Content area
Full Text
God's Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism. By Hilary Hinds. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. viii + 264 pp. $74.95 cloth; $24.95 paper.
When Christopher Hill, the eminent Oxford historian, produced his ma isterial study of God's Englishmen in 1971, little could he have imagined this namesake study on the radical sectarian women of that chaotic and intriguing age in English history, the seventeenth century. Scholarship related to the life and work of women, both in terms of their historical contextuality and their literary output, had simply not reached the point where a sequel was even possible. Undertaken initially as a doctoral dissertation in the department of English at the University of Birmingham, Hinds's unique volume not only combines historical, literary, and women's studies, but provides accessibility to a number of fascinating, previously unavailable texts.
It should be said at the outset that this study, in the balance, is more literary criticism and less church history. While the historical context of the Quaker, Baptist, and Fifth Monarchist women detailed in Hinds's volume is carefully laid out, and while the dynamics of the religious world of the day, into which women had to carve their own place, is handled with sensitivity and skill, this is not the focus of the study. Hinds's intention is to rediscover the frequently neglected (or dismissed) writings of the radical sectarian women, refract these prophecies, spiritual autobiographies, and religious tracts through the contemporary lens of feminist literary criticism (without doing injustice to their historical contextuality), and discern the variety of new colors and hues that emerges in the process.
Hinds establishes several...