In 1676 the apostate Baptist prophet Anne Wentworth (1629/30—1693?) published A True Account of Anne Wentworths Being Cruelly, Unjustly, and Unchristianly Dealt With by Some of Those People called Anabaptists, the first in a series of pamphlets that would continue to the end of the decade. Originally a member of a London Baptist church, Wentworth left the congregation and eventually her own home after her husband used physical force to stop her writing and prophesying. Yet Wentworth persisted in her “revelations.” These prophecies increasingly focused on her response to those who were trying to stop her efforts, especially within her own household. This article examines Wentworth’s writings as an effort by an early modern woman, using arguments of spiritual agency, to assert ideas about proper gender roles and household responsibilities to denounce her husband and rebut those who criticized and attempted to suppress her.
The National Archives, Kew, State Papers (hereafter SP) 29/395, #82.
2.
The current study includes within its analysis Englands Spiritual Pill ([London, 1679]), which, because of the extreme rarity of this tract, most previous analyses of Wentworth’s writings have not included comment on. I follow the dating of its publication as November 1679 found in Catie Gill’s article on Anne Wentworth in the Dictionary of National Biography: Catie Gill, "Wentworth, Anne," in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004) and at http://www.oxforddnb.com (hereafter cited as ODNB). Patricia Crawford identified Anne Wentworth as the author of this work in her essay on seventeenth-century women’s publications: Patricia Crawford, "Women’s Published Writings 1600-1700," in Women in English Society, ed. Mary Prior (London: Routledge, 1985), 257. Wentworth’s name is included in full on the title page of Englands Spiritual Pill, and she identifies herself as author, by initials and by her full name, in several locations throughout the work.
3.
Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660-1685 (London: Penguin, 2005), 44; Keith Thomas, "Women and the Civil War Sects," Past and Present 13 (April 1958): 48, 49; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century England (London: Penguin, 1971/1988), 171n134; C. E. Whiting, Studies in English Puritanism from the Restoration to the Revolution, 1660-1688 (London: Routledge, 1931/1968), 123; Dorothy Ludlow, "Shaking Patriarchy’s Foundations: Sectarian Women in England, 1641-1700," in Triumph over Silence: Women in Protestant History, ed. Richard L. Greaves (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985), 111; Crawford, "Women’s Published Writings," 226, and idem; Patricia Crawford, "Public Duty, Conscience, and Women in Early Modern England," in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-century England, ed. John Morrill, Paul Slack, and Daniel Woolf (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,1993) 74; "Introduction," in Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-century Englishwomen, ed. Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby, and Helen Wilcox (London: Routledge, 1989), 3; Maria Magro, "Spiritual Autobiography and Radical Sectarian Women’s Discourse: Anna Trapnel and the Bad Girls of the English Revolution," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 412-13; Graham et al., Her Own Life, 4; Sue Wiseman, "Unsilent Instruments and the Devil’s Cushions: Authority in Seventeenth-century Women’s Prophetic Discourse," in New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts, ed. Isobel Armstrong (London, 1992), 192; Katharine Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century: English Women Writers and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 12, 202-10; Vera J. Camden, "Prophetic Discourse and the Voice of Protest: The Vindication of Anne Wentworth," in Man and Nature: Proceedings of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-century Studies, vol. 8, ed. Nicholas Hudson and Rosena Davison (Edmonton: Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1989), 31; "Introduction [to Part I]," in English Women’s Voices 1540-1700, ed. Charlotte F. Otten (Miami: Florida International University Press, 1992), 19 [Attacks against Wentworth did not come from the "established" church in the usual application of this phrase to the early modern period in England but instead from her former Particular Baptist congregation, a non-conforming denomination during the Restoration.]; Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1646-1688 (London: Virago Press, 1988), 53.
4.
See, e.g., Gill, "Wentworth"; The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, Series II: Printed Writings, 1641-1700: Part I, vol. 2, Life Writings, II (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001); Anne Crawford, Tony Hayter, Ann Hughes, Frank Prochaska, Pauline Strafford, and Elizabeth Vallance, eds., The Europa Biographical Dictionary of British Women: Over 1000 Notable Women from Britain’s Past (London: Europa, 1983), 418-19; Maureen Bell, George Parfitt, and Simon Shepherd, A Biographical Dictionary of English Women Writers 1580-1720 (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990), 210-11, 280; English Women’s Voices, 41-42; Lorna Sage, ed., The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English, ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 658-59; Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, eds., The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 1148; Elaine Hobby, "Prophecy," in A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Anita Pacheco (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2002), 277-78; Vickie Taft, "Anne Wentworth: The Revolution of Jesus Christ," http://www.english.emory.edu/classes/Wentworth/homepg.html, and also at Emory Women Writers Resource Project, http://chaucer.library. emory.edu/cgi-bin/sgml2html/wwrp.pl?act=contents&f=%2Fdata%2Fwomen_writers%2Fdata%2Fwent. sgm.
5.
Dianne Watt, Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1997); Esther S. Cope, Handmaid of the Holy Spirit: Dame Eleanor Davies, Never Soe Mad a Ladie (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); Ludlow, "Shaking Patriarchy’s Foundations"; Manfred Brod, "Politics and Prophecy in Seventeenth-century England: The Case of Elizabeth Poole," Albion 31 (1999): 395-412; Catherine Smith, "Jane Lead: The Feminist Mind and Art of a Seventeenth-century Protestant Mystic," in Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 183-203; Catherine Smith, "Jane Lead’s Wisdom: Women and Prophecy in Seventeenth-century England," in Poetic Prophecy in Western Literature, ed. Jan Wojcik and Raymond-Jean Frontain (London: Associated University Presses, 1984), 55-63.
6.
Watt, Secretaries, 6, 10-11. Also see Caroline Walker Bynum, "Women’s Stories, Women’s Symbols: A Critique of Victor Turner’s Theory of Liminality," Anthropology and the Study of Religion, ed. Robert L. Moore and Frank E. Reynolds (Chicago: Center for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1984), 119. Even Diane Watt, who is clear to caution against broad generalizations of different women’s experiences, argues for the existence of "established traditions" in and common responses to female prophetic testimony. Watt, Secretaries, 2, 10.
7.
Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003), 76; Cope, Handmaid, 88.
8.
Watt, Secretaries, 10, 43, 45, 46, 47, 155; Hilary Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996), 43. Diane Purkiss notes that prophecy was similar to demonic possession in its "abrogation of individual sovereignty," allowing women to disavow agency in their actions and message. Diane Purkiss, "Invasions: Prophecy and Bewitchment in the Case of Margaret Muschamp," Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 17 (1998): 241.
9.
See, e.g., Watt, Secretaries, 13-14, 17-18; Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 33, 107; Cope, Handmaid, 38-39; Wiseman, "Unsilent Instruments," 176, 177, 179-80, 186; Gordon DesBrisay, "Lilias Skene: A Quaker Poet and Her ‘Cursed Self,’" in Woman and the Feminine in Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing, ed. Sarah M. Dunnigan, C. Marie Harker, and Evelyn S. Newlyn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 163-64; Crawford, "Women’s Published Writings," 227; Crawford, "Public Duty," 72-73; Hinds, God’s Englishwomen, 56, 89, 95, 96, 99; Camden, "Prophetic Discourse," 32, 33; Smith, "Jane Lead’s Wisdom," 55; Lois G. Schwoerer, "Women’s Public Political Voice in England: 1640-1700," in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda Smith (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 71; Ludlow, "Shaking Patriarchy’s Foundations," 105.
10.
Mack, Visionary Women, 33. Also see Smith, "Jane Lead’s Wisdom," 55; Robert B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, 1650-1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (London: Longman, 1998), 210; Hinds, God’s Englishwomen, 10; Brod, "Politics and Prophecy," 411.
11.
Mack, Visionary Women, 88.
12.
See, e.g., Anne Wentworth, A Vindication of Anne Wentworth, Tending to the Better Preparing of All People for Her Larger Testimony, Which Is Making Ready for Publick View ([London], 1677), 3, 6, 7, 8, 9; Anne Wentworth, Englands Spiritual Pill Which Will Purge, Cure or Kill ([London, 1679]), 30; Anne Wentworth, The Revelation of Jesus Christ, Just as He Spake it in Verses at Several Times, and Sometimes in Prose, unto His Faithful Servant Anne Wentworth Who Suffereth for His Name ([London], 1679), 6; SP 29/395, #82.
13.
Wentworth, Vindication , 3.
14.
Wentworth, Spiritual Pill, 39. This is a paraphrase of Isaiah 66:11.
15.
Wentworth, Spiritual Pill , 23.
16.
Mack, Visionary Women, 10.
17.
Wiseman, "Unsilent Instruments ," 178.
18.
Mack, Visionary Women, 106-7.
19.
Ibid., 108.
20.
Teresa Feroli , Political Speaking Justified: Women Prophets and the English Revolution (NewarkUniversity of Delaware Press, 2006), 19.
21.
Ibid., 32.
22.
Ibid., 196-97.
23.
Ibid., 71.
24.
Ibid., 93.
25.
Ibid., 196.
26.
Katharine Gillespie , Domesticity and Dissent, 12.
27.
Ibid., 15, 25-27, 40.
28.
Ibid., 49, 50, 173-74, 209, 210.
29.
Megan Matchinske, "Holy Hatred: Formations of the Gendered Subject in English Apocalyptic Writing, 1625-1651," English Literary History 60 (1993): 360; Smith, "Jane Lead’s Wisdom," 55; DesBrisay, "Lilias Skene," 165; Graham et al., Her Own Life, 26n6; Hinds, God’s Englishwomen, 90, 93-94; Watt, Secretaries, 61.
30.
M. O., "Reflection upon the Message and Testimony of Mrs. Wentworth," in Wentworth, Spiritual Pill, 48. Wentworth noted that she was forty years of age in 1670. Anne Wentworth, A True Account of Anne Wentworths Being Cruelly, Unjustly, and Unchristianly Dealt with by Some of Those People Called Anabaptists ([London], 1676), 16.
31.
Wentworth, Vindication, 18, 19; Wentworth, True Account, 9. The identification of William Wentworth’s occupation is made from his link to "Glovers-Hall." Wentworth, Spiritual Pill, 17. It should be noted that Glovers’ Hall was also the name of a London nonconformist meeting house during the Restoration with which the Baptists were associated by the early 1660s. Walter Wilson, The History and Antiquities of Dissenting Churches and Meeting Houses in London, Westminster, and Southwark, vol. 3 (London, 1810), 217-18; Whiting, Studies in English Puritanism, 111. However, Anne’s description of her husband being there with his "company" (rather than "brethren," her usual descriptor of his Baptist associates) strengthens the connection to the trade.
A. B., "An Admonition to the Reader," in Wentworth, Spiritual Pill, 34.
34.
Although Wentworth provided the date of January 1670 for this event, she consistently uses Old Style dating (with the new year not beginning until March) throughout her writings. Thus, using New Style dating, with the new year beginning on January 1, this date is January 1671.
Wentworth, True Account, 9, 10, quote at 9. Also see Wentworth, Spiritual Pill, 4; Wentworth, Vindication, 12; Wentworth, Revelation, 9. The passage in Luke actually speaks of a woman who is afflicted with "a spirit of infirmity" for eighteen years. Luke 13:11. Scriptural quotations in the notes are taken from the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible.
Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500-1720 (London: Routledge, 1993), 45, 201; Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998), 181.
55.
Crawford, Women and Religion , 198-204.
56.
Wentworth, Spiritual Pill , 44.
57.
Ibid., 5, 30-31; Wentworth, Revelation, 10, 14, 16, 20; Wentworth, Vindication, 1, 11. Nehemiah Cox (or Coxe) was a pastor to the London congregation in Petty France from the mid-1670s to the late 1680s; Thomas Hicks was a minister and controversial writer who published a series of tracts in the 1670s in a controversy with the Quakers; William Dix (or Dixe) was possibly a London hat-band maker in the 1640s who later became a preacher in Ireland. Whiting, Studies in English Puritanism, 84, 165, 166-69, 187; B. R. White, Hanserd Knollys and Radical Dissent in the 17th Century (London: Dr Williams’s Trust, 1977), 21; Dennis Bustin, Paradox and Perseverance: Hanserd Knollys, Particular Baptist Pioneer in Seventeenth-century England (Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 2006), 152-54; Stephen Wright, The Early English Baptists (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2006), 92n62, 93. Nothing is yet known about Philip Barder.
58.
Wentworth, Spiritual Pill, 6-8. Also see Wentworth, True Account, 18; Wentworth, Vindication, 11 (in this passage, Wentworth indicates that this event occurred on "13. of the Twelfth Month 1673"-thus February 13, 1674; in other locations she indicates the date as February 13, 1673 [Old Style]).
59.
Wentworth, Spiritual Pill , 16, 22, 31.
60.
Blain et al., Feminist Companion, 1049, 1148.
61.
Katherine Sutton, A Christian Womans Experiences of the Glorious Working of Gods Free Grace (Rotterdam, 1663), sig. *2r. Knollys was also in a delegation that visited the Interregnum prophet Anna Trapnell in 1654. White, Hanserd Knollys, 17; Kenneth G. C. Newport, "Knollys, Hanserd," ODNB; Bustin, Paradox and Perseverance, 304.
62.
Bustin, Paradox and Perseverance, 303-304. Bustin’s biography of Knollys makes no mention of the Wentworth episode or Knollys’s role in it.
63.
Wentworth, Vindication , 15-16, 1.
64.
Wentworth records the location as "Hoxdon." Hoxton was about one half mile northeast of the city and now forms a suburban area of London.
65.
This account of the events of August and September 1677 is taken from Wentworth, Spiritual Pill, 16-17. Also see Wentworth, Revelation, 22; Wentworth, Spiritual Pill, 6. It appears that William Wentworth took three pieces of writing from her. The description of these is included in a letter on Anne’s behalf demanding their return. The writings were "1st A Booke with a White Parchment Cover . . . The title. A Mothers Legacy to her Daughter . . . 2d. A little Booke with a Painted Red Cover that hath 8 or 9 titles . . . 3d. A paper of Verses, Dated the 22th September." SP29/397, #104. See note 32 above regarding Glovers’ Hall.
66.
Wentworth, Vindication, 4. It appears that, after separation from her husband, Anne temporarily took out lodgings in Fetter Lane. Wentworth, Spiritual Pill, 18.
67.
Wentworth, Spiritual Pill, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 26-27; Wentworth, Revelation, 22. Her house was located in Kingshead Court in Whitecross Street. Wentworth, True Account, 22; SP 29/395, #82; Wentworth, Revelation, title page; Wentworth, Spiritual Pill, 22.
68.
This account of Anne Wentworth’s repossession of her house is taken from Wentworth, Spiritual Pill, 33-34. Also see Wentworth, Revelation, 22.
69.
Much has been written on the importance of the early modern household as epitomizing proper order within the state, including in many of the sources cited in the passages below. For a good example, see Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in the Early Modern England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 10-11, 34.
70.
Elizabeth Foyster , Marital Violence: An English Family History, 1660-1857 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 66.
71.
Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, 64; Susan Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 168; Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, 136; Crawford, "Public Duty," 59-60.
72.
Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series (hereafter CSPD) 1677-1678 (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint Limited, 1911/1968), 385-86. This information comes from a report from Thomas Barnes, dated September 30, 1677. Barnes was a government agent operating during the 1670s. Alan Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage in the Reign of Charles II, 1660-1685 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 201.
73.
Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, 40.
74.
Again, there is much literature analyzing the place of violence within the early modern household. See, e.g., Foyster, Marital Violence; Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, 49, 63; Russell Dobash and R. Emerson Dobash, "Community Response to Violence Against Wives: Charivari, Abstract Justice and Patriarchy," Social Problems 28, no. 5 (June 1981): 568.
75.
Amussen, Ordered Society, 38, 42-43; Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, 73; Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, 73, 80-81, 86; Foyster, Marital Violence, 12, 40; Shoemaker, Gender, 102.
76.
Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, 73, 83; Amussen, Ordered Society, 39, 47; Joanne Bailey, Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in England, 1660-1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 113; Cynthia Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996), 71.
77.
Jennine Hurl-Eamon, "Domestic Violence Prosecuted: Women Binding over Their Husbands for Assault at Westminster Quarter Sessions, 1685-1720," Journal of Family History 26, no. 4 (October 2001): 449; Laura Gowing, "Gender and the Language of Insult in Early Modern London," History Workshop Journal 35 (1993): 9-10, 12, 13-14; Hinds, God’s Englishwomen, 173.
78.
Susan Amussen, "‘Being Stirred to Much Unquietness’: Violence and Domestic Violence in Early Modern England," Journal of Women’s History 6, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 73; Carole Pateman, "Women’s Writing, Women’s Standing: Theory and Politics in the Early Modern Period," in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda Smith (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 368; Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 91; Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, 80; Ann Taves, "Introduction," in Religion and Domestic Violence in Early New England: The Memoirs of Abigail Abbot Bailey, ed. Ann Taves (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 11; Cynthia Herrup, "The Patriarch at Home: The Trial of the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven for Rape and Sodomy," History Workshop Journal 41 (1996): 9; Herrup, House in Gross Disorder, xiv.
79.
James T. Johnson, "The Covenant Idea and the Puritan View of Marriage," Journal of the History of Ideas 32, no. 1 (January 1971): 107-18; Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth-century England (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1975), 71, 83, 84, 249; Taves, "Introduction," 43n65.
80.
Hurl-Eamon, "Domestic Violence," 450; Dobash and Dobash, "Community Response," 568; Amussen, Ordered Society, 167; Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, 72-73; Herrup, "Patriarch at Home," 9.
81.
Elizabeth Foyster , "Male Honour, Social Control and Wife Beating in Late Stuart England," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6 (6th series; 1996): 216-17.
82.
Foyster, Marital Violence, 41; Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, 51, 63; Amussen, Ordered Society, 129. Also see Julia Rudolph, "Rape and Resistance: Women and Consent in Seventeenth-century English Legal and Political Thought," Journal of British Studies 39, no. 2 (April 2000): 164, 165, 167, 168, 171; Mendelson and Crawford, Women, 50.
83.
Foyster, Marital Violence, 40, 45; Bailey, Unquiet Lives, 5, 115-17; Hurl-Eamon, "Domestic Violence," 438-39; Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, 65, 69, 73; Susan Amussen, "Gender, Family and the Social Order, 1560-1725," in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 209-10.
84.
Foyster, Marital Violence, 44, 47; Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, 65; Hurl-Eamon, "Domestic Violence," 440; Amussen, Ordered Society, 44; Bailey, Unquiet Lives, 62, 63, 66; Schochet, Patriarchalism, 147-48; Diane Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics during the English Civil War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 54.
Amussen, "Violence and Domestic Violence," 70-89; Foyster, "Male Honour," 215-24; Margaret Hunt, "Wife Beating, Domesticity, and Women’s Independence in Eighteenth-century London," Gender and History 4, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 10-33; Hurl-Eamon, "Domestic Violence," 435-54; Bailey, Unquiet Lives, 46, 51.
88.
Hunt, "Wife Beating," 13; Susan Dwyer Amussen, "Punishment, Discipline, and Power: The Social Meanings of Violence in Early Modern England," Journal of British Studies 34, no. 1 (January 1995): 14-15; Amussen, "Violence and Domestic Violence," 78-80, 81, 82; Joanne M. Ferraro, "The Power to Decide: Battered Wives in Early Modern Venice," Renaissance Quarterly 48, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 500, 501, 504, 510; Bailey, Unquiet Lives, 5, 32; Hurl-Eamon, "Domestic Violence," 445-46; Shoemaker, Gender, 106; Robert B. Shoemaker, "Separate Spheres? Ideology and Practice in London Gender Relations, 1660-1740," in Protestant Identities: Religion, Society, and Self-fashioning in Post-Reformation England, ed. Muriel McClendon, Joseph Ward, and Michael MacDonald (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 284. It has even been argued that the transition from community regulation of domestic violence to state regulation actually left abused women without a support network they had previously had within the community. Dobash and Dobash, "Community Response," 564. For a differing view of the effectiveness of community and family intervention in domestic abuse in early modern society, see Julius Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 131-32, 136.
89.
Shepard, Meanings of Manhood , 137.
90.
An example of this is found in Steve Hindle’s study of the case of Margaret Knowsley and Stephen Jerome in the early seventeenth century. Though not an instance of marital dispute-Jerome was a minister and Knowsley his married housekeeper-it does demonstrate that truth was no assurance that a woman would be found innocent in cases that endangered community relations. Knowsley accused Jerome of improper sexual advances, a charge that was eventually verified, but Knowsley herself was punished because of the unrest her recounting of the incident caused and because of her refusal to retract her accusations. Knowsley was whipped through the streets of the town of Nantwich and publicly shamed. Steve Hindle, "The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley: Gossip, Gender and the Experience of Authority in Early Modern England," Continuity and Change 9, no. 3 (1994): 391-419.
91.
Wentworth, True Account, 5. Also see 7. The first quotation here is an allusion to Isaiah 51:23.
Wentworth, Vindication, 1; Wentworth, Spiritual Pill, 20, 31. The term yokefellow is found in the Bible (Philippians 4:3), and in early modern usage it meant husband. Oxford English Dictionary online, http:// www.oed.com.
Amussen, "Violence and Domestic Violence," 83. Also see Hunt, "Wife Beating," 15; Ferraro, "Power to Decide," 501-2. Some scholars have also argued that the struggles between king and parliament during the seventeenth century affected theories of household governance. See, e.g., Amussen, Ordered Society, 54-65; Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, 67-73; Susan Kingsley Kent, Gender and Power in Britain, 1640-1990 (London: Routledge, 1999), 20; Mary Lyndon Shanley, "Marriage Contract and Social Contract in Seventeenth Century English Political Thought," Western Political Quarterly 32, no. 1 (March 1979): 79-91; Schochet, Patriarchalism; Brod, "Politics and Prophecy," 398-399.
SP 29/297, #103, fol. 120v. Isaiah 49:26 reads, "And I will feed them that oppress thee with their own flesh; and they shall be drunken with their own blood, as with sweet wine: and all flesh shall know that I the Lord am thy Saviour and they Redeemer, the mighty One of Jacob."
CSPD 1677-1678, 411. Again, the informant here is Thomas Barnes.
146.
Wentworth, Revelation (Epistle to the Reader): sig. A2r.
147.
Lois Schwoerer has noted that between 1640 and 1700 around 700 tracts authored by women were published, among about 53,350 published in total in England. Of those, approximately 300 focused on political and/or religious topics and were written by about thirty female authors. Schwoerer, "Women’s Public Political Voice," 61. Also see Crawford, "Women’s Published Writings," esp. 265-74; Maureen Bell, "Women Writing and Women Written," in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume IV: 1557-1695, ed. John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 433, 434, 439.
SP 29/397, #103, fol. 120v-121r. Also see Wentworth, True Account, 4-5, 6.
153.
SP 29/397, #103, fol. 121r.
154.
Wentworth, True Account, 5.
155.
SP 29/395, #82.
156.
Despite such social restrictions and the small numbers of female authors, Lois Schwoerer has argued that publishing written works empowered women to defy social restrictions and provided one of the most effective means to spread their ideas to a large audience in the middle to late seventeenth century. Schwoerer, "Women’s Public Political Voice," 57.
157.
Wentworth, True Account, 6.
158.
SP 29/397, #103, fol. 120v.
159.
Wentworth, Vindication, 15-16.
160.
Wentworth, True Account, 6, 16.
161.
Ibid., 13.
162.
Wentworth, Spiritual Pill, 6.
163.
CSPD 1677-1678, 529. Thomas Barnes is again the source of this information.
164.
Wentworth, Revelation, title page.
165.
Wentworth, Spiritual Pill, 3, 35, 48.
166.
SP/29, #104, fol. 122v, 123r.
167.
Wentworth, Spiritual Pill, 45. She also noted here that, in doing this work, she was "about my Fathers business"; the context suggests that she is referring to God rather than a parent.
168.
Wentworth, Spiritual Pill, 29, 2. Also see SP 29/397, #104, fol. 122r.
169.
Wentworth, Revelation, 9. Also see Wentworth, Spiritual Pill, 29.
Wentworth, True Account, 7-8; Wentworth, Vindication, 5-6. Also see 3-4.
184.
It is not clear what happened to Anne after 1679, when her last extant work was published. Catie Gill notes that she may be the Anne Wentworth buried at St. James’s Church, Clerkenwell, in May 1693. Gill, "Wentworth." Wentworth also had a child, although this daughter is not named and is mentioned only three times in her writings. See SP 29/397, #103, fol. 121r; and Wentworth, Spiritual Pill, 7, 33.
