“A knowing people”

Abstract

In 1646, Dorothy Burch, a working class wife and mother who lived in a small village in Kent, published A Catechism of the Several Heads of the Christian Religion. This essay draws upon such diverse sources as county histories, public records, taxation lists, and churchwarden's accounts in order to attend to the factors that allowed Burch to enter early modern print culture. In the early 1640's, a Royalist minister arrived at her local parish church and insulted the local parishioners, the majority of whom worked as fisherman, oyster-dredgers, and mariners. Dorothy Burch wrote her catechism to demonstrate her-and her community's-knowledge of the Protestant faith. She chose to write a catechism in part because of the importance accorded to catechizing within Evangelical Protestantism, but also because catechisms were a genre traditionally associated with women and mothers.