![]()
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 legitimized 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 dynamics 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 presence 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.1
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,2 as a response to the classic and influential work by Carole Pateman in which the implicit subordination to men (or sexual contract) was a requirement for a successful social contract.3 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.4
Mihoko Suzuki places women’s political participation and the “symbolic deployment of gender” as part of the larger discourse of the “subaltern” (as Antonio Gramsci formulated it) that includes also men.5 In their overview study of women’s political thought in Europe, Karen Green and Jacqueline Broad have found that many early modern women entered 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 “influenced their political thinking such as they recognized the implications of their theories as a social group”.6 Often, the writings of women who verbalized 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.7 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.8
Apart from examining the imbrication of religion in women’s experiences 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, access to education) needed to be regulated by the state. I suggest that the prophetesses’ exposure of their textual production was a form of activism, 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 persuasion, 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 contributions of women to the print debate over political representation”.9
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 observation that Locke’s argument for sovereign individualism was based on a divinely ordained moral law,10 and explores the manners in which the principles of voluntary association in church matters facilitated free political association, often against or outside state control, and often, as Jürgen 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”.11 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 matters 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 aesthetic, a structuring of meaning, an identity, a politics”.12 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 access to higher education.13 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 mores, 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 examines how women’s freedom of conscience, that both included and also extended beyond religious belief, did not prevent male figures of sectarian authority from making an instrumental use of the woman prophet for political ends, as it did not prevent women from exerting their influence 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 matters 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 egalitarianism, even though the economic status, the educational background, and the religious-political affinities of women who prophesied were fairly diverse.14 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 response 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’.15 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 on their own so as to make sense of these events within their own cultural and social framework. Wiseman suggests that both approaches present pitfalls when gender tends to be the ultimate end “or part of a teleology”,16 even though looking at seventeenth-century women’s prophecy 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 consistent 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 interventions 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 political 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, persuaded, 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.
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 Justified: Women Prophets and the En...
