Voices of Thunder

Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century

Naomi Baker, Baker, Naomi

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN:
  9781836391555
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Europäische Geschichte der Renaissance

Voices of Thunder illuminates the stories and beliefs of more than a dozen seventeenth-century radical Protestant women, including a Colchester woman who feared that her four children would starve to death and a former maidservant from Yorkshire who was granted an audience with the sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Their belief in spiritual equality empowered them to resist the status quo, questioning the authority of those who sought to lord it over them. From mostly humble backgrounds, they found ways to make their voices heard, creating some of the earliest autobiographical accounts in English and allowing us a rare and precious glimpse of the lives and experiences of women in the early modern era.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Textual Note
• Timeline
• Introduction
• Part One: ‘Mine own experience’
• Part Two: ‘The prophetical stage’
• Part Three: ‘She-Preachers’
• Part Four: ‘To the ends of the earth’
• Part Five: Apocalyptical Women
• Afterword
• References
• Further Reading
• Acknowledgements
• Photo Acknowledgements
• Index