Accueil
"Gathered by George Fox during the early 1650s, the Society of Friends, or Quakers, originated in the remote rural counties of Cumberland, Lancashire, and Yorkshire. Their missionaries moved south to evangelize London and the southern counties in 1654 and then traveled even farther afield, preaching to audiences in New England, the Atlantic colonies, the Caribbean, even to Catholics and Moslems on the island of Malta and in Turkey. The Quakers were only one of many such groups to appear during the two decades of the English Civil War and Interregnum. Yet they were by far the most successful, attracting some sixty thousand members by 1660, the year King Charles II was restored to the throne. The Quakers were also the most receptive to the spiritual authority of women. Of the nearly three hundred visionary women who wrote and prophesied during that early period, over two hundred belonged to the Society of Friends.
During the movement's first decades, Quakers urged and enacted their experience of salvation in a highly public arenain streets, marketplaces, churches, fields, and prisonsand they did this through flamboyant public gestures: symbolic signs, charismatic preaching, and martyrdom. By the final years of the century, after decades of systematic persecution by the restored monarchical government, Quakers were attempting to become part of the social and political mainstream. Their public behavior, now subjected to the moral discipline of recognized elders and ministers, became sober and restrained. Sermons and published writings, scrutinized by the Quakers' own Morning Meeting for censorship, took the form of calls for unity and renewed self-discipline rather than imprecations against society or predictions of God's reward or vengeance. Women as prophets retired behind the closed doors of the meeting house, while larger, centralized meetings for business were attended only by men."
"Quaker women prophets were never simply vessels of charismatic energy. On the contrary, they organized a system of charity, a communications network, care of prisoners, safe houses, and negotiations with magistrates, all of which distinguished Quakers from other more truly anarchic groups and helped to keep the movement alive through decades of persecution. Indeed, women who became prophets, Quaker and non-Quaker, turn out to be nothing more nor less than good citizens. We will find them paying taxes, raising families, manufacturing stockings, holding meetings, testifying in court, maintaining their farms and shops, and carrying their spinning wheels into prison. Their experiences suggest that models of liminality and structure are most meaningful when we restrict our field of vision to strictly formal structures and modes of authority; yet it was precisely because women had no formal authority as ordained ministers or magistrates that their activities were so effective in shaping and sustaining the Quakers' charismatic movement in its formative years.
The prophets of the Civil War period, many of them laborers, farmers, or artisans, understood their condemnation of an engorged clergy and aristocracy as both spiritual and social protest. And since women were commonly identified with the poor and deprived, both in Christian tradition and in popular and legal language, one would expect that those radical movements that championed the poor and deprived would also champion the increased authority of women. Yet we will see that those sects that were most radical in challenging traditional social and economic relationships were least likely to be attentive to the needs and rights of oppressed people who were female. Conversely, those women who were most conscious of their authority as females, Quaker and non-Quaker, were also those middle and upper class women who had the least affinity with the plight of the laboring classes. This suggests that there may have been at least two kinds of radicalism in seventeenth-century England and that they were actually at odds."
"Quaker women portrayed their conversions as less dramatic reversals of status and as a less devastating sacrifice of all ties to home, all hope of parental love, than men did. Subsequently, women prophets were less insistent on their absolute freedom to separate from family and to travel and preach wherever the spirit might lead them. The language and behavior of visionary women, Quaker and non-Quaker, were also less emotional, less pretentious, and less unbalanced than those of men."
"Women as prophets enjoyed virtually the only taste of public authority they would ever know. Some of them used that authority to write and publish their own works, to organize separate women's meetings, or to challenge the greater authority of the male leaders. Yet the assumption that visionary women were pursuing a covert strategy of self-assertion ignores the very real problem of agency for seventeenth-century religious actors. For the ground of women's authority as spiritual leaders was their achievement of complete self-transcendence, surely a very different subjective experience from that of the modern social activist or career woman. This suggests not that women as prophets were devoid of personal ambition but that they had a different, more complex view of the self and of the meaning of personal success.
It appears, in short, that the historian's attentiveness to the issue of gender is likely to raise more questions than it answers. It suggests that issues of class and gender have intersected in very different ways at different historical moments, forcing us to broaden our definition of the term "radical."."
"In hundreds of published tracts, private letters, accounts of dreams, and autobiographical journals, Quakers and others recorded their attempts to apply the acid of self-criticism, fasting, and incessant prayer to their own bodies and personalities; to dissolve the habits, passions, gestures, and little secret sins that made them who they were; to expose themselves as creatures without status, without intelligence, without gender; to become blank. "I am as a white paper book without any line or sentence," wrote one Friend.
What distinguished Quakers and others from the modern poststructuralist, of course, was their belief that beneath the individual self, which they called "the flesh," was an irreducible, eternal essence, which they called "the soul." "The flesh," wrote the Welsh Puritan Morgan Llwyd,
is everything under the sun that is outside the inner man. Whatever is transient and not eternalthat is flesh. Man's senses are flesh, as well as the pleasures of the world. Playfulness in old and young is flesh. . . . Time and all that is limited by it is flesh. . . . The honour of great men and the snobbishness of small men are flesh. Flesh is all that the natural man can see, and hear, and get, and absorb.
The woman or man who had erased the self, or flesh, and exposed the soulthat piece of God, as Quakers thoughtwas believed to speak a new, authentic language."
"the thrust of the visionary's energy was to make something universal of her personal experience, to identify her own particular insights with those expressed by biblical figures or the members of a religious congregation. The formal salutations and biblical paraphrases in private letters and journals are therefore as revealing to the historian as are the shreds of personal information they contain. The visionary's sense of enhanced perception was also intensely physical. Her negation of her material body did not open the way to the sensational, out-of-the-body experiences of the modern occultist nor to the extreme self-loathing of the medieval ascetic. Rather, she felt her body to be flooded by a divine essence that she experienced variously as a loss of control (as in the Quakers' shaking or quaking) or as the mystic's rush of energy streaming from inside the self. Finally, the visionary's experience was profoundly social. Her enlightened condition did not imply detachment from the world but connectedness with humanity and nature: a "unity with the creation," as George Fox said. Society made individuals; salvation made bonding.
Each of these elements may be illustrated by a single religious text, the diary of Arm Bathurst, a respectable, middle-aged widow and a member of the mystical Philadelphian Society, which was active in London during the 1690s. In 1679 Bathurst recorded a self-induced vision:
I desired that one of my children might come up, and she came a little after: and then another of them, . . . then all my children one after another: and as they came up, I remembered two little children, which died one at fourteen weeks, the other at fourteen days' end, and immediately as soon as I began to desire it, they came like two bright sparks.
The text tells us that, contrary to the assumption of many historians, a woman might cherish the memory of her dead children even when she lost them as infants. It also tells us what a religious woman might make of that feeling. In a vision recorded four months later, Bathurst experienced intense physical ecstasy, feeling the locus of her own spiritual power in her womb. ''Then I feared not the Enemy: and I had a light that shined from my stomach like a sun. . . . This was the first time I received, or knew I had, the flame." Two months afterward, on a night when she was visited by Christ and God the Father, "then they opened my stomach. . . . and went into my stomach, and closed it up again. . . . O the joy! that I had gotten my God, my saviour and redeemer, sitting in me, as on a throne of refiner's fire." In yet another vision eight years later, Bathurst extended her personal experience to encompass her wider spiritual community, becoming an intercessor for several male and female friends, who brought their own dead children to her to suckle and to receive the benefit of her prayers."
"The earliest Quakers were radical and democratic not only because they appreciated the particular qualities of women as helpmeets or "mothers in Israel" but because they perceived the attributes of men and women to be fluid and interchangeable. The letters and visionary texts written by the first female prophets are often indistinguishable from those written by men. Indeed, a few women prophets actually announced to their audiences that they were men; having transcended the social identities that dictated that they remain subject to their fathers and husbands, they claimed the right, with other genderless souls, to stand and speak at the very altar of the church and before the very doors of Parliament. This was a remarkably creative act, yet it did not liberate women from the constraints of a traditional gendered discourse. As prophets seeking to reinterpret rather than deny their own religious heritage, as public actors attempting to enlighten their audiences rather than simply attack them, women used not an unfamiliar, invented language but a traditional male language. Moreover, it is unlikely that anyone listening to those early prophets would have been moved to reevaluate negative female symbols and stereotypes; on the contrary, women as prophets relied on those very symbols (the Anglican priest as the "whore of Babylon," the luxurious trappings of the church as "menstrous rags") in order to discredit their antagonists.
By contrast, Quaker women ministers of the second generation based their public authority not only on their conviction of being "in the light" but on their competence and integrity as daughters, as mothers, and as heads of families. Their written texts are easily distinguishable from those of male Friends. Rather than emphasize the role of reason in the activities of worship and meditation, as male writers now did, women stressed the principles of universal love and personal virtue, principles they frequently depicted in mystical, highly feminine imagery. Their most intense spiritual experiences were attained not in the great open-air gatherings of earlier days but within the closed circles of their own women's meetings. The price women paid for this new autonomy was a dilution of the physical intensity of their earlier ecstatic experiences and a greater separation from those women who did not share their resources or family statuses. Their dignity as women was linked not only to a new appreciation of "feminine" qualities but to an emphasis on the specifically bourgeois qualities of moderation, competence in business and in the home, and personal self-control."
"Lady Eleanor Davies, whose lifetime saw the death of Queen Elizabeth and the beheading of King Charles I, was the wealthy daughter of an earl, wife of the attorney general for Ireland, mistress of a great estate, and the mother of two children; she was also a prophet. One morning in 1625, she was awakened in the gallery of her manor house in Berkshire by the voice of the prophet Daniel, "speaking as through a trumpet." "Nineteen years and a half to the Judgment," intoned the voice, "and you as the meek Virgin." From that moment until her death twenty-seven years later, Lady Eleanor never looked back.
Noting that her own maiden name of Audeley lent itself to a highly significant anagram, "Eleanor Audelie: reveale o Daniel," she proceeded to address the Archbishop of Canterbury with a written statement of advice on international politics ["A Warning to the Dragon and All His Angels", 1625]. He was unimpressed and returned it to her husband, who threw it into the fire. She retaliated by predicting that Sir Davies would die within three years, which he did, in just half that time (in 1626), after she began wearing mourning for him at dinner.
Emboldened by this apparent vindication of her powers, she began circulating about the court, where her advice was requested by the royal family on matters relating to the queen's fertility. She soon acquired a national reputation as a prophet, her reputation further enhanced by her correct prediction of the death in 1628 of the Duke of Buckingham.
Lady Eleanor's troubles began when she decided to publish her political writings. In 1633, on the pretext of accompanying her husband to a continental spa, she traveled to Holland, where she brought out a tract, published at her own expense, comparing King Charles I to the biblical tyrant Belshazzar. She was promptly arrested, fined the enormous sum of three thousand pounds (which was never paid), and imprisoned for two years. The magistrates also burned her books, judging that she was dangerous because she had presumed to penetrate arcane biblical texts, "which much unbeseemed her sex," and because she had acquired the reputation of a "cunning woman" among the common people. (One magistrate, clearly convinced she was insane, invented a new anagram, "Dame Eleanor Davies: never soe mad a ladie," which titillated the courtroom.) Lady Eleanor responded by imposing her own sentence on Archbishop Laud, a prediction of his death within the month. Confined in the gatehouse of Westminster, she petitioned the House of Commons for better treatment, demanded a formal apology from King Charles, and during a full moon received a visit from an angel, who rested on her bed for an hour and left a scent from his glove, ''all oiled with ambergreece."
She was released from prison in 1635, and some months later she appeared in a church in Lichfield, sat in the bishop's throne, declared herself primate and metropolitan, and poured a kettle full of hot tar and wheat paste on the church hangings, calling it "holy water." This time (1637) she was condemned as a lunatic and committed to the asylum of Bedlam, whose inmates were visited by sightseers on weekend excursions.
Released from Bedlam (and another imprisonment in the tower) in 1639, Lady Eleanor spent the rest of her life composing apocalyptic, antigovernment tracts that were handed personally to members of Parliament, which she may have visited almost daily during the 1640s. In 1639 she predicted that London would be destroyed by fire, and fires shortly broke out. In 1645 Archbishop Laud was executed, which confirmed, for her, the approaching end of the nineteen-and-a-half years before the Last Judgment. When Charles I was executed in 1649, yet another of her prophecies come true, her reputation revived, and she acquired a number of ardent disciples, one of whom wrote flowery introductions to her works. Her last prediction was of a second flood, to occur in 1656, but she did not live to see whether she had been right. Lady Eleanor died in 1652 and was buried with honor in the family chapel."
"When a seventeenth-century Englishman was confronted by the shocking spectacle of a woman who prophesied in public, what did he see and hear? "A woman clothed with the sun," "a base slut," ''a Jezebel," "a Jesuit," "a silly old woman," "a goat rough and hairy," "a woman to make your heart to tremble," "an old trot." There was enormous variation in the tone of contemporary responses to the speech and writing of visionary women, from the satirical sniping of playwrights like Ben Jonson and Thomas Heywood and the authors of astrological almanacs, to the ponderous introspection of Puritan spiritual treatises, to the purple prose of some mystical philosophers. There was also great variation in the reaction of these observers toward individual women, from sycophantic veneration, to cynical amusement, to outright sadism.
Surely one of the most bizarre elements of Lady Eleanor's very bizarre story is the fluidity of her public identitythe ease and rapidity with which contemporaries changed their perceptions of her from prophet, to witch, to lunatic, to prophet again. Part of the reason for this volatility must lie with Lady Eleanor's own extremely volatile personality [...]
A more fundamental reason for the fluidity of Lady Eleanor's public persona lies not in the temperament of the real woman, nor in those of the individuals around her, but in the images and stereotypes about women that pervaded the culture in which she lived and that helped to mold that temperament into a shape her audiences understood. "As with language," writes historian Carlo Ginzburg, "culture offers to the individual a horizon of latent possibilities a flexible and invisible cage in which he can exercise his own conditional liberty." The following two chapters describe the cage of symbols and stereotypes that conditioned the public expression of visionary women during the period of the English Civil War, while chapter 3 describes the prophets of the 1640s from the perspective of the visionary herself."
"Images of womanhood have always been a fundamental element of Christian tradition. We are all acquainted with the figures of Eve and the Virgin Mary and with the symbol of the church as the bride of Christ. Protestants in seventeenth-century England and America had jettisoned the traditional feminine cults of Mary and the saints, but the traditional feminine qualities of humility, receptivity, and emotionalism remained appropriate to express their spiritual values. When they spoke of the absolute nullity of human virtue in relation to divine love and judgment, that human nullity or spiritual nakedness was often seen as feminine. Thus, the Puritan Thomas Shephard equated the vanity of human goodness with female corruption."
"The existential experiences of sin and salvation were also expressed in gendered imagery. In sermons, tracts, and spiritual diaries, the damned soul was a selfish whore or a monster mother or a sow sprawling in the mud with her piglets, while the soul that was saved was a nursing mother or a bride eager for intimate union with the bridegroom. God was not only a father and husband; he was a hen spreading her wings over her baby chicks, and his words were milk, sucked in by believers as they meditated on their Bibles or the minister's sermon."
"To a seventeenth-century Englishman, an image or metaphor of womanhood meant both less and more than it does to the modern reader. Less, because the Renaissance was an age of paradox, when the contemplation of truth and beauty in opposites was a central theme of rhetorical expression. Thus, an exposition of the virtues and vices of Mary and Eve might well have been intended as an intellectual or aesthetic exercise, more akin to Clément Marot's matched poems "The Beautiful Breast" and "The Ugly Breast" than to serious polemic ; literary misogynists were not ipso facto woman haters. More, because the enterprise of many seventeenth-century writers went far beyond that of the mere poet or scholar. They were seekers after God's own face."
"Many radical Protestants, who had long denied the validity of consubstantiation or the "real presence" in the sense Luther gave the terms, believed, nevertheless, in the real appearance or presence of God in human individuals and events. And this real presence was not tied to the ritual of a church or the hierarchy of a priesthood. It permeated the secret consciousness of the devout, illiterate worshiper as well as the public discourse of the educated minister. Thus, the prophet's statement, "I am Daniel," was not intended to be understood merely as descriptive metaphor ("I am [like] Daniel"), any more than the consecrated wafer was to be seen as bearing a mere resemblance or remembrance of God's flesh. It might mean, as it did for Quakers, that God inhabited the new prophet in exactly the same way as the biblical Daniel had been inhabited. It might even mean, as it did for followers of the prophet Lodowijk Muggleton, that their leader was to be seen as a physical reincarnation of a concrete biblical figure.
Of course an observer might conclude, as some did of Lady Eleanor, that a statement like "I am Daniel" was either misguided or insane. In most cases, however, critics rejected the visionary not because they denied the theoretical possibility of divine intervention in human history but because they believed either that the age of prophecy had ended with the coming of Christ or that the individual confronting them was an inappropriate vehicle for God's voice. Likewise, sceptics denigrated witchcraft not because they found the notion of diabolical possession intrinsically ridiculous; what was ridiculous was the notion that Satan's magisterial presence would actually become manifest through the persona of a silly old woman. Thus, a parliamentary paper of 1645 included an editorial belittling the importance of withchcraft accusations: "But whence is it that devils should choose to be conversant with silly women that know not their right hands from their left, is the great wonder." The physician Reginald Scot stated as the purpose of his scientific treatise against withchcraft practices, "first, that the glory and power of God be not so abridged and abased, as to be thrust into the hand or lip of a lewd old woman; whereby the work of the Creator should be attributed to the power of creature."."
"Seventeenth-century Protestants were far removed, in their own estimation, from those superstitious Catholics who knelt before the encased body parts of saints as containers of powerful heavenly distillations or from the nuns and monks who dissected holy corpses oozing aromatic sap, discovering minute crosses or thorns embedded in the depths of the gall bladder, liver, or heart. Yet Puritans and Anglicans did hold to the allied belief that the individual's spiritual state was reflected in the texture, moisture, and aroma of his or her own flesh. The condition of the body was thus a sign, visible both to oneself and to others, of the spiritual condition of the soul beneath the skin. In a letter to his friend Anne Conway, the Cambridge Platonist Henry More conjectured that a certain patient was cured neither by the power of the devil nor by miracle,
but by a power partly natural and partly devotional . . . [because] the blood and spirits of this party [i.e., the healer] is become sanitive and healing, by long temperance and devotion . . . nature being so hugely advanced and perfectly concocted, that his blood and spirits are a true elixir, and therefore he laying his hand upon diseased persons, his spirits run out of his own body into the party diseased, and actuate and purify the blood and spirits of the diseased party, which I conceive they do with more efficacy, if he add devotion to his laying on of his hands, for that sets his spirits afloat the more copiously and animates them the more strongly.
Far from posing a clear dichotomy between mind and body, seventeenth-century men and women felt certain kinds of knowledge. They described their own spirituality not as an ethereal, disembodied state but as polymorphous, subterranean energy, more akin to the power Freud ascribed to sex than it was to the diluted piety of an eighteenth-century pillar of the church. Thus, the metaphor of woman as vessel conveyed a literal as well as a literary meaning, for the woman's body was understood to be a potentially explosive device, the carrier of an inflammable spiritual essence. But whereas the visionary's protean energy had been transmuted by the real presence of God into pure spiritual ecstasy, the energy of the witch had been transmuted by Satanic influence into pure bestial malice or lust. "Nature hath put a fierceness into the female because of the impotency thereof," wrote the Puritan Daniel Rogers, "therefore the she bear [and] the lioness, are the most raging, and cruel. But grace makes that natural impotency of the woman, turn impotency for God."."
"Contemporary beliefs about the fluidity of the feminine archetype derived from the more general belief, expressed in the writings of philosophers, doctors, playwrights, and ministers as well as in the pamphlets and broadsides of astrologers and religious sectarians, in the fluidity or mutability of real women. The image of the female personality that emerges from these various genres of popular and learned culture might best be described as amphibious. As civilized beingson land, so to speakwomen were portrayed as members of a particular class and upholders of cultural values, just as men were. Yet women were also portrayed as liminal creatures inhabiting a no-man's-land of natural and spiritual forces that had nothing to do with culture. Whereas a man's identity was chiefly determined by his place in the social hierarchy, which was part of a universal hierarchy, or Chain of Being, a woman's nature was thought to have no fixed identity or place. Outwardly ordinary, a woman was thought to have an inner essence or imagination that could careen over the widest emotional and spiritual landscape, all the way to a union with God and an identification with cosmic wisdom or, in the other spiritual direction, to suicidal insanity or possession by demons. As [Tertullian, De cultu feminarum] put it, "Women are in churches, saints: abroad, angels: at home, devils: at windows, sirens: at doors, [mag]pies: and in gardens, goats."."
"While a woman's breeding and deportment were crucial in reflecting and transmitting the status of her family, underneath her clothes and manners a middle or upper class woman was often portrayed as having potentially more in common with a peasant woman or a prostitute than with the men in her own household. Thus, the author of Poor Robin's Almanac would remark of the Quakers, "These zealous people make no distinction of persons, . . . yet though Joan be as good as my Lady in the dark, Madam by daylight deserves some reverance."
It is not surprising that contemporaries tended to define the male character in terms of the individual's position in the class structure, while women were defined in terms of underlying, occult qualities that were irrelevant to their social position. In their own everyday experience, these writers could not help but observe that virtually every sort of womanfrom the aristocrat practicing surgery or dispensing medicines on her estate, to the local white witch or midwife, to the "searchers" (poor old women hired to examine dead bodies in times of plague)engaged in healing, assisted in childbirth, and comforted the dying, activities that were always awesome, frequently terrifying, and often involved the use of magic. Indeed, black magic was sometimes the sole recourse of women attempting to mitigate the brutality of their domestic environment. After John Spinkes, a London physician, punched his wife Elizabeth in the face, beat her with a horse whip, and locked her up in a lunatic asylum in order to force her to yield up part of her estate, she conspired with a local fortune teller to bewitch him, using a potion made of his urine, a cat's heart, and bull's blood stuck with pins."
" "It is proper," observed one treatise on wifely duty, "that not only arms but indeed also the speech of women never be made public; for the speech of a noble woman can be no less dangerous than the nakedness of the limbs." This conflating of the acts of speech, greed, and sex was reflected in the negative image of the female religious zealot as a prostitute sprawled on her back."
"The readers who attempted to decipher the arcane prophecies of Eleanor Davies lived in at least two mental worlds, each with its own set of assumptions about the symbolic associations of the words "male" and "female" and about the qualities and behavior appropriate to real men and women. The kind of power associated with the social and political sphere, which was at least formally dominated by men, was power exercised in daylight: self-willed, rational, organized, and generally obvious. The kind of power associated with the spiritual realm, in which women often predominated, was, we have seen, power of a very different sort. Spiritual power infused and energized the body, it was polymorphous and morally ambiguous, either godly or demonic.
The polarity of reason and spirituality should not be taken to reflect a difference between mind and body or between secular society and religion. The opposition was rather between the world of culture, or the ideally static and hierarchical social order, and that of a natural universe pulsating with occult spiritual forces."
"The witch Margaret Johnson of Lancashire, whose confession was recorded in 1634, described her seduction thusly: While she sat at home in a mood of anger and depression, the devil appeared to her in the shape of a man in a black silk suit, offering to supply all her wants in exchange for her soul and to give her the power to kill man or beast whenever she desired. She agreed, and he defiled her by an act of "wicked uncleanness." Later she attended a sabbat at which she saw some witches grander than the rest who had no breasts at all but sharp bones for the devil to prick and raise blood, fashioning a pap or dug from which he might suck. (Margaret Johnson and three other witches were brought to London and examined by five physicians and ten female obstetricians, acting under the direction of William Harvey, discoverer of the circulation of the blood. They found "two things which might be called teats" on her body.)."
"During the Civil War period, male sectarian prophets were also viewed as Faust figures, prideful and ambitious seekers after forbidden knowledge and authority, while female sectarians were frequently depicted as witch figures, animalistic creatures who were never seen to think but whose bodies secreted polluted substances as false notions. One diatribe against the Brownist sect described a meeting similar to a witches' sabbat and a witty young gentlewoman who was seduced by the minister."
"Perhaps more than any other arena of social activity, the practice of religion offered the individual temporary liberation from rigid gender roles, for while the Protestant church was governed, analyzed, and defended by men, these same men allowed themselves a high degree of feminine expressiveness when, as worshipers, they assumed the role of loving spouse and supplicant before a masculine God. So the Leveler leader John Lilburne affirmed, "and this I counted my wedding day in which I was married to the Lord Jesus Christ; for now I know he loves me in that he bestowed so rich apparel this day upon me." Conversely, women, who kept an enforced silence in matters of secular politics, might find an audience of both men and women when they composed treatises on Christian piety or on their own spiritual travail, Thus, religious practice offered the individual moments of social as well as spiritual liberation, allowing the worshiper to express a sensibility and authority that was largely inaccessible to him or her in secular life. It was therefore a potentially dangerous practice , for it sanctioned a fluidity of self-perception that, if allowed to interfere with the ordered functioning of the hierarchies of state, church, and family, might render those hierarchies effectively null and void."
"In the relatively stable years of the Elizabethan period, it was still possible to distinguish holy behavior, or sanctity, from criminal behavior, or diabolism, by reference to the political and social hierarchies. The queen's reputed ability to heal by touch did not place her in the same social or spiritual category as the village cunning woman, although both had occult curative powers. The aristocratic lady's function as a dispenser of herbal medicines on her estate did not quite place her in the same category as the local white witch, although their activities were also similar. [...] The politics of reconciliation and its accompanying feminine association reached its apogee under Queen Elizabeth, when there evolved a highly sophisticated tradition of positive feminine symbolism around the figure of the queen and her coterie of alchemists and astrologers. Elizabeth was compared to the biblical prophet Deborah, Judith, Esther, the queen of Sheba, and the Virgin Mary."
"This benign attitude toward the arts of the magician or natural philosopher, and toward the feminine imagery of Elizabethan pageantry and literature, became less tenable in the society of prerevolutionary England, where women in general were perceived as more visible and more aggressive than before and where fears about increasing social dislocation were frequently articulated as criticism of women's independence and their co-optation of the dress and behavior normally reserved for men.15 One of those most disturbed about women's new assertiveness and the blurring of gender boundaries was the eminent witch hunter King James I. In a letter of 1620, one London gentleman reported:
Yesterday the bishop of London called together all his clergy about this town, and told them he had express commandment from the King to will them to inveigh vehemently against the insolency of our women, and their wearing of broad brimmed hats, pointed doublets, their hair cut short or shorn, and some of them stilettos or poniards . . . adding with all that if pulpit admonitions will not reform them he would proceed by another course ; the truth is the world is very much out of order.
Two weeks later he reported an escalation of misogynist propaganda:
Our pulpits ring continually of the insolence and impudence of women, and to help the matter forward the players have likewise taken to task, and so too the ballads and ballad-singers, so that they can come nowhere but their ears tingle; and if all this will not serve, the King threatens to fall upon their husbands, parents or friends that have or should have power over them, and make them pay for it.
Popular discussion of women's cross dressing culminated in the publication in 1620 of two pamphlets, Hic Mulier: Or, The Man-Woman and a humorous rejoinder, Haec-Vir: Or The Womanish-Man, which defended women's rights to exhibit the masculine virtues of courage and self-control as well as masculine dress [...]
Moll Cutpurse, the villainous heroine of one popular London play, was sympathetically modeled on a real brawling, singing, smoking, bawdy woman named Mary Frith, who dressed as a man and dealt in stolen goods."
"Not only did numbers of women engage in cross-dressing and other flamboyant or underworld activities; other, quite ordinary women (and men) loudly objected to a sermon by William Gouge, in which he approved of the law denying a married woman the right to own property. "I remember," Gouge later wrote, "that when these Domestical Duties were first uttered out of the pulpit, much exception was taken against the application of a wife's subjection to the restraining of her from disposing the common goods of the family without, or against her husband's consent." He also marveled at the fact that "many wives . . . think themselves every way as good as their husbands, and no way inferior to them."
"In 1649, a group of Leveler women protested the imprisonment of their men, insisting that they themselves were "assured of their creation in the image of God, and of an interest in Christ equal unto men, as also of a proportionable share in the freedoms of this commonwealth." There is also evidence that women's economic activities in midwifery, dairy farming, and small trades were becoming more visible in some areas of the country and that, in those very areas, rituals expressing sexual hostility were more prominent."
""All sorts of people dreamed of an utopia and infinite liberty," lamented one Royalist, "especially in matters of religion."."
"It was during the reign of King James I that the royal power authorized examinations for the discovery of witches' marks on the body, setting a precedent for the trials of the Civil War period. Witchcraft executions, formerly concentrated in London and adjacent counties, now occurred in East Anglia, the Midlands, and the remote counties of Yorkshire and Lancashire and later in Durham, Wales, and Cheshire."
"All enemies of the propertied classes and of the religious establishment, both male and female, were portrayed symbolically as women (most notably the Whore of Babylon), while actual female visionaries were portrayed as tramps, in both the sexual and economic sense."
-Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women. Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England, University of California Press, 1995.
