Women Writing the English Republic, 1625–1681 by Katharine Gillespie (review)

Katharine Gillespie's important new work, Women Writing the English Republic, 1625–1681, anchors its discussion of women's role in the revolutionary politics of the seventeenth-century in the classical figure of Lucretia, but the book's dense interweaving of multiple contexts and sources also brings to mind the figure of Philomel. Gillespie's rich tapestry serves as a model and a map of the kind of imaginative and multilayered analysis necessary to make the political stakes of women's writing fully legible. The remarkable scope and range of the book reveal the place of women writers in a standard genealogy of republican thought in the English Revolution and its aftermath (her title pays homage to the work of David Norbrook), as well as chart the many different, sometimes less obvious intersecting conceptual paths (including fifth monarchism, stoicism, skepticism, humoralism, zionism, and hermeticism) that Eleanor Davies, Brilliana Harley, Isabella Twysden, Anne Bradstreet, Anne Venn, and Lucy Hutchinson pursued in order to engage their political moments.

Gillespie begins with an optimistic anecdote about Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, arguing that the history of seventeenth-century women writers will help us understand how women have been able to reach such political heights despite the supposedly exclusionary legacy of the Anglo-American republican tradition. Given the rampant misogyny of the 2016 US presidential election, Gillespie's introduction now stands as a monument to a more hopeful moment. But this new evidence for the limits of such optimism demonstrates the significance of the work Gillespie does here to chart alternative visions of politics, even if her commitment to the potential of liberalism might sometimes seem a slightly limiting frame for her subtle and insightful research and analysis.

This project extends Gillespie's earlier work in Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century (2004), which argued that female religious dissenters, rather than being simply excluded from the emergent public sphere as many feminist scholars had argued, also embraced and advocated for key liberal concepts. While that book focused on the domestic as a space and figure for freedom from the state, this book focuses more on the figure of the individual woman as the quintessential site of freedom from the state, a site grounded in "full embodiment" (47). Gillespie contests Stephanie Jed's influential account, in Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (1989), of republicanism's political exclusion of women by arguing that Lucretia does not serve only as the pharmakon, or passive victim whose violated body and suicide together serve as a catalyst for the foundation of the republic; she also functions as a skeptron, or a "shining exemplar of chastity and endurance to which the community must aspire as it surmounts tyranny" (21). At times, Gillespie's focus on women as representing a private space of political resistance through their embrace of republican articulations of "the 'secret place' or ontological 'chastity' of the individual's heart" seems to move toward a more abstract theory of the individual (6), but, at its most powerful, the book reveals the many ways these women's writings attended to issues of embodiment.

Chapter 1, "Eleanor Davies, Fifth Monarchism, and the Early Liberal Critique of Tyranny," argues that the more than seventy prophecies that Davies published between 1625 and 1661 position her as "an important figure in antiestablishment subculture from which Milton's and then Locke's liberalism eventually emerged" (58). Gillespie connects Davies's narratives of the Book of Revelation's "Woman in the Wilderness" versus the "Whore of Babylon," as well as her typology of Samson, to Milton and Locke's critiques of religious overreach and political tyranny. Davies thus emerges as an active participant in republicanism as she remakes the tropes of Lucretia to tell a story of survival and the eventual conquering of her conqueror.

Chapter 2 turns to Brilliana Harley's embrace of stoicism as a commonwealth principle, arguing that scholars have mistakenly depicted it...