take stock of the ways women appropriated an already existing
ee (the Bible) and created, in some cases, a double or ventriloquized
voice.”! These analyses reveal what we might call the psychology of the
writing woman. She would identify with an external factor that trig-
gers a need for self-expression while recognizing a degree of inadequacy
 Introduction 21
in the process—be this extrinsic or intrinsic to her—by virtue of being
a woman, which may in turn activate a degree of gender awareness.
Prophetic writing shares some of these tensions and negotiations in the
eclectic and even poetic lyricism of some of its messages, revealing that
most women prophets did not write from a sense of inadequacy. Rachel
Trubowitz concurs with the general notion that prophetic identity was
gendered, to such an extent that spiritual feminization was compelling
even to men who styled themselves as prophets.”” If prophecy was a gen-
dered genre enabled by the idiom and practice of religion, the study of
seventeenth-century prophecy may also allow us to see how a particular
society was feminized by religion. In this regard, women claiming the
language of prophecy perform an exercise in feminism.
Although the idea that religious fervor and participation could “libe-
rate” early modern women from stereotyped roles may seem too far-
fetched for some modern readers, a great number of specialists on
women’s writing in the Renaissance now concur that this was indeed the
case. For Erica Longfellow, the population of large numbers of women
in the public sphere for religious, political, or secular reasons is a break-
through that necessarily had an impact on the minds and lives of women.
As sincere believers for whom God was real and part of their daily lives,
women would not separate the religious message from its format, and
used “religious metaphors and considered religious questions because
they believed both language and issues to be vital”.?* Texts on female
education from the Restoration which combined a classical model of
instruction with vindictive tones, by household writers and poets such
as Batshua Makin, Mary Astell, and Mary, Lady Chudleigh would ap-
pear to be a retreat from the political engagement of the revolution-
ary days of the 1640s and 1650s. But then, promoting education is not
devoid of political significance. Katharine Gillespie has insisted on the
fact that, for those women who were active in the years of the English
Revolution, the very act of publishing and making their positions pub-
licly known involved an active intervention in politics, even if it was at
a grassroots level: “To defend and protect the innovative definition of
the individual, many women wrote texts that translated their religious
understanding of privacy, self-determination, and property-in-self into
a set of political prerogatives”.’‘ In a similar vein, Phyllis Mack has ar-
gued that the women prophets of the 1640s and 1650s enjoyed the only
taste of public authority they could possibly know at that time because
“their authority as spiritual leaders was their achievement of complete
self-transcendence, surely a very different subjective experience from
that of the modern social activist or career woman”.”> Even though this
view presupposes that most prophecies by women were ecstatic, that re-
ligious transcendence was a goal in itself and that the body was the focus
of prophetic enactment, Mack is correct in underlining the parallelisms
that emerge in some cases between prophetic utterance and forms of
22 Introduction

ecstatic mysticism, which lend themselves to a psychoanalytical model

as it has been mostly applied to French and Hispanic mystics. However,
this perspective tends to exclude forms of spiritual authority that are not
claimed on ecstatic grounds but on personal interpretation, in which the
textual body is not the locus of duplicity of divine speech but the center
of inter-textual appropriation.
Whether motivated by spiritual realization or exegesis, prophetic
texts were generally assertive and tended not to conceal the voice of
their feminine author, even in those cases where it was interwoven in
the text (or inter-text). Diane Purkiss sounds a cautionary note in this
regard and invites us to value first the literary and historical contribution
of these women as authors before we can draw any conclusions about
their gender awareness: “This [female] voice must in turn be sited in a
female agent; indeed the voice is prized less for itself than as a sign point-
ing towards such an authorial presence”.’° Whereas for Teresa Feroli,
the shaping of a political role in the work of these women, more or less
determined by personal circumstances and the demands of the group,
allows us to appreciate an early contribution to feminist awareness since
prophecy projects an authority that becomes an attribute of femininity.
Elaine Hobby suggested that later prophetic texts were in fact a conti-
nuation of the previous tradition under a renewed, adapted form, since
prophecy had a material force that could be extended into arguments
concerning personal circumstances.””
But the notion of self-awareness is problematic when the nature of
the prophetic text is fluid (triggered by events ranging from religious
and political confrontation to episodes of earthly or spiritual origin),
and not always single-authored. Roger Smith delves into the notion of
self-awareness through public expression by acknowledging that, despite
the unavoidable fact that there was a “heightened sense of the self in
the seventeenth century”,’® we cannot assume that “the discovery of the
self” took place just then. According to Smith, there are different notions
of the individual and the self in every age, and we cannot ascertain one
single origin or invention of selfhood as we understand it today. We can
only trace developments toward a greater emotional identification with
the inner life of the individual as distinct from other people and external
factors—including religious, social, and political constraints. There ex-
ists a medieval and early modern corpus of literature that discusses the
nature of the person in terms of the immortal substance of the soul and
its embodiment. In turn, Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke (with his famous
tabula rasa as a reflection of the self in the making)?? devoted consid-
erable energy to a new understanding of individuality devoid of what
Stephen Greenblatt much later termed as “Renaissance self-fashioning”,
However, none of this informs us on the degree of internalization of a
sense of self-identity and how far different types of people used a lan-
guage that represented experiences of an inner self. Jonathan Sawday
 Introduction 23
complements this view by establishing that during the intense period of
political and social unrest in mid-seventeenth-century England, a new
“ipseity” emerged as a result of a 1649 translation of the German
“icheit” or “meinheit’ as “selfhood” in a prophetic rendering of the early
seventeenth-century mystic Jacob Boehme. This “selfhood”, however,
did not suggest a modern concept of “ipseity’—the quality of having
or possessing a ‘self’. Rather it expressed the inability to govern the self:
“‘Selfhood’ was the mark of Satan; it was a token of the spiritually unre-
generate individual, in thrall to the flesh rather than the spirit”!
The social unrest of the period prompted an exaltation of individual
energies that channeled themselves through a divine cause, but, at the
same time, they could—and very often did—heighten a fresh recogni-
tion of the power of the self in relation to the ideas it espoused. For
dissenting groups in particular, “religion as living experience became
the focus of attention”,!°! so that the mere expression and exposure of
oneself with its message was a mark of identity.
Sharon Achinstein noted that the royalist metaphor of Babel used to
describe the diverse ‘babble’ of opinions in the press was a critical re-
sponse to the opening up of the public sphere and an attempt to unify
and repress all the private voices making themselves public. If this was
so, the revolutionary press would pose a danger not for its subversive
arguments but for the condition of its “linguistic diversity” that under-
mined institutional authority by reinforcing its private agency.!°* The
overall awareness of an opinion which was public and filtered through
social strata and genders is, according to Dagmar Freist, the hallmark
of an early modern public sphere.!°* However, Catharine Gray has spec-
ified the reasons for her approach to the concept of a “public space”:
first, the fact that seventeenth-century female authors, along with their
male interlocutors, often figure at the center of communities of oral,
manuscript, and print exchange; and, second, the fact that, in spite of a
seeming marginality in terms of publications and institutional presence,
women are “imaginatively central” in the great debates of the period,
and “pivotal for particular communities and for what they tell us about
changes in public life more generally”.!°4
In the two senses specified by Gray—as active participants in the cul-
ture of writing and print, and as playing a central part as objects of debate
in the cultural confrontations of the period—women prophets also legiti-
mized its exposure in the public sphere appealing to a common good that
was spiritually sanctioned. The willingness to effect collective change,
regardless of the private motivations of the promoter or her impact in
the publicum, may stimulate a public conscience about private concerns.
Religion might not be a private matter in the seventeenth century, but the
causes that religion promoted or rejected in the publicum could be.
My interest in the public sphere revolves around the ways the pub-
lic realm acted as a facilitator of women’s authority in her prophetic
24 Introduction

message and a mediator of the prophetic word, not on the stimulation

of the social category of ‘public’ per se. But Gray’s analysis is useful too
when she argues persuasively that a neat division between public and
private life would ignore the multiple interactions of these two spheres
in the biographies of seventeenth-century English women: many of them
played roles outside the home and in marketplaces, they hawked mer-
chandise or ran shops and alehouses, so that “private relations in general
were imbued with public meaning in this period—both by conserva-
tive conduct discourse and by the conflicting political communities that
flourished in the revolutionary period”.!°> Ann Hughes develops this
concept further by inverting the categories of history and gender, and ar-
gues lucidly about the centrality of gender in understanding the political
events in England in the 1640s, when female initiative was of paramount
importance to practical survival, political networking, and religious
commitment.!° These analyses invite a reconsideration of households
as enclosed spaces with no potential for political participation (other
than ‘ancillary’), whether this was recognized by third parties as being
significant or not. There is a case for writing the history of gender as
much as the gender of history.!°7
Scholars such as Gray, Zaret, and Norbrook have pointed out that it
is perfectly possible to locate the origin of the Habermasian concept of
public space in the mid-seventeenth century, specifically in the heady
context of the English Civil War. The relative independence of audi-
ences and micro-publics in the shape of radical religious groupings, the
enabling role of printing, and the circulation of printed material in the
creation of alternative forms of opinion presented new designs of public
authority for women. For Norbrook this requires the acceptance that
modern political and other liberties for women could ever have emerged
from political cultures whose traditions apparently paralyzed women’s
agency”.!98 The unfolding of the revolution, including the regicide and
the institution of a parliamentary regime, was still a far cry from full
democratic representation, but it set up new forms of participation in
common affairs that opened up areas of opinion-making and interven-
tion in politics.
Political propaganda was not a seventeenth-century novelty, though.
Henry VIII curtailed the influx of “popish books” that were printed
in London with the establishment of licensing requirements at the
hands of “his grace Privy’s Council”. In early Elizabethan times, ec-
clesiastical officials took over this task under the terms specified by
the Injunctions of Religion (1559) and the statue that allowed for the
ecclesiastical Court of High Commission.!°? In the 1530s, sixty-four
thousand copies of Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament catered
a population of 3.5 million. Some 90 editions of the Bible were pub-
lished in 1644, and inexpensive Bibles sold for two or three shillings,
which coexisted with popular lay chapbooks (with their penchant for
 Introduction 25
entertaining ‘news’ and sensational reports) sold for 2d to 3d.!!° Re-
ligious instruction for the popular class flourished in the first decades
of the seventeenth century with catechisms and spiritual advice books,
but these had not been an exclusive product of the English Reforma-
tion. Simple spiritual guides on conduct were published in the early
decades of the sixteenth century, with Richard Whitford A Work for
Householders undergoing several editions in the 1530s.!!! Sir Thomas
More’s commission to produce a book for ordinary people that con-
vinced them against reading Tyndale materialized in The Confutation
of Tyndale’s Answer (1532). The combination of controversy and com-
mercial gain was a perfect match for printers since the late fifteenth
century, and governmental and ecclesiastical control sought to regulate
the tenor of the printed matter as well as its actual circulation, espe-
cially Catholic propaganda campaigns and threats of invasions. Early
Elizabethans were eager to report on English campaigns abroad (such
as the forces sent to assist the Huguenots in France) and to stimu-
late ‘obedience’ propaganda at home to thwart any temptation of a
Catholic rebellion among the British aristocracy.'!* The 1580s were a
golden time for pamphlets, due to an increase in literacy rates, a pro-
fessionalization of the book trade, and the warm popular reception of
contracultural figures, such as the pseudonymous pamphleteer Martin
Marprelate, whose writings publicly challenged persons of authority
and criticized the “bishops and episcopacy” of the Anglican Church.!!3
By the time of the Civil War, London was already accustomed to listen
to a multiplicity of voices in print that strove to convince, manipulate,
convert, shock, and entertain.
David Zaret noted it was not simply Protestantism but its “lay ini-
tiative”!!4 that created a new form of public space, the “public sphere
of religion”, whose participants saw themselves as fully able “to form
their own judgments, to use Habermas’ terminology”.!!> Zaret under-
lined the importance of the radical religious groups in that process of
secularizing a religiously charged space by “replacing revelation with
public reason”.!!® My analysis of the prophetesses’ interactions with and
beyond their immediate audience takes this largely untrodden direction
of understanding how women handled a religious discourse with the
potential to raise awareness over concerns that were not typically or
immediately the object of religious attention.
Part I of this book, with the keyword ‘politicum’, unfolds in the
seventeenth-century politicised publicum. It examines the political ele-
ment of women’s prophetic writing, suggesting that the public ex-
posure of their texts was in itself a form and a practice of political
activism, especially when women faced confrontation and a defence of
their own positions. In the crammed atmosphere of godly polemic and
factional disputes, the prophetesses’ various appeals to the common
good transcended the blurred edges of the political and the religious
26 Introduction

to propose their own notion of justice and communal well-being.

Whether more or less radical in their opinions about regicide, Mary
Pope, Elizabeth Warren, Elizabeth Poole, and Elizabeth Avery saw
their prophetic selves challenged when the content of their messages
was out of sync with the expectations of their audience or when it was
perceived as non-prophetic, thus enhancing a sense of authorship and
authority.
Part I, with the keyword ‘protean feminisms’, is concerned with the
prophetic content of much of Puritan narratives and devotional writing
of the mid-1650s, and how the woman prophet negotiated her own con-
science with that of God. It also pays attention to the ecstatic component
of prophetic speech and how it contributed both to a greater aware-
ness of the physicality of the body and the textual space through acts
of performance and performativity. The nuanced prophetic texture of
Katherine Sutton, Jane Turner, Anna Trapnel, Anne Venn, and Elizabeth
Major, among others, reveals a psychological intensity and an interest in
processes of self-growth that outstripped the rhetoric of election narra-
tives. By discerning the transformative power of individual energies for
the self and the community, the spiritually infused woman projected a
greater awareness of a collective feminine conscience.
Part II], with the keyword ‘in-communications’, concentrates on the
expressive abilities in the construction of a radical language to con-
vey the prophetic experience. The process could involve a gradual loss
of substantive religious content toward an engagement with highly
metaphorical meanings and stylistic experimentation that reveals a
willingness to stretch the basic foundation of biblical referencing and
interpretation to seize a vision. Prophetess Lady Eleanor Davies kept a
difficult and isolationist position with her surroundings, but her pur-
ist conception of prophecy led her to visualize simultaneous actions
and times. Jane Lead and the Philadelphian movement embraced a
non-representational feminized language rooted in occult strands of
medieval mysticism whose prophetic leanings sought to explore new
relationships between revelation and reason in the early decades of the
eighteenth century. The final sections are devoted to the particulars of
how prophecy empowered seventeenth-century women to articulate an
experience of traumatic suffering, and how their particular congrega-
tion responded to it. Most Quaker prophetesses enjoyed the emotional
and infrastructural support of their spiritual community, while others
like the Independent Susanna Parr or the Baptist Anne Wentworth
faced ostracism when their prophecies sounded too personal and vin-
dictive against abuse. Such is the power of prophecy for women—the
power of the word exposed. Understanding their messages within their
specific contexts allows us a better grasp of the history of how women
have created meaning for themselves and their audiences. Let us now
hearken to their voices.
 Introduction 27
Notes
1 Mary Adams, A Warning to the Inhabitants of England and London in
Particular (s.1., s.n., 1676), 5-6.
yi pegs Morey, A True and Faithful Warning from the Lord God (s.l., s.n.,
1665), 6.
3 Anne Wentworth, A True Account of Anne Wentworths Being Cruelly,
Unjustly, and Unchristianly Dealt with by Some of Those People Called
Anabaptists (London: 1676), 1.
4 Sarah Blackborow, A Visit to the Spirit in Prison (London: printed for
Thomas Simmons, 1658), A2-5.
5 Sarah Blackborow, The Just and Equall Balance Discovered (London:
printed for M.W., 1660), 13-14.
6 See prophecies by John Robinson, The People’s Plea for the Exercise of
Prophesie (London, 1641); Lewis Rogers, Here Is Something Following
ofa Vision and a Few Words of Prophesie Concerning the Fall of Babilon
(London, 1663); Jeremiah Burroughs, An Exposition with Practical Ob-
servations Continued upon the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Chapters
of the Prophesy of Hosea (London, 1650).
7 For early anthologies that included prophetic texts, see Betty Travitski,
The Paradise of Women: Writings by Englishwomen in the Renaissance
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Moira Ferguson, First
Feminists: British Women Writers 1578-1799 (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1985); Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s
Writing 1646-1688 (London: Virago Press, 1988); for studies on proph-
ecy, see Hilary Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-century Radi-
cal Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1996); Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Proph-
ecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994); Teresa Feroli, Political Speaking Justified: Women Prophets
and the English Revolution (Newark: Delaware University Press, 2006);
Hobby, “Prophecy”, in A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing,
ed. Anita Pacheco (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 264-81; Keith
Thomas, “Women and the Civil War Sects”, Past & Present 13:4 (1958):
42-62; Ethyn Morgan Williams, “Women Preachers in the Civil War”,
The Journal of Modern History 1:4 (1929): 561-69; for prophecy in early
America, see Elizabeth Bouldin, Women Prophets and Radical Protestant-
ism in the British Atlantic World 1640-1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2015); Susan Juster, Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy
in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2006); for monographs on specific communities, see Catie Gill, Women
in the Seventeenth-century Quaker Community: A Literary Study
of Political Identities, 1650-1700 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005); Curtis
W. Freeman, A Company of Women Preachers: Baptist Prophetesses in
Seventeenth-Century England (Texas: Baylor University Press, 2011);
Rachel Adcock, Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture,
1640-1680 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).
8 Diane Purkiss, “Producing the Voice, Consuming the Body: Women Prophets
of the Seventeenth Century”, in Women, Writing, History 1640-1740, eds.
Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (London: Bratsford, 1992), 139.
9 Laura Salah Nasrallah, An Ecstasy of Folly: Prophecy and Authority in
Early Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Theological Studies, 2003), 1.
10 Jan Wojcik and Raymond-Jean Frontain, Poetic Prophecy in Western Lite-
rature (Plainsboro, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1984), 9.
28 Introduction
11 For the links between prophecy, biblical poetics, and early modern
Protestant poetry, see Barbara K. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the
Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2014 [1979]), 8; David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English
Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Joad Raymond,
Milton’s Angels: The Early Modern Imagination (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2010).
12 John Barton, “History and Rhetoric in the Prophets”, in The Bible as
Rhetoric: Studies in Biblical Persuasion and Credibility, ed. Martin
Warner (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 52.
13 St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Vol. 4, Part III (New York:
Cosimo Classics, 2013), 1889.
14 Nun Hilgard, A Strange Prophecie against Bishops (London: printed for
John Thomas, 1641), A2.
115) Margaret Fell, Women’s Speaking Justified (London, 1666), 9.
16 Michele Osherow, Biblical Women’s Voices in Early Modern England
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). See also Victoria Brownlee and Laura
Gallagher (eds.), Biblical Women in Early Modern Literary Culture,
1500-1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 25-40. For
recent studies on the paradoxes of silence and speech, see Christina Luckyj,
A Moving Retoricke: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England
(Manchester University Press, 2011), 121-25; Stevie Davies, Unbriddled
Spirits (London: The Women’s Press, 1998), 10-33; Suzanne Trill, Kate
Chedgzoy, and Melanie Osborne (eds.), Lay by Your Needles Ladies, Take
the Pen (London: Arnold, 1997), 4; Patricia Crawford, Women and Reli-
gion in England 1500-1720 (London and New York: Routledge, 1993),
21-73; Katherine Larson, Early Modern Women in Conversation (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
7 See Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century
Revolution (London: Allen Lane, 1993), 9-14; Andrew Chambers, Godly
Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England 1580-1720
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
18 Christina Berg and Phillipa Berry, “Spiritual Whoredom: An Essay on
Female Prophets in the Seventeenth Century”, in 1642: Literature and
Power in the Seventeenth Century, eds. Francis Baker et al. (Colchester:
University of Essex Press, 1981), 38.
13 Hinds, God’s Englishwomen, 10.
20 Sarah Apetrei, Women, Feminism and Religion in Early Enlightenment
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 39-40.
Ai Mack, Visionary Women, 33.
ae Tim Thornton, Prophecy, Politics and the People in Early Modern England
(Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006), 14-18.
Ms) “My Lord, said she, the time will come you will be as low as I am, and that
is a low one indeed”, addressed to the Duke of Suffolk. See Mother Shipton,
qrteee Strange Prophecies (London: printed for Francis Coles, 1641), 2.
24 Ioyralgs Sy
25 Jeremy Taylor, Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying (London: printed
for R. Royston, 1647), 82-83.
26 John Smith, Select Discourses (London: printed for J. Fletcher, 1660), 169.
Ze Smith is expounding on the principles of “Naturall Theologie”, as it is
apparent from his chapter on “The Existence and Nature of God” and his
Thomistic influence.
28 According to the OED, a seventeenth-century use of “Condescension”, now
obsolete, was “The action of descending or stooping to things unworthy”,
 Introduction 29
J.-A. Simpson and E, Weiner, eds. The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989), Vol. 3.
29 Katherine Chidley, The Justification of the Independent Churches of
Christ (London: printed for William Larnar, 1641), 13. Childley quotes 1
Cor. 14:32.
30 Ibid., 26. Chidley quotes 1 Cor. 7:12.
31 1 Corinthians 11:5.
32 See 1 Corinthians 14:34, “Let your women keep silence in the churches:
for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be
under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn anything, let
them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in
the church”.
33 For a global assessment of anti-misogynistic tracts of the 1610s—1640s,
see Katherine U. Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, Half Human-
kind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England,
1540-1640 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Mary
Prior (ed.), Women in English Society (London and New York: Routledge,
1985), 172-76; Megan Matchinske, “Channeling the Gender Debate:
Legitimation and Agency in Seventeenth-Century Tracts and Women’s
Poetry”, in The History of British Women’s Writing 1610-1690, ed.
Mihoko Suzuki (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 48-63; Barbara
K. Lewalski (ed.), The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996); Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki
(eds.), Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500-1700 (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism:
Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1990); Sarah G. Ross, The Birth of Feminism: Women as Intellect in Re-
naissance Italy and England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2009). See also Constantia Munda, The Worming of aMad Dog (London:
printed for Lavrence Hayes, 1617); Marie le Jars de Gournay, trans. and ed.
Richard Hillman and Colette Quesnel, Apology for the Woman Writing
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Rachel Speght, A Mouzell
for Melastomus (London: printed for Nicholas Ohes, 1617); Jane Anger,
Jane Anger Her Protection for Women (London: printed for Richard Jones,
1589); T. Teltroth [J. Swetnam], Araignment of Lewde, idle, froward, and
unconstant women (London: printed for Thomas Archer, 1615).
34 For studies on the literary expression of ‘cases’ for women in an English
context, see Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Lit-
erature and the Nature of Womankind 1540-1620 (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1984); Alcuin Blamires, The Case for Women in Medieval
Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999); Constance Jordan, Renaissance
Feminism: Literary Text and Political Models (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1990); Pamela Joseph Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance
Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and
Thought of Italy and England (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University
Press,91992)).
35 Alcuin Blamires, Woman Defamed and Women Defended: An Anthology
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 251.
36 Samuel Torshell, The Woman’s Glorie: A Treatise (London: printed for
John Bellamy, 1650), 40-42.
Si See Kimberly Ann Coles, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing in Early
Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Teresa
Feroli, Political Speaking Justified: Women Prophets and the English
Revolution (Newark: Delaware University Press, 2006); Hilary Hinds,
30 Introduction
Goa’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-century Radical Sectarian Writing and
Feminist Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); and
Susan Wiseman, “Exemplarity, Women and Political Rhetoric”, in Rheto-
ric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England, eds. Jennifer Richards
and Alison Thorne (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).
38 Julie Crawford, Mediatrix: Women, Politics and Literary Production in
Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3. See
also Margaret Ezell, “To Be Your Daughter in Your Pen: The Social Func-
tions of Literature in the Writings of Lady Elizabeth Brackley and Lady
Jane Cavendish”, Huntington Library Quarterly 51 (1988): 281-96.
Coles, Religion, Reform and Women’s Writing, 181.
Ibid., 182-83.
Ibid.
42 Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 12.
Peacey, Print and Public Politics, 249 passim.
Ibid.g251)
Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 23.
Lois Schwoerer, “Women’s Public Political Voice in England: 1640-1740”,
in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed.
Hilda Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 58.
47 Louise Fargo Brown, The Political Activities of the Baptists and Fifth
Monarchy Men in England During the Interregnum (London: Henry
Frowde, Oxford University Press, 1912), 67.
48 Hilary Hinds, “Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea”, in A Companion to Early
Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Anita Pacheco (Oxford: Blackwell Publish-
ers, 2002); 7
49 For a now classical study on the dynamics of power of popular forms
of politics and Puritan sects in the seventeenth century, see Christopher
Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (London: Penguin Books, 1991);
Timothy Morton and Nigel Smith (eds.), Radicalism in British Literary
Culture 1650-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Blair
Worden, God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver
Cromwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); James Holstun, Ehud’s
Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London: Verso, 2000).
50 Joseph Mede, The Key of the Revelation (London: printed by R.B., 1643).
Sil An early example are the exegetical readings of Daniel and Revelation
made by the churchman John Bale in the 1550s. Bale argued in The Im-
age of Bothe Churches that the Book of Revelation told the history of the
Protestant church opposing the corruption of Catholic powers (and also
possibly Anglican). See Bale, The Image of Bothe Churches (Antwerp:
S. Mierdman, 1545).
Bz For women’s participation in the Lollard movement, see Alcuin Blamires,
“Women and Preaching in Medieval Orthodoxy, Heresy, and Saint’s
Lives”, Viator 26 (1995): 135-52 (135-37); Claire Cross, “Great Reasoners
in Scripture: the Activities of Women Lollards 1380-1530”, in Medieval
Women, Studies in Church History, Subsidia 1, ed. Derek Baker (London:
Blackwell for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1978), 359-80; Shannon
McSheffrey, Gender and Heresy: Women and Men in Lollard Communi-
ties, 1420-1530 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).
See Fiona Somerset and Jill C. Havens (eds.), Lollards and Their Influence
in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006); Richard
 Introduction 31
Rex, The Lollards (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Margaret Aston,
Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion
(London: Hambledon Press, 1984); Robert Lutton, Lollardy and Ortho-
dox Religion in Pre-Reformation England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press,
2006); Tamar Herzig, Savonarola’s Women: Visions of Reform in Renais-
sance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
54 For recent studies on the Beguine movement, see Walter Simons, Cities
of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries,
1200-1565 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Laura
Swam, The Wisdom of the Beguines: The Forgotten Story ofa Medieval
Women’s Movement (Katonah, NY: BlueBridge, 2014); Letha Bohringer
et al. (eds.), Labels and Libels: Naming Beguines in Northern Medieval
Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014).
5S See Jodi Blinkoff, “A Spanish Prophetess and Her Patrons: The Case of
Maria de Santo Domingo”, Sixteenth Century Journal 23.1 (1992): 21-34;
Alison Weber (ed.), Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World (London
and New York: Routledge, 2016); Vicente Beltran de Heredia, Miscelanea
Beltran de Heredia, Vol. 27 (Salamanca: Biblioteca de Tedlogos Espafioles,
1972), 448-52.
56 Christopher Haigh, “The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Ref-
ormation”, in The English Reformation Revised, ed. Christopher Haigh
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 176-208; Marie
B. Rowlands, “Recusant Women 1560-1640”, in Women in English Soci-
ety 1500-1800, ed. Mary Prior (London and New York: Routledge, 1985),
112-28; Ethan H. Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Peter Davidson, “Re-
cusant Catholic Spaces in Early Modern England”, in Catholic Culture
in Early Modern England, ed. Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan et al.
(Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 19-51.
57. See M. Immolata Wetter, Mary Ward: Under the Shadow ofthe Inquisition
(Oxford: The Way Books, 2006); Henriette Peters, Mary Ward: A World in
Contemplation, trans. H. Butterworth (Herefordshire: Gracewing Fowler
Wright Books, 1995); M. G. Kirkus, “Yes, My Lord: Some Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Century Bishops and the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary”,
Recusant History 24:2 (1998): 171-92; Claire Walker, Gender and Politics
in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Coun-
tries (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002).
58 David Wallace, “Periodizing Women: Mary Ward and the Premodern
Canon”, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36:2 (2006):
428-29.
59 Patrick Collinson, The Reformation (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
2003); Frances Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and
Seventeenth-century Print Culture (Indiana: Notre Dame Press, 2005);
Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in
England 1500-1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009);
Megan Matchinske, Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 53-85; Peter Lake, The
Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics
of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (London: Continuum, 2011); David
Aers, Nigel Smith, “English Reformations”, Journal of Medieval and Early
Modern Studies 40:3 (2010): 425-38.
60 Simon, Elliott M., “Prophetic Voices: Joachim de Fiore, Moses Maimon-
ides, Philip Sidney, Mary Herbert, and the Psalms”, in Religious Diversity
a2 Introduction
and Early Modern English Texts, eds. Arthur F. Marotti and Chanita
Goodblatt (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013), 195-96. See also
Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages:
A Study in Joachimism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).
61 Femke Molekamp, Women and the Bible in Early Modern England
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 7.
62 Sharon L. Arnoult, “‘Some Improvement to Their Spiritual and Eternal
State’: Women’s Prayers in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England”,
in Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters, ed.
Julie D. Campbell and Anne R. Larsen (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 121-36;
Judith Maltby, “The Good Old Way: Prayer Book Protestantism in the
1640s and 1650s”, Studies in Church History 38 (2004): 233-S6.
63 Kate Narveson, Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 15-16.
64 Kevin Sharpe, Reading Authority and Representing Rule in Early Modern
England (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 55-57.
6S John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. Rev. Stephen Reed
Cattley (London: R.B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1837), Vol. 4, 238.
66 Doreen Rosman, The Evolution of the English Churches (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), 56-57. See also Rosman, From Catholic
to Protestant: Religion and the People in Tudor and Stuart England
(London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 49, 82; Haigh, English Refor-
mations, 274.
67 David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor
and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 121.
68 For a historical appreciation of gender and religion in seventeenth-
century England, see Elaine Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers
of the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1987); Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Reli-
gious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988); Patricia Crawford, Women and Re-
ligion in England 1500-1720 (London and New York: Routledge, 1993);
Scott Paul Gordon, The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature,
1640-1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Christopher
Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993); Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier
(eds.), Religion, Literature and Politics in Post-Reformation England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Rosemary Radford
Ruether, “Prophets and Humanists: Types of Religious Feminism in Stuart
England”, Journal of Religion 70 (1990): 133-53; Margo Todd, Refor-
mation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England
(London and New York: Routledge, 1995); Suzanne Trill, “Religion and
the Construction of Femininity”, in Women and Literature in Britain
1500-1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Merry
E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Diane Willen, “Religion and the Construction of the Feminine”, in The
Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Anita Pacheco
(London: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 22.
Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford (eds.), Women in Early Modern
England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 417.
Hinds, God’s Englishwomen, 13.
A considerable number of women ran printing businesses in collabora-
tion with their husbands, and some widows signed and managed printing
 Introduction 33
business on their own, such as the well-known radical Elizabeth Calvert,
or Hannah Allen, Martha Simmonds, and Mary Clark. See Alice Clark,
The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (Abingdon:
Frank Cass & Co, 1965), 165-66; James Raven, The Business of Books
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 335-37; John Barnard and
D.F. McKenzie, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. 4,
1557-1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 441.
73 Feroli, Political Speaking, 24.
74 Margaret J.M. Ezell, “Performance Texts: Arise Evans, Grace Carrie, and
the Interplay of Oral and Handwritten Traditions During the Print Revolu-
tion”, ELH 76:1 (2009): 49-73.
75 Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 16.
76 Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 26; For studies on politi-
cal pamphleteering in seventeenth-century England, see Marcus Nevitt,
Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England 1640-1660
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2006); Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print:
Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997); James Holstun (ed.), Pamphlet Wars:
Prose in the English Revolution (London: Frank Cass, 1992).
Tae Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1646-1688
(London: Virago Press, 1988), 26-27.
78 Mary Prior (ed.), Women in English Society, 1500-1800 (London and
New York: Routledge, 1985), 242.
79 Mack, Visionary Women, 265.
80 Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 419.
81 Batshua Makin, Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen,
in Religion, Manners, Arts &@ Tongues (London: printed by J.D., 1673),
4-6.
82 Mack, Visionary Women, 8.
83 See E.A. Petroff (ed.), Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1986); Rosalynn Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s
Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writings of Late-Medieval
Women Visionaries (York: York Medieval Press, 1999); C.M. Meale (ed.),
Women and Literature in Britain, 1150-1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993); Barry Windeatt, English Mystics of the Middle
Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Diane Watt, Secretaries of God: Late Medieval and Early Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2.
Hinds, God’s Englishwomen, 14-15.
Susan Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing and Politics in
Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3.
Ann Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution (London and New York:
Routledge, 2012), 138-39. See also Hughes, “Men, the ‘public’ and the
‘private’ in the English Revolution”, in The Politics of the Public Sphere
in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2007), 191-212. Johanna Meehan (ed.),
Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of the Discourse
(London and New York: Routledge, 2013 [1995]).
88 Nancy Fraser, The Fortunes of Feminism: From Women’s Liberation to
Identity Politics to Anti-Capitalism (London: Verso, 2013), 19-52.
89 Kevin Sharpe, Reading Authority and Representing Rule in Early Modern
England (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 5.
34 Introduction
90 Hilda Smith, Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 9.
91 See Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke, This Double Voice: Gendered
Writing in Early Modern England. (London: Macmillan Press, 2000);
Elizabeth Harvey, Ventriloquized Voice: Feminist Theory and English
Renaissance Texts (London and New York: Routledge, 1992); Jennifer
Richards and Alison Thorne, Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Mod-
ern England (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).
92 Rachel Trubowitz, “Feminizing Vision: Andrew Marvell and Female
Prophecy”, Women’s Studies 24 (1994): 15-29.
93 Erika Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 12.
94 Katharine Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century:
English Women’s Writing and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 44.
95 Phyllis Mack, “In a Female Voice: Preaching and Politics in Eighteenth
Century British Quakerism”, in Women Preachers and Prophets through
Two Millennia of Christianity, eds. Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela
J. Walker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 5.
96 Diane Purkiss, “Material Girls: The Seventeenth-Century Woman De-
bate”, in Women, Texts and Histories 1575-1760, eds. Clare Brant and
Diane Purkiss (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 71.
a7 Elaine Hobby, “Prophecy”, in A Companion to Early Modern Women’s
Writing, ed. Anita Pacheco (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 278.
98 Roger Smith, “Self-Reflection and the Self”, in Rewriting the Self: Histo-
ries from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London and
New York: Routledge, 1997), 50.
99 As suggested by Jerrold Seigel in The Idea of the Self: Thought and Ex-
perience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005).
100 Jonathan Sawday, “Self and Selfhood in the Seventeenth Century”, in
Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy
Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 30.
101 Bernard M.G. Reardon, Religious Thought in the Reformation (London:
Longman, 1981), 214.
102 Sharon Achinstein, “The Politics of Babel in the English Revolution”,
in Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution, ed. James Holstun
(London and New York: Routledge 1992), 17-18.
3 Dagmar Freist, Governed by Opinion: Politics, Religion and the Dyna-
mics of Communication in Stuart London 1637-1645 (London: Tauris
Academic Studies, 1997), 5.
Catharine Gray, Women Writers and Public Debate in Seventeenth-
Century Britain (London: Palgrave, 2007), 7-10.
Ibid., 7.
Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution, 139.
For a succinct and now classic review on enlarging traditional notions of
historical significance, see Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category
ceHistorical Analysis”, The American Historical Review 91:5 (1986):
1053-75.
David Norbrook, “Women, the Republic of Letters, and the Public Sphere
in the mid-Seventeenth Century”, Criticism 46:2 (2004):224.
109 David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the
Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2000), 142-43.
 Introduction 35
110 Data from S.H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing (Delaware: Oak
Knoll Press, 1996), 167-69.
111 Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, 157; see also Margaret Spufford,
Small Books and Pleasant Histories (London: Methuen & Co., 1981),
194-218.
112 Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, 12-14.
113 See Martin Marprelate, Hay any worke for Cooper: or a brief epistle di-
rected by waye of an hublication to the reverende byshopps counselling
them (Coventry: by Robert Waldegrave, 1589).
114 David Zaret, “Religion, Science, and Printing in the Public Spheres in
Seventeenth-Century England”, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed.
Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 213.
115 Ibid., 223.
116 Ibid., 224.
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Part I

Politicum
 1 Prophetic politics and
revolutionary spirit

Early Modernists have long noted the intersections of prophecy and

politics in seventeenth-century Britain, even though the definition of
what is ‘political’ in prophecy and the extent to which its agency legiti-
mized women as active political subjects has been difficult to elucidate.
One point of contention is whether to count women prophets as full
political subjects beyond their sectarian activities when no effective or
lasting political change was achieved. This approach reveals a finalist
conception of politics that does not always correspond with the dyna-
mics of social and political change, both for men and for women. It also
tends to disregard religion as a transformative force outside the domains
of personal belief and conscience. Hilda Smith reinstated women as
political subjects in the seventeenth century since they had a “real pres-
ence in political and economic structure” (albeit, as we have seen in
the Introduction, not necessarily a full ‘feminist’ conscience), and traced
the road map from political existence to awareness, participation, and
finally, political tenure.!
Susan Wiseman and Katharine Gillespie have provided insightful
analyses of what was political for seventeenth-century women, including
prophetesses, which take the representation of gender into full account
while seeking to disentangle the politics of gender from influence in state
matters. Gillespie, in particular, associates revolutionary and dissenting
writing with the unfolding of liberal political principles of toleration,
separation of church from state and individualism,” as a response to the
classic and influential work by Carole Pateman in which the implicit sub-
ordination to men (or sexual contract) was a requirement for a successful
social contract.* For Danielle Clarke, Teresa Feroli, and Shannon Miller,
women’s political legitimacy cannot be dissociated from gender politics
when narratives of the Fall were often used to articulate theories on
government authority.*
Mihoko Suzuki places women’s political participation and the “sym-
bolic deployment of gender” as part of the larger discourse of the “subal-
tern” (as Antonio Gramsci formulated it) that includes also men.° In their
overview study of women’s political thought in Europe, Karen Green and
Jacqueline Broad have found that many early modern women entered
40 Politicum

into the political discourse of their times aware of their gender as being
in an inferior position in relation to men, but that this awareness “influ-
enced their political thinking such as they recognized the implications of
their theories as a social group”.° Often, the writings of women who ver-
balized their political stance through the prophetic idiom went precisely
in this direction of shaping a positive collective awareness that included
gender. Catherine Gray and Ann Hughes have approached politics and
gender from a perspective that blurs or even inverts the notions of private
and public, since private conduct impinged on the legitimation to public
life.’ Erica Longfellow calls into question the assumptions that ‘public’
writing correlated with the structures of political power and that ‘private’
writing was less valuable because it did not enjoy widespread impact.®
Apart from examining the imbrication of religion in women’s experi-
ences of authorship, the following case studies also explore the nature of
women’s political participation in seventeenth-century culture beyond
their status as individuals whose private life (marriage, legal status, ac-
cess to education) needed to be regulated by the state. I suggest that the
prophetesses’ exposure of their textual production was a form of acti-
vism, especially when it involved an open defense of their ideas, when
women were challenged on those ideas, or when these articulated a vision
on behalf of the common good. Seeking a reaction from an audience, or
responding to the audience’s resistance to the prophet’s message, shows a
degree of conscious public intervention beyond the mandate to prophesy.
Prophetic writing, whether more or less openly millenarian in its persua-
sion, was also an attempt to regenerate the state through a divine code
of ethics that sought to find a correspondence in matters of public life
and political organization for the benefit of all (or all the elect). In this
sense, most prophetic texts seek to be interventionist. Katherine Romack
observes that the large-scale dissemination of print was conducive to
a “radical transformation of the conceptual means through which the
rights and obligations of individual ‘male’ subjects were envisioned”, and
that women were obviously not immune to these conceptual changes.
What remains to be fully addressed are, in Romack’s words, “the con-
tributions of women to the print debate over political representation”.”
These compelling studies ward off any anachronisms in our approach
to the value and the mode of women’s written production, and force us to
reconsider how early modern texts interacted among themselves, rather
than with our contemporary notions of politics, religion, or patriarchy.
My analysis looks into the ways prophecy permeated seventeenth-century
society through its mandate of projecting private spiritual experience
toward public life, and the manner in which these discourses secularized
a religiously charged publicum. It shares with David Wooton his ob-
servation that Locke’s argument for sovereign individualism was based
on a divinely ordained moral law,!° and explores the manners in which
the principles of voluntary association in church matters facilitated
 Prophetic politics and revolutionary spirit 41
free political association, often against or outside state control, and of-
ten, as Jurgen Habermas remarked, as the result of “the movement for
a so-called freedom of religion which historically has secured the first
sphere of private autonomy”.!! Since prophecy sought public exposure,
it often legitimized its public function by appealing to a common good.
This Part I is concerned with the agency of women’s prophecy in mat-
ters of political participation, as seen in writings that show an awareness
of the common good beyond an abstract religious ideal. It acknowledges
the political nature of most prophetic writing, in line with Kevin Sharpe’s
view that religion was not just about doctrine, “but a language, an aes-
thetic, a structuring of meaning, an identity, a politics”.!* Keith Thomas
was among the first to suggest that women were essential partners to
nonconformity, since the spiritual equality and authority that sectarian
groups offered was attractive to them as well as to men who lacked ac-
cess to higher education.!? Subsequent analyses of gender and politics
have taken multiple directions in explicating the ways in which prophecy
helped women overcome the constraints of entrenched patriarchal mo-
res, especially within their own groups. The following pages take the
less trodden route of exploring how prophecy informs us about women’s
active representation in state politics, its particular form of intervention,
and the double bind of sexual politics in prophecy. In particular, it ex-
amines how women’s freedom of conscience, that both included and also
extended beyond religious belief, did not prevent male figures of sectar-
ian authority from making an instrumental use of the woman prophet
for political ends, as it did not prevent women from exerting their influ-
ence in normalizing the written expression and the action (personal or
civic) of the dictates of their conscience.
The reasons for an apparent lack of women’s leverage in political mat-
ters has been variously explained, for example, as the patriarchal glass
ceiling of Locke’s contract theory or the resistance to populism of the
privileged class that equated prophecy with disorder and egalitarian-
ism, even though the economic status, the educational background, and
the religious-political affinities of women who prophesied were fairly
diverse.!4 Individual case studies on what is political in the woman
prophet focus on her authority as a conveyor of meaning both inside and
outside their congregation, while paying less attention to the kind of re-
sponse her message elicited. In her analysis of how seventeenth-century
women advanced in their participation in public life, Catharine Gray has
stressed the role of private affiliation as “grounding” the public identity
of these women, and this is largely the direction that critics have taken in
the assessment of the main motivations of women who ‘went public’.!°
Susan Wiseman states that women’s participation and prophecy are
also connected as part of a greater movement of female emancipation.
She asks whether scholars should view these case studies as “presaging”
a development toward a modern notion of feminism, or rather, statically
42 Politicum

on their own so as to make sense of these events within their own cul-
tural and social framework. Wiseman suggests that both approaches
present pitfalls when gender tends to be the ultimate end “or part of a te-
leology”,!® even though looking at seventeenth-century women’s proph-
ecy as an epiphenomenon may be helpful to understand the confluence
of two phenomena that occur simultaneously in a causal relationship,
namely, the fact that prophecy could enable women’s awareness in ways
that will perhaps remain obscure to the literary historian, while moving
toward an articulation of gender and public participation that we can
conceptualize as being modern.
Women prophets who spoke beyond their congregations were consis-
tent with the prophetic mandate of intervening in communal affairs, and
so public intervention would not be a ‘space to conquer’ but rather the
natural locus of prophetic delivery. The importance of these interven-
tions should not be underestimated: regardless of the positive or negative
response to their messages, women prophets were allowed to participate
in the creation of public opinion and articulate points of view that were
not directly controlled or harnessed by the state.
My suggested approach is to look at both authority and reception to
ascertain the nature of the political influence of women prophets. As
we shall see, an indifferent or negative reception to the prophesying of
a woman might not diminish her political hand. It may delegitimize the
transcendence of prophecy as a spiritual message when its content does
not conform to particular interests, a line of thinking that might induce
us to regard prophecy as a rhetorical exercise, a mode of speech, or as
literary genre. The fact that prophecy is or claims to be divinely inspired
does not necessarily mean it is irresistible, since the audience may deny
both the message and its messenger. A backlash often revealed the fear of
accepting the possibility that the prophetic message might have the ring
of truth, a suspicion that could erode the spiritual purport of prophecy
but not the material content of the prophetic message.
The women featured in Part I, Elizabeth Avery, Elizabeth Warren,
Elizabeth Poole, and Mary Pope, among others, furnished a prophetic
content that was directed toward a politicized audience or intended to
effect political change based on a spiritualized notion of “the common
good”. While they were generally aware of their inferior position as po-
litical subjects, their texts and responses were assured and positively
connoted about their own sex, both individually and as a group. The
possibility that women acted on their own accord or were invited, per-
suaded, or even manipulated to prophesy, as might have been the case
with Elizabeth Poole, does not detract from the fact that they owned
their discourse and that their messages elicited a response. It was a form
of activism because social or political regeneration, and not religious
conversion, was the primary concern of prophetesses. Their suggested
course of action legitimized itself through speech and text by unfolding
the sacred rationale of ‘truths’ hiding behind current affairs.
 Prophetic politics and revolutionary
spirit 43
Notes
1 Hilda Smith (ed.), Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political
Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
2 Katherine Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Susan Wiseman, Conspiracy
and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
3 Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).
4 Danielle Clarke, The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing (London
and New York: Routledge, 2001); Teresa Feroli, Political Speaking Justi-
fied: Women Prophets and the English Revolution (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 2006); Shannon Miller, Engendering the Fall: John Milton
and Seventeenth-Century Women Writers (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
5 Mihoko Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation and
Literary Form in England, 1588-1688 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2003), 8. For
literary representations of the subordinate subject, see Sharon Achinstein,
Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2008).
6 Jacqueline Broad and Karen Green, A History of Women’s Political Thought
in Europe, 1400-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), ix.
7 Catherine Gray, Women Writers and Public Debate in Seventeenth-Century
Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Ann Hughes, Gender
and the English Revolution (London and New York: Routledge, 2012);
Megan Matchinske, Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
8 Erika Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 11.
9 Katherine Romack, “Monstruous Births and the Body Politic”, in Debating
Gender in Early Modern England 1500-1700, ed. Cristina Malcomson and
Mihoko Suzuki (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 210.
10 David Wootton (ed.), “Introduction”, in Divine Right and Democracy
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986).
11 Jiirgen Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere”, in Habermas
and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1992), 422-61.
12 Kevin Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 12.
13 Keith Thomas, “Women and Civil War Sects”, Past & Present 13:4 (1958):
42-62.
14 Gillespie, Domesticity, 118-20; Hughes, Gender and the English Revo-
lution, 144-50; Matchinske, Writing, Gender and State, 22-34; Lois
Schwoerer, “Women’s Public Political Voice in England: 1640-1740”,
in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed.
Hilda Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 56-74; Susan
Wiseman, “Exemplarity, Women and Political Rhetoric”, in Rhetoric,
Women and Politics in Early Modern England, eds. Jennifer Richards and
Alison Thorne (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 144-46.
15 Gray, Women Writers and Public Debate, 25.
16 Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue, 172.
2 Women’s prophetic ministry

The prophet Elizabeth Avery (fl. 1614-1653) came from a family

background of non-conformity and millenarian ideals. Her father,
Robert Parker, was a vicar of Wiltshire who fled to Amsterdam after
having denounced religious ceremonies and supported the autonomy of
congregations, while her brother Thomas was pastor in New England.
In the spiritual testimony that she provided in Obel for the Fifth
Monarchist John Rogers while he was in Ireland, entitled “an experience
of Elizabeth Avery”, she records that from the age of sixteen she had
“an entire love to the preaching of the Gospel”. She suffered a personal
crisis, where she was “brought out of Egypt into the wilderness” as a
result of losing her three children, underwent several trances where God
appeared to her after deep prayer, and went to Oxford where she “heard
the disputes between Master Kiffith and others, very hot, but saw noth-
ing of God there”.! She was so distressed after the “passion” of the epi-
sode that she retired in a Gethsemane fashion to “bewail in a garden”
not caring for what became of her until God came in upon her spirit and
gave her full assurance of her salvation.? Her only known printed tract,
Scripture-prophecies opened (1647), is an epistolary account of her mil-
lenarian vision through the assumption of a prophetic voice that dis-
closes doctrinal secrets before the impending second coming of Christ.
The Fifth Monarchist slant toward apocalyptic biblical interpretation,
drawn from the Revelation and Daniel, allowed for highly politicized
texts that were in tune with the origins of the congregation. Its founder,
the preacher John Simpson (1614-1662) of the gathered congregation of
All Hallows-the-Great, had promoted lay preaching by soldiers when
these were inspired by the spirit. Gathered churches provided support
to Major-General Thomas Harrison to fight against Charles II at the
Battle of Worcester, even though Simpson was distrustful of Cromwell.?
Fifth Monarchists believed that the chosen ‘saints’ (a synonym for the
Puritan ‘elect’) were meant to rule over the non-elect, while the old cor-
rupted Babylon would give way to a New Jerusalem. There were fewer
women who prophesied under the umbrella of Fifth Monarchism than
in Quaker or Baptist congregations, even though dreams and visions
were accepted as part of the group dynamics and as a gift of inspiration
 Women’s prophetic ministry 45
to interpret Scripture. Their tracts conveyed a sense of national history
as much as of personal analysis geared to assert the salvation of the self
and the community before the establishment of the kingdom of Christ.
A basic textual structure and set of metaphors were recurrent in Fifth
Monarchist prophecies despite individual traits: allusions to the four
preceding monarchies, the salvation of the soul, the fall of Babylon, and
the establishment of a new saintly monarchy. Jason Peacey has acknow-
ledged the difficulty of determining the circulation of ‘private texts’,
either published ‘for the author’ or for well-known printers such as Giles
Calvert, which would then be freely but not indiscriminately distributed
at strategic locations in the city on account of their public service.4 The
sense of prophesying for a greater audience was, as we shall see, a deter-
mining factor in the production of Fifth Monarchist prophecy by women
since this reinforced their perception of political urgency in the promo-
tion of the common good.
Even though Elizabeth Avery’s three letters were intended for “some
particular Christians”, she presented her message “to the view of all”
since she did not “dare to conceal it in oblivion”. She was addressing a
generalist audience, a “good Reader”, and claimed not to be afraid of
prison or ridicule, “though I may be counted mad to the world”.> These
allusions might be exaggerated but were not entirely rhetorical. In her
first letter, Avery opened the “mystery of the state and fall of Babylon”
in which “Babylon is not onely the Church of Rome” for reasons that are
“well known to all”, but “Babylon does more mystically appear to be in
this present State and Church of England”. The country and Church of
England made “but one beast”, but she objected to the image of Daniel
2.34 in which the state was the feet of the beast. She preferred to ex-
pound on the glorious past of Britain which, as with the Babylon of Jer.
51.7, had been the golden cup in the Lord’s hand that made the earth
drunk and slain, “not with a temporal sword but slain in a spiritual
sense” since the state has been “led in Errour” with corruption.® In her
second letter, Avery elaborated on the nature of the dissolution of the
heavens and the earth on the last day before the coming of Christ. She
did so for the purpose of communicating this spiritual truth, with God’s
assistance, “for the benefit of others”, even though such an assistance
did not materialize in the form of a vision or a dream. Her method
consisted in showing “how far I can joyn with them and where I dif-
fer”, rather than refuting by force of argument. She quoted 2 Pet. 3:12
with regard to the dissolution of heavens being on fire and the melting
of the elements, in a manner that did not produce any alterations: “As
when we say the Parliament is dissolved, the men continue the same,
onely it ceaseth to be a body Politick”.’ So the ‘body politic’ is a form
of political organization that may assume different shapes while leav-
ing the human nature of its members intact. Likewise, when the bodily
heaven is dissolved, the godly manifest its spiritual matter within them,
46 Politicum

in the form of wisdom, “humane learnings”, and spiritual gifts to speak

onto edification. Honest political praxis has more to do with its spiri-
tual essence than with establishing forms or ordinances. Avery’s assured
style and theology went beyond a straight paraphrase and repetition of
biblical readings, since there was a willingness to establish her own in-
formed opinion about salvation that involved an understanding of cur-
rent debates at the core of particular Baptism and Fifth Monarchism and
its politicized factions, of which the Levellers were a prominent party.
Avery qualified the apostle Peter in saying that “to be dead with Christ”
meant “dead unto the Ordinances”, and that “to be risen with him is
to live in God”. Her third letter, concerned with the resurrection of the
death, followed the same line of presenting herself as an interpreter of
God’s word, who calls her forth to “heark what he shall say” so as to
communicate it “before I can conceive it myself”.® Avery followed on
the tradition of biblical commentary, in this case of John 2:17 when
Jesus spoke of the resurrection of the temple of his body. She deployed a
discursive style that resembled the millenarian John Mede’s The Key of
the Revelation (1643) or the anonymous The Great Mysterie of God...
Whereby comparing Scripture with acts of Divine Providence (1645)
in their depiction of the saints and the resurrection of the church of
Christ, his mystical body, when the godly were “with child” of “civill
government” by which Jesus and the saints were to rule all nations with
a rod of iron.’ The prophetess Elizabeth Warren, far more contained
in her millenarian arguments and still keeping herself within borders
of Anglican theology, pointed at the confusion of those who “climb to
heaven by residing in the palaces of princes” or “feed on the froth of
fanaticall illusions”, refuting any dreams of “temporall kingdome” when
Christ reigns in heaven and on earth.!? In A Warning Peece (1649) she
presents several examples throughout history of the wrath of God as it
occurs when He sends “the mortall darts of divine displeasure” against
his enemies or as it has been manifested in times of moral corruption.
When “the wrath of God is thus revealed from heaven” through the
“malice” of monarchs such as “haughty Antiochus” or “Adonibezek”,
subjects don’t have to indulge in the same errors.
Warren used this argument to justify the “person and honour of the
king”, which was promised by oath to be kept “inviolably with the privi-
leges of Parliament and fundamentall Laws, preserving the Libertyes of
free-borne people”.!!-Her unusual, near Erastian stance on kings who
are the instruments, the recipients and almost the thermometers of God’s
satisfaction with the world of humans placed the true Christian and
political subject at the hands of the King, regulated but not usurped by
Parliament. The natural order of Protestant kingship, for Warren, is not
or should not be authoritarian or polluted by the meddling of earthy
‘popery’ powers that distort the filiation between God, the King and his
‘wife’. Popery is as obnoxious for divine order as civil unrest. Being our
 Women’s prophetic ministry 47

WARNINGPEECE
fromH ® av zw, againft theSins
_ of the Times, inciting us to fy
from theVengeance tocome,
a < ¥ oO R, ES

— CMournfull Meditations of revealed

Wrath, appearing in the Progref[e
ofour Sins and Sorrows.
Whar baye I now done, is there not acaufe ?

TLABETH Warren.
gy oe
(ae ONDON, |
Printed byRi cua p. ConsTaBte
8 for Henry Shepbeara, at the Sign of the
| «Bible om Tower hill. 16 ae

Figure 2.1 Frontispiece. Elizabeth Warren, A Warning-Peece from Heaven,

against the Sins of the Times, 1649. The British Library, E.581[5]
© The British Library Board.

souls sensible and having violated “every promise that clameth our
Impiety”, some have been “smeared” with the “olium of papal hierarchy”
and see themselves as dispensed of the “oath of Allegiance” and “make
such regicides now stiled meritorious”.!* Time is running out for them,
since God will soon express His indignation on to them. Her argument
of what constitutes a graceful social behaviour lies in the fact that
“the civil property of distinguished societies is bound up in the law
48 Politicum

either humane or divine, the legall constitutions of positive precepts be-

ing originally founded on maxims of morality”. Thus Warren is not jus-
tifying tyranny or authoritarian rule, but a whole theology of kingship
in which the morality of the law acts as it is the only civil instrument of
society to oppose any abuse. But God is always meant to be a mystery
since “no man can, in this state of mortality, describe the perfect purity
of God’s divine attributes”.!° In The Old and Good Way Vindicated in
a Treatesie, Warren engaged in a lengthy explanation of the errors of
judgement of those times, which she attributed to our lack of under-
standing of the fact that our ministers are no longer like Moses or Aaron,
who “were graced with miracles to confirm their message from God to
his people”. Present ministers, Warren held, “unfold the mysterie that
God manifested in the flesh with more perspicuitie”, inviting “the
saints to the [marriage] supper of the lamb” (Rev. 19:6) and using words
that are closer to people. Warren launched a sober defense, with Latin
marginalia, of preaching and wise ministry as the solution to the many
confusions in church and state in the present times, promoting a combi-
nation of prophetic gift and exegesis. The fact that a woman should ad-
vise on matters of preaching and ministry was rare, and on account of
this oddity she was recommended by the imprimatur James Cranford,
who wrote: “having perused (not without admiration) this short, but
reasonable treatise, | could not but see fulfilled that of the Psalmist and
that of the prophet”, whereas T.C. also recommended Warren’s “neces-
sary and profitable essay” to the reader “against the new errours of these
times, by this rare and precious Gentlewoman, the envie and glorie of
her sex”.!° Warren’s prophetic style urged her to convey a sense of imme-
diacy for the benefit of the nation, but her tone and her authorial pres-
ence were not subdued in an arid succession of commentary. She is
present in the pronoun “I” that often appears in the text as well as in her
assured scholarship. Her prophetic personality and her careful style
seem to be closer to sermon and exegesis than revelation and perfor-
mance, and the fact that she did not write on the spur of the moment
could indicate that both Avery and Warren took care for producing a
coherent message for an audience that they deemed universal. Their
writings went beyond the presentation of a political scheme and invited
political action or at least an informed opinion on the cause of contem-
porary maladies. Spiritual Thrift, published in 1647, set forth the virtues
of living in Christian humility, which Warren presented as a unifying
ethical force of all Christian factions. It reads as a treatise about how to
conduct ourselves in a responsible lifestyle that may generate prosperity
and well-being for those who not only read the Bible, but understand it
fully and abide by its precepts. Warren becomes an interpreter of the set
of values that the Bible presents for the benefit of society: her text does
not rely on preaching in an admonitory tone, but on a personalized voice
in which Warren’s scholarship and glosses justify her view and
 Women’s prophetic ministry 49
recommendations about a wholesome work ethic. Values such as charity
toward the poor are essential in Warren’s argumentation, but she pro-
vides her explanation of the causes of this poverty in a discussion that
assumes the dynamics of an essay on political economy. For Warren,
there are people who become poor due to an adversity that escapes their
control. But many others find themselves in dire straits because they
have failed to plan ahead or have not employed themselves wisely. Thus,
humility goes beyond a pastoral duty and a show of piety. “Let us then
by labour improve opportunities, tendred unto us by a hand of provi-
dence, prizing and valuing the meanest of the creatures as much tran-
scending what we can merit, that every surplus of our plentiful saciety,
may be an ingagement to dutiful obedience and our daily enjoyment of
these present favours, a firme obligation to divine bounty”.!® Personal
conduct impinges on national fate, too, as Warren concludes after listing
the sins of England: “Hath it then been our care to collect such precepts,
as the Word holds out for our ample direction, pouring forth our soules
to satisfie the hungry, and drawing out our store to relieve the afflicted?
Have we contributed to them?”!” Warren further blames the “riotous
intemperance of England” that has been the cause of a civil war, but her
peace-making discourse finds some room to accommodate discussions
about the right use of cures and medicines that emerge as a result of
understanding the work of God in nature. Even creatures with a short
life span, like “emmets” [ants], act as a reminder of our mortal condi-
tion, and we “have no need of Egyptian hierogliphicks to informe our
judgements in such necessary knowledge”, since those who study the
occult qualities of nature know that divine providence has spared
England of dangerous beasts (‘beares, panthers’) and favored laborious
animals such as oxen.!® Then Warren interrupts her explanation about
the chain of being to insist on the fact that rational understanding of the
causes of nature is a sort of spiritual endowment that should be used for
the instruction of others to “build up ourselves in the faith and know-
ledge of our Lord and Saviour” with the purpose to “be united to the
mystical body”.!? The prophetic character of Warren’s meditations was
based on a divinely inspired interpretation of the works and ways of God
leading to a personal ethical commentary with the purpose of fostering
collective interest in both earthy and divine matters. The millenarian
impulse of Warren’s sermonic prophecy is subdued but nevertheless pres-
ent in the impending need to effect reforms on the personal, communal,
and political state of the English nation. Her writing is assured, despite
the occasional rhetorical references to female’s modesty. It does not in-
flect, though, into a preaching, warning, or reflecting tone about man’s
existence, the preferred theme of any meditation on ‘ars moriend?’ which
Alice Sutcliffe employed in her Meditations on Man’s Mortality (1634),
where her essay on good living as preparation for death also relied on a
mild warning tone and biblical referencing as it was the case with other
50. Politicum
texts of this genre.*? A noticeable feature in women’s prophecy that
leans on typology rather than direct revelation is the abundant referenc-
ing to biblical sources, either as marginal annotation or parenthetical
notes. This heavy imbrication in the biblical text attests to the tradition
of women’s intensive practice of Bible reading since the second half of
the sixteenth century. Andrew Chambers has noted that “reading lends
itself to a model of early modern religion in which ‘belief’ was primarily
socially constructed and maintained”,*! challenging the common as-
sumption that the Reformation implied only an interiorized mode of
biblical reading that, as the texts by Warren and Avery show, are not
restricted to sectarian examples of Puritan writing. Femke Molekamp
traces the roots of seventeenth-century prophecy “in an earlier period
when the new availability of an accessible, affordable Bible in English
enabled women to participate in and shape specific Bible-reading cul-
tures”.?* But the combination of a tradition of deep biblical reading that
took place within a closet or congregation, and its external manifesta-
tion as prophetic display in speech or writing, often secularized the reli-
gious public space rather than spiritualized a pre-figured and commonly
assumed lay publicum. When matters of general interest, such as the
form of government or economic theory, were grounded in a religious
key and the understanding that earthly considerations stemmed from a
spiritual cause, biblical prophecy would assimilate any discourse on the
public good. Prophetic speech by women, who owned the word and the
mandate to prophesy but not the mundane authority to hold executive
office in religion, politics, or public professional life, offered a sense of a
shared destiny that could create friction between different religious per-
suasions, while at the same time normalizing religion as being the cata-
lyst of collective welfare. Women prophets did not always strive to
convert non-believers, they sought to show that their spiritually based
notion of the world held the truth and the key to a shared well-being.
Another firm stance about the legitimacy of preserving the King’s life,
while being critical of the monarch’s abuses, is expressed by Mary Pope
(d. 1653?). She belonged to the Erastian congregation of Thomas Coleman
and was the wife of a prominent member of London Salters’ Company.??
Coleman was a Hebraic scholar and a member of the Westminster
Assembly, a group of theologians and members of Parliament with the
mandate to restructure the Church of England (from 1643 to 1653). While
Pope was recovering from illness and the death of several of her children,
she produced three tracts, A Treatise of Magistracy (1647); Behold, Here
is a Word (1648); and the sequel of Behold entitled, Heare, Heare, Heare,
Heare, a Word or Message from Heaven (1648).
Pope began writing A Treatise with the purpose of submitting it to
Parliament when she found that “God was over-powering my spirit, as
it were forcing of me on, for the improvements of those tallents he hath
given me for his glory, and serving of my generation”. Her ambitious aim
 Women’s prophetic ministry 51
was to settle the instability of her times, but she had to overcome several
obstacles and writer’s blocks, even though the actual writing was appar-
ently carried out by a mediator, “my child (a youth) the writer”. It took
her three years to complete her project. She had planned to submit her
“petition” to Parliament in its earlier form and without an “Epistle dedi-
catory”. Then she found unspecified “extraordinary incomes in a special
manner from the mediate spirit of God”, which moved her with words
“from Saint John’s Revelations that “I found to be sweet in my mouth
but bitter in my belly”.24 The turmoil of public life affected her and she
suffered an “extraordinary change in my own family”, probably the death
of her husband. However, God enabled her to recollect her thoughts
while she waited and tried to join other like-minded parties. Her heart
could not “comply or joyne with any party, I meane with Independent or
Presbyterian” in the government of the Church. She further noted that
Presbyterians expressed their minds clearly, whereas with the “Indepen-
dents I could not tell what their minds were”.?° She added that both groups
held forth that the “Magistrate was not the chiefe Officer in the Church
jure divino” or that he had any governmental office. Pope could not agree
with this and aimed to set the “Church or Commonwealth” into order.
She knew the church was in disarray because otherwise it would follow
God’s way. When she learned that the “king was brought to Holmby”, the
mansion in which Charles I had been imprisoned between February and
June 1647, she further convinced herself of the importance of her peti-
tion since the King was the “person assigned out by God to be the cheife
Governour in and over the church”. She decided to add a twelve-page let-
ter to Charles I urging him to return to his throne on account of his divine
mandate. And to those who might be tempted to say that Pope’s writings
were non-sensical, she had an answer at hand: “If they would study the
Scripture as I doe, they shall find them very good sense”.*®
Pope’s prophetic mandate derives from her perception of the spirit and
her biblical study. On the basis of her own intellectual understanding of
God’s ways, she preaches to the figures of political authority that they
should abide by natural order. However, these ‘high persons’ were not
amenable to her call when she finally delivered her tract on 6 January
1647. The Commons arrested her on the grounds that Pope’s manuscript
had given Parliament “much discontent”.’ The rejection did not prevent
her from publishing her two other tracts that she writes (or dictates) in
response to the Leveller’s Foundation ofthe People’s Freedomes together
with “A message to all covenant-breakers, whom God hates”. Also in the
title page, Pope urged them to “read this book immediately and observe
what God would have you to do, and do it”. It should not have come
as a surprise that her writings, overtly against the regicide, were not
welcome. Referring explicitly to her previous troubles, she mentioned
in Behold that since 1647 she had ‘laine among the pots, under disgrace,
because of my book of Magistracy’.”*
52 Politicum

Pope alerted members of Parliament to the perils of believing that in-

dividuals’ opinion could supersede the King’s divine authority, probably
without realizing that she was placing herself in a position of divine au-
thority by claiming to be an interpreter of God’s word. While most politi-
cal factions were attempting to find legal and divine grounds on which
to justify a regicide, Pope produced her interpretation of the Scripture to
argue the contrary. She grounded her truth (not her opinions, which are
always biased) on prophetic inspiration, while the Parliament could not
do so. The members of Parliament were perfectly entitled, however, to
refuse to hear her prophetic speech. Pope, as a woman prophet, might
‘own’ the word, but parliamentarians held office and power. Despite
Pope’s inability to change the course of regicide through her divinely
inspired political arguments, she was nonetheless taking an active stance
about her right to pronounce herself over matters of state and seek public
change. Her tone in the second and third tracts sounded threatening as
if Pope herself had become an instrument of God’s wrath, and accused
the Parliament of having “set forth a Magna Carta which is to kill your
Lord and King”.*? She warned them, as it pertains to biblical prophecy,
of the impending dangers of their actions. Their adventure would not
hold, since “you have moulded the Parliament to your modle” and hence,
“you will not die the common death of men”.?? Her anger forms a con-
trast with her polite address to “the Right Honourable the Lords and
Commons assembled in Parliament” in her first tract. Since they repre-
sent the “great Court of heaven”, she is certain at the time of writing that
those men will gladly correct their mistakes as soon as they thoroughly
understand “what God by me hath put you in mind to do in this little
tractate”. Throughout her eighty-pages tract, Pope invoked the argument
of natural obedience and reciprocity between subjects, King and God:
“We, by the self-same law have made a reciprocal promise, to obey him
our parent in the Lord; and it is commanded by God that parents should
not provoke their children to wrath, but bring them up I the feare and
nurture of the Lord”.?! She also compared the new supremacy of indi-
vidual conscience with a pharisaical tradition, at a time when everybody
gives their reasons about whether they can profit “from such or such
minister” according to their consciences. Her recurring argument that
“opinions ought not to be the rule of things, but the nature of the things
itself” comes as a conclusion to having reflected upon the wrong be-
havior of the “popish” church throughout history. Thus, killing Charles
I or preserving his life is not only for Pope a matter of political wisdom
and the execution of natural order, it is also a way of demonstrating
that the Church of the commonwealth is the right one because it is not
indulging in the errors of non-reformed churches when they allowed cor-
ruption and personal interests to take over the affairs of men. Poet and
biographer Lucy Hutchinson, writing from a more privileged position
than Pope and with a pinch of irony, was nevertheless trying to make
 Women’s prophetic ministry 53
sense of the fact that the conscience of judges and parliamentarians who
brought King Charles I to trial “did not execute justice upon him, but
God would require at their hands all the blood and desolation which
should ensure by their suffering to escape”.* Mary Cary also instructed
rulers to be true “Judges of England” so that Jesus Christ could “reign
over you”. She made no difference between members of Parliament and
the King, since both parties had their fair share in economic instability
and the “oppression of the poor and the neglect of doing justice in their
behalf”. Cary’s defense of the unprivileged classes did not conclude in a
separation between church and state, but she did not spare the King from
any evil consequences that his erratic behavior had caused in the country.
Speaking from the viewpoint of a Fifth monarchist prophetess, she re-
minds political leaders that Christ was the only king who reigned in the
consciences of his people and his law: “Therefore, make you no Laws for
the consciences of his people, no suffer any to do it by any authority de-
rived from you”.°? She quoted Mark 7 to substantiate her claim that laws
should not rule over the consciences of people and invited leaders to “kiss
the son with the kiss of obedience, and subject yourselves to his blessed
government so that the blessings of his grace be poured out upon you”.*4
Cary touched upon the essence of Puritan thought: that obedience to the
divine brings about happiness, and that high public responsibility implies
the mandate to provide a dignified life for the lowly, so that through
collective well-being and harmony the English nation can shine as an
elect nation. Cary finished this argument with a reminder of the right to
prophesy: “Do not you enact any law against ant Saints exercising the
gifts of the Spirit that are given to them in Preaching or prophesying”.*°
Pope did not contest either the diversity and loquacity of the ‘sects’,
as it was the case with Edwards’ Gangraena in 1646, and did not hold
them responsible for the proliferation of ‘heretical’ opinions that created
fractions and divisions in government. Pope’s appeal to order should
not be deemed a mark of regressive thinking, though. It was common
among religious radicals to point at human sins as the cause of political
turmoil, and often the root of sinful behavior was a freedom of con-
science that was not in line with God’s designs for the world. J.C. Davis
argued that while parliament and law were the instruments that made
possible the consolidation of freedom, religion did not base its appeals
to freedom of association on any right of the individual to exert his or
her own will if it was out of sync with the designs of God for the com-
monwealth. This would suggest, as both Davis and Smith have pointed
out, that differences between radical groups—whether they dissent from
or partially conform with the Anglican Church—could not be grasped
without the basic realization that the individual stands in a relation of
co-participation with God.°° Of course, whether the regicide is in line
with God’s will or not, as articulated by its defenders and opponents, is
open to interpretation.
$4 Politicum

Mary Pope’s tracts are rare in their length and the fact that they do
not fashion themselves as ‘petitions’ submitted to the government, as
it was the right and privilege of any subjects, regardless of their social
standing. Between 1647 and 1648, the Long Parliament received so
many Royalist petitions, often accompanied with street rallies, that the
Commons instructed a committee to regulate the liberty to petition in
a “due manner”.®” Pope’s writings were obviously perceived as royalists
and contrary to the main line of parliamentary thinking. Her second
and third ventures into print a year later in 1648 were therefore submit-
ted after a rejection and the prospect of being rejected again, but this
circumstance did not prevent her from insisting on the universal truth
of preserving the King’s life as a reflection of natural order where Christ
is the head “of all members of the body” in a relationship of mutual de-
pendence. The essence of her work is the justification by way of Scripture
of the natural order. Disposing of Charles I is a breach of this order, but
Pope is careful to not indulge in monarchical praise. Her anti-regicidal
stance does not turn her into a royalist writer, since in her epistle she
urges the King to demonstrate he is worthy of the honor of his own posi-
tion. “If you desire the God of Heaven to be on your side, then turne you
to the Law and Testimony, and heare what that saith”.°® Her biblical
quotations are meant to remind him of the fact that “he that ruleth over
men, must be just and rule in the feare of the Lord”.*? Therefore, Charles
I should not be afraid because “God in Christ will set your Royal person
upon your throne again and direct you to Governe in God”. It is both
the King’s and the politicians’ failure to have departed from “the Word”,
which is unchangeable. Why, then, “should we relie upon those that are
subject to change, without having a word for it2?”*° Pope’s reasoning does
not spare the King as partly responsible for the situation he finds him-
self in. Her authorial intentions are not merely descriptive, informative,
or rhetorical, but are geared toward an actual change in public affairs
for the common good. Around the same time Elizabeth Poole, another
prophetess-activist with her own slant on justifying anti regicidal think-
ing, was more successful in catching the parliamentarians’ attention.

Notes
1 Elizabeth Avery, “Experience of Elizabeth Avery”, in Ohel, A Tabernacle
for the Sun, ed. John Rogers (London: printed for R.I. and H. Eversden,
1653), 402-6.
2 Ibid., 404-5.
3 Bernard Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century
English Millenarianism (London: Faber and Faber, 2008 [1972]), 35, 229.
4 Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), 254-56.
5 Elizabeth Avery, Scripture-Prophecies Opened (London: printed for Giles
Calvert, 1647), A3.
6 Ibid., 3-S.
 Women’s prophetic ministry 55
7 Ibid., 20-21.
8 Ibid., 36.
9 Anon. The Great Mysterie of God, or the Vision of the Evening and the
Morning Opened (London: printed for John Wright, 1645), 7.
10 Elizabeth Warren, A Warning-Peece from Heaven or Mournfull Medita-
tions (London: printed for Richard Constable, 1649), 51,
11 Ibid., 22.
12 Ibid., 42.
13) Ubid., 3,
14 Elizabeth Warren, The Old and Good Way Vindicated (London: printed for
Henry Shepherd, 1645), 3.
15 Ibid., Al.
16 Elizabeth Warren, Spiritual Thrift (London: James Cranford, 1647), 4.
17 Ibid., 14.
18 Ibid., 34-35.
19 Ibid., 48.
20 Christopher Sutton, Disce Mori (London: printed by John Wolfe, 1600);
William Perkins, A Salve for a Sicke Man (London: printed by John Legate,
1595).
21 Andrew Chambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in
England 1580-1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 9.
22 Femke Molekamp, Women and the Bible in Early Modern England (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013), 220.
23 See Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England 1640-1660
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994) 125; Catie Gill, “Mary Pope”,
ODNB, accessed November 30, 2015, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/
article/69153.
24 Mary Pope, A Treatise of Magistracy (London, 1647), 2-3.
257 lbid!, C3:
26 Ibid., cS.
27 See A Perfect Diurnall of the Passages in Parliament, 165 (3-10 Jan. 1647):
1865-72.
28 Pope, Behold, 32.
29 Pope, A Treatise, 15.
30 Mary Pope, Behold, here is a Word (London, 1649), 16.
31 Pope, A Treatise, Epistle, 2.
32 From Julius Hutchinson (ed.), Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson(London:
printed for 1808), 193.
33 Mary Cary, A Word in Season to the Kingdom of England (London: printed
by R.W. for Giles Calvert, 1647), 3.
34 Ibid., 3; “Howbeit in vain do you worship me, observing for doctrines the
commandments of men” (Mark 7:7).
35 Cary, A Word in Season, S.
36 Smith, Literature and Revolution, 125; J.C. Davis, “Religion and the
Struggle for Freedom in the English Revolution”, The Historical Journal
35:3 (1992): 507-30.
37 See David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2000), 86-87.
38 Pope, A Treatesie, To the Most High and Mighty Prince Charles, sig.A.
39 2 Samuel 23:3.
40 Ibid., 37.
3 Confronting Parliament
with the word
The case for Elizabeth Poole

Elizabeth Poole, a woman who is known to have prophesied in the halls

of power, provides us with an example of the complex dynamics of pro-
phetic reception. When Poole’s message was in synchrony with the in-
terests of the Army Council, she was welcomed and acknowledged as a
prophetess. When her message did not conform to political expectations,
her morals and prophetic abilities were challenged. In both cases, Poole
cast her prophetic interpretation of events as her right to political repre-
sentation. By involving itself in discussions of earthly matters, prophecy
provided a tradition and promoted an awareness of what was good for
all (or all the godly) that the language of political radicals, despite the
individual religious convictions of their members, could not yet furnish
in entirely secular terms.
The work and public exposure of prophetess Elizabeth Poole was cir-
cumscribed by a transcendent occasion in the history of England: the
intervening weeks between December 1648 and January 1649 in which
the Army Council debated the possible execution of Charles I. Poole
was able to do so by assuming a prophetic role and putting it forward
as a basis for an elaborate political discourse. She began prophesying at
the Army Council in December 1648, shortly after the establishment of
the Rump Parliament and when preparations for the King’s trial were in
place. General Henry Ireton had co-authored with the polemicist Hugh
Peters the Remonstrance of the Army of November 1648, and supported
the second Leveller Agreement of the People published on December 15,
1648, which insisted on a thorough constitutional reform, including the
dissolution of Parliament by April 1649 and a “more convenient election
of representatives”.! Shortly afterward Elizabeth Poole was summoned
to appear before the Army Council where, on December 29, 1648, she
explained and commented on the vision she had received concerning the
future of England. A version of her speech on that day, and of her short
debate with the army grandees, was published under her own name and
the title of A Vision.?
Poole’s first speech to the Council on December 1648, her Vision, was
warmly received and she was invited a second time only days before
the execution of Charles I. On this occasion, and before the Leveller
 Confronting Parliament with the word 57
leader John Lilburne, Poole gave out her anti-regicidal discourse that
astounded most army members.
On the eve of Poole’s first public intervention in Whitehall she was
offered temporary lodgings there as was customary for sympathisers of
the army. The issue of whether Poole was acting on behalf of someone
else, and especially of whom, has been an object of speculation.’ It is un-
certain whether Poole’s anti-regicidal discourse was secretly sponsored
by a parliamentary source (most probably John Lilburne or even the
Baptist leader William Kiffin himself) or whether this was really her
own whim to challenge army officers. Poole was undoubtedly a sym-
pathiser of the Army Council, and she was invited to foster its agenda
which, at that time, leaned heavily on dispensing with the King’s life.
The Clarke Papers reproduce the exchange between the “General
Councill of 5 January 1649 att Whitehall” where “Elizabeth Poole who
came from Abingdon call’d in”. After her own introduction of her vision,
she “gives in a paper” and we read in a footnote that “it was against the
King’s execution”. The Clarke proceedings do not reproduce the details
of Poole’s “paper”, but we can read the questions that several council
members placed about their main concerns: can Poole demonstrate that
her message comes from God, and, is she advocating for the King’s trial
only or for his death? Poole replies that “he is due to bee judged I believe,
and that you may binde his hands and hold him fast under”.* A footnote
attached to Poole’s answer informs us that “Ireton appears to have tried
to make use of Mrs. Poole vision to support the policy he had been urg-
ing”, and when Ireton reformulates the same question, she insists that
the text will “beare witness for itself” and describes its content:

[It] be consider’d in the relation that Kinges are sett in for Govern-
ment, though I doe nott speake this to favour the tyranny or blood-
thistinesse of any, for I doe looke upon the Conquest to bee of
Divine pleasure, though I doe nott speake this —- God is nott the
supporter of tyranny or injustice, those are thinges hee desires may
bee kept under.°

Poole is faithful to her role as prophetess in that she refers the gentlemen
to the authority of her written prophecy, but she is on occasion willing to
provide her own informed opinion, which is rich in nuances on contract
theory. Poole makes it clear that she is not defending tyranny, and that
therefore her prophetic message in favor of preserving the King’s life can-
not be understood as a defense of absolutist depravity. “Conquest” pleases
God, though he does not support tyranny or injustice. The mentioning
of the word ‘conquest’ might have led Colonel Rich to frame the same
question to Poole in terms of the relationship between natural reason and
divine will, even though Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan in 1651.
Hobbes defined ‘conquest’ as “the acquiring of the right of sovereignty
58 Politicum

by victory”, which he extends to Parliament when the ‘Oath of Engage-

ment’ were mbsctibed to “by all men over 18 as required by parliament”.°
The notion of ‘conquest’ could also be reminiscent of Marchamont
Nedham’s reporting and later essay, The Case of the Commonwealth—
whose definition of “conquest” is grounded in Machiavelli’s Chapter 6
of The Prince, “conquests by virtue” and Nedham’s abundant references
to Grotius’ De jure belli and his defence of natural law in a civil war.’
Defending the right of Parliament to prosecute a king, John Milton would
publish his The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates in February 1649 and
Eikonoklastes in October 1649. Colonel Rich replies to Poole with a long
question: “I desire to know whether that which is the will of God is nott
concordant with naturall reason”. Is it consistent with natural reason to
think that the will of God “will be inconsistent with the most essential
being for which itt was orndain’d?” Ultimately, Colonel Rich is wonder-
ing whether we can interpret the will of God (through prophecy) as pos-
sibly meaning that “for the highest breach of trust there ae be such
an outward forfeiture of life itself, as of the trust itt self”.8 His questions
touch upon the core of a political and religious argument for justifying
regicide, and these can be seen as both a challenge to Poole’s authority
and as recognition of her role as prophet-interpreter. Poole replies in an
astute manner that preserves the faithfulness to her prophetic message as
well as her own political interpretation and standing. “If these thinges
bee mistaken by mee and found out by you, soe God may be glorified”.?
The “Mrs Poole” who is resorting to her role as interpreter first, and then
to her role as divine vessel, challenges Colonel Rich to find out for himself
the mystery of God’s ways.
A few days after this episode, the royalist weekly newsbook Mercurius
Pragmaticus (now managed by Nedham till May 1649)!° wrote an ac-
count of the event, highlighting the party-line factions at the heart of the
Council:

Shee told the Grandees of their Sinnes, and the Levellers of their
Transgressions; after which the Brethren Ordered her Thankes,
and were it not too large I would have printer her Sermon. It might
have served handsomely to have shewne the private Quarrells and
deadly feuds, which run in their Divisions, and petty sub-Divisions
of Faction. i

Lilburne might have sponsored Poole’s appearance, but she did not spare
comments that ran against the respective political agendas of gran-
dees and Levellers alike, who had been debating both the disposal of
the King and The Agreement of the People. On 28 December Lilburne
had submitted a modified version of the Agreement, entitled A Plea for
Common Right and Freedom to his Excellency, urging the army offi-
cers to honor the “banner and standard” of liberty now that “all power
 Confronting Parliament with the word 59
lay in their hands”.!? Susan Wiseman has suggested that the timing
of Lilburne’s struggles with the Army Council on matters of religious
conscience and Poole’s two appearances might be related.!? If this were
the case, it would not explain why Poole insisted on her anti-regicidal
position, unless Lilburne made a strategic use of it to oppose the reli-
gious fervor of the army ranks and agitators or anyone who was not
seriously committed to a true government of the people. In April 1649
Katherine Chidley, Liburne’s wife Elizabeth, probably Elizabeth Poole,
and hundreds of other women besieged parliament to claim the release
of Leveller leaders who were dissatisfied with the new Commonwealth,
and proffered a petition entitled The Petition of Women (1649).!* Poole’s
“sermon”, as the reporter of the Mercurius Pragmaticus noted, left ex-
posed the feuds and divisions within party lines, and struck the audience
as being an elaborate message of political significance that went beyond
the expected conventions of spiritual speech.
William Kiffin and his congregation turned against Poole in the after-
math of her January prophesying. He sent a letter to John Pendarves, the
Baptist minister of Abingdon at that time, urging him to slander Poole.
Pendarves’ wife, Thomasine, intercepted the letter and wrote a heartfelt
response published in March 1649 along with a reprint of Poole’s original
Vision in a second short tract entitled An Alarum of War Given to the
Army.'> Pendarves defends Poole’s personal reputation, challenged by
Kiffin’s mention of her ‘past sins’, and the truthfulness of her prophecies:

Iam sure, and I speak nothing but the truth, that I have found a most
divine spirit in her, as far as I could discern, and that which comes to
the spirit and life of things, and in this methinks you should rejoice,
for truly I have heard many professors and professions, but to my
knowledge I never heard one come so near the power. I do not speak
this as being affected with any person, party or opinion; I blesse my
God, I am now in his strength.!°

Pendarves appeals to Kiffin’s sense of Christian ethics in these times

in which the “crime of self-love” is rampant and men, especially those
who have defected churches, “speak largely upon little ground”.!” Poole
authored a third tract interpreting the actual meaning of her prophecy,
also published in the spring of 1649 as Another Alarum of War given
to the Army.'® The text of the Vision, together with part of the material
contained in the two subsequent Alarums, are all the actual copy that
can be credited to Poole as an author.
Like most of her contemporary prophetesses, there is scant biographi-
cal data about the origins and personal circumstances of Elizabeth
Poole. We are acquainted with what exists through her own texts,
The Clarke Papers (1647-1649), and a handful of letters attached to
a reprint of her writings, bound together as A Prophesie Touching the
60 Politicum

Death of King Charles (1649) and slightly amended by the bookseller

George Thomason. Elizabeth Poole was probably baptised in 1622 and
died in or after 1668.!? She was the daughter of Robert Poole who,
in 1645, attacked the congregation’s minister, William Kiffin, for
“seducing” his children away from his home and into the Particular
Baptist church. Kiffin had become a wealthy wool merchant and a
Nonconformist. Bernard Capp remarked that wealthy millenarians,
as Kiffin probably was at the beginning of his ministry, avoided Fifth
Monarchism due to the movement’s emphasis on equal distribution of
wealth.2° They tended to gravitate toward Baptist groups or used their
businesses and political leverage to engage in parliamentarian affairs.
Kiffin came to sign the First London (1644) and the Second London
Confession of Faith (1677) and embraced the belief that baptism should
be delivered only to believers.2! Contrary to what has traditionally
been assumed in Baptist scholarship, Stephen Wright has argued that
the formal division between the General and the Particular Baptists oc-
curred much later in the seventeenth century as a result of the hard-
ening of the predestinarian debate in the Second London Confession
and their belief in particular atonement. Wright further argues that by
the late 1640s, many Particular Baptist leaders showed hostility toward
the Levellers after the Independent sentiment in Parliament gradually
distanced itself from Presbyterian factions and gained ground.** Apart
from their changing political allegiances, Baptists were often looked at
with distrust for their claim that children and servants could decide to
be baptized against the authority of their parents or masters. A printed
dialogue between Robert Poole and William Kiffin entitled A Briefe Re-
monstrance (1645) reveals why groups such as the Baptists could be
enticing to young women who might be disaffected with domesticity.??
William Kiffin stated that “if we can prove ourselves to be such Con-
gregations as are before spoken of, such as sincerely and truly strive,
according to the light we have, to be such; then I hope you will be so
farre from dispising such gatherings of the Saints together, as that you
will not denie them to receive in members and to dispense such gifts for
the edifying one of another”.?4 This emphasis upon spiritual equality
and edification was a defining characteristic of Baptist congregations
and translated into extending the right of prophesy to women.?°
Thomasine Pendarves’ letter mentioned that Poole was living “by her
hands” in her reply vindicating Poole’s reputation and prophetic stand-
ing.?° She was probably at that time a young seamstress who joined
the London-based Particular Baptist congregation of Abingdon around
1644-1645, defying the authority of her father. A few periodical accounts,
especially from The True and Perfect Dutch Diurnall and The Weekly
Intelligencer of the Commonwealth (1653) suggested that Poole was
preaching in the 1650s: “One Mrs Anne Pool, who preached on the last
Sunday and on the Sunday before in the Chappel at Somerset-House,
 Confronting Parliament with the word 61
she took her Text out of that in Essay. Thou shall write with the pen
of a man. Care is taken for the future, to prevent all disturbances in
that nature”.*” “Anne” may or may not be “Elizabeth” Poole, but The
Weekly Intelligencer did not seem to sympathise with her preaching
activities. Maureen Bell notes that Elizabeth Poole was living at Mint
in Southwark in 1668 and was imprisoned that same year for owning
the building where an unlicensed printing press belonging to Elizabeth
Calvert ran its business.?° Poole issued a petition to the King for release,
but her trail is lost after that on any information about her activities or
eventual death.”
Membership within the Baptist “house of spirit” offered the possibil-
ity that a person could be elected to represent the congregation before
an official gathering of a Particular Baptist group. Each of these congre-
gations elected delegates (or “messengers”) that were sent to periodic
gatherings, otherwise known as “general meetings”.°° Patricia Crawford
notes that women were not sent as messengers or intermediaries when
the church wanted to resolve vital policy,*! but Poole often referred
to the prophecies she delivered to the Army Council as her “message”
and the title page of An Alarum of War states that the tract’s contents
had been “by the will of God; revealed in Elizabeth Pooll, sometimes a
Messenger of the Lord to the Generall Councell, concerning the Cure
of the Land, and the manner thereof”. By stating her prophetic status
in print, Poole could identify herself as a legitimate representative of her
church, a member of an “elect” who could exercise public influence.
Baptists could also perform a spiritual “cure” through rebaptism and
the “laying on of hands”. Men and women considered to have the gift
of purgation of past evils took part in these rituals, since appointment
and acceptance to the congregation was ritualistically displayed when
an “elder” laid hands on the new member after Baptism.*? There was a
fine line between a woman’s assisting a male minister in his practice and
her assuming the ministerial function of acting as a vehicle for another’s
salvation. Curing was synonymous with an inner transformation of the
spirit, and hence Poole could defend the notion that through divine inter-
mediation a person could purify his “head” if he so wished.
Since marriage in the seventeenth century was understood to be “a nat-
ural political relationship involving the sovereignty of husband over wife”,
according to Victoria Kahn, the inviolability of the marriage contract was
often invoked to support monarchist thought.*? Any absolutist theology
of kingship is problematic, as Barbara Shuger suggested in her commen-
tary of John Donne’s sermons, because it did not necessarily endorse ab-
solutist monarchy and because an analogy articulates a relation but does
not provide the key to its analysis. Ultimately, according to Shuger, this
theology seeks to answer the ways social forms of power are used to
understand the nature of God.** This view informs my analysis of Poole
as a prophetess, since regardless of the debate about who promoted her
62 Politicum

appearances in the army council, especially on her second visit, it helps to

trace a consistency in argument throughout Poole’s production even after
the prophetic deed proper. Most analyses of Poole’s prophecies have con-
centrated on explicating the particulars of her extended metaphor of mar-
riage and divorce as justification to spare the King’s life, and how Poole’s
argument both departs and conforms to Baptist practice in particular,
which was more conservative in preserving the institution of marriage
than seventeenth-century heresiographies claimed. However, Poole is
providing a theological base for making sense of an impending political
deed and its consequences, trying to show how the secular action of a
regicide would not correlate with divine order. She does not employ an
admonitory or warning tone, but her second message infuriates the coun-
cil. Poole is aware of it when she hands in her written prophecy to Colonel
Deane, but proceeds with the delivery of her speech in her attempt to
effect political change on the grounds of her prophetic understanding of
the covenant between God and humanity. Thus Poole is in line with the
essence of prophesying, that of rendering a public service and explicating
current events through theology. Her prophecy is not more public because
it takes place in a hall of power outside her congregation. It is so because
the message is crafted with the willingness to readdress a political course
of action even in the face of a challenging audience.
Seventeenth-century Baptist practice played a major role in Poole’s
visions and was an influence on fashioning her prophetic speech. Through
her elaborated metaphor of “curing” and “divorcing” the body politic,
Poole presented herself as a concerned individual who aimed at restoring
the “health” of an ailing nation, after its leaders had severed a sacred con-
tract with their people. While Marcus Nevitt surveys her adept use of the
metaphors of divorce to justify an anti-regicidal discourse, his emphasis
is on Poole’s contribution to the political debate rather than her author-
ity as a prophet or a writer.°° Manfred Brod’s approach leans toward
Poole’s biographical details and the circumstances of her appearances at
Whitehall.°?” Susan Wiseman and Katherine Gillespie, respectively, have
expanded on Brod’s line of inquiry toward the elucidation of who might
be pulling the strings behind Poole’s public interventions. They have also
connected them to extended readings of Poole’s usage of the tropes of
marriage and the body politic and linked them to wider considerations
on women’s voice and political authority in the seventeenth century.*°
Two Royalist accounts on parliamentarian affairs and commentary,
A Brief Narration of the Mysteries of State Carried on by the Spanish
Faction in England (1649) and The English-Devil (1660) provide addi-
tional information about the circumstances of Poole’s appearance, even
though The English-Devil borrows most of its account from A Brief
Narration.°? The anonymous author of A Brief Narration is intent on
showing the plotting of Cromwell and his Spanish faction. In his descrip-
tion of how the depraved Cromwell had to resort to sectaries to promote
 Confronting Parliament with the word 63
his agenda, the reporter provides an account of how the “witch full of
deceiptufull craft, put into brave cloathes and pretended she was a Lady
that come from a far Countrey, being sent by God to the Army with a
Revelation which she must make known to the army”.*? The report does
not mention the name ‘Poole’, but the circumstances of the “witch’s” ap-
pearance coincide with those of the The Clarke Papers. We learn further
details, though, such as her “strange postures expressing high devotion”
and her advice of “removing the King out of the way which they must do
by proceeding first to try him, and then to condemn him, and then to de-
pose him, but not to put him to death”.*! The reporter expresses contempt
for the whole episode and tries to ridicule both Poole and her sponsors:

Cromwell and Ireton fixing their eyes upon her in most solemn man-
ner (to beget in the rest of the Officers (who were ready to laugh) an
apprehension of some extraordinary serious thing) fell both of them
to weeping; the Witch looking in their faces, and seeing them weep,
fell to weeping likewise; and began to tell them what acquaintance
she had with God by Revelation.”

His tone contrasts with the sober account of The Clarke Papers in which
the gathered officers were trying to make sense of the anti-regicidal chal-
lenge of Poole’s prophecy. It might well have been the case that Cromwell,
Poole, and Ireton did not weep after all, or that the officers did not
wrestle to hold their laughter. The report provides a vivid scene of up-
roar and confusion at seeing a woman speaking in parliament, and it is
likewise revelatory that women prophets—whether their messages were
taken in earnest or in ridicule—were not always regarded as dangerous
or suspicious or even politically innocuous.** A Brief Narration states
that “this relation I had from one that was strongly of the Armies party,
but related this shamefull story with much indignation”, and finishes
the episode with a short derogatory reference to the astrologer-prophet
William Lilly “which was much according to the opinion of his sister
witch”.4* The pamphlet underlines the ludicrous element of prophecy,
whether produced by a man or a woman, if it is in line—as Lilly’s prog-
nostications were at that time—with the parliamentarian faction. It also
attempts to discredit prophecy from inside the Independent’s side, as
when the reporter describes how “I repaired to some of the most reli-
gious and able Independents to know their opinion of these things; they
replied (I am informed [by] Thomas Goodwin in particular) that since
they had gone too far, they must now Carry it on”.*> Goodwin, the non-
conformist minister who in 1652 would favor the Cromwellian settle-
ment,’® finishes his reply to the anonymous reporter with a “Machiavells
aphorism”, namely, that “this [the prophetic performance] was good in
Politikes, but bad in Divinity”.4” Goodwill reported commentary would
appear to criticize deism in politics, as Machiavelli did, while retaining
64 Politicum

the cryptic double meaning that Poole’s prophecy is good for politics and
in political content.
The central images that Poole presented as being the core of her visions
and those that she developed as commentary are closely interrelated, es-
pecially when she addresses the central issues concerning regicide. This
applies to both of the tracts that she authored, but to Another Alarum of
War in particular. The opening speech of A Vision makes it clear, already
in the title page, that it “was delivered to the councel of War” by Poole:

I have been (by the pleasure of the most High) made sensible of the
distresses of this Land, and also a sympathizer with you in your
labours: for having sometimes read your Remonstrance, I was for
many daies made a sad mourner for her.*8

The beginning of Poole’s address is startling in the directness with which

it immediately links the political and the spiritual. In the first sentence,
she presents herself as having become conscious of the difficulties of
England by the grace of God: by dint of His will she had grown in
political awareness. In doing so, she has entered a new situation of sol-
idarity with the members of the Army: she can now “sympathize” with
them. She has been able to understand their troubles and share them.
The visionary experience does not precede the political. On the contrary,
it seems to be framed and even motivated by it. We are not only facing an
interaction between the political and the spiritual, but a precedent, both
thematic and chronological, of the former over the latter.
Even more significant and surprising, perhaps, is the fact that the speaker
reacts to an experience of reading. She has become “a sad mourner” for
England because she has been reading the “Remonstrance” for some time.
Here Poole is referring to A Remonstrance of Fairfax and the Council of
Officers, a formal statement of grievances on the state of the kingdom,
similar to the one that had been produced by the House of Commons
and addressed to the Crown in 1641.*? This is a remarkable detail, since
A Remonstrance had been only recently released. Poole might have been
able to get a copy of it through the network of booksellers and radical
activists that she befriended, probably from her connections with the pub-
lisher Giles Calvert and John Pordage, rector of Bradfield in Berkshire,
and Lilburne’s circle. The opening of A Vision acts a particular captatio
benevolentiae in front of the specific audience before whom her speech is
delivered. Having set the vision in its particular political context, Poole
proceeds to describe her own personal state as she was about to receive it:

I was for many daies made a sad mourner for her; the pangs of a
travelling woman was upon me, and the pangs of death oft-times
panging mee, being a member in her body, of whose dying state
I was made purely sensible.°°
 Confronting Parliament with the word 65
The reiteration of the central word here (“pangs”) is intended to focalize
the experience of pain that affects the whole nation on Poole herself.
These “pangs” can be understood either as literal or as metaphoric. It
was usual for prophetic visions to be heralded, or physically announced,
by the appearance of different forms of suffering which manifested
themselves unexpectedly in the body of the seer, thus preparing her
for the transcendent experience at hand. Poole’s approach to prophecy,
though, does not rely on these sufferings: she does not make any further
reference to them afterward in the whole of the Vision, and there is no
mentioning of them at all in the text of Another Alarum, where she
explains her second vision after the regicide. Her travails identify the
person of Poole as an integral part of the suffering body of England, so
as to further her own identification with the country. In this way Poole
assumes authority even before her vision: she is able to speak about the
state of England because she is deeply identified with its troubles. Her
own body thus concentrates, synecdochally, the “pangs” of the whole
country, thus expressing her intimate connection to that wider, superior
body. It is only at this point that the vision begins. Its content is dealt
with briefly in the following lines:

And after many daies mourning, a vision was set before me, to shew
her cure, and the manner of it, by this similitude: A man who is a
member of the Army, having sometimes much bewailed her state,
saying He could gladly be a sacrifice for her, and was set before me,
presenting the body of the Army; and on the other hand, a woman
crooked, sick, weak, and imperfect in body, to present unto me, the
weak and imperfect state of the Kingdome: I having the gift of faith
upon me for her cure, was thus to appeal to the person on the other
hand, that he should improve his faith in fullnesse to the Kingdome,
by using a diligence for the cure of this woman, as I by the gift of
faith on me should direct him.*!

The terms ‘similitude’ and ‘presenting’ here underline the metaphoric

content of the images that are presented to Poole in her vision. Poole her-
self specifies that the “cure” of England was revealed to her “by this si-
militude”, and that the figures that appeared to her actually “presented”
or signified something beyond themselves: the soldier represented the
army, and the crooked woman represented the land. Despite the sim-
plicity of the metaphoric vocabulary, Poole understands that the images
she has received are signs or symbols, not objects in themselves, and
she explains and defines them as such. She does not specify that she
understood these images afterward or that she had to work them out
on her own, when the visionary experience was over: she seems to have
understood from the outset that the persons she was seeing were stag-
ing a “similitude” that could clarify the means to restore England to
66 Politicum

peace. This awareness of the figural content of the prophecy seems to

tone down the intensity that we would associate with mystical ecstasy,
while it increases the didactic purpose of the prophet and it emphasizes
the fact that her words are aimed toward practical application.
The vision is thus already interpreted for us by the prophet, and ini-
tially its content appears to be quite simple. The soldier that Poole has
seen (“a man who was a member of the army”) was lamenting loudly for
the state of a sick and infirm woman (“a woman crooked, sick, weak,
and imperfect in body”) that embodies, as Poole herself quickly clari-
fies, the deficient and sad state of the country. England, like a sick and
crooked woman, is in need of a cleansing cure, and the army is her
rescuing attendant spirit. It is her responsibility to cure her by using due
diligence and fulfilling the advice that Poole herself has received “by the
gift of faith”. In the lines immediately following these, Poole will clarify
that this diligence entails, for the army, retaining the “kingly power”
in its own “godly” hands and preserving the life of the monarch, rather
than betraying its function by “giving up” the power entirely to the peo-
ple. It is worth noticing that the bodily metaphor put forward at the very
beginning of the text is revisited here, and employed to refer to the army
officer that appears before Poole, just as Poole herself was presented as
“a member” of the body of England: both of them are “members” of
bodies that are bigger than themselves. Inclusiveness is at the heart of
Poole’s political ideology: the tropes of the body politic are an instru-
ment through which she can speak about participation and member-
ship, a set of values that can only be upheld if the army continues to act
without worldly care for their own ambition, and with the sole desire to
contribute to the nation’s definitive cure.
The metaphors centered on images of bodily ties are extended in the
next paragraphs of A Vision, and it is there that, for the first time, the
theme of the relationship between the King and his subjects is resumed
and explored:

You have all that you have and are, and also in Subordination you
owe him all that you have and are, and although he would not be
your Father and husband, Subordinate, but absolute, yet know that
you are for the Lords sake to honour his person. For he is the Father
and husband of your bodies, as unto men, and therefore your right
cannot be without him, as unto men, and I know I am very sensi-
ble, that no small straight lyeth upon you in respect of securing his
person.°”

The content of this passage seems to bear an implicit paradox that con-
cerns the conceptual distribution of gender roles. Poole’s language in-
volves traditional connotations of masculinity and loyalty, and harnesses
them to the specific political situation at hand. But, by doing so, the
 Confronting Parliament with the word 67
army itself is conceptually re-sexed as female, which immediately pro-
jects upon it a strong sense of subordination and dependence upon its
metaphoric “father and husband”. Poole’s message, like the vision that
she received, appeals to well-established, ancient notions of contract and
patriarchy in order to draw the limits that the revolutionary process must
not trespass, and to insist upon the idea that the King’s person is sacred.
For Poole, the King’s deep transgressions require fair punishment, but at
the same time, the army must secure and respect his person and refrain
from executing him. The prophet’s perspective has changed in A Vision,
because her advice has gone unheeded, but also because of what she sees
as a further step downward in the degeneration of her original audi-
ence, the members of the Army Council. At one point, a prophetic vision
shapes the ideological core of the text, since the central images of the
passage are presented to the reader before the key to their meaning is
clarified by Poole herself. It occurs shortly after the beginning of the text,
in its second page, immediately after the author voices her complaint
against the army because of the recent execution of the King:

For I have seen your carcasses slain upon the grounds, and whilst
I was mourning over them, because of that spirit of justice, judge-
ment, and equity, which had sometime appeared in you; there stood
up a young man, a man of strength in whom they appeared, and I,
seeing they had their resurrection in anther, was comforted, as also
this word I received, their carcasses fell in the wildernesse though
unbeliefe; thereby I saw it was but your carcasses, or he body of your
confederacy or combination, wherein ye were for your selves.*?

In this case there is no reference to the “pangs” that prepare the prophet
for her transcendent experience, and the phrase “a vision was set before
me”, which had played an essential role in the first tract, is completely
absent here: what Poole presents has actually been witnessed by her (“for
I have seen...”), but it may have been experienced as an image created
by herself, as an allegory, out of her own meditations. At any rate, its
status remains ambiguous, and it cannot be firmly seen as the result of
a visionary experience or a trance. The description of what Poole “saw”
or imagined in this occasion is quite simple again. It is structured in two
parts, the first one offering an image of death, and the second presenting
one of resurrection. At first, the dead bodies or carcasses of the members
of the Army Council are strewn on the ground before Poole, who imme-
diately recognizes them. Her immediate reaction is to weep and mourn,
not so much because of the recent behavior of the army, but because of
its past glory, that is, “because of that spirit of justice, judgement and
equity which had sometime appeared in you”. The mourning is followed
by a glimpse of hope: before Poole appears a young man, whom she im-
mediately identifies as the resurrected body of the army itself. There is a
68 Politicum

brief aural element in the whole situation, as she hears a voice that tells
her: “Their carcasses fell in the wilderness through unbeliefe”. Poole
immediately offers the interpretation of the whole scene (still without
defining it as “vision”) to her readers: the carcasses represent the army
insofar as it has responded only to its own material interests, being only
“wise for your selves [...] that is, your wisdoms, councels, devotions,
humiliations and religious consultations”, where they would “inquire of
God (as you call it) though it were grounded in your hearts what to doe”.
The accusation is severe, and the metaphoric language is simple albeit
powerful. It is also strongly linked to the bodily images that are conjured
up in the early Vision. The imagery in that text was related to notions of
integration, belonging, sharing, and laid its emphasis on the restoration
of the ill body of the nation to its full health and vigor. The vision plays
on notions of corporeal life, but this time the metaphoric game has in-
tensified, just as the political situation that triggers it has become more
dramatic: there is now a sense of the irrevocable in Poole’s discourse,
which is expressed in the pictures of death and grieving. The possibility
of recovery is still present, and it is metaphorically expressed by tropes
of resurrection. Elizabeth Poole herself still appears here, as she did in
the Vision, as the best interpreter and commentator of her own proph-
ecy, and therefore as a valid though self-appointed moral guide for the
Army Council.
There is yet another key image in the Alarum, one that is obsessively
repeated throughout the text: the image of the destruction of idols,
which Poole develops, as we shall see, in several directions. This image
is not part of the short vision that is at the core of the Alarum, and even
though it is thematically linked to it, it develops in a relatively indepen-
dent direction. Its first appearance occurs after Poole has concluded her
revision and re-enactment of her original Vision, in order to reprimand
the Army Council. The following excerpt introduces the second part of
the text, in which she warns the members of the Council of the possible
temptations (or icons) that still may tempt them further away from the
fulfilment of their duties:

In the day that the Lord shall shake terribly the Earth, then shall yee
take the images of Gold and silver which every man hath made unto
himselfe, and cast them to the Mouls and to the Bars, for yee have
formed glorious, glittering Images of State policies, religious ordi-
nances, Orders, Faiths, Lights, Knowledges, and these are drawne
over them very beautiful pretences, curiously wrought over with
needle worke, very costly (when I say Images, that is to say, as if
every man hath imagined to himselfe something more desirable than
another), whereas all things are to be knowne in God, with the like
estimation, for old things shall be done away, and behold all things
shall become new.
 Confronting Parliament with the word 69
In this fragment, Poole presents the casting down of idols with strong
apocalyptic overtones, warning her audience of the day when “the im-
ages of Gold and Silver that every man hath made” will be thrown to
“the Mouls and the Bars”: the army is being accused of having built
their own idols, to have taken their own ambition into various areas
of political and civil life and having turned them into images of desire,
as projections of their own wishes. She makes it clear that, when she
speaks of the “images” that are being worshipped, she is using a figural
expression (“that is to say”) in order to refer to unlawful desires, those
that “every man hath imagined to himselfe”. In the second Alarum, as in
A Vision, Poole’s intention remains firmly didactic, and the clarification
of her message takes precedence over the transcendence of her visionary
experience.
As already mentioned, the message that Poole delivered in Whitehall
for the second time elicited a sustained negative response, although it
had initially been received with a seal of approval by a few prominent
members of the Army Council. Colonel Rich, for example, was delighted
with the message of military supremacy that she seemed to be voicing:
“I doe rejoice to heare what hath been said, and itt meetes much with
what hath been upon my heart heretofore [...]| and shall rejoice to see
itt made out more and more in others”.°> Thomas Harrison similarly
approved of the message, but asked her to define further the particular
means wherewith the army should effect the “cure” that Poole suggested
as the best solution resource for England (his question to her is indeed
recorded and reproduced in the text of A Vision).°° In her answer, Poole
denied that there was any specific or detailed plan informing her vision,
claiming instead that the army should put themselves at the hands of
providence after renouncing any idea of regicide: “By the gift and faith
of the Church shall you bee guided, which spirit is in you, which shall di-
rect you”.>” Ireton’s response to her first appearance before the Council
was far more skeptical that those coming from Rich or Harrison, and
therefore most telling:

I see nothing in her but those [things] that are the fruites of the
spiritt of God, and am therefore apt to thinke soe at the present, be-
ing not able to judge the contrary, because mee thinkes it comes with
such a spiritt that does take and hold forth humility and self deniall,
and that rules very much about the whole that shee hath deliver’d,
which makes mee have the better apprehension of itt for the present.
Itt is only God that can judge the spiritts of men and women,°®

The judgement voiced here seems positive overall, but in fact it pres-
ents itself as provisional: Ireton gives his approval “for the present”
(an expression that he repeats twice), simply because he cannot “judge
the contrary”: the final verdict is left only to God. The slight sense
70 Politicum

of approval that is given here is justified on the grounds of the “hu-

mility and self-denial” that Poole showed in her appearance before
the Council. She points to a sense of a self-contained and modest at-
titude on the part of the prophetess. As we have seen, this did not
exclude a firm conviction on the necessity of directing the decisions of
the Council in what she perceived to be the correct path. This became
evident in the short exchange that took place immediately after her
presentation, when she was asked to define her position clearly and
shortly concerning regicide. This exchange was also reproduced at the
end of A Vision:

After the delivery of this, she was asked, whether she spake against
the bringing of him to triall, or against their taking of his (life).
She answered, Bring him to his triall, that he may be convicted in
his conscience, but touch not his person.°?

Poole’s insistence on bringing the King to trial but preserving his person
following the terms of her metaphor with the body politic infuriated
most members of the Council and Kiffin himself after Poole’s second
appearance, to the point that her status as a prophet was questioned.
The contrast with her first visit to Whitehall could not be starker. This
controversy about authorial control prompted Thomasine Pendarves
to vindicate Poole’s authority as a prophetess in her letter addressed to
Willian Kiffin, in which she asked him “how you durst so peremptorily
to judge the woman that has brought a vision from God”.°° Pendarves
argues that “visions and revelations doe most especially confirme and
strengthen those that have them” in a solid attempt to reinstate Poole’s
status as a prophetess. But at this point, that status was being seriously
disputed, and she herself had been forced to question it in her second
appearance before the Army Council:

Col. Deane: I must desire to aske one question: whether you were
commanded by the spiritt of God to deliver itt unto us in
this manner.
Woman: I believe I had a command from God for itt.
Col. Deane: To deliver this paper in this forme?
Woman: To deliver in this paper or otherwise a message.
Col. Deane: And so you bringe itt, and present itt to us, as directed by
his spiritt in you, and commanded to deliver itt to us?
Woman: Yea Sim l doce)
Mr Sadler: doe [you] offer this paper or [is it] from the Revelation of
God?
Woman: I saw noe vision, nor noe Angell, nor heard no voice, butt
my spiritt being drawne out about those thinges, I was in
itt. Soe far as it is from God I thinke itt is a revelation.*!
 Confronting Parliament with the word 71
Colonel Deane’s disbelief captures his difficulty in coming to terms with
a woman expressing her own political views in public and in print; but
his resistance seems also due to the fact that her prophetic dispatch is
closer to a political statement than to a prophetic message. Deane in-
sists on teasing Poole so as to make her clarify the extent to which she
is acting through a “revelation of God”, since that would be the only
valid legitimation for her to present her “message” to the Council. His
repeated questions are not only meant to clarify the extent to which
Poole is acting as a prophet: they are also, in themselves, visible proof of
his scepticism before her, and part of an attempt to discredit her publicly
by putting her authority in doubt. She establishes the common depen-
dence of all (the soldiers and herself) on the will of God, as the main
aspect that must bind them together, and make them heed her warnings
throughout her argument:

Neverthelesse it is not the gift of faith in me, say I, nor the act of dili-
gence in you, but in dependance on the divine will, which calls me
to beleeve, and you to act. Wherefore I being called to beleeve ought
not to stagger, neither you being called to act should be slacke. For
looke how farr you come short of acting (as before the Lord for her
cure) not according to the former rule of men prescribed for cure,
but according to the direction of faith in me, so farre you have come
short of her consolation; and look, how far you shall act before the
Lord, with diligence for her cure, you shall be made partakers of her
consolation.°”

In this excerpt, Poole moves from the description of her vision to her di-
rect address to the army. The divine will is presented as the main motiva-
tion for her appearance before the Council, but at the same time it seems
to act as a dynamic force that sets all the actors in the text in motion:
she has been moved to speak, but the army is meant to act. She must not
doubt, but they must not hesitate either. The use of parallel clauses is sig-
nificant, as it underlies the double movement that Poole wants to empha-
size: her action in delivering her prophecy, and the action that the army
should take in following her advice (God “calls me to believe, and you
to act”, “I ought not to stagger, neither you [...] should be slacke”). The
syntax suggests one joint movement and purpose between the speaker
and her addressees. This is followed by a long sentence in which a para-
dox is introduced, playing upon the terms “far” and “short”: the army
has come “short of acting” while believing to go “farr”, since, up to
the present moment, they have “so farre come short” of consoling the
country in its sufferings. This smart game of paradox hints at the ambi-
valent position in which the Council finds itself when Poole appears be-
fore them: having taken serious steps for the benefit of the country, but
not having fulfilled the whole of their mission yet; unsure, in any case,
72 Politicum

in which direction to move. It is only by following Poole’s indications

and heeding her message, insofar as these are sanctioned by her faith
that the Council will be able to escape this contradictory situation and
ensure the well-being of the country.
In her first address to the army, Poole presents herself as sharing a
common interest with her audience and even as identifying herself with
it. She dares to address them not only because of her prophetic status,
but especially because of the preoccupation for the welfare of the country
which she shares with them, and which she has already presented as the
key reason for her prophetic vision. Poole does not seek to reprove or to
accuse her audience here. On the contrary, she tries to assert a common
basis with it, a degree of confidence in the will of God that should move
them to follow her example and act, just as she has been moved to act by
presenting herself before them. Apocalyptic threats and moral reproof
would seem to be out of place here since, in fact, the prophet and her
audience are rhetorically presented as having the same ultimate aims.
The prophetic personality that emerges is that of an advisor, a coun-
selor that is moved by the same ideals as those of her audience. The
fact that Poole should be trying to influence the army on such a dra-
matic and serious question as the possibility of regicide does not con-
tradict her need to be persuasive and to seek to convey the sense of
a well-meaning piece of advice. The transcendent significance of the
historical moment requires this kind of presentation: benevolent and
thoughtful, even while it is firm in trying to guide the addressees to a
specific kind of “action”. This action would perhaps appear as passivity
in a different context: because the army is required not to execute the
King, but to refrain from taking revenge on him, and to place them-
selves in the hands and the will of God so as to complete the salvation
of the country without further bloodshed. The three pages that follow
in A Vision concentrate on a more elaborate political discourse, based
on a few essential metaphors of marriage. In these, the prophetic per-
sonality that Poole has established at the beginning is strengthened.
She conveys the shared perspective that she supposedly shares with her
audience—“I with you rest in your labours”, “I am made sensible of the
many ills that lye upon you”, “The spirit of sympathy abiding in me con-
straineth me to groane with you in your paine”.*? She constantly returns
upon her role as a gentle and conscientious advisor of the army—‘“the
Kingly power has fallen unto your hands, therefore my advice is, that
you take heed to improve it for the lord”, “my humble advice to you
is that you stand as in the awfull presence of the most high Father”,
“I know not what acceptance (my message) may finde with you, yet
I am content”.°4 Her commentary on the images of the holy marriage
between the King and his people is completed with several addresses
to the army, in which she invites them to draw the logical conclusions
from the simple allegories that she presents, or from the parallels that
 Confronting Parliament with the word 73
she seeks in Scripture—“onely consider, that as she lifteth not her hand
against her husband [...] no more doe ye against yours”, “you never
heard that a wife might put away her husband, as he is the head of
her body”.® It is only toward the end of the text that Poole begins
to use a more apocalyptic tone, and to offer a stern moral warning,
when she entertains the possibility of the execution of the King, and
its consequences—“vengeance is mine, I will repay it, saith the Lord”,
“As the Lord revenged his own cause on him (Nabal), he shall doe on
yours”,°° but this approach only appears before the close of her discus-
sion. By the end of it, she has returned to her dominant tone. At the very
end of the tract, she recovers the imagery that she had introduced in the
vision, so as to draw the text towards its conclusion:

I beseech you for the Lords sake, whose I am, and whom I serve in
the Spirit, that you let not goe the vision which I shewed you con-
cerning the cure of England, as she was presented to me: wherein the
party acting, being first required to stand, as in the awfull presence
of God, and to act for her cure, according to the direction which he
should receive from the church, but the gift of faith upon her: Act
he must, but not after any former rule by men prescribed for cure
(but after the rule of the gift of faith), which I humbly beseech the
lord God to establish upon you.°”

Poole once again plays upon the metaphoric content of her original
vision: the tone becomes didactic rather than threatening, as the images
of the “party acting” (the soldier that appeared to her) and of the “cure
of England” are finally recovered. There is a sense of urgency contained
in the repetition of the verb “beseech” (addressed both to the army and
to God himself), but there is no sense of an apocalyptic warning, or of a
serious punishment that might come as a consequence of disobedience:
the dominating element in this last fragment is the “gift of faith”, which
is presented as the central element that unifies the perspective of the
prophet and of her addressees, and the key motivating force that must
rule the decisions of the latter. However, here Poole displays a very dif-
ferent approach to prophetic authority from the beginning of Another
Alarum of War:

Oh! How are my bowels straightened, and yet I am come forth to

lanch deepe into the sides of my Brethren: are yee not unto me as
mine own bowels? Is not my soule as your soules, in all your pur-
suite of justice, judgement, and Truth? Yea, ye are to me as mine own
bowels, and your soules as my soule, in all your pursuit of Justic,
judgement, and Truth; neverthelesse though as Father, Mother,
Husband, Wife, Children, House, Land, yea my owne life, I must
forsake your evil and adulterate party.°°
74 Politicum

The exclamation at the very beginning already gives a new, more dra-
matic tone to the text. The rhetorical interrogations that follow estab-
lish a sense of community and oneness between the speaker and the
audience, and the affirmative clauses that follow seem to enhance that
union. And yet, all of these elements are meant to give a stronger res-
onance to the moral reproof that emerges at the end. In spite of the in-
tense emotional, spiritual, and political links between her and the Army
Council, she must now speak from a position of a radical moral separa-
tion from them.
There is in Another Alarum a sense of warning against the punish-
ments that may be visited upon the army, for having failed to listen to the
voice of the Lord. These warnings are systematically put in the second
person, and are unequivocally addressed to the members of the Council:
“As yee have hasted your flight upon the swift and strong, so shall they
bee swifte and stronger that pursue you” or “you would not heare,
wherefore woe to them, that seeke deep to hide these counsels from the
Lord” and “ye shall come to Him, and on that day al that provoke them
shall be ashamed”. This series of imprecations is reinforced by the cen-
tral imagery of the text: the dream or vision that Poole narrates toward
the beginning, in which she sees the corpse of the army soldiers. The
very repetition of the term ‘carcass’ thus acquires a strong connotative
force, expressing the spiritual death that has been brought about by the
regicide (“Their carcasses fell on the wilderness through unbelief”).’°
All through the first part of the tract, as Poole goes through the many
spiritual and material misdeeds of the army, she keeps reminding them
of the main thematic issues that she had introduced in A Vision, and she
keeps quoting that earlier text as she does so. This allows her to struc-
ture her text in a series of rhetorical questions, listing the many aspects
in which her warnings were ignored: the first four pages abound in sen-
tences which carry the same interrogative start, in a series of anaphoric
repetitions (“Did I not say unto thee?”) which are closed by the same re-
mark, added as a sort of epistrophe (“and yet thou wouldst not listen”).
Thus the guilt of the members of the council, and the prophet’s reaction
of strong disappointment and disapproval, actually come to articulate
the very form of the text; most of the material in the Vision is thus re-
covered again in this repetitive sequence which acquires a sustained and
cumulative force that gives to the whole of the tract its tone of moral
accusation.
In the second part of the text, having reproached the army extensively,
Poole begins to concentrate on the ways in which their “dead carcasses”
may turn into the “young man” that she has seen, and which represents
their possible future. The tone here becomes more and more didactic,
as Poole explains the options that are now left for the Council. She re-
sorts to simple metaphoric images (the “young man” that the army shall
turn into, the “idols and images” that they have carved for themselves
 Confronting Parliament with the word 75
in their self-worship) that are glossed over again and again, so that her
message can come across clearly. This does not prevent her from com-
ing back, occasionally, to the reproachful attitude that she had adopted
at the beginning. At this point, however, she does so by inviting her
listeners to draw their own consequences as to their moral misdeeds:
“judge ye for yourselves, whether you have done wickedly or no”, “your
ordinances, you will say also that you have received of the Lord, then,
consider also”.’! There is an ongoing sense of an implicit debate between
the prophet and her audience, in which she anticipates the possible ob-
jections that will be made to her (“you will say”, “you will say also”).
The concluding section of the tract is thus built as an imagined debate
between the army and the prophet, in which the latter keeps correcting
the misunderstandings and errors of the former.
The discussion on icons in the last part of Another Alarum develops
as well a special emphasis on the prophet’s own authority. While insist-
ing on the different kinds of idol-worship that the army has displayed,
she contrasts the idols that they have built with her own position as
their adviser, thus suggesting that their attention has been misdirected:
they should have heeded her words, rather than their own interest. The
council believes it has received its knowledge from God, but to assume
too much upon this belief, without true faith, is a form of idolatry since
it will lead to “despise the knowledge of another because it is not bound
up in thy bundle”.’* The Council claims as well that it has received its
orders from God, and claims to know exactly what these orders are. But
in claiming this they do not consider that they “cannot find out all his
steps”, because these “may be given to another to discern”.”? They say
to have received their lights directly from the Lord, but this should not
lead them to do away with the lights that He may have given to others:
“Therefore, you may not goe to put out that light which another hath
received also from the Lord”.”* Poole refers to herself only indirectly in
these examples: and yet, this series of statements in which the army is
said to have despised and ignored “another” has no other purpose but
to vindicate her own role when she appeared for the first time before
them, and to point toward her own authority in the present moment. In
this way, Poole cleverly manages to reassert her role and her prophetic
style: her advice has been ignored and the disaster she warned against
has come to occur, but the moral failure of the army shows, after the
event, the importance of heeding the advice of those who may appear
more marginal or humble (such as herself), but who, in strict Christian
logic, may also be those through whose mouth God speaks. At no point
does Poole suggest that her womanhood makes her inferior, or that she
has not been listened to because she is a woman. This aspect is kept
out of her self-vindication in Another Alarum, just as it was kept out of
A Vision: for Poole being a prophet seems to be a condition that immedi-
ately undoes all the connotations of inferiority that might be attributed
76 Politicum

to her gender. She presents herself repeatedly as one of the small and
humble, but the way in which she uses these terms is generic, and meant
to bolster her authority precisely through the reason of the Gospels: it
is the humble and the meek that will, in the end, appear to have been
able to see God clearly. This line of argumentation also implies that the
mistake of the army in not heeding her advice has been caused by the sin
of pride, which has led them to moral blindness, “for behold, he (God)
is both here and there, though thou perceiveth it not”.” The rhetorical
assumption of humbleness thus contributes to the assertion of a pro-
phetic authority that can only dispensed by its divine source, operating
irrespective of the prejudices and demands of those in power.
There are thus two separate and different aspects to Elizabeth Poole’s
prophetic persona: the first is presented in A Vision, the second, in
Another Alarum of War. The first presents Poole as a woman endowed
with a vision that she has received for the good of the country, and which
she has to share with those that desire its good as well: the main motiva-
tion for her prophecy is political. Her tone is, at this point, more didac-
tic and explanatory than accusatory or apocalyptic, since she presents
her role as complementary to that of the army: she is moved by God to
speak, just as the army is moved by God to act. Her speech leads toward
the cure of the nation, and it is the army that must fulfil this cure. The
visionary element in her discourse is kept to a minimum, and conversely,
the political aspect is paramount in it through the traditional imagery
of the body politic. On the other hand, Poole develops a more marked
prophetic personality in Another Alarum of War: after the regicide,
she addresses the army again and tries to make them confront the con-
sequences of their actions. Assuming a more conventional prophetic
role, Poole accuses, denounces and condemns. Her language becomes
strongly apocalyptic. She anticipates punishments and the vengeance of
God upon those who have disobeyed her. There is now a sense of implicit
debate between the prophet and her audience, as she anticipates their
response and answers them beforehand. At the same time, several ele-
ments of her former text are recovered and re-examined, as she reminds
her audience of the transcendent advice that they have not heeded. These
two distinct aspects of Poole’s self-representation correspond to the two
specific moments in which she intervened in the political debate: before
and after the regicide. There is thus a conscious, precise adequacy of her
literary persona to the situation in which she was intervening. Her voice
is modulated according to the changes that she sees occurring in the
public space she has entered, and also according to the image she wants
to project of herself in each occasion.
The content of A Vision is determined by the vision that is narrated at
its very beginning, in which the army is presented as a “young man” who
is meant to save and heal the “crooked woman” representing England
itself. After commenting on the vision and establishing her authority
 Confronting Parliament with the word 77
as a prophetess, Poole goes on to detail the ways in which the army is
supposed to behave while the King is their prisoner. At this point Poole,
while following on the ideas of participation and membership that she
has introduced at the beginning, begins to elaborate on the central meta-
phor of the state as a body politic. She tells the army officers that they
are expected to act, just as she has been called to speak. But she then
goes on to specify the constraints and requirements of that action. By re-
visiting the excerpt devoted to the theme of ‘subordination’, we realize
that its language becomes strongly tinged with more traditional tones:

The King is your Father and husband, which you were and are to
obey in the Lord, & no other way, for when he forgot his Subordi-
nation to divine Faith hood and headship, thinking he had begotten
you a generation to his own pleasure, and taking you a wife for his
own lusts, thereby is the yoake taken from your necks ... You have
all that you have and are, and also in Subordination you owe him all
that you have and are, and although he would not be your Father
and husband, Subordinate, but absolute, yet know that you are for
the Lords sake to honour his person. For he is the Father and hus-
band of your bodyes, as unto men, and therefore your right cannot
be without him.”°

Here Poole addresses the main problem that the army is facing: the
nature of the King’s authority. In the first place, it must be observed that
she manages both to affirm the monarch’s authority while specifying
that he has also been untrue to his appointed task: on the one hand,
he is both “father and husband” to the army, and it is to him that the
army must “obey in the Lord, and in no other way”; on the other hand,
he himself has forgotten his own “subordination to divine Faith hood
and headship”. Poole acknowledges the existence of a double chain of
subordination (of the King to God and of the nation to the King), and it
is unambiguously the King who has broken this chain: here the prophet
takes care to list some of the accusations against Charles | that had be-
come commonplace among the revolutionaries (his observation of “his
own pleasure” and his having taken “a wife for his own lusts”, Queen
Henrietta Maria). But the use of this metaphoric language is also or1-
ented toward suggesting strong limitations on the initiative and freedom
of the army itself: since both subordinations, the royal and the popular,
exist “for the Lord’s sake”, the fact that one of them has been abandoned
does not justify forsaking the other. As Poole specifies at the beginning
and at the end of the passage above, the King is both “father and hus-
band”: two ties that cannot be shaken because these establish obliga-
tions on both sides. The particular re-sexing of the army as “wife” to
the monarch thus implies that it is not free to turn against him violently,
or to substitute his authority entirely: it is bound to respect both his
78 Politicum

position and the obligation that has been divinely conferred on it, even
though he has proven personally unworthy. As Poole puts it: “Although
he would not be your Father and husband...yet know that you are for
the Lord’s sake to honour his person. For he is the father and husband
of your bodyes”.’”
The rhetorical feminization of the army has noteworthy consequences
when it is translated into the political sphere: the daughterly and wifely obe-
dience implied by this view hinders any physical violence against the father
and spouse. Since late medieval times, women who killed their husbands
were accused of high treason, whereas men who killed their wives were
accused of murder.’® In Elizabeth Poole’s mind, then, the high treason
involved in regicide was analogous to murdering a husband:

You never heard that a wife might put away her husband, as he is the
head of her body, but for the Lord’s sake suffereth his terror to her
flesh, though she be free in the spirit of the Lord; and he being inca-
pable to act as her husband, she acteth in his stead; ... accordingly
you may hold the hands of your husband, that he pierce not your
bowels with a knife or a sword to take your life.””

Poole’s allusions to marital violence are striking. Although physical abuse

from husband to wife was not legally sanctioned in seventeenth-century
London, popular ballads and legal records show that it was probably
widespread and that society tolerated a high level of violence against
wives in domestic relations.®° Poole advises a passive suffering of this
violence by dint of her almost divine obedience to husbands, but this
physical pain is at the same time liberating and rejuvenating in spirit.
Thus, a country may patiently suffer the ill-treatment of a king, but kill-
ing him would detract the army (as representatives of the people) from
a moral and a sacred bond with God. The chain of subordinations that
she establishes places several obligations on the army: the duty of not
overstepping their position, and the obligation to refrain from violent ac-
tion against the monarch. But if this pyramidal structure imposes limits
on those below, it is because of the logic of divine justice that emanates
from above. Thus Poole feels enabled to give serious warnings: if the
army chooses revenge on Charles I, it will have broken the system of
correspondences that articulates the whole state. Up to this point, it has
removed the King from his throne and it has taken legislative power
away from him. To go beyond that is to act for the sake of vengeance,
and this is a prerogative that only belongs to the Lord:

For as the Lord revenged his owne cause on him, he shall doe on
yours; For vengeance is mine, I will repay it, saith the Lord; who
made him the Saviour of your body, though he hath profaned his
Saviour-ship; Stretch not forth the hand against him: For know this,
 Confronting Parliament with the word 79
the Conquest was not without divine displeasure, whereby Kings
came to reigne, though through lust they tyrannized, which God ex-
cuseth not, but judgeth; and his judgements are fallen heavy, as you
see, upon Charles your Lord: Forget not your pity towards him, for
you were given him an helper in the body of the people.*!

The theme of divine vengeance is introduced in a way that praises the

work hitherto done by the army, while setting strong limits on it. The
biblical quotation here “Vengeance is Mine, Saith the Lord” (Romans
12:19) is presented both as an example of what has occurred already
and of what may yet occur: the army has been the instrument of God’s
vengeance against Him, but it may yet be the object of that vengeance
itself. Once more, Poole manages to play her metaphoric game elegantly,
so as to establish a parallelism between victorious revolutionaries and
conquering kings: the latter often provoked “divine displeasure” in their
conquests, even though these may be legitimate; in the same way, the
revolution carried out by the army may have been fair, but to go further
would be an act of vengeance, and it would mount to replacing and
disobeying God’s will. All this is subtly brought together at the end by
the reappearance of Poole’s key metaphor of unity and participation, the
idea of the “body of the people”, that body of which both Charles I and
the army are “helpers”, and of which Poole herself is a “member”. It is
her membership in that body, after all, that has authorized her to speak
in the first place: in the end, the whole of Poole’s political discourse is
subtly brought back to the notions of common purpose and union in
the participation of the state that had articulated her vision, and which
are at the root of her own prophetic authority. In spite of her nimble
manipulation of biblical echoes, conceptual parallelisms and traditional
theories of authority and subordination, Poole’s advice went unheard.

Notes
1 John Lilburne, An Agreement of the People of England (London: printed
for R. Smithhurst, 1648), 3. For recent accounts of revisionist and post-
revisionist scholarship on Leveller political ideas, in particular their reliance
on army factions and separatist congregations, see Philip Baker and Elliot
Vernon (eds.), The Agreements of the People, the Levellers, and the Con-
stitutional Crisis of the English Revolution (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2012), 19; Rachel Foxley, The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the
English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); for
seventeenth-century urban popular politics and rebellion, see Andy Wood,
Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (London:
Palgrave Macmillan 2002), 82-170.
2 Elizabeth Poole, A Vision, Wherein is Manifested the Disease and Cure
of the Kingdome, Being the Summe of what was delivered to the General
Councel of the Army, December 29, 1648, Together with a Copie of what
was delivered in writing the fifth of this present January (London, 1648).
80 Politicum
3 Teresa Feroli in Political Speaking, 68, suggests that Poole may have been
brought before the Council by either Colonel Rich or General Fairfax, since
both men were interested in preserving the King’s life; Ian Gentles marks
the same point in The New Model Army (London: Blackwell, 1994), 301;
Manfred Brod in “Politics and Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England:
The Case of Elizabeth Poole”, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned
with British Studies Studies 31:3 (1999):398, supports this view drawing
from the facts that Colonel Rich interrogated Poole after her second vision
and that Thomasine Pendarves mentions a “Colonel Reeth”, a name which
is homophonic with “Rich”; David Underdown in Pride’s Purge: Politics
and the Puritan Revolution (London: Harper Collins, 1985), 182, and
Marcus Nevitt in “Elizabeth Poole Writes the Regicide”, Women’s Writing
9:2 (2002): 235ff, point at either Cromwell or Ireton as sponsors of Poole’s
appearance, although evidence of this is not conclusive; Susan Wiseman in
Conspiracy and Virtue, 144, leans toward Lilburne’s sponsorship.
C.H. Firth, The Clarke Papers, Vol. 2 (London: printed for the Camden
Society, 1894), 164-66.
Ibid., 166.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (London: Penguin Classics,
2002 [1651]), 286. “Conquest, is not the Victory itself; but the Acquisition
by Victory, of a Right, over the persons of men [...]Comquest (to define it) is
the Acquiring of the Right of Sovereignty by Victory”.
Marchamont Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth of England, Stated
(London: printed for E. Blackmore and R. Lowndes, 1650), ch. 4.
8 Firth, The Clarke Papers, 167.
9 Ibid., 167.
10 Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007), 18.
11 Mercurius Pragmaticus, Tuesday, 26 Dec. 1648—Tuesday, 9 Jan. 1649.
Lig John Lilburne et al., A Plea for Common Right and Freedom (London:
printed for Ja. and Jo. Moxon, 1648), 6.
13 Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue, 148.
14 See Ann Hughes, “Gender and Politics in Leveller Literature”, in Politi-
cal Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England, eds. Susan
D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1995), 162-88.
Elizabeth Poole, Thomasine Pendarves, An Alarum of War given to the
Army and to their High Court ofJustice (so called) revealed by the Will of
God in a Vision to E. Poole (London, 1649).
Thomasine Pendarves, An Alarum of War, 9.
Ibid., 10.
An [other] Alarum of VVar, Given to the Army, and to their High Court of
Justice (so called) by the will of God; revealed in Elizabeth Pooll, sometime
a messenger of the Lord to the Generall Councell, concerning the cure ofthe
land, and the manner thereof (London, 1649).
Lo Manfred Brod, “Elizabeth Poole”, ODNB, accessed October 2, 2015,
doi,10.1093/ref:odnb/47110.
20 Bernard Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century
English Millenarianism (London: Faber, 2008 [1972]), 93.
21 See Joseph Ivimey, The Life of Mr. William Kiffin (London: printed for the
author, 1811), 33.
ey Stephen Wright, The Early English Baptists, 1603-1649 (Rochester, NY:
Boydell & Brewer, 2006), 12-20.
 Confronting Parliament with the word 81
23 William Kiffin, A Briefe Remonstrance of the Reasons and Grounds of
the People Commonly Called Anabaptists, for their Separation (London:
printed and published for publike information, 1645), 2-15.
24 Ibid., 11.
25 Rachel Adcock, Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture,
1640-1680 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 3-9.
26 Pendarves, An Alarum, 9.
27 Richard Collings (ed.), The Weekly Intelligencer of the Common-wealth
(London: printed for R.C., 1653), 930.
28 Maureen Bell, “Seditious Sisterhood: Women Publishers of Opposition Lite-
rature at the Restoration”, in Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in
Early Modern Writing, eds. Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen, and Suzanne
Trill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 190.
29 CSPD, May (?) 1668. Petition of Elizabeth Poole of the Mint, Southwark,
now prisoner in the Gatehouse, to the King, for release. SP 29/239 f.121.
30 B.R. White, The English Baptists of the Seventeenth Century (London:
Baptist Historical Society, 1996), 67.
31 Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford (eds.), Women in Early Modern
England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 144.
32 See article 9 of the 1677 Confession of Faith: “The way appointed by Christ
for the Calling of any person, fitted, and gifted by the Holy Spirit, unto the
Office of Bishop, or Elder, in a Church, is, that he be chosen thereunto by
the common suffrage of the Church itself; and Solemnly set apart by Fasting
and Prayer, with imposition of hands of the Eldership of the Church, if there
be any before Constituted therein; And of a Deacon that he be chosen by the
like suffrage, and set apart by Prayer, and the like Imposition of hands”.
33 Victoria Kahn, “Margaret Cavendish and the Romance of Contract”, in
Feminism and Renaissance Studies, ed. Lorna Hutson (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 288-94.
34 Barbara Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1997), 162-64.
35 Adcock, Baptist Women’s Writings, 51; Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography: ora
Description of the Heretickes and Sectaries of these Latter Times (London:
printed by M. Okes, 1645), 13. Gillespie, Domesticity, 119-23.
36 Marcus Nevitt, “Elizabeth Poole Writes the Regicide”, Women’s Writing
9:2 (2002), 233-48.
37 Manfred Brod, “A Radical Network in the English Revolution: John Pordage
and His Circle, 1646-1654”, The English Historical Review 119:484 (2004):
1230-53.
38 Gillespie, Domesticity, 115-65; Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue, 143-78.
39 To Xeiphos td Marty6n, or A Brief Narration of the Mysteries of State
Carried on by the Spanish Faction in England (The Hague: printed by
Samuel Brown, 1651); The English-Devil: or Cromwel and his Monstruous
Witch Discover'd at Whitehall (London: printed by Robert Wood, 1660).
40 A Brief Narration, 69.
41 Ibid., 70.
42 Ibid., 70.
43 For Dorothy Ludlow, “Shaking Patriarchy’s Foundations: Sectarian Women
in England 1641-1700”, in Triumph Over Silence: Women in Protestant
History, ed. Richard L. Greaves (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985),
(Pay
44 A Brief Narration, 70.
45 Ibid., 71.
82 Politicum
46 See T. M. Lawrence, “Thomas Goodwin”, ODNB, accessed November 15,
2015, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10996.
47 A Brief Narration, 71.
48 Elizabeth Poole, A Vision: wherein is Manifested the Disease and Cure
of the Kingdome. Being the summe of what was delivered to the Generall
Councel of the Army, Decemb. 29.1648. Together with a true copie of
what was delivered in writing (the fifth of this present January) to the said
Generall Conncel [sic], of divine pleasure concerning the King in reference
to his being brought to triall, what they are therein to do, and what not,
both concerning his office and person (London, 1648), A2r.
49 For the whole Remonstrance, see Puritanism and Liberty, being the Army
Debates (1647-9) from the Clarke Manuscripts with Supplementary
Documents, selected and edited with an Introduction by A.S.P. Woodhouse
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), November, 16, 1648.
Poole, A Vision, A2r.
Ibid., A2r.
Ibid., 4.
Poole [Pooll], Elizabeth, An [other] Alarum of War Given to the Army and
to the High Court ofJustice (London, 1649), 2.
Ibid., 12.
Firth, The Clarke Papers, 151.
Poole, A Vision, A2.
Si Firth, The Clarke Papers, 154.
58 Ibid., 154.
52 Poole, A Vision, 6.
60 Thomasine Pendarves, “The Copy of a Letter as it was sent from T.P. a friend
of Mrs. Elizabeth Poole, To the Congregations of Saints, walking in fellow-
ship with Mr. William Kiffin”, in An Alarum of War (London, 1649), 13.
61 Firth, The Clarke Papers, 164.
62 Poole, A Vision, A2.
63

Poole, Another Alarum, 1.

Ibid, 9325.99:
bide),
Ibid., 16.
72: Ibid., 15.
73 Ibid., 14.
74 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
76 Poole, A Vision, 5.
77 Ibid., 6.
78 Anne Laurence, Women in England 1500-1760 (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1994), 240.
7? Poole, A Vision, 5.
80 Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 140.
81 Poole, A Vision, 9.
4 Politically incorrect prophecy

The political narrative included in Another Alarum of War, the tract

published after the execution of the King, is coherent with the principles
stated in A Vision. Most of the text of Another Alarum is no more than
another enunciation of the same arguments that were made in the earlier
text. Thus, the metaphor of the body politic is revisited, and its use is
exactly the same as it was in the previous text. The only difference is that
the holy matrimony is now evoked after it has been finally broken, after
the wife has turned unlawfully against her husband. But there is a new
discursive element in this text, one that appears only in its final pages
and which has both political and religious implications: the accusation
of idolatry that is leveled against the army leaders.
Poole’s discourse here comes much closer to a central aspect in
Protestant tradition. The accusation of idolatry had been reiterated
on many occasions since the beginning of the English Reformation
to the Revolution.! The initial reason for this is the return to crypto-
Catholicism in several areas of England during the reign of Charles I,
and the return to ceremonialism that had been the hallmark of William
Laud’s tenure as archbishop. Since this had involved a physical reloca-
tion of altars in the churches, and the use of rails to distance the altars
from the congregation, radical and grassroots groups had interpreted
those moves as a return to the making of idols and statues and a re-
treat to pre-Reformation worship. Samuel Chidley, son of the Leveller
prophetess Katherine Chidley, defended the freedom of ‘conventicles’ by
considering that meeting in a church proper was an act of “popish idola-
try”.* An anonymous tract, The Examiner Defended, distinguished bet-
ween religious and moral idolatry, the former being the fear of nations to
worship false deities, and the latter all kinds of personal “goings out of
the heart” such as “pride, self-love or ambition”, while the clergyman
and anti-paedobaptist John Tombes in Anthropolatria expounded on
the different kinds of “sin of glorying” in men.* The iconoclasm of the
seventeenth century encompassed an inclusive notion of idolatry that
allowed radical preachers to put the emphasis on the fallen condition of
humanity. Therefore, the real danger for the Reformed Christians was
not so much the overt worship of physical figures but the various forms
84 Politicum

of dependence on the goods of this world, as opposed to trust in Provi-

dence and Scripture. John Milton prefigured in Eikonoklastes a modern
notion of iconoclasm in stating that the disposition to attach divinity to
any person, institution, or material good was idolatrous.° In his study
of iconoclasm, Ernest B. Gilman Henry singles out the Nonconform-
ist view of the early seventeenth-century scholar and clergyman Henry
Ainsworth, and argues that, because of his post-lapsarian tendency to
sin, man’s “inmost affections are most deeply and continually infected
with this vice, and addicted to it”, since he constantly tries to imagine
new gods according to his own capacity.°
Elizabeth Poole’s approach to idolatry is consistent with this latter
perspective. The Army Council has been guilty of worshipping their
own capacities too much. They have built “images” for themselves.
Poole clarifies that she uses this term “to say, as every man hath imag-
ined to himselfe something more desirable than another”, and they have
therefore fallen into an idolatry of the mind, more dangerous than one
based only on the use of the senses. Among these forms of idolatry,
Poole mentions institutional practices, secular and sacred (“state poli-
cies”, “religious ordinances”, “orders”), and also forms of intellectual
and spiritual life (“faiths”, “lights”, “knowledges”): all of these have
been appropriated by the army in its attempt to become entirely self-
sufficient, impervious, or indifferent to the advice or the intervention
of others—including Poole herself—who might speak in the name of
God. This has all become evident through the execution of the king:
the army has gone beyond its province and has built an idol out of its
“beautifull pretences”, and then it has “curiously wrought (it) over with
needle worke, very costly”—notice the implicit reference to the ancient
Catholic practice of decorating the images of saints. The political icons
that the army has erected are, specifically, its “orders” to fix the complex
movements of the Lord into a simple “mould” that it could control), its
“ordinances” (thinking that they could “be not further improved by the
Lord”), and their “state policies” in which God was “beseeched”, but
whose resolutions, and whose justice “had been concluded on before
in your breasts”.’ These have been different forms of abusing power
revealed in the very act of regicide. All of them can be considered, there-
fore, as “images graven unto your selves”, that “shall be broken to pieces
in the day of the Lord”.®
The language of iconoclasm here is not invoked to support the cleans-
ing, purifying mission of the revolutionaries, but rather it is used to
accuse a distinguished group within them: the army itself, perceived
here as guilty of idolatry and the worship of impure icons. Milton’s
Eikonoklastes presents the execution of the King as a major act of icon-
oclasm, the destruction of the greatest idol, and the completion of the
historical process of the Reformation in England. For Poole, the King is
the victim, and the army soldiers are cast as idolaters. The language of
 Politically incorrect prophecy 85
iconoclasm bolsters her own authority. The constant implication in the
last pages of her tract is that the army’s idolatry of their own capacities
has led it to ignore her advice, and that listening to her voice would have
kept them on their proper role, both spiritually and politically. We are
confronted with one of the most original features of Poole’s intervention
in the regicide debate: the notion of “icon”, with all its connotations of
paganism and regression to a Catholic frame of mind, is taken away
from the figure of the King and displaced on to the mind of the army of-
ficers. Rhetorically, this casts them as a regressive force that is halting the
progress of the English Revolution and entering into modes of thought
that are rooted in the old, pre-reformed traditions. The discourse is as-
tutely organized so as to insist on the mental nature of this idolatry: even
though the regicide has been the proof of the army’s moral downfall,
and the cause for the very existence of Another Alarum itself, the figure
of the King is not mentioned at all in the last four pages of the tract, as
Poole concentrates on the moral state of her audience. The prophet is
treading on a very fine line: she rewrites the discourse on idolatry so as
to become an iconoclast herself, contributing to the destruction of the
“graven images” that the army has built in their self-regard, but care-
fully manages to avoid any undue idealization or panegyric of the King
after his execution. Any hint of royalist nostalgia for the Caroline period
is thus in its place. Even though the prophet is reproaching the army for
its actions and lamenting them, she is still most firmly on their side.
In the final analysis, Poole attributes the cause of the regicide to the sin
that the Protestant tradition had always seen as the root cause of idolatry:
pride. It is because of this that the text concludes with a reminder of the
final justice of God, who will “bring down the Mountaines and exalt
the Vallies”? so as to clarify where true authority remains: any attempt
to reach toward self-exaltation will ultimately be punished, whether it
comes from the monarch or from those that have executed him. The final
Postscript returns, in its very final lines, to the theme of kingship, but
relocating the notion entirely, and firmly, in the sphere of spirituality:

There is none in Heaven or Earth, that I desire in comparison of thee;

whose soninuall prayer is in faith and confidence, let thy Kingdome
come, and thy will be done in Earth as it is in Heaven; rejoycing in
this, that that onely which can be shaken must be done away...The
Lord will maintaine the Cause of the just: Thy fellow sufferer in the
Kingdome of the patience of Christ, Elizabeth Poole.!®

The regicide has brought the “cause of the just” to a crisis, but the cause
moves forward and its ultimate resolution will clarify the true hierarchy
underlying, and surpassing, all human affairs: the “Kingdom of the
patience of Christ”. The admonition “let thy kingdom come” is not only
a neutral quote from the Lord’s prayer, but a reminder of the radical,
86 Politicum

revolutionary hope that is still shared both by Poole and the army: the
active expectation of the moment when all earthly kingdoms will pass
away before the true one. In the final analysis, Poole was no more a roy-
alist than were her “fellow sufferers” from the army.
Several of the aspects figuring prominently in Poole’s short prophetic
output point to a stalwart intervention in the public space. This inter-
vention can be seen as occurring already in the very nature of her pro-
phetic vision: both in A Vision and in Another Alarum of War, the
political context takes precedence over the individual experience of the
prophetess, and the historical occasion determines both the form and
the content of the prophecy. The visionary material in her tracts is in
itself brief, almost subdued, but it becomes the basis for the political
discourse that Poole offers to the army, and which is developed at length
in both works.
Poole’s performance as a prophet stems from an awareness that she is
addressing an audience of army officers and the need to build a public
persona fit for the occasion. The prophetic character that she adopts in
each case is specifically attuned to the circumstances in which she inter-
venes, immediately before and after the regicide. In the first occurrence,
she introduces herself both as a “fellow sufferer” with the army officers,
and as a “member” of the body of the state who is personally afflicted
by a political crisis. Other elements contribute to situating Poole’s work
in an area that partakes not only in spirituality, but also in a sense of pa-
triotism and public conscience: we have seen that she repeatedly invokes
the faith of the army officers, their judgement, and their reason. Eventu-
ally, Poole herself comes to justify her second intervention in the regicide
debate on these grounds. These aspects, along with the predominance
of Poole’s political discourse over her visionary capacity, situate her
work in an intermediate position between the religious and the secular.
The importance that Avery, Warren, Pope, or Poole granted to personal
conscience, correct reasoning, and duty toward the general good make
their work stand out among the legacy of seventeenth-century women
prophets.
Even if Poole was, to a certain extent, manipulated by members of her
Baptist environment, she was likewise directly engaged in the creation
of a public response to the regicide. Before it occurred, she articulated
the voice of those revolutionary factions that were against it, and, after
it had taken place, she was able to build a clear accusation against the
army, playing on themes (the dangers of idolatry, especially) that had
previously been popular in radical discourses. This entails no less than a
first-hand participation in the creation of forms of opinion that were not
directly sponsored by the state and sought to influence the direction of
state politics. Poole in particular was aware of her engaging in this kind
of opinion-making: all the references she makes to her own authority,
and the continued vindication of all the “others” that may have been
 Politically incorrect prophecy 87
given the grace of God and deserve to be heard, involve a bid for the
opening of areas of political debate.
Despite her relatively privileged platform in her works, Poole had to
justify her public interventions on the basis of her visionary status. The
implicit vindication of her capacity in Another Alarum of War, in the
face of open disregard, shows that she was well aware of the gender con-
straints that conditioned her audience’s response. When Colonel Deane
discredits her authority as a prophetess, implying that her anti regicidal
discourse could not come from God, Poole is ashamed neither of the
complex nuances of her prophetic utterance nor of its rationale. Her per-
sonalized discourse has conflated her prophetic and authorial self, where
listeners no longer know when the former ends and the latter begins.
Elizabeth Poole’s persuasive voice had permeated earthy politics from
the altar of prophecy.
Women who showed political awareness about state matters in their
writings were not so exceptional cases in the 1640s and later in the
Interregnum and Restoration with Quaker women campaigning against
payment of tithes.!! The mandate of prophecy allowed women to par-
take in a political culture in which public matters were verbalized in the
language of religion. A closer look into a variety of texts by women who
were politically aware shows that prophecy was not necessarily tied to
a specific cause or to a radical agenda. Its mandate to make itself verbal
and heard promoted a public function of prophecy and a message of
political change, since collective order and well-being reflected a corre-
spondence with the divine.
Marcus Nevitt noted that political agency was not the privilege of
gifted women writers or those with a strong presence in radical poli-
tics, as the large number of women who sold or produced pamphlets
shows.!* To the assumption that seventeenth-century politics needed
religion as much as religion needed a political discourse, we should
add that prophecy was the language that legitimized both before the
separation between church and state took place. Megan Matchinske
pointed out that the transition from state as monarchy to state as re-
public occurring in the 1640s is one in which “state subjects, instead
of seeing themselves as beholden to a ruling body outside and above,
embodied in the King, symbolically become the state (viaapa tliaments
obliged to defend it as they would defend themselves”.’” In this re-
spect, women’s prophetic writings shared a common ground with their
male fellow citizens who did not prophesy, but nevertheless articu-
lated politics through a religious discourse. Robert Aylett considered
prophecy a worthy attribute of women who were also ladies, when
he dedicated his Devotions to Lady Anne Pierpoint, daughter to the
“Tord Marquisse of Dorchester”.!4 In his Discourse of the Liberty of
Prophesying, Jeremy Taylor adopted the pragmatic view that allow-
ing a variety of public worship was the best way to avoid mischiefs
88 Politicum

through arguments: “Give Toleration to disagreeing persons, whose

opinions by faire meanes cannot be altered, for if the persons be con-
fident, they will serve God according to their persuasions”.!° Hav-
ing different “opinions” as Taylor wrote, shouldn’t be a problem if
these serve God. His views contrast with the flurry of tracts around
that same time about the dangers of religious separatism, since they
“usurp Ministry” and allow the preaching of “lay people”, including
women.!® Fifth monarchists and Baptists were not always comfortable
with women’s prophesying when it resembled preaching, even though
this potential conflict in the ‘churches’, on account of St Paul’s well-
known piece of advice to the Corinthians,” did not prevent them from
printing their prophecies.!® Sir Henry Vane, writing in a Republican
and Puritan context, also expressed his views on a toleration that at-
tempted to separate church from state, although both were still myste-
riously related through a meritocracy of the spirit. After defining the
Word of God as a treasure, he recommends the reader not to judge the
“earthiness of the vessel” through which that word is expressed. “My
design having been more to intend the knowledge of things, than the
elegancy of words” in his “opening of mystical and dark prophecies”
for the sake of discovering their spiritual meaning. Sir Vane did not
claim to be moved by a spirit but he adopted the role of a prophet-
interpreter who penned the development of spiritual truths: “Know,
that it is not to exclude thereby their literal and historical sense, but
to show how well both may stand together. In which case, such essays
deserve to be born with, considering how much of the one sort is made
extant by many pens already, and how little of the other”.!? Spiritual
revelation is thus inscribed in history, and Sir Vane invoked “the need
of these times to reveal the scriptures of the prophets, according to the
commandment of the everlasting God, made known to all nations for
the obedience of fait”.??
The social normalization of prophecy, particularly in the revolutionary
decades, does not detract from the fact that women’s prophetic speech
displayed its own idiosyncratic and notable set of rhetorical devices, in-
tellectual reasoning, and literary skills. The fact that we come across
‘bad’ and ‘good’ prophecies in the archives challenges the assumption of
uniformity and spontaneity that has often tinged our approach to these
texts as being the rantings of religious enthusiasts.
If prophecy was the language of politics and spirituality in much of
the seventeenth century, women’s powers of persuasion were also put to
the test when their divine message to the world was intertwined with
gender concerns, self-defense, or a sophisticated language. As we shall
see in the next chapters, prophesying for many women was the closest
they could get to a form of ministry on whose behalf they produced,
performed, and ultimately owned the word.
 Politically incorrect prophecy 89
Notes
1 For a recent study of idolatry in the period, see Margaret Aston, Broken
Idols of the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2015); see also Aston, England’s Iconoclasts: Laws Against Images (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1988).
2 Samuel Chidley, Thunder from the Throne of God against the Temples of
Idols (London, 1653), 3-4.
3 Anon., The Examiner Defended (London: printed by James Cottrel, 1652),
45-47.
4 John Tombes, Anthropolatria (London: printed for G. Miller, 1645).
5 Barbara K. Lewalski, “Milton and Idolatry”, Studies in English Literature,
1500-1900, 43:1 (2003), 214.
6 Ernest B. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 140.
7 Poole, Another Alarum, 14.
8 Ibid., 15.
2 Thids, 2:
10 Ibid., 18.
11 For Quaker women petitions to the Rump Parliament, see Catie Gill, Women
in the Seventeenth-century Quaker Community (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005),
90-92.
12 Marcus Nevitt, Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary
England 1640-1660 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), 7-8.
13 Megan Matchinske, Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 130.
14 Robert Aylett, Devotions: A Good Womans and The Humble Mans Prayer
(London: printed for Abel Roper, 1655), sig. A2.
15 Jeremy Taylor, A Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying (London: printed
for R. Royston, 1647), 22.
16 Anon., Tub-Preachers Overturn’s (London, 1647), 1.
17 1 Cor. 14:34, “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not per-
mitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience,
as also saith the law”.
18 Phillis Mack, Visionary Women (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1992), 107; Elizabeth Bouldin, Women Prophets and Radical Protestantism
in the British Atlantic World 1640-1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2015), 26; Adcock, Baptist Women, 1.
19 Sir Henry Vane, The Retired Mans Meditations of the Mysterie and Power
of Godliness (London: printed by R.W., 1655), sig. A3-4.
20 Ibid., sig.A3 quoting Rom. 16:26.
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Part II

Protean feminisms
5 Prophecy and personal
conscience

After the death of her merchant first husband, the nonconformist

Hannah Allen pondered about the relationship between the carnal and
the spiritual, concluding that “the Soul of Man hath a singular affection
for its own Body”.! She had been prone to melancholy and ill-health
since childhood, but her widowhood worsened her disposition. Apart
from her connection by marriage to the Minister John Shorthose, who
comforted her, and her relation with a network of Puritan friends
through Hannah’s second husband, Charles Hatt, there is no evidence
of Hannah’s active prophesying or taking part in a congregation. She
sought to depict her soul’s journey from dejection to spiritual joy, even
though it took her several decades to dispel her melancholy and clean her
blood and humours, the “soul’s organs”, through Scripture reading and
the purification of her heart through faith. “The Christian’s life is not a
life of sense but of faith. We walk by faith and not by sight”, Allen wrote
paraphrasing 2 Corinthians 5:7 as a direct charge against idolatry.* Her
work followed the core narrative structure of a Puritan autobiography,
the progression from a depraved life of despair that included suicidal
attempts and truculent thoughts about damnation, to one of election.
Allen also demonstrated a particular concern with the actual workings
of the soul and the body in preparing the individual for salvation as well
as her agency in it. After an orphic comparison of the soul to a skillful
musician who cannot play any pleasant melody with a broken instru-
ment, Allen defined election as a state in which one is at peace with God,
who grants “all understanding into the Believer’s soul”.° Her approach
to adjusting the body and mind to faith, which requires “feeding upon
the all-sufficient merits of an unseen Jesus”, revealed a concern with the
role of the individual in the mental discipline that actually facilitated
choice. At the end of her seventy-three pages record, she described the
gradual receding of her melancholic humour. As a result, God could
“convince her by degrees” that her delusions and temptations were from
Satan. Even though Allen’s text can be read as a case study on depres-
sion,’ the warning tone of her soteriology emphasize the corporeal and
psychological state of the individual as a key to being chosen. If our body
is not balanced and well-tuned, God cannot play his music on us.
94 Protean feminisms
Similar experiential accounts were often read in congregations well
after the interregnum as evidence of election, but many women kept dia-
ries or collections of occasional verse to sustain their faith and examine
their conscience. As Patricia Crawford has argued, “religious writing
enhanced women’s self-awareness” as it often coalesced in an eclectic
and early form of autobiography, in which descriptions of domestic epi-
sodes could mingle with devotional songs or reports of election with
abundant theological commentary of prophetic undertones.° Crawford
further noted that early modern women used religious arguments and
beliefs about conscience to justify action in the public sphere.© Much of
the casuistic put forward by male clerics and women prophets concur in
that the individual must follow his or her own conscience as a reflection
of the voice of God in humans. Conscience did not stem from personal
values, but from an individual understanding of God’s will. The clergy-
man William Fenner wrote a book to teach us “how to get into the
state of grace and how to get and keep a good conscience”,’ and in it he
argued that “albeit it is always a sinne to disobey conscience though it
erre, yet it is not always a sinne to obey conscience when it erreth”.® For
Fenner the discipline of following one’s conscience keeps us attuned with
God’s dictates, even though our judgment may interpret those wrongly.
Paraphrasing Deuteronomy 13, Richard Baxter wrote that any man who
spoke against any part of God’s law was not to be believed, since God
could not speak contrary to himself. He added that [Biblical] prophets
were meant to believe in their own visions and inspirations more than
anybody else, “for God’s great extraordinary revelation was like the light,
which immediately revealed itself, and constrained the understanding to
know that it was of God”. So the full understanding of an act of divine
communication involved both the prophet recognizing that she was re-
ceiving truth (an aspect of God’s law) and the audience, who had to use
their own discernment into believing. Such a recognition precluded a no-
tion of prophecy as passive channeling, since conscience dwelled in the
interaction between understanding and revealed truth that animated the
prophet’s actions in the public realm. “Therefore prophets themselves
might be bound to more than their bare word could have bound their
hearers to”, even though for Baxter prophecies that foretold “temporal
things” were excluded for being more “a prediction than a law”, and men
were not sinning if they did not believe them. However, Baxter conceded
that “since we live in the age when most prophecies are fulfilled”, the
obligation to believe them was greater, provided these were not false.!?
Conscience would assimilate the voice of God filtered by the judgement
of reason, a process that is reminiscent of John Locke’s appeal to reason
as a moderator of passions, especially when these are meant for the pub-
lic good or come from a spiritual nature, since Christian truths do not
oppose reason and would not easily yield to conflicting interpretations
in conscience.!! Within a Puritan context, though, conscience would not
 Prophecy and personal conscience 95
be detached from an innate conception of goodness in revealed truth,
but since the rational understanding of this truth could potentially be
erroneous, correcting judgment with cases, conducts, and “directions”
might become necessary.!? John Stachniewski pointed to the difficulty
of grasping “puritanism’s experiential actuality” in narratives of spiri-
tual despair, since the reprobate-elect experience is represented and nar-
rated.!3 Most of these textual materials, though, entail a performative
function in which the reading act itself is meant to effect individual and
collective change.
Captain John Turner was very proud of his wife, Jane, when in 1653
she published a Baptist election narrative with the title Choice Experi-
ences. John’s Epistle Dedicatory acknowledged his “neer relation on the
Author” and the “public owning of the treatise” while addressing it to
their “dear Brethren at the Newcastle, Barwick and Scotland Baptists
congregations.!* He added that Jane did not express any desire to pub-
lish her 208-pages tract on the discovery and the experience of grace
as it was freely given to her by God. “Let her works praise her”, John
commended, since “you have here the labours of one of the weakest sex
which I trust will occasion you the more to give glory to God, in that his
strength appears in weakness”,!> Jane’s endeavours were presented as
an example of her spiritual superiority despite the fact that she belonged
to the lower cast of ‘women’. However offensive John’s comments may
appear to a twenty-first century reader, these might have actually autho-
rized and empowered Jane’s writing. He was praising her work from a
socially accepted position (the fact that women are ‘weak vessels’), and
it would have been more difficult for him to convince audiences of Jane’s
spiritual excellency outside this conventional frame.
Jane’s project began as a collection of notes that she had been writing
in her husband’s absence. She had intended those for her own private use
as a reminder of the Lord’s kindness toward her. She claimed not to have
thought of presenting these to a public view, but after she finished most
of the writing and showed it to her husband, he suggested be published
since it might be “profitable to some precious souls” despite the “broken,
scattering way” of her writing style and her professed “unworthiness to
be an instrument for the good of souls”. Jane acknowledged that she had
“received much of the Lord by reading”, and she realized that her tract
would help some “to walk in an untrodden path”, since she had not seen
“anything written before in the manner and method”.!® This was not
entirely true, since election narratives within a Puritan Calvinist context
flourished in the interregnum in ways which sought to interiorize the
spiritual connection with the divine, transforming the text into a conduit
for the Holy Spirit that effected change both in the individual and her
community of readers. This Part 2 pays attention to the performative
and mystically oriented elements of prophetic speech, as well as the ways
in which these interact with a degree of gender awareness that is partly
96 Protean feminisms
derived from a call to personal conscience and the expectation of being
read and heeded in the case of election narratives.
Jerald Brauer located early mystical elements in Puritanism as spring-
ing primarily from a reaction to extreme literalism, gaining strength with
Bernard of Clairvaux and medieval German mysticism.!” Francis Rous
(1580-1659) would then be a Puritan mystic in a strict sense of the term,
since he established a union with the absolute, with God itself, and not
with the Holy Spirit which, according to Brauer, would correspond to
a variety of Puritan mysticism that chimed with election narratives. As
a Psalmist and commentator of mystical marriage as a “experimentall
discovery”, Rous described the journey of the soul-bride in search for a
husband-Christ, urging the believer to see the soul as a partner of Christ.
The soul is the actual narrator of this process: “I am a spirit, though a
low one, and God who is a Spirit is the fountain of this Spirit [...] For
the Deity, and that humanity being united, make one Saviour, head and
husband of soules; and thou being married to him who is God, in him,
art also one with God”.!® Rous also employed abundant sensory meta-
phors, such as dissolving himself into the sweetness of tears in order to
unite with God.!? Brauer noted the connections of the Puritan mystical
element, especially when it was also millenarianist, with the develop-
ment of liberalism at the end of the seventeenth century.*° Rous further
articulated the social and personal relationship between man and God
(“modestly asserted”) in which “every natural man is called a micro-
cosmus, an epitome of the world in whose Conscience God hath his
throne”.?! His notion of individual liberty did not preclude social duty
when it lacked benevolence toward “publique peace”, and so “the State,
or the government thereof” would be entitled to force men to contribute
to public safety and good: “Not yet may all principles that derive them-
selves from Conscience have the benefit of this plea of Liberty”. Rous’
logic led him to adopt a semi-libertarian stance as God did not gain any-
thing by imposing a religion, “yet the State may have benefit by a forced
service”.** Hence the appeal to freedom of religious conscience under-
pinned a liberal social framework in which God acted as a promoter of
the common good in the public sphere. It would also seem to anticipate
later seventeenth-century Calvinist thought that resorted to versions of
natural theology to oppose Deistic reactions against revelation.*>
The psychoanalytical connections between mysticism and gender
have long been explored by post-structuralist feminist scholars, espe-
cially with regard to language, desire, and the body. The biblical lan-
guage the prophet employed, the raptures inspired by free grace or, later
in the century, the ‘enthusiasm’ of her revelation, as well as the bodily
reactions of the women prophets were often taken as signs of authenti-
cation of the prophetic experience in order to differentiate it from ser-
mons or lay ‘tub’ preaching—a reference to women who preached on
top of a washtub, often ridiculed in pamphlets for usurping the male
 Prophecy and personal conscience 97
ministry of preaching when moved by the spirit.24 Although women’s
prophetic speech in seventeenth-century Britain displayed a combina-
tion of ecstatic, exegetic, and autobiographical elements, the empha-
ses on each of these could vary according to the prophetic personality
of the individual, her sectarian affiliation or lack thereof. The women
surveyed in the following pages wove a highly individualized discourse
about their lives that dwelled on the private experience of grace while,
at the same time, strove to communicate it to an audience. For Hilary
Hinds, ascertaining the precise meaning and limits of the concept of
‘free grace’ was a defining issue within sectarian belief and practice,**
while Peter Lake considers it a reproduction of the “notion of the holy”
that emerged when Protestantism rejected the “sacramental world view
of traditional Catholicism”.*° In election narratives, the divine connec-
tion may occur at one point and transform the life of the individual,
who rationalizes this experience for her readers. Another variety of
spiritual Puritan autobiography involves the narration of a trance in
an immediate and sensorial manner. Some prophecies rely heavily on
mystical elements, albeit not every piece of mystical writing is prophetic
in essence. To what an extent, then, are election narratives prophetic
speech? The “problem of ecstasy” in prophecy, as Robert Wilson set
it out, has been tackled by marking a distinction between the actual
content of prophecies and the ecstatic means by which these were re-
ceived.”” While the “I” that participates in a moment of mystical union
with grace and the “I” that relays the experience and the message are
the same, the ecstatic nature of prophetic revelation would depend on
the length of this mystical union as well as the ‘when’ and the ‘how’ it is
shown to the public. Election narratives, however, challenge the duality
between revealed truth and individual knowledge by proposing a model
of prophetic speech that blurs the boundaries between revelation and its
transmission, since once an individual is touched by grace, her words
and everyday actions are imbued with the gift of spiritual truth. My
analysis looks at the parallel movements of ecstatic union and prophetic
speech as they coalesce in the prophetic text and legitimize it as a mes-
sage that fulfils both a visionary and a public function. As opposed to a
strictly mystical experience that seeks union with the divine and a ‘way’
to it, prophecy ‘finds’ revelation and explicates it. Both approaches, the
former commonly associated with Counter-reformation revealed speech,
the latter with Protestant-radical writing, share a common theological
background in which the perception of the divine is incarnated through
the agency of language, gesture, and gender. The physical exertions of
divinity are in fact made more visual and accessible in many Puritan
narratives of conversion, where the individual goes through an ordeal of
self-abjection and a test of faith that allows her to receive grace. If the
reprobate persists in seeking God despite the dire circumstances, her
perseverance will be rewarded.
98 Protean feminisms
William Perkins’ early tract and ‘dialogue’ for recognizing signs of
salvation or reprobation entitled A Treatise Tending unto a Declaration
(1589), provides the key for a practical self-examination in which the es-
tate of one’s faith is at the forefront of salvation and where “true humili-
ation” is defined as “holy desperation”.*® Decades later, John Bunyan’s
autobiography, Grace Abounding (1666), written while he was serving a
prison sentence in Bedford for being a conventicler, is the testimony of a
whole life devoted to elucidating the mystery of election which he later de-
veloped into full allegory with his celebrated The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678).
As an elect, Bunyan recognized signs of his ‘effectual calling’ in episodes
of daily life, as when he saw a group of poor women in Bedford “talking
about the things of God”.?? The realization that lowly and illiterate indi-
viduals could show a greater understanding of divinity than many schol-
ars convinced him that God’s gift of grace challenges social conventions
of good and evil, high and low, male and female. Being an elected soul
does not transform the social status of a person from base to privileged, as
being an elected woman does not grant her additional civic rights. Women
will remain the weaker sex in their physical and social bodies, albeit equal
in essence to men since in theological terms God made no sexual distinc-
tion in souls. Gender equality for women begins in the realm of the spirit,
and prophecy acts as a platform where a woman can claim her spiritual
status as a speaker of minds and souls for her own benefit and that of her
community and the world at large. Fifth Monarchist writer John Rogers
in Ohel reviewed women’s role as a moral and spiritual force according to
biblical history, proving the “reason which requires their just liberty in the
Church of Christ”?° and supporting the independence of churches within
a civil government. Rogers reminded the reader that the Church is Christ’s
wife and spouse in Rev. 19 Can. 2 and that a woman—however learned or
holy—might not preach in public (but “in private as much as she would”)
nor baptize, but she can “vote, or aske, or object, or offer anything which
concerned the whole body” by dint of being a Church-member.*! But just
when it would seem that this egalitarian vision of the sexes might find a
correspondence outside the Church walls, Rogers commented on the fact
that there is a “civill subjection to men in their aeconomical relations”
which is not servile or abusive but based on a “threefold liberty of nature,
grace and glory”.3* Thanks to Mary’s role as the mother of Christ, he
could “turn Eva to Ave” and restore women’s spiritual liberty and their
Christian equality in the Church. James Holstun invites us to understand
the intrinsic contradictions of women’s spiritual empowerment from the
viewpoint of dialectical feminism where women are gradually emanci-
pated from the social constraints of their gender in their respective con-
gregations, rather than ruling out religion altogether as being intrinsically
segregationist.°? While the latter has dominated the feminist analyses of a
first wave of studies on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women and re-
ligion, there is now a degree of critical consensus in that spiritual equality
 Prophecy and personal conscience 99
often reverberated in a greater gender awareness on earthly matters. The
particulars of how this process might have occurred has triggered a vari-
ety of collateral debates about the boundaries of domestic and public, the
limits of contract theory as a category of political enfranchisement, or the
interplay of the female body and linguistic authority in the seventeenth
century. Most of the extant case studies highlight the ways in which re-
ligious rhetoric might have effectively pointed to an authoritative notion
of a female self. In our readings of how women claim, dignify, and con-
quer their position as equal members of society we may wish to consider
that the process of patriarchal emancipation might not have run parallel
to an emancipation from religious discourse, and that the former might
have happened earlier than what the rhetoric of most seventeenth-century
women’s textualities reflect.
Most analyses of ecstatic prophets tend to interpret the subject’s ‘emp-
tiness’ of her body as a surrender or a negation of her own authority
and body control, while the opposite might well be the case. While the
practice of mortification of the flesh was prevalent in medieval mysticism,
the various degrees of physical abjection of Puritan narratives are the re-
sult of a soul-crisis and not a way in itself to the soul. However, physical
pain provokes the same purifying and humbling effect, insofar as the in-
dividual puts her faith to the test that will eventually grant salvation. The
candidate for election is in fact in control of her own decision to desist or
persist, which awards her a measure of command over her own body and
salvation. It also turns her into a prophet, a soul who lives in grace and
is capable of sharing its wisdom for the present and future well-being of
her community or her audience-readers at large. While obviously Puritans
refuse the doctrine of works, their accounts of particular election bring
up a necessary collaboration of the individual in the process of salva-
tion. Finding oneself in the throes of death intensifies the drama of faith-
seeking in hora mortis, even when one does not even realize that faith is
the key for recovery. When a blind maid visited Sarah Wight and told her
that “she did not see the depth”, Wight replied that “Christ must wash
you with clean water; he must give it and he will work, and who shall let
him”.*4 Wight was instructing the maid in letting go her resistance to the
purification of her sins with clean water, so that Christ could work on
her. Another maid acknowledged that she couldn’t believe after catching a
glimpse of God. Here, Wight confided to the girl that there was a time in
her own life when she could not believe in either God or the devil, but that
“the same power that did it for you will do it for me”. By conflating gen-
eral and particular election in a single response, Wight acknowledged the
availability of grace to anyone, provided one is not resistant to faith. “Say
thus to God”, concluded Wight to the maid: “Say turn me and I shall be
turned, the Lord saith; he heale your backslidings and love you freely”.>>
While the prophetic content of election narratives might be less con-
spicuous when it does not elaborate on political concerns or current
100 Protean feminisms
affairs, the near hagiographic stance in which the prophet is observed
and admired has not gone unnoticed by most critics. Ecstatic proph-
ecy, as with female medieval or even baroque mysticism, lends itself to
spectacle and worship, and there is certainly an exemplary component
in both the texts of election narratives and the actual public events that
they might describe. However, the main purpose of counseling and ad-
miring the prophet-elect is not to feature her as an exception but as
a token of the workings of God in humankind. There might even be
a standardizing element in the public exposure of ecstatic prophecy
that could stifle its potential subversive drive. While some late medieval
women mystics were careful not to indulge themselves in ‘raptures’ that
ecclesiastic, inquisitorial, or civic authorities could view as potentially
disruptive of spiritual and political order, seventeenth-century ecstatic
prophets might normalize—but customize—their spiritual experience
within and outside their congregations. Before the enforcement of the
Clarendon Code in the 1660s, theological truths in women’s speech
could be assimilated in the fabric of political-religious sectarianism of
apocalyptic overtones that fulfilled a public role in the creation of a
Godly nation. Women’s prophecy defied standardization, though, and
idiosyncrasies added a characteristic preaching flavor in the character of
the woman prophet.
The young Sarah Wight published The Exceeding Riches of Grace
(1647), where she recounted through a relator and editor, the Baptist
minister Henry Jessey, her life before and after receiving God’s grace in
her being. At a time of family distress after the death of her father and her
mother’s depression, Sarah began to entertain suicidal impulses and be-
came seriously ill, including the temporary loss of her eyesight and hearing
when her anxiety about her fallen condition reached a dramatic climax.
Wight did not restrain herself in self-cursing and denouncing her early
life as a reprobate where temptations assailed her and made her life a
“hell in her conscience”.*° She began to experience trances in which she
quoted Scripture, and when she was about to die after a fast of 75 days
in June 1647, she recovered her physical senses and felt a sudden peace of
spirit.” Over the next few months, Wight received the visits of members
of her congregation and others, from army wives to curious passers-by,
who were fascinated by Wight’s story and wisdom. Jessey decided to put
Wight’s experiences to good narrative use and in his “Dedicatory to the
Christian Reader” he quoted from the Gospel of John 4:30 as a reminder
of the moral and exemplary force of spiritual testimony: “And many of
the Samaritans of that city believed on him for the saying of the woman,
which testified, He told me all that ever I did”.°® The quotation is not
devoid of spiritual and gender significance. Wight might be a weak vessel
in her physical form but the metaphorical use of this Biblical passage can
be strategically appropriated to empower women in the spiritual realm
since it appeals to the recipient’s purity. This is exactly what Jessey is do-
ing: validating Wight’s experience of grace and presenting it in the form
 Prophecy and personal conscience 101
of a “conference” in which visitors ask questions to the ‘maiden’ so that
she can provide both an experience and an insight into the actual reli-
gious meaning of justification. The answer to ‘how one is cured?’ has both
theological and pragmatic implications for Jessey, since Wight’s testimony
could potentially attract more members to his congregation and enhance
its spiritual reputation. The question and answer format follows the struc-
tural pattern of many catechisms, from the texts by protestant reformer
Edmund Allen in the mid-sixteenth century to the “shorter catechisms” of
near contemporaries such as Joseph Alleine. Wight’s account, however, is
closer to a spiritual interview in which the maiden expounds on her new-
found status of elect with the assurance of a celebrity:

M Sp/rig]. | would be glad to hear, which way the Lord came in to

refresh you?
Ans. It was revealed to me that Christ was crucified for me, even
for me, the chiefest of sinners. I never had a glimpse of Christ be-
fore, and then I admired him. I saw it plainly. My greatest sin was
unbeliefe.°?

Wight’s main concern is the experiential and theological implications

of her state of grace (a free grace which God grants to particular souls,
even though her account hints at general election) for the didactic and
exemplary purpose of the reader. The details of her physical life become
irrelevant compared to her intimate connection with Christ, who adopts
the role of a bridegroom and facilitator of her trances. “Wait on God”,
recommends Wight when Mr Sprig bids her advice for those who are
“in that condition of darkness”, since the “Glorie of God supports a
soule under terror as in delivering out of terror”. Before her experience of
grace, Wight could not even find solace in reading Scripture, since “the
Letter did but kill, but God hath refreshed me in his love”.4° In 1656,
A wonderful pleasant and profitable letter written by Mris Sarah Wight
published without her explicit consent by the friend for “the use of the
afflicted” mentions that Wight’s modesty would have prevented “thus
making you publick”, which was, as the writer adds, “divinely urged
of God in many”.*! The friend, identified as R.B., adds a dedicatory
preface to Lady Fleetwood, former widow of Henry Ireton and daughter
of Oliver Cromwell. Kathleen Lynch aptly notes that the godly increas-
ingly depended on print to maintain their sense of community—across
geography and class—and mentions the possibility that R.B. was Robert
Bragge, who at that time was rector of All Hallows.*? Wight invites her
fellow sons and daughters of Sion to “experimentally witness the truth”
of both adversity and prosperity, which, like the seasons, represent the
“varieties and changes that are in the inward world of mankinde”.*? Sin
is momentary and will be done away, and once this is understood “the
pure language, the new melodious tune of joy and gladness from the
: minter 44
eee
spirit shall be onely sung, heard and known to be for ever in the saints”.
102 Protean feminisms
Notes
1 Hannah Allen, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings (London: printed
by John Wallis, 1683), D1’.
2 Ibid., D4"".
3 Ibid.
4 See Allan Ingram et al. Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long
Eighteenth Century Before Depression, 1660-1800 (London: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2011), 14; Patricia Crawford and Laura Gowing, Women’s
Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England: A Sourcebook (London and
New York: Routledge, 2000), 269.
See Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500-1720
(London and New York: Routledge, 1993); Sara Heller Mendelson, “Stuart
Women’s Diaries and Occasional Memoirs”, in Women in English Society,
1500-1800, ed. Mary Prior (London and New York: Routledge, 1985),
136-57.
Patricia Crawford, “Public Duty, Conscience, and Women in Early Modern
England”, in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century
England: Essays Presented to G.E. Aylmer, ed. John Morrill, Paul Slack,
and Daniel Woolf (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 57-76.
William Fenner, The Souls Looking Glass (Cambridge: printed by Roger
Daniel, 1640), 3v.
Ibid., 80.
Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory of aSumm of Practical Theologie
(London: printed by Robert White, 1673), 202-3. See also earlier texts by
Immanuel Bourne, The Anatomie of Conscience or a Threefold Revela-
tion (London: printed for G.E. and M.F. for Nathaniel Butter, 1623); and
Ephraim Huit, The Anatomy of Conscience or the Summe of Pauls Regen-
eracy (London: printed for I.D. for William Sheffard, 1626).
10 Baxter, Christian Directory, 202.
11 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Roger
Woolhouse (London: Penguin Classics, 1997), Book 1, 82-85.
22 See Edmund Leites, Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe
(London: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Elliot Rose, Cases of Con-
science: Alternatives open to Recusants and Puritans under Elizabeth
I and James I (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Keith Thomas,
“Cases of Conscience in Seventeenth Century England”, in Public Duty and
Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England: Essays Presented to
G.E. Aylmer, ed. John Morrill, Paul Slack, and Daniel Woolf (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1993), 29-56.
John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and
the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 52-53.
John Turner, “The Epistle Dedicatory”, in Jane Turner, Choice Experiences
of the Kind Dealings of God before, in, and after Conversion (London:
printed by H. Hils, 1653), A2.
Ibid., 6, [n.p.].
Jane ee “A Word from the Author to the Reader”, in Choice Experi-
ences, 3.
iy! Jerald C. Brauer, “Puritan Mysticism and the Development of Liberalism”,
Church History 19:3 (1950): 152.
18 Francis Rous, The Mysticall Marriage, Or Experimentall Discoveries ofthe
Heavenly Marriage betweene a Soule and her Saviour (London: printed by
I.C. for John Wright, 1653), 2, 9. Rous’ reworking of the Psalms are directed
for ‘spiritual use’. The Booke of Psalmes in English Meeter (Rotterdam:
printed for Henry Tutill, 1638), A2r.
 Prophecy and personal conscience 103
19 Francis Rous, Treatises and Meditations (London: printed by Robert White,
1657), 718-20.
20 Ibid., 154.
21 Francis Rous, The Ancient Bounds or Liberty of Conscience, Tenderly
Stated, Modestly Asserted, and Mildly Vindicated (London: printed by
M.S. for Henry Overton, 1645), A2r.
22 ibid: 712.
23 For a recent study on later developments of Calvinist thought in the late
seventeenth century, see Dewey Wallace, Shapers of English Calvinism,
1660-1714: Variety, Persistence, and Transformation (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011).
24 The anonymous short pamphlet entitled A Discovery of Six-Women Preachers
(1641) is a well-known example of popular anti-woman preaching sentiment.
25 Hilary Hinds, “Soul-Ravishing and Sin-Subduing: Anna Trapnel and the
Gendered Politics of Free Grace”, Renaissance and Reformation xxv:4
(2001): 118,
26 Peter Lake, “Feminine Piety and Personal Potency: The Emancipation of
Mrs Jane Ratcliffe”, The Seventeenth Century, Jul 1 (1987): 145.
27 Robert Wilson, “Prophecy and Ecstasy: a Reexamination”, Journal ofBib-
lical Literature 98:3 (1979): 323.
28 William Perkins, A Treatise Tending unto a Declaration Whether a Man Be
in the Estate of Damnation or in the Estate of Grace (London: printed by
R. Robinson, 1589), 42.
29 John Bunyan, “Grace Abounding”, in Grace Abounding with other Spiri-
tual Autobiographies, eds. John Stachniewski and Anita Pacheco (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008), 14.
30 John Rogers, Ohel or A Tabernacle for the Sun (London: printed for
R.I. and G. and H. Eversden, 1653), 468.
31 Ibid., 268.
32 Ibid., 472. Please note that Rogers’ pagination in the original is faulty and
moves from 500 to 461. I have kept the printed numbers on the page, regard-
less of their logical order.
33 James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution
(London: Verso, 2003), 262-64.
34 Henry Jessey, Sarah Wight, The Exceeding Riches of Grace Advanced by
the Spirit of Grace in an Empty Nothing Creature (London: printed by
Matthew Simmons for Henry Overton, 1647), 62.
35. Ibid...63.
36 Ibid., 11.
37 ibid. '31;
38 Jessey, Wight, The Exceeding Riches of Grace, 11.
39 Ibid., 88.
40 Ibid., 89.
41 Sarah Wight, A Wonderful Pleasant and Profitable Letter written by Mris
Sarah Wight to a Friend (London: Printed by James Cottrel for Richard
Moone, 1656), A4v.
42 Kathleen Lynch, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century
Anglophone World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 91.
43 Wight, A Wonderful Pleasant, Ibid., 7.
44 Ibid., 19.
6 Exposing the prophetic word

Jane Turner pursued a similar argument in her emphasis on experience

over Bible reading and interpretation. She defined as “superstitious devo-
tion” her earlier practices of psalming, book prayer, and her anxiety over
ordinances and the law. When she became acquainted with “some who
were then called Puritans”, she began to question her condition through
the intensive reading of Scriptures and attendance to sermons. However,
Jane was afflicted since she could not yet understand the real meaning of
those words until she received the “assurance of the love of God in be-
lieving the free and full pardon of all my sins”, which are of an unspeci-
fied nature. Turner’s intensity of her experience of grace was high but not
dramatically depicted. She acknowledged that she “cannot express the
joyfulness and sweetness of my condition, not being able to contain my-
self from calling the others to tell them what God had done for my soul”.!
The Gospel had not come to her in word only, “but in power”, and in that
way she learnt that “justification and sanctification are inseparable”.?
The antinomian reminiscence of overemphasizing the transforming ef-
fects of divine grace (theosis) to the point that there could not possibly be
a difference between Christ and the believer touched by grace had been
raised again as an issue of theological contention between supporters
of independent orthodox Calvinist positions, such as John Goodwin.
He was labeled as an Arminianist for questioning predestination and
allowing the possibility that the believer could lose God’s grace, and by
the early 1660s Goodwin and John Simpson, who in 1647 had become
the minister of the congregation of Allhallows-the-Great, engaged in an
antinomian disputation. Simpson had already been accused of antinomi-
anism in 1643 by the Westminster Assembly, at the request of Thomas
Gateker, who in his treatise mentioned Simpson’s influence on women
in his previous lectureship at St Dunstan’s and St Botolph, Aldgate.*
Election narratives tended to dramatize the communion of the chosen
one with Christ, creating an imperceptible distance between the divine
agent and the individual. Members of ‘antinomian congregations’ would
not define themselves as such and sought to distance themselves from
any association with the blatant antinomianism of the Ranters, which
claimed an absolute dissociation from the law. Paul Lim has elucidated
 Exposing the prophetic word 105
the close connection between antinomian and anti-Trinitarian positions
in dissenting congregations as the result of making the trinity superflu-
ous as divinity dwelled in the individual, and not of a conscious denial
of the three persons in Christ’s Godhead.» Thomas Goodwin’s eclectic
stance as independent strove to minimize the risk of antinomians justi-
fying sin—or even intimating that sin is de facto committed by Christ.
As the antinomian clergyman John Eaton (c. 1575-1630) had done ear-
lier, Simpson sought to underline the transformative nature of election
to counteract any turn toward ordinances, idolatry, or other Laudian
excesses so as to reinforce the national and millenarianist character of
election due to his commitment with the Fifth-monarchist cause.®
Turner followed the protocol of the experimental theology in Puritan
conversion narratives, where the individual welcomes her Ordo salutis
of the Holy Spirit through a series of progressive steps that reach an
epiphany of salvation from which there is no way back. Free grace, once
it is acknowledged and perceived by the subject, may trigger rapture.’
This is not the course of action that Turner takes, though, since she
opts for an inspired interpretation of her newfound experiential under-
standing of the Bible against the abstractions of rational thinking devoid
of grace. Frederick Beiser has argued that the spirit gradually became
identified with reason in the history of Puritan theology in seventeenth-
century England, through major theologians as William Perkins,
Richard Baxter, or Richard Sibbes, to meet the challenge of providing
convincing arguments for the dwelling of the spirit in the individual
against the criticisms of ‘enthusiasm’ from Quakers or Presbyterians,
for example.® This would make sense in the case of Turner, since her de-
scription of how she is experiencing election is emotionally subdued. She
articulates her findings through a series of observations often substantt-
ated by biblical referencing aimed as well at rebutting the Quakers. For
Turner, it is not confidence that makes someone right: “Persons can be
very confident on false grounds, and it is not the confidence that makes
the condition good, but the grounds for it”.? The aphorism draws a dis-
tinction between objective truth and what the audience might perceive
as the essence of godly speech: the conviction of the individual believer
that was often proffered as proof of election. With her statement, Turner
is also propping up the grounds on which her confidence is based. Her
“idolizing” of ministers had kept her from paying attention to other doc-
trines and to be led by them in spiritual matters. Personal conscience
can be misleading only if it is not imbued by grace. However, Turner is
aware of the usual charges of antinomianism that might lead to carnal
liberty. She dispatched those possible criticisms by anticipating that only
“those who are ignorant of the Free Grace of God are subject to this
mistake” since the elect individual cannot “think it the way to sin”, thus
adopting a similar stance to that of Simpson and Eaton in which justi-
fication “enlarges the heart to God-ward”, free from the terrors of the
106 Protean feminisms
law.!° Turner continued on these lines by adding that the complete free
grace of God makes it incompatible with sinning against him, whereas if
“there is only the notion of it, there is the greatest advantage to Satan”.!!
She distinguished an intellectual knowledge of grace from the state of
experiencing it, since before the Holy Spirit descends on us we remain in
ignorance of true Christian duty and are prone to think that “bondage
is not only liberty but a great privilege”.!* Turner’s argument appears
to be ultra-prophetic, in the sense that she is distrustful of the spiri-
tual convenience and reliability of listening to “glorious things, where
there is no promise of a blessing from God”.!? She marks that the sense
of hearing is a key to staying on the path of the chosen since “strange
doctrine” can be a hindrance. “As faith comes by hearing”, Turner con-
tinues, “so there may be a hearing that tends to the prejudice of faith”.
Once achieved, faith has to be preserved since it is the evidence of God’s
grace in the individual. The sensorial element is important in the life of
the elect, since “public hearing out of the Church of God, though some
do iudge it their liberty and privilege so to do, I must needs confess
[ cannot iudge”.!4 For Turner, the exposure to the word of God, whether
in a sermonic or prophetic context, might be a hindrance if there is no
guarantee that God’s blessing will animate those words. Her distrust of
other people’s spiritual speech reinforces that of her own congregation
or even fall in solipsism. However, it may also point to some antinomian
elements that were not uncommon in congregations that, like the parti-
cular Baptists, leaned toward particular election. Even though Choice
Experiences and most election narratives emphasized the unworthiness
of the subject to deserve God’s grace, his or her spiritual evolution put
them in a position that favored choice. Turner was in fact addressing and
setting an example of election for her Baptist congregation.!> Her des-
perate search for spiritual meaning in life, her awareness of sin, and, in
the most dramatic cases, her attempts at suicide, act as a prelude to sal-
vation, since no one can be saved if she has not previously been aware of
the miseries of a reprobate life. The Saints Legacies (1654), attributed to
Prophetess Anne Fenwick, gave precise and didactic instructions on how
to understand God’s voice, how to overcome suicidal impulses when the
individual is fallen, or how to satisfy one’s desire of grace when there is
none. Imitating the structure of catechisms, Fenwick promised to fellow
Saints that through faith God does not allow “to suffer thee to fall for
ever”.!® Her prayers and ecstatic prophecies have been lost, and most of
the content in Saints Legacies circulated in manuscript form well before
it was collected and printed “for private use, but published for the com-
fort of God’s people”.!” David Como notes the coincidence in the title
with Anna Trapnel’s A Legacy for Saints, also collected for Trapnel and
published in 1654. This allows Como to argue that women prophets
within their own congregations would often adopt the role of preachers,
challenging the general view that they were essentially followers with
 Exposing the prophetic word 107
no pastoral influence.!® His point defies generalization, but rightly aims
at the precise influence and scope of women’s prophecies that might
be gleaned from their content as much as from their agency and voice.
Women engaged in discussions of theological significance in their pro-
phetic speeches and tracts, since prophecy granted them a degree of sty-
listic freedom and a voice that would speak in various forms of ecstatic
verse and prose.
Seeking spiritual meaning before election is a sign of human agency
that shows an eagerness and predisposition towards receiving grace.
Hilary Hinds reminded us that the precise meaning of free grace, as
well as the limits of its application, was one of the defining traits of
seventeenth-century religious history, whether in a sectarian or moder-
ate Protestant context, since it touches on the need to justify faith and
therefore election.!” This is in line with the nuances of argument that
we encounter when reading women’s election narratives: underneath
the thread of despair, searching, and election, they display a highly per-
sonalized way of explicating and justifying grace. Life-writing provides
empirical evidence to substantiate the fact—or the hypothesis—of salva-
tion, while dramatic and sensorial elements are included to reinforce the
presence of the holy ghost. Grace and election required expressiveness
beyond the one conveyed exclusively with biblical referring and typo-
logy. Nigel Smith pointed out the similar position that Catholic mysti-
cism and Puritan spiritual writings shared when the latter pushed the
boundaries of their own spiritual experiences, both psychologically and
politically, and emphasized direct divine inspiration. Diane Watt and
Nancy Bradley Warren have traced continuities between medieval mys-
tics and their seventeenth-century counterparts, considering that the
differences between prophecy and mysticism mostly have to do with
the vantage point of the one who is promoting the revealed experience.
I concur with Watt that a prophet is one who speaks for God, someone
who may predict the future and aims at making public his or her revela-
tion, and that a mystic is one who “attains direct communion with God
and whose revelations are concerned with the way of perfection”.*° This
definition alone would dissuade us from drawing comparisons between
revealed speech in two broad confessional distinct spaces: Protestant and
Catholic. At the same time, when reading Puritan spiritual autobiogra-
phies, and election narratives in particular, scenic similarities between
these two methods of expressing revelation emerge. Even though their
commonalities have not been explored at length in the critical literature,
Watt recognizes “residual elements” of Catholicism and medieval proph-
ecy in some seventeenth-century spiritual writing, and Nancy Bradley
refers to an “incarnational textuality” which has “porous boundaries”
among readers, writers, and the textual corpus.*! Tracts on devotional
prayer and meditation by ‘affectionate’ Puritans who focused on spiri-
tual guidance and comfort, such as Isaac Ambrose, Joseph Hall’s Arte of
108 Protean feminisms
Divine Meditation (1606) or Lewis Bayly The Practice of Pietie (1609)
underwent several editions throughout the century and offered specific
advice that suited ‘experimental’ Christians. Their discussion of men-
tal prayer and visual contemplative methods introduced continental
practices of devotion that influenced English religious writing, includ-
ing verse and prophecy.?* They sought to engage the individual in a
discipline that made him open to grace, while describing the virtues of
discovering election and living as a reborn Christian. While faith is obvi-
ously a pre-requisite, the emphasis is placed on a systematic description
of the purifying stages of the relationship between the body and the soul
that prepares for a godly life. Richard Baxter and his casuistic expounds
on the necessary “qualities to enjoy the Glory of the Saints’ personal
perfection” that, once it is achieved, stimulates the senses to experience
the joy of God.?3 The six hundred pages of Isaac Ambrose’s Looking
into Jesus are devoted to the “duty” that he called “looking into Jesus”.
After a debilitating illness, Ambrose realized that Jesus had restored his
life and that his divine agency had instilled in him an affection toward
Jesus’ image. He resolved to search in “the Scriptures, several authors
and in my own heart” about the “spiritual comforts” of looking unto
Jesus.** He defined the process as a “mental” and “experimental look-
ing” that enlightens understanding “with some measure of speculative
sight in spiritual and heavenly mysteries”.7> This looking into the mind
and also the heart allows the individual to “see spiritual things” and
be affected by them, so that “we desire, love, believe, joy and embrace
them with the ultimate purpose to become grateful co-participants in
Jesus’ work of “salvation in eternity”.2° Ambrose’s Prima insists as well
that the primary stage in the new birth of the believer is prayer, “which
first brings thee to God’s throne and then to the new birth”, and recom-
mends crying “with the spouse of the Canticles” in order to rush the
wind of the spirit and its grace.*” To his description of the steps that
uplift man from a state of a regeneration from sin and misery to desire
and final obedience to Christ, Ambrose adds “humility” or the state of
being humbled.”° Joseph Hall in his collection of personal meditations
and songs, Breathings of the Devout Soul, complains about the inade-
quate condition of his wretched heart that is the result of his “natural
pride so deep rooted in me, for could I be sensible enough of my own un-
worthiness, I should think everything too good and too much for me”.2?
The near Franciscan rhetoric of humilitas in reformed and non-reformed
churches and sects from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be
attributed to the entrenched presence of Augustinian philosophy as it
permeated Puritan mysticism through the Ignatian reading of Thomas
a Kempis, with its devotional line of mental prayer and spiritual exer-
cises, or through the more mystically and abstract oriented branch of
Niclaesian and Behmenist interpretation with their focus on the imma-
nence of God in the individual soul. In both cases, salvation comes as
 Exposing the prophetic word 109
a result of ‘self-induced’ election through an intimation of God that is
both intellectual and sensorial and favors an experiential understanding
of living in unity with the divine. While the focus was on individual ex-
perience and the prophetic content is less conspicuous than in political
prophecy, election narratives by women, in particular, sought to project
themselves publicly and serve as examples of pious living for an eventual
social regeneration.
Phyllis Mack has highlighted the ecstatic quality of prophecy, espe-
cially in the case of Quakers, whose inward connection with the Light
triggers physical signs of rapture. The centrality of the body in these cases,
as most feminist scholars of early modern religious writing have noted,
allowed a myriad of interactions between the spiritual and the physical
that facilitated a feminine aesthetics of prophetic speech, through which
women’s authority and gender awareness could be further articulated.
The revisionist feminist model, which emerged as a response to exclu-
sionist paradigms that emphasized the absence or extreme marginaliza-
tion of women in society and art, has been valuable in comprehending the
specificity of women’s cultural and social agency. The analyses of Mack,
Hobby, Wiseman, or Hinds have been eye-openers for understanding
that the activities of women prophets were not ephemeral or useless acts
of engagement in public culture and politics which often required a con-
scious manipulation of rhetoric and patriarchal constraints. By including
performativity in their analyses, most feminist scholars have updated the
complex psychoanalytical inflections of the post-structuralist model of
Irigaray, Kristeva, or Butler that sexualizes women’s acts of communi-
cation. These analyses take us now to a further post-revisionist phase,
in which we are called on to integrate gender concerns and women’s his-
tory into mainstream culture so as to gauge the global impact of, in this
case, seventeenth-century women prophets’ specific contributions, and
to do so in a dialogue that may compel us to read prophetic texts com-
paratively or in synchrony with others from different cultural parame-
ters, times, genres, and genders. Should gender and sexuality constitute
the central tropes of feminist literary criticism??? An overemphasis on
the female body as the defining element of ecstatic discourse may blur
our understanding of the rational elements within this discourse and
the meaning of the prophetic text itself, while singling out the ‘woman
prophet’ as a uniform category of analysis that does not sufficiently take
into account issues of class, personal circumstance, talent, or religious
affiliation. It may likewise prevent us from appreciating similar ecstatic
irruptions by male sectarians and preachers such as Abiezer Coppe,
with his eclectic style mixing exhortation and songs, or the conformist
Calvinist Lewis Bayly with his well-known The Practise of Piety which
underwent several editions after its publication in 1612: “O that I had
spent the hours that I consumed in carding, dicing, playing and other
vile exercises, in reading the Scriptures, in hearing sermons, in receiving
110 Protean feminisms
the communion, in weeping for my sins, in fasting, watching, praying,
and in preparing my soul!”?! The range of bodily reactions that antici-
pate the workings of grace is common stock in the medieval tradition of
male and female mysticism that finds its way into seventeenth-century
prophetic speech.
Michel de Certeau expounded on the specificities of the mystical text
in coming to terms with the discrepancy between the divine and the
I who speaks on his behalf. Since the mystic is led to provide a dis-
course that relies on the experience of the recipient (the “I” who speaks)
that authorizes her or him, the prophet-author “presents himself in the
name of what speaks within him: the Real (in mystic discourse) or the
Speaking Word (in prophetic discourse)”.>” In both cases, the author has
to make her text ‘believable’ by providing signs of divine provenance.
Certeau resolves the discrepancy between prophecy and sermon or theo-
logy, or between ecstatic prophecy and charismatic preaching, by con-
sidering that both individuals speak “from a different place” (as ‘mystic’
or as ‘church instructor’) even though both share the same inspiration
(as “Christians”).°> This distinction would resonate with women’s sec-
tarian writing in that women claimed their place as prophets when their
place as preachers was restricted—even in their own congregations.
Certeau considers as well those texts that combine mystical poems with
prose commentary, in which the former would authorize itself by dint of
its performativity, while the latter would require an external authentica-
tion subject to group or audience approval. Many prophecies by women
in the Civil War and Interregnum period followed an ecstatic model
that combined various degrees of performativity and commentary, but
others preferred the autobiographical format only, especially in the case
of Baptists and Fifth Monarchists, since the testimony of their ‘election’
was a requisite for being admitted to the congregation. The protagonist
of a Puritan autobiography is elected by God, who finds him or her after
a period of much tribulation, whereas in a ‘vita’ the individual finds God
and a way to God. In both cases there is an instant of revelation and
mystical union, which is vividly registered by the senses and the images
that divinity conjures up. For Julia Kristeva, women mystics combine
the symbolic with the semiotic, and thus by chanting and singing they
would be transforming the fixed symbol of a phoneme into units of auto-
nomous meaning that may employ the body, and I would add, the mind
as an intrinsic part of this body.**
Inscribing the rational faculties of the mind on an ecstatic experience
may appear to be contradictory with a notion of mysticism as an irra-
tional and emotional event that defies or shuns any attempt to compre-
hend it, especially since the instant of fusion with the divine appears to
efface the rational to transform it into the visionary. William Harmless
very aptly points out that the study of mystical neurotics, eccentrics, and
holy fools distorts the historical record of the meaning and impact of
 Exposing the prophetic word 111
communication with the divine,’ and his remarks resonate with the bias
of stressing the communicative experience of prophetic speech by women
alone to the detriment of the depth of meaning of these experiences.
While many medieval mystics were intellectuals who devoted their lives
to both experiencing and explicating divinity, some seventeenth-century
women prophets sought to rationalize their spiritual life, be that in the
form of a Puritan autobiography, devotional poetry, or as we shall see in
the case of Elizabeth Chidley with The Justification of the Independent
Churches of Christ (1641), a prophetic riposte.
Election triggers in Puritan autobiography an inspired speech that
authenticates not only the veracity of the divine point of contact, by
dint of the transformative powers in the mind and the general dispo-
sition of the subject: she no longer feels depraved, and her mind and
spirit are lucid to reveal the truth, which often implies another truth
that corresponds with a political or social vindication of some sort. The
interpretative faculties of the mind that rationalizes the divine contact
and its ensuring transformations in the conscience of the believer claims
an independence which, in the case of women, may be conducive to a
positive gender awareness—while most women mystics still relied on a
male figure, usually a confessor. It would also be inaccurate to assume
that sectarian prophets enjoyed a large degree of intellectual freedom in
their prophecies. Despite the fact that they crafted their own language
and reinstated the mind as an intrinsic part of their prophetic authorial
self, most women exerted relative freedom of speech and leadership in
their communities. Nevertheless, a discourse that legitimizes and digni-
fies women’s role in society is explicit in many prophecies.
The constant deferral, interpretation, and projection of divinely in-
spired speech toward the external space of the body of the prophet
compel us to make a clear distinction between performative speech and
performance. Performativity elevates naming to an act that immediately
does what it says and triggers effects in its very enunciation. Strictly
speaking, only ecstatic prophecy would be performative since revelation
can only name the truth, while non-ecstatic prophetic fragments would
be an extension of the performative use of language which in some cases
may lead to a performance. This distinction could be used to differen-
tiate real from false prophecy, or prophecy from demonic possession or
madness.

Notes
1 Turner, Choice Experiences, 59.
2 Ibid., 60.
3 Fora broader context on the Arminian and Antinomian debates, see Nicholas
Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c.1590-1640
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); G.F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan
Faith and Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 [1946]);
112 Protean feminisms
David Loewenstein, John Marshall (eds.), Heresy, Literature and Politics
in Early Modern English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010);
David Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an
Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil War England (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2004); Dewey Wallace, Puritans and Predestination: Grace
in English Protestant Theology (Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2004).
See Bernard Capp, “John Simpson”, ODNB, accessed February 25, 2016,
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/37963.
Paul C.H. Lim, Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis if the Trinity in Early Modern
England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 102.
For further arguments on the antinomian debates, see John Eaton, The Dis-
covery of the Most Dangerous Dead Faith (London, 1641); John Simpson,
The Perfection ofJustification Maintained (London, 1648).
For psychological aspects of the Puritan conversion process, see Edmund
Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1963); G.F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan
Faith and Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992[1946]);
Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants, the Ford Lectures (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1982).
co Frederick Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in
the Early English Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1996), 152-56.
9 Turner, Choice Experiences, 62.
10 John Eaton, The Honey-combe of Free Justification by Christ alone
(London: printed by R.B., 1641), 471-72.
Turner, Choice Experiences, 66-67.
Ibid, 93)
Ibid 27,
Ibid., 96-97.
For an analysis of the Turners’ participation in their Baptist congregation,
see Adcock in Baptist Women’s Writings, 130-139.
A.F., The Saints Legacies (London: printed by S. Griffin, 1654), 62. David
Como attributes it to Anne Fenwick -Anne Phoenix. But the STC attributes
earlier versions of it (in 1629 and 1631) to clergymen Anthony Farindon or
Antony Fawkner.
17 Ibid., [t.p.].
18 David Como, “Women, Prophecy, and Authority in Early Stuart Puritanism”,
Huntington Library Quarterly, 61, 2 (1998): 203-22.
ie) Hinds, “Soul-Ravishing and Sin-Subduing”, 118.
20 Diane Watt, Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and
Early Modern England (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 3.
74 Nancy Bradley Warren, The Embodied Word (Indiana: University of Notre
Dame, 2010), 7.
22 See Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1954); Richard McCabe, Joseph Hall: A Study in Satire
and Meditation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); Ramie Targoff, Common
Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001),
23 Richard Baxter, The Saints Everlasting Rest or a Treatise of the Blessed
State of the Saints in their Enjoyment of God in Glory (London: Thomas
Underhill and Francis Tyton, 1651), 25.
24 Na peagr Looking unto Jesus (London: printed by Edward Mottershed,
 Exposing the prophetic word 113
25 'tbid; £9.
26 Ibid., 118.
27 Isaac Ambrose, Prima (London: printed by T.R. and E.M.,1650), 41.
28 Ibid., 38.
29 Joseph Hall, The Breathings of the Devout Soul (London, 1648), 48-49.
30 See Dympna Callaghan, The Impact of Feminism in English Renaissance
Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 17; James Holstun, Ehud’s
Dagger, 264-65; Diane Willen explores Puritan experiential religion as
promoter of gender equality in “Godly Women in Early Modern England:
Puritanism and Gender”, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 43:4 (1992):
561-80.
31 Lewis Bayly, The Practice of Piety (London: printed for Philip Chetwin,
1656), 52:
32 Michel de Certeau, Michael B. Smith (tr.) The Mystic Fable (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 180.
33 Ibid., 181.
34 Julia Kristeva, Leon S. Roudiez (ed), Thomas Gora et al. (tr.) Desire in
Language, A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1980), 135-38.
35 William Harmless, Mystics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 227.
7 The prophetic poetry
of Anna Trapnel

One of the woman prophets who has received sustained scholarly

attention is Anna Trapnel. Her long prophecies have triggered thorough
analyses on her political and social discourse, particularly in The Cry
of a Stone, or her rhetoric of religious and personal resistance in Anna
Trapnel Report and Plea. Trapnel’s shorter work, A Legacy for Saints,
ripe with exegetical commentary and a full description on election, has
been less favored by critics.
Anna Trapnel was the daughter of a London shipwright from the par-
ish of Stepney, and of a religious mother to whom she was very attached.!
Trapnel experienced visions at the age of nine although she claimed not
to understand them because she was still an Anglican conditioned by the
doctrine of works. She attended Puritan congregations and conventicles
in her teens, and after her mother’s death in 1645, she started to work
as a house companion to a Mrs. Harlow in Aldgate. Trapnel recalls the
dying words of her mother in the opening sentences of The Cry of a
Stone: “Lord! Double thy spirit upon my child”,? which she repeated
three times.* Diane Purkiss defines this sentence as a formative element
for young Anna, since her mother’s dying speech would represent the full
subversive power of the woman prophet through inverting the partner-
ship between God and the believer: “The woman commands, and com-
mands God”.*
In the summer of 1646 Trapnel underwent what she considered to
be her first true vision while ill with high fever. Soon afterward she
was reported by pamphleteer and visionary preacher Arise Evans to
be one of the witnesses to the fifty-three-day trance of Sarah Wight,
who would exert a strong influence on Trapnel in her early prophetic
activity. After embracing the covenant of grace, she joined Simpson’s
Baptist congregation in 1650 and, following a brief contact with the
Familists in 1652, became a fervent supporter of Fifth Monarchist ideas,
among which were the destruction of earthly kingdoms and their rulers
and the effacement of social differences based on rank and class. Fifth
Monarchist connections with small traders in London—especially in the
clothing business—as well as their ties with the army and even with the
poor neighborhoods in the capital, made them appealing and strategic
 The prophetic poetry of Anna Trapnel 115
political allies.° Their leaders, among them Vavasor Powell, reacted fu-
riously to the Army Council passing The Instrument of Government in
1653 that would pave the way for Cromwell to become Lord Protector.
By this time the radical anticlericalism of Fifth Monarchists, as well as
their backlash against the Protectorate “court”, had become more pro-
nounced, Cromwell tried to control the millenarians’ anger by impris-
oning a number of prominent Fifth Monarchist men such as Simpson,
while as a result of their pervasive influence in state matters, Powell
and other dissenter leaders resorted to extreme measures to shake public
sensibilities. Their policy making was strongly reinforced by public mes-
sages of divine inspiration, such as the speeches of Anna Trapnel.
She was already an established member of the Fifth Monarchists
when, at the beginning of January 1653,° she came suddenly into the
public eye by virtue of her notorious and public experience of a divine
vision. For eleven or twelve days she attracted a large audience who lis-
tened to the songs, recitations, and prayers that constituted the bulk of
her prophetic speech uttered in a small inn near Whitehall. She neither
ate nor drank, and some members of the audience reported fragments
of this experience, most notably an affectionate “Relator” who wrote
down most of Trapnel’s speech. The journalist Marchamont Nedham,
who was also a witness to Trapnel’s trance, wrote to Cromwell:

There is a two-fold design about the prophetess Hannah; one to

print her discourses and hymns which are desperate against your
person, family, children, friends and the government; the other to
send her all over England, to proclaim them viva voce. She is much
visited, and does a world of mischief in London, and will do in the
country. The vulgar dote on vain prophecies. I saw hers in the hands
of a man who was in the room when she uttered them day by day in
her trance, as they call it. He promised to lend me them; if he does,
I will show you them. They would make 15 or 16 sheets in print.’

Nedham’s remarks may be derogatory of Trapnel’s speech, but are

nevertheless indicative of her specific influence on London’s public
opinion. Trapnel caused considerable commotion during her two-week
confinement and attracted the attention of dismissed members of the
Nominated Assembly, ordinary Londoners and journalists, some of
them favorable to radical sectarian viewpoints. A case in point was
Henry Walker, at that time a pamphleteer and editor of Severall Pro-
ceedings of State Affaires, who delighted in Trapnel’s prayers and re-
marked that “many hundreds do daily come to see and hear her”.®
However, Nedham’s commentary suggests that the moves of her con-
gregation were perceived as a plausible threat to government stability.
Nedham was far more worried about the political reverberations and
the manipulation of the sensibility of the masses than he is about the
116 Protean feminisms
possible veracity of Trapnel’s words. Being a journalist himself, he could
not help thinking about the publishable quality of her speech: “They
would make 15 or 16 sheets in print”.
On January 7, 1654, while accompanying fellow Fifth Monarchist
member Vavasor Powell to an examination at Whitehall, Trapnel fell
into a twelve-day trance. According to the Relator or amanuensis of
her speech, Anna lay in bed with her eyes shut and her hands clasped,
and delivered a series of visions about the coming Kingdom of Christ
together with a denunciation of Cromwell for his ““great pomp and reve-
nue, while the poor are ready to starve”.” During her long trance, she
was visited by some notables, including Colonel William Sydenham from
the Council of State, and Captain Langdon, “member of the late parlia-
ment”. The gist of her long prophecy addressed the future of England
after Cromwell had betrayed the revolutionary and republican cause by
taking on the office of Lord Protector.
Since Trapnel’s attacks on Cromwell were at this point comparatively
more discreet than in her future speeches, no action was taken against
her. This situation lasted until her congregation sent her on a preaching
mission to Cornwall. Her activities in the west of England attracted the
attention of the clergy and the government. She was arrested on March
23 and was immediately imprisoned in Plymouth, and later transferred
first to Portsmouth and then to Bridewell, before being released on July
26. These experiences were narrated in two tracts published in 1654 too,
Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea and Legacy for Saints. Her later tracts
acknowledged only the authority of God as her source of inspiration
and support, as she did not require the introductory authentication by a
male relator:

A Declaration from my own hand shall follow, not being put on by

any, save by the great Instructor, who counselleth with his eye, who
beareth me out before men and devils. The LORD is on my side,
I will not feat men, what they can do; the LORD is my help and
refuge. Farewell. Your Servant that loves Christ in sincerity, A.T.!°

In this preface to Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea, she explicitly affirms
that the text is a collection of her own words guided and inspired by
God, her “great Instructor”. She warns the reader that she will relate
the truth “without addition, although I cannot (it may be) remember all
the passages in order, yet as many as the LORD brings to my minde”.!!
Consequently, God acts as a guiding force, but Trapnel is not a simple
amanuensis of his word. There seems to be a double bind in this inter-
action between Trapnel the prophetess and God. He brings the words
to her mind, and she has to decipher and interpret these terms in the
correct order so as to transmit their whole symbolic meaning. At the
same time, she retains a measure of control in the actual utterance of her
 The prophetic poetry of Anna Trapnel 117
prophecy, since she has to render the right order and the proper interpre-
tation of God’s divine inspiration. Also, in several instances throughout
her trance, she is able to interact with the audience and urge the Relator
to write down attentively.
Toward the end of 1655, Anna Trapnel made a second trip to Cornwall
in order to visit the imprisoned Fifth Monarchist member, John Carew.
On this occasion, she was summoned before the Justice of Peace in
Truro, but was unable to appear because she fell into another trance.
She managed to escape arrest this time, but could not complete her nego-
tiation to free Carew.
These setbacks were the backdrop of what turned out to be the longest
trance of Anna Trapnel’s prophetic career: for nearly ten months, from
October 1657 to August 1658, lying in bed and sustained only by a
daily ration of “small beer” and a few pieces of toast, she poured forth a
series of prophecies in over fifty sessions that are recorded in two tracts,
Voice for the King of Saints (1658) and a 990-page folio with a miss-
ing title-page that is lodged in the Bodleian Library.!* In a characteris-
tic Fifth Monarchist manner, in which political events are indicative of
Christ’s imminent return, Trapnel does not spare criticisms of Cromwell
and his usurpation of a crown that belongs to Christ, not to him: “When
Cromwel came forth in his name, Victory did abound; For he did say
he came for Christ, And to exalt his Crown. He fetcht his government
from Christ, O’twas a master-sin”.!? By 1657, many radicals were disap-
pointed at Cromwell’s protectorate when it began to resemble a court.!4
Throughout The Cry of a Stone, Anna Trapnel always retains a strong
measure of control over her revealed message. This allows her to decide
when to begin her public speaking, when to stop it, and, equally impor-
tantly, what mode of transmission is the most appropriate and effective
for it. There are complementary ways through which she legitimises such
transmission: the first is by affirming her authority paradoxically, al-
most as a gesture of self-abasement or self-humiliation; the second is by
developing a complex set of gestures that dramatizes and enhances her
performance, ensuring its appeal and resonance before the public.
Trapnel begins The Cry of a Stone by presenting herself and the cir-
cumstances of her speech at Whitehall.!° We are drawn to reflect on
the fact that this vision “shall not be held unworthy the hearing and
consideration of any, because it is administered by a simple and unlikely
hand”.!® She refers to the reader to 1 Corinthians, suggesting that the
lowly and humble can be turned into messengers of the Lord.!” Trapnel
stretched its use so as to include women as part of those “foolish, lowly
and despised things” that Paul mentions as being committed to speak on
behalf of a God that chooses them. Her own gender could thus demon-
strate that she was a more suitable vessel than male prophets. Being
a lowly thing would prevent her from boasting before God. By impli-
cation, the emergence of Trapnel’s own voice by the agency of God is
118 Protean feminisms
also intended to “confound the wise”, “proclaim their sin, lay open their
> 6

iniquity”, and “cry out against their transgressions”.!® This becomes the
central argument upon which she will validate her right to speak.
Throughout her work, Trapnel presents herself as one of those lowly
things upon which the spirit of God can be poured out, a living proof that
the Kingdom is at hand. She is one of the stones that God will raise up to
be His children because of His people’s iniquity, one of the stones that,
while others keep quiet, will stand and cry out in the name of the Lord.!?
By comparing herself to a stone, Trapnel was overtly acknowledging her
condition as a woman, wishing to state and highlight her inferiority,
which at the same time was the reason God had chosen her. Trapnel
broadens this image and quotes biblical verses to validate her prophetic
voice, while strengthening her overt criticism of the government. She does
so by identifying herself as one of the stones joined to the “corner-stone”,
and by making reference to herself as a stumbling-stone for the powerful.
Consequently, she is not only a herald who calls out God’s message, but
also a witness and accuser before the Lord.
In the Gospels, Jesus identifies himself as the cornerstone that had
been rejected by his own people.?° Following this allegory, Trapnel
prays that “the stones that are joined to the Cornerstone may not
have the hammer come upon them”.! By doing so, she is on the one
hand identifying herself as one of God’s faithful children who had
not forsaken Him, and on the other, she is accounting for her vision
and voice as a witness. She is the stone that will be a witness against
the hammer (Cromwell and his government), which has heard all the
condemning words the Lord has said to them, and which will be a
witness against them if they are untrue to their God. The author-
ity and legitimacy of prophetic texts produced in the context of the
radical sects depended on the texts being accepted as God’s Word
rather than an author’s interpretation of that word. Whereas this is
the general position of Smith, Mack, Hinds, or Watt in analyzing the
essential duality of the transmission of divine speech as incarnated
in a prophet-body and its message, we have seen that non-ecstatic
and interpretative modes of prophecy may be equally convincing since
the prophet’s mind and conscience are lifted to a higher state of un-
derstanding. The mind, as an organic part of the body, participates
as well in the sensory experience of prophetic delivery.“* However,
and particularly in the case of Fifth Monarchist prophecy, visionary
elements played a significant role in the legitimation of the prophet’s
authority: revelations and trances were often described as a peculiar
juxtaposition of dream and vision. The latter is to be understood as a
message from God in a dream, received exclusively by the prophet or
visionary at night or during the hours of sleep. Trapnel often identifies
her own visions as events that occurred at night, and most of them
prompted an immediate bodily response.
 The prophetic poetry of Anna Trapnel 119
There are more than twenty-five direct references to visions and dreams
in The Cry of a Stone, and they all imply a vivification of the written
message that carries the audience away to a divinely inspired image.
Anna Trapnel features prominently in her own dream sequences, cre-
ating a liminal space where the prosody of language—her gestures and
variations in voice pitch—do not replace the meaning of words but move
from the symbolic to the semiotic, to what biblical language denotes in
the minds of Trapnel and her audience and what language is. A psycho-
analytical approach may help to ascertain the prophetess’ oscillations
in this chora from which she extracts a meaning that she interprets and
inhabits in her own mind and body. While most of the Puritan conver-
sion narratives imply an element of abjection in their self-abasement,
pointing at “a mystic’s fount of infinite jouissance”,*? Anna Trapnel nei-
ther denies nor effaces herself in The Cry of a Stone to demonstrate her
spiritual connection with the divine. She becomes a separate entity that
is already chosen and conversant with God, and therefore, is capable
of rendering prophetic speech. An awareness of separation pushes the
mystic-prophet—especially within the context of a conversion—toward
a desire for union while seeking a language that allows them to articu-
late the division between self and other. In The Cry of a Stone, Trapnel
recreates the image of the ten horns of the bull (the beast) of Daniel 7:7
and Revelation, and the very voice of God refers her back to the Bible
for its meaning. The fourth bull in Trapnel’s vision takes after Cromwell,
and as he runs toward her pointing with his horn to her breast, she is
rescued by a hand while a voice avows her safety before the earth breaks
forth and Anna sings praise to God and a new kingdom.

For the foremost, his Countenance was perfectly like unto Oliver
Cromwels; and on a suddain there was a great shout of those that
followed him, he being singled out alone, and the foremost [...] and
immediately they prompting him and fawning upon him, he run at
me, and as he was neer with his horn to my breast, an arm and a
hand clasped me round, a Voice said, I will be thy safety.
He gave them many pushes, scratching them with his horn, and
driving them into several houses, he ran still along, till at length
there was a great silence, and suddenly there broke forth in the Earth
great Fury coming forth from the Clouds, and they presently were
scattered, and their horns broken, and they tumbled into Graves;
with that I broke forth, and sang praise, and the Lord said mark
that Scripture, Three horns shall arise, a fourth shall come different
from the former.”*

Her description of the “pushes” and “scratches” recreate this dramatic

appropriation of a biblical dream that is enhanced by movement and
noise: the fury coming from the clouds and the bulls that tumble into
120 Protean feminisms
the graves. If we compare this passage with its biblical base reference
in Daniel 7:7 (“After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth
beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great
iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with
the feet of it”), we appreciate a sense of narrative movement starting
from the depiction of the violence of the bulls, the silence that ensued,
the divine fury emanating from the clouds, and Trapnel’s own singing
at the end: “Three horns shall arise, a fourth shall come”.*> The most
important statement in this paragraph is revealed at the end to fuel sus-
pense, rather than in the beginning as in the more simply informative
biblical version of Daniel.
According to Hilary Hinds, “of all the women writers in the sects, Anna
Trapnel is the one who more explicitly anatomises her understandings of
the workings and meanings of language” including intonation, wordplay,
or other significant gestures.*° Markus Nevitt expands on this argument
by observing that Trapnel is fully aware that transformative action is not
dependent simply on the transmission of her words, but also that it be-
comes much more effective if it is complemented by other gestures:

[Action] resides in prayer and song, but it must be traced back, too,
to the less spectacular material operations involved in making a text.
If agency can be resistance (to an authoritarian administration or
individuals hostile to women’s public expression) it can also be co-
operation, unseen association and dialogue. It has, then, perhaps less
to do with self-assertion than self-effacement be it in a community,
behind a nameless male ‘relator’, with God or before an enemy.?”

Thus, it is possible to view Trapnel’s act of prophecy as a cooperative

endeavor between herself, God, and the audience in which self-assertion
goes far beyond the spoken word. The function of the Relator is essen-
tial here: he acts as a mediator between Trapnel and her readers. While
Trapnel speaks directly to the audience that has gathered in the inn, the
Relator ensures that her voice will reach into print. Beyond his work, it is
possible to discover Trapnel’s own awareness of the importance of print
as the means through which her prophecy will reach to a wider audience,
far beyond the limits of the physical space in which she is speaking.
Soon after Trapnel has described the most notable events in her life, the
Relator is presented as someone deprived of status, religious affiliation,
or special achievements. Besides, we are told that this anonymous and
sympathetic individual records Trapnel’s utterances rather inaccurately:

The Relator coming into the Chamber where she lay, heard her first
making melody and spiritual Song, which he could not take but in
part, and that too with such imperfection, as he cannot present any
account of it to the understanding of others.?°
 The prophetic poetry of Anna Trapnel 121
Trapnel’s affectionate Relator is never a hindrance or an element of dis-
tortion in what refers to her presence in The Cry of a Stone: she remains
the protagonist, the center of attention, and the narrator cannot always
capture what he sees because he is sometimes incapable of understand-
ing the special connection between Trapnel and the Lord. She is aware,
perhaps even expectant, of the Relator’s approach and occasional ques-
tions, written in italics in the original print to mark his commentary on
the text. They both keep a special rapport that is similar to a conducted
reporting: she is aware of his recording, she has a certain hand in it
(“she takeing me by the hand ere I was aware”), and she is even open
to his questions, while he remains attentive to her speech, gestures, and
well-being. The Relator’s account is necessarily inaccurate since he did
not witness the whole twelve-day trance: he came in and out of the tav-
ern and had his own businesses to tend to. He is sympathetic to Trapnel
but he cannot capture every single minute of her prophetic speech. As a
result of this, she is really in charge of the trance, the length of the inter-
action with the audience, and the content of the writing itself.
With regard to the gaps in the Relator’s account, Rebecca Bullard
points out that even though Trapnel might retain a large measure of con-
trol over her own performance, the flaws in the transmission from oral
speech to a manuscript narrative and then to a printed text have the capa-
city to rescue, in a very literal sense, the prophetess’ words and visions
from oblivion, even compensate for the weakness of Trapnel’s body.”?
If the Relator’s own annotations in manuscript form can be subject
to deterioration, the printed form emerges as the reliable witness of the
whole experience. But the printed text alone cannot register the whole
dimension of Trapnel’s experience: there is a touch of drama in several
passages of The Cry of a Stone between the lines of the Relator’s ac-
count, and this suggests a vividness that is apparent in the printed text
but which cannot adequately convey the full impact of Trapnel’s perfor-
mativity as it was experienced by her audience. For instance, in order to
emphasize the truthfulness of the message he is writing down, the Rela-
tor captures the expressive details in Trapnel’s utterance. Those nuances
may pass unnoticed by an inattentive observer but not by him:

To give you the Relators observation for the further persvvading him
of the truth of this; He took notice twice in her ceasing from speaking;
Once she ended with prayer, wherein being sweetly and highly raised in
her admirings of the glory that she saw, she uttered these, or like words:
Oh what brightness! what glory! what sweetness! what splendor! which
last word she hardly expressed in a full sound, and said no more.>?

The Relator is not only registering the prophetess’ words, but her actual
emotions in relation to her prophetic utterance. After she ceases from
speaking and ends her prayer, Trapnel is moved by her own message.
122 Protean feminisms
This prompts her to remark, in an exclamatory but also intimate way,
the feelings that those words have triggered in her. The Relator presents
this outpouring as proof of the veracity of her message. The emotion
after the delivery of the message seems to him (and therefore, implicitly,
to the reader) as convincing as the prophetic utterance itself.
Trapnel’s emotional delivery is emphasized when music or intonation
clothe the prophetic message. In these cases, the Relator indicates the
beginnings of Trapnel’s songs and makes it clear to the reader that they
take place at moments when “she had overflowings of joy and delight
in spirit, and poured out her heart in a song”.°! Baptists congregations
promoted worship from the heart (not from a book like the Anglican
practice of psalm chanting), and thus they practiced extemporaneous
singing and praying as in 1 Cor 14:15, which supports praise to God
from both the heart and the mind.°”
But Anna Trapnel uses suspense as well in order to hold the attention
of the audience. She engages the reader with lavish images of richness
and abundance that are then left momentarily interrupted, in order to
return briefly to a drier message in which Trapnel’s voice is embedded
into biblical language: “For it is true, sayes Jesus Christ, looke into my
records, and see whether I have not declar’d what you are unto me”.*?
Most interestingly, there is some degree of anxiety on Trapnel’s part
concerning the transcription of word into text. Her prayers and songs
convey the sense of urgency that prophetic speech must be codified in
writing. In one of the ballad-prayers that the Relator could not record
because of “the press of the people”, Trapnel places the emphasis on the
importance of “writing” and “transcribing” as a valid instrument for
the salvation of many. The passage is worth quoting in full:

Oh, you shall have great Rols of writ

Concerning Babylons”* fall,
And the destruction of the whore,
Which now seems spiritual.
Come write down how that Anti-Christ,
That is so rigid here,
Shall fall down quite, when Christ comes forth,
Who suddenly will appear ...
Write how that Protectors shall go,
And into graves there lye:
Let pens make known what is said that
They shall expire and die.
Oh write also that colonels
And captains they shall down,
But not afraid to pen also
That Christ will them cast down.
Did they believe what in thy word,
Reported is and penned down.**
 The prophetic poetry of Anna Trapnel 123
We may note in this passage the interaction between speaking, writing,
and reception of the message. Trapnel is urging the audience to write
anything and everything connected to God’s will concerning the political
future of the English nation. She urges this through an almost rhythmical
repetition of the verbs “write” and “pen”, sometimes in imperative mode,
to create a nearly hypnotic effect on the audience. All of her speech here
is coated from the start in a typological network: the present situation of
England is represented initially as the conflict between the chosen people
and Babylon, and immediately re-figured as an apocalyptic confronta-
tion between the godly and the “whore” (of Babylon), who “now seems
spiritual”, but which will eventually be revealed as evil. Trapnel is indeed
suggesting that the end of the world has started, and is being worked out
in the political conflicts that are shaking England: hence the mention of
the “protectors” and the “captains” and the “colonels” that will be “cast
down” by Christ. And it is precisely at this point, when her criticism of
the Protectorate is at its most extreme that she wants her words to be put
down in “great rols of writ”, as if they belonged with the prophecies of
the Old Testament. Trapnel knows that the modern equivalent of these
ancient rolls is nothing other than the modern press, where her words
will ultimately be captured, preserved, and communicated to others.
In these examples, Trapnel’s message is overtly multi-layered because
she addresses a general public and the Relator at the same time, although
both recipients may capture it slightly differently: the audience is made
to understand the transcendence of the present political moment, and
at the same time the Relator is being urged to write down her speech,
so that it will reach others in time. Thus, it is possible to distinguish
two moments in the act of communication that is envisaged and en-
acted by Trapnel. At the beginning of the prophetic performance at the
inn Trapnel, the Relator and the audience are all involved in the cre-
ation and communication of a speech act, since as Mikhail Bakhtin put
it, discourse does not reflect a situation, it is a situation: “Each time
we talk, we enact literary values in our speech through the process of
scripting our place and that of our listener in a culturally specific social
scenario”.°° In this regard, the act of communicating meaning promotes
further meaning, and every discourse enters an interaction that creates
a dialogic stream. But this interaction is notably amplified by the use of
print and publication, as Trapnel’s prophecy becomes part of the “rols
of writ” that are preserved for others to read. A second moment of com-
munication is triggered by Trapnel’s performance: one that does not take
place actively in her presence, but is set in motion once her words have
been enshrined in paper and later in print, so that they circulate widely
and enlarge her sphere of influence. For Trapnel herself, it seems that the
actual transcription of her words is the key for reaching an audience that
is far larger than the one she has in front of her.
The introductory lines to The Cry ofa Stone, written by an anony-
mous publisher, insist on the importance of Trapnel’s message not just
124 Protean feminisms
for the reader or for the subjects of critical scrutiny—‘“the governors,
army, churches, ministry universities and the whole nation”, according
to the book’s title page—but for all English citizens. He then alerts the
reader to the importance of not entertaining thoughts or making judg-
ments that are above his or her capacity, “and not judge in a matter that
is above them”, meaning that only people like Trapnel, who are suppos-
edly filled with the spirit, are able to judge matters such as the visionary
experiences that are included in the text. He finishes his statement by
explaining that this was the express wish of her audience “it was upon
the heart of some that heard her to present to public view a true and
faithful relation of so much as for some seven or eight days could be
taken from her by a very slow and unready hand”.?” One of the most
interesting features of The Cry ofa Stone is the way in which Trapnel
displays her awareness of the social world around her, and how she man-
ages to present herself in contact with it. Toward the beginning of the
text, she evokes part of the audience that attended the visionary trances
she experienced in 1654, giving a detailed list of those who attended her
performance at that point.

At this time, I keeping of my bed seven whole days and eight

nights in Mark-lane, at widdow Smiths, Glasier, where were many
Spectators of account, both sea-Captains and others; Mr. Allen a
Common- Councel-man, Mr. Smith, Mr. Radcliffe, Captain Palmer,
Mr. Knollys, and several other men of account in the City; at this
time for seventeen days I eat nothing but two broyled Herrings, and
drunk Water and small Beer.*®

The fragment brings into play some key features of Trapnel’s particular
form of self-representation: she insists on her physical resistance (eating
and drinking very little “for seventeen days”) and on the length of the
period during which she undergoes her fasting; once again she is bring-
ing her own body to the foreground and making it a living sign of the
reception of God’s grace. She evokes the names and some of the occu-
pations of people who came to see her: what emerges here is a varied
world, made of “sea-captains and others”, including councilmen and
“men of account in the city”. She even specifies that she was staying at
the house of one Mrs. Smith, widow of a glazier. Trapnel’s prophecy is
projected into a social world that is dynamic and diverse whose inhabi-
tants are traders, manufacturers, men of commerce, sailors, or soldiers.
She invites them to partake of her visionary experience in which she is
the center and the moral vortex of her own congregation and indepen-
dent church.
But this active social world is brought to life as an essential part of
Trapnel’s own visions: quite often these concern not only Cromwell, but
other members of Parliament, and even as this occurs, other characters
 The prophetic poetry of Anna Trapnel 125
come into the picture, presented by Trapnel as reliable witnesses of her
competence as a prophetess. In the following fragment, for example,
she remembers the dissolution of the Parliament as it was about to be
replaced by its Barebones version:

And a Vision I had concerning the Dissolution of the Parliament

about four days before it was, not knowing anything of that nature
was intended, which I sung; the manner of it, that suddenly Gideon
(as I called him) and M. G. Harrison came into the Parliament-house
and desired removal of them; desiring Mr. Speaker to deliver up his
Commission, and so I saw suddainly a departure of them, though
they were very loath thereunto; And this many in the Country can
witness: the Minister of Hillington, Mr. Taverner by name, whose
wife sent me word of it within four days after I had the Vision of it:
In these Visions I lay seven days, and then arose, having strength as
formerly.°?

Here both audience and readers are led into the world of politics and out
of it through a quick evocation of one of Trapnel’s trances. Cromwell
(here designed as Gideon),*° Harrison, and one of the speakers are desig-
nated openly and appear as part of the vision itself: Trapnel appears
to have witnessed their actions and their enforced dissolution of the
Parliament in her vision. But then, at the end of the passage, another
real-life character is brought into the picture: in this case it is a minister,
Mr. Hillington, who is only one of the “many in the country that can
witness” that an inspired Anna Trapnel really did speak of the change
in Parliament during those days. The emerging middle classes are made
witnesses of visions that concern that institution directly: there is here a
powerful circulation between the first audience of the prophecy and its
content, in which the latter affects the former, and the former acts as a
witness to the latter. The audience is thus not only a witness to a vision,
but is being made part of it: its direct concerns and interests are incorpo-
rated into the voice and the message of the prophet.
Trapnel’s long performance at the inn in Whitehall, which forms
the core of The Cry ofa Stone, can therefore be seen as the crowning
achievement in a process of projection toward the audience, and also as
the culminating moment in which she also defines, through her choice of
the space where she speaks, the public that she wants to address. The inn
becomes a social microcosm: it is inhabited by members of the emerging
middle classes who interact with poorer individuals and the main center
of political power. Trapnel is thus ready to address the various layers of
her audience, and to remind them of their role: just as she is not slow
or silent in confronting Gideon-Cromwell, so they must be able to pre-
pare, each in their own way, the arrival of “King Jesus”. On occasion,
prophecy seems to be thematically determined by the audience facing
126 Protean feminisms
her: she abandons her political message in order to assume the attitude
of a preacher before her listeners. For instance, the Relator explains that
at one point Anna centered her attention on the merchants, dedicating
a “hymn” to them and devoting a long time to extolling the virtues of
their trade:

O merchants! Oh turn to the Lord!

What he to you reports,
Look into the written word so sure,
And see what he brings forth.
Oh, do not grieve at losses great,
Though all your ships do split
Oh, look to that bottom wherein
Cannot come any leak.*!

This hymn is presented as a message from “the Lord” to the merchants,

in which he advises them not to complain about scant benefits even when
they lose their ships. They should concentrate instead on the inner be-
ing (“that bottom”) in which there is not “any leak”. Trapnel insists
throughout that they should forgo their penchant for everything that is
carnal and expensive in order to concentrate on their inner purity. She
resorts to lavish imagery to convince her audience that the merchants,
despite their show of “black spots and powdered locks” are able to trans-
form their “carnal hearts” into a spiritual mission; she then invokes the
traditional image of Adam covering himself with fig leaves:

Remember when that Adam fell,

He covered was leaves in.
His nakedness with leavy skins,
At length must be his clothes;
Oh therefore all you naked ones,
Oh do not scripture oppose.*”

Since Adam had to get used to wearing leaves and covering his body,
the role of the merchants is necessary to “cover” us sinners and “naked
ones” with garments. The use of this extended metaphor on clothes
and a divine errand is significant not only because Trapnel’s imagery
departs for a while from her usual subjects (Cromwell, Protectorate, and
Parliament) but because she appeals to an emergent and powerful sec-
ular class that would become instrumental in effecting economic and
political change in England. It is a well-known fact that many Fifth
Monarchist associates worked as drapers and retained links with the
clothing business, and Trapnel’s hymn is infusing beauty and a spiri-
tual slant to a social segment of society that she acknowledges as hav-
ing significant leverage on public affairs. Thus merchants, in their zeal
 The prophetic poetry of Anna Trapnel 127
for profits, could understand her words as (in one layer of meaning) an
invitation to do business. On the other hand, Trapnel seems to invite
them directly to forgo grand and expensive business on behalf of macro-
economic interests and concentrate on a more spiritual clothing:

Oh Merchants cloath your selves with robes,

Which will never be wore
Not that which will to raggs be turn’d,
Nor that which can be tore.
But here is Cloathing substantial,
Oh it is costly too!
Oh it is white! Oh it is that
Which Christs blood bought to you!*?

By complaining against the cost of the products and their poor quality
Trapnel infuses her words with metaphorical meaning: on the one hand,
and in a typical feminine fashion, she asks merchants to seek better qual-
ity at a lower price in their fabrics, but on a deeper level of meaning she
is appealing to the importance of whiteness, resilience, and purity in
their own souls.
We have already seen how Trapnel addresses several members of the
army at different moments of her grand performance at Whitehall. It is
interesting to observe that her attitude toward the soldiers in her audi-
ence is far from condescending: she is constantly accusing them of hav-
ing failed to complete the work of regeneration that had been brought
about by the English Revolution and of collaborating with the unjust
structure of the Protectorate:

Oh poor Soldiers, your errour was here, that while you did strike
down the Philistin without, you have not been watchful to draw
your swords against that that is within; here you were not inquisi-
tive, and this hath made you to fal so flat, and this hath deadned
you: thou wouldst have thine full of eyes: poor Souldiers, you have
had eyes without, but not as those creatures recorded, have you had
eyes within? [...] Christ when he came at first, was willing to become
weak, and to be thrown into the Grave, but he will come in flames
of fire; you Soldiers, he will come as the Messenger of his Temple.*4

The tone of denunciation and accusation is not merely rhetorical: the

soldiers have betrayed the high mission that God conferred on them,
and they have failed to complete the work of regeneration and recon-
struction of the country. While destroying the “philistine without”, they
have not opposed sufficiently “that which is within”; they have had “eyes
without”, but not “within” to remain watchful over the possibility of
becoming corrupted too. At one point, it looks as if Trapnel herself is
128 Protean feminisms
addressing some of the sergeants or members of the army that she has
known personally:

Oh Serjeants, some of you I have

Look’t on to be such which
Would not have taken such a place,
Your hands forth for to reach.
Poor Serjeants that were honest men
Oh how are you fallen,
Oh how are you now taken with
The vanity of men?4°

The fact that Trapnel identifies some of the army members as having
“look’t on” herself does not necessarily imply that this expression has
to be taken literally: but the very fact that she uses it is indicative of
the kind of close relationship she wants to establish with them: one of
proximity, but at the same time of critical distance and moral reproof
whenever necessary.
On other occasions, Trapnel’s discourse enters into conflict with
institutions or with individuals who did not come to see her. It is un-
likely that there were many members of the old Church of England
among her direct audience at the Whitehall inn, but she managed to
integrate these religious authorities in her prayers in order to confront
them and assert her authority before them. There is a covert argument
going on between the prophet and the academy of her time, despite
the scant possibility of a face-to-face exchange taking place between
Trapnel and the Anglican clerics or university professors. Just as the
commentaries discrediting her reached her, so she was ready to oppose
them and to engage them on their own terms. The Relator mentions
who it was that she was addressing to in those occasions, as in the
following lines:
Having further in prayer made mention of the University-learning
and the National Clergy (as they are called) she proceeded unto singing,
seven or eight of the first verses of the Song could not bee taken by the
Relator, it being Evening, and no light in the Chamber: The rest were as
follows.

For human Arts and Sciences,

because you doat on them,
Therfore the Lord wil others teach
whom you count but Lay-men.
For you have set too high a price
upon your Learning here,
Oh that makes Christ for to come out
and from you it to tear.*®
 The prophetic poetry of Anna Trapnel 129
There is a battle being fought out over auctoritas here: Trapnel accuses
the university professors and the established church of “doating” too
much on “human Arts and Sciences”, and of using them in order to
distinguish between those who are laymen and those who are not; that
priced learning will be destroyed, in time, by the arrival of Christ him-
self, who will tear it from the hands of the mighty in order to exalt the
weak. Trapnel’s discourse is linked to a theme that had been part of the
essential ideological discourse of Protestantism from its inception, in
Martin Luther’s early works: the priestly capacity and religious dignity
of the laymen. The prophetess might not have thought in strictly theo-
logical terms here: she was espousing her own capacity to preach and
openly defending the word of God, but at the same time she was react-
ing against a rigid stratification of religious knowledge, and arguing in
favor of lay spirituality. The clerical and religious authorities that she
was opposing here were also part of her audience, even if they were not
present during her performance: she knew well that her words and mes-
sage would eventually reach them through the testimony of those who
had heard her directly. Marcus Nevitt observes that “the precise scru-
tiny given to the setting, Trapnel’s gestural vocabulary and the way in
which she modulated her delivery in both poetry and prose suggest that
seventeenth-century commentators regarded the occasion as supremely
theatrical”*” and James Holstun reinforces this view by considering the
incident as a “choreographed piece of political theatre through which
Trapnel transforms the social space of tavern bedroom into a birthing
room, parliament, meeting house and stage”.*® Trapnel’s bodily display
goes far beyond this: her gestures, her shifts in voice and attitude, her
tendency to burst out in song and hymn were signs of her response to the
Spirit and ways of affecting her audience. An excerpt of her vision of the
horns was published in London’s Star in 1796 under the heading of “pre-
dictions”.*” In her conscious and skillful creation of her audience, Anna
Trapnel was able to place herself at the center of her social world, and to
ensure that her prophetic discourse received the necessary impetus for
challenging the Protectorate.
But her assertive social discourse brings us to another key aspect of
her prophetic personality: her gestures and corporality as discursive ele-
ments. Since the body is already in a state of grace, it can be subjected
to extremes and it can be employed as a vehicle for emotional group
dynamics. Maria Magro has interpreted female sectarian discourse as
an element of a subaltern public sphere that functioned as a discursive
alternative to mainstream Puritanism and the emergent liberal public
sphere—an alternative discourse precisely because it used “antiration-
alist practices of prophecy and embodied communicative performance
that functioned in opposition to a ratiocinating, masculine Protestant-
ism”.°” Trapnel’s movement back and forth from the uttered word to
the body display, and from the desire for anonymity to her use of public
130 Protean feminisms
platforms, bears witness to the fact that she was aware of the means
through which her divinely inspired message operated on her audience.
Trapnel regretted that her journey to Cornwall had transformed her into
“a gazing stock for all the people”, condemned the ways in which “all
sorts of people” had turned her into “a spectacle to the whole land”
and criticized those “Rulers and Clergy who have brought me upon the
world’s stage”.°! These self-deprecatory statements can be partly un-
derstood as the result of a typical Puritan mistrust of theatrical display,
coupled with a prophetic imperative according to which a divine mes-
sage is always more important than its medium of production. Trapnel is
explicit about her willingness to efface herself under the mantle of God:

I came not into the country to be seen... I desired Christ and the
beauty of holiness might be taken notice of, so that others might be
taken with Christ; and that I might be onely a voyce, and Christ the
sound.°*

Trapnel emphasizes the auditory and verbal nature of prophecy as she

presents her Whitehall protest as an event with consequences reaching
far beyond the specific moment of her utterance.
During the eleven days and twelve nights that Trapnel’s vision lasted
in Whitehall, she underwent abstemious food practices. Her inedia
placed her in the female tradition of fasting, but it allowed her to present
herself as an extraordinary example of the way a chosen one behaves.
It inscribed her in the biblical and medieval visionary tradition while it
overtly manifested God’s power and control on her, which would have
inevitably brought Paul’s words to her audience’s minds: “God said to
me: ‘my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in
weakness’ [...] That is why I delight in weaknesses. For when I am weak,
then I am strong”.°? With this oxymoronic statement, Trapnel hints
at the fortitude of spiritual power in the believer, which transcends all
physical notions of health and illness to enact the perfect union with the
holy spirit. In addition to fasting, there were other physical visible signs
that she used to validate her public appearance, as if she were reinstating
a public fast for the nations like the ones prevalent in previous decades.
Right at the beginning, we are told that her initial sickness, “contention
and crookedness” of spirit were allowed by the Lord himself as to “keep
her humble”.°4 In spite of that, she was “judged by divers friends to
be under a temptation”, and many observers held her “convulsion-fits,
and sickness, and diseases” as signs of an immorally, disorderly mad
woman, and they used them in order to discredit her as a prophet. How-
ever, she brought them forth precisely as proofs of God’s presence, “for
that makes the body crumble, and weakens nature. In these extraordi-
nary workings thou (God) intendest to show what is coming forth here-
after”.°> The display of her weakness was the external sign of one who
 The prophetic poetry of Anna Trapnel 131
was really filled with the spirit. It also allowed her to detach herself from
those who were, in her view, false visionaries who did not show contri-
tion and meekness.
Such a denial of the body led into a depreciation of the self, to the
extreme that Trapnel was no longer herself but “made a sound, a voice
within a voice, another’s voice”.°° The gradual rejection of the self be-
gins with the acknowledgement of her position as an instrument of the
Lord through which He speaks as the active, creative force. Trapnel’s use
of this term represents her as a medium: she was the “earthen vessel” in
which “this all-surpassing power is shown to be from God and not from
her”’’, Throughout The Cry of a Stone, Trapnel stretches the concept
of her body as God’s instrument to the point of projecting a reconsider-
ation of her own being, which was seen as a “poor carcass” that should
moulder before the Lord and “decrease so He can increase”.°® This
re-examination culminates with her exceptional assertion that “there is
no self in this thing”,°’ which stresses not only the denial of her capacity
for agency and activity, but also her selfhood. Such a strategy of self-
depreciation allowed Trapnel to present herself as one of God’s children,
following the example of biblical characters who, using the words of
St. Paul, yield themselves unto God “as those that are alive from the
dead”.®° She even rejected the voice of the Spirit when it first manifested
in her, as she related in A Legacy for Saints. It was a “small voice” in the
beginning that produced an echo and it was strange for her, especially
when she received the message that “Christ is thine and thou are his”,
thus pointing at the trope of the believer and her Church as the wife of
Christ and at the consubstantiality of Christ and the sanctified indivi-
dual.®! Her body was emptied for several days and only the voice with
this message remained in her. She was confused about the provenance of
this voice, since she had not read in Scripture that the spirit could talk
to her. The belief that had “departed” her from the “living God” was
shattered by the same power that raised Christ out of the grave. Her
past, present, and future sins were pardoned and understood so that her
desolation gave way now to a sweet consolation and a feeling of joy.
Trapnel no longer inhabits an empty body, but one that is invigorated
by that whom she is now: Christ. Diane Purkiss has argued that female
agency is momentarily evacuated in Trapnel’s process of election to be
recovered in a being that somewhat has lost her body.®? While she feels
as if she were levitating instead of walking, to the extent that she would
not have noticed whether she fell flat on the ground or known whether
she was in the body or out of it, when she is aware of her body she
celebrates in it the joy of election: the bread she eats is sweet, she melts
into tears, and she smells perfume. Thus grace does not erase the body,
but transforms it to a signifier of spiritual perfection. Self-depreciation
brings her only into closer connection with the divine, and that rapport
is so intimate that, on specific occasions, not even the Relator of The Cry
132 Protean feminisms
of a Stone can pierce through it, as for example, when she is singing
hymns: “He (the Relator) heard her first making Melody with a spiritual
Song, which he could not take but in part, and that too with such im-
perfection, as he cannot present any account of it to the understanding
of others”.®* In other occasions, though, the Relator cannot transcribe
properly because “of the press of People in the chamber” and the noise
they make, or because Trapnel’s delivery is too fast or too soft to record
in writing. Very rarely, he can also contribute to the relation with his
own words, in order to complete one of her prayers or utterances:

They shall look on the Sun so bright,

and on its beames ofgrace,
Which doth appeare, and cometh forth,
And on them casts its rayes.

The foure last words of the last verse are added by the relator, who
could not take the maids owne words, her voyce as it were dying,
and sinking into her breast.°°

In his willingness to be faithful and sympathetic to her, the Relator tries

to access Trapnel’s divinity through her poetic style and the gestures of
her body. In several locations throughout the narration, he explains that
her voice fell “into her breast” and became inaudible so that he could
not record any more words. This gesture on the part of “the maid” is
suggestive of intimacy and secrecy, as if her words inspired by God were
too private to be spoken in public and thus she withdraws them into
her breast, which is a vivid symbol for ‘nurturing’ and femininity. The
subtle movements of her body are significant: when she raises the pitch
of her voice during her singing in order to mark an important passage,
she seems to raise the pathos of her prophetic utterance, thus proving her
insight into the workings of divinity:

Oh, who can be silent and hold their peace at this? Thou wilt poure
out thy spirit upon sons and daughters, and they shall witnesse for
thee against them: Thine may be Lambes and Sheep, meek and
lowly; yet they shall be, as thou hast said; as a young Lyon, and shall
teare all that rise up against them— Oh, where is thy voice, Lord,
thou that speakest with a mighty alarum, and thy voice breaks the
Cedars; oh, thy voice comes forth with much power! Oh, let that
voice come forth concerning Restauration, and Generation-work.*°

The exclamations and the direct address to God reveal that Trapnel felt
outraged by the political and social circumstances of her time: the voice
of God is thundering, it breaks the cedars, and it is impossible for her
to be silent before so many injustices (the possibility of a monarchic
 The prophetic poetry of Anna Trapnel 133
Restoration, the idleness of the younger generation, to whom she re-
fers on several occasions). The repetition of the word “voice”, together
with the crescendo of the rhetorical questions she utters with arrest-
ing force in order to move the audience (who would dare to question
God’s powerful voice amidst the political problems of England?) gives
musical intonation and dramatic impact to this passage. In Voice for
the King—whose title seems to counteract the royalist tract by Arise
Evans’ The Voice of King Charles the Father published two years before
Trapnel’s with the aim to convince Cromwell to intercede for a monar-
chic restoration®’—Trapnel compares her prophetic spirit with a harp
that allows her to sing and confront all enemies: “If once that harp be
in my hand, I will stand against you all”.°® The whole prophetic poem
is conceived as a “song” that reworks verses of the Psalms (in this case,
Psalm 43) and the canticles, as was customary among every would-be
and established poet of the late sixteenth well into the seventeenth cen-
tury.” As Barbara Lewalski notes, the difference between the tradition
of psalmic rewriting in the case of classically trained poets and those
who were not lies in the former’s more direct reworking of the biblical
text without a classical frame of reference.’? While Trapnel establishes
a typological comparison with the prophet David and his lyre (or harp),
she is also tapping into an orphic tradition by overcoming obstacles
through her music. This same voice prevents Quakers from meddling
with her performance: “While this was uttered, the Quakers being pres-
ent spake, but could not interrupt, for withmore, power and swiftnesse
the voice went on as followeth”.”!
Trapnel’s audience also empathizes with her as she repeatedly in-
vokes the power of the Spirit to pour into all her witnesses. She thus
makes them participants in a performative event that goes beyond words
and the self to embrace a communal cause. Hilary Hinds suggests that
“these modes of self-inscripturation have the effect, to some extent at
least, of removing the text from the realm of fallible human language
and realigning it with the revealed, scriptural word of God”.”” But in so
doing, the prophet is not denying her own language, but aligning it to
the divine word to enhance the expression of that which is ineffable. The
woman prophet in a seventeenth-century Puritan context externalizes
and performs her exercise in mental prayer for her own edification and
that of her audience. The pleasure and wisdom extracted from a post-
reprobate state furnishes the evidence of election and of living under
the permanent effects of grace. While being essentially the same pheno-
menon branching off from a shared pre-reformed theological tradition,
what sets a mystical and a prophetic message slightly apart is not the
inwardness of the experience—the tears, the sensorial rapture—or its
challenge to linguistic prowess, but the willingness to share it for public
(and possibly sectarian) benefit. While being in a state of grace may grant
you the gift of prophecy, it does not make one automatically a prophet.
134 Protean feminisms
Ramie Targoff argues that early English Protestants had sought to con-
struct a theological justification for the sincerity of public worship as an
element that might strengthen community faith through long sermons,
prayers, and songs.’* Counter-reformation mysticism was more wary of
affective public worship, since it could degenerate not only into public
spectacle but into prophecy, the heresy of alumbrados [illuminated], in
unmediated verbal expressions of the divine that escaped the supervision
of Church authorities. Women prophets could also face accusations of
“antinomian” if they took too many liberties in their expression of un-
mediated grace, as Jane Lead did when she claimed that the grace of
the Holy Spirit was bestowed on all the members of her Philadelphian
congregation by dint of forming the Church or Body of Christ.”4 Trapnel
dispelled accusations of being “antinomian” with a mixture of indiffer-
ence and defiance when she defined herself “an antinomian through im-
putation but not by adherency”. She considered that Saints were “dead
to the law by the life of Christ in them”, and that “antinomianism” was
simply the devil’s nickname for the doctrine of grace.”°
In Voice for the King, Trapnel’s poetic talents transform her into a
“prophetess/mystic/preacher”© and invite us to approach her work as
a lyrical poet. Pamela Hammonds argues that the religious fulcrum in
poet-prophetesses—typically but not exclusively Anne Bradstreet, An
Collins, or Lucy Hutchinson—should not preclude a literary and poetical
appreciation of their work.’’ While verse prophecies are closer to a bardic
tradition that would find sophisticated creative expression in the theo-
logically and politically nuanced poetry of the Sidney and the Herbert
circles in the sixteenth century, the interactions between prophecy and
poetry remains an understudied matter,’® partly because of the difficulty
of distinguishing the prophetic voice in most poetic expressions (poetry
as prophecy) and partly due to the fact that the conspicuous religious and
political substance has privileged a focus on the conditions of prophetic
production to the detriment of how its content is aesthetically represented.
When looking at the nuances of exegetical and political argument, most
women prophets emerge as competent poets and writers capable of cre-
ating original units of meaning. Susan Wiseman observed the need to
cultivate “a fuller sense of both royalists and other women’s relationships
to politics and poetry in the Civil War” beyond the numerous critical
studies of Katherine Philips and Margaret Cavendish”.’? Carol Barash
considered the year 1649 as a crucial moment in which “the tensions bet-
ween pastoral retreat and political protest” that had long characterized
men and women’s poetry, “repeatedly map political tropes—monarchy,
community, legitimacy—onto a feminized pastoral after 1649, suggest-
ing tensions between public and private spheres of authority”.8° Even
though those “pastoral” elements would not be obviously recognizable
in Trapnel’s poetry, there is in much verse prophecy an inwardness that
partakes of a sense of community that is both radical and feminine.
 The prophetic poetry of Anna Trapnel 135
Notes
1 Stevie Davies, “Anna Trapnel”, ODNB, accessed May 9, 2015, http://www.
oxforddnb.com/view/article/38075.
2 Zechariah 9.9-12. “Return to the stronghold, O prisoners who have the
hope; this very day I am declaring that I will restore double to you”.
3 Anna Trapnel, The Cry ofaStone. Or A Relation of Something Spoken in
Whitehall (London, 1654).
4 Diane Purkiss, “Producing the Voice, Consuming the Body: Women Prophets
of the Seventeenth Century”, in Women, Writing, History 1640-1740, eds.
Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (Athens, GA: University of Georgia
Press, 1992), 143.
) eae Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men (1972 London: Faber, 2008),
-S1,
6 SeOre Ine to the modern (Gregorian) calendar, this is equivalent to January

7 CSPD, 7 February 1654.

8 Marcus Nevitt, Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary
England, 1640-1660 (Farnham: Ashgate Publishers, 2006), 9.
9 Trapnel, The Cry ofa Stone, 50.
10 Trapnel, Report and Plea, Al.
11 Ibid., A.
12 Anna Trapnel (atr.), Poetical addresses or discourses delivered to a gather-
ing of ‘Companions’ in 1657 and 1658 (London, 1659), Bodleian, shelfmark
S.42.i Theology. For descriptions of the Folio, see Champlin Burrage,
“Trapnel’s Prophecies”, The English Historical Review 26:103 (1911):
526-35; Matthew Prineas, “The Discourse of Love and the Rhetoric of
Apocalypse in Anna Trapnel’s Folio Songs”, Comitatus 28 (1997): 90-110.
13 Trapnel, Poetical addresses, 840.
14 Bernard Capp notes a scheme to make Cromwell a king in the first months
of 1657, see The Fifth Monarchy Men, 119; Blair Worden documents the
royalist turn in the last months of Cromwell’s protectorate, see Literature
and Politics in Cromwellian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009), 303-5.
15 There are two possible biblical references that can be taken as basis for Trapnel’s
title, The Cry ofaStone. Hilary Hinds’ edition of The Cry ofaStone (Arizona:
ACMBRS, 2000) notes how the title may refer to the apocryphal Second Book
of Esdras, also known as ‘the Apocalypse of Ezra’ and 4 Esdras: “But if the
Most High grant thee to live, thou shalt see that which is after the third king-
dom to be troubled; and the sun shall suddenly shine forth in the night, and the
moon in the day: and blood shall drop out of wood, and the stone shall give his
voice, and the peoples shall be troubled” [2 (4) Esdras 5:4].
Another biblical reference to speaking and crying stones is found in Luke
19:40, in the passage of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. When asked
by the Pharisees to reprimand his disciples for speaking out aloud and prais-
ing Jesus, he replied: “I tell you, if the people become silent, the stones will
cry out”, In Luke 19:41—44, Jesus admonishes the Pharisees for being igno-
rant about peace and not acknowledging him as the Messiah (“the time of
your visitation”). Given the millenarianist slant of Fifth Monarchists, the
parallels seem clear: Trapnel is also announcing the imminent presence of
the Lord at a time of political turmoil, since she also awaits and announces
His arrival.
Yet another possible reference for Trapnel’s title is to be found in Matthew
21:42—46 in the Parable of the wicked tenants: Jesus said to them, “Did you
136 Protean feminisms
never read in the Scriptures, ‘The stone which the builders rejected, This
became the chief corner-stone; This came about from the Lord, And it is
marvelous in our eyes’? Therefore I say to you, the kingdom of God will be
taken away from you, and be given to a nation producing the fruit of it. And
he who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; but on whomever it falls,
it will scatter him like dust”. Trapnel also plays to great effect with the para-
dox of humility and exaltation contained in the image of the corner-stone.
16 Ibid., A2r.
i 1 Corinthians 1:27, “but God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the
wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose
the lowly things of this world and the despised things (and the things that
are not) to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him”.
Ibid., 69, 70.
Luke 19:40, “If the people are quiet, then the stones will cry out”.
Mark 12:10, “Haven’t you read this scripture: “The stone that the builders
rejected has become the corner stone’”.
Trapnel, The Cry ofa Stone, 23.
Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 269;
Hilary Hinds, God’s Englishwomen (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1996), 122; Phillis Mack, Visionary Women (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992), 18-22. Diane Watt, Secretaries of God (Cambridge:
D.S. Brewer, 1997), 3-14.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon
S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 127.
Ibid., 13.
Trapnel, The Cry ofa Stone, 14.
Hinds, God’s Englishwomen, 122.
Nevitt, Women and the Pamphlet Culture, 18.
Trapnel, The Cry ofa Stone, 16.
Rebecca Bullard, “Textual Disruption in Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea
(1654)”, The Seventeenth Century 23:1 (2008): 34.
Trapnel, The Cry ofa Stone, 15.
Ibid., 48.
1 Cor. 14:14-15, “I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the under-
rape also: I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understand-
ing also”.
Trapnel, The Cry ofa Stone, 40.
Oliver Cromwell is compared to the whore of Babylon for having betrayed
the government of Saints in the English Parliament and, hence, he is respon-
sible for the fall of the English nation.
Ibid., 19-20.
Michael Holquist, Dialogism (London and New York: Routledge, 2002
[1990]), 63.
Trapnel. The Cry of a Stone, 3.
Tide 7
Ibid., 10.
Blair Worden notes that the protectoral regime had taken special care in
portraying Cromwell as a wise judge of England, rather than presenting him
as a ‘king’, see Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England, 146.
Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone, 30.
Ibid., 31.
Ibid., 30.
44 Ibid., 65.
 The prophetic poetry of Anna Trapnel 137
45 Ibid., 20.
46 Ibid., 42.
47 Nevitt, Women and the Pamphlet Culture, 10.
48 Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger, 282.
49 oa Trapnel, “Predictions to the Editor”, Star, London, June 2, 1796, issue

50 Maria Magro, “Spiritual Autobiography and Radical Sectarian Women’s

Discourse: Anna Trapnel and the Bad Girls of the English Revolution”, Jour-
nal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34, 2 (2004): 405-35.
51 Anna Trapnel, Anna Trapnel Report and Plea (London: printed for Thomas
Brewster, 1654), 46-48.
52 Ibid., 29.
53 2 Corinthians 12:8-10.
54 Trapnel, The Cry ofa Stone, 4, 7.
55 Ibid. 29,
56 Ibid., 45.
57 2 Corinthians 4:7, “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the
excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us”.
58 John 3:30, “He must increase, but I must decrease”.
59 Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone, 45.
60 Romans 6:13, “Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrigh-
teousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from
the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God”.
61 Anna Trapnel, A Legacy for Saints; Being several experiences of the deal-
ings with God with Anna Trapnel in and after her Conversion (London:
printed for Thomas Brewster, 1654), 7.
62 Ibid., 8.
63 Purkiss, “Producing the Voice”, 139-58.
64 Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone, 4.
65 Ibid., 45.
66 Ibid., 63.
67 Arise Evans, The Voice of King Charles the Father (London: printed for the
Author, 1655).
68 Anna Trapnel, A Lively Voice for the King of Saints and Nations (London,
1657)2 66:
69 Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-century Revolu-
tion (London: Penguin Press), 360.
70 Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Reli-
gious Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 33.
71 Trapnel, Voice of the King, 70.
72 Hinds, God’s Englishwomen, 186.
73 Ramie Targoff, “The Performance of Prayer: Sincerity and Theatricality in
Early Modern England”, Representations 60, Autumn (1997): 5S.
74 Jane Lead, A Message to the Philadelphian Society Whithersoever Dispersed
over the whole Earth (London: 1696), 39.
75 Trapnel, A Legacy for Saints, 15.
76 Dorothy Ludlow, “Shaking Patriarchy’s Foundation: Sectarian Women in
England 1641-1700”, in Triumph Over Silence: Women in Protestant His-
tory, ed. R. Greaves (New York: Greenwood Press, 1985), 107.
77 Pamela S. Hammons, Poetic Resistance: English Women Writers and the
Early Modern Lyric (Farnham: Ashgate, 2002), 65.
78 See Rosalind Smith, Sonnets and the English Woman Writer 1560-1621
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Steven May, The Elizabethan Courtier
138 Protean feminisms
Poets (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991); Barbara K. Lewalski,
Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1993); Sarah C.E. Ross, “Elizabeth Melville and the Religious Sonnet
Sequence in Scotland and England”, in Early Modern Women and the Poem,
ed. Susan Wiseman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013),
42-59; Julie Crawford, Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Produc-
tion in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
79 Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue, 181.
80 Carol Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 1640-1714 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1996), 7. For recent studies on seventeenth-century poetry and politics,
see Sarah C.E. Ross, Women, Poetry and Politics in Seventeenth-Century
Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015; Susan Wiseman (ed.), Early
Modern Women and the Poem (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2013); Gillian Wright, Producing Women’s Poetry, 1600-1730 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013).
8 Obstat sexus

Saint Teresa of Avila was named a Doctor of the Church by Pope Paul
VI in 1970, nearly four hundred years after she was canonized in 1622
by Pope Gregory XV. The reason why she was made a saint before a
doctor was the ecclesiastical seal of Obstat sexus, that is, “her sex does
not allow it”. Seventeenth-century women could speak in churches in a
prophetic fashion, but they could not preach. However, as this book con-
tends, the textual variety by women prophets force us to appreciate the
wide range of subject matters, narrative viewpoints, and nuanced theo-
logical arguments that emerge from apparently formulaic devotional dis-
courses that were aimed at an audience within and without its immediate
readership in print. Preaching and prophesying were often in practice in-
distinguishable in intent and content, especially when the prophecy did
not rely on dreams or visions but on the in-dwelling of the Holy Spirit.
This prophetic essence was then rendered by women’s rational faculties
in the form of a text or speech that showed a personal conscience and a
marked (female) authorial presence. The prophetess Elizabeth Bathurst
wrote The Sayings of Women to show how the Lord poured out his spirit
“not only on the male, but also on the female”. Women are for Bathurst
the stewards of his gifts of grace, but only those who have been wise in
heart “manage their particular talents to the praise and glory of god”.!
Bathurst’s catalogue of biblical women infused with authorial and pro-
phetic wisdom makes it clear that its protagonists were powerful by dint
of their conscience. And when they praised God, they were true to both
their own selves and God’s will and exerted influence in their communi-
ties, such as the “woman of Tekoah speaking to King David or Miriam
addressing an assembly of women. Reconciliation and Restoration,
according to Bathurst, have come of Christ, a woman’s seed, and that’s
why he is “the healer of our breaches and the reformer of our paths”.?
In him, male and female are made all one.
Divine Songs and Meditations by An Collins, her only extant work
printed in 1653, reveals that she was driven to poetry as a result of her frail
health, and after listening to many “prophane histories” at first which
gave her no satisfaction, she experienced the divine truth that moved
her to a “spiritual calmnesse taking up my thoughts to Theologicall
140 Protean feminisms
employments”.* She did not intend to take her poetry “unto the pub-
lick view of everyone”, but she did so when she realized her “crosses”
would be useful to those who questioned their own state. She refused to
be compared to a Sibell, since she could not “devine of future things to
treat”, or to be taken as a virgin muse of the Parnassus who composes
from a “free conception of the mind”. She is a Deborah who sings when
the “land has rest”, at night, when she can think clearly and be inspired
by God to write “from new conceptions to relate”.* Prophecy empowers
literary creative talents for An Collins, which promipts her to comment
on the Fall as an abuse of God who made us free out of Love toward
humanity. Prefiguring a Miltonic reminiscence, she defined the “sense
of Love as eternal, doth/with Love, Obedience will produce”.> Helen
Wilcox and Jonathan Post have noted Collins’ commonalities to George
Herbert’s The Temple,® suggesting that the range of her readings might
have gone beyond the devotional stock for a woman. While her religious
affiliation is unclear despite some references to the “light”, which might
point at Quaker sympathies, Collins’ devotional poetry is not devoid of
a prophetic voice that penetrated the kernel of spiritual mystery: “Now
to be justified is to be freed/from gilt and punishment or sin likewise”,
“With God, whose grace it is that justifies; and not our works, as vainly
some surmise”.’ She continued explicating the uselessness of performing
good deeds when people “are not able to think one good thought”, and
regarded her poetry as a truth that was “recited” in her mind. She would
not cast these poetic thoughts off, “nor will be so alone to them con-
fined”. In so far as God has entrusted his poetry on her, she will write
her “meditacions” with just the words that suffice. She defined her un-
derstanding of life as superior to the vanity of earthly matters, including
scholarly learning that, despite its practicality, “he that hath studied as-
tronomy/though his meditacions ascend to the sky/he may miss of heaven
and heavenly bliss/if that he can practise no study but his”.® In the sec-
tion entitled The Discourse, rendered in rime royal stanzas, Collins de-
fined the scholarly knowledge of astronomers as masculine and as being
a “meditacion” too, which is “vain in conscience”, while placing herself
above it as the purveyor of wisdom and joy. Despite her confinement,
An Collins wished to share a vision. Her assured style and willingness
to understand the world through divine inspiration have led scholars to
make sense both of her melancholic tones and her more ecstatic and even
experiential moments, which are less textually based on Biblical refer-
encing. W. Scott Howard suggests that “An Collins writes with a keen
sense of self-consciousness about her subjectivity and her faith, about the
gender/power dynamics of her time, and with a nuanced understanding
of her participation within (and contribution to) an emerging tradition
of women’s literary achievement”.” There is a train of thinking and feel-
ing in Divine Songs that defies ‘occasional’ versification and returns,
like the seasons of the year it often features, to the origins of true love
 Obstat sexus 141
and grace. In one of Collins’ shorter songs written in Sicilian octave, she
added a marital slant to the healing effects of grace. When grace occurs,
it can even cure the entrenched sinful enmity of the sexes in a household
that creates “much domestick woes” and prevents the union that makes
it a family “of one mind and communion”.!” It is all, as An would have
said, “vanity under the Sun”.!!
Another woman who was probably in poor health and resorted to
writing to seek spiritual reassurance was Anne Venn (1627-1654), the
daughter of a well-off silk merchant in London, John Venn, who became
involved in parliamentarian politics in the 1640s. After a disappoint-
ment with Presbyterianism, Anne and her mother fell under the influence
of the Independent divine Isaac Knight at his church in Fulham.!* Her
only extant text, A Wise Virgin’s Lamp Burning is 331-pages long and
was printed posthumously by her step-father, who found the manuscript
“in her closet”. It follows the structure of a diary, and includes some
“scattered meditations” and letters to “Master Knight” about spiritual
instruction. The text is largely divided into two parts or ‘books’, The
incomes of God to a Beleever and God’s sweet incomes to a Believer,'*
which bring together Anne’s anxiety about the state of her soul in an
intense psychological tone:

I could serve the Lord more and better, but oh! how do I live? And
how poorly do I walk? But oh that I could come to prayer, and read,
and hear, and meditate, and do all private and publike duties, and
walk in all my Relations in this world, as might honor this my Lord;
are not these the continual groans and breathings of my heart before
the Lord (Lord though knowest it”) for I have non I desire to appeal
unto, but to thee the searcher of my heart.!*

In this and other passages, Venn expresses her concern about the practi-
cal aspects of living in a state of grace and the ways in which she could
be instrumental to the Lord. Her frail condition and the desire to recon-
cile her private devotion with a more direct intervention are anticipated
by a lengthy dissertation about how God’s love operates in humankind,
especially through Saints or daughters of Sion. “This love in God is a
nature, not a passion” since it is the way God communicates all He igure
Venn expounds on the fact that even the best men and women are imper-
fect vessels due to the “vanity of all creatures compared with the Lord”.
She weaves a series of rhetorical questions asking what is desirable in
those men and women, and concludes that it is their resemblance to the
Lord. Venn establishes an anti-idolatrous comparison between the im-
age represented in painting, which fades over time and is the condition
of all “finite creatures”, and God’s “eternal substance” that manifests in
“every relation wherein the Lord is pleased to manifest itself”.!° After
all, painted images, despite their beauty, cannot smile if God frowns,
142 Protean feminisms
they cannot talk, raise up, or heal themselves. She returns to the dis-
cussion of God forming men’s hearts to his likeness by noting that God
loves righteousness and that’s why he terribly “executes his displeasure
on unrighteousness” on those who cannot behold divine justice without
being confounded.!” Here the sense of vision acquires spiritual connota-
tions as in Romans 3:20-27, since only when the believer is accustomed
to the sight of God’s righteousness he or she will be made like Christ
through a process of “assimilation”, which obviously differs from any
practice of beatific contemplation.!® Depravity is essential to be able to
appreciate and accept God’s workings of grace on us. Venn’s spiritual
autobiography, instead of offering a vivid description of her own de-
pravity, is geared toward preparing the believer for the actual everyday
meaning of what a life of grace means.
Elizabeth Major (fl. 1656) turned her affliction into a dialogue bet-
ween “soul” and “consolation”, and between “soul” and “echo”, for
a “comfortable contemplation” in her Honey on the Rod, prefaced
by Joseph Caryl, a leading nonconformist and rector of St Magnus in
London during the civil wars and interregnum. Caryl also acted as a
licenser for printing books of divinity, which would explain his involve-
ment in the publication.!? The second part of Major’s account briefly
relates how after her mother’s demise she was raised by her father and
then educated by a governess in the household of a “great and honour-
able family” until she fell ill and lame and returned to her father. Given
her physical disability, it is unlikely that she visited any congregation on
a regular basis, but she may have been invited to make her thoughts and
experience “publique” for the “kind acceptance I knew it would find
from some and the good it might do to others”, which prevented her to
look upon her tract as “waste paper”.2? She considered herself “incapable
of learning the trade driven in Heaven”, since she had spent her money
and deprived herself of the little health she enjoyed, which triggered a
faith crisis.2! Inspired by the words in Psalm 43:5 (“Why art though
cast down, oh my soul, and why are thou disquieted within me”?) Major
positioned herself in a middle narrative ground that mediated between
the afflictions of her soul and the consolation that she found through her
understanding of God’s will and “the prophets’ own words”. Her soul,
true self, or “noblest part of man”, wishing that her tongue be the pen
of a “ready writer” to impart her “cases”, often begins her dialogue with
the formula “I confess, I confess” to disclose her sins and elucidate her
conscience. “Consolation” replies to the soul that reason was never given
to dishonour God and “neither wast thou made a rational creature, that
thou mightiest with the more reason distrust thy Maker”.2 Major ad-
mits that “having no more than sense and reason, we shall never know
God nor his truths with comfort”, but we can rely on our “diligence
and trust” in our maker as an exclusive human gift. Her process of self-
examination seeks to uplift her faith as an example to others and exert
 Obstat sexus 143
her reason to understand human affliction. Adam features as a man who
deserves the reader’s sympathy, for his transgression—and not Eve’s, who
is the victim of Satan’s schemes—caused him to be deep in sorrow. “To
his conscience?” Major’s soul asks, to which Consolation replies that
Adam’s conscience “upbraided him with his fault”, even though God
in his great wisdom allowed the transgression and ensuing suffering to
occur so as to manifest the glory of his mercy ina context of a felix culpa
or “fortunate fall”. Major was also aware of the sins generally attributed
to the female sex and wished that her judgement failed in understanding
them since these made her blush: “I fear there is no sin under the sun, but
someone or other of my sex have been stained with the guilt of it”.2 Her
guilt for the female sex appears to be rhetorical, though, since she does
not elaborate on this argument other than suggesting that only free grace
“made the difference” in alleviating the seed of sin in her nature. At the
end of her tract after “the authors confession”, Major appended an “au-
thor’s belief” in which the soul dramatically defines itself as sin-sick and
asks for help to an “Eccho”, who induces her to accept Christ since faith
“can mount the lofty skies”. Her belief, her faith in her conscience, leads
Major to become a new person, defining herself with the anagram of
“O Tama blesst Heir” which allows her to present her “particular appli-
cation of the book of Jonah”, a prophecy in which she sees God’s nature
as it is being “held forth” to me.*4 Major, as Jonah did in resisting the
call of God to preach the population of Nineveh, accepted her prophetic
function and published her soul-seeking trip to salvation for the benefit
of an entire nation.
In 1646, Dorothy Burch, a mother from the fishing village of Stroud
in Kent, wrote two catechisms in question and answer format to prevent
abuses and errors within her congregation, led by a minister “descended
from Rome” who did not deserve “herself and others’ honour in the
way he is in”. When the minister began to cast aspersions on Burch, she
decided to put her thoughts into print to correct errors in practice and
conscience for the sake of “the safety of persons”, such as the presump-
tion in the mortality of the soul, the worship of images or the belief that
a man is bound to accept that which his reason cannot comprehend.*°
While Burch’s purpose was didactic, she was not aiming at a young audi-
ence, since the content went well beyond a basic instruction for children
and her tone was not particularly emotional or markedly different from
catechisms written by male clerics. Nonetheless, Burch chose this format
driven almost by a maternal instinct to instruct, correct, and warn those
with mistaken judgment.~° She did so appealing to a prophetic capacity,
that of “the love which I hear to truth, and the service I owe to those who
are willing to take paines to find it”. Burch further advises the reader to
take notice not only of her words, “but of the scope of the holy ghost
in them”.2” The author of a postscript to Scripture Security, identified
as I.K., mentioned that the reader may have noticed that this catechism
144 Protean feminisms
“was penned for Christians of the lowest form to whom the author in-
tended with briefnesse, clearnesse and Scripture-language, to give gene-
ral notes for caution against the dangerous doctrines of the times”.78
The didactic purpose is also a characteristic feature of the prophecies
of the Baptist Katherine Sutton (fl. 1630-1663), even though most of
them were lost in a shipwreck while she was sailing for the Netherlands
to flee from Archbishop Laud’s ‘Popish’ reforms of church practices in the
1630s. She lost thirty years of experiences recorded in writing, according
to Sutton’s only surviving tract, the spiritual autobiography A Christian
Womans Experiences of the Glorious Working of God’s Free Grace
(1663) published “for the edification of others”. Sutton was a married
woman who had a gift for spiritual singing, in a similar Deborah-like
manner as in Trapnel that combined prophetic political denunciation
and praise to God. She had worked as a governess in her youth, and
while still married she traveled extensively throughout England to attend
sermons and probably to perform some occasional work as governess as
she was “sent to houses”. While Sutton proclaims her spiritual status by
recording in song what God instructs her to do, essentially to follow his
bidding (“Cease thou thy mourning, and see thou dost praise/For thou
shalt do my will in all my ways”),7” there is throughout the text a subtle
resistance to comply with God’s will forthwith, thus creating a delayed
effect between divine order and its acceptance. Sutton’s appropriation
and interpretation of God’s command is diligently used as an example of
how His will and grace works in humans while, at the same time, allows
her a space for personal conscience.
Sutton explains how on one occasion she was “called by providence”
to move to a household she particularly disliked since she had found
“opposition against her”. She set herself to pray not to express her will-
ingness to submit to the will of God, but to ask not to be sent to that
family. She then realized that her husband’s relatives had inadvertently
arranged for her trip there, and Katherine prayed again to ask God to
be made to submit to his will. When she was “brought to submit unto
it”, through her earnest seeking and understanding of God, her heart
“was soon made willing to go”.°? She went and found that the Lord
had “worked upon one of the family” whom Katherine abhorred, and
she was able to stay there. Sutton’s initial resistance to pray in order to
express her submission to God reveals her understanding that her own
wishes are above God’s, and she can only accept them if her heart is made
to feel satisfied with them. While she appears to be submissive to God’s
will, she actually privileges her own stance to His so as to highlight
God’s workings on humans and the close, almost familial relationship
with Him. Sutton’s will is God’s will. In her songs, at the end of which
she assures the reader that “these are not stud[iJed things, but are given
immediately”,*! Sutton praises God while putting herself at the forefront
as someone who has taken the trouble to search for him, and as a result
 Obstat sexus 145
she lives a life of glory. God advises her to “cast of the world” and not to
waste time with the ‘base world’ so that “all the meek ones of the earth”
come home with her. “What I have done for thee my love/since thou to
mee drew’st near”.°? Sutton’s prophetic mission is to show that God
finds the ways to inhabit one’s being so as to negotiate a life with better
terms, but this usually implies foregoing one’s own limitations.
One night, she records, while Sutton was not sure of how she could
honor God in her generation, she was told by Him to write down her
thirty years of experiences. Her first reaction was to deny herself and the
feasibility of the task, since she thought she was a “poor weak worm”
with a dull memory or talent. God replied with direct quotes from Isaiah
41 and Psalm 37:5 urging her not to fear. But she was afraid, and debated
with herself about how to go about her writing. Then God poured out
his spirit to her and she was able to record her experiences on paper but
did not print them, as God had instructed her to do. She put the origi-
nals in a trunk and traveled to Holland, where she lost them following
a storm. Much distressed, and fearing that God would have abandoned
her spirit, she prayed and God inspired her to write again. Even though
she often procrastinated for lack of time, she set herself to do it and
the Lord was pleased to assist her.>° Sutton defined prayer as a mental
exercise in which the spirit can act, since “God accepts what himself
gives”, rejecting outer performances that resemble prayer. She set the
example of Hannah or Daniel for their faith and their rejoicing that God
had heard their plight. Despite the didactic and edifying purpose of the
tract, which the preface of the minister Hanserd Knollys announced as
the work in fragments of a godly woman who “would not lose any op-
portunity she could get either in publicke or in private for her precious
soul” to endure all sort of circumstances,>4 Sutton was able to set herself
as an example for both the Baptist community and possibly outside of
it, while at the same time she dramatized the difficulties of following
God’s will when it defies logic or personal wishes.*> At a time when dis-
senters were again persecuted after the Act of Uniformity, dissenter men
and women (including Baptists) had to be careful in promoting any show
of performance or public disruption while being true to their practices,
which in the case of women included the gift of prophecy. In her note to
the “courteous reader” at the end of her tract, Sutton remarked that she
signed her printed tract out of obedience to God. She did not do it out of
pride or “to own a prophetical spirit”—that is, she was not speaking on
behalf of a prophet, or fashioning herself as one, since she only “own{s]
a prophetical voice of Christ”.°° Christ’s speech is then prophetic by
nature and it cannot be despised even when the spirit runs through the
weakest of vessels: “For Christ did not reject the woman through weak,
ignorant and sinful; where he had forgiven much, he maketh them love
much”,.?” Women have a special relationship with Christ because they
are capable of loving more—as Sutton illustrates with her mentioning
146 Protean feminisms
of Mary Magdalene’s visit to Jesus’ burial place—so that “the edifying
effect on others”, as the title page announces, seems to be complete.
But will these others, particularly women, feel identified with the same
dilemmas as Sutton’s? Her activism as a prophet who advises the nation
was less conspicuous and enclosed in a private textual space, even
though she defined her voice as prophetical and her songs express a con-
cern for the well-being of the nation that touches upon every social rank,
high and low. Through her prophetic voice, Christ assures the poor that
“I, their God, and portion, will them bless/That Ihave made of them
my onely choyce”.*® In one occasion in which she was “breaking bread”,
Sutton enacted a home mass ceremony of consecration of the body of
Christ soon after she received the voice of God as a blessing and as an
invitation to partake of His banquet of joy and love. At the same time,
her position as the protagonist of her own story in which she challenged
momentarily God’s will in matters that involve personal decisions is con-
vincing while appealing to readers who might empathize with Sutton’s
indomitable personality. Sutton is writing a public text, in the sense of
speaking on behalf not only of her private self or her prophetic spirit in
a state of grace, but of women who find themselves in similar circum-
stances. While Sutton introduced herself as a weak and dull woman—
and she reminded readers that God loves women the most and he made
them love the most too—she represented herself as one individual with
her own preferences and opinions, which can only be changed when she
is imbued with the spirit of Christ. Sutton may be writing on behalf of
her congregation, but through her account she is also dignifying the role
of women both as prophets and as individuals with a full awareness that
she is being read.
Her perspective forms a contrast with the victimizing role attributed
to women by some Calvinist or Presbyterian polemicists, such as the
prolific William Prynne, who warned against toleration to the con-
venticlers who gathered in private houses and took advantage of “silly
women” to effect “new fashions in church government”.*? The anony-
mous pamphlet A Spirit Moving in Women Preachers branded a “new
feminine brood” of female preachers in independent churches who, out
of ignorance and arrogance, “preach in mixt congregations of men and
women in an indolent manner and usurping authority over men”.*° The
pamphlet also questioned women’s prophetic warrant as it allowed them
to “intrude themselves in this grand office of preaching”.*! At the same
time, John Lilburne replied to Prynne’s latest book, Truth triumphing
over Falsehood (1645), that the prophecies in Revelation 17 were ful-
filled in that the Kings of the Earth gave their power to the Beast in
assisting the Pope “to joyne the ecclesiasticall and civill state together”,
since spiritual laws could not depend on the laws of man.* Prynne, and
Thomas Edwards in particular, were concerned about the detachment
of independent groups from a natural covenant of Christ, which would
 Obstat sexus 147
endanger the unity of reformed churches against the popish enemy. In
their eagerness to consolidate a reformed church, anti-tolerationists were
accused of that which they feared the most: a catholic cult. Edwards
foresaw that the proliferation of separatist churches would entitle hus-
bands and wives to belong to different congregations, and their dis-
parity in conscience could alter “oeconomicall relations and duties” in
the household and weaken the “power and authority which God hath
given to the husbands, fathers and masters over wives, children and ser-
vants”.*3 Whether Edwards was exaggerating the scenario of privacy
disruption to lure independents or not, this did not prevent some women
prophets from defending independence precisely as the solution to public
and private well-being. As we have seen in Trapnel, her new world or-
der is promulgated from her own congregation by dint of her prophetic
ministry, while others such as Katherine Chidley—with direct links to
the levellers—dwelled upon the practical advantages of spiritual inde-
pendence. Katharine Gillespie noted that Chidley’s life-long defense of
independence and toleration was conceived as an undue interference of
church authorities in the private sphere of spiritual practice.44 Chidley
(fl. 1616-1653) and her husband Daniel, a tailor from Shrewsbury,
had been reported to the consistory court for not attending their local
church, and by the mid-1620s they moved to London where they ini-
tially joined the separatists of John Duppa and the levellers, with whom
their son Samuel became involved.** Imbued by the voice of the spirit in
her, Chidley employed a belligerent tone to wage war against Thomas
Edwards and his reasons for opposing toleration which, in her view,
were inconsequential: “Mr. Edwards, now I will counsel you to muster
up all your army you bragge of, and come forth, set up your colours, and
pitch a field with the Separation, bring forth all your strong reasons, not
only the last conceived”.4° Those reasons, which she rebutted as a pack
of “shadows and fig-leaves”, revolved around the nature of the Refor-
mation. While Edwards considered toleration to be against the tenor of
reform because it could not be achieved without “offending many con-
sciences”, Chidley pointed out that he would only offend the consciences
of those who “have knowledge in the word of God” and then sneered
at that which sectaries were often accused of, namely, ignorance and
disorder: “The ignorant multitude will be offended at nothing, but of
whatever religion their king will be of, they will be of the same, there-
fore you are a contentious man indeede!”*” For Chidley, independent
congregations already perform Christ’s public worship. Edwards’ worse
crime would lie in his efforts to seek parliamentary support for the “con-
gregational way”, since the laws of man cannot possibly rule matters
of conscience. She turns Edwards over to parliament so that “they deal
with him for the same” in an attempt that her public act of denunciation
sets in motion a political machinery against him and effects a change in
his conscience. Chidley further urges him to correct his language and
148 Protean feminisms
the tenor of his writing. “Consider and receive admonition, though it
be from a woman. I am sure many godly persons and Churches beyond
the seas are grieved at your writing”.4* The assured tone of Chidley’s
prophetic tracts speaks for something more than toleration. She stands
for the moral, spiritual, and practical well-being of a group, becoming
a prophetic guide and a preacher who, in her relationship next of kin
with the divine, can tell right from wrong and is not deterred by fears
of retaliation, public sneer, or sexual bias. The exercise of an individual
feminine conscience brings out personal change and invites women to
participate in acts of collective transformation that push them beyond
their apprehensions to go public, get printed, and be noticed.

Notes
= Elizabeth Bathurst, The Sayings of Women (London: printed by Andrew
Sowle, 1683), t.p.
Dalit dear.
3 An Collins, Divine Songs and Meditacions (London: printed by R. Bishop,
1653), Alt.
Ibid., 63.
Ibid., 48.
Helen Wilcox, “Entering The Temple: women, reading and devotion in
NM
seventeenth-century England”, in Religion, Literature, and Politics in
Post-Reformation, England, 1540-1688, ed. Donna B. Hamilton and Richard
Strier (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), 201-2; Jonathan
Post, English Lyric Poetry: The Early Seventeenth Century (London and
New York: Routledge, 1999), 236.
T Mente. 2a
8 Ibid., 41.
9 W. Scott Howard, An Collins and the Historical Imagination (London &
New York: Routledge, 2016), 13.
10 Collins, Divine Songs, 36.
11 Ibid., 41.
12 Keith Lindley, “Anne Venn”, ODNB, accessed March 10, 2016, http://www.
oxforddnb.com/view/article/69139.
13 “Income” in its now rare meaning of “the coming of a divine influence
into the soul; spiritual influx or communication”, according to the Oxford
English Dictionary, 2009 edn.
14 Anne Venn, A Wise Virgins Lamp Burning (London: printed for E. Cole,
1658), 212.
ISelbide 1018
16 Ibid., 245-46,
17 Ibid., 307.
18 Ibid., 309.
19 Sarah Ross, “Elizabeth Major”, ODNB, accessed November 30, 2015,
doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/68092 .
20 Elizabeth Major, Honey on the Rod (London: printed by Thomas Maxey,
1656), [A8].
21 Major, Sin-and Mercy, [b2].
22 Ibid., 82.
23 Ibid., [b4].
 Obstat sexus 149
24 Ibid., 201-9,
25 Dorothy Burch, Scripture Security for Conscience (London: printed by
T.R. and E.M. for John Bellamie, 1646), 16.
26 For a survey on women’s catechisms and Dorothy Burch’s case, see Paula
McQuade, “A Knowing People: Early Modern Motherhood, Female
Authorship and Working Class Community in Dorothy Burch’s A Catechisme
of the Several Heads of the Christian Religion (1646)”, Prose Studies,
32 (2010): 167-86.
27 Burch, Scripture Security, A2.
28 Ibid., 18.
29 Katherine Sutton, A Christian Womans Experiences of the Glorious Work-
ings of God’s Free Grace (Rotterdam: printed by Henry Goddaeus, 1663), 21.
30 Ibid., 5-6.
31 Ibid., 44.
32° Ibid., 13.
Sa ibids 21-22;
34 Ibid., sig.*1.
35 Rachel Adcock notes how male Baptists in the period often commented on
the fortitude of women to help the formation and growth of their congrega-
tions (Baptist Women’s Writing, 74).
36 Sutton, A Christian Womans Experiences, 40.
37 Ibid., 40-41.
38 Sutton, “Hymns”, in A Christian Womans Experience, 42.
39 William Prynne, A Fresh Discovery of Some Prodigious New Wandering-
Blasing Stars (London: printed by John Macock, 1645), B1.
40 Anon. A Spirit Moving in the Women Preachers (London: printed for Henry
Shepheard, 1645), 3.
41 Ibid., 4.
42 John Lilburne, A Copie ofa Letter (London, 1645), 4.
43 Thomas Edwards, Reasons against the Independent Government of Parti-
cular Congregations (London: printed by Richard Cotes, 1641), 26.
44 Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent, 76-78.
45 Ian J. Gentles, “Katherine Chidley”, ODNB, accessed February 21, 2016,
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/37278.
46 Katherine Chidley, A New-Yeares-Gift or a Brief Exhortation to Mr Thomas
Edwards (London, 1645), 2.
47 Ibid., 18.
48 Ibid., 22.
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Part II

In-communications
9 Prophetic word vision
Lady Eleanor Davies
and textual bi-location

Prophetesses were able to not only promote political change or gain a

new sense of themselves through their writing, they also created a new
radical language to convey the transcendence of the Holy Ghost. Since
prophecy helped to explain everyday events by virtue of God’s reason,
writers sought to expand their expressive abilities to depict complex
spiritual realities. This process could involve a gradual loss of substantive
religious content to privilege an engagement with meanings, metaphors,
discursive modes, and stylistic resources that went beyond the basic
foundation of biblical referencing and interpretation. The present Part 3
is concerned with how prophecy reinforced authorial control over the
text and fostered creative freedom and expression. I approach this aspect
of prophetic writing by focusing on two women whose most productive
periods were several decades apart. They did not adopt a position of
inferiority with regard to their prophetic work, not even rhetorically as
‘weaker vessels’. Lady Eleanor Douglas and Jane Lead wrote in a highly
personalized style with various degrees of success and public acceptance.
While the former failed to communicate effectively with an audience,
the latter gathered a faithful following who respected and admired her.
Delving into Lady Eleanor Davies’ writings can be a daunting expe-
rience due to their disruptive syntax, the abrupt shifts in content, and
dense allegorical references.! She was branded as “mad” in her lifetime,
and early twentieth-century scholarship did not fundamentally differ
from this view. $.G. Wright considered that Davies displayed a definite
weakness of the mind,* whereas Theodore Spencer suggested that she
suffered from a mental condition that would explain her digressions,
changes in narrative perspective, and her anagrams.° Esther S. Cope’s
thorough reconstruction of Davies’ biography and main corpus is cru-
cial for any foray into the study of Davies’ work,’ and Diane Watt drew
attention to the role printing and publishing played in her identity as
a prophet.° The main lines of research that have emerged over the last
twenty years focus on the potential hidden meanings of Davies’ biblical
renderings and her subversive apocalyptical politics. Megan Matchinske
argued that Davies’ tracts were successful as part of a tradition of mille-
narian and apocalyptic writing in the 1640s that resorted to communal
154 In-communications

reproach and penance in the effective creation of a national identity, but

failed as gendered texts. She further noted that Davies’ enemies were not
simply institutional, like the church or the state, but adversaries who
personally responded to her prophecies, negating her authority.° Davies
would have been led to position herself and her tracts at the epicenter of
all action, designing a concentric narration that moved from scriptural
exegesis to a mix of current affairs and personal vindication, only to
come back again to prophetic commentary. Along these lines, Teresa
Feroli analyzed Davies’ account of the shameful trial of her brother as an
exercise of identification with a social outcast in an attempt to subvert
political, ecclesiastical, and even moral codes. Amanda Capern read the
theological subtext of the Daviesan corpus against the backdrop of the
culminating process of the English Reformation, in which Davies would
come to defend, for instance, double predestination (both for elect and
reprobate). She regards Davies’ particular style as her mode of represen-
tation that “reflects the gender of her pedagogy”, that is, “constructions
that she heard in sermons and in the puzzles and mnemonics used in the
intellectual exercises of sermon-recall and catechistical repetition”’ as
opposed to the classical training of the educated male Puritans—which
could also be highly mnemonic and repetitive. This approach, however,
tends to disregard Davies’ imaginative efforts because it also reads the
theology of her message in the light of its intellectual sources.
Other recent surveys of Davies’ canon have also questioned the con-
nection between madness and stylistic density, reconsidering the influ-
ence of her work in its political and social milieu. Jonathan Andrews
drew attention to class nuances, and argued that aristocratic ladies with
too vocal religious views were deemed mad so as to excuse their be-
havior, rather than starting legal actions against them.® Aquila Weekes,
keeper of the gatehouse and warden of the prison for the Court of High
Commission, filed a petition in 1634 to receive “further allowances” for
Lady Eleanor, one of “his Majesty’s prisoners”, who had been captive for
a long time.’ Lucy and her husband Ferdinando Lord Hastings sought to
obtain from the king the release of Lady Eleanor, “who was committed
some time by warrant from the Board for a great offence, the particular
mention whereof we think fitter to supress”.!? Lady Eleanor’s unfit be-
havior might have embarrassed more than intimidated her peers, but this
did not deter her writing spree.
For Richard Pickard, Davies’ tracts destabilize meaning itself and en-
tail a paradox, since “the artistic inadequacy of the text confirms the
author’s call to prophecy” and “her tortuous prose signifies not errors
introduced by madness of illiteracy, but a structural symbolism deriving
from the linguistically complicated role of the prophet”.!! This approach
required the ability to represent biblical types, cast metaphorical associ-
ations, and inscribe oneself in biblical episodes (parables) that pertain to
eternal and national truths. We could therefore define Davies’ outreach
 Prophetic word vision 155
as meta-prophetic. She produced a complete corpus of biblical prophecy
that was true to its revealed nature: mysterious, at times confrontational,
obscure, and demanding for the reader. Its literal meaning is elusive
unless the individual engages in a meditative sort of intensive reading
that, as it may happen with the Bible, fosters intuitive understanding.
The dense biblical texture of Davies’ prose is unique as well because it
serves an autobiographical purpose, rather than the other way round.
The biblical subtext may clarify some aspects of her life, which is a dif-
ferent approach from other prophetesses whose personal narratives were
used to illustrate religious or political truths. While this does not detract
from the fact that her texts sought to instil spiritual regeneration, it also
reveals that biblical prophecy by seventeenth-century women was not
only a platform but a language that women used to allude to a myriad
of non-religious themes. Davies sought to make her messages known
by adopting a direct and often confrontational stance with her readers,
which might have granted her authorial control over her own discourse
and textual production but did not do much to entice her readership. By
contrast, Jane Lead was less concerned with the material aspects of her
own works but managed to attract the admiration of her circle of read-
ers, even outside England. The richly allegorical and mystical content of
her texts point to an intriguing aspect of seventeenth-century prophesy-
ing: the articulation of a whole feminist theology. Anne Bathurst, a close
associate of Lead, circulated her writing in manuscript form and dis-
played an idiosyncratic use of spelling that enhanced the melodic quality
of her spiritual diary (1679-1693).
According to Elaine Hobby, “Davies’ style has prompted some com-
mentators to read her texts through the perspective of French psycho-
analytical feminism, and to see their anarchic language as an eruption
of the semiotic chora through the constraints of the signifying chain”.
Such an interpretation would lend itself to approaching Davies as a sub-
versive figure, whose messages and personal troubles would be symbolic
projections of the social situation of most women at that time. However,
as Hobby suggests, the embedded intertextuality of Davies speaks for
a private or a national interest, but a gendered text does not seem to
emerge out of it. Her prophecies were also slightly atypical of their age
since her high social rank allowed her to pay for her pamphlets’ printing.
Leaving aside the subsequent legal prosecutions that she endured, this
granted her a degree of freedom in her authorship, and the possibility of
sustaining a sense of authority in the capacity of what we may call an
“author-function”.
The French historian Roger Chartier asserted that the value of the
“author-function” and the recognition of authorship preceded the
legal establishment of intellectual ownership over literary works before
the eighteenth century. Chartier defined this “author-function” by
refining Michel Foucault’s earlier approach to authorship in his widely
156 In-communications

anthologised lecture “What is an Author?” (1969), and considered that

the unity and cohesion of an author’s work, or of a series of works, runs
parallel with a constructed subject, even though not all life events are
pertinent in defining the position of an author.!? According to Chartier,
orality implies the consideration of the text as an “event”. A reader may
however regard texts as a “monument”, fixed on paper and in ink, which
is bound to be recovered, analyzed, and reconsidered.!4 For Chartier
most literature of the early modern period moves uneasily between the
two categories: the printed “monument” is always ready to be turned
into an “event”, read or acted out before an audience; and, vice versa,
the oral event can also be turned into a document designed to last for a
longer or shorter time, depending on the circumstances of its publication
and the demands of its audience. This conjunction of printing-awareness
and the need to address an audience-readership that legitimizes her sta-
tus as a prophetess resonates with Davies’ case. However, she fell short
of gaining recognition as an author-prophet because her subjective expe-
rience with God was written down in a codified language that confused
her readership. Without the back-up of a community or group, Davies
might not have been sufficiently aware or careful about how her reader-
ship would receive her messages or even who her audience was in the first
place. Her use of biblical typology and her prophetic persona were not
created before or beyond the process of publication, but rather through-
out that very process. In this way, Davies activated an “author-function”
in the sense that Chartier used this term: the presence of an underlying
identity that unifies a canon and presents itself as its source.
Lady Eleanor Davies was born in 1590 to George Touchet, Baron
Audeley, and his wife Lucy.!> According to C.J. Hindle, borrowing from
the data provided by George Ballard in his Memoirs of Several Ladies of
Great Britain (1752),'© which Mary Hays subsequently used as a source
in her six-volume Female Biography (1803) that includes an entry on
“Lady Eleanor Davies”,!” her father had been a Fellow of Magdalen
College, Oxford, which allowed her to receive a “learned education”.!®
In 1609 she married Sir John Davies, a poet and the King’s attorney in
Ireland, to whom she bore three children. Although Sir John expected to
use his position as a platform for professional advancement in Ireland,
he did not actually fulfill these ambitions, and in 1625 the family moved
back to England. The couple had two sons, one of whom was handi-
capped and died as an infant, and a daughter, Lucy, who was married
at an early age to Ferdinando Hastings, heir to the earl of Huntington.
According to her own account, Davies received a transcendent vision
at home at Englefield Manor shortly after an episode with a dumb boy,
when she heard a voice that she attributed to the spirit of the prophet
Daniel himself.!? The experience kick-started her prophetic career,
which began in 1625 with the publication of A Warning to the Dragon
and all his Angels, an exegetical treatise on the prophecies of Daniel
 Prophetic word vision 157
which predicted that “the day of Judgement” would occur in “nineteene
yeares and a halfe”. Due to Davies’ aristocratic origins she had a right
to the royal audience, although her differences with Charles I would
soon become conspicuous. Her accurate prediction in A Warning of the
death of Charles’ chief advisor, the Duke of Buckingham, put her in the
limelight. Sir John was concerned about the negative consequences on
his own career, and burned some of her early writings. She responded by
warning him that “within three years to expect the mortal blow” and
indeed he died within months in 1626.2?
Lady Eleanor Davies’ own family did not escape defamation. In 1631
her brother Mervin, Lord Audeley and second earl of Castlehaven, was
tried and executed for sodomy and being an accessory to the rape of
his own wife. Family scandals, along with Davies’ ongoing prophetic
activities, did little to help her maintain a reputation as a respectable
lady and member of the aristocracy. Under the pretext of accompanying
her second husband (the Scottish captain Archibald Douglas, whom she
had married in 1627) to a health resort, Davies traveled to Amsterdam
in 1633 with the secret intention of finding a printer willing to pub-
lish her treatises. Once she returned to England and began to distribute
her newly printed tracts, Archbishop Laud ordered them to be burned.
Beyond destroying her books, Laud also oversaw her trial before the
Commission for Causes Ecclesiastical, at which the judges determined
that her writings “much unbeseemed her Sex”,?! and she was sentenced
to two years in Bedlam. Lucy issued a petition to the King in 1633 for
her mother to be removed to another prison so that she could enjoy some
fresh air, soon after Lady Eleanor was fined the substantial amount of
“3,000/ for publishing fanatical pamphlets” which she never paid for
lack of funds.** Despite her dire circumstances, she was not discouraged
from further public activity. In 1636 she burst into Lichfield Cathedral
with a small group of women followers and daubed the wall hangings
around the altar with tar and water.”? She proclaimed herself “Primate
and Metropolitan” (Archbishop Laud’s titles) and sat on the archbishop’s
throne.** These actions earned her a second sentence in Bedlam in 1637,
this time for several months, and later in the Tower of London, where
she remained until 1640. After these difficult times of confinement, her
writings became more aggressive against the wave of opposition that she
was generating, both within and without her family ranks. Apparently,
Davies herself regarded her rejection by others as evidence of the truth-
fulness of her message, since she considered writing, not conversion, her
responsibility.*°
The last productive period of Eleanor Davies’ life from 1640 onward
was marked by the events of the English Civil War but was, compara-
tively speaking, a less convulsive period for her than the preceding de-
cades had been. Her literary output was bountiful, publishing sixty-six
of her seventy-odd tracts. Although the easing of censorship restrictions
158 In-communications

at this time enabled her to publish with greater freedom, she continued
to encounter official opposition and could not escape further periods of
imprisonment between 1646 and 1651. Archbishop Laud was executed
in January 1645, almost nineteen and a half years after Davies’ first
vision of July 1625, an event that confirmed for her the validity of her
mission. Charles I’s regicide in 1649 spurred once again her prophetic
convictions, in what she saw as a new time for the English nation.7°
The last four years of her life before her death in 1652 were marked by
intensive writing. Davies penned most of her work in prose—only Given
to the Elector (1633) is in ballad form—and she rarely presented her
prophetic utterances before an audience.
Most of Davies’ work is available to us because of her commitment
to leaving documentary evidence of her prophetic task, including
proof-reading and annotating the printed copies. In From the Lady
Eleanor: Her Blessing, Davies describes her daughter Lucy as “her alone
and sole support under the Almighty”.*” Apart from visiting and car-
ing for her mother while in prison, Lucy contributed to the recognition
of Davies as a prophet by keeping copies of her tracts and compiling
them.7® She also seems to have kept a close relationship with her sisters,
to whom she occasionally wrote from prison, signing her biblical mis-
sives as “Tichett” and “Your sister in the lion’s den”. In a short letter
that she sent to them commenting on a passage in Psalm 75 about her
vision of a cup of red wine, signifying the destruction of London, she
assured her sisters that the truth of her vision was sealed with a kiss on
her mouth “by Him that made her and heaven and earth”.??
In both her early and later tracts, Eleanor Davies insists that her writ-
ing is clear and even self-explanatory, since “line upon line, the Lord’s
own words again and again [are uttered] expressly what can be said
more plain” or “this cleare and out of question parable or portion of
Scripture”.°° Davies’ style seems to make a point of condensation and
synthesis, since “preaching ye have always, and may hear them when
ye please, and their large Dedicatories and Volumns my License them
daily: But the little Book, the Spirit of Prophesie, Not always”.>! From
her point of view, dense and elaborate preaching is against the natural
and simple spirit of prophecy, which is “a little book” (in reference to
the little book an angel is holding in Revelation)** in which the Spirit
warns against the dangers of idolatry or any movement away from bib-
lical precepts. A significant factor in Davies’ peculiar self-construction
is the lack of a male mediator or a printer-friend who would preface and
endorse her writings. Apart from a short-lived contact with the ‘digger’
Gerrard Winstanley, who worked on the estate of the Hastings family
in Hertfordshire, Davies did not associate herself with any specific dis-
senter group on whom she could depend physically and emotionally.*?
The prophetic self that speaks in her texts operates from a strong sense
of isolation from any institutional or communal support, turning it
 Prophetic word vision 159
even into a mark of identity, a guarantee of her sincerity and resolution.
Davies did not hesitate in defining her role in explicit terms when she ad-
dressed her daughter in her tracts (or ‘babes’, as she called them): “And
farther as to you not unknown especially at what time your Mother
became a VVriter or Secretary, concerning the unsealing or interpreting
this obscure piece to open the Visions of Daniel, though no obscure
persons of the seed of the KINGS and of PRINCES”.** Davies depicted
herself as a writer as much as a “secretary” or “interpreter” whose role
was to “unseal” the visions of Daniel affecting public personalities. She
linked two different modes of prophetic activity: on the one hand, the
Old Testament prophetic custom of interpreting dreams and visions as
a warning of future apocalyptic events, and, on the other, the radical-
millenarian approach of inserting symbolic biblical types as models for
actual public behavior. Other than her apocalyptic slant and a general
criticism against the corruption of the church, Davies was not a sectar-
ian. Her Anglicanism emerges when she dates some of her tracts ac-
cording to the liturgical calendar, when she refers to the Virgin Mary
as a redeemer or when she later in life expressed her belief in universal
salvation, thus effacing any possible previous sympathy with Calvinist
doctrines of predestination.
As with Isaiah and Jeremiah, Daniel became the recipient of di-
vine revelations during the exile of Israel in Babylonian territory. He
occupied a distinguished position at court, acting as a counselor for
King Nebuchadnezzar, the exegete of the dreams of others (especially
Nebuchadnezzar himself, in Daniel 2 and 4), and interpreter of the will
of God through the decoding of dreams. It is no coincidence that this
role should have been most prominent when Davies proffered her mate-
rial to Charles I at the beginning of his reign, and if the text had had the
impact she originally expected, her position might have paralleled that
of the ancient prophet relative to Nebuchadnezzar. The true strength of
the figure of Daniel lies, for Davies, in its combination of a visionary
with an exegetic role: to be a modern Daniel is to assume the double
function of visionary and interpreter of visions (one’s own or those in-
cluded in the Bible), of combining the prophetic stance with the capacity
to explain the content of the prophecy, whether that vision has been re-
ceived from Scripture or read in its pages. In A Warning, she accuses the
dragon—the Beast, Satan—of having brought about a gloomy political
future for England by causing the spiritual bankruptcy of its leaders:

In the Visions of this Prophet are revealed the same things contained
in the Revelation, which GOD gave to Jesus Christ, to shew unto
his Servants things which must shortly come to passe; things that
are not, to bring to nought things that are: And as he signified to
his beloved Servant JOHN, the Contents of the secret Booke by his
Angell; Even so the Lambe slaine by the eternall Decree purposed
160 In-communications

from the foundations of the world; Declared the same things to the
man greatly beloved, his servant DANIEL, unfolded in this present
exposition.

Here Davies is presenting her own exegesis of the prophet Daniel, who
saw and narrated essentially “the same things contained in the Reve-
lation”. The godly spirit animating Daniel, Davies, and John is in fact
the same one, and that Spirit is using a long lineage of prophets whose
task is to alert humanity so that goodness is established and evil is de-
feated by wisdom (“to bring to nought things that are”).°° Scripture,
then, is not a rigid document belonging to a distant past, but a living
and speaking text that is extant for prophets to interpret and publicize
as a warning in times of crisis. In her short postscript to this same
pamphlet, Davies writes that “to unmaske error I crave no Pardon,
the manner let none dispise; Dreames in times past have been inter-
preted, our Fathers in divers manners have been spoken unto”.°” These
lines are a statement of her bold assumption of authority: she asks no
permission or pardon, since she acts only in order to denounce the
misbehavior of others. Davies follows a consistent intertextual practice
of retelling biblical passages from the viewpoint of the prophet who is
inspired by the same spirit of Daniel to re-interpret the word of God
for her own times.

From Dan. 8:1: In the third year of the reign of king Belshazzar a
vision appeared unto me, even unto me Daniel, after that which
appeared unto me at the first. From Dan. 8:16: And I heard a man’s
voice between the banks of Ulai, which called, and said, Gabriel,
make this man to understand the vision.

Davies’ version: In the third yeare of Belshazzer a Vision appeared

unto DANIEL alone, even unto himselfe, and hee heard a mans voice
that called, saying, GABRIEL, make the man understand the Vision.?°

Davies is joining two separate lines (from 8:1 and 8:16) in a single para-
graph and replacing the first person by a “Daniel” through a process of
reported speech. In her transcription she omits reference to the banks of
the Ulai to gain directness and immediacy. She also shows fascination
toward figures of political and spiritual authority:

From Dan. 10:1 and 10:14: In the third year of Cyrus king of Persia a
thing was revealed unto Daniel, whose name was called Belteshazzar;
and the thing was true, but the time appointed was long: and he un-
derstood the thing, and had understanding of the vision. [...] Now
I am come to make thee understand what shall befall thy people in
the latter days: for yet the vision is for many days.
 Prophetic word vision 161
Davies’ version: In the third yeare of Cyrus King of Persia, a thing
was revealed to Daniel (whose name was called belteshazzer) and the
thing was true but the time appointed was long. These are the things
not only come to passe, in the latter age of the world, but at this time
and in this day; signified by the Son of God to the Prophet.

PRINCE OF PERSIA —I CAN Pore FRIERS

Divell. I can Pope Friers. Man hold up my Traine?
Pope. Kings I Depose, and all their Race, to Raigne.
Divell. And Popes to Friers I can turne againe.°”

The beginning of Davies’ account follows the same content and pattern
of the biblical text, adopting the narrative voice that is imbued by the
Holy Ghost to retell the facts of the Bible and to interpret those anachro-
nically. In the second part of Davies’ version, she, the biblical narrator
and scribe, underlines the fact that the following events will take place
in a latter age and at her present time. Then she includes a quick and
parodic exchange stemming from an anagram translation of “Prince of
Persia” in which the Devil and the Pope boast about their prerogative of
appointment in high offices, implying that monarchic and ecclesiastic
powers are satanic. An update of what biblical characters and types rep-
resent in the seventeenth century follows suit: “The Prince of the King-
dome of Persia, (that Lord by whom the Lord of Lords was withstood)
is Sathan the Divell, Michael one of the first Princes that came then to
helpe him; This is James King of Great Britaine, and the man who is
raised on high”.*° While her explanation is meant to be clarifying, the
text demands the same degree of sustained attention as the reading of
the original Bible. But Davies is perhaps more successful in transporting
the reader to a new Bible being written by her prophetic gift and man-
date to interpret history. The prophetic message, whether in the form of
visions or dreams, may appear dark to those who have not received the
necessary illumination, but for Davies herself there is nothing so dark as
to be impenetrable in her exegesis of Scripture:

It is a salve to annoint and open the eyes of the blinde, to bring them
that sit in darkenesse a light, to leade them out of the Prison-house.
It is a true looking-glasse, a large houreglasse, Phisicke for the sicke,
wholsome for the whole, milke for the young, and meate for the
strong. It is upon Record due, an olde debt One and Twenty hun-
yeares since; unto me is given this stone to polish, unto me this grace
is given.4!

Davies’ writing provides salvation both for her and her audience. She is
opening the eyes of the blind, as Isaiah prophesied would happen at the
end of times.’ She is freeing her audience of their inner prison-house*
162. In-communications

and leading them to clarity and light. Grace has been bestowed on
Davies, and she is called on “to polish a stone”: her writing becomes,
through the work of grace, the soothing of the various surfaces (whether
these be texts, dreams or visions) where truth has been established. The
status of the narrator is also fluid in many texts, and it may slip into an
“I” that speaks through Davies’ biblical rendering: “[...] that fall downe
and worship the Image, that I Nabuchadnezar have set up, whose breath
is in my hand, and whole are all my wayes to glorifie mee”.*4 By the end
of her life, her role combined the prophetic with the apostolic stance, as
she repeated the words of Paul “Unto me, who am less than the least of
all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the
unsearchable riches of Christ” in Ephesians 3:8.
In The Lady Eleanor, Her Appeale to the High Court (1641), Davies
offered her own interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream and the other
prophecies from the Book of Daniel. She linked King Charles’ agreement
to the execution of his former royal advisor, the earl of Stafford, with
Nebuchadnezzar’s death warrant against the wise men who had worked
for him. At the core of this pamphlet, she reminds her reader of the mo-
mentous events of 1625, when Charles I came to the throne and when
she herself received her prophetic revelation from Daniel. After this re-
minder, altering the thread of events in her political relation, she writes
in italics and puts a specific emphasis on the importance of publishing:

And of whose making to justifie here, by whom Published; through

hitherto by authority with-stood.
ELEANOR AUDELEY, handmayden of the most high GOD of
Heaven, this Booke brought forth by Her, fifth Daughter of George,
Lord of Castlehaven, Lord AUDLEY, and Tuichet. NO inferior
PEERE of this Land, in Ireland the fifth Earle.*

In the first part of the excerpt, Davies states that the truth of her words
is derived from the very fact of their publication, since it was licensed
almost cum privilegio and not censored. The rest of the excerpt can be
read as an affirmation of authority as well, since she explicitly links her
maiden name with her family lineage and sense of belonging to a higher
social class. The tract shares a sense of continuity with her previous
work. She herself had written years before, in her exegesis of Daniel 10
that “these are the things not only to passe, in this latter age of the
world, but at this time and in this day, signified by the Son of God to the
Prophet”.*° Once again, in Her Appeale, her identification with Daniel is
so intense that it thoroughly empowers her: she provides another exege-
sis of his original prophecies, reinterpreting them once more as warnings
for present political events, and acting anew as Daniel did in his time
before kings and political authorities. Here, as elsewhere, her authorial
voice does not spring from any deprecation of her sex, unworthy of the
 Prophetic word vision 163
divine grace it receives. On the contrary, it is assertive and unmistakably
individualized.
In a representative fragment in which the proximity of divine Judge-
ment is announced, Davies harangues the population at large:

You onely have I knowne, of all the families of the Earth, whose
transgressions doe hasten your Judgement; Therefore I will pun-
ish you for your iniquities, you shall bee like the Morning Cloud,
and the early dew that passeth away as the Chaffe that is driven
with a scattering whirle-winde out of the Flower, as smoake out of
a Chimney vanishing away. [...] You are impudent and disobedient
Children, as the day of your Visitation, so are your sinnes hidden
from you, when you shall say for shame to the Mountaines Cover us
and to the Rocks and Hills fall upon us; you will know your trans-
gressions. [...] Therefore awake yee Drunkards, weepe and howle all
yee drinkers of Wine, because of the new Wine the Deepe Cup, the
day of the wrath of the Lord is at hand.*”

In these lines Davies adopts the role of the prophet Daniel once again to
rebuke the personalized object of her “holy hatred”: Archbishop Abbot
of Canterbury.*® She also abuses the audience for not paying enough
attention to her words, notes the perils looming large if the reader does
not drink from “the new wine in new cups”, and even goes so far as to
assume the execution of disciplinary action through her own prophetic
status. She likewise accuses her readership of being “drunkards” hiding
their shame, and warns them that soon they will know the effects of
their “transgressions”. This warning, in an insistent tone of menace, is
in fact present from the very beginning of the text, in which the ultimate
responsibility for impending disaster is placed on its reader:

Pressed and constrained with obedience to him, and Duty towards

you; saying no other things then the Prophets and Apostles did say
should come to passe, that yee might know the certainty of those
things, wherein yee have beene instructed, whether you will heare
or whether you will forbeare.*?

Due to her sense of obedience to the Spirit, Davies feels compelled to write
down the events that the prophets and apostles of old had said “should
come to pass” so that the reader can be certain of “those things”. After
that, the audience can do whatever they wish, “to heare or forbeare”,
but Davies’ own accountability ends with the writing and printing of
the text. The reader must complete the process, by choosing to “heare”
the truth in her words. “Hearing” points at the reader’s own capacity
to take decisions before the printed text. To accept or reject, to “heare
or forebeare” are far from being morally equivalent actions: for Davies,
164 In-communications

those who refuse to receive the message will of course be subject to divine
punishment. But it is nonetheless significant that she should place that
ultimate capacity on the addressees of her tracts. Already on page 1 of
A Warning to the Dragon, she appends a succinct and bitter commentary
against those readers who might dare not agree with her: “Marke yee this
wicked persons, & yee friends of the unrighteous Mammon”. As the time
for the Second Coming is fast approaching, and the political and moral
condition of the English nation is not complying with integrity, Davies re-
acts aggressively against those who do not heed her warning. In A Word
of God, she responded to the trial of her brother Mervin. The defence
of her own lineage must be carried out in terms of biblical parallels that
force the reader to accept (at least, rhetorically) the moral exoneration of
her family. We see, for instance, how she refers to the name “Audeley”:

The sonne of old ancient Abraham also; the house of Audeley no

obscure one, though one much envied, and such a one then come of
no Sodome seed, but like Isaack rather sacrificed, who as he sufferd
for the misdemenors of an unrulie houshold sufferd by him, laying
on him their faults, so had the honour to have this added.*°

In this passage, Davies implies that her maiden name has always been
respected and simultaneously places it in a position of moral victimization
by the community. Her brother Mervin is not a son of Sodom but rather
an “Isaack”. Because he belongs to a distinguished breed, he has to en-
dure “the misdemenors” that “an unrulie household” has foisted on him.
Davies might have been angered by the loss of aristocratic privilege—
since even the household servants were made to testify against the Earl
of Castlehaven—and by the fact that the Earl’s own wife was allowed to
be a witness against him, thus unsettling the traditional gender roles.*!
Firmly underpinned by sordid details of the Castlehaven trial, Davies’ in-
criminations gain fresh meaning when seen from the perspective of her
life-long struggle to re-enact a prophetic self and maintain it over the
years. Whether Davies is actually concerned about her loss of aristocratic
privilege and the transgression of conventional sex roles becomes only
secondary when we notice that most of the tract is devoted to comparing
these troubling autobiographical episodes with upheavals in the contem-
porary social, political, and historical domains. In this text, private affairs
are seen and understood as standing metonymically for the public and
political situation. For Eleanor Davies, ignoring the contents of her tracts
is the seventeenth-century equivalent of ignoring the voice of the biblical
prophets. An unwilling or unaccommodating readership is a metaphor for
the misled masses that ignored the inspired voices of the Old Testament:

And therefore shall but name them, the contrivers of it. Ann his
wife, and his brother Ferdinando: the one for envie, she being an
 Prophetic word vision 165
Heire, and such a notorious one, (O Ann) The other a perverted
Papist wanting no malice: wherefore to cut him off, some time gone
that way astray too: but recald himself, no aspertion was held too
foule for him, And for saving her honour an adultresse by promisd
preferment.°*

Davies introduces in derogatory terms the “contrivers” of the plot against

her family: her envious sister-in-law Ann, who is a “notorious Heire”,
and the Earl’s “perverted Papist” brother. Ann is pictured as an adulter-
ess who feigns rape in order to conceal her out-of-wedlock pregnancy,
while the Earl’s brother Ferdinando appears as a man of no malice who
spares no effort to please his sister-in-law. Ann’s betrayal of her husband
would be consistent with the treachery of the Church of England as a
recurrent comparison that appears in a later account of the case, The
Restitution of Prophecy (1651).°° In The Word of God Ann is portrayed
as “that ominous Scarlet”, and the Archbishop of Canterbury—who ac-
tually took an obsessive interest in Castlehaven’s case and execution—is
accused of committing treason against the family by burying his “Lords
money (as it may well be no little)”. Davies closes her tract with a state-
ment that summarizes her apocalyptic vision of the end of time by invok-
ing the second coming of Jesus (“so come Lord, and cut off such an evill
time, deferre us not”): for her, Castlehaven’s trial is not only a family
tragedy, but clear evidence of the depravity of her times.*4
Davies never ceased to alert her fellow citizens to impending dangers,
although her language and histrionic gestures became more moderate
over time. Megan Matchinske argues that only in her relationship with
her daughter was Davies able to negotiate and establish a liaison with
an external presence. In From The Lady Eleanor, Her Blessing (1644),
she dedicates the tract—it reads almost as a letter, but it is a “blessing”
understood in the old traditional way in which aristocratic fathers offered
their benedictions to their sons in writing—to “her beloved daughter”,
adding that “you have punctually discharged that duty of the first com-
mandment with promise, in so much and such dishonour endured, have
bene your mothers Copartner”.°> But this change in tone and register
undoubtedly finds its roots in motherly love as well as in recognition on
Davies’ part that her daughter has acted as a true Christian, enduring dis-
honor and family tensions with her own husband in order to keep the bib-
lical commandment of honoring one’s parents. By the end of her tract, she
is pleased to adopt a comforting quality that is meant to acknowledge her
daughter’s love and care for her while persisting in her usual ranting of
current affairs: “And since a pleasing Theame (as tis said) makes a good
Orator [...] Ishall the lesse need to excuse it unto such as have a ful knowl-
edge of the Scriptures, That should it be written at large a Chronicle”.*°
Eleanor Davies is eager to display her maternal affection to Lucy as much
as she wants to be acknowledged as a competent writer and scholar. And
166 In-communications

such a happy combination contributes to making her a “good Orator”. In

a letter addressed to her daughter, in which Davies acknowledges receipt
of Lucy’s signed petition and says that “I must not looke severely on your
letter” (lost to us), she insists on her divine essence and Lucy’s: “I am no
less than His figure. Whose mother was His daughter”. She adds an ana-
gram to mark her point playing with the meanings of light (“Lucy”) and
has (“Hastings”) —“Lucis Hast: Live Chast: Sing and rejoice your Name
is written in Heaven”.>’” Davies interprets history and personal biography
as prophecy, adopting a permanent defensive and self-assertive position in
which she is the protagonist of her own drama. She does not abandon her
prophetic self in her personal correspondence and affairs, which might
have irritated her family and third parties: “As for my debts, let them
have patience a little while. I have written to Lord Maior to borrow some
money”.°® In a letter dated on April 9, 1637, Davies adopts a fainter pro-
phetic tone when she communicates to her daughter that her “preferment
is now on the winge”. She is aware that she is likely to be imprisoned
for the Lichfield affair, a fact that she accepts with resolution and def-
ance with her accustomed cryptic style: Bedlems. Gatehouses. Birds &
Bulls”. [...] “Avant not therein” [...] “honore & Truthe cannot put out
of countenance”. The postscript of her letter adds a moving touch when
she refers to “Elizabeth” (probably, one of Davies’ sisters, Lady Elizabeth
Griffin) upon thanking Lucy for a gift, for which she “craves to kiss the
hemme of this paper”.°? One can almost imagine Lady Eleanor kissing
the edge of the letter in a loving gesture that she believes to be imbued
with the emanations of the Holy Spirit.
In a short manuscript poem entitled Bathe Daughter of BabyLondon
(1636), Davies makes her own creative exegesis of passages in chapters 15
and 16 of Revelation and equates the town of Bath with one of the seven
wonders of Britain that the woman sitting on seven mountains in Reve-
lation 17:9 observes. Babylonia and London become “BabyLondon”, a
place of corruption whose daughter is Bath.

xvi And I heard the Angell of the some noteable judgement

chap: waters saye Lord &c observed &c then.

And the fourthe angell powred

his vial on the sunn &c a dryer summer &c

And Men Boyled in great heate

blasphemed for theire paines and such maladies cured by
soares &c (repented not) the waters

On the left-hand-side column, Davies lists several verses (beginning with

an “And” for a rhythmical effect) that allude to waters, cleaning, and
temples in those particular chapters of Revelation, while offering her
 Prophetic word vision 167

Figure 9.1 Letter. Lady Eleanor Davies to her daughter Lucy Hastings, 9 April
1637. Reproduced by kind permission of the Huntington Library,
San Marino, California.

own interpretation as it pertains to Bath. This pastiche technique, in

which Davies combines the biblical text with her exegetical pronounce-
ments, allows the reader to follow two parallel short stories running
from top to bottom while seeing the mysterious spiritual ‘modern’ mean-
ing for each line.
In one of Davies’s later works, The Restitution of Prophecy (1651),
published one year before her death while corners in Fleet prison,
Digies resorted to the parable of the talents°? to vindicate her own
168 In-communications

work and envision the future of England after the Jubilee year (1650).
In this short tract, her histrionic language is largely subdued: in her
anxiety for the fate of the nation, Davies seems to claim and mourn
over everything that has been denied to her. She explicitly names The
Restitution of Prophecy and her last printed tract, Tobits Book, her
“babes” and insists that they should be “fathered or licensed” after
receiving official permission, claiming her right to be legally printed
at a time when she lacked the funds and the social connections to se-
cure publication. Her rebukes to the audience are ‘abandoned in favor
of more neutral addresses “to the reader”. She even adds a postscript
when closing the first part of The Restitution that is unmistakably
geared toward making peace with her audience: “Blessed is he not of-
fended”.®! At the end of the piece, she also appends a verse from the
Scripture in Latin, as another gesture of humility: “Qui se humiliav-
erat, ipse exaltavit”.©*
One further interesting aspect of Davies’ prophetic production and
her writing style is to be found in her commentary on the Book of Tobias
entitled Tobits Book. The singularity of this tract derives not only from
Davies’ decision to address this often overlooked apocryphal book but
also from her approach to it: she reads it as an apocalyptic text that
prefigures Christ’s triumphant return at the end of time. She encourages
readers to find consolation in the fact that God will soon come to them
in the magnificence of the “New Jerusalem”:

As by the Fish taken in Tygris River of such vertue &c. “O make

ye friends of the unrighteous Mammon, That they may receive you
into everlasting Habitations”: pointing to the transitory whereon
set up their rest, all dote. So finished his magnificat Tobias, that
Brides incomparable Lustre or preparation: New Jerusalems pre-
cious Edifice so ravished with it.°?

In other passages of this brief text we note that Davies is interested in

the accounts of how Tobias, following the advice of the Angel Raphael,
used the fish he captured in the Tigris River to cure his bride Sarah
of devilish possession and his father Tobit of blindness. Davies under-
stands the miraculous healing of Tobit as a figurative representation of
God’s mercy on those who suffer, but she also sees in the whole story
an illustration of the many miracles that will occur on the occasion of
Christ’s triumphant return at the end of time: “And in Adam as all died,
so in Christ all made alive, O the depth of the wisdom and knowledge
of God”.** Davies’ subdued tone in her later writings, and her penchant
for gratifying her audience are inescapably linked to her apocalyptic per-
spective and her conviction of the arrival of the end of times, hence the
urgency of general reform. The subheading of Tobits Book, “a lesson”, is
explanatory enough: “New lights” are necessary to disperse darkness in
 Prophetic word vision 169
order to anticipate the end of humanity. She signed her tract as “from the
Lady Eleanor Tobias signifying good, for Good-Friday”, thus denoting a
reassuring shift in attitude and outlook.
Her benevolent purpose can also be appreciated in Davies’ use of
the word “talent” in the original biblical sense of the Greek talanton,
namely, the gift of God that is a sin to bury (the subheading of The
Restitution of Prophecy leaves no doubt about the author’s intentions:
“that buried talent to be revived”). Carol Thysell has argued that Davies’
defense of her public role rests on her use of the church’s traditional
understanding of talanton as the word of God and the responsibility to
share that word, understood specifically as the prophetic word about the
coming demise of England.°°
In this way, Davies conflated both the obligation of prophesying as
an observance of good Christian practice and the effort it takes—even
perhaps the artistry it involves—to transmit and describe the actual
prophetic act. While Davies’ earlier histrionic gestures denoted a strong
presence and personality behind her incriminations, often avoiding the
direct use of the pronoun “I”, her later tracts seemed to bring to the
surface the waning soul of an individual who experiences a final epi-
phany: the certainty that God is love, and that the prophet must also
act lovingly, in keeping with her received “talent”. This spirit permeates
her latest writings and brings about an attempt to forge, perhaps too
late, a new relationship with her audience. When she decides to speak
more deeply, rather than louder, we see more of Davies as a mother and
woman whose life was devoted to biblical prophesying.

Notes
Teak Richard Pickard, “Anagrams etc: The Interpretative Dilemmas of Lady
Eleanor Douglas”, Renaissance and Reformation 20:3 (1996): 5.
2 S.G. Wright, “Dougle Fooleries”, The Bodleian Quarterly Record 7:1
(1932)2.95.
3 Theodore Spencer, “The History of an Unfortunate Lady”, Studies and
Notes in Philology and Literature 20 (1938): 53.
4 See Esther Cope, Handmaid of the Holy Spirit: Dame Eleanor Davies,
Never Soe Mad a Lady (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1993);
Cope, Prophetic Writings by Lady Eleanor Davies: Women Writers in
English 1350-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Cope,
“Dame Eleanor Davies Never Soe Mad a Ladie?”, The Huntington Library
Ouarterly 50:2 (Spring 1987): 133-44.
5 Diane Watt, Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England
(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 118-48.
6 Megan Matchinske, Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England:
Identity Formation and the Female Subject (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), 127.
7 Amanda L. Capern, “Eleanor Davies and the New Jerusalem”, in Women
during the English Reformations, ed. Julie A. Chapell and Kaley A. Kramer
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 101.
170 In-communications

8 Jonathan Andrews, “The politics of committal to early modern Bethlem”,

in Medicine in the Enlightenment, ed. Roy Porter (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1995). See also Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety
and Healing in Seventeenth-century England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983); Porter, “The Prophetic Body: Lady Eleanor Davies
and the Meaning of Madness”, Women’s Writing (1994): 51-63.
CSPD, 1634, SP 16/283 f. 28.
CSPD, 1640, SP 16/466 f. 207.
Pickard, Anagrams, 17.
Elaine Hobby, “Prophecy”, in A Companion to Early Modern Women’s
Writing, ed. Anita Pacheco (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 266.
Roger Chartier, The Order of Books, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 31-33.
Ibid., 34-36.
Diane Watt, “Lady Eleanor Davies”, ODNB, accessed May 2, 2015, http://
www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7233.
George Ballard, Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain (Oxford:
printed by W. Jackson, 1752), 271.
Mary Hays, Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated
Women, of
All Ages and Countries (London: Richard Phillips, 1803), vol. 2,
30-37.
C.J. Hindle, A Bibliography of the Printed Pamphlets and Broadsides of Lady
Eleanor Douglas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, 1936), 5;
Cope, Prophetic Writings, xi; Ballard, Memoirs of Several Ladies, 271.
Lady Eleanor Davies, The Lady Eleanor her Appeal (s.1., s.n., 1646), 4-7.
Ibid., 15.
illoytehe, Wy
CSBD SP 16r255 1A).
3 Davies never succeeded in attracting a consistent group of followers during
her prophetic career, nor could she count on the help, spiritual or otherwise,
of a minister or counselor. According to the CSPD (16/380/f.138), the only
evidence we have of a closer association is her group discussion with other
women on religious matters before their raid at Lichfield Cathedral. Two of
these women, Susan Walker and Marie Noble, both married to clerks, were
prosecuted in the High Commission in 1637 for having discussed religious
concerns with Davies.
24 Lady Eleanor Davies, Bethlehem signifying the house of bread, or, V Var
(s.1., s.n.,1652), 4.
25 Cope, Prophetic Writings, xv.
26 Davies, The New Jerusalem at Hand (s.|., s.n., 1649), 6-9.
27 Davies, From the Lady Eleanor, her Blessing, to her Beloved Davghter the
Right Honorable Lucy, Covntesse of Huntingdon (s.1., s.n.: 1644), 38.
28 Esther Cope attributes to Lucy a volume containing forty-five of Davies’ titles,
now lodged in the Folger Shakespeare Library. There are eleven more in the
George Thomason collection held in the British Library and several dozen
among the Clarke Papers in the Library of Worcester College (Oxford), in the
Bodleian Library, in the Houghton Library at Harvard, and in the Huntington
Library in San Marino. The latter holds the extensive manuscript collection of
the Hastings Family Papers, earls of Huntingdon (Hastings MSS), including
a bunch of letters that Lady Eleanor sent to her daughter and a series of legal
documents related to the lineage of Lucy’s husband.
29 Davies, MSS Letters, in CSPD, February: 1634-5, SP 16/283 f. 231.
30 Davies, A Warning to the Dragon and all his Angels (London: B. Alsop,
1625), 10-12.
 Prophetic word vision 171
31 Davies, The Star to the Wise. (London, 1643), 17-18.
32 Rev. 10:1-2, “And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven,
clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it
were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire: And he had in his hand a little book
open: and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth”.
33 See Mack, Visionary Women, 72-73. For more details on the Winstanley-
Davies episode, in which the former accused Davies of not being a true
prophetess since she did not pay her laborers, see P. Hardacre, “Gerrard
Winstanley in 1650”, Huntington Library Quarterly 22 (1959): 345-49.
34 Davies, From the Lady Eleanor, her Blessing, 7.
35 Davies, A Warning, 1.
36 See 1 Corinthians 1:28, “God chose what is low and despised in the world,
even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are”.
37 Davies, A Warning, 8.
38 Ibid., 37-38.
39 Ibid., 49-50.
40 Ibid., 50.
41 Ibid., 3.
42 See Isaiah 35:5, “The eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the
deaf shall be unstopped”.
43 Ibid., 42:7, “To open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the
prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house”.
44 Davies, A Warning, 22.
45 Davies, Her Appeal, 11.
46 Davies, A Warning, 10.
47 Ibid., 7-8.
48 Matchinske, Writing, Gender, 127.
49 Davies, A Warning, 3.
50 Davies, The VVord of God, to the Citie of London (London, 1644), 6-7.
51 See Teresa Feroli, Political Speaking Justified: Women Prophets and the
English Revolution (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 76-79.
52 Davies, The VVord of God, 5.
53 Feroli, Political Speaking, 88.
54 Davies, The VVord of God, 11.
55 Davies, From the Lady Eleanor, 38.
56 Ibid., 36.
57 MSS Hastings, Folder HA 2339, Letter by Lady Eleanor, 3 June 1643. San
Marino: The Huntington Library.
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid., Folder HA 2335, Letter by Lady Eleanor, 9 April 1637.
60 See Mathew 24:25, “Then he which had received the one talent came and
said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast
not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed: And I was afraid, and
went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine”.
61 See Matthew 11:6, “And blessed is the one who is not offended by me”.
62 See Ezekiel 21:25, “He who humbles himself shall be exalted”.
63 Lady Eleanor Davies, Tobits Book a lesson appointed for Lent (London,
1652), 16.
64 See isesetate tar 15:22, “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all
be made alive”.
65 Carol Thysell, “Unearthing the Treasure, Unknitting the Napkin: The Par-
able of the Talents as a Justification for Early Modern Women’s Preaching
and Prophesying”, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 15:1 (1999): 20.
10 The soul’s flight of Jane Lead

Lady Eleanor would have enjoyed the kind of respect that Jane Lead’s
activities commanded in her readers and co-workers, but it was slow to
come and short-lived. Jane Lead (1624-1704) was born in Norfolk out
of a landed gentry family. Her father was a squire and magistrate, and
she was educated at home.! When she was fifteen, Lead experienced a
dramatic episode at Christmas when she was dancing and enjoying a
good time. She was overtaken by sorrow as she understood that this
was not the correct way to remember Christ’s birth, and then she heard
a voice: “Cease from this, | have another dance to lead thee in; for this
is vanity”.? The sentence was premonitory, since the voice uses the verb
“lead” before Jane could even know it would be her married name. She
withdrew to a long melancholic phase in which she studied the Bible and
read extensively from her family library. After a six-month visit to her
merchant brother in London, which brought her into contact with radi-
cal preachers and millenarians, in particular the sermons of clergyman
Tobias Crisp—who preached free grace and universal salvation but de-
nied any association with licentiousness—she returned to Norfolk and
married another merchant, William Lead. The couple forged a stable
relationship that bore four children. However, Jane understood life with
her “first” husband to be under “the law of carnal command”, a prepa-
ration for her second, true marriage “with the Lord from heaven”. Much
of William’s household estate had been lost upon his death in 1670 and
Jane was left destitute. Despite her daughter’s insistence that they should
stay with Jane’s brother, she resisted the family pressure and decided
to live in spiritual partnership with John Pordage, former rector of
Bradfield, physician and staunch follower of the theology of the German
mystic writer Jakob Boehme (1575-1624). It was a bold move that alien-
ated her from her family but brought her closer to her true vocation.
Upon a visit of her daughter, that Jane enacted in her mind as a battle
with “the adversary” in which she saw “many archers drawing against
me”, she heard the voice of the Lord reaffirming her resolution to stay
with her friends: “Stand by thy vow and solemn engagement, where by
thou hast given away thy right as to the disposal of thy self”.? This test
on a quintessential aspect of femininity, the choice between self over
 The soul’s flight of Jane Lead 173
family, was definitely resolved in favor of the Lord. She began to write
her spiritual diary and lead a contemplative life. Upon Pordage’s death
in 1681, Lead took over his role as leader of the congregation and pub-
lished Heavenly Cloud now Breaking, perhaps the text that best reveals
the Behmenist influence on her work.’ Lead began to display a powerful
imagery to represent states of being in which biblical episodes, figures,
or types appear only to reinforce the sensory and visual impact of her
argument. When she describes the process of spiritual dying, in which
the body of sin is crucified and all temporal things perish, including
political strife, she receives the spirit of Daniel that makes her mourn at
beholding “under what a law of sin and tyrannical bondage the saints
are under”.> The procession of spirits continued with a serpent, a beast,
and “the airy region”, which was also the serpent-prince whose job is to
tempt. The same spirit of prophecy that disclosed “wonderful mysteries
now in this last age” shows as well “the way for consummation”, and
she was able to feel as if “the sin of the whole relapsed creation had been
upon me”.® The gift of prophecy is the “testimony of Jesus the Lord”
that is put to the service of the Church to have a knowledge of things to
come. “Blessed are them [friends of the Lord] who understand the voice
of prophecy and have it in themselves”.’
Most of the scholarship on Jane Lead, still insufficient to comprehend
the philosophical and literary value of her more than fifteen published
tracts, some of them several hundred pages long, has been mostly con-
cerned with her textual affinities with Pordage. It was particularly so be-
fore feminist readings confronted the representation of the spiritual and
the physical female bodies in an attempt to efface gender barriers.® Despite
the eloquence of these arguments, Lead’s choice of a female iconography
reveals her own theology and experience.” The originality of her proph-
ecies lay in the way they gave meaning to her visual experience, becom-
ing a catalyst of several mystical traditions that would feed the bedrock
of eighteenth-century millenarian revivals and early Romantics. Ariel
Hessayon has provided an insightful analysis of the context of Lead’s trail
of reception, paving the way for further research in this area.)
Lead’s rejection of an excessive literality in biblical interpretation and
her heterodox integration of Behmenist, scholastic, alchemic, Judaic,
Neoplatonic, or cabbalistic elements is problematic when attempting
to make sense of them altogether. Her case is illustrative of a cross-
pollination of religious and philosophical traditions that makes it hard
to distinguish whether Lead’s gnostic and alchemic reminiscences were
assimilated from Pordage and Boehme or from a direct exposure to
Hermetic texts. She was able to extract new meanings out of her sources,
creating that which every writer wishes to attain: a voice, a vision, a full
cosmology that captures the reader’s attention.
Jane Lead accomplished that and much more. After the publication in
1683 of The Revelation of Revelations while she was staying in a house
174 In-communications

of charity in Stepney, she caught the attention of followers of Boehme

who translated her texts into German and also of Francis Lee, a young
theologian and physician who had lived in the Netherlands and Italy and
was deeply impressed by Lead’s spiritual writings. A specialist in Semitic
languages, Lee was well-connected to Oxford circles and acquainted his
former schoolfellow rector, Richard Roach, with his new discovery.!
Roach had a long-standing interest in female mysticism (from St. Teresa
of Avila to the late seventeenth-century Quietism of Jeanne Guyon) and
a via negativa of contemplation.'* Lee had been attracted to the early
Christian movement of Montanism, which relied much in prophecy and
the ecstatic visions of the prophetess Ammia of Philadelphia in Asia
Minor, where Montanists believed the New Jerusalem would descend
out of heaven.!? Both men would become Lead’s closest associates in
taking her visions into print and formalized the group status as the
Philadelphian Society, named after the sixth of the seven churches of
Asia mentioned in John’s Revelation 1:4 and 3:7. Lee expounded on the
nature and aims of the group in The State of the Philadelphian Society,
by way of a reply to many questions from eager readers. The Philadel-
phians did not differ from “the Protestant Churches as to external Com-
munion; they do not refuse Communion with them, either in hearing the
Word, or receiving the Sacraments, and therefore make no Schism”.!* As
to the question whether the Philadelphians shared the principle of the
“private Spirit”, Lee was careful neither to deny nor to accept this claim,
but took the opportunity to state that their “peculiar principles” re-
volved around the fact that “the coming of Christ was near at hand”,
and asa result, the Society thought it their duty to prepare the world for
this event “by a good life, universal charity [caritas, or “love for God”|,
and union among the Protestant Churches”. The Philadelphians were
sincere in their ecumenism, and they would invoke it to have their own
identity respected by other congregations from “the whole Christian
world”.!> Lee raised one of the tenets that seemed to preoccupy their
readers: whether evidence of the coming of Christ could be “found out
by reason” so that “[believers] must come to the knowledge of it either
by private Revelation or by publick Revelation, such as is made to us all
in Scripture”.!© Lee’s reply made it clear that reason was not useful as a
category of analysis to understand the ineffable. If a private revelation
takes place, then the individual has to demonstrate that she is really in-
spired by the divine spirit. Lead’s writings display a marked first-person
perspective, and readers are drawn to partake of her visions and senso-
rial experiences. The Philadelphians were committed to promoting the
elderly and blind Jane Lead to a near status of an iconic figure whose
spiritual authority relied on reading as a form of contemplative practice
that promised personal and world change. In 1697 the Society began to
publish the journal Theosophical Transactions and provided a regular
supply of tracts on Lead’s visions. The ‘advertisements’ endorsing her
 The soul’s flight of Jane Lead 175
works, as well as the prefatory material and the annotations in manu-
script tracts by Lead and other members of the group indicate a close
collaboration—even a practice of social authorship—among the Phila-
delphians,'” whereby texts by a single author would be ipoblished;
whereas occasional writings circulated in manuscript form.!® Michael
Martin has explored the Pauline reverberations of Lead’s enterprise, in
which Lee and Roach fashion themselves as Paul’s associates and Lead
attends to the Lord’s voice (Wisdom’s voice in her case) to undertake her
mission.!? Paula McDowell has aptly noted the professionalism and de-
votion of Lead’s co-workers in dealing with a flurry of correspondence at
home and abroad, showing a modern awareness of the medium of print
culture to advance Philadelphian ideas. The whole of Lead’s actual the-
ology, however, resists uniformity. Julie Hirst, in an important mono-
graph, tackled the historical study of Lead’s model from the perspective
of feminine symbols and references, which helps to place her life and
work within the framework of a feminist theology.?° Phillis Mack situ-
ated Lead in an “ongoing tradition of female mysticism and nascent
feminism” that was gradually detached from any “vision of social soli-
darity or broad social transformation”,*! but this impression may not be
accurate when considering that Philadelphian spirituality aimed at what
today we would call a ‘paradigm change’ that involved the seven churches
in the world.?? Catherine Smith argued that Lead’s tracts and occasional
poetry are highly significant for their historical value, since the work
“signals women’s awakening” of their own feminine power.*> More re-
cently, Sarah Apetrei has updated this line of thinking by showing that
Jane Lead and her circle realized the full potential of the Behmenist doc-
trine on the female principle, and argues against McDowell’s suggestion
that the Philadelphians failed when they were swallowed by the new
enlightened spirit of the age. Their avoidance of sectarianism, their privi-
leging of inward over outward religion, their pursuit of early Christianity,
and their rejection of Calvinist predetermination would have brought
them near to “the same concerns which drove Enlightenment thinkers
into radical positions”.24 While I concur with Apetrei’s scrutiny,
McDowell makes a valid point as well in signaling how Lead’s emphasis
on vision as a cognitive process over reason was gradually lost, to the
extent that, as McDowell remarks, our contemporary modes of scientific
observation stemming from the Enlightenment are the same ones that
“marginalize religious writing in our literary histories and cultural stud-
ies models”.*° Lead’s capital as a thinker rests on her defense of vision as
a source of human understanding and non-verbal communication. The
beatific images that her readers contemplate are not meant only to de-
light. She is showing, for instance, that time is an eternal now, that an ex-
perience of God’s divinity is accessible to humans, and that the female
principle is a constitutive element of a non-dualistic creation. Lead’s theo-
logy can be assimilated but not fully apprehended by reason. Her prophetic
176 In-communications

language was not rooted in Daniel or in feminine biblical types that were
common stock earlier in the seventeenth century. This did not make her
work and immediate sources, Pordage and Boehme, more esoteric for
that. I suggest that Lead reinstates an English medieval tradition of mys-
ticism that had gone largely underground for much of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries in Britain but did not quite disappear from circu-
lation thanks in part to recusant devotional literature and, in particular,
the monastic spirituality of Benedictine orders in exile. The instructional
work of the monk Augustine Baker (1575-1641), attached to the priory
of St Lawrence in Lorraine while still living in England and later, in
1624, as a spiritual guide to a Benedictine nunnery at Cambrai, shows a
keen interest in ascetic literature. He translated and composed treatises
from his readings of Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and the anony-
mous The Cloud of Unknowing, among others, which he might have
borrowed from the exiled English Carthusians or Sir Robert Cotton,
whose library he knew well as a result of a commission to refute a group
of English monks who did not accept the union of their congregations by
a papal brief.2° Modernized editions of Hilton’s The Scale of Perfection
and Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love were published bet-
ween 1658 and 1680 by biographer and editor Serenus Cressy.?’ Baker’s
Sancta Sophia, published posthumously, reveals his wide knowledge of
continental and English mysticism, including St. Teresa of Avila and
Hildegard of Bingen, whom Boehme might have read as well.?° St. Teresa’s
works had been published in Antwerp and circulated in England up to
the 1650s, and later translations of The Life and miscellanies of her
works were published in London since the 1670s.7?
Many of Lead’s visions involve the overwhelming presence of Sophia,
the Virgin Wisdom, foregrounding the sacred feminine aspect of Christ’
divinity (the wisdom aspect of God, or mirror of God as Love-Wisdom)
which is reflected onto Christ through the Holy Ghost. The female
divine would be part of God’s nature and necessary for Christ’s gene-
ration (the Son of God in the Trinity) or even a partner in the creative
power of God. Boehme considered that the human soul is impregnated
with Sophia, as “substantial wisdom”, adding that “Christ seedeth the
soul with the substance of Sophia”,°” since he himself contains Wisdom.
Thus, animated by the Holy Spirit, human’s latent divinity, the soul in
action, can raise through the faculty of the imagination to capture that
which can only be envisioned but not rationalized. In The Way to Christ,
Boehme beautifully described the dialogue between Wisdom and the
soul of Christ as an embrace between bride and bridegroom, in an over-
lap with Song of Solomon, where “the noble Sophia draweth near in the
essence of the soul, and kisseth it friendly, and tinctureth [transferred]
the dark fire of the soul with her rayes of love, and shineth through
the soul with her kiss of love”.*! Lead further described the “Glorious”
or “Eternal Virgin” as one of “Eves generation of lost births in which
 The soul’s flight of Jane Lead 177
the virgin-purity was deflowered”. Out of these virgins, “spiritual born
creatures were begotten by the Holy Ghost, wherein the unfathomable
mystery of the Wisdom, and Love of God, is made manifest in this
lapsed state”.** Inviting the reader to keep walks with God “as another
translated Enoch”—the Book of Enoch being apocryphal for Christians
except for the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Churches—Lead fur-
ther noted that Jesus’ words to John in the cross, “Behold thy Mother”,
referred to “the Virgin Mary, who was the representative of the eternal
virgin” whereby the Lord transferred a privilege of adoption so that “we
may entitle this virgin for our true mother”.*? Thus, Lead restored the
central role of the Virgin Mary while avoiding the suspect Catholic con-
notations in an exercise of syncretism in which the Madonna becomes a
Hagia Sophia. But Lead can also commune with a Mary Magdalen who
is not a sinful and repentant woman, but a trusted disciple of Jesus who
attends to his teachings and spirit after the Resurrection. The Gnostic
references to the books of Pistis Sophia resonate in her arresting account
of the episode, when she found “Mary Magdalen’s restless spirit with
me, to attend the Sepulchre of my Lord, which I could not go”.24 Once
again, Lead is not simply narrating the episode, but being its protago-
nist. While she was ‘in situ’ mourning in hope, the angel that rolled away
the stone of the sepulchre came to comfort her about the fact that Christ
will not “leave thee a restless seeker here”. After a short while, the Lord
appears to reassure her that he has returned to “give thee a “Resurrec-
tion with myself”. He further invites Lead, as Mary Magdalen, to ascend
together in Spirit, “that thou mayst not only behold me in my Glory, but
know thy self also with me, as a Partaker of the same Glory”.*> Such
a vivid impersonation enhances the narrative and visual impact of the
(Gnostic) biblical episode in which the Resurrection figures as a shared
sacred space of spiritual knowledge and partnership. Magdalen does not
provide further details, but Lead bemoans the difficulty of living per-
manently in this resurrected state, creating unspecified “ecclesiastical
disorders in my visible church militant”.*°
The manifestation of the Holy Ghost, which the Philadelphians be-
lieved to be prevalent at their present time, fostered the life-infusion of
the Word, including that belonging to the apocryphal books whose di-
vine inspiration and authorial attribution were in question—and which
the original 1611 King James Bible inserted between the Old and New
Testaments. Lead’s visions would thus infuse, legitimize, and authorize
the apocrypha with her visionary power, acting as a genuine prophet
of old. By doing so, visions (icon for Paracelsus, a direct influence of
Boehme)?’ would transcend speech, an inferior form of communication,
and transform words into images for contemplation that were at the
core of Luther’s sola scriptura: reading as an invocative act contained
in the mental exercise of reading and the spiritual infusion of the word.
The hermit and mystic Richard Rolle (d. 1349) had written on the three
178 In-communications

parts of contemplative life: “The first is reading, the second is praying,

and the third is meditation. In reading speaks God to us; in praying
we speak with God”.°8 Lead’s way to God, and to a certain extent
Davies’, poses a method of understanding and of reading that stretches
back to the medieval monastic practice of lectio divina. Encouraged by
Benedictines and Cistercians, and present as well in the many editions
of An Introduction to a Devout Life by the Bishop of Geneva, Francis
de Sales (1567-1622),*” reading allows the mind to soar to deep levels of
insight. Through de Sales the concept of ‘oraison jaculatoire’ or ‘ejacu-
lation’ in its English translation (orationes jaculatas for Saint Augustin),
introduced the fashion of succinct and spiritually intense poetry as in
George Herbert’s The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations:
“Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back”.4? The connotation
of “ejecting” a poem as a result of having experienced the power of the
spirit forms a contrast with the metaphoric sense of ‘offspring’ in the
‘babes’ of contemporary women poets.*! In this gendering of spiritual
poetics, women conceive a body of words while men project a seed.
In The Laws of Paradise, which bears the subtitle Given forth by
Wisdom to a translated spirit (i.e. Jane Lead), Francis Lee describes in
his preface how one day, while Jane was in contemplation of the para-
disiacal world, “God’s eternal Virgin Wisdom” appeared to her in order
to unseal “the treasures of God’s deep wisdom unto thee”. After three
days, the vision announced that Jane was entering into covenant with
her to reveal and obey the “laws of the new creation” upon a golden
book that contains the “mysteries of the divine wisdom”. The visions of
this “Divine Virgin” reappeared six days later to tell Jane that she would
“cease to appear in a visible figure to three, but I will not fail to trans-
figure myself in thy mind and then open the spring of wisdom and under-
standing”. Lead’s authority over her prophetic and written production
is thus established by means of her spiritual credentials: A virgin wisdom
engenders and gives new life to another woman, much as Boehme did
when Wisdom infuses the Virgin Mary. Jane Lead recounts the same
experience in first person, while she is in the vision:

There came upon me an overshadowing bright Cloud, and I the

midst of it the Figure of a Woman, most richly adorned with trans-
parent Gold, her Hair hanging down, and her Face as the terrible
Crystal for brightness, but her Countenance was sweet and mild.
At which sight I was somewhat amazed, but immediately this voice
came, saying, Behold I am God’s Eternal Virgin-Wisdom.*?

Virginal Wisdom makes a dramatic entrance in Jane’s mind through her

imaginative powers, introducing herself as God’s eternal partner. She
urges her to behold, and contemplate her majesty, and Jane assimilates
this image in amazement before she can hear her. The vision is more
 The soul’s flight of Jane Lead 179
eloquent than her words, and Jane can only describe it in oxymoronic
terms: a bright cloud that casts a shadow, adorned with such a pure gold
that is transparent and a sweet countenance that can only be seen through
a translucent face. In this description, Lead defies the laws of physics so
that the reader can see beyond appearance and the biblical reference of
the woman clothed with the sun of Revelation 12:1. Lead is able to con-
vey this vision because she is in it, to the point that divinity does not
descend upon her (as in Puritan election narratives) rather she is ascended
to a new exalted dimension. When Lead writes “Oh how sweet is to feel
the Life’s Blood run into the Fountain of that Godhead, from whence it
came”, she feels her own blood flowing in the source of divinity itself, not
the effects of divinity running into her veins.*4 Such a hectic activity of
the imagination warranted further details, which Lead provided as a sort
of help-guide to her ekphrasis, or verbal representation of a visual image:

As you may observe when you read the similitudes and visions which
are here published, God many times coming down to unfold himself
in this Figurative and Parabolical. Yet more essentially, and Deeper,
above and beyond the Figures and Representations. [...] Now here
is a cessation of sensible images, for all is turned into an Intellectual
sight, Operation, and Sensation.*°

The language of ‘similitude’, figures, and parables may be employed

sometimes by God to manifest Himself, but beyond these sensory images
there is an intellectual sight (a vision sparked off by wisdom), an actual
enactment of it (operation), and a feeling of it. Intellectual sight leads
to the higher stage of “Beatifical vision” or “seeing of God without any
other medium”,*° other than “self-annihilation”, eventually “nothing to
be with reference to the creaturely being” when the soul in “all-deistick
unction” enters into an eternal now from which “prophecies and revela-
tions” will precipitate in the world. Lead is guiding the reader to a full
recognition of an experience of election that takes place outside time,
without this necessarily creating a conflict with the Philadelphian belief
in general election or with the relationship between God’s foreknow-
ledge and predetermination. Lead is describing the via negativa of medi-
eval mystics, with special emphasis on casting aside the “vulturous eye
of the greatest rationality”.4” Francis Lee remarked in his Enochian Life
that Moses best described the state of divine existence, which Enoch
discovers in his walks with God, as the simple negation: “‘He was not,’
which contains in it, short as it is, a great deal more than many affir-
matives”,*® thus echoing the biblical verse in Genesis 5:24, “and Enoch
walked with God: and he was not; for God took him”.
The negation of the self implies much more than the physical (female)
body. While it is possible to interpret Lead’s effacement of all things
material as a quest to transcend the barriers of gender with a semiotic
180 In-communications

language that defies the patriarchal symbolic order, the femininity and
feminism of Lead resonate powerfully in her intellectual vision: a hetero-
dox updating of medieval mysticism and esotericism that drives her to
take quantum leaps from different states of being, in apparent discontin-
uous fashion, while remaining in essence the same. Her body is at times
atomized, becoming the light of the soul infused with the Godly energy
of Sophia. Ultimately, true freedom is a liberation of oneself—physically,
emotionally, and mentally—to return to the Godhead, which is equally
male and female in a no-place and no-time that can only be described as
an imago and from which true prophecy stems.
Such an alchemic transformation is accessible to all souls but not all
“vessels” are pure enough to commit themselves to true prophecy that is,
fundamentally, a vision of the absolute. Lead describes it in her “magical
journey to the land of all Blessed stores”:

A Figure therefore was acted Magically before me, I being carried

to a Gate, which was so narrow and strait, that there was no getting
through [...] Such a Perfuming Gale I felt, as if all manner of Flowers
were growing. But this Word came also to me, saying, Here is the
Place for Love’s Kingdom to grow, with its Natural inhabitants, that
have left behind the gross selfish Love. That must not come here; for
that it is that makes the Passage so strait.*”

Those who read Lead’s texts in a meditative manner partake of her visions
in a near-Miltonic tradition of cosmic travel and engage in a psycho-
magia, as she and Boehme named it after the Latin poet Prudentius
(Sth c.), albeit in a slightly different meaning from its original allegory
of a soul’s struggle. The guided journey of the soul, who captures the
fragrance of the wind, takes Lead to a place where only those who have
abandoned selfish love can enter Love’s Kingdom.
Wisdom features prominently in Lead as in the German Benedictine
abbess and mystic Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), following the
‘sapiential tradition’ of the Old Testament apocrypha, in particular the
books of Wisdom and Sirach.°? Hildegard’s style is more didactic than
expressive, but Sophia is also represented as being in a loving bond of
partnership with God:

All wisdom comes from God the ruler of all. With his wisdom he
foresaw all things and composed all things in the cosmos, and with
that same wisdom he distinguished every creature from the next.
It was Wisdom who knew and tasted heavenly things and travelled
round the circle of the heavens in her regal ministry [...] But wisdom
is also the eye of God, through whom he foresees and oversees all
things. She stands before him as his fondest friend in loving em-
brace, considering and reckoning all things with him.*!
 The soul’s flight of Jane Lead 181
Hildegard’s visions of Jesus Christ are described as a bright and “lucent
cloud”, as a “shadow of living brightness” that is not only beautiful to con-
template, but also infuses wisdom in an intuitive manner, since she could
“know the meaning and exposition of the Scriptures” without grasping
the interpretation of the words themselves. Her cognition does not rely on
reason, but on “sensing in myself wonderfully the power and mystery of
secret”.° In a letter to Guibert de Gembloux, a French-speaking monk
who became Hildegard’s last secretary, she revealed that “the brightness
that I see is not spatial, yet it is far more lucent than a cloud that envelops
the sun [...] the words I see are like a sparkling flame”.*?
Lead’s wisdom is not described as God’s wisdom, an attribute of the
divine, as in most allusions to it in mystical literature, even though wisdom
was not always represented as female.** Driven by the undercurrents of
occult Christianity in Behmenism, she highlighted the femininity, corpo-
reity, and union of God’s essence, thus revisiting a medieval tradition that
feminizes union with the divine and a way to it that challenges the capa-
bility of human language itself. Margery Kempe (1373-c.1438), who made
frequent references to Richard Rolle’s “fire of love” in her Book, stresses
the individual bond existing between Jesus and Mary Magdalen after the
resurrection: “Remember, Lord, the good things that you gave me, and the
intimacy and love that you granted me”, to which he replies before giving
Magdalen her blessing: “Don’t be afraid, be confident and constant, for
I shall always be with you”. Kempe’s appropriation of the Biblical pas-
sage in John does not imply Lead’s full impersonation as Magdalen and
her flight with Jesus Christ, but is a clear statement of a woman’s imagi-
native power to transmit both the human and transcendent experience
of divinity.°° Julian of Norwich (1342-1416), a contemporary of Kempe,
described the mystery of the Trinity almost in domestic terms when “God
brought our Lady into my mind”. God showed Julian “the wisdom and
truth of the Lady’s soul” so that Julian could understand how reverently
“she marvelled that he chose to be born of her, a simple creature of his
own making. For what made her marvel was that he who was her Maker
chose to be born of the creature he had made”.°’ The mystery of Immacu-
late Conception is rendered accessible when the Lady (Mary-Wisdom) ad-
mires the power of her femininity for having begotten God the Son.
Another prominent Philadelphian, Anne Bathurst (no relation to
Elizabeth Bathurst),°® had belonged to the original Pordage circle and was
meant to be Lead’s successor upon her death, although Ann died soon
afterward. Her ecstatic poetry has only reached us in manuscript form, and
maintains a distinctive devotional tone in which she often resorts to met-
aphors of maternity and pregnancy to create a feeling of spiritual fullness:

There’s such a deepth, Large & powerfull to come forth & arise
in & thro me, as if it must needs be to the rending of the vail (the out
ward Body.) for That Birth of Power seemeth so Large & Masculine
182 In-communications

fform, Larger by far than my own fform; that sure to have That
born in & thro me, & to arise in Jss Manly fform in strength & -
power; must needs rend the case; being too big to be contained in
it. It is as if it were to fill all my whole Man, wth Jss Manhood, -
strength, victory & power.°”

Ann is filled with the maleness of the Holy Ghost in a spiritual preg-
nancy that brims with sensual overtones all over her manuscript. She
depicts the spiritual infinity of the Holy Ghost in her as a large and mas-
culine form that takes over her “own form” which she can barely con-
tain in her female body. By being pregnant with this energy, she is filled
with manhood, which she associates with virile qualities of strength,
victory, and power, transforming her into a man.°? The Holy Ghost
does not enhance her femininity but empowers her with a vis, not with a
phallus. The Philadelphians tended to represent the natural qualities of
the sexes by portraying them in metaphysical terms, rather than defining
male-female in terms of their social construct, which left them exposed
to accusations of being too liberal in their relationship with the sexes.
Pordage represented man in a pre-lapsarian state as being both male and
female: “He should both Father be, and Mother then/For Male, and
Female God created Man: Both Man, and Woman, Wise, and Virgin he
Together was, in state of purity”.°! Bathurst’s metaphors of pregnancy
help her to conceive her own notion of via negativa, since the body that
fills her annihilates her femininity until “she is no more”.

That, how then can I be the Case to such a fform, till I be no more I,
nor any thing but power. Sense even saith, how can This be? yt I be
embodied all over, head, hands, body, feet wth a Body in my Body;
seing it is too big, bigger than the case that It is to be putt in; yet sure
It is for me either in time or Eternity.°?

Ann’s body is full of another, exulting in her over-worldly (but hardly

immaculate) conception that does not take place in the known confines of
time, but in eternity. As in Lead, Ann’s imagination takes her on a flight
of an experience with God outside the physical dimension, since “it is the
prerogative of God to change Times and Seasons, who under no bounds of
Time will be”.°* Bathurst depicts her ecstasy resorting to the graphic qual-
ity of speech. Her spelling captures the pronunciation so that the sound
of each unit of meaning is sensed by the reader, thus creating a ‘natu-
ral’ language that is said to imitate that of angels. Another Philadelphian,
Elizabeth Glover, shows more restraint in her visions, but is concerned
with how the holy word of the Bible effects changes in the individual:

{I heard] several times here Voices, and they were these Voices in the
Revelations; and I knew when I heard it, it was the Voice of God,
 The soul’s flight of Jane Lead 183
differing from all other that ever I heard in all my life-time; and
whenever I heard a Voice, or saw a Vision, or bore witness to any of
the Words of the Prophecy of that Book, I was so awed with it, that
durst never entertain a thought ever any more against it; it became a
perpetual law in my Soul.%4

The voices of Revelation bless the reader of prophetic words,®* and work
a magical effect on the reader who suddenly gains true knowledge with
her soul—not with her mind. Lead also heard from the angelical world
“great and mighty sounds round about me, with one distinct word,
saying, behold him, who descends upon the White Throne”.°° Glover
equates this descent with an angelic promise, an oath and a “sign to the
Church of Philadelphia” of the covenant between God and humanity.°”
Whereas Pordage’s approach to the “Angelical world” was more cosmo-
logical and systematic,°® angels feature in Ann Bathurst’s writings as
proto-novelistic characters who speak among them and facilitate visions
in the word of God, rather than being ‘messengers’, since they are en-
dowed with a heightened perception. In one sequence of angelic travel,
Ann recounts how her angel, ‘a she-angel’, receives God’s instruction to
eat from a book of gold, again the “little book” that an angel is hold-
ing in Revelation.©? According to Ann’s rewriting of the episode, the
book is not bittersweet but contains the love and the law of God and,
just as John did, the angel “took the Book & eat it, and her Garment
became very rich”.”? In this instance of word-fagia, Bathurst celebrates
the faithfulness of the angelic spirit to God’s orders and represents the
gift of prophecy as a feast that endows word-eaters with the brightness
of wisdom.
The distance between women’s prophetic speech and mystical expe-
rience becomes tighter when prophetesses wish to convey an experience
of revelation that challenges verbal and physical expression. Davies and
Lead, both influenced by a different set of sources and circumstances,
were successful in tapping into one core aspect of biblical prophecy
that had been largely unnoticed in sectarian discourse: the ability to
alter the perception of time, creating a bi-location effect in the reader
who actually sees the prophet traveling from past to present in the re-
lation of revealed events unfolding in an eternal now. Davies was not
able to enjoy the support of a group who promoted her work, but she
was one of the few prophets to establish a recognizable authorial voice
throughout her extensive corpus, while Lead flourished in a late gener-
ation of seventeenth-century women prophets who were weary of what
they saw as the verbal excesses and the conflicting positions of politi-
cal prophecy—including the Quakers. Prophecy did not die out in its
‘look within’, but continued to serve the spiritual needs of devout men
and women who sought a fundamental change that resonated with early
eighteenth-century Pietist sensibilities. In so doing, the prophetic word
184 In-communications

elevated to full vision revisited the rich tradition of medieval mysticism

with its esoteric undercurrents, whose flame had not been completely
extinguished in seventeenth-century Protestant and Puritan circles.

Notes
1 Sylvia Bowerbank, “Jane Lead”, ODNB, accessed May 18, 2015, http:/
www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16231.
) Jane Lead, The Wars of David and the Peaceable Reign of Solomon (London:
Thos. Wood, 1816 [1700]), 21.
3 Jane Lead, A Fountain of Gardens (London: printed by J. Bradford,
1697), 328.
4 The millennial inspiration and pantheistic spirit of Boehme appealed to
many radical sects, which would explain the thirty-two separate transla-
tions of Boehme between 1644 and 1662 (Cf. Smith, Perfection Proclaimed,
188). For a reception of Behmenist ideas in Britain, see B.J. Gibbons, Gen-
der in Mystical and Occult Thought: Behmenism and its Development in
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Arthur Versluis,
Wisdom’s Children: A Christin Esoteric Tradition (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1999).
nN Jane Lead, The Heavenly Cloud Now Breaking (London: printed for the
author, 1681), 7.
6 Ibid., 8.
ee Jane Lead, The Enochian Walks (London: printed by D. Edwards, 1694), 28.
8 See Diane Purkiss, “Producing the Voice, Consuming the Body: Women
Prophets of the Seventeenth Century”, in Women, Writing, History
1640-1740, eds. Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1992), 37-54; Christina Berg and Phillipa Berry, “Spiritual
Whoredom: An Essay on Female Prophets in the Seventeenth Century”, in
1642: Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Francis Baker
(Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1981), 51-62; Catherine F. Smith,
“Jane Lead: The Feminist Mind and Art of a Seventeenth-century Protestant
Mystic”, in Women of Spirit, eds. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Eleanor
McLaughlin (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1998), 183-205.
\o Carter Linberg noted the “experiential-expressive” nature of Pietist currents
in the early eighteenth century, including Jane Lead. See The Pietist Theo-
logians: An Introduction to Theology in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 1.
Ariel Hessayon, ed., Jane Lead and her Transnational Legacy (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Francis Lee, Dissertations. A Short Account of the Author (London: printed
for Alexander Strahan, 1752), v-xxviii; see also Paula McDowell, The
Women of Grub Street (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 171.
Richard Roach, The Great Crisis (London: printed and sold by N. Blandford,
1725), 168-69.
William Tabbernee, Early Christianity in Contexts (Grand Rapids, MI:
Baker Academic, 2014), 268; see also Geza Vermes, Christian Beginnings
(London: Penguin, 2013); Augustine Casiday, The Cambridge History of
Christianity, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
14 Francis Lee, The State of the Philadelphian Society (London, 1697), 1.
Ibid., 14.
16 Ibid., 2.
 The soul’s flight ofJane Lead 185
17 See Margaret Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 22-32.
18 MS Rawl. C.266 is attributed to several Philadelphians, containing “visions”
whose “themes and ecstatic style are strongly evocative of Lead”. See Sarah
Apetrei, “Mystical Divinity in the Manuscript Writings of Jane Lead and
Anne Bathurst”, in Hessayon, Jane Lead and her Transnational Legacy,
167-86. According to Apetrei, another possible manuscript by Lead is held
in the BL, Sloane MS 2569 fols. 87r-87v, 1676.
19 Michael Martin, Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation
England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 162-75.
20 Julie Hirst, Jane Leade: Biography of a Seventeenth-century Mystic
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2005).
21 Mack, Visionary Women, 410.
22 Jane Lead, The Messenger of an Universal Peace (London: printed for the
booksellers of London and Westminster, 1698), 3-4.
23 Catherine F. Smith, “Jane Lead: Mysticism and the Woman Cloathed with
the Sun”, in Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, ed.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (Bloomington: Indiana University
Bresss979) 5Se
24 Sarah Apetrei, Women, Feminism and Religion in Early Enlightenment
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 189.
25 Paula McDowell, “Enlightenment Enthusiasms and the Spectacular Failure
of the Philadelphian Society”, Eighteenth-Century Studies 35:4 (2002): 518.
26 Gordon Mursell, English Spirituality: from earliest times to 1700 (Louisville,
KY: John Knox Press, 2001), 348-55; See also James Gaffney, Augustine
Baker’s Inner Light: a Study In English Recusant Spirituality (Scranton, PA:
University of Scranton Press, 1989).
27 Walter Hilton, The Scale (or Ladder) of Perfection (London: printed by
T.R., 1659); Julian of Norwich, xvi Revelations of Divine Love (London:
published by R.F.S. Cressy, 1670).
28 Augustin Baker, Sancta Sophia (Doway: John Patte and Thomas Fievet,
1657). For a theology and reception of Hildegard’s works, see Barbara
Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard of Bingen’s Theology of the
Feminine (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998);
Maud Burnett (ed.), Hildegard of Bingen: A Book of Essays (New York and
London: Garland Publishing, 1998); Karen J. Campbell (ed.), German Mys-
tical Writings (London: Continuum, 1991).
29 See Saint Teresa of Avila, The Flaming Heart (Antwerp: printed by Johannes
Meursius, 1642); Saint Teresa of Avila, The Soul’s Delight (Antwerp: by
William Lesteems, 1654); Saint Teresa of Avila, The Life of the Holy Mother
S. Teresa (London, 1671).
30 Jacob Boehme, Two Theosophicall Epistles (London: printed for B. Allen,
1645), 19.
31 Jacob Boehme, The Way to Christ Discovered (London: printed by Lodowick
Lloyd, 1656), 75-77.
32 Lead, Enochian Walks, 24.
33 Ibid., 24-25.
34 Lead, Fountain of Gardens, 215-16.
35 Ibid, 216-17.
36 Ibid., 217.
37 Cyril o’Regan, Gnostic Apocalypse (Albany: State University of New York,
2002), 66. Hendrik Niclaes (1502-1580), founder of the Family of Love, pre-
figures a similar but more verbal and biblical notion of the divine feminine
186 In-communications

as an embodiment of nurturing love in Revelatio Dei (London: printed for

Giles Calvert, 1649), 40: “After that I saw and behold this same woman,
that was so bright and glorious in all the heavens, opened her mouth, and
there out flowed the Word of God and the true bread and water of life”
[John 4:11].
Richard Rolle, “The Meaning of Life”, in English Mystics of the Middle Ages,
ed. Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 18.
Francis de Sales, An Introduction to a Devout Life (London: printed by
Nicholas Okes, 1616). More than fifteen translations of this and other mys-
tical works by de Sales were published between 1613 and 1686.
40 George Herbert, “Love (III)”, in George Herbert: The Complete English
Poems, ed. John Tobin (London: Penguin Classics, 2004), 178.
41 For gendered analyses of the language of devotional poetry, especially
‘ejaculatory’ poetry, see Elizabeth Clarke, “Ejaculation or Virgin Birth?
The Gendering of the Religious Lyric in the Interregnum”, in This Double
Voice: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England, ed. Danielle Clarke
and Elizabeth Clarke (London: Macmillan Press, 2000), 208-29; Helen
Wilcox, “Exploring the Language of Devotion in the English Revolution”, in
Literature and the English Civil War, ed. Yom Healy and Jonathan Sawday
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 75-89.
Francis Lee, Jane Lead, The Laws of Paradise (London: printed by T. Sowle,
1695), A3-AS.
3 Lead, Fountain of Gardens, 18.
Ibid., 33.
5 Ibid., 7-9.
Ibidty9:
Ibid., At.
Francis Lee, Dissertations (London: printed for Alexander Strahan, 1752), 216.
Ibid., 53-55,
Sirach 1:1, “All wisdom cometh from the Lord, and is with him for ever”;
Sirach 1:10, “She is with all flesh according to his gift, and he hath given her
upon all his works”.
Hildegard of Bingen, “The Voice from Heaven”, The Book ofLife’s Merits I,
in Hildegard of Bingen: Selected Writings, ed. Oliver Davies (London:
Penguin Classics, 2001), 147. For a feminization of religious language in
medieval monastic writings, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother:
Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1982); see also Jennifer Summit,
Lost Property: the Woman Writer and English Literary History 1380-1589
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 109-11; Theresa Tinkle,
Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010), 1-48. Anne Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles: Women Writing
about Women in the Late Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2004).
Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Jane Bishop et al. (New York: Paulist
gece, OCI See
Joseph Baird, The Personal Correspondence of Hildegard of Bingen
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 103.
Eugene F. Rice, The Renaissance Idea of Wisdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1958), 21-22.
5S Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Lynn Staley (New York
and London: W.W. Norton, 2001), 200.
See John 20:17-18, “Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet
ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend
 The soul’s flight of Jane Lead 187
unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God. Mary
Magdalene came and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and that
he had spoken these things unto her”.
57 Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, ed. Barry Windeatt (Oxford:
Oxford World Classics, 2015), 7.
58 About the apparent family bonds of Elizabeth and Ann Bathurst, see Apetrei,
Women, Feminism, 213.
59 Ann Bathurst, Spiritual Diary, 6 March 1692, Bodleian MS Rawl. D. 1262,
line 10 ff. There are two other known manuscripts by Bathurst: fragment
MS Rawl. Q.e.28, also in the Bodleian Library, and MS Q.538, held in the
Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg.
60 For Patristic representations of ‘manly spiritual women’, see Hannah Hunt,
Clothed in the Body: Asceticism, the Body and the Spiritual in the Late
Antique Era (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 63-78.
61 John Pordage, Mundorum Explicatio (London: printed for Lodowick Lloyd,
1663), 62.
62 Ibid., line 18 ff.
63 Jane Lead, The Tree of Faith (London: printed by J. Bradford, 1696), 94.
64 Elizabeth Glover, The Angels Oath (London: printed for the author, 1694), 19.
65 Revelation 1:3, “Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of
this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time
is at hand”.
66 Lead, Fountain of Gardens, 299.
67 Glover, The Angels Oath, 27.
68 John Pordage and Jane Lead, Theologia Mystica (London, 1683), 114-15.
For a complete study on Pordage and Milton’s angelology, see Joad Raymond,
Milton’s Angels, 147-61.
69 Revelation 10:9-10, “And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, Give
me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall
make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey. And I took
the little book out of the angel’s hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth
sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter”.
70 Bathurst, Spiritual Diary, Bodleian MS Rawl. D. 1262, 90.
11 Prophecy and the transmutation
of suffering

The letters and prefatory notes addressed to the reader of God’s Mighty
Power Magnified reveal that Joan Vokins was a woman loved by her
friends and family: “The following papers and epistles here collected
together, and printed for thy benefit, were not written and given forth
by the Will of Man, or worldly Wisdom, but by the Will and hidden
Wisdom of God, which is (and ever was) a Mystery to the Learned
Scribes”.! She was an active member of the Quaker congregation of
north Berkshire, together with her husband and children, and a leader
of a woman’s group in the area.” One day she heard an inward call to
travel to America and in May 1680 she arrived in New York, where she
preached, helped to set up Quaker communities, and tried to counteract
the effects of a more radical competing group, the Ranters, which took
the Quakers’ antinomian tendencies to an extreme in denying any sense
of moral and public obedience. When Vokins was planning to go back
home, her Inner Light instructed her to stop in Barbados instead, where
after a strenuous journey she settled to preach to white and blacks alike.
She returned to England in 1681 and traveled to Kent and Ireland for
some time before reuniting with her family; she died in 1690.° For her
friends, Vokins was a woman who “practised what she preached”, a fine
example of how her “outward weakness” and the many dangers she
had to endure made her “strong through believing in God’s almighty
power”./ In typical seventeenth-century Quaker fashion, God’s Mighty
Power Magnified gathers diverse materials: an “epistle” by Vokins “to
be read amongst Friends” where she expounds on the reasons why she
collected her writings and recommends not to “limit the Holy Spirit of
the Lord, which is but one in the Male and in the Female chief among
them”.° Another epistle by Theophila Townsend, a reputed Quaker
member who had been imprisoned several times and had written a short
tract calling on women to serve the Lord (while she criticized the “pride,
vanity, and superfluity in many of the younger sort that profess the Holy
Truth”, especially in London)® explained that Joan had visited her once
to hand her over some “papers she desired to made publick after her de-
cease”, and made the most of this occasion to bewail her loss in the name
of the congregation and praise her service.’
 Prophecy and the transmutation ofsuffering 189
Since the beginning of the group’s formation in the 1650s with George
Fox (1624-1691), the Quakers enjoyed a highly active and organized
group life, especially after the Restoration when many of the radical sects
failed to adapt to the new political climate. More recently, Marjon Ames
has qualified this long-standing view® by suggesting that the Quakers’
expansion and consolidation after the Restoration owed much to Fox’s
wife, Margaret Fell.? The Quakers’ central doctrine of the immanent
divinity of men and women who shine in their inner light made them
vulnerable to the Blasphemy Act of 1650, whereby those who claimed
to be equal with God could be prosecuted. Early Quakers rejected sac-
ramental observance, interrupted sermons in churches on account of
their right to preach extempore and provided abundant testimonies and
sermons in their informal gatherings, which over the 1650s and 1660s
grew exponentially into further organized units.!° Most Quakers who
were imprisoned faced charges of vagrancy and public disorder. Writ-
ing and keeping a record of the activities of their members (or Friends)
was encouraged. Women’s Quaker writing amounted to about twenty
percent of women’s output for the whole century, a large amount given
their numbers in society.!! Whereas we have not yet formed a complete
picture on whether the Quakers enjoyed a measure of public respect
despite the negative response they often elicited for their activism, there
is a critical consensus that they availed themselves of the opportunities
that printing offered and came to regard it as an extension of their spiri-
tual activity and their regular meetings, serving the double purpose of
strengthening the group cohesion and its expansion—both in the British
isles and abroad.!*
Quaker women produced texts for various purposes and audiences:
inspirational letters to their families and communities, prefaces to
Friends’ books, polemical rebuttals, and personal testimonies of perse-
cution and faith that could be articulated with a prophetic voice.'? The
evangelizing purpose of these texts was often framed in a narration of
a strenuous situation that put faith to the test. The Quaker writing style
has been defined as plain, “neither civil nor sensible”, and reactionary
to metaphorical meanings,'* in which women, in particular, faced the
challenge of having to work out a discourse that was not a repetition
of Scripture, but a direct experience of being filled with the Light.!> By
placing the emphasis on personal episodes inspired by God’s mysteri-
ous hand a whole spiritual epic with its own pathos is presented to the
reader, who is also invited to learn and rejoice with the ‘private’ corre-
spondence between family and friends of the writer, meant to be read
in group. Unlike Baptist or Fifth-Monarchist prophecy, Quaker offered
a form of worship that put the emphasis on the individual recognizing
their own inner light, rather than expecting a millenarian change or
waiting for signs of election. Quakers offered a praxis for life, and prom-
ised self-expression and equality. Meiling Hazelton noted that Quaker
190 In-communications

writing practice rejected publishing as an act of consumption “in the

marketplace of ideas” as well as the conception of the author as owner.
Quaker ‘freedom of speech’ would not be close to a sectarian and un-
regulated trade of language, but “a language free of charge, unhindered
by buying and selling”.!° However, this did not detract from a Quaker
agenda behind the stream of publications.
The women examined here kept strong bonds with a community of
belief, Quaker, Separatist, or other, which reinforced their independence
and resolution in the harshest of circumstances. Without their prophetic
gift, these women would not have traveled to remote locations, set up
communities of faith, or vindicated women’s dignity in marriage. The
ways in which prophecy articulates a voice and a narrative of challenge
and persecution to foster a sense of justice and spiritual community
world-wide, as well as its potential to reverberate outside Quaker groups
in the public sphere, will be the focus of the present section.
“It is troublesome for me to write, the vessel doth so wave”, wrote
Vokins on board of the ship that took her to America for the first time.
She was hoping that the letter reached her husband and children, one of
many who penned and sent to Friends at home and the places she had
visited, especially New York and New England. The bunch of letters,
even the ‘private’ ones from her family, could be read in public as a
Pauline epistle, thus magnifying the impact of spiritual discovery and
courage in the face of adversity. When Joan reached the Leeward Islands
after a stay in New York and Barbados, she hastened to a Quaker meet-
ing and found the Lord’s power among its people: “Our hearts were ren-
dered and our souls comforted, and we rejoiced that the Lord caused us
in his Love to visit each other”.!” Vokins not only showed the virtues of
listening to the “Almighty Power” within that allowed her to overcome
obstacles and lead a purposeful life, but she met other souls like her, true
friends, who formed a community united by the mystery of true spiritual
fraternity. But Vokins’ presence was not always welcomed. When she
was at Sandwich near Kent, she entered the “Steeple-house there” and
the “heavenly power wrought mightily in her heart”. She delivered a
message and “exhorted priests and people to take a measure or manifes-
tation thereof in their own hearts”.!® Then she invited men and women to
deliver any message from the Lord in situ, with the result that a man hurt
her arm and a priest made the most to stop her. Another man confronted
her by saying that women could not speak in churches, but she replied in
defiance: “What church that was? For I had spoken in the true Church
many times amongst God’s people and they did not hinder me”.!? Soon
after she left, Joan learned that the priest had tried to imprison her, but
the mayor prevented him from doing so. Despite the priest’s insistence
on “harming” the group of Friends there after Joan left, “God’s power
was over all, and Friends had no harm”.?? The pattern of discovery,
challenge, and spiritual edification keeps repeating throughout Vokins’
 Prophecy and the transmutation of suffering 191
narrative, creating an irresistible effect on the reader, who is drawn to
embrace a spiritual reality, vibrant and protective, which is available to
everyone. As a woman, though, she is often torn between her family
duties and spiritual commitment: “As for my husband and children, my
true and tender love was so great, that I could have done or suffered
much for them: but if I had disobeyed the Lord to please them, I might
have provoked him to have withholden his Mercies from us all, and to
bring his Judgements upon us”.*! Vokins fashions herself as a spiritual
bread-winner, the link between the family unit and the Lord to procure
its well-being, and her husband and children gladly accept her service as
their letters prefacing God’s Mighty Power show.
In 1658, coinciding with the early years of the Quaker movement,
Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers arrived in Malta on their way to
Alexandria. They were arrested after interrupting a Catholic mass and
attempting to distribute pamphlets among the congregation.2” While
in prison, they wrote one of the most popular Quaker texts in the
seventeenth century, A Short Relation of Some of the Cruel Sufferings
of Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers in the Inquisition in the Isle of
Malta (1662), which includes the narration of their imprisonment, their
lengthy interrogation at the hands of the Inquisition, and their eventual
release.?? Throughout the narrative, we find not only a single individual
perspective (the “I” of Katharine Evans), but also a surprising variety of
voices that constantly interrelate, address, and interrogate one another.
Evans and Cheevers were itinerant Quakers and travel companions
who preached their message throughout England and abroad. They had
been among the earliest Quaker missionaries to Scotland in 1653, and
they were used to encountering opposition in their preaching activities.7*
In 1655 Evans was banished from the Isle of Wight after enduring
harsh insults and “many abuses from the rude people there”,”> and later
that year she was put on trial along with eight other Friends (including
her fellow Quaker leader James Nayler) for visiting Quaker prisoners. As
a result of these events, she and probably also Cheevers were imprisoned
in Exeter in 1655.
Evans and Cheevers were perfectly aware of the fact that their ‘mis-
sion’ implied leaving behind their respective husbands and children to
embark on a dangerous journey (Evans’ husband, John, was a Quaker
minister), yet there is no evidence that this was perceived by them as a
questioning of their family life. On the contrary, their strong commit-
ment to Quakerism did not imply for these women a renunciation of
their status as beloved wives and mothers. In the transcription of her
interrogation by the inquisition of Malta, Cheevers explains—in Italian
translation, whereas the procedure itself is written in Latin—how she
felt an intense inner fire that inspired her to leave her native England to
travel to the Levant. After conferring her plans with her husband, some
other relatives, and members of her Quaker congregation, they were all
192 In-communications

apparently delighted that she was thus inspired and encouraged her to set
off for her journey.2° She then met Katherine Evans in London and in the
autumn of 1658 embarked on an English vessel commanded by Captain
John Green (“Giovanne Grim”) bound for Livorno. There they got a
passage in a Dutch ship with the idea of reaching Alexandria. When they
put in at La Valletta, the capital of Malta, Evans and Cheevers began
to preach and distribute Quaker literature written in English, French,
and Latin in the streets, even going so far as to interrupt a mass, which
caused the intervention of the authorities, at that ‘time under the rule
of the Catholic Order of Hospitallers. After being arrested, the two
women were handed over to the English consul of Valletta, John Watts,
for safe-keeping in his own house.*” However, Evans and Cheevers were
not formally under home arrest, which soon proved to be a bad idea.
In February 1659, the cardinal Francesco Barberini, secretary of the
Holy Office (Sant’Uffizio), replied to a previous letter by the inquisitor
to Malta Girolamo Casanate about “the process against the two Quaker
English women”, and ordered that they were taken to the prison of the
inquisitor’s palace, known as Vittoriosa, in the town of Birgu, where
they remained from April 1659 until September 1662.78 After several
requests from George Fox and others to set the two women free, the
Friend Daniel Baker negotiated their release and, “in line with common
Quaker practice, offered himself as a substitute prisoner”.*? A letter by
Evans to her husband, co-signed by Cheevers and published in A True
Account, tried to comfort him by explaining that the inquisitors treated
them relatively well and that Baker’s offer was denied. The Houghton’s
Library copy of the tract contains marginalia from several sources and
the hand-written name of “Sarah” underneath Cheevers’ printed name
and elsewhere in the tract, which might be her own signature written
down soon before she died—probably in 1664.°°
Baker left Malta carrying several documents written by the women
and, back in London, published the first edition of their prison narra-
tive. Evans and Cheevers were finally released in September 1662, and
reached England later that year. A Short Relation depicts two women
at the center of a wider circle figured by the kind of intimate language of
family and friendship. Baker, in particular, is presented as an interces-
sor on their behalf, an eager reader of their manuscripts, and someone
who compiles their letters to engage a transnational audience beyond
Quaker circles.?! Often, the proximity of sharing the same cause with
fellow members becomes the stimulus for engaging in ecstatic visions
or uttering prophetic speech in which the voice of the author in prison
and the words of the Bible merge in a single purpose and discourse:

The Lord (who alone is our Life and Redeemer) moved our dear
Brother to offer his own body to redeem ours, but it would not be
received; then he offered to lay down his own dear and precious life
for our liberty: Greater love can no man have, than to lay down his
 Prophecy and the transmutation of suffering 193

Figure 11.1 Printed letter and signature, Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers.
A True Account of the Great Tryals and Cruel Sufferings, 1663.
Reproduced by kind permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard
University.

life for his Friend; the Lord will restore it into his bosom double;
his service can never be blotted out; his Name is called Daniel Baker;
his outward being is near London, right dear and precious heart he
is: The blessing, strength, and power of the Almighty be upon him
and his, and overshadow them for ever, Amen. Greater comfort
could never be administered to us in our conditions.*”
194 In-communications

Evans and Cheevers explain how the Lord moved Daniel Baker to offer
himself as a prisoner in exchange for them and an act of divine inter-
cession. Evans and Cheevers were also making a distinction between
Baker’s outward body (its physicality, dwelling in London) and his spirit
or heart which was with them. Leaving aside the pantheist reverbera-
tions of the distinction between soul and body, Evans and Cheevers were
extending the geographical borders of their community and strength-
ening the prophetic character of their mission: suffering was a form
of bonding and articulating their prophetic message beyond the prison
walls. Their emphasis as women talking to God was less important for
Evans and Cheevers than the fact that they, as individuals, were giving
themselves up to the will of God. The Quaker ‘self? was defined by
“conscience” seen as a fragment, or part of universal truth: it was God’s
own voice embedded in the self, a voice to which they also referred as
“the light” or “the seed”, devoid of any trace of Calvinist predestinarian
impulse. Phyllis Mack defined the light of conscience graphically as be-
ing catapulted from the depths of the soul, through layers of tempera-
ment, appetite, and habit, finally bursting through the individual’s outer
husk—her social status, her physical shape, her gender—to unite with
the voices of other Friends in prayer or to enlighten strangers in the
public arena.°?
The Quaker emphasis on engaging in communication with God, on
being one with Him “in the Light” was complemented by various other
perspectives in A Short Relation. The voices of the inquisition and the
Catholic authorities were also integrated in the text, and these were con-
trasted at every point with those of the protagonists. Even the voice of
the Spirit is heard in the text, offering guidance and support to the two
women.
They were first made to identify themselves in terms of the fami-
lies they belonged to (“they asked us our names, and the names of our
husbands”), but the interrogations—one at the consul’s premises in
December 1658, and two in prison in April 1659—quickly came to be
centered on matters of doctrine. Whenever the two women made use
of active forms of resistance, such as fasting, episodes of harassment
became more frequent. In the second half of the narrative, Evans is
called a “madwoman”, a “possessed one”, and, eventually, a “witch”
(twice). None of these terms awoke any forceful response from her,
only when faith was at stake. Evans endured several attempts to convert
her to Catholicism, but she asserted her spiritual beliefs by refusing to
‘bow’, both physically and metaphorically, as the inquisitors begged her
to recant by treating her more courteously and forcing her to go down
on their knees to pray with them: “They did come to me with falling
upon their knees, saying Miss, and would have me to say after them, but
in the Name of the Lord I denied them”.*4 On another occasion, one of
 Prophecy and the transmutation of suffering 195
the friars tried to force Evans to perform some kind of practical work to
occupy her time in prison and earn some money:

The Fryar then came to me, and askt me, why I did not work? I said
unto him, What Work dost thou do? He said he did write. I told
him I would write too, if he would bring me a Pen, Ink and Paper,
and I would write truth. He said, He would not that we should write,
for St. Paul did work at Rome, and we might get nine or ten grains
a day, if we would knit, that is three half pence ...Then his mouth
was stopped, and he spake no more to me of work: But though our
affliction of body was great, and our travel of soul was greater, yet
we did knit Stockins, and gave to them that were made serviceable
to u., and did make Garments for the poor prisoners, and mended
their Clothes which had need, and were made helpful to them all.*>

She refused to perform a typical feminine occupation to satisfy the

wishes of her captors, putting her talent and abilities to the service of a
spiritual and social cause. When the friar told her that he could write,
she retorted she could write truth. He then raised the typological figure
of St. Paul to illustrate the point that her main spiritual referent en-
gaged in some practical work other than writing. Evans refused to knit
for money, but accepted to mend the stockings of poor prisoners, thus
rejecting the pattern of dependence and forced labor while invoking soli-
darity with fellow sufferers and their well-being. Quaker women reacted
in a similar manner in their trips abroad and in their taxes at home:
showing their independence and diligence in money matters to avoid
charges of corruption and using every opportunity to show a responsible
and pro-active attitude toward social concerns.°*® Barbara Blaugdone,
in her journey back to England from Limerick, reported her brief en-
counter with some pirates who kidnapped her ship. After deciding that
these men were lost souls who would not benefit from her preaching, she
added that “in all my travels, I travelled on my own purse, and was never
chargeable to any, but paid for what I had”.>” Quaker travel narratives
used the encounter with ‘the other’ as a platform from which to high-
light the sufferers’ moral and doctrinal authority. Isabel Yeamans, one of
Margaret Fell’s daughters, made a direct link between world ignorance
and unbelief: “The reason why people come short of this knowledge is
because they will not believe in, and yield obedience unto the Light of
Christ Jesus manifested in their hearts”.?® Being true to one’s own con-
victions and to heed God’s word is an exercise of higher knowledge that
brings a greater understanding about oneself and the ways of the world.
In one particularly desperate move to have Evans and Cheevers convert
to Catholicism, the friar suggested that they could do so while keeping
their own Quaker faith. The two women were smart in replying with
196 In-communications

a rhetorical question that exposed the friar’s lack of spiritual honesty:

“We askt if we should profess a Christ we should be ashamed died?
Every time that Evans reported her individual interrogations at the
hands of the inquisitors, or on the occasions in which she expounded
on her personal visions or inner conversations with the Spirit, she used
the first person. Elsewhere, her perspective is merged with that of Sarah
Cheevers, and it is then expressed in the first-person plural pronoun,
“we”, This is what occurs in the third interrogation, when both women
are questioned in depth on the specific aspects that differentiate their
beliefs from the Catholic faith:

He asked, if we believed their holy Sacrament? We said, We never

read (the Word) Sacrament in Scripture. The Fryar replied, Where
we did read in our Bibles Sanctification, it was Sacrament in theirs.
He said, Their holy Sacrament was Bread and Wine, which they
converted into the Flesh and Blood of Christ by the virtue of Christ.
We said, they did work Miracles then, for Christ’s virtue is the
same as it was when he turned Water into Wine at the Marriage in
Canaan. He said, If we did not eat the flesh, and drink the blood of
the Son of God, we had no life in us. We said, the Flesh and Blood
of Christ is spiritual, and we do feed upon it daily.*°

The inclusive ‘we’ is more than the sum of Evans and Cheevers, since
it speaks for the whole community of Quaker believers. Evans did not
deem it necessary to distinguish between her own voice and that of her
companion when it came to matters of doctrine (their answers in this
text were always introduced by “we said”): it did not matter who actu-
ally voiced the responses to the inquisitors, or which of the two women
was speaking, as long as they could be both assertive and didactic in
the exegesis of their position: Quakers feed upon the spiritual flesh of
Christ and refuse transubstantiation because Christ’s virtue remained
the same when he did miracles. The typography of the 1662 edition
of the text enhanced this sense of dramatic contrast by presenting the
voices of the inquisitor and the two women in two alternative letter
types (italics and roman, respectively), which oppose each other visually
on the surface of the page. Even the voice of the Spirit is distinguished
typographically in Gothic characters, and thus set apart from the domi-
nant roman lettering.
The inquisitors’ records of the examination, however, show a more
sober exchange. On April 7, 1659, Cheevers was interrogated and the
chief concern of the inquisitor’s assistants—helped by the discalced
Carmelite interpreter friar Malachia—was to know the traveling
plans of Quaker members: Hester Biddle being one of the first to go to
Alexandria in the company of other Friends whose names Cheevers does
not remember, George Robertson traveling to Jerusalem and “a woman
 Prophecy and the transmutation of suffering 197
of que sown sect”, leaving Portugal and Spain after founding a group
there.*! The examination includes the “testimony” or oral part in an in-
quisitorial process, which in this case does not include a formal defence
of the accused.4* When Evans is examined, the inquisitors are interested
in double-checking Cheevers’ account (in English translation here for
ease of reference):

Asked whether she knew of any other woman in her sect who had
founded a congregation somewhere, and when.
She replied: some three years ago, a woman called Ann Gargill,
about 24 years of age, tall, plump, and olive-skinned, returned to
England from Portugal and I talked several times with her. She was
first Catholic, then she joined our sect and came to our meetings.
After she left for Spain, it was said that she had founded a congre-
gation in some part of Spain, but I don’t know exactly which one.*?

While obviously the atmosphere might have been tense, the written re-
port of the examination is devoid of dramatism or any sense of defend-
ing one’s position at the prospect of a severe punishment. Evans gives
details about the physical appearance of Ann Gargill, the woman who
traveled to Spain. She does not know to which regions exactly, despite
the fact of having spoken to Gargill in the past. The whole process is
focused on information, and the attitude of the accused women, as well
as that of the interrogators, seems collaborative even in matters of doc-
trine. Cheevers, for instance, provided a summary of Quaker beliefs,
some of them problematic for the inquisitors, such as the rejection of
sacraments or the denial of heaven and hell.44 The account of the inter-
rogation forms a contrast with Evans’ relation of the same events, which
reflect distrust and tension between the two parties. When they were
about to appear before the inquisition for the first time at the consul’s
premises, the consul’s wife brought some meat for them, which Evans
refused to eat. While the consul had told them the night before that
there was “no such thing as to ensnare intended”, Evans saw a vision
of their imprisonment. “The same day it was he called me, and told me,
the Inquisition had sent for us, and they had papers from Rome, and
he did hope we should be set free, which was a lye; for he knew there
was a room prepared for us”. Eventually her misgivings turned out to
be founded, since in Evans’ account of their interrogation the threat of
punishment, imprisonment or death is present as a measure of exerting
pressure and have the two women recant:

They said, The Pope was Christ’s Vicar, and we were of his Church,
and what he did, was for the good of our Souls. We answered the
Lord had not committed the charge of our souls to the Pope not to
them.*°
198 In-communications

Unlike the uniformity of the inquisitor’s report, Evans’ relation empha-

sizes the conflictive elements of their exchange with officers and how
they resisted every attempt to bend their will. In her narrative, the magis-
trates are afraid of the women’s reactions, and the impact of disclosing
any sensitive Quaker information is minimized: “The Friar would suffer
the Magistrate to propound but few [propositions] to us, for fear the
Light would break forth: but they asked, how many Friends ofours were
gone forth in the Ministry, and into what parts? We told them what we
did know”.*” The prospect of suffering dramatizes the examination in
which Evans and Cheevers are represented as forces of resistance that
uphold the Quaker tenets and the well-being of their community. At
the same time, the actual accusations or charges are minimized in both
Evans’ and the inquisitor’s account, since these omit the complete list of
“propositions” to be examined in the hearing or the actual questions
presented in the phase of Instructio. When the friar brought a “physi-
cian in charity” for the two women, Evans replied that the Lord was
her physician and the friar threatened with physical violence: “He said
I should be whipt and quartered and burnt that night in Malta, and my
Mate too: wherefore did we come to teach them? | told them I did not
fear, the Lord was on our side”.4® The terrors of the inquisitor are only
invoked as a reaction to the irritation that the prisoners’ responses create
in the authorities, heightening the perception of potential martyrdom
in the eyes of the reader. When the physician comes, he confirms the
prospects of terror: “he said, we must never come forth of that room
while we lived, and we might thank God and him it was no worse, for
it was like to be worse. We said, if we had died, we had died as inno-
cent as ever did Servants of the Lord”.4? Quakers, more than any other
group, were keen on publishing their narratives of imprisonment in the
last decades of the seventeenth century for the obvious purpose of pro-
moting a sense of religious and community bonding while denouncing
the abuses of their captors, usually Catholic or Anglican authorities.°?
Nonetheless, their representation as martyrs of injustice and doctrinal
error has another more fundamental purpose of defending an individual
freedom of conscience that, as Edward Burrough argued in his account
of Quaker prosecution, no man can take from another: “It is forgotten
what was one of the great causes of our late wars, the sufferings that
then was imposed, and lay upon many for matters of conscience; and
was it not a chief pretense of our fighting, that we might enjoy the free-
dom of conscience, as well as outward rights”.°! Once in prison, Evans
and Cheevers were separated but kept a secret method of exchanging
information and written notes—which they did not disclose in their nar-
rative of events. On one occasion that Evans’ writings were intercepted,
she was threatened with being chained while Cheevers was intimidated
with the prospect of wearing a halter—as their fellow Quaker Dorothy
Waugh had suffered in Cumbria as punishment for her public speaking
 Prophecy and the transmutation ofsuffering 199
“against all deceit and ungodly practices”.® She retorted to the friar,
who was accompanied by two other men, that she was not “possessed”,
but “she was with the power of an endless life”.°°
Other voices are occasionally included in Evans and Cheevers’ text as
the narration proceeds: the voice of the English consul—who attempts
to improve the situation of both women—and those of the judges and
prison-keepers. In this way, the narration of their imprisonment inte-
grates a remarkable variety of accents, even though the dynamics of
the text tend to reproduce similar patterns of dramatic confrontation
in which the women’s language is opposed to that of the Catholic au-
thorities. After the first month of captivity, the women start a period of
fasting in order to force their release or, if this should not be possible,
to provoke martyrdom.*‘ At that point, Evans was once again separated
from Cheevers, and a friar came very close to using physical violence
against her. The tension of the verbal exchanges revolved around the use
and significance of the crucifix:

The Fryar commanded my dear friend to go out of the room, and

he came and pull’d my hand out of the bed, and said, is the Devil so
great in you, that you cannot speak? | said, Depart from me thou
worker of iniquity, | know thee not; the Power of the Lord is upon
me, and thou call’st him Devil. He took the Crucifix to strike me in
the mouth, and I said, Look here! and I asked him, whether it were
that Cross which crucified Paul to the World, and the World unto
him? And he said, it was, I denied and said, the Lord had made me
a Witness for himself against all workers of iniquity He bid me be
obedient, and went to strike me: I said, Wilt thou strike me? He said,
he would. I said, Thou art out of the Apostles Doctrine, they were
no strikers; I deny thee to be any of them who went in the Name of
the Lord.°*

The crucifix is for Evans not only a reminder of the passion of the Christ,
but the same cross that brought about the crucifixion of Paul: its sight
awakens a sense of parallel between herself and the first Christians, re-
inforcing her role as a disciple of Christ and a preacher of His doctrine.
For the friar, on the other hand, the crucifix is a sign and guarantee of
his own authority, a physical representation of the power of the church,
and, as such, it can be used physically against heretics. Even when the
Friar tries to strike Evans for the second time, she can turn the tables on
her captor by making use of one of the essential tenets of Quakerism,
the renunciation of all forms of violence: the apostles “were no strikers”,
and none that threaten others can number themselves among “them who
went in the name of the Lord”. There is a final element that contributes to
the differentiation of Evans’ voice, even beyond her constant contact with
the Spirit: the visions that she receives individually, in moments of crisis,
200 In-communications

and which are a major source of relief and comfort in her travails. These
visions occur only in specific moments, coinciding with periods of fasting
or great physical deprivation. Fasting was a common form of active resis-
tance for Quakers whenever they were deprived of freedom or put under
strong political and institutional pressure, and Evans and Cheevers also
made use of it on two occasions during their imprisonment.°° On the
first one that lasted for several weeks, and having rejected the help of a
physician that the inquisitors had sent to them in exchange for their doc-
trinal recantation, Evans experienced a long and complex vision, which
appears to have been sent to her as comfort in her time of need:

And I saw a great wonder in Heaven, the Woman clothed with the
Sun, and she had the Moon under her feet, and a Crown of 12 Stars
upon her head, and she travelled in pain ready to be delivered of
a Man-child, and there was a great Dragon stood ready to devour
the Man-child as soon as it was born, and there was given to the
Woman two Wings of a great Eagle to carry her into the desert,
where she should be nourished... And I heard a voice saying unto me,
Behold And I looked, and I saw Pharaoh and his Host pursuing the
Children of Israel, and he and his Host were drowned in the Sea.°”

The vision of the ‘woman clothed with the sun’ from chapter 12 in
the Book of Revelation evokes the themes of persecution by the devil
(through the key image of the woman threatened by the dragon) and
confrontation between good and evil in the final battle between angels
and demons, at the end of time. There is an implicit typological identifi-
cation here: Evans and Cheevers are also living under persecution, and
even in their imprisonment they are contributing to the arrival of the
Final Judgement by participating in the war against the forces of evil.
Evans hears the trumpets that announce the drowning of Pharaoh and
its hosts. The very substance of these visions is the text of Scripture, the
word of God, remembered and re-experienced by the speaker in ways
that establish implicit parallels between herself and the biblical figures
and situations that she evokes. However, the physical experience of these
words is more important than the fact that they are based on the Bible,
since her inner light legitimizes them as real:

Dear Friends and People, whatsoever I have written, it is not because

it is recorded in the Scripture, or that I have heard of such things, but
in obedience to the Lord I have written the things which I did hear,
see, tasted and handled for the good Word of God, in praise of his
Name for ever.°®

The language of Scripture is explicitly recognized by Evans herself as

a key constituent of her own voice, and as informing key areas of her
 Prophecy and the transmutation ofsuffering 201
perspective and identity. The word of God, then, is to be privileged
among all the other words that are heard in the text, especially in solemn
pronouncements. After Evans and Cheevers begin a second period of
fasting “in our own wills but in obedience to the Lord”, they wait until
Evans receives a direct confirmation from God that the food they have
been offered is safe because it is sanctified by him: “Ye shall not dye”.
Evans’ prophetic voice is the result of both the direct pronouncements
from God and her spiritually infused personality; their fluid exchange—
often marked typographically in the text—creates a dynamic narrative
effect in which the reader is educated into the tenets of Quaker thought
and practice by being a witness of the transactions between God, the
prophet, and her surroundings.
Another Quaker, Rebecca Travers, who suffered imprisonment for
preaching in the streets of London and later defended Quaker prisoners
in her role as prison visitor,*’ represents her spiritual convictions as an
act of social rebellion:

But it may be you will say that The Scripture says that rebellion is
sin, and disobedience is sin, and requires us to be subject onto kings,
and rulers, and parents, and masters, @c. And to this I answer;
We are so to all those, not for fear but for Conscience sake, and
in all things are subject to the Higher Power, which I hope none
of you will deny to be Christ, for he is the Power of God [...] As
Moses, ¢ Daniel & Paul could obey those very kings and rulers
in some things, which in other things pertaining to God and their
Conscience they could not.®?

Obedience is thus subordinated to the higher power of God that dwells

in us; being rebellious means to obey authorities in some respects and
to one’s conscience in all the others. Her antinomian stance is based
on Biblical referents and not on personal will. While this position was
representative of Quaker thought, Travers’ intensity and willingness to
proclaim it in prophetic terms is distinctive. The title page of this tract,
with its wording shaped as a cup, is addressed to everyone who resists
the Spirit as the world “draws to an end” and as “things to come are
here declared”.®! She accepts her teaching mission as a sacrifice, a cross
of redemption that the Lord asks to many but few are able to take on:
“IT am crucified to the world, and the world to me; and this to the world
is a mysterie, who by wisdom cannot know the things of God which
are spiritually discerned and therefore are in vain imaginations”.©* Her
revolution does not promote a radical obedience to the will God, but
stems from a Quaker tendency to deny intellectual forms of rationalizing
and understanding to embrace divinely inspired wisdom.
The Quaker Hester Biddle, who traveled extensively abroad and
preached against university-educated churchmen and local political
202 In-communications

Figure 11,2 Title page. Rebecca Travers (R.T.) This is for all or any of those
(by what name or title soever they be distinguished) that resist
the Spirit, 1664. Reproduced by kind permission of the Houghton
Library, Harvard University.

authorities, was also imprisoned several times,°? but this did not prevent
her from issuing her warnings accusing local authorities of not belonging
to a true church since they persisted in beating and bruising the innocent
when they appeared before magistrates. “Thy clouds of religion be they
never so thick, they are seen thorough; in the light and power of God we
do measure the height, the length, depth and breadth of all thy religion”.©4
Anne Audland, another itinerant Quaker woman who was imprisoned,
constructed her notion of the sacrificial value of innocent suffering on the
grounds of conscience, following Peter’s advice.®* Her written defense in-
sists on the fact that her accusers did not act according to the law of God,
who “hears both small and great”. She deemed her prison sentence false
because she “had not the liberty to speak face to face with my accusers”.°°
 Prophecy and the transmutation of suffering 203
Notes
1 Joan Vokins, God’s Mighty Power Magnified (London: printed for Thomas
Northcott, 1691), A2.
2 Separate Quaker women’s meetings were formed to look after the sick and
to offer mentorship to younger members, including marital counselling, but
they were the object of much debate in the 1690s. See Rachel Warburton,
“The Lord hath joined us together, and wo be to them that should part us:
Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers as Traveling Friends”, Texas Studies in
Literature and Language 47:4 (2005): 402-24.
3 Manfred Brod, “Joan Vokins”, ODNB, accessed June 7, 2015, http://www.
oxforddnb.com/view/article/28351.
4 Vokins, God’s Mighty Power, 2-3.
b) Ibid., 8.
6 Teophila Townsend, An Epistle of Love to Friends in the Womens Meetings
in London (London, 1680), 2.
Z Teophila Townsend, “A Testimony concerning Joan Vokins”, in God’s
Mighty Power (London, 1691), A4.
8 Put forward by Christopher Hill in The Experience of Defeat (London:
Faber and Faber, 1984), 165.
es Marjon Ames, Margaret Fell, Letters, and the Making of Quakerism
(London & New York: Routledge, 2016), 2.
10 For further reference on early Quaker history and doctrine, see William
Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2008 [1954]); Richard T. Vann, Social Development of English
Quakerism 1655-1755 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970);
Richard Bauman, Let Your Words Be Few: Symbolism of Speaking and
Silence among Seventeenth-century Quakers (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983); Joseph Besse and Michael Gandy, Sufferings of
Early Quakers: Ireland, Scotland and Wales Including Monmouthshire
and Shropshire 1653-1691 (York: Sessions Book Trust, 2003[1753]); John
Punshon, Portrait in Grey: A Short History of the Quakers (London:
Quaker Books, 2003).
11 Mary Prior (ed.), Women in English Society 1500-1800 (London and
New York: Methuen & Co, 1985), 159.
12 For a recent study on the significance and use of printed materials in Quaker
culture, see Kate Peters, Print Culture and Early Quakers (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009).
13 For modern studies on Quaker women’s writing, see David Booy, Auto-
biographical Writings by Early Quaker Women (Farnham: Ashgate,
2004); Elaine Hobby, “Handmaids of the Lord and Mothers in Israel: Early
Vindications of Quaker Women’s Prophecy”, Prose Studies 17 (1994):
88-89; Mary Garman et al. (eds.), Hidden in Plain Sight: Quaker
Women’s Writings 1650-1700 (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 1996);
Catie Gill, Women in the Seventeenth-century Quaker Community:
A Literary Study of Political Identities, 1650-1700 (Farnham: Ashgate,
2005); Phyllis Mack, “In a Female Voice: Preaching and Politics in
Eighteenth Century British Quakerism”, in Women Preachers and Proph-
ets Through Two Millennia of Christianity, eds. Beverly Mayne Kienzle
and Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1998); Mary Ann Schofield, “‘Women’s Speaking Justified’: Femi-
nine Quaker Voice 1662-1797”, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 6:1
(1987): 61-77.
14 N.H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-
Century England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 245.
204 In-communications

15 Margaret J.M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore and

London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 139-40.
16 Meiling Hazelton, “Mony Choaks: The Quaker Critique of the Seventeenth-
Century Public Sphere”, Modern Philology 98:2 (2000): 263-64.
17 Vokins, God’s Mighty Power, 38-39.
18 Ibid., 44.
19 Ibid., 45.
20 Ibid., 46.
21 Thid 233
22 Stefano Villani, “Katharine Evans”, ODNB, accessed May 2, 2015, http://
www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/45814.
23 A second edition of A Short Relation, entitled A True Account of the Great
Tryals and Cruel Sufferings undergone by those two faithful servants of
God, Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers (London, 1663) includes several
additional letters and an account of the women’s return to England after
their release from prison.
24 See Teresa Feroli, Political Speaking Justified: Women Prophets and the
English Revolution (Newark: Delaware University Press, 2006), 23; Hilary
Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-century Radical Sectarian Writ-
ing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996),
44, 155, 162; Gill, Women in the Seventeenth-century Quaker Community;
Catharine Gray, Women Writers and Public Debate in Seventeenth-Century
Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 183-97; Helen Wilcox
et al., Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century
Englishwomen (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 117-19; Susan
Wiseman, “Read Within; Gender, Cultural Difference and Quaker Women’s
Travel Narratives”, in Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Mod-
ern Writing, ed. Kate Chedgzoy et al. (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne Univer-
sity Press, 1996), 153-59; Rosemary Kegl, “Women’s Preaching, Absolute
Property, and the Cruel Sufferings (for the Truth’s Sake) of Katharine Evans
and Sarah Cheevers”, Women’s Studies 24 (1994): 51-83; Carmen Font Paz,
“Tl have written the things which I did hear, see, tasted and handled’: Self-
hood and Voice in Katherine Evans’ and Sarah Cheevers’ A Short Relation of
Their Sufferings (1662)”, SEDERI Yearbook ofthe Spanish and Portuguese
Society for English Renaissance Studies 20 (2010): 50-77. For emphasis
on the inquisitorial examination, see also Genelle Gertz, Heresy Trials
and English Women Writers 1400-1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2012), 144-73; Stefano Villani, Tremolanti e Papisti: Missioni
Quacchere nell’Italia del Seiscento (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura,
1996), 201-26.
25 Besse and Gandy, Sufferings of Early Quakers, 2: 495.
26 “Il che ho conferito con detto mio marito, et altri miei parenti, quali furono
contenti che jo eseguissi tale inspiratione, et facessi detto viaggio”. Stefano
Villani (ed.), A True Account of the Great Tryals and Cruel Sufferings:
La vicenda di due quacchere prigioniere dell’inquisizione di Malta (Pisa:
Scuola Normale Superiore, 2003), 316. The volume includes a complete edi-
tion and historical account of the inquisitorial process of Evans and Cheevers.
27 See A. Misfud, Knights Hospitallers of the Ven. Tongue of England in Malta
(New York: AMS Press, 1914), 278.
28 Villani, A True Account, 23-27. See also a partial report in Andrew P. Vella’s
study The Tribunal of the Inquisition in Malta (Malta: Royal University of
Malta, 1964), 31-32.
29 David Booy, Autobiographical Writings by Early Quaker Women (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2004), 27.
 Prophecy and the transmutation ofsuffering 205
30 Year of death provided by Stefano Villani, “Sarah Cheevers”, ODNB,
accessed June 12, 2015, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/64776.
31 Gray, Women Writers and Public Debate, 187.
32 Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, This is a Short Relation (London:
printed for Robert Wilson, 1662), 62.
33 Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century
England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 136.
34 Evans and Cheevers, This is a Short Relation, 37.
35 Ibid., 41-42.
36 Quaker women were active participants in the anti-tithe Quaker campaigns,
based on the fundamental notion that the ‘state religion’ should not tax
citizens who did not profess the beliefs of the Church of England. In 1659,
more than seven thousand Quaker women signed a petition against the “op-
pression of tithes”, prefaced by Mary Forster and signed in the first place
by Margaret Fell and her daughters, These Several Papers Was Sent to the
Parliament (London: printed by Mary Westwood, 1659). See also Barry
Reay, “Quaker Opposition to Tithes 1652-1660”, Past and Present 86:2
(1980): 98-120; Gill, Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Commu-
nity, 77-111.
37 Barbara Blaugdone, An Account of the Travels, Sufferings and Persecutions
(London: printed and sold by T.S., 1691), 30.
38 Isabel Yeamans, An Invitation of Love (London, 1679), 11.
39 Ibid., 34.
40 Ibid., 7.
41 Villani, “Examen Evans e Cheevers”, A True Account, 323-24.
42 See Gustav Henningsen and John Tedeschi (ed.), The Inquisition in Early
Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods (DeKalb: Northern Illi-
nois University Press, 1986), 178. See also Adriano Prosperi (ed.), Dizion-
ario Storico dell’ Inquisizione, vol. II (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2010);
Edward Peters, Inquisition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1989), 105-22.
43 Ibid., 330. tr. “Interrogata An audiverit aliquam mulierem ex sua secta fun-
dasse congregationem in aliqua parte ubi et de quo tempore. Respondit: Tre
anni sono in circa una donna di nome Anna Garghel di eta d’anni 24 in circa
di giusta statura, grassotta, olivastra dale parti di Portogallo venne in Ing-
hilterra, con la quale iu pit volte ho parlato, et prima era catholica, et pou si
fece della nostra setta e veneva nelle nostre congregationi, et doppo essendo
di un’altra volta ritornata nelle parti di Spagna, si intese nel nostro paese
che lei in detta parte di Spagna havea fondato una congregatione, et non ho
inteso in che parte precisa”.
I am grateful to Joan Curbet for his translation from the Latin and to
Helena Aguila for her assistance with the Italian.
44 Ibid., 325.
45 Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, A True Account (London: printed for
Robert Wilson, 1663), 10.
46 Ibid., 15.
47 Ibid., 17.
48 Ibid., 20.
49 Ibid., 21.
50 See John R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature,
1563-1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 216; Catie
Gill, “Evans and Cheevers’s A Short Relation in Context: Flesh, Spirit, and
Authority in Quaker Prison Writings, 1650-1662”, Huntington Library
Quarterly 72:2 (2009): 257-72.
206 In-communications

Sf Edward Burrough, A Declaration of the Present Sufferings (London: printed

for Thomas Simmons, 1659), 24.
52 Dorothy Waugh, “A Relation Concerning Dorothy Waugh’s Cruell Usage by
the Mayor of Carlile”, in The Lambs Defence Against Lyes, anon. (London:
printed by Giles Calvert, 1655), 29.
Evans and Cheevers, A True Account, 44.
Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom. 216-55.
Ibid., 10.
On fasting as a language of resistance, see Diane Purkiss, “Producing the
Voice, Consuming the Body: Women Prophets of the Seventeenth Century”,
in Women, Writing, History 1640-1740, ed. Isobel Grundy and Susan
Wiseman (London: B.T. Batsford, 1992), 139-58; Teresa Feroli, Politi-
cal Speaking Justified: Women and Prophets of the English Revolution
(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 97-147; Jane Shaw, “Fast-
ing Women: the Significance of Gender and Bodies in Radical Religion and
Politics, 1650-1813”, in Radicalism in British Literary Culture 1650-1830,
ed. Timothy Morton and Nigel Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002).
Ibid&-12
Ibid., 12-13.
Lotte Mulligan, “Rebecca Travers”, ODNB, accessed May 1, 2015, http://
www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27276. See also Eduard Burrough,
A Brief Relation of the Persecutions and Cruelties that have been acted
upon the people called Quakers in and about the city of London (London,
1662) 12)
Rebecca Travers (R.T.), This is for all or any of Those (London, 1664), 4.
Ibid., t.p.
Rebecca Travers, For Those who meet to worship at the steeplehouse called
John Evangelist, in London (London: printed at the Black Spread Eagle,
1659), 10.
Besse and Gandy, Sufferings of Early Quakers, 1:564.
Hester Biddle, A Warning from the Lord God of Life and Power unto thee
city of London (London: printed for Robert Wilson, 1660), 4.
1 Pet. 2:19, “Por this is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God
endure grief, suffering wrongfully”.
5 Anne Audland, A True Declaration ofthe Suffering of the Innocent (London:
printed by Giles Calvert, 1654), 6.
12 Prophetic activism

Women prophets could also face moral harassment and persecution

within their own ranks if their understanding of revealed truth was not
in line with that of their group leadership. While it is generally assumed
that sectarian groups and separatist churches had porous boundaries
and shared sympathies and did not apply control mechanisms on their
members (they were, after all, separatist), leaders of congregations could
“excommunicate” members. The cases of Susanna Parr, Mary Allein,
and Anne Wentworth illustrate precisely how inconvenient women’s
speech was attacked on personal and moral grounds within a congrega-
tion that prided itself on allowing the free-flow of female voices.
Susanna Parr, a married woman from Exeter who had left the es-
tablished church because she was looking for a true reformation, had
found it in “the Congregationall way”, that is, in separatist groups. She
joined the Independent congregation of Lewis Stucley that met regularly
in Exeter cathedral and was for some time satisfied with her new com-
munity of faith. On their private fast days, after praying, they remained
“in conference, and then did I take occasion to speak of the disorders
among us”.! She feared that Stucley’s absence in many of their meetings
had contributed to a lessening of devotional standards: the congregation
was attracting “scarce well-principled novices” and the “name of God
was often taken in vain in prayer”. As a result, the spirit of Diotrephes,
that is, of pride and disrespect, and not the spirit of prophecy, was ram-
pant.* She was not interested in “setting up pure ordinances and did
not look after a party or a confederacy, but to have the Gospel more
discovered in greater light and beauty”.° One of their members had been
“an Anabaptist, then a Seeker, next a Papist”, which further convinced
Parr of the many disorders in her congregation. She diligently informed
Stucley about them, but he did not take it gladly: he began to force her
to speak up in the group against her will, and in one particularly heated
episode, he despised her spiritual aspirations for the congregation com-
paring Parr with a woman who “goes after another man because of
fruitfulnesse”.4 At such an insult, Parr left the place but Stucley came
with her to the door and “desired me to deny self-holinesse for God,
and look for a reward in heaven”.> Stucley interpreted Parr’s search for
208 In-communications

genuine church reform as spiritual ambition and a Catholic deviation

of ‘salvation by deeds’; in turn, she felt offended not because her ‘elder’
had contravened her religious convictions, but because he assaulted her
dignity as a woman and her freedom of conscience. Convinced of the
fact that she was in “greater bondage” because she wasn’t truly free to
dissent, and that the alleged “liberty of conscience and freedom” in non-
conformity was only superficial, she returned to her former Presbyterian
church. When she lost a child along this process, Parr’s hurting bowels
evoked in her the “Lord’s tender bowels towards his children”, and she
beheld “the breach that the Lord had made in my family as a breach
in his family”.° Parr’s prophetic call to ‘true reform’ fashioned her not
only as the “valiant Deborah” of Judges against the powers of a weak
leader, Barak.’ Her story resonates in the reader’s mind as a modern-day
account of a woman who grows in self-assurance and resolution when
she is verbally and morally attacked. Parr wrote her Vindication, which
includes a persuasive “narrative” (not a “relation”)® of events, as a re-
sponse to a slanderous pamphlet by Stucley.” In it, Stucley accused her
of taking “the liberty of speaking”, but she retorted that “the liberty of
being silent was denied me”.!°
Parr’s episode cannot be easily dismissed as personal differences among
church members. Her arguments show a depth of thinking and of feeling
that questions the ability of separatist congregations to be regarded as a
locus of authentic spiritual change. Another member of the same group,
Mary Allein, was excommunicated when she detected similar abuses
to those witnessed by Parr, and Mary’s husband, Toby Allein, decided
to write a vindication to denounce her wife’s dismissal and Stucley’s
meddling with extra-congregational affairs, as he saw them. The couple
felt uneasy when the church issued a petition to “pray the Lord protec-
tor not to accept of the kingly office” and Toby was asked to sign it.
He refused to do so for fear that it could be taken as an act of treason,
arguing that “the Parliament were wise enough for state affairs” and
that “any private person could meddle with such great matters”.!! The
tract includes the excommunication summons received by Mary Allein,
as well as the joint reply by her and Susanna Parr defending their posi-
tion and asking the elders to reconsider their decision. Stucley refused
to read the women’s letter aloud in the congregation and he declared
their formal excommunication: “We, therefore, in the name of Christ,
deliver them over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the Spirit
may be saved in the day of Christ”.!* While in medieval church prac-
tice excommunicated individuals were denied civil rights and Christian
burial, after the Reformation these measures were not commonplace but
could still cause anxiety on those concerned.!° Parr and Allein’s narra-
tives gave publicity to their case to defend a private matter since they
did not want their reputation to be tarnished—the Alleins managed a
serge making business. John’s text is sincere as well in its systematic
 Prophetic activism 209
defence of his wife’s dignity, challenged when she was accused of visiting
other ministers while she was still in Stucley’s congregation. Exeter was
the seat of a growing Baptist group, with their fair share of members
hostile to the government, which was creating some tensions between
Presbyterians and Independents.'* In line with Parr’s argument that the
church had a double standard, John took on a warning tone: “I tell thee
Reader, Hypocrisie was never more in fashion than in our times: the vil-
est & most abominable practice & designe in the world must have this
preface and varnish of Religion and conscience to cover ‘its ugly face
and form”.!° Parr and Allein were not afraid of reproducing the actual
formula of excommunication in their tract, but what was meant to be
an intimidating move by the congregation was turned upside down by
the excommunicants with a judicious and well-presented criticism of
non-conformist church malpractice in which “it is sad to see how men
cover wickednesse with holynesse even the garment of God”.!®
A far less agreeable married life was that of another excommunicated
woman, Anne Wentworth, from the Particular Baptist community of
London led by Hanserd Knollys. Originally from Lincolnshire, Anne
married the glover William Wentworth in 1652, and after twenty years
of marriage and one daughter she began to write about the abuses of
her husband against her.!” Although these early writings have been lost,
four tracts remain in which she combines prophecy and denunciation.
In Englands Spiritual Pill, Wentworth justifies her writing as an act of
divine will: “During a hectick feaver, God visited her with a command
to ‘discover my Husbands cruelty to me’”.!® The members and leader-
ship of her congregation did not sympathize with her plight, and turned
away from Anne to avoid that a marital dispute could tarnish the group’s
reputation. She then intensified her accusations precisely on that front,
by accusing them of “Papists” and defending a thorough reformation
of church worship at a time when anti-Catholic sentiment by the 1670s
was stirred again with the Exclusion Crisis and the prospect that the
succession line fell on Charles I’s second son, the Catholic James, Duke
of York. In July 1677 she addressed to the King and the Lord Mayor
in a series of prophecies with apocalyptic scenarios against the nation,
which were duly recorded in the Calendar of State Papers Domestic
(1677-1678). However, Wentworth’s predictions of doom did not come
to pass and her reputation as a prophet declined by the late 1670s.'?
The Wentworth affair brings home the dynamics between prophetic
speech and its actual content. The gift of prophecy can only be real-
ized through prophesying, and urges the individual to go public. But in
order to justify the public purport of one’s prophecy, its content must
be relevant to the community it addresses. When Anne discovered her
prophetic voice, she needed a message to tell to her surroundings. Her
private struggle with her husband, a life of marital violence as proba-
bly many other women also experienced, ceased to be an underground
210 In-communications

affair, a social taboo, to become a metaphor of the evils of the English

nation—an item that was recognized by her readers and followers as
being of public concern.
Whether Wentworth wished to denounce marital violence and did
so with the authority that prophecy granted her, or whether she felt a
prophet in the first place who needed to find a cause that justified her
public role as such, in both cases prophecy grounds the authority of the
woman prophet in the text. It also feeds the public space with subject
matters that would otherwise miss public exposure. It is difficult to de-
termine in the case of Wentworth, and in most women prophets who
deal with social concerns, whether her prophetic gift empowered a cause
or whether the cause found in prophecy the leverage it needed to make
itself visible. As a result, a myriad of issues that were not directly re-
lated to evangelizing reached the collective conscience to stay, well after
prophecy ceased to be a favored method of speaking on behalf of God.
A significant part of Anne’s Vindication consists of explaining the way
her traumatic experiences with her husband over the years “emptied” her-
self to an extreme until her ‘holy’ suffering gave way to a fresh and strong
Anne Wentworth. God’s spiritual discipline and protection—He saved
her from many life-threatening episodes with her husband—fashion a
new self that overcomes her period in the wilderness and, once purified
of pride and material pulls, is able to receive God’s words and inspira-
tion to transform her private suffering into a form of community ser-
vice beyond her congregation and against its consent. While readers see
that Wentworth is using her marital suffering as a metaphor of national
evil, it won’t escape them that abusing one’s wife is evil. The prophetic
message is not simply didactic, or empowering of a new woman and
authorial self: it brings to the surface hidden concerns that need to be
collectively addressed regardless of any church’s position about them.
In A True Account, Wentworth underlines the “absolute necessity” of
publishing her account of the facts, and the reason why something that
could have been resolved in private became public: “It was commanded
by God my Father to declare his goodess [...] hearing the crys and
prayers of the destitute and afflicted” so that readers understand “what
it is to be born again”.*° She is interested in the psychology of elect ones,
and how the forces of light and darkness play out at an individual and
national level. God proved her all those years to “humble me, and prove
me, and see what was in my heart and to do my soul good”.”! Suffering
is not a pre-condition of election, but a test of how God helps elect ones
to overcome suffering through his direct intervention in Wentworth’s
personal growth. By speaking the truth in print to her antagonists, she
is leaving them alone with their consciences. Her husband is delighted
with keeping within himself his corrupted spirit, his “dellilah”,2? a fallen
woman. With this typological referent, Wentworth is not only accusing
John of keeping a mistress in his own being, while she remains a pure
 Prophetic activism 211
woman in spirit, but she is defending herself of any accusation of having
been an unfaithful wife. John’s soul is not a bride, but a femme fatale
that will bring about his downfall. Their indifference is a sign of the
times in people who only see faith “outwardly” and superficially, but
she is drawing up against them all a “bill of charge”. Wentworth’s tone
becomes more resentful as she expounds on the wrongdoing of her con-
gregation, in particular three men who came to her place on February
1676 to threaten her: “[It] charges you with Labouring with all your
might and strength to force my conscience, and would make a rape of
my soul to have it bow down to you, and is unsatisfied as the horseleech
with all my bodily sufferings”.?? Employing legal language and rheto-
ric, Wentworth pronounces sentence to the gang that sought to rape
her soul. These are serious accusations that refer to a spiritual breach of
trust built upon a real episode and a narrative of physical abuse that per-
vades the emotional tone of the whole tract. By insisting so much on the
moral side of her suffering, the whole trauma of marital abuse emerges
powerfully not as a shameful private matter to be buried away, but as an
incarnation of individual, group, and national wrong-doing. Katherine
Gillespie has noted Wentworth’s non-submissive discourse as anticipat-
ing Locke’s modern sovereignty of the individual. Since we are all equals
before God, and He inhabits Wentworth’s being, she is not accountable
to those who have abused her.?* But prophetic writing by women was
seldom victimizing or subdued in the display of its individual energies.
What is particularly interesting in Wentworth’s case is the way in which
her abusive domestic episode props up her prophetic self to the extent
that it authorizes her public speech—and not the other way round. In an
advertisement to Englands Spiritual Pill, signed by “A.S.”, Wentworth is
presented as someone who speaks as the Spouse of Christ, the Church,
in a manner that pertains to God’s elect. Her own existence is a “riddle
of God’s prophetical style” that the reader is meant to understand, since
in “God’s words and dealings with men, there is almost a twofold sense:
one that is literall, and another that is mysticall”.2° Wentworth’s own
life is shown as a metaphor of God’s “divine transactions” in His rela-
tionship to humanity and, in particular, the English nation. As a result,
we should not “think hard of God, because he makes so much ado with
Anne Wentworth’s personal condition and suffering” since this entails
a mystical sense for the “true Church of God’s elect”.*® Beyond its reli-
gious and congregational key, however, Wentworth’s efforts often come
before its prophetic justification: God instructs her to continue writing
despite her husband’s opposition, arguing that “I own the book to be of
my own writing, yet not of my own will”.*” She changes the lock of her
former house and accepts gifts from neighbours to settle down at home,
her “Jerusalem”, a move that the Lord obviously approves.*> Wentworth
and God share a warrior spirit, an invincible spiritual alliance united
in a war of the sexes between husband and wife in which both sides
212 In-communications

gather their forces. The Lord tells her that her enemies “can see nothing
but a man and a woman, and strike so hard at the woman [...] How
can so weak a woman, as weak as water, stand against them all?”??
Wentworth’s moral and personal victory not only empowers “the
woman”, but those women who have been dispossessed, beaten, and
humiliated in a community that has lost its moral bearings and must
return to the house of the Lord.
Wentworth’s direct warnings to the nation in another tract, The Reve-
lations of Jesus Christ, do not reach a level of emotional intensity and
national pathos, but look fairly ‘standard’ in the use of topical Biblical
referents at a time when the Clarendon codes sought to curtail sectar-
ian writing: “Babylon would have deprived you of her unjust laws/Who
doth think, that in England is the painted whore?”°° The preface to
Wentworth’s Revelations in the same tract explains the way the Lord
communicates with her: “His time of teaching her is, for the most part,
in the night, when others are asleep; then doth she hear the voice of God,
which is very sweet and pleasant on her”.>! On the next morning, she
requests the Lord to bring his words to her memory, which he does. She
claims to be able to write in verse only when the Lord “teacheth her”.
In one of these revelations the reader can almost hear the voice of God:
“I stand ready to execute my righteous Judgments upon England, for
their abominations are great”.°~ However, warnings to the nation are
interspersed with her private affair, which seems to be the real reason
why the tract is published: “And as concerning my husband’s behaviour
towards me in this case of the Lords, he the Lord will also judge betwixt
Him and Me?” |...] “So far it is the will of God, that the world should
know the true reason, why I must live alone and apart from my said
Husband”.*? In her Revelation x11, she invokes the wrath of God to any-
one who does not heed his words and causes suffering to one of “Christ
little ones”, but Wentworth does not miss any opportunity to make clear
that her husband will be on top of God’s list: “[the Lord say unto thee,
that I will severely punish thy Husband, and William Dicks, for their
sin is great].** The assault to Anne’s conscience and reputation was as
unforgivable as the reason that motivated it: going public about marital
abuse. It was, as well, far more convincing that her prophecy of a great
“overturn” that she sent to the King Charles II on July 31, 1677:

I durst not for ten thousand worlds send this, if I did not know very
well what I write, and after keeping it by me a few days. the thing is
certain and will come to pass, but I send this in love and goodwill
to warn all to prepare for such an overturn as never was since the
world began. King Charles, let it be not a month or a week, before
you consider and lay it to heart, and, if you never speak with me,
remember, when it comes, you had warning that an overturn will be
in the nation and mercy and judgement is a coming.»
 Prophetic activism 213
Despite the initial attention from “divers Christian friends” who issued
a letter declaring a resolution to claim several writings that Wentworth’s
husband had stolen from her,*® on account that these could contain de-
tails about the “overturn” (presumably “before the end of this year”),
Wentworth’s prophetic fame quickly vanished since she wasn’t success-
ful in making accurate predictions and was too vague about how these
fateful events would unfold. However, the prophecies about her marital
dispute were specific and intense. Those ‘divers serious Christians’ were
well-acquainted with the reasons behind John’s appropriation of Anne’s
intellectual property but these are at the point of diminishing returns
when the entire country is at risk: “There is some other and greater thing
than private differences between her and her husband, that has raised
such a storm against her and exposed her to much unmerciful usage and
oppression. But it is not our purpose to pry into the secrets of families
or the particular discipline of your Church”.*” Her followers, who are
not emotionally involved in the abuse, show an ambivalent position: they
refuse to intrude in a marital dispute, while pronouncing that these dif-
ferences are unfair and have oppressed Wentworth. Her role as a politi-
cal prophet failed to mobilize supporters into a large following, despite
some evidence that they might have tried to finance the publication of
Englands Spiritual Pill.2° Wentworth’s case against abuse, however, re-
mained open and public for every Christian conscience to recognize as
true prophecy.
The gift of prophecy could often serve a dialogical purpose within
a community of faith and the individual prophet that explicated and
transmuted suffering to an intended general audience. Quaker groups,
in particular, were keen on publishing and making public their manifold
episodes of persecution, imprisonment, and suffering to strengthen their
group purpose, as their organization in itinerant ministries and editorial
interventionist practices reveal. More than any other dissenting group
in the past decades, the Quaker emphasis on evangelizing promoted a
sense of spiritual community in which prophecy was put at the service
of advancing Quaker tenets. Chief among those were the overwhelm-
ing presence of the Inner Light, the in-dwelling divine seed that legiti-
mized individual conscience. Anne Docwra beautifully explained the
difference between her Quaker notion of an ecumenical bond of spiri-
tual community and a false connection based on opinions and church
traditions: “All those that place the bond of their community in the
universal Light, or Spirit of Grace, which is an inward principle of the
divine Life, whereby all good people govern their actions; they have a
witness in every man’s conscience”.*” Establishing a dialogue with one’s
conscience, then, was a prophetic act in itself, since it revealed truth—
personal and communal—and had the potential to transform suffer-
ing and injustice when this individually illuminated conscience spread.
Non-Quaker women, however, could also adopt a prophetic voice to
214 In-communications

do the opposite: to denounce abusive group practices when individual

dignity and conscience were at stake. Toward the later decades of the
seventeenth century, as the acts of the Clarendon code were tighter on
dissenters, faith was becoming privatized by the individual. Prophecy
could even allow the articulation of personal convictions as spiritual
beliefs, as the case of Anne Wentworth suggests. The complex narrative
and dialogic texture of accounts of injustice highlighted the plight of
individual women who found themselves in a prophetic voice that spoke
their own wisdom and transformed their personal circumstances.

Notes
1 Susanna Parr, Susanna’s Apologie against the Elders (London, 1659), 7.
2 Ibid., 8.
Ibid., 8-9.
Ibid., 10.
Ibid.
Ibid., 13-14.
NH
ND
BW See Rachel Adcock, Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture,
1640-1680 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 71.
8 For a discussion on how seventeenth-century “relations” engage readers in
shaping the ‘truth’ of the written text, see Frances E. Dolan, True Rela-
tions: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-century England
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 3-20.
9 Lewis Stucley, Manifest Truth: or an inversion of Truths Manifest (London:
printed for D.M., 1658).
10 Parr, Susanna’s Apologie, 77.
11 Tobie Allein, Truth Manifest (London: printed by R.D., 1659), 10.
Mice 6.
13 Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500-1720 (London &
New York: Routledge, 1993), 155.
14 Bernard Capp, England’s Culture Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012), 254.
15 Tobie Allein, Truth Manifest, 56.
16 Ibid.
17 Catie Gill, “Anne Wentworth”, ODNB, accessed June 15, 2015, http://
www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/67075.
18 Anne Wentworth, England’s Spiritual Pill, which will purge, cure, or kill
(London, 1679), 4. See also Anne Wentworth, A True Account (London,
1676), 9.
19 For recent readings of Wentworth’s biography or works see Adcock, Baptist
Women’s Writings, 108-10; Hilary Hinds, God’s Englishwomen (Manches-
ter: Manchester University Press, 1996), 102-7; Warren Johnston, “Prophecy,
Patriarchy, and Violence in the Early Modern Household: The Revelations of
Anne Wentworth”, Journal of Family History 34:4 (2009): 344-68; Kath-
arine Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 202-14.
20 Wentworth, A True Account, 5S.
PA Mesrale. Gs.
DID Montel, We
23 Ibid. 18,
 Prophetic activism 215
24 Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent, 207.
25 A.S, “Advertisement”, in England’s Spiritual Pill, 2.
26 Ibid.
27 Anne Wentworth, Englands Spiritual Pill, 7.
28 Ibid., 34.
29 Thid., 29.
30 Anne Wentworth, The Revelation of Jesus Christ (London, 1679), 4.
31 Wentworth, The Revelation ofJesus Christ, a3.
ChAM eye Snale
33 Ibid., 18.
34 Ibid., 14.
35 Anne Wentworth, “Anne Wentworth to the King”, CSPD, MS letter,
SP:29/395 £.118:
36 “This letter declares the resolution of divers serious Christians who have
seen and considered well the contents of two papers by Mrs. [Wentworth]”,
CSPD, MS letter, SP 29/397 £.122.
37 Ibid, f.2.
38 Adcock, Baptist Women’s Writings, 181.
39 Anne Docwra, Spiritual Community (London, printed by John Bringhurst,
1685), Al.
Conclusion
Old sectaries, new prophetesses

This study has sought to illustrate the ways in which prophecy was much
the language and culture of seventeenth-century Britain as individuals
addressed a variety of subjects that affected their conscience and public
life. It did not mean the same for men and for women, though. For the
latter, the promise of spiritual transformation and collective rejuvenation
which prompted them to prophesize in large numbers was often shaped
into a narrative that could integrate a myriad of ‘lay’ concerns that might
not be the immediate focus of religion. This process did not necessarily
entail a ‘secularization’ of society or a decline in religious sensibility,
but rather that events of greater or lesser collective transcendence could
be explained by virtue of God’s reason and exposed to public view or
scrutiny. Society would not be the less ‘modern’ for that, as proponents
of the “secularization theory” or the “rise of modern paganism” in the
eighteenth century would suggest.! Peter Berger has even claimed that
the assumption, coming from historians of the Enlightenment, that mo-
dernity implies living in a secularized world is false: “The world today,
with some exceptions, is as furiously religious as it ever was”.* Feminist
theorists of the Renaissance have pointed out the negative effects of lib-
eral political theories in the separation of private (domestic, feminine)
and public (male, political) spheres in the articulation of modernity,
relegating the excesses of religious and political heterodoxy to the sev-
enteenth century. Sarah Mortimer and John Robertson remarked that
intellectual historians have tended “to assume that heterodoxy was the
harbinger of secularism” since the history of ideas has been distorted by
“a powerful teleology”, with the ‘modern’ being equated with the ‘lay’.?
At the same time, seventeenth-century prophecy tended to feed the pub-
lic space with concerns that could otherwise go unnoticed.
Sharon Achinstein has shown the value of belief systems for femi-
nist studies and advocates for a broader view of religion in the early
modern period beyond the analyses of polemics about church organiza-
tion and ecclesiological controversies to include the way religion engages
the individual in larger questions about oneself and the world around:
“Theological discourse was a means to express existential purpose, to
construct subjectivity and community, indeed to mediate public and
 Conclusion 217
private”.* The analyses from the previous chapters have shown that by
adopting a prophetic narrative voice women were in a position to con-
struct their own version of revealed truth, thus promoting, defending,
or modifying the views of their own congregations (if they belonged
to one) before an external agent. To read prophecy as an adjunct of a
religious discourse only is to deny its full discursive capability: from
spiritual autobiography to travel narrative, rhapsodic poetry, or political
tract, women’s prophetic narrative created an authorial center capable
of confronting political adversaries, subverting institutional control, or
dignifying the social status of women. While evidence so far suggests
that women writing prophecy were neither feminists nor political agents
in a modern sense of the word, their texts reflect a preoccupation and
a competence in crafting particular arguments, defenses, and interpre-
tations (sometimes on behalf of a community, either real or imaginary)
that defy our notion of women as being ‘devotional writers’ with limited
skill or theological knowledge to advance autonomous meaning. While
most women from the Civil War sects were not learned, they showed a
sophistication in their use of their biblical source material to posit their
arguments convincingly. Sometimes, the prophetic narrator detached
herself from her divine source, creating confusion about the nature of
her revealed truth. Women writing prophecy already took a stand on
their independence of mind within a textual space that had to be de-
fended and protected, an artefact appealing to conscience for inner and
outer change in an exercise of textual activism.
By looking at the essential components of what made women’s speech
prophetic—religion, politics, gender, and language—this study has not
applied a theoretical model to prophecy, but rather has opted to see the
ways in which prophecy modified our notions of women’s authorship.
Most approaches to specific prophetic writings have focused on the inter-
actions between the prophet and her congregation, but mine has broad-
ened the focus of the elements that distinguish prophecy as a discourse
and a culture across belief and interest groups. Orianne Smith argued
that the tradition of women’s prophetic speech that combines both reve-
lation and biblical exegesis is activated in revolutionary times—including
the Romantic revolution—to justify their own active participation in vi-
sionary discourse at points in which sacred and secular history converge.°
However, the substantive content of prophetic speech, its format, and
even the conceptual categories of “God”, “woman”, “soul” may vary sub-
stantially from one revolutionary momentum to another, which makes a
comparison between prophetic moments relevant in their mode of pro-
duction but more problematic in the replicability of their actual messages.
The case of Mary Astell (1666-1731), hailed as an accomplished
philosopher in her own right, provides an example of how a discourse on
reason, public duty, and gender bias was built upon a religious ground
that, far from eroding her authority over her original thinking, showed
218 Conclusion

that religion was not yet exclusively consigned to the private sphere of
conscience. While scholarship on Astell has tended to privilege her femi-
nist and political arguments, her religious writings are now beginning to
gain more attention. For Astell, living in compliance with God’s will is
not only morally correct but conducive to happiness. However, getting
to know His will requires the use of reason (itself a God-given gift), not
a blind following of precepts. God would not have given reason to men
and women if he had not intended it to be used. “Reason is that light
which God himself has set up in my mind to lead me to Him, I will there-
fore follow it so far as it can conduct me. [...] Let me see then how far
Reason can carry me, and next what further light God has been pleas’d
to afford”.® Astell understands the practice of thought in a providential
manner resembling what Jacqueline Broad has termed as an Augustinian
“epistemic illumination” that aligns the human soul with God’s pur-
pose.’ Astell’s prophetic stance offers a vision and a method for living
in correct relationship with others and oneself which, as with sectarian
prophecy, promises a transformation of the individual and those public
structures that do not conform with God’s plans and purpose, as Mary
understands them. She is an exegete of the mind of God. The influence
of Astell’s “divine reason” was not lost among ‘enthusiasts’ of the early
eighteenth century, including Jane Lead and the circle of Philadelphians,
with whom Astell had some direct contact. Her call to a greater connec-
tion between soundness of heart and mind as a requirement to a purified
reason that can be instrumental to women chimed with pietistic currents
and the plan for mystical rejuvenation of the Labadists and Philadel-
phians. Interest in a quietly intense ‘heart religion’ or ‘meditation on the
heart’ for salvation by grace was prevalent among both Anglicans and
Dissenters and a key aspect of the English Evangelical Revival of the first
decades of the eighteenth century.® As early as in 1670, the prophetess
Sarah Davy offered daily meditations on the birth of a new heart based
on Luke 19, which the Lord gives to a converted Puritan soul because
“it is the heart that he requires in duties the sincerity of the soul to walk
before him in Love”.? Non-juror and writer William Law addressed to
“all order of Christians” in his A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life
(1728), defining a devout man (and woman) as someone who no longer
lives to his own will but one who serves God in everything.!° He does
not seem to make a distinction between reason and religion in the rules
that govern a spiritual life (one dominated by benign action) since both
follow a divine logic—which might be rational or imply a mystery.
For M. Marsin (fl. 1696-1701) a semi-obscure writer of unknown origin
and affiliation whose interests ranged from interpretation of Scripture to
parodic defences of matrimony and instruction for good women, religion
had not gone ‘underground’ as a referent of authority, nor was it less hetero-
dox in expression.'! When she learned that the “Word of God” had pre-
dicted earthquakes that, according to news reports, were happening in her
lifetime mainly in Italy, Marsin felt an “ardent desire” for the coming of the
 Conclusion 219
Christ and began to study the Scripture and write profusely for two main
causes that were God-inspired: to make the Old and New Testament agree
in their ‘figurative speeches’ and to reinstate women’s moral authority and
dignity in society through her biblical interpretation. In an “advertisement”
to one of Marsin’s tracts, she is announced as an “author” with a list of
published “new books” and other “yet to be published”.!2 While her direct
interpretation of Scripture situates Marsin’s work in line with the prophetic
tradition of the previous revolutionary decades, her sharp and recurrent
discourse denouncing gender disparity may appear to have no filiation with
a religious discourse, but then Marsin avails itself of a prophetic authority
that justifies her speaking on behalf of women as being divinely inspired.
Astell’s appeal can also be understood as a reconsideration of women’s
intellectual and moral authority as prophets, that is, as agents of spiri-
tual and social change in which women’s words are taken in earnest—
but without the visionary mysticism of the Philadelphians. The extent to
which strands of pietistic feminist theology are a reaction of or a deve-
lopment from the “excesses” of sectarian performance does not detract
from the fact that prophecy was still an idiom of “the common good”
that gained ground as a narrative voice that shouted, denounced, and
showed with a sense of social transformation and impending need. As we
have seen in the previous chapters, the textual activism of the different
manifestations of the prophetic text informed and modified the broad
mental and public spaces of politics, gender, and language. Old secta-
ries and new prophetesses sought to instruct, not to entertain, but along
these processes their voices were gradually detached from a direct point
of revelation toward an assimilation of an authorship that was informed
and inspired. Later in the century, the Baptist Anne Dutton wrote letters
and tracts about her election with the purport to show God’s workings
of grace in humans. While it shared the same didactic intention of the
election narratives of the mid-seventeenth century, Dutton’s divine con-
nection was more inspirational than directly dictated when she described
the reasons for election, or the reasons why Jesus Christ “adopts” some
individuals and not others: “My design in this discourse, being to speak
somewhat concerning the Adoption of Children, as it is a special gra-
cious privilege conferr’d upon the elect of God: I shall, first, give a defi-
nition of it (according to the Measure of Light received”).!? Dutton was
a methodical writer who combined biblical commentary and referencing
as evidence for her hypothesis, which she put to the test with different or-
dered arguments. She “endeavours to explain”, “shows with metaphors”,
and “concludes” each one of her premises with a language devoid of rap-
tures but filled with the spirit: “God breaks in in an infant to the souls
of some of his people, in the reading of his word, with a bright display
of his Glory in Christ”.!4 Her devotional poetry and letters—addressed
to both sides of the Atlantic to early Methodist evangelical correspon-
dents such as George Whitefield or John Wesley—showed restraint and
were clear about the difference between the “carnal mind” that resists
220 Conclusion
a god-infused life and a mind touched by grace. “Being a Poem, made
by One/sav’d by Free Grace, thro’s God’s dear Son./The author wishes’t
may be blest/To give some Soul a Glimpse of Christ”. 'S A glimpse to the
writings by a completely unknown poet, whose production was never
published and remains in manuscript form, reveals the influence of de-
votion as an articulator of not only personal belief but also of private
and everyday collective interests that authorize women’s assured voice in
writing—even that which remains invisible in our literary canon.

pate AMSEMDIS CK Teath .

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Figure C.1 Ann Yerbury, Some Reflections on Death (1730). With kind permis-
sion of The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University
of California, Los Angeles.
 Conclusion 221
Ann Yerbury, a wife and mother from Bristol, helped run a tex-
tile family business and was acquainted with Baptist evangelical prac-
tice, probably through the Methodist congregation founded in 1739
by John Wesley which gathered in the New Room chapel in Bristol.
Yerbury’s syncretism combined devotional raptures with didacticism
and a fascination with death of Sapphic undertones. Death and its
repercussions are the motive underpinning her life-writing from 1729
to 1753: writing is a proof of being alive and of participating in the
flow of history, which is ruthless but mitigated by God’s hand who
cares for one’s soul.!° Yerbury believed that nobody should fear death,
particularly those “children” who are assured of Jesus Christ’s adop-
tion as Saints: “But why sho’d those who have y* most bright, y* most
comfortable assurance of a saving interest in Jesus Christ, of being
received into y® adoption of Children: & thereby, thro Grace, intitled
to an Inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, & that fadeth not away,
why sho’d those, I say, be under y* least uneasiness at ye thoughts, at y°
apprehensions, of so advantageous a Change?”!” Through silence and
meditation, Yerbury reached a near-transcendent state that allowed
her to employ her thinking and creative abilities to make sense of the
world around her and inside herself. But the appreciation of linguistic
skill and the creative, even aesthetic engagement with meanings of in-
visible women who wrote, such as Yerbury, confirm to us the wealth
and variety of early modern women’s writing that coexisted in what
Margaret Ezell termed the “competing technologies of oo and print
in Britain in the latter part of the seventeenth century”.’° There was
good prophecy and bad prophecy, prophecy that was the somatiza-
tion of public disorder and prophecy that provoked in calmness. This
book has sought to highlight the best part of it as a literary exercise of
engagement with a tradition of scriptural reading and interpretation
while the inspired prophetic narrative center gradually detached from
divine revelation and impregnated the genres of prose, poetry, and the
novel. Susan Staves’ view that “literary forms other than the novel
were important in the Restoration and eighteenth century” and that
“much of women’s best writing was in nonfiction prose” is suggestive
in many respects.!? It may act here as a reminder that there is a wel-
coming place for prophecy in the seventeenth-century literary canon
and beyond as a generator of perceptive meaning and as a textual lab-
oratory of ideas for women who expressed themselves in writing and
recognized themselves in it.

Notes
1 Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1995). on
2 Peter Berger (ed.), The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion
and World Politics (Washington: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), 2.
222 Conclusion
3 Sarah Mortimer and John Robertson (eds.), The Intellectual Consequences
of Religious Heterodoxy, 1600-1750 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 2-5.
4 Sharon Achinstein, “Mary Astell, Religion, and Feminism: Texts in Motion”,
in Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, ed. William Kolbrener and Michal
Michelson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 19.
Orianne Smith, “Unlearned & Ill-qualified Pokers into Prophecy: Hester
Lynch Piozzi and the Female Prophetic Tradition”, Eighteenth- Century Life
28:2 (2004): 87. For prophetic reminiscences in Romantic women writers,
see Smith, Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy: Rebellious
Daughters 1786-1826 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 5.
6 Mary Astell, The Christian Religion, As Professed by a Daughter of the
Church of England (London: printed for S.H. for R, Wilkin, 1705), 7.
7 Jacqueline Broad, The Philosophy of Mary Astell: an Early Modern
Theory of Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 37-39. See also
Patricia Springborg, Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
8 John Coffey, Heart Religion: Evangelical Piety in England (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016), 8.
”) Sarah Davy, Heaven Realized (London: published by A.P., 1670), 80.
10 William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (London: printed
for William Innys, 1728), 7.
il For more extensive accounts of M. Marsin, see W.E. Burns, “By Him the
Woman will be Delivered from that Bondage, which some have found in-
tolerable: M. Marsin, English Millenarian Feminist”, Eighteenth-Century
Women 1 (2001): 19-38; Sarah Apetrei. Women, Feminism and Religion
in Early Enlightenment England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010), 179-87.
M. Marsin, The Near Aproach of Christ’s Kingdom Clearly Proved by Scrip-
ture (London: printed for M.M., 1696), a; See also Marsin, The Christian
Belief, Shewing what a Christian ought to Believe (London: printed by John
Clarke, 1697), A.
Anne Dutton, A Discourse Concerning God’s Acts of Adoption (London:
printed for the Author, 1737), 9-10.
Anne Dutton, A Discourse Concerning the New-Birth, to which are added
two Poems (London: printed by John Oswald, 1740), 11. For a modern edi-
tion of Dutton’s texts, see JoAnn Ford Watson, Selected Spiritual Writings
Se i Dutton (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2010-2012).
tbidmi22%
For a more extensive account of Ann Yerbury’s life and work, see Carme
Font Paz, “Mary Hays’ Invisible Women: Manuscript Poetry and the Practice
of Life-Writing in Ann Yerbury (1729-1754)”, in The Invention of Female
Biography, ed. Gina Luria Walker (New York: Routledge, 2017), in press.
17 Ann Yerbury, Some Reflections on Death. The Yerbury Papers, MS.1994.002,
Box 1, Folder 24, 1730. With kind permission of The William Andrews
Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
18 Margaret J.M. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore
and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 5.
i Susan Staves, A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660-1789
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2-3.
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Index

Act of Uniformity (1559) 14, 145 Bible: women’s reading 50-1, 170;
Adam 126, 143, 168 meditative reading 155, 161, 180;
Adams, Mary 1 piety 16, 49, 109; editions 24—5; as
Allen, Hannah 93-95; 33n72 prophetic subtext 50, 192, 200 see
Allein, Mary 208-209 prophecy as exegesis
alumbradas 14, 134 Biddle, Hester 196, 201
Ambrose, Isaac 107-108 Bingen, Hildegard 176, 180
Ammia of Philadelphia, prophet 174 Blackborow, Sarah 2
Anger, Jane 10 Blaugdone, Barbara 192
anti- Trinitarian stances 105 Body politic 45-46; 62, 66, 70, 76,
Antinomian 104-106; Quakers 188, Oris)
201; women prophets’ accusations Boehme, Jakob 172-174
of 134 Bradstreet, Anne 134
Aquinas, Saint Thomas: on Brut, Walter 10
prophecy 5 Bunyan, John 98
A Spirit Moving in Women Burch, Dorothy 143-144, 149n26
Preachers 146 Burrough, Edward 198
ascetic literature 176; lectio divina Butler, Judith 109
178
Astell, Mary 21, 217-219 Calvert, Elizabeth 61
Audland, Anne 202 Calvert, Giles 45, 64
Avery, Elizabeth 44-48 Cary, Mary 53
Avila, Saint Teresa of 139, 174, 176 Caryl, Joseph 142
Aylett, Robert 87 catechisms 25, 101, 106, 149n26
Cavendish, Margaret 134
Babylon 44, 45, 122, 123, 159, 212; Certeau, Michel de 110
BabyLondon 166 Charles I, King 13, 77-79, 84,
Baker, Augustine: Sancta Sophia 176 157-159 passim 162, 209, 212
Baker, Daniel 192 Cheevers, Sarah see Katherine Evans
Baptist Congregations 2, 18, 60-62, Chidley, Katherine 9, 19, 84; The
209; 224 Petition of Women 59
Barberini, Francesco 192 Chidley, Samuel 84
Bathurst, Anne 181-183 Chudleigh, Lady Mary 21
Bathurst, Elizabeth 139, 181 Clarendon Codes 100, 212, 214
Baxter, Richard 93-94, 105, 108 Colins, Alice 15
Bayly, Lewis: The Practice of Piety Collins, An 134, 139-140
108-109 Conventicles 15, 114
Beatas 14 Cromwell, Oliver 13, 44, 62-63,
Beguines 14 80n3, 101, 115. See also Anna
Bentley, Thomas 10 Trapnel
248 Index
Daniel, Biblical prophet 13-15, Gargill, Ann 197
30n51, 44, 119-120, 145, 156, Glover, Elizabeth 182-183
159. See Lady Eleanor Davies Greenblatt, Stephen 22
Davies, Lady Eleanor: idiosyncratic
style 153-155; biography 156-157; Habermas, Jiirgen 19, 24, 41; feminist
visions of Daniel 159-162, criticism of the public space 19-20;
163-164; relationship with 25,41
daughter 165-166; personal Hall, Joseph: Breathings of the
correspondence 166; authorial Devout Soul 108; 107
isolation 168-169; intertextual Harrison, Thomas 44, 69, 125
practice 160-162. See also prophecy Hastings, Lucy 154, 158-167 passim
as exegesis Hays, Mary 156, 222n16
Davy, Sarah 218 Herbert, George 140
Deborah, Biblical figure 4, 7, 14, Hilgard, Nun 5-6
144, 208 Hilton, Walter: The Scale of
Dewans, Morey 1, 4 Perfection 176
Docwra, Anne 213 Hinds, Hilary 13, 19, 133, 135n15
Donne, John: sermons 61 Hobby, Elaine 22, 109, 155
Dutton, Anne 219 humilitas 48, 108
Hutchinson, Lucy 52-53, 134
Edwards, Thomas 146-147;
Gangraena 13, 53 Ireton, Henry 56-57, 63, 69,
Election: signs of 16, 93-94, 99, 101; 80n3, 101
narratives 3, 26, 95, 104; abjection Isaiah, Biblical prophet 5, 145,
99; conscience 94; duality truth- £59461
knowledge 97; prophetic content
99-100 Jessey, Henry 100-101
Enoch, Book of 177
enthusiasts 9, 88, 96, 105, 218 Kempe, Margery 181
Erastian stance 46 Kiffin, William 56-57, 59-60, 70
Evans, Arise: The Voice of the King Kristeva, Julia 109-110 passim
Charles the Father 133
Evans, Katherine: Quaker itinerant Labadists 218
ministry 191-192; arrest in Malta Law, William 218
194; prophecy as resistance Lead, Jane: family and background
196-201; prison narratives 198; 172-173; Philadelphian society
letters 189, 192; voices in the 174; journal Theosophical
text 196 transactions 174—75; vision over
‘experimental’ Christians 107-108 reason 175-177; mystical language
Ezell, Margaret: print and manuscript 179-181; ekphrasis 179; Wisdom
coullliquate Wal, 7, Dau 181-182
Lee, Francis 174, 178-179
Fell, Margaret 7, 189, 195, 205n36 Levellers 2, 46, 58, 60, 147;
Fenner, William 94 Agreement of the People 56
Fenwick, Anne 106 Lilburne, John 56-59 passim 64,
Fifth Monarchists 2, 13, 44-46, 53, 80n3, 146
60, 88, 98, 105, 110, 114-118 Lilly, William 63
passim 126, 189 Locke, John 40-41
Fiore, Joachim de 14
Forster, Mary 205n36 Machiavelli, Niccolé 58, 63
Foxe, John: The Acts and Monuments Magdalene, Mary 146, 187n56
of John Foxe 15 Major, Elizabeth 26, 142-43
Free Grace 97, 101, 105 Makin, Batshua 21
 Index 249
Marsin, M. 218-219 and performativity 109-111, 121;
Mede, Joseph 13, 46 and reception 56; and women’s
Milton, John 84; Miltonic 140, 180 preaching 106-107, 110, 126, 134,
Mother Shipton 9 146, 148; feminist theology 216, 219
Prynne, William 146
Nedham, Marchamont 58 Psalms 4, 14, 15, 48, 96, 102n18,
New Jerusalem 13, 44, 168, 174 122, 133, 142, 145, 158
Niclaes, Hendrik: Family of Love public sphere: blurred 40;
185n37 secularization of 50, 216
Norwich, Julian of: Revelations of Puritan conversion narratives see
Divine Love 176; 181 election narratives
Purkiss, Diane 4, 22, 114, 131
Parr, Susanna 26, 207-209
pastiche 167 Quakers: congregations 18, 87, 189;
Pendarves, John 59 women’s texts 189-190; Quaker
Pendarves, Thomasine 59-60, 70, 80n3 prophecy 109, 133, 183, 189-190
Philadelphians see Jane Lead Querelle de femmes, debates 10
Phyllis Mack 8, 18, 19, 21, 109, 118,
175, 194 Ranters 2, 104, 188
Pierpoint, Lady Anne 87 recusants 14, 176
poetry: devotional 111, 139, 186n41, Revelation, Book of 119, 146,
217, 219; pastoral 134; psalms 15, 158-160, 166, 174, 179, 200
102n18, 133; ecstatic 107, 181. See Rich, Colonel 57, 58, 69, 80n3
Anna Trapnel Roger Chartier 155-156
Poole, Elizabeth 53; appearances at Rogers, John 45, 98
Whitehall 57-60; biography 60; Rolle, Richard 177, 181
political visions 64-66, 76-78, Rous, Francis 96, 102n18
87-88; authority over content
69-72; abuse 78-79; iconoclasm Sales, Francis de 178, 186n39
83-85; regicide 58, 62-65, 85 Santo Domingo, Maria de 14
Pope, Mary 50-55 Savonarola, Girolamo 13
Pordage, John 63, 172-176 passim Simpson, John 44, 104-105, 114
Porete, Marguerite 13 Smith, John: Select discourses 9, 28n27
printing market 12, 17-18, 24 Sophia 176-180 passim
Prophecy: definitions 4-7; ancient St. Paul: typological figure 131, 162,
prophecy 5; and female body 11, 175, 192, 195, 199; epistles and
99 NOI A29, 139,132,179, 182; injunctions 7, 10, 88, 117, 130, 190
as justification for women’s writing Sutcliffe, Alice 49
7-8, 12; as exegesis 8, 22, 48, 154, Sutton, Katherine 144-145
160-162; as narrative 3, 11, 93,
95, 217, 221; and authority 4, 5, Taylor, Jeremy 9; Discourse of the
73, 76, 79, 217-219; and print Liberty of Prophesying 87
culture 12, 18; and lay concerns Textual activism 3, 216-217, 219
216; millenarianism and apocalypse Theodicy 5, 104
5, 12, 44, 209; and history 15; Torshell, Samuel 10
and common good 40-2, 45, 54, Townsend, Theophila 188
96, 219; and public space 23-24, Trapnel, Anna 106; network 114-116;
39-41; and feminist approaches public prophesying 115-117;
20-21, 216-217; and mysticism poetics 116-122, 134; political
21-22, 97, 100; and poetry 15, visions 117-119; body and
107; and self-awareness 22-23; performativity 129-131
and early Protestantism 24-25; and Travers, Rebecca 201-203
political agency 19, 39-42, 218; Turner, Jane 95, 104-107
250 Index
van Schurman, Anna Maria 11 Winstanley, Gerrard 158, 171n33
Vane, Sir Henry 88 Wisdom, Books of 180; Virgin
Venn, Anne 141-142 Wisdom 176, 178
Virgin Mary: Madonna 159, 177 women’s literacy 16-17, 25; and
Vokins, Joan 188-190 humanism 14
women’s petitions 51-52
Ward, Mary 14 word, the: interpreting 4, 8-9, 17,
Warren, Elizabeth 46-49 19, 20, 26, 49, 54, 56, 88, 106,
Waugh, Dorothy 198 147, 160, 174, 180; owning 50,
Weekes, Aquila 154 2 Nee ‘
Wentworth, Anne 1, 207-214 Wycliffe, John: Lollards 13
Wesley, John 219, 221
Whitefield, George 219 Yeamans, Isabel 192
Wight, Sarah 99, 100 Yerbury, Ann 220-221
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