Gender and Faith in the Early Modern British World

Gender and Faith in the Early Modern British World Patrida Crawford. Women and Religion in England 1500-1720. London: Routledge, 1993. χ + 268 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-415-01696-7. Phyllis Mack. Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. xni + 465 pp. ISBN 0-520-07845-1 (cl). Esther S. Cope. Handmaid of the Holy Spirit: Dame Eleanor Davies, Never Soe Mad a Ladie. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. xvii + 247 pp.; iU. ISBN 0-472-10303-2 (d). Amanda Porterfield. Female Piety in Puritan New England: The Emergence of Religious Humanism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.207 pp. ISBN 0-19-506821-1 (cl). Christine Kooi The scope of Reformation studies and of early modem European religious history has been broadened in recent years by a new and often provocative focus on problems and issues of gender. The Reformation was one of the most important events in the social history of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and its impact and effects on aU segments of European society, female and male, ought to be examined and evaluated. A question implidt in all four books reviewed here is whether religion (or reUgious change) in the early modern period was experienced differently by women and men. Specifically, these works consider various problems of women and religion in the Tudor-Stuart British world (which includes, by extension, New England). One is a general survey of the field and the other three examine particular cases of female reUgiosity. Patrida Crawford's synthesis, Women and Religion in England 15001720 , will be useful to spedalist and nonspeciatist alike. It provides a valuable introdudion for the general reader and a helpful reference for the student of the period. The book's four parts give a roughly chronological account of the topic. Part One describes the sixteenth-century Reformation and the attendant rise of Puritanism until the outbreak of the Engfish Revolution in 1640. Part Two discusses women's spirituaUty and piety during the era as a whole. Part Three assesses women and radical reUgion during the revolutionary upheavals between 1640 and 1660, and the fourth section examines the era of restoration and toleration after 1660. The basic theme uniting aU of these separate treatments is what Crawford terms women's "apprehensions of God," that is, what early modern EngUsh women beUeved about God and how they aded on those beUefs. Crawford © 1995 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 7 No. 3 (Fall) 1995 Book Review: Christine Kooi 147 astutely points out the basic paradox of Christianity for these women: it could on the one hand reinforce traditional patriarchal society and gender hierarchy, yet on the other hand it could offer them opportunities to transcend normative social structures. For women, therefore, reUgion could act potentiaUy as an agent either of repression or of tiberation. In the tumultuous reUgious history of Tudor-Stuart England, which presented a denominational spectrum from Recusant to Ranter, both possibilities could be realized. To be sure, Tudor-Stuart Christianity (in most of its manifestations) generaUy upheld and justified traditional assumptions about gender differences and sexual roles, which emphasized women's subordination to men. Crawford's introduction condsely summarizes common cultural beliefs and stereotypes (medical and psychological) about women. Through scripture and ecclesiastical tradition, Christianity shaped these beUefs and was in turn influenced by them. Gendered language permeated reUgious discourse: the true church was the chaste "bride of Christ"; the false church was "the whore." God was masculine (although PhylUs Mack qualifies this generalization by suggesting that Quakers, both male and female, sometimes described God in maternal metaphors as a nourisher of the soul). This extended analogy of God as Father, Christ as Son, and church as Bride both buttressed and reflected traditional domestic family arrangements. Engtish Cathotics, AngUcans, Puritans, and Dissenters alike expected women's reUgious role to be private and famUial, whüe men occupied the public and political sphere. Neverthdess, Crawford cautiously concludes that women as a sex advanced in this era, espedaUy during the political and sedarian unrest of the 1640s and 1650s. In the late sixteenth century, the burgeoning Puritan movement attraded many female supporters, and...