Anna Trapnel's Report and Plea; or, A Narrative of Her Journey from London into Cornwall ed. by Hilary Hinds (review)

This exciting new volume is a crucial, much-needed contribution to the study of early modern women writers, history, politics, religion, and material culture. Hinds is the perfect scholar to have edited this volume because she has produced some of the most important work on Anna Trapnel, the fascinating seventeenth-century Baptist and Fifth Monarchist prophet. Hinds edited Trapnel's 1654 The Cry of a Stone (2000) and authored the landmark monograph, God's Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (1996). Thus, she is particularly well-suited to have written this fine edition of Trapnel's Report and Plea (1654), which details the travels and trials of a young single-woman and shipwright's daughter who was known in her day for falling into prophetic trances and serving as a conduit for the words of the Holy Spirit. Trapnel's prophetic utterances in prose and verse were recorded by a sympathetic scribe and witness in the form of collaborative authorship in her works, The Cry of a Stone, Strange and Wonderful Newes from White-Hall (1654), and A Voice for the King of Saints and Nations (1657). However, she also penned her spiritual autobiography, A Legacy for Saints (1654), and Report and Plea, her multi-generic account of her trip to Cornwall, court trial, and imprisonment in Bridewell Prison in London. As Hinds rightly notes, Report and Plea "is the one [of Trapnel's texts] that speaks most directly to twenty-first-century readers" (19).

Hinds has created a thoroughly accessible modern transcription, accompanied by a richly informative thirty-nine-page introduction and detailed textual apparatus. By republishing this vital narrative in its entirety for the first time since its original imprint of 1654, Hinds brings Trapnel's Report and Plea to vibrant new life for experts in the field and will, no doubt, make this important text easily accessible to non-experts, especially undergraduate and graduate students. The introduction is helpfully broken into well-organized, logical parts: "The Other Voice"; "'The world's stage': Anna Trapnel's Historical Context"; "'From her own hand': The Life and Work of Anna Trapnel"; "'Well observe the ensuing discourse': Reading Anna Trapnel's Report and Plea"; "Reports and Rumors: The Afterlife of Anna Trapnel's Report and Plea"; and "Editorial Principles and Practices." These sections map Trapnel's complex historical context with admirable precision, clarity, and thoroughness by detailing the key events, conflicts, and players during the Civil Wars and Interregnum; provide her biographical context as fully as the historical record allows; explain how her diverse texts relate to each other; trace responses, both historical and scholarly, to Trapnel and her writings from her lifetime to today; and elucidate Hinds's own methods as the contemporary editor of this important text. Novice readers will especially appreciate Hinds's clear explanation (38–39) of the dual calendric dating system common during the period and Trapnel's radical sectarian practice of naming days and months numerically (that is, instead of using "March" or "Tuesday," for instance).

Overall, Hinds gives a comprehensive, yet concise, account of how Trapnel fit into the religious debates and controversies of her day, which includes explaining who the many, diverse religious groups were—Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, General Baptists, Particular Baptists, Quakers, Fifth Monarchists, and so on—and how their attitudes differed in relation to specific beliefs such as the nature of salvation and grace, the question of the existence of free will, and matters of church hierarchy and governance. Moreover, she explains how early modern prophetic discourses and behaviors were understood by Trapnel and her audiences, her millenarianism as a Fifth Monarchist, the historical significance of Cromwell's New Model Army, and the importance of the proliferation of cheap print that enabled...