Voices of Thunder: Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century, Naomi Baker, Reaktion Books, £16.99

On 29 December 1648, as Charles I languished in captivity, the seamstress Elizabeth Poole confronted the leaders of the New Model Army. Marching into the council chamber at Westminster, she claimed to have received a divine communication about their royal prisoner. But when she returned a week later, her message was not the supportive one that Oliver Cromwell and his fellow rebels had hoped for. Instead, Poole presented a detailed argument against executing the king, reminding them that Charles I’s fate must be left to God.

After further discussion, it was decided that, since she could not prove her status as God’s messenger, Poole’s warning could safely be ignored. And so, the unfortunate monarch was beheaded on 31 January 1649 – after which Poole stood by her claims, publishing a pamphlet in which she denounced those who had ignored ‘the word of the Lord at my mouth’. Despite, or perhaps because of, this defiance, she found herself the target of a vicious smear campaign, publicly denounced both in print and by people she had considered friends, as a ‘monstrous witch’ and a whore. And yet, only weeks earlier, some of the most powerful men in the kingdom had taken Elizabeth Poole seriously and were open to the possibility that her prophecy might reveal the correct course of action at a pivotal moment in English history.

Poole was undoubtedly a brave individual with unusually strong convictions; later in life, she was arrested for running a radical printing press from her home in Southwark, south of the Thames. But, as Naomi Baker shows in Voices of Thunder, she was not the only woman who did remarkable things in the name of religion in the middle decades of the 17th century, as England was turned upside down by the Civil War and Interregnum. This turbulent period spawned numerous radical religious sects, many of them preoccupied with the impending end times. Challenging conventional ideas about spiritual authority and emphasising direct contact between individual believers and their God, they gave ordinary people (who, in the Church of England, could play only a limited role) a powerful voice.

Though hostile claims that these radical sects were overrun with women were certainly exaggerated, some female dissenters were extremely vocal – including the dozen women who are the focus of Voices of Thunder. Some, such as Sarah Wight, experienced visions: this deeply troubled teenager spent years believing that she was ‘damned, damned, damned’, until she saw the crucified Christ, and began to burst into ‘ecstatic forms of speech’. This went on for eleven weeks, during which time she ate nothing and took only sips of water – a miracle which, along with the clear disparity between her extreme youth and her considerable wisdom, led many to believe that this was indeed ‘the Lord’s work’. For a time, she attracted large numbers of visitors, and her published revelations (credited to ‘an Empty Nothing Creature’) were widely read for several decades.

Others preached, among them Elizabeth Attaway, a London lace-woman known as the ‘mistress of all the she-preachers’, who attracted audiences of over a thousand. Some intrepid Quaker women, called by God to spread his message, embarked on international missions: Katharine Edwards and Sarah Cheevers were held for three years by the Maltese Inquisition after God told them to ‘go over the seas to do his will’. Mary Fisher, one of the first Quakers to visit both Barbados and New England, also travelled to Turkey because she felt ‘moved of the Lord to go and deliver his word to the Great Turk’. Though she was warned against this risky mission, she later claimed that Mehmet IV had shown her greater kindness than many supposed Christians.

And in an age of increasingly female literacy, a growing number of women felt called to share their views in print. God first spoke to Jane Lead during a Christmas party, telling her that he had ‘another dance to lead her in’; she went on to become one of the most prolific female writers of the 17th century, author of 17 volumes, which set out her deeply unconventional beliefs about universal salvation, the divine potential of humanity, and the existence of a female figure of divinity named Sophia.

From a distance of several centuries, it can be hard to connect with such intense and deeply unorthodox faith, but Baker’s careful and sympathetic analysis of these women’s writings (which are often the only source we have for their lives, so that some remain shadowy figures) enables her to provide an accessible and insightful introduction to their strange world. She is particularly good at showing how spiritual beliefs intersect with real-world problems such as social inequality. Hester Biddle, for example, was deeply troubled by a world in which some could afford to waste money on theatregoing, gambling, and fashionable cosmetics, while others starved to death in the streets. God, she claimed, had made ‘all men and women upon the earth of one mould’. Come the apocalypse, he would surely provide for the poor, while depriving the ‘high and mighty’ of their ‘mortal glory.’

These case studies also offer real insights into the difficult lives of early modern women. Many spiritual conversions were triggered by personal tragedy; several of the women in this book lost children or husbands, suffered serious illness, or fell on hard times shortly before embarking on their spiritual journey. The Londoner Anne Wentworth was married to William, a seemingly respectable Baptist glove-maker who subjected her to two decades of physical and mental abuse. Then, in her early forties, she felt a sudden compulsion to share the ‘testimony, given her by the Lord Jesus, to… the world’ and, leaving her marriage, began to write a detailed account of her life. This brought her further trouble: William pursued her with such violence that she was forced into hiding, and their community took his side, condemning Anne as a ‘proud, passionate, revengeful, discontented and mad woman’ who should have obeyed her husband.

Happily, Anne managed to publish several books and eventually returned to her former marital home with her daughter, changing the locks to keep her troublesome ex out. Like many of her fellow radical women, she interpreted her difficulties as having spiritual purpose: her eventual victory over her husband was a sign that Satan was ‘upon his last legs’ and, come the day of judgement, her persecutors would ‘stand without with the dogs and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolators’, while ‘I shall speak, and no more reviled, nor more abused, no more persecuted.’

Until that day came, women who dared to defy the norms of a deeply patriarchal society were bound to suffer for it. Even within the radical sects, female participation was often limited; arguably, only the Quakers were truly receptive to women’s spiritual authority, encouraging them to write, prophesy and preach. In more conventional circles, many feared that spiritual equality would destroy ‘that power and authority which God hath given to husbands, fathers and masters over wives, children and servants’.

Consequently, though working-class male preachers were subject to criticism, women who spoke out attracted vitriol. According to the Presbyterian minister Thomas Hall, the example of Eve, who took it upon herself to ‘be a teacher’ to Adam and caused the Fall, was proof that women should never speak in public.

Such attitudes meant that radical women were regularly dismissed as ‘addle-headed’ and ‘crack-brained’; most were accused of being sexually promiscuous, and many were ostracised by those closest to them. When Elizabeth Avery published a controversial theological treatise, her brother, a New England minister, responded in an open letter which denounced her ‘horrid’ book as an ‘attempt above your gifts and sex’; she was ‘a lost woman, a lost sister, and lost eternally’. Others were subjected to significant violence, including Hester Biddle, who was regularly arrested for preaching at Quaker meetings. On at least one occasion, the alderman Sir Richard Browne, ‘pinched me all black as a hat and kicked me till I was sore and struck me on the mouth’. She was in no doubt that he would ‘murder us all’ if he could.

Such persecution only intensified after the Restoration, as dissenting voices of all kinds were firmly suppressed, and many radical movements disappeared in the early 1660s. Today, few of these women are familiar only to those with a keen interest in the Civil War, and their long-term impact seems limited. But Baker makes a compelling case for their significance as women, as radicals, and as writers – and shows that their thunderous voices deserve to be heard.