God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth Century Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism

This study investigates the writing of women in the radical sects of the 17th century. This text introduces new primary sources and presents them in a way which is accessible to 20th-century scholars. The book offers a detailed study of the spiritual autobiographies and prophecies produced by Quaker, Baptist and Fifth Monarchist women, and asks how texts, in such numbers, were produced in a culture dismissive of women’s writing. It also attempts to reveal how these hostile attitudes were manifested in the texts themselves. Each chapter introduces new material through a discussion of existing critical and theoretical work on the gendering of authors, texts and readers respectively. Finally, the appendices reproduce substantial selections from previously unavailable 17th-century texts discussed in the book, by Mary Cary, Jane Turner, Elinor Channell, Priscilla Cotton, and Dorothy Waugh.