Gender and Faith in the Early Modern British World

Gender and Faith in the Early Modern British World -- Women and Religion in England

1500-1720

Christine Kooi

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Gender and faith in the early modern British world -- Women and Religion in

England 1500-1720 by Patricia Crawford / Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy

in Seventeenth-Century England by Phyllis Mack / Handmaid of the Holy Spirit

by Esther S. Cope / et al

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Patricia Crawford. Women and Religion in England 1500-1720. London:

Routledge, 1993. x + 268 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-415-01696-7.

Phyllis Mack. Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century

England. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991.

xiii + 465 pp. ISBN 0-520-07845-4 (cl).

Esther S. Cope. Handmaid of the Holy Spirit: Dame Eleanor Davies, Never Soe

Mad a Ladie. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. xvii + 247 pp.;

ill. ISBN 0-472-10303-2 (cl).

Amanda Porterfield. Female Piety in Puritan New England: The Emergence of

Religious humanism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.207 pp. ISBN

0-19-506821-1 (cl).

The scope of Reformation studies and of early modem European religious

history has been broadened in recent years by a new and often provocative

focus on problems and issues of gender. The Reformation was one of the most

important events in the social history of Europe in the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries, and its impact and effects on all segments of

European society, female and male, ought to be examined and evaluated. A

question implicit in all four books reviewed here is whether religion (or

religious change) in the early modem period was experienced differently by

women and men. Specifically, these works consider various problems of women

and religion in the Tudor-Stuart British world (which includes, by

extension, New England). One is a general survey of the field and the other

three examine particular cases of female religiosity.

Patricia Crawford's synthesis, Women and Religion in England 1500-1720, will

be useful to specialist and nonspecialist alike. It provides a valuable

introduction for the general reader and a helpful reference for the student

of the period. The book's four parts give a roughly chronological account of

the topic. Part One describes the sixteenth-century Reformation and the

attendant rise of Puritanism until the outbreak of the English Revolution in

1640. Part Two discusses women's spirituality and piety during the era as a

whole. Part Three assesses women and radical religion during the

revolutionary upheavals between 1640 and 1660, and the fourth section

examines the era of restoration and toleration after 1660. The basic theme

uniting all of these separate treatments is what Crawford terms women's

"apprehensions of God," that is, what early modern English women believed

about God and how they acted on those beliefs. Crawford astutely points out

the basic paradox of Christianity for these women: it could on the one hand

reinforce traditional patriarchal society and gender hierarchy, yet on the

other hand it could offer them opportunities to transcend normative social

structures. For women, therefore, religion could act potentially as an agent

either of repression or of liberation. In the tumultuous religious history

of Tudor-Stuart England, which presented a denominational spectrum from

Recusant to Ranter, both possibilities could be realized.

To be sure, Tudor-Stuart Christianity (in most of its manifestations)

generally upheld and justified traditional assumptions about gender

differences and sexual roles, which emphasized women's subordination to men.

Crawford's introduction concisely summarizes common cultural beliefs and

stereotypes (medical and psychological) about women. Through scripture and

ecclesiastical tradition, Christianity shaped these beliefs and was in turn

influenced by them. Gendered language permeated religious discourse: the

true church was the chaste "bride of Christ"; the false church was "the

whore." God was masculine (although Phyllis Mack qualifies this

generalization by suggesting that Quakers, both male and female, sometimes

described God in maternal metaphors as a nourisher of the soul). This

extended analogy of God as Father, Christ as Son, and church as Bride both

buttressed and reflected traditional domestic family arrangements. English

Catholics, Anglicans, Puritans, and Dissenters alike expected women's

religious role to be private and familial, while men occupied the public and

political sphere.

Nevertheless, Crawford cautiously concludes that women as a sex advanced in

this era, especially during the political and sectarian unrest of the 1640s

and 1650s. In the late sixteenth century, the burgeoning Puritan movement

attracted many female supporters, and while it refused them any leadership

roles, its exaltation of marriage and family life over celibacy gave Puritan

wives and mothers an increased spiritual authority over their households.

Vociferous radical and dissenting groups that emerged during the Revolution,

in their attempt to turn the world upside down, created opportunities for

some female believers and enthusiasts to participate in religious movements

in nontraditional, public ways, as prophets, visionaries, and even leaders.

After 1660 the Restoration put an end to this kind of enthusiasm, but the

precedent for female activism in religious life had been firmly established.

Crawford describes all of these developments with subtle argument and

effective detail, consistently emphasizing that Christianity for

Tudor-Stuart women was socially, politically, and spiritually an ambiguous

package. The writing is clear and precise in style. The only thing one

misses in the book is a historiographical context. Since this is a work of

synthesis, some extended discussion of the historiography of the period

(certainly longer than the four pages in the introduction) would be

desirable. Admittedly there is no long tradition of Tudor-Stuart women's

history to examine (a vacuum which this book begins to fill), but an untold

number of volumes have been devoted to the social history of Tudor-Stuart

religion, and it would be illuminating to learn how women's history compares

with that older tradition. Perhaps a bibliographical essay to supplement the

rather terse endnotes would have been useful.

Crawford's survey is an excellent introduction to the other three more

specialized monographs, especially Phyllis Mack's superb Visionary Women.

Mack's work analyzes the phenomenon of ecstatic female prophets in the

seventeenth century, with particular focus on the Society of Friends, or

Quakers. Like Crawford, Mack addresses the significance of gender in the

religious experiences of these visionaries. Since Quaker women left behind a

comparatively large body of writing, both public and private, the lion's

share of the book is devoted to them. Mack reads and deciphers these sources

with extraordinary skill and subtlety. The author's voice is sensitive and

unobtrusive, so that her subjects seem to speak directly across the

centuries to the reader, a hallmark of the best kind of history writing.

Visionary Women is composed of three sections. The first part considers

female prophecy in general, in the context of contemporary attitudes towards

women, and then examines more specifically the words and deeds of female

prophets during the Civil War and Interregnum. The succeeding two parts

examine the specific case of Quaker visionaries, first during the early

history of Quakerism in the 1650s and 1660s, when it was still a radical

dissenting movement, and then in the period 1664 to 1700, when the Friends

were slowly evolving into an established, almost respectable denomination.

The old paradigm of sect becoming church, with its attendant social

evolution from radicalism to respectability, is therefore studied in the new

light of gender concerns. The resulting conclusions are both fascinating and

stimulating.

Compared to most of their Puritan and Dissenting contemporaries, Quaker

women enjoyed exceptional public authority within their movement, assuming

highly visible roles as prophets and visionaries. Seeking to transcend the

sinful self, Quaker women transformed themselves into Old Testament prophets

(modeled on Moses and Jeremaiah, not Deborah or Esther) and in doing so,

according to Mack, transcended their womanhood as well. "He that is born of

God, whether in male or in female, let him speak freely," writes one female

Friend (p.176). They adapted conventional misogynist stereotypes to their

own purposes, deriding as "silly women" any one (male or female) who failed

to see the light. In other words, they tried to justify female evangelism by

denying their femininity altogether, and assumed a new spiritual identity by

shedding their gendered social identity.

At the same time, however, Quaker women embraced those aspects of their

female identity that served their movement. The flip side of the Quakers'

search to overcome the individual sinful personality was their devotion to

community. Symbolizing this devotion were the "mothers in Israel," Quaker

women who, in addition to their activities as missionaries, organized

charities, maintained safe houses, visited prisoners, and hosted meetings.

These Friends used the domestic virtues that Tudor-Stuart society associated

with motherhood to serve not only their own immediate families but their

extended family of coreligionists as well. In this matriarchal role many

Quaker women came to enjoy considerable personal authority within their

movement. In this respect they resembled the Puritan mothers and wives

described by Patricia Crawford: they earned spiritual influence in their

families through exemplary behavior.

What was different (or "radical," as Mack terms it) about Quaker women,

however, was their ability to combine this rather conventional social

identity with an ecstatic and charismatic spirituality -- they could act

effectively as both prophets and mothers. The Quakers shrewdly offered their

audience the best of both worlds: religious satisfaction and social

solidity. Small wonder, then, that the Society of Friends was by far the

most successful of all the sects that arose during the Revolution. Mack

further argues that the "mothers in Israel" were the "linchpin" of the whole

movement. The exaltation of their private virtues made the "mothers" the

moral lifeblood of the Friends. These women's seemingly private traditional

identity in fact gave them a radical sense of public empowerment.

With the passage of the Conventicle Act in 1664 and the resulting

persecution of sects, Quakerism lost some of the radicalism and

unconventionality of its early days. The Friends spent most of the later

seventeenth century completing the evolution from sect to church, becoming

less liminal, less mystical, more organized, and more bureaucratic. In the

process prophetic women largely disappeared from the public arena. Yet, as

Mack argues, this was not simply a case of repression of female liberty, for

in fact, while Quaker women lost public authority as prophets, they gained a

new influence (admittedly narrower and more limited) within the Society's

internal structures and politics. Anew system of autonomous women's meetings

developed that provided female Friends with an arena for both spontaneous

worship and moral discipline. This structural evolution mirrored a growing

preoccupation among Quaker theologians with problems of reason and

conscience. Women's meetings were entrusted with matters of charity,

marriage, and discipline. The "mothers in Israel" were given a formal

parental role in guiding the community, creating what Mack calls "sanctified

domestic politics."

The author gives an interesting account of the meetings' activities as

disciplinary bodies. In this function they resembled the church elders in

Reformed Protestantism in that both shared the goal of keeping the household

of faith cohesive and secure, but with the extraordinary difference, of

course, that Quaker elders were often women. Such responsibility tended to

turn the spiritual energies of Quaker women away from public proselytizing

and inward towards maintaining the moral health of their community, that is,

from enthusiasm to pietism. Mack correctly argues that this was not so much

a diminution of women's authority as a redirection of it. Although it may be

a bit much to contend, as the author does, that women's meetings were the

"cradle" of modem feminism, her larger point that historians of gender may

have to reconsider definitions of "advance" and "decline" when analyzing the

evolution of the status of women is a valid one. The earliest female

prophets among the Quakers used a radically egalitarian denial of their

womanhood (as it was socially constructed) to justify their evangelizing

authority. When it became clear that Restoration England would no longer

accept this kind of sectarianism, female Friends emphasized and exploited

their status as mothers and wives to retain their importance in the internal

politics of the increasingly structured Quaker movement. Mack's sensitively

written Visionary Women joins Caroline Walker Bynum's Holy Feast and Holy

Fast in the body of provocative feminist historiography that forces us to

rethink conventional assumptions about what progress and empowerment meant

to religious women in the premodern era.

Lady Eleanor Davies (1560-1652) was a female visionary of a particularly

apocalyptic stripe. If early Quaker prophets emulated Moses, her preferred

model was that of Elijah or Daniel. She authored several dozen pamphlets

which contained sometimes unreadable mixtures of scripture, prophecy,

autobiography, puns, anagrams, prose, and verse. Inspired by current events,

Lady Eleanor interpreted the contemporary history of Britain in the light of

biblical prophecy and her expectation of the Second Coming. The theology

contained in these writings defies easy categorization. Unlike Puritan

women, she had no interest in rigorously examining her conscience or, like

her later Quaker counterparts, in transcending her sinful self. Her moral

judgments were reserved for more conspicuous targets such as King Charles I,

his French Catholic consort Henrietta Maria, and Archbishop Laud. Her

religion might best be characterized as an extremely sectarian

Protestantism, for her attacks on Roman Catholicism were particularly

venomous.

Esther S. Cope's biography of Dame Eleanor Davies (the subtitle of which,

"never soe mad a ladie," was a hostile contemporary's anagram of her name)

tries to make the case that its subject was in fact an "early feminist"

whose unconventional public behavior was not merely religious prophecy but

also a systematic attack on the patriarchal social order of Stuart England.

Through painstaking archival research Cope has vividly reconstructed Lady

Eleanor's colorful life. The daughter of an earl, Lady Eleanor traveled in

aristocratic and court circles. Twice married, she correctly predicted the

death of her first husband Sir John Davies, and her second husband, Sir

Archibald Douglas, would himself eventually claim the gift of prophecy. Her

two sons died in childhood, but she was particularly close to her daughter

Lucy, although she quarrelled fiercely with Lucy's in-laws over the

inheritance of Davies's estate.

In 1625 Lady Eleanor, whose intensive Bible studies had already inclined her

in this direction, experienced what she believed was a revelation from the

prophet Daniel, who charged her to preach the Last Judgment publicly. She

immediately wrote a hundred-page commentary on several chapters of Daniel,

offering portentous scriptural interpretations of the accession of the new

king Charles I and his "popish" wife, and sent it to the Archbishop of

Canterbury. Lady's Eleanor's literary output was prodigious, over sixty

tracts in all. In the 1630s the Caroline government made numerous attempts

to suppress her prophesying. She was arrested, fined, and imprisoned, and

her books were burned. She remained defiant, however; in 1636 she and

several female companions committed a number of acts of iconoclasm in

Lichfield cathedral, including sitting in the bishop's throne, declaring

herself primate, and pouring hot tar and wheat paste over the altar

hangings. For this she was declared insane and confined to Bedlam for two

years. She spent the final decade of her life writing apocalyptic tracts,

now addressing most of them to Parliament rather than to the court. When her

prediction of Charles I's execution came true in 1649, she gained a small

circle of admiring disciples. Her epitaph, written. by her devoted daughter

Lucy, included the attribute, "in a woman's body a man's spirit."

Cope attempts to cast Lady Eleanor as a proto-feminist, whose antigovernment

harangues contained a veiled antipatriarchal message. One might adduce this

from the use of female metaphors and imagery in her writings. She called

herself "the Lamb's wife," used feminine pronouns for the Holy Spirit, and

sometimes compared herself in her function as messenger to the Virgin Mary,

who had also brought Light into the world. On the other hand, it seems a bit

of a stretch to argue that her tendency not to repeat exactly the

patriarchal language of the prayerbook (such as describing God as "Creator"

rather than "Father") is evidence of a feminist consciousness. Furthermore,

she was quite willing to employ the conventional misogynist language of her

day when it suited her purposes, especially in her diatribes against one of

her most hated targets, the queen Henrietta Maria. She called her "Jezebel"

and "Delilah," among other epithets, and castigated Charles I for allowing

her Catholic influence to permeate the court, in effect condemning the king

for his inability to control his wife.

To judge from the book's quotations from her writings, Lady Eleanor's social

identity as a woman mattered far less to her than her own chosen identity as

a prophet. In this respect she perhaps resembles Mack's early Quaker

visionaries. Her notoriety probably rested at least as much on her

aristocratic status as on her sex. Considering the number of lawsuits she

became involved in regarding her deceased husbands' properties, her social

position was obviously important to her. She never associated with the

groups of other women who petitioned Parliament in the 1640s. Of course, her

sex made the male-dominated public world of Stuart England that much more

hostile to her. The author, however, never adequately establishes a cultural

context describing contemporary images of women (beyond a superficial

reference to the "hell" of daily life for women like Lady Eleanor) that

might make her argument more plausible.

In short, to label Lady Eleanor a feminist is anachronistic. Obviously her

own consuming interests were religion and, more especially, politics.

Perhaps she viewed apocalyptic prophecy as an indirect means to participate

in and influence the otherwise male world of national politics.

Mid-seventeenth-century England apparently tolerated the idea of a female

prophet more easily than that of a female politician, and so she believed

her religious inspiration invested her with an authority to comment on the

issues of the day. Given the highly charged and polemical atmosphere of

English political life in the 1630s and 1640s, Lady Eleanor might be more

fruitfully studied as an example of the kind of extreme and eccentric

sectarian such a milieu could produce, rather than as a precursor to modem

feminism. Her personality was volatile to say the least, but the question of

her mental stability is not thoroughly addressed by the author and so

remains unclear for the reader. This is partly due to the way in which the

book is written. Cope cites her subject's writings in snippets. There are

very few extended quotations in the text, so Lady Eleanor's words seldom

stand alone and open for the reader to interpret. Ironically, despite the

fact that her influence (such as it was) rested to a large degree on her

considerable body of writing, Lady Eleanor's own voice is often lost in this

biography.

Across the water in seventeenth-century New England, Puritan dissenters from

the Anglican ecclesiastical establishment were successfully creating a new

society founded on their own religious vision. As Amanda Porterfield argues

in Female Piety in Puritan New England, that vision included descriptions of

God's grace in gendered metaphors of marriage and domesticity. Like the

later Quakers, New England Puritans invested ordinary life with spiritual

significance, which in turn both sanctified and reinforced the familial,

patriarchal social order that was the basis of their commonwealth.

Porterfield calls this Puritan conflation of the everyday and the

supernatural "religious humanism." Puritan divines consistently employed

images of female piety in particular to depict the humble and deferential

disposition needed by the suffering soul to receive God's grace. According

to Porterfield, this "religion of female piety" enhanced the "modernization"

of Puritan culture by elevating the status of both women and marriage. New

England's later seventeenth-century evolution from an agricultural to a

commercial economy, however, factionalized its society, and female piety,

which had been one aspect of its cultural cohesion, consequently diminished.

This in turn contributed to the increasing marginalization of women in New

England's culture and society by 1700.

In four extended chapters the author sets out her argument in great detail.

Chapter One considers general Puritan beliefs and attitudes about women,

sexuality, and marriage, and places them within a larger Christian

tradition. Porterfield emphasizes in particular the erotic language and

imagery that Puritan preachers often employed to portray the relationship

between the soul and God. Chapter Two analyzes the influence of female piety

in the sermons and writings of three major Puritan ministers from the first

generation of New England leaders: Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, and John

Cotton. All three used metaphors of female devotion and humility to exhort

their audience (and themselves) to exercise the emotional control and

restraint they associated with the state of grace. In Chapter Three

Porterfield examines two of the best-known Puritan women, Anne Hutchinson

and Anne Bradstreet. Hutchinson's radicalism and Bradstreet's poetry both

emphasized the redemptive quality of female suffering and sanctity and the

religious authority that these experiences conferred on them. Chapter Four

outlines the "rise and fall" of female piety's symbolic significance in the

later seventeenth century. Female devotion and suffering became associated

with sacramental piety, especially the Lord's Supper. This idealization of

female piety would be severely tested by the Salem witchcraft trials, which

signaled the decline of humanism and the resurgence of supernaturalism in

Puritan religious culture.

There is the kernel of an important book here, but unfortunately the author

obscures her argument by failing to define precisely what she means by

either "female piety" or "religious humanism," the two key elements of her

study. Her vague use of the word "humanism" will be especially troubling to

students of the early modern period, for whom it implies a specific set of

educational, moral, and cultural ideas first proposed by the Renaissance.

Here the word is apparently employed in its twentieth-century sense, as a

synonym for "humanity" or "humaneness." According to Porterfield, the

Puritans' religious "humanism" is found in their emphasis on the human (as

opposed to divine) aspects of spiritual experience, for example, in their

definitions of grace as a kind of espousal or marriage between the soul and

God. One can argue, however, that all religions describe the relationship

with the divine in human terms (what other referent is there?), and that in

that sense all religions are "humanistic." The Puritans were certainly not

unique in this.

What did make them different, of course, was their "female piety." Here

again, however, the author's terminology is obscure and unsatisfying. The

phrase seems to imply the humility, submission, and affection with which

Christian women were thought to have apprehended God, but a clear, useful

definition is never provided. Perhaps the introduction could have provided a

more elaborate discussion of the origins and evolution of Puritan beliefs

about women, thus giving the reader a background in which to place the New

Englanders' assumptions about how women experienced religion differently

from men. Porterfield's basic argument, that this female piety allowed

seventeenth-century Puritan women to enjoy at least a spiritual equality

with men before the reaction set in after 1700, would have been better

supported by a much more careful use of language. Editorial sloppiness

sometimes mars the text: the Dutch spiritualist Hendrik Niclaes is

inexplicably given the German first name "Heinrich" (p.97), and Patrick

Collinson is misquoted on page 84.

Methodologically the book is also puzzling. Porterfield, whose

interpretation of religion is strongly psychological and sociological, moves

jarringly from one theoretical framework to another in her explanations.

Elizabethan Puritanism is superficially described as a "social reform

movement" that emerged in response to the brutality and aggression of

sixteenth-century life -- the question of religious belief does not even

come up. Hooker's, Cotton's, and Shepard's sermons are interpreted

psychologically, which tends to lead to some facile and uninteresting

conclusions (for example, Shepard's use of maternal imagery to depict God is

actually a search for his dead mother's love). Such explanations tell us

more about twentieth-century psychological theory than about

seventeenth-century Puritanism. Sociologically, Porterfield associates the

decline of female piety in the later 1600s with the decline of New England's

agricultural economy in favor of commercial capitalism, without ever

offering any concrete, tangible evidence linking the two. The odd amalgam of

psycho- and social history that informs this study unfortunately obscures

what could be an otherwise interesting discussion of the role of gender in

the religious culture of New England.

The four books reviewed here, though varying in quality, will all stimulate

further debate and study about the importance of gender to faith for women

of the Tudor-Stuart world. They ask important questions about the

universality of religion and its relevance to the everyday lives of ordinary

individuals. Such studies can only enhance our understanding of the social

history of religion in the early modern era.

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