How important was religion in
influencing female authorship?
Structure
Political Influences:
- Feminist?
- Katherine Phillips
Cross-over between religious and political influences:
- Hinds
- Hobby
Religious Influences:
- Prophecy
- Autobiography
Secular Social Trends
Conclusions
Other Questions to think about
Political Influences
Civil War meant challenges to Political Ideologies
Smith and Gallagher: Connection between Royalism and Proto-Feminism
Royalist
Parliamentarian
Margaret Cavendish
Katherine Phillips
Anne Bradstreet
Lucy Hutchinson
Margaret Cavendish
(1623-1673)
Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)
Political Influences: Katherine Phillips
In her commendatory verse for the 1651 volume of William
Cartwright’s posthumously published works:
But when those happy powers that guard thy dust,
To us and to thy memory shall be Just,
And by a flame from thy blest Genius lent,
Rescue us from our dull imprisonment,
Unsequester our fancys, and create
A worth that may upon thy glory wait;
We then shall understand thee, and descry
The splendour of restored Poetry. (Works 1:143)
Cross-Over between Political and Religious
Influences
Religion then was the foundation on which politics – or economics,
or science, or history – was predicated
Examples:
• The king was not only the head of state but also ‘defender of
the faith’, head of the Church of Enlgand - his power to rule
was accorded him by God himself.
• Cromwell justified the severance of relations with Charles I
through reference to the Bible and drew on the prophecies of
the book of Daniel and of Revelation in his inaugural speech to
parliament in 1653
Hinds, Hilary, God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical
Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester, 1996).
‘I will pour out of my
Spirit upon all flesh: and
your sons and your
daughters shall
prophesy’ (Acts 2:17).
Groups with prominent proportion of female
authors:




Baptists
Quakers
Fifth Monarchists
Independents
Types of Religiously Inspired Texts:





Prophecy
Spiritual Autobiography
Conversion Narrative
Scriptural commentaries
General warnings, exhortations, and advice
Prophecy
Femininity legitimised prophets as they were seen as closer to God
Mack – evidence of as many as 300 female profits between 16401660
Rooted in Scripture and related to contemporary circumstances
with political aims
Examples:
 Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole’s ‘To the Priest and People of
England’ (1655),
 Grace Barwick’s ‘To all present Rulers’ (1659),
 Hester Biddles’ ‘A Warning from the Lord God’ (1676)
Dewans Morey’s ‘A True and Faithful Warning from the
Lord God, sounded through me, a poor despised earthen
vessel, unto all the Inhabitants of England, who are yet in
your sins’ (1655):
‘been made to fast, hunger and pine, to groan, weep and
cry bitterly’ for the imminent dreadful fate of the nation,
and calls on Charles II to ‘come down from his Throne and
sit in the Dust’.
Elizabeth Poole: New Model Army’s General Council of
Officers -29th December 1648 and 5th January 1649.
Spiritual Autobiographies
Lady Eleanor Douglas in sixty tracts between 1625-1652
interpreted her own life through Bible promises to God’s
nation of Zion.
Susanna Parr’s Susanna’s Apologie Against the Elders (1659)
compares sufferings of losing a child (the ‘very melting
affliction’ of bereavement) to how God suffers when a
congregation leaves the Church’s body
Subjects in the Female Tatler:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
gossip,
edification,
masquerade
talking airs,
decorum,
celebrity,
conversation/wit,
women’s beauty,
men’s beauty and fashionability,
Marriage and courtship,
the war of the Sex.
Conclusions
• Religion influences gave women the chance to become
authors, through the beliefs of the last days and
prophecy
• The formation of the state on religious principles
meant that most political writing also had a religious
dimension
• Its very difficult to separate religion and politics as
influences on women authors
Other Areas to Think About
What does the relatively brief run (1709-1710) of the
Female Talter suggest about it’s reception?
Why have female authors been ignored while male authors
rose to prominence?
Bibliography:
Feroli, Teresa, Political speaking justified: women prophets and the
English Revolution (Delaware, 2006).
Hinds, Hilary, God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical
Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester, 1996).
Hobby, Elaine, ‘Prophecy, enthusiasm and female pamphleteers’, in
N.H.Keeble (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the
English Revolution (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 162-78.
Wiseman, Susan, 'Women's Poetry' in N.H.Keeble (eds), The
Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution
(Cambridge, 2001), pp. 127-47.