"Taken Weak in My Outward Man": The Paradox of the Pathologized Female Prophet

Vision! The body crumbles before it, and becomes weak.Anna Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone

On March 8, 1690, twenty-year-old Christian James "fell sick and in a deadly swound," her body lifeless for some "twenty hours space" before her mother's ministrations revived her.¹ Yet when the young maid returned to her senses, she reacted not with gratitude but with dismay: "with voice most shrill" James cried out, "O Mother you have done me wrong" (58–59), and then declared the apocalypse imminent. Her prophesy asserts, "This is the last age of the world" and predicts that "dooms dreadfull day is nigh at hand / Fire and brimstone shall destroy / the heaven, the earth, the sea and land" (78; 98–100). The prophecy failed to materialize, and her mother's efforts to restore her child to health ultimately failed as well: James's swoon returned, plunging her back into a coma from which she would not again recover. The ballad recounting this story imagines James's experience as a wondrous miracle and the prophesy itself as rather more a lesson than a prediction, in the hopes that printing it might cause "wicked men their ways [to] change" (144).

Christian James did not survive to augur further doom, and there is no record of her making other bold proclamations in the years leading up to this incident, yet her story places her within a cohort of female prophets that grew in size and influence in England during the seventeenth century. Remarkably diverse in both background and approach, these women spoke and were spoken about in surprisingly high numbers (more than 300 female visionaries are recorded during the Interregnum alone), and their "prophecies" ranged from careful Biblical exegesis to ecstatic song, from doomsday predictions to political critiques.² Assessments of the prophets themselves likewise varied: some, like Elizabeth Poole, garnered respect in political and social circles, and many had supporters who deemed them true visionaries.³ But most also faced critique and skepticism, and charges of fraud, witchcraft, and lunacy were thrown at any woman who dared to claim divine inspiration for her visions. In this growing population, class, politics, and religion coalesce around the woman speaking or writing, and especially around the interpretation, by outsiders, of prophet and prophecy.

Whether foretelling doom, preaching, or critiquing political figures and governmental practices, the authority of all these visionaries was claimed, by themselves and their supporters, by reference to the broad definition of prophecy as divine inspiration, and women were seen as especially suited to the receipt of that inspiration. The metaphor of the woman as an ideal vessel for prophecy had a long precedent in Christianity and was frequently invoked throughout the period.⁴ Sarah Wight references this image in her Wonderful Pleasant and Profitable Letter (1656), calling herself "an empty nothing, whose fulness is all in that Fountain that filleth all in all."⁵ Woman's special capacity for vessel-hood relied upon several contemporary notions about female nature. Socially, women were expected to exercise their virtue partly through passivity, obedience, and chaste honesty, and their status placed them uniformly lower in the social hierarchy than their male counterparts. As Elaine Hobby notes, this position in society made the holy woman less likely to commit the sin of pride and more likely to embody Matthew 20:16: "So the last shall be first, and the first last."⁶ Ideal feminine behavior thus allowed a closer connection to God.

Much of the conception of the female readiness for divine inspiration links not to idealized perceptions of womanly conduct, however, but to perceptions of physiological deficiency. At its healthiest, the female body was understood to be cold and moist—directly opposite the hot, dry composition of the male body—and these conditions manifested in natural weakness relative to men, as well as a tendency toward plethora (the excess of humoral fluids) and an inevitable leakiness and porosity within the body.⁷ As a result, women were seen as innately more irrational, for without the tempering force of heat, the...