Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

In Domesticity and Dissent Katharine Gillespie examines writings by seventeenth-century English Puritan women who fought for religious freedom. Seeking the right to preach and prophesy, women such as Katherine Chidley, Anna Trapnel, Elizabeth Poole, and Anne Wentworth envisioned the modern political principles of toleration, the separation of Church from state, privacy, and individualism. Gillespie argues that their sermons, prophesies, and petitions illustrate the fact that these liberal theories did not originate only with such well-known male thinkers as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. Rather, they emerged also from a group of determined female religious dissenters who used the Bible to reassess traditional definitions of womanhood, public speech and religious and political authority. Gillespie takes the 'pamphlet literatures' of the seventeenth century as important subjects for analysis, and her study contributes to the important scholarship on the revolutionary writings that emerged during the volatile years of the mid-seventeenth-century Civil War in England.

Duelling Ecclesiologies: 1640s Religious Independency in Katherine Chidley's Separatism vs. Thomas Edwards's Presbyterianism

“…86 In fact, it has been argued that Chidley was the author of Leveller petitions of the 1640s, which began to reconfigure the home as a political entity, not to restrict women, but to provide a base for both men and women to contribute to public life. 87 Her ecclesiological sparring with Edwards did not raise gender directly; nevertheless, writing as she did challenged the gender expectations of her day, and those of Edwards specifically. 88 Chidley contributed an ecclesiologically driven egalitarianism to the 1640s.…”

“…87 Her ecclesiological sparring with Edwards did not raise gender directly; nevertheless, writing as she did challenged the gender expectations of her day, and those of Edwards specifically. 88 Chidley contributed an ecclesiologically driven egalitarianism to the 1640s.…”