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Lynette Hunter. The Letters of Dorothy Moore, 1612-64: The Friendships, Marriage, and Intellectual Life of a Seventeenth-Century Woman. The Early Modern Englishwoman 1500-1750: Contemporary Editions. Aldershot, Hants, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2004. lviii + 138 pp. $74.95.
In seventeenth-century Europe, while any number of scholars were occupied in the observation and analysis of the natural world and Man's place in it, a few religious leaders were still engaging in serious discussion about whether women even possessed souls-there was very little question that if they did, a woman's soul would not be the equal of a man's soul. Women were lesser creatures. The physicality of the childbearing process relegated women to a status barely above the beasts, and it was common knowledge that the female was morally and intellectually inferior and significantly more depraved than the male. Education was the province of men. A woman's intelligence was based upon the "softer" realms of knowledge, limiting her scope to housewifery and childrearing, caring for the sick, and ministering to the poor. Only in private life was a woman able to practice her gifts; public life was the domain of men.
Dorothy Moore (1612-1664?) was not satisfied to allow society or Protestant clergymen to set limits for her personal vocation or religious convictions. The daughter of an English colonist in Ireland, the young widow of an Irish nobleman, Moore was a woman of great intellect who lived in England and on the Continent at various times in her life. She also came to be a participant in the circle of Protestant reformers that included the Polish-born "intelligencer" and educational-reform...