Religion and Women in Britain, c. 1660–1760 ed. Sarah Apetrei and Hannah Smith (review)

This collection brings women's voices to the fore in the history of religion in early modern Britain. Some of the women discussed in this volume use their "inside voices": they are polite and considerate, they worship soberly and respectfully, and they pray quietly in their closets. Other women are shouting at the top of their lungs, out on the streets, denouncing their persecutors and bitterly complaining about their husbands. The first group includes a number of Anglicans, such as Mary II, Damaris Masham, and Catherine Talbot; the second includes the Scottish Coat-Muir Folk, the sisters Grisell and Mary Spritt, and the English Particular Baptist Anne Wentworth. Most readers will be left in no doubt that women's practical and theoretical contributions to religious change in this period were too vital—too much an integral part of the whole "conversation"—to be ignored by historians any longer.

Nevertheless, some readers might be left wondering if this polyphony of voices also undermines the basic organizing principle of the volume: its focus on women and what women have to tell us about their religious experiences in this period. Here is the difficulty: if these women have such vastly different ways of expressing themselves, without anything distinctive uniting their voices as one, where then is the unifying thread tying these disparate essays together? The inclusion criteria "women" and "religion" is possibly so broad as to include just about every possible religious opinion and experience that might have been had by anyone during this time. Some readers might think that in such a diverse collection—a veritable Tower of Babel of jumbled voices—the concerns of women as women disappear from view. I believe this criticism is unwarranted and misguided; there are some valid reasons for readers to be critical, however, and I will begin with several probable objections to the collection.

The opening essay is a good place to start. Here Alison Searle focuses on two nonconformist women of the Restoration era: Margaret Charlton, a respected counselor and advisor to her husband, and Anne Wentworth, a firebrand and trouble-maker who used religious justifications for separating from her abusive spouse. Neither woman really speaks as an authoritative subject in her own right. Charlton gains legitimacy for her religious expression insofar as she is a helpmeet for her husband; Wentworth gains legitimacy insofar as she is a helpmeet for her "true" husband, Jesus Christ. Similar examples of female subservience abound throughout the volume. Alasdair Raffe's essay shows how Presbyterian nonconformist women in Scotland were able to get around restrictions on formal worship by presiding over lay prayer meetings. In these meetings, however, women asserted their religious authority by highlighting their spiritual status and their special relationship with God; they effaced their sex, in other words, and did not claim authority as women. Similarly, in Ms. Apetrei's essay, we learn that with the abolition of Catholic nunneries in England, both Anglican and nonconformist women alike sought out alternative programs for leading celibate lives. For some women in late Stuart England, these programs enabled them to pursue a more "manly" existence, one in which they were free from the burdens of reproduction. In short, these women used their religious celibacy to transcend their gender.

Other contributions to this volume focus on early-modern women who won support for their religious activities by exhibiting stereotypically feminine traits. In Claire Walker's essay, we learn how exiled English Catholic nuns in Europe demonstrated an unswerving loyalty to the exiled Stuarts for many long years, in the form of prayers and other spiritual services. In Emma Major's final chapter, we learn that the English spinster Catherine Talbot acted as amanuensis, letter-writer, and general dogsbody for a clergyman friend, Thomas Secker. Many other women in this volume were likewise exemplars of feminine loyalty, selflessness, passionate devotion, and blind obedience. They acted out a stereotype of female piety as...