Religion and Women in Britain, c. 1650–1760 ed. by Sarah Apetrei and Hannah Smith (review)

Here are ten essays about English women’s writing and experience covering the period from the English civil war and religious conflicts of the mid seventeenth century to the late eighteenth-century world of commerce and the Enlightenment. The editors’ stress is on the history of “women” as opposed to “gender,” and the complex relationship of religious women to the larger themes of British history, particularly notions of private and public as developed by Jürgen Habermas. The majority of essays present biographical studies of well-known individuals, while others consider the nature of power and authority for groups of women; these include nuns exiled under the Stuarts, Scottish lay activists, and celibate London women. (Oddly, there are no essays dealing in depth with the civil war itself.)

William Kolbrener’s imaginative essay on Mary Astell’s vision of a Protestant nunnery broadens our conception of the forms of thought and expression available to religious women by relating Astell’s thought to the theory of private and public spheres: the private sphere of female domesticity and religion and the public sphere of the coffee house and politics. Kolbrener argues that Astell’s work challenges the idea of a new, latitudinarian public sphere. Imagining the interchanges among intellectual and pious women gathered into a society (her own fantasy of a public sphere), she argues that it is only theology that makes such a community possible: “Astell’s work registers her awareness of the utopian public sphere based upon moderate rationality; both her A Serious proposal to the Ladies and her Christian Religion as Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England provide a High Church correlate, if not a corrective, to the emergent liberal ideal” (134). Indeed, Astell goes further in arguing that the conventional male public sphere is rather a site for inequality and partisanship, compared to the Christian discourse of her own vision. In Kolbrener’s view, Astell’s vision of women’s “ingenious conversation” enhanced by spirituality would ultimately improve the quality of men’s public activities and domestic comforts, both material and intellectual (139).

Another essay that challenges conventional historiography is the chapter on Scotland by Alasdair Raffe, “Female Authority and Lay Activism in Scottish Presbyterianism, 1660–1740.” Others have recognized the importance of women in Scottish Calvinism, but still presented them negatively as “silly women” who threatened church order or used passive resistance to prevent violence against the conventicles. Instead of the repressed, dour Scot of popular imagination, Raffe stresses Calvinism’s egalitarian and emotional aspects and its appeal to both men and women. “Men and women were thought equally likely to be among the elect . . . Godly men valued the prayers and conversation of their female co-religionists, and this reciprocity made for loving marriages and close friendships between men and women” (62). Moreover, relations between women and their ministers often developed into intense and pious bonds. He also emphasizes the forms of formal and informal activism engaged in by women, arguing that, while women may not have had authority on church committees, they were empowered by their activities in conventicles and lay prayer societies. He also traces the departure of lay people from the kirk as a result of informal female authority and influence. These developments are presented in depth in Raffe’s analysis of a single group, the Coat-Muir Folk, a lay prayer society dominated by women.

Sarah Hutton’s discussion of Damaris Masham is one of several biographical essays that dig deeper into the experience and cultural significance of individual women. Masham’s correspondence with famous philosophers has usually been the focus of historians’ attention, but Hutton emphasizes rather the relationship between social exchange and religious opinion, and the writer’s use of both philosophy and humor in her attempt to enter the homosocial world of philosophical debate. Both in her philosophical predilections and her devotion to letter...