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

Chapter] Body and Soul: The Epistemology ofRevelation Three decades before the French Prophets made their dramatic entrance upon the British religious scene, a prophetess by the name of Jane Lead joined a small millenarian sect in London. Lead was a new breed of prophet from the fire-eaters of the Civil War era, who, convinced that the world would come to a bloody end in their own lifetime if not by their own hand, spoke with an urgency born of genuine panic. Lead was more a mystic than a red-blooded millenarian, drawing inspiration from the visionary rhapsodies of the German writer Jacob Boehme (or Behmen, as the English called him) while affecting a posture of quiet waiting for the Second Coming . Surveying the wickedness that surrounded her, she counseled patience and penitence, not immediate action. In her passivity and insistence that Christ's kingdom be renewed from within rather than imposed from without , she represents the chastened millenarian culture of the Restoration era. Escaping her own bodily infirmities into the exalted realm of the spirit, she spoke with celestial beings and translated their wisdom into human terms. She was also a bridge between two traditions of inspired behavior-the incorporated and the incorporeal. When she died in 1704, she left behind a corpus of mystical treatises that were widely read on the continent and a small but sturdy circle of adherents who would welcome the Camisard prophets in 1707 as fellow travelers. Straddling two centuries, her story allows us to see how the epistemology of revelation was reconfigured in the Anglo-American world in the century and a halfbetween the Civil War and the "age of revolution:' Lead belongs to a long, illustrious tradition of spiritual prodigies who come from nowhere to speak with a mighty voice. No one could have predicted that this unassuming widow would become the leader ofa small community of mystics whose influence would cross international borders by the 169os. Frail, and without any visible means of support after her husband's death in 1670, Lead moved into the home of her spiritual father, Dr. John Pordage, four years later. Pordage, the foremost popularizer of Jacob Boehme's theology in England, was a noted visionary in his own right who Body and Soul 97 had helped found the millenarian Philadelphian Society in the 166os after being briefly imprisoned for "blasphemy and immoral conduct" during Cromwell's Protectorate. Lead soon surpassed her mentor, a rather anemic mystic whose "pale and bloodless" revelations (in the words ofone historian) betray a certain "poverty of emotion and imagination" in comparison to the far more robust visions of his disciple.1 Together Lead and Pordage transformed the Philadelphians from a private congregation into a public society, of which Lead was the undisputed head following Pordage's death in 1681. Prophecy was never the focal point of Lead's ministry. She "always rejected the title of a prophetess when it was applied to her;' according to her son-in-law and chief scribe Francis Lee, though she did "think herself to be conducted & taught by ye Holy Spirit, as really as ye Prophets under ye old, or ye Apostles under ye New Testament did themselves." Her prophecies, however, tended to be "of a more universal nature, or indeterminate as to persons & times" than English millenarians were accustomed to, Lee explained . Rather than issue pointed calls-to-arms, Lead advised her followers to await Christ's Second Coming in their own hearts and souls-"to retire into their centre, that they might find within them the living oracle:'2 Under her leadership the society became a center of mystical theology, publishing a monthly periodical and Lead's own writings, which by the 1690s were available in Germany and Holland, earning the prophetess an international reputation as an important and original thinker in the Behmenite tradition. By 1703, however, Lead's health was deteriorating and her final publication, written in haste and poorly edited, went nearly unnoticed in Britain. When she died in August 1704 after a long and debilitating illness, she left behind a dispirited group of believers whose millenarian hopes were buried with their leader.3 Lead's visions, profuse and sensual, are at the core ofher unique theology. The full flowering of her mysticism began with a visit in April 1670 to the 1 Nils Thune, The Behmenists and the Philadelphians: A Contribution to the Study ofEnglish Mysticism in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Uppsala, 1948), pp. 155, 158. 2 Francis...

Share