Baptist Women's Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640–1680 by Rachel Adcock (review)

Rachel Adcock's Baptist Women's Writing in Revolutionary Culture, 1640–1660 is essential reading for students of early modern women's literature. Her study examines women, whose writings were informed by the Baptist movement, who attempted to alter either the spiritual order of their church or the political landscape of their country. Under the movement's umbrella, Adcock links the writing of women whose work has been previously studied, but not in terms of its relationship to a religious organization. She focuses on nine women—Anna Trapnel, Elizabeth Poole, Susanna Parr, Agnes Beaumont, Katherine Sutton, Sara Jones, Anne Wentworth, Jane Turner, and Deborah Huish—together with briefer entries about others, whose writing constitutes, in her view, a distinct canon.

One reason this claim has not been made previously is that the Baptists were doctrinally heterogeneous. Particular Baptists retained a Calvinist outlook and maintained that salvation was open only to the elect, while General Baptists insisted that salvation was available to all. Some Baptists accepted those who, after the national church, affirmed infant baptism, while other congregations only admitted those who as adults testified to their salvation and then were baptized, a practice known as believers' baptism. On the level of politics, some Baptists supported the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, while others became disenchanted with his rule and formed the Fifth Monarchists, a group that sought to instantiate a godly kingdom on earth with themselves in charge.

With respect to women's participation, all congregations insisted on women's spiritual equality with men and required both men and women to testify to their experience of God's redeeming love. However, congregations varied in their attitudes toward women's public speaking and prophesying in the church and the extent to which they might contribute to doctrinal debates. Adcock notes that Susanna Parr, a founding member of the Exeter church, watched with dismay as her capacity to participate in the church she had founded was undermined until she was finally excommunicated.

The variety and even locally changeable nature of Baptist attitudes toward women did not register with their peers; this is documented in Adcock's first chapter, which considers popular representations of female Baptists. Many linked the English Baptists, and the relative liberty they granted women, with the European Anabaptists, whom they identified with the Münster uprisings of the 1530s. Baptists were seen as likely fomenters of civil unrest, and their women as threatening to subvert the natural order of human relationships altogether. One satirical tract Adcock examines shows a Baptist mother, who rejected infant baptism, cutting off the head of her child to prevent the father from taking the child to be baptized. This woman upended traditional ideals of femininity as a loving mother and an obedient wife. Such popular satires of Baptists shaped the way these women organized their texts, as Adcock argues, because they needed to "respond" to these "cultural stereotypes . . . for their message to be understood" (47).

Adcock's second chapter addresses the subject of women's voices in Baptist congregations. It begins with an overview of the range of Baptist attitudes toward women's public speaking: one church permitted women to prophesy in private but not in church, another permitted women to speak only about their own experiences or needs, yet another allowed women to speak through a male member, and another still sanctioned the prophesying of veiled women. (Some Baptist women were not amused by all of this parsing of their public speech, and they did contest many of these restrictions.) As a general point, Adcock notes that all Baptists encouraged women to profess their faith, while the Fifth Monarchists were more likely to encourage women to prophesy. She observes too that women who wrote implicitly registered the ambivalence of their coreligionists toward their public words, and thus created justifications for their tracts. Sara Jones, who urged the participation of all—not just exceptional—women in church...