Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (review)

56Quaker History Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England. By Phyllis Mack. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 1992. xv + 465 pp. Appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $40.00. To say that Phyllis Mack's Visionary Women is one of the best books on early Quakerism to date, falls short ofgiving due credit to its larger contribution. It is an important work that doubtless will influence ongoing scholarship on gender and religion. Mack's sympathy to the inner life of seventeenth-century women, her seasoned understanding of early modern society, and her sensitivity to the shifting contours of gender relationships across generations, have resulted in a clear articulation of Quaker beginnings—and the origins of the modern self. The book is divided into three parts: the period of "feminine symbolism and female prophecy" during the English Civil War; early Quakerism, 1650-1664; and the laterperiod of"visionary order," 1 664- 1 770. Mack is concerned with the Quaker contribution to the heritage of modern feminism. Hers is a cultural history ofhow words and behaviors define and redefine the social roles and conventions for women and men over time. In the initial period of female prophecy, the male metaphor of the Old Testament prophet with its masculine language gave women authority to externalize "evil" and to challenge social conventions. They did so, Mack cautions, not as modern women who feel the need to assert their individuality, but rather as premodern Christians, who believed that the selfmust be transcended or annihilated to allow the divine spirit to act in and through them. In this holy endeavor, females as "empty vessels" supposedly had some advantage over males who aspired to the same ecstatic experience. For as conventional wisdom taught, men (self-willed and organized by nature) could not so readily divest themselves oftheir rational (albeit imperfect) integrity. Yet the moral ambiguity of females, their polymorphous, porous, andpenetrable natures, was thought to make them equally receptive to evil influences—hence the paired stereotypes of the witch and the holy prophet. Mack deftly shows how the implicit disorder of female prophecy (women could only be accepted as true prophets if they literally appeared to be insane) contradicted the desire of sectarians to achieve churchly discipline in the later seventeenth century. Early Quaker women and men belonged to this self-transcendent, prophetic heritage. The originality of the Friends vis-a-vis other sects, was their attempt to balance the liminal, charismatic elements of the early movement with the strictures of communal discipline. From the beginning, Friends were more radical than other groups in allowing both sexes greater flexibility of expression and participation outside the engendered conventions ofcontemporary English society. In the process of sectarian organization, however, there were losses as well as gains. The creation ofseparate women's meetings, for example, gave women limitedpolitical and moral authority in the Society ofFriends but took away the prophets' freedom to speak and move as free agents ofa "universal social transformation" in the outside world. As women substituted their own feminine imagery for the masculine language of Old Testament prophecy in the later period of Quakerism, they also took on the new conventional roles and restraints of "bourgeois womanhood." And they lost the immediate "bodily knowledge" ofthe earlier prophets. This voluntary discipline of personal virtue and selfcontrol became the hallmark of modern individualism and it supported women's formal organization for action; first, in the women's meetings and later in the reform movements ofabolition and women's suffrage. While women benefited from the confidence inspired by the nurturing context of the women's meetings, the self-denigration in the earlier prophets remained in the guise of a judgmental (in Mack's words "repressive") conscience. The gist of Mack's argument is that women's history—as any history—is Book Reviews57 misunderstood if the simplistic terminology of "progress" and "decline" drives the historical argument. Heritage is a bag of mixed blessings. Readers will find intelligent discussions of recent historiography in this carefully researched book. Phyllis Mack's eloquent study makes a complex history more accessible to us all. Baker Library, Harvard UniversityBarbara Ritter Dailey Graduate School of Business Administration Gentlemen and Scholars: College and Community in...