:Church and State in Early Modern England 1509-1640

Abstract

Marcus Nevitt, Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640-1660, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006, pp. 218, hb. £45, ISBN: 0754641155Due to the plethora of academic literature on the subject one might wonder what could be added to the scholarship on the pamphlet wars of the English Revolution. Both historians and literary scholars have looked at them from a variety of angles, studying the material aspects of pamphlet and newsbook production (Joad Raymond) as well as the fragmentation of literary genres in the upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century (Nigel Smith), or the rites of secrecy in royalist writings (Lois Potter). Recent scholars have antedated the emergence of a Habermasian public sphere from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century to the civil war period and have engaged with the role gender played within this public sphere (Sharon Achinstein, Dagmar Freist, Ann Hughes, Susan Wiseman). The list could go on. All of these works, moreover, are to varying extents optimistic about the democratising effects of pamphlet culture and participatory opportunities for women within it (p. 1). The English civil wars, the consensus goes, did not only challenge the traditional social order, but also established gender hierarchies; and the emergence of sectarian movements in particular gave women new space for agency (Patricia Crawford, Keith Thomas). Yet Marcus Nevitt adds a word of caution.Nevitt's book on Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640-1660 deals as much with female agency as with limitations to that agency. Whenever a woman dared to speak up there was a man to silence her, and if there was not then public order was perceived as under threat and those failing to act were taken to account. In a number of case studies that look at the contributions of non-aristocratic women to revolutionary pamphlet culture Nevitt engages both with the 'rhetorical devices' of women's writings as well as with women's involvement in the 'material circumstances' (p. 4) of pamphlet production, and illustrates how female agents negotiated their way around a male-dominated world. In doing so, Nevitt offers what he calls 'a more gender-sensitive picture' (p. 4) of revolutionary print culture and at the same time a more balanced account of the actions of proto-feminist icons, such as Katherine Chidley, Elizabeth Poole, or 'Parliament Joan', without diminishing their achievements.When we meet the Leveller Katherine Chidley in chapter one, for instance, we learn of her extraordinary achievements in rebutting the anti-tolerationist writings of the Presbyterian lecturer and pamphleteer Thomas Edwards in works such as her Justifications of the Independent Churches of Christ (1641). Yet the intellectual significance of Chidley's contributions to the toleration debate was constantly being undermined by men who feared that 'female discursivity' implied 'male weakness' (p. 25). Chidley was attacked, Nevitt argues, not for what she said, but because she was female and had transgressed 'the necessary deference and silence of women in the early modern period' (p. 22). While Edwards himself for a long time decided to ignore Chidley's contributions, Edwards's critics delighted in the humiliation he suffered through Chidley. For being criticised by a woman was seen as a 'symbolic sleight' that Edwards would not be able to live down. Hezekiah Woodward, for instance, described Chidley's attack on Edwards as 'a spetting in his face' (p. 29), a physical rather than an intellectual violation and a 'wilful transgression... of social prohibition' (p. 30). Even men who agreed with Chidley's tolerationist views, it seems, would not accept her as a rational intellectual equal.Chapter two on women's reactions to the regicide is based on similar assumptions about 'a cross-party conviction of the necessity of female silence' (p. 51). Nevitt argues that 'around the time of the king's trial women's political consciousnesses were sensitively attuned to recent developments in matters of state' (p. …