Political Speaking Justified: Women Prophets and the English Revolution

In 1996 Hilary Hinds asked "Why does traditional literary history honour . . . John Bunyan and not Anna Trapnel?" (God's Englishwomen, 2). Ten years on, the question has partly been answered, yet its needs are still not fully met. Teresa Feroli's study of three women — Trapnel herself, Eleanor Davies, and Margaret Fell — goes some valuable way toward meeting these needs, while raising others. Her book shows the importance of female prophecy — explaining the present and the future in relation to scriptural authority — to the politics of revolution, especially within radical sects like the Fifth Monarchists, of which Trapnel was a member. Such groups found variable influence as well as voice: Fifth Monarchists formed part of the Barebones Parliament, but by December 1653 many felt let down by Cromwell. In January 1654, during the Whitehall examination of Vavasor Powell, Trapnel fell into a trance, dictating prophecies. The Cry of a Stone and Strange and Wonderful Newes from White-Hall were the result, followed by Report and Plea, about her subsequent imprisonment.

While Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down (1972) only lists Trapnel with other "doubters and despairers," and his John Bunyan and his Church (1988) sees her "Familistical ranting tenets" (186) as an alternative to suicide, Feroli properly moves Trapnel, Davies, and Fell from their bit parts as revolutionary extras to somewhere nearer central stage. By situating their work in relation to biblical and contemporary literary modes, Feroli establishes that their prophetic interpretation, mainly of the books of Daniel and Revelation, energized change within an atmosphere of immanence. Davies, for example, predicted that the Day of Judgement would come in "nineteene years and a halfe."

Such immediacy appears contagious: Feroli declares "love at first sight" for her subjects, and at times it feels as if her text is overcome by urgency. Some claims, if welcome, sound wishful: the women prophets "inaugurate an early phase in the rise of modern feminist consciousness" (15), and represent "the first significant group of women to instantiate the political authority of self-consciously female selves" (16). These are exhilarating assertions, but they raise doubts that are not always persuasively assuaged.

What, after all, is meant by group? And, when many women were entering public debate, why choose these particular three for detailed exploration? Reasonably enough, their dates allow Feroli to chart the beginning, middle, and end of the period, but this implies progression, leading to Mary Astell, who "translates the women prophets' insistence that female sexuality underwrites female authority into a more recognizably modern assertion of feminist concerns" (17), a claim in itself not easy to maintain.

Feroli provides close readings of particular treatises in terms of literary traditions. Sometimes texts are also situated within wider cultural contexts: she explores notions of transgression, for example, in her account of the trial of Davies's brother, the Earl of Castlehaven, for rape and sodomy, relating it to discursive association of sexual, religious, and other alleged deviance. As Feroli says, while Castlehaven "proved unable to shake the stigma of his Catholic leanings" (77), his sister insisted he stood "not for Roman Catholicism but for Protestantism, and not for sexual depravity but for the family" (83).

Such touches are essential and fleeting, for there is an occupational hazard here: studies predominantly based on one tradition open themselves to the dangers of apparent isolationism. While the book acknowledges medieval and early modern continuities, it might register more sharply both the existence of religious binaries and their opposite, exploring continuities that transcend the boundaries of reform. More extensive analysis of somatic and symbolic modes that were perhaps gendered, non-gendered, and ongoing might temper the otherwise apparently audacious claim that Trapnel's understanding of her body is necessarily new: that she is able "to theorize her body as a set of political practices" (121) and translate "her version of political representation into a vision of female authority that anticipates [a] feminist theory of state" (135).

Maybe such comments reveal this reviewer's own wishful thinking. Maybe it is unfair to criticize a book for what it does not set out to do. Instead, we might welcome Feroli's book as an important, sometimes brilliant, if on occasion over-wishful analysis, charting the waves caused by prophecies like Trapnel's Stone toward genuine, long-rippling revolutions.