Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Sabrina versus the state
- 1 “Born of the mother's seed”: liberalism, feminism, and religious separatism
- 2 A hammer in her hand: Katherine Chidley and Anna Trapnel separate church from state
- 3 Cure for a diseased head: divorce and contract in the prophecies of Elizabeth Poole
- 4 The unquenchable smoking flax: Sarah Wight, Anne Wentworth, and the “rise” of the sovereign individual
- 5 Improving God's estate: pastoral servitude and the free market in the writings of Mary Cary
- Conclusion
- Index
Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Sabrina versus the state
- 1 “Born of the mother's seed”: liberalism, feminism, and religious separatism
- 2 A hammer in her hand: Katherine Chidley and Anna Trapnel separate church from state
- 3 Cure for a diseased head: divorce and contract in the prophecies of Elizabeth Poole
- 4 The unquenchable smoking flax: Sarah Wight, Anne Wentworth, and the “rise” of the sovereign individual
- 5 Improving God's estate: pastoral servitude and the free market in the writings of Mary Cary
- Conclusion
- Index
Summary
But now my task is smoothly done,
I can fly, or I can run
Quickly to the green earths end,
Where the bow'd welkin slow doth bend,
And from thence can soar as soon
To the corners of the Moon.
The Attendant Spirit, ComusThere hath been too much despising and disdaining of me already
Anne Wentworth, A VindicationIn a small group of sectarian women writers, liberalism finds its “mothers.” Their formulation of such core liberal ideas as property-in-self, the separation of church from state, and a free marketplace devolved heteronomously from their expressed desire for liberty of conscience. Their private spheres of public performance were the kitchen, the birthing room, and the bedchamber, and the public stages upon which they performed their private selves included the prison cell, Whitehall, and Parliament, since, after all, their “suums” accompanied them wherever they went. Their ideological criticism of political domination took the “exclamatory” forms of visions of contractual relations between the subject and the body politic, pleas for freedom of religious conscience, vindications of the possessive individual, and words in season favoring a free market in preaching. Their rhetoric of reason was infused with the ostensibly competing, more literary languages of marriage, motherhood, midwifery, domestic and agricultural servitude, and religious devotion. Their protoliberal influences included the mythical – theWelsh goddess Sabrina – the biblical – Hannah, Jael, Christ, and Amos – and even the crypto-Catholic – the Virgin Mary, a penetrable self who was immaculately impregnated by the spirit alone.
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- Information
- Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth CenturyEnglish Women Writers and the Public Sphere, pp. 262 - 266Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004