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Visionary Women
Visionary Women
Ecstatic Prophecy in
Seventeenth-Century England

Phyllis Mack

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley • Los Angeles • Oxford
Portions of Chapters 1, 2, and 3 were published in an earlier form in the
following articles:
"Women as Prophets during the English Civil War," Feminist Studies 8 (1982).

"The Female Prophet and her Audience: Class and Gender in the World Turned Upside
Down," in Reviving the English Revolution, edited by Geoff Eley and William Hunt,
Verso, 1988.
"Prophecy and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England," in Witnesses for Change:
Quaker Women over Three Centuries, edited by Elizabeth Potts Brown and Susan Stuard,
Rutgers University Press, 1989.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

Oxford, England
© 1992 by
The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mack, Phyllis.
Visionary Women : ecstatic prophecy in seventeenth-century England / Phyllis Mack,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-520-07845-4 (alk. paper)
1. Women, Quaker—England—History—17th century. 2. Prophecy (Christianity)—
History—17th century. 3. Spirituality—Society of Friends—History—17th century.
4. Spirituality—England—History—17th century. I. Title.
IN PROCESS (ONLINE)
289.6'42'082—dc20 91-39580

Printed in the United States of America

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ©
For Tory
Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Abbreviations xi

Author's Note xiii

Introduction 1

PART ONE: FEMININE SYMBOLISM

AND FEMALE PROPHECY:
GENDER AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE
WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

1. Woman, Nature, and Spirit 15

2. Male and Female Power: Visionary Women
and the Social Order 45
3. Talking Back: Women as Prophets during
the Civil War and Interregnum, 1 6 4 0 - 1 6 5 5 87

PART TWO: FRIENDS IN EDEN:

GENDER AND SPIRITUALITY IN
EARLY QUAKERISM, 1650-1664

4. Ecstasy and Self-Transcendence 127

5. Prophecy 165
viii Contents

6. Ecstasy and Everyday Life 212

7. How Were Quakers Radical? 236

PART THREE: VISIONARY ORDER:

WOMEN IN THE QUAKER MOVEMENT,
1664-1700

8. The Snake in the Garden: Quaker Politics

and the Origin of the Women's Meeting 265
9. The Mystical Housewife 305
10. Selfhood and Enlightenment: Quaker
Preaching and Discipline, 1 6 6 4 - 1 7 0 0 351

Epilogue 403

Appendices 413

Bibliography 425

Index 455
Acknowledgments

Several friends and colleagues have read and commented on portions of

this study, while others have allowed me to read their own unpublished
work and otherwise assisted my research. Thanks to Rudolph Bell,
Edwin Bronner, Esther Cope, Patricia Crawford, Miriam Garber, John
Gillis, Philip Greven, Carla Hesse, Suzanne Lebsock, Mark Robertson,
Rachel Weil, and especially Margaret Hunt. Thanks also to Kenneth
Carroll, for unstinting encouragement and good cheer, and to Joan
Scott, Ruth Bloch, Sarah Hanley, and the other members of the Gender
Seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1985-86).
The staffs of several libraries have been extremely helpful and en-
couraging. I particularly want to thank Malcolm Thomas and the staff
of the Library of the Society of Friends in London, and Edwin Bronner,
Elizabeth Potts Brown, and the staff of the Quaker Collection at Hav-
erford College Library. Thanks also to the staffs at the British Library,
Bodleian Library, and Preston Public Record Office in England and to
the Folger, Princeton University, Swarthmore College, and Union Theo-
logical Seminary libraries in the United States.
Many of the ideas in this book were developed as lectures at Amherst
College, Barnard College, Boston College, Dartmouth College, Ithaca
College, Haverford College, Rutgers University, the University of Lon-
don, U.C.L.A., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale University,
and the Quaker Meeting of Cambridge, Massachusetts. I thank those
institutions and audiences for their patronage and their stimulating
questions. This study was also written with the assistance of the Rutgers

IX
X Acknowledgments

University Research Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, Haverford

College (which awarded me a T. Wistar Brown fellowship in 1982), and
the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, which provided a luxurious
and stimulating environment in which to work in 1985—86. As readers
for the University of California Press, Irene Brown and Jean Soderlund
made invaluable contributions to the finished manuscript. My editors,
Sheila Levine, David Severtson, and Mary Lamprech, have been im-
mensely helpful and encouraging during the long process of completion
and revision.
Both as a student of the Society of Friends (or Quakers), and as a
struggling single parent, I am daily made aware of the importance of
friendship in sustaining and enriching my own life. For their humor,
hospitality, intellectual stimulation, and emotional support, I would like
to thank Renée and Matthew Baigell, Maxine Berg and John Robertson,
Scott Campbell, Gwen and Carmen Cerasoli, Ann Fagan and Gabor
Vermes, Jane Fremon, Ziva Galili, Dee Garrison, Judy Gerson, Ruth and
Rob Goldston, Deborah Hertz and Martin Bunzl, Margaret Hunt, Peg
Jacob, Coppelia Kahn and Avi Wortis, Lisa and Alex Kent, Maureen
McCarthy, Ann Markuson, Ruth Perry, Terry Poe, Marilyn, Phil, and
Ari Rabinowitz and Sara Budin, Joanna Regulska and Anne Marie Poniz,
Marea and Mark Robertson, Susan Shrepfer and Ed Ortiz, Carol, Neil,
Laura, and Rachel Weinstein.
I dedicate this book to my beloved daughter, Tory, who has always
helped me to find what is best in the world and in myself.
Abbreviations Used
in the Footnotes

BQ William C. Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism (Cam-

bridge, 1955)
Besse Joseph Besse, A Collection of the Sufferings of the People
Called Quakers (London, 1753)
DBR Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seven-
teenth Century, ed. Richard L. Greaves and Robert Zaller
(Brighton, 1982-84)
DQB Dictionary of Quaker Biography, typescript, Haverford Col-
lege Library and Library of the Society of Friends, London
EQW Early Quaker Writings, 1650-1700, ed. Hugh Barbour and
Arthur O. Roberts (Grand Rapids, 1973)
FL The Friends Library (Philadelphia, 1842)
FPT The First Publishers of Truth, ed. Norman Penney (London,
1907)
GBS Great Book of Sufferings, MS, Library of the Society of
Friends, London
JFHS Journal of the Friends Historical Society
PP Piety Promoted, in a Collection of Dying Sayings of Many of
the People Called Quakers, 4 vols. (Philadelphia, 1854)

xi
xii Abbreviations

PWP The Papers of William Penn, ed. Mary Maples Dunn and
Richard S. Dunn (Philadelphia, 1981-)
QH Quaker History
QPE Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England (New Haven
and London, 1964)
SM Swarthmore Manuscripts
SPQ William C. Braithwaite, The Second Period of Quakerism
(York, 1979)
Author's Note

In most quotations from seventeenth-century sources, archaisms such as

" y e " and " y t " have been replaced with their modern alternatives, and
modern spellings have been used to replace abbreviations and other
orthographic conventions peculiar to the century or to particular au-
thors. Otherwise, spelling and punctuation have been retained as they are
in the sources.
Quakers called March "1st month," April " 2 d month," and so on. I
have altered the Quaker system of dates to conform to modern practice.
Thus, "1st month" becomes March, and so on.
In citations to manuscript sources, an effort has been made to impose
consistency on volume and folio numbers, even though archival insti-
tutions will often catalog different manuscripts according to different
conventions. A citation such as 1/123 refers to volume 1, folio 123. The
abbreviations " f o l . " or "fols." are used whenever folio numbers do not
follow a volume number. In references to the Swarthmore Manuscripts,
parenthetical numerals such as (II, 235) refer to transcript number.
Otherwise, citations follow the practices of the archival institutions.

xiii
This is not ink and paper, or words, which the worst of
men, or the devil may read or talk of; but it is spirit, life,
and power, killing and making alive; as a fire in the bosom.
Rebeckah Travers, For Those That
Meet to Worship . . . , 1659
Introduction

I am come to bid thee come down, thou painted beast.

Jane Ashburner to the rector of Aldingham, 1655

The woman who spoke (or rather screamed) those words called herself
a "Friend," a member of a religious society whose adherents repudiated
all outward distinctions of wealth, rank, and political power and af-
firmed the existence of a pure divine light in the heart of every human
being. The Anglican priest whom she attacked called her a " Q u a k e r , "
one of a group of religious fanatics who shouted, quaked, prophesied,
and otherwise attempted to undermine the precarious social order of
mid-seventeenth-century England. Gathered by George Fox during the
early 1650s, the Society of Friends, or Quakers, originated in the remote
rural counties of Cumberland, Lancashire, and Yorkshire. Their mis-
sionaries moved south to evangelize London and the southern counties
in 1 6 5 4 and then traveled even farther afield, preaching to audiences in
New England, the Atlantic colonies, the Caribbean, even to Catholics
and Moslems on the island of Malta and in Turkey. The Quakers were
only one of many such groups to appear during the two decades of the
English Civil War and Interregnum. Yet they were by far the most
successful, attracting some sixty thousand members by 1660, the year
King Charles II was restored to the throne. The Quakers were also the
most receptive to the spiritual authority of women. Of the nearly three
hundred visionary women who wrote and prophesied during that early
period, over two hundred belonged to the Society of Friends.
During the movement's first decades, Quakers urged and enacted their
experience of salvation in a highly public arena—in streets, market-
places, churches, fields, and prisons—and they did this through flam-

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