New Evidence for the Reading of Sectarian Women’s Prophecies

Extract

THE turbulent period of the mid-seventeenth century gave rise to a great number of radical religious sects—Fifth Monarchists, Diggers, Ranters, Quakers, Baptists, and others—who communicated their messages through public preaching and printed tracts. Women often played an active role in these sects: in particular, those who spoke out and/or wrote as prophets, circumventing traditional restrictions on women’s speech by apparently serving as direct conduits for the Holy Spirit. The current evidence for how their works were received is scanty and focused on a brief period of controversy surrounding their active prophetic careers. However, a collection of three such pamphlets held in the Edinburgh University Library (*z.8.1/1) contains two pages of manuscript on its flyleaf titled ‘a Memorandum to the reidar of this book’ (transcribed below), which suggests that these women’s prophecies—usually regarded as topical or ephemeral—were in fact still being read and circulated for some time after their publication.¹

Bound together and trimmed to 14.5 × 18 cm, the volume contains Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea and The Cry of a Stone as well as the only known copy of Anne Wentworth’s England’s Spirituall Pill. Apart from an early-nineteenth-century Edinburgh University Library shelfmark, nothing is currently known about this book’s provenance; however, the ‘Memorandum’s’ hand (mixed with strong secretary influences on letters like t, v, w, c, and backward e), along with contextual evidence, date this preface to the end of the seventeenth century. Its contents suggest that, for at least one reader, Trapnel and Wentworth’s prophecies continued to have contemporary relevance even in the late 1680s, thirty-five years after the first of the texts was published. It also provides a potentially broader context for the cause of female Protestant visionaries and the response to it, on the Continent and in Scotland.