In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640-1660
  • Rachel J. Trubowitz
Marcus Nevitt . Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640–1660. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006. xiv + 218 pp. index. illus. bibl. $89.95. ISBN: 0–7546–4115–5.

Since the 1980s, the theory of separate spheres has served as a governing paradigm for feminist scholarship on early modern English literature and culture. The theory posits that during the early modern period the hitherto unified realms of public and private experience split into two distinct, but unequally valued, gendered domains: the marginal female sphere of domesticity, and the central male sphere of politics and commerce. Based on this theory, scholars argued during the first wave of feminism that the English Renaissance privileged masculine attributes like reason, aggression, and authoritarianism and devalued such female traits as tenderness, gentleness, and emotion. Since the early 1990s, second-wave feminist scholars have modified the separate-spheres narrative by reviewing its gendered binaries through a variety of larger cultural lenses: emergent capitalism, consumerism, and colonization, among others. Most recently, Judith Butler has argued that, like it or not, women and other oppressed groups derive their agency from "precisely the power [they] oppose" (Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection [1997], cited in Nevitt, 6). Butler's more ambiguous formulation of women's agency is the starting point for Marcus Nevitt's remarkable study of seventeenth-century women prophets, pamphleteers, and petitioners. Proving that women's silence is not always a response to repression and that female self-negation can be a politically purposeful rhetorical strategy, Nevitt takes the study of Civil War women writers beyond the theory of separate spheres.

In chapter 1, Nevitt argues that the sometime Leveller Katherine Chidley effaces herself in her pamphlet disputes with the conservative Presbyterian divine Thomas Edwards as a way to demonstrate that her arguments for religious toleration are not hers alone: that her views are shared by many others, whose collective voices she echoes. What appears to be self-abnegation is, in fact, a rhetorical strategy for registering "the multiple agencies required to make pamphlet dialogue and (as importantly) religious toleration work" (45). Nevitt's fascinating discussion of Chidley lays the groundwork for his excellent final chapter on "Women's Agency in Early Modern Tithe Dispute." Nevitt is especially interested in These Several Papers, a printed pamphlet that gathers the signatures of 7,000 women in support of the Quaker anti-tithe position. The pamphlet, he argues, "deserves a prominent place in the histories of early modern women's writing, revolutionary pamphlet culture, and popular protest because of the way it foregrounds the combined material traces of associative agency" (170). Rather than "individualistic [male] modes of authorship," it stresses "the communality and collectivity of female deliberation on the institution of tithes" (171).

One of Nevitt's most innovative contributions to scholarship on early modern women, then, is to recognize seventeenth-century female agency as something both textual and extra-textual: "the agency of non-aristocratic women in the mid-seventeenth century had a material as well as a rhetorical dimension" (179). This [End Page 674] important insight is demonstrated especially well in his lively chapter on "Clothing the Naked Woman." Nevitt focuses on the political and cultural fallout that occurred when, on 17 July 1652, an anonymous, thirty-year-old woman took off her clothes during the middle of Peter Sterry's (Oliver Cromwell's chaplain) Sunday morning sermon. She cried, "Resurrection I am ready for thee," before she was taken into custody by the authorities, but she somehow managed to escape without any punishment. The incident at first acquired incredible notoriety until the Scottish minister David Brown, in his twenty-two-page pamphlet The Naked Woman, downplayed the shock value of the woman's stripping — by attributing her scandalous actions to madness or satanic possession — and shifted the focus to Chaplain Sterry's unforgivable failure to speak out against her flagrant violation of social decorum and the Pauline injunction that women should keep silent in churches. Such unmanliness, if left unchecked, might usher in a new world turned upside...

pdf

Share