Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640–1660 (review)

In this sophisticated study of pamphlet culture in the 1640s and 1650s Marcus Nevitt attempts to draw a more ‘gender-sensitive picture’ of pamphlet discourse in the period (p. 3). His contention is that whilst ‘pamphlets, and pamphlet culture more generally, have frequently been located amongst the most inclusive and democratic aspects of early modern English society’, these notions of inclusivity and democratization can conceal ‘the material and rhetorical barriers that women encountered when participating in revolutionary pamphlet culture’ (pp. 1, 5).

Nevitt’s book is divided into five chapters and proceeds, sensibly, given the topic of pamphlet culture, by detailed case study. He considers the radical Katherine Chidley’s involvement in debates over religious toleration in the 1640s, then examines the pamphlet writings of Mary Pope and Elizabeth Poole following the regicide. Nevitt goes on to look at Elizabeth Alkin (‘Parliament Joan’) as he attempts to further our understanding of the role women played in the book trade and in the production of pamphlets and newsbooks. In the final two chapters Nevitt seeks to unpack the significance of the physical (and naked) protest of an anonymous woman at a church service and the contribution made by women to the Quaker campaign against tithes.

In his first chapter, on Katherine Chidley, Nevitt looks closely at some of the under lying tropes of pamphlet discourse and the ways these could operate to exclude women from public debate. He seeks to demonstrate the kinds of voice women adopted or constructed when seeking to carve out credible rhetorical positions for them selves, or in Nevitt’s terms, in relation to controversy over religious toleration, how Chidley ‘created and manipulated rhetoric in order to negotiate the antifeminist limits placed upon women in the masculinist environment of the toleration debates’ (p. 23). In this respect Nevitt analyses a dominant and powerful trope, chivalric confrontation and challenge, a trope that presented difficulties for female authorship (particularly non-aristocratic female authorship, part of Nevitt’s focus in this book) and led to the generation and use of other strategies of debate. When engaging in print with the Presbyterian pamphleteer Thomas Edwards, Nevitt finds that Chidley’s responses are less to do with straight rebuttal than with dialogue and appeals to the reader; ‘Agency for Chidley’, writes Nevitt, is ‘fundamentally dependent on a willingness to stress the presence of others in the creative process’ (p. 45). He argues that this more open-ended and self-effacing style is characteristic of a feminine mode of intervention in a domain that proved difficult for them to enter. Nevitt goes on to show how Chidley’s writing, after being met with initial silence, was ultimately branded as transgressive, breaching established, masculine codes of engagement as well as the decorum of political and religious public debate; her pamphlets were described as ‘spitting’ in the face of Edwards, representing her intervention in this male domain as violent, crude, and even as something ‘non-verbal’ (p. 30).

Nevitt’s analysis of strategies of female rhetorical agency extends to the material realm, illustrated by his analysis of women’s engagement in the book trade. In his chapter on Elizabeth Alkin, for instance, he attempts to demonstrate how ‘some women eschewed individualistic modes of agency in their engagement with the collective material practices of newsbook publication’ (p. 86). This collective activity and the multiple agencies at work in the book trade suited non-aristocratic, female polemicists (such as Alkin) aspiring to enter into public debate.

In July 1652 the sermon of Peter Sterry (Cromwell’s chaplain) was disrupted by the entry of a naked woman into his chapel. Nevitt nicely outlines the ways in which the actions of this anonymous, socially mobile woman were represented as transgressive and disruptive. In the ‘male-authored pamphlet literature’ this woman (who produced no writing or pamphlet of her own) was ‘stripped of sane political and religious motivation’, yet...