Jane Lead (pronounced Leed or Leeds by contemporaries) and sometimes written with a final ‘e’ (especially in printed German translations of her works) was among the most prolific published female authors of the long eighteenth century.1 More than a dozen different printed titles bearing Lead’s name, with one consisting of multiple volumes, were originally issued in English between 1681 and 1702.2 Her final work ‘The Resurrection of Life’ (1703) was issued posthumously in German translation and has recently been re-translated into English.3 Moreover, during Lead’s lifetime four of her works appeared in a second edition, while from 1694 several writings were also published in translation at Amsterdam—primarily in German, with two rendered into Dutch as well.4 In addition to these languages one tract was translated into Swedish, most likely from the German version, although this remained in manuscript.5 Besides being the author of extensive spiritual diaries, theological treatises, epistles and some verse, during the last decade of her 80-year life Lead became the centre of an extensive correspondence network stretching from Pennsylvania to the Electorate of Saxony. Yet as her son-in-law and amanuensis Francis Lee conceded, outside a small community of believers Lead’s writings were largely ignored in her own country. Instead they enjoyed a widespread if mixed continental reception among an audience of assorted Spiritualists, Behmenists and Pietists—not to mention occasional curious readers, such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.6
Although the devotional writer William Law (1686–1761) initially claimed to know little of Lead, within a few years he was recounting the Philadelphians’ thirst for ‘visions, openings and revelations &c.’ in private correspondence. Since Law later transcribed many of Francis Lee’s manuscripts he doubtless learned much there concerning Lead.7 Other eighteenth-century figures familiar with Lead’s name are largely identifiable through ownership inscriptions in printed English editions of her writings. These included a Mr. Portales, most likely Charles Portales (1676–1763), an early supporter of the French Prophets, and the Methodist preacher and writer Cornelius Cayley (1727–1779).8 The latter may have been drawn to Lead because of an interest in the doctrine of the universal restoration of all humanity. Indeed, Cayley’s reading extended to Richard Coppin (fl.1646–fl.1659), who like Lead was incorporated within a catalogue of authors advocating the possibility of universal redemption.9 Other owners of works by both Lead and Coppin included the publisher Henri Lion,10 the bookseller John Denis the elder (c.1735–1785),11 and the Alsatian artist Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740–1812).12 It should be noted that after obtaining his copy of one of Lead’s books Denis published the third edition of The Restoration of All Things (1779), a defence of universal salvation by the nonconformist minister Jeremiah White, to which Denis added a preface. Furthermore, in partnership with his son and namesake Denis sold several volumes in English and French by the polymath and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. Significantly, several people attracted to Swedenborg’s teachings were also readers of Lead. These included de Loutherbourg, an elected member of the Royal Academy, who dated two of the five known copies of Lead’s works in his possession ‘1796’; de Loutherbourg’s associate and self-described ‘Lover of the Lamb of God’, Mary Pratt; the former vegetarian turned Methodist Ralph Mather (1750?–1803); the clergyman John Clowes (1743–1831); the Huguenot surgeon and pharmacist Benedict Chastanier (c.1739–c.1818); and the surgeon and apothecary Henry Peckitt (1734?–1808), who possessed a manuscript account of Lead’s last hours.13 Some owners, however, have proved more difficult to trace: A. Bremner (Strand, 1782), Thomas Kane (9 June 1772), and an Alexander Leslie of Aberdeen (no date).14
From 1771 to 1782 some of Lead’s works had been advertised for sale in book catalogues issued by George Wagstaff.
15 But as the nineteenth century progressed they seem to have become rarer, prompting a handful of reprints: one perhaps marking the centenary of her death, another issued with the approval of Zion Ward and his Southcottian followers.
16 Hence rather than purchasing books between 1825 and 1834 a certain John Phillips transcribed extracts from Lead’s printed English writings together with an English re-translation of a German account of her last hours. In addition, Phillips made excerpts from books held in the British Museum by the Behmenists John Pordage and Quirinus Kuhlmann. Phillips’s interest in Lead was shared by a Miss Peacock and Samuel Jackson, the English translator of Johann Heinrich Jung [Heinrich Stilling].
17 Eventually Phillips’s transcripts were acquired by the jeweller and goldsmith Christopher Walton (1809–1877), an undeservedly neglected figure who contributed substantially to the demise of his own legacy through an unfortunate mix of humourlessness, appalling inter-personal skills and inability to adequately organise his immensely rich manuscript and rare book collections.
18 By about 1871 Walton owned copies of several printed titles by Lead together with important manuscript accounts.
19 Yet Walton, himself a Methodist, judged Lead harshly, remarking:
It would not, perhaps, be difficult to dissect Mrs. Lead’s character, and demonstrate the philosophy of her prophetic assumptions, from a consideration of the constitution of her mind, the character of the piety of the Cromwell-Muggletonian-fanatic days in which she lived, her intricate study of Behmen’s works … and the popular spiritual topics of her age.
Acknowledging that she was a woman of ‘great piety’ and not wishing to ridicule her writings, a disappointed Walton still complained that Lead, the ‘chief heroine’ of the Philadelphian Society, had buried her profound spiritual experiences in ‘a huge mass of parabolicalism and idiocratic deformity’.
20 A few nineteenth-century commentators were more charitable. One reckoned Lead a woman of ‘elevated and enthusiastic piety’ while others suggested that the visions and spiritual experiences of this ‘most singular’ if then lesser-known English disciple of Boehme had influenced Swedenborg’s theological system.21 Nonetheless, Lead’s prophetic pretensions and obscure style were derided as a ‘lamentable example of bad English’ and ‘confusion of thought’, amounting to nothing more than a ‘wonderful concatenation of folly’ and ‘strange farrago of nonsense’.22 This unflattering verdict, pronounced by Walton’s correspondent the clergyman and translator Robert Charles Jenkins (1816–1896), brings to mind the Quaker historian Rufus Jones (1863–1948) who felt Lead was too emotional, criticising her ‘ungrammatical’ language and ‘involved style’, which was ‘full of overwrought and fanciful imagination’.23 Similarly, the peace activist Stephen Hobhouse (1881–1961) dismissed Pordage and Lead as ‘Christians of a dangerously psychic type’ whose ‘visionary eccentricities and speculations’ resulted in ‘confused writings’.24 Even the Anglo-Catholic writer Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941) thought Lead and the Philadelphians exhibited mysticism ‘in its least balanced aspect mingled with mediumistic phenomena, wild symbolic visions, and apocalyptic prophecies’.25
Such criticism was not new. It went back to an early eighteenth-century life of Lead in Latin by Johann Wolfgang Jaeger, a German professor of theology hostile to mysticism and chiliasm.26 Jaeger was doubtless responding to the popularity of Philadelphian texts within radical Pietist circles and the legacy of that appeal saw greater interest in Lead’s writings among German rather than English speakers—at least until the mid-1970s. Most notable in this regard were studies by C.W.H. Hochhuth and especially the Swedish scholar Nils Thune, whose work remains valuable despite its then fashionable preoccupation with applying psychology to the study of religion.27 Also noteworthy was the Viennese psychoanalyst Herbert Silberer’s pioneering Probleme der Mystik und ihrer Symbolik (1914) which inspired Carl Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy (1944).28
Although Lead was discussed during the 1960s within the context of monographs focusing on the reception of Boehme’s thought and the doctrine of universal salvation,29 it was only with a second-wave of feminism that she began to be studied in her own right by North American scholars such as Catherine Smith and Joanne Sperle. Indeed, Smith’s earlier work drew attention to supposed similarities between feminist theory and mystic philosophy, positioning Lead within a tradition stretching from the Eleusinian mysteries through the Protestant Reformation to present-day feminism.30 In the wake of Second Wave Feminism it is unsurprising that within the last 20 years Lead’s reputation has undergone a remarkable ascent from the depths of disdain to the peaks of veneration. So much so, that she is now lauded as an example of ‘female genius’ and regarded by her most recent biographer, Julie Hirst, as the most important female religious leader in late seventeenth-century England.31
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Including this brief survey of Lead’s legacy there are 12 chapters in this volume. The next focuses on the period of Lead’s life before she became a widow in 1670 and suggests that Lead was far more radical than has been supposed. Making use of a great many archival discoveries it provides mainly circumstantial but nonetheless cumulatively overwhelming evidence that Lead’s relatively well-known autobiography (printed in German in 1696) conceals almost as much as it reveals. Constructed to reassure its intended audience of continental Spiritualists, Behmenists and Pietists of Lead’s upright character, respectable social status and divinely bestowed gifts this so-called ‘Life of the Author’ adopted a similar strategy to that observable in a number of Philadelphian publications which masked private heterodox beliefs and rituals with public professions of irenic conformity. Accordingly key names, activities and teachings were omitted from Lead’s German biography because in the political, military and religious contexts of the mid-1690s detailing past associations would have damaged Lead’s reputation among her heterogeneous readership.
Chapter three covers the period from 1670 to 1695—that is from the beginning of Lead’s widowhood until she went blind. Here the focus is as much on extensive and overlapping domestic and continental networks of assorted millenarians, prophets, theosophists and devotees of mystic and spiritualist authors generally as on Lead herself. It also traces an evolution of Lead’s thought as she came under successive influences and began to develop her own distinctive beliefs. This was a religious journey with staging posts: an initial Calvinist obsession with sin and predestination wedded to a conventional Protestant understanding of the coming apocalypse; then the introduction of Jacob Boehme’s teachings and accompanying visions of a female personification of divine wisdom; finally, the adoption, albeit with inconsistencies...
