Abstract
R It has been suggested that women prophets in the culture of seventeenth-century England represent the first significant group of women to establish the political authority of self-conscious female identity, and that as such they stand for a foundational moment in the development of modern feminist consciousness. This article argues that the political, religious and social upheavals in the English Revolution witnessed an unprecedented outburst of prophetic speech among women. As a result, women prophets forged a widely-read and persuasive literary genre which suited both their private and public concerns; at the same time, this venue allowed them to approach a sense of feminine writing away from the topos found in the Querelles des femmes, thus contributing to the formation of a prehistory of novelistic discourse. Focusing on the persuasive narrative of Lady Eleanor Davies, this article shows how prophetesses used a deeply personal rhetorical discourse which appropriates the voice and the manner of the Hebrew prophets of old. Many female visionaries understood themselves to be called by God to warn political leaders, and calls to prophesy and to intervention in the public sphere could take the form of anagrams, dramatic visions, complex dreams or carefully plotted exegetical commentary.
Highlights
To a certain extent, we are still catching up to the multiplicity and variety of early modern autobiographical writings by women
No doubt this is the result of the enormous variety of these texts: along with the general impulse given to writing by the spread of Protestantism, there were multiple and often incompatible traditions of belief that developed in Britain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the very act of writing had different meanings and connotations in each of these traditions, and this applies as well to the concept of “self” expressed in autobiographical texts
The massive extension and dissemination of prophetic utterances that is intimately characteristic of the climate of dissent in seventeenth-century England compels us to review the interrelation between contemporary politics, religion and the public sphere
Summary
We are still catching up to the multiplicity and variety of early modern autobiographical writings by women. According to the Oxford Companion to the Bible (1993: 621), “prophecy in Israel represents the true prophet as the agent and defender of Yahweh in opposition both to religious apostasy and syncretism and to the authority of kings when these failed to uphold the cause of Yahweh or flouted his moral demands” This definition suggests that the political substance of prophetic writing is an imperative of the genre, and that both divine inspiration and political counsel to ruling authorities are embedded in the prophetic text.
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