In 1662 two Quaker women stormed into a service at St. Paul’s in London. They wore sackcloth and left their hair unbound, rubbed ashes all over their faces and dumped blood over themselves. Blood poured down onto the altar. It was a very bad sign. There were many such inauspicious signs and omens witnessed in seventeenth-century England. The Reformation, begun a century before, had splintered into dozens of separate, self-governing communities of belief. In 1646 one London man described how his household of four now held four totally irreconcilable beliefs: he was an Anglican; his wife, a profound skeptic—she doubted “whether there be any church or no upon the earth”; their maidservant, a dissenter under the influence of the parliamentary army; their manservant, a member of a radical congregation where they “sing no psalms” and “keep none of our days of fasting.” The husband was baffled, but his household was a microcosm of the nation. By 1642 it was riven by civil war, divided between those who supported King Charles I and those who believed he was a tyrant and supported Parliament. Everywhere was dissent, religious and political; it ignited the printing presses, and men and women of every rank found new congregations and communities, new forms of expression for their doubts and beliefs. When the Quaker women stood doused in blood at St. Paul’s, they made a sensational, ominous scene; but then, seventeenth-century Londoners were used to that.

Naomi Baker’s Voices of Thunder is a history of the dissenting women who wrote, preached, and testified during this tumultuous century. Women had long claimed an unfiltered knowledge of God. There were the medieval mystics—Julian of Norwich, for example, or Margery Kempe—and there were the radical women of the early Reformation, like Elizabeth Barton, who prophesied that if Henry VIII wed Anne Boleyn he would die within six months. Barton is the only woman ever to have had her head displayed on a spike on London Bridge. But the radical dissenters of the seventeenth century took the Protestant claim to a direct knowledge of God to its extreme. They believed most of all in the power and authority of their own consciences; to listen to one’s inner conscience was the same as listening to God speak. The trouble was that everyone’s conscience revealed different doubts, critiques, and beliefs. The Seekers believed in no established church, rejected all rituals, and wandered the countryside encountering God alone. Ranters held that they were governed by grace, not laws made by men; they rejected the concept of sin and instead embraced sexual libertinism and swearing. The Levellers preached radical social equality; they wanted to abolish the monarchy and the House of Lords. The Fifth Monarchists knew that the apocalypse was imminent. One of them told Oliver Cromwell, “I regard your laws in matters of my God no more than straws.” And then there was the Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers, who preached against distinctions of gender and social rank; they walked “cheerfully over the world,” speaking the “light within.”

It is hard to know how many women participated in any given radical congregation, and harder still to know what percentage of them wrote or preached. But there were a lot of them, and those who did write were prolific. One historian identified almost three hundred radical women who wrote in seventeenth-century England, and between 1649 and 1688 more than half of all publications by women were prophecies. Radical spiritual writing—prophecies, autobiographies, spiritual accounts—was a genre in which women flourished, introducing new experiences into print: they wrote about childbirth, about raising and feeding children, about abusive marriages, about their own trials with poverty and hunger, about travel and their encounters with cultures across the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds. Their texts are not typically included in histories of feminism—there is so often that odd gap between Christine de Pizan, in the fifteenth century, and Mary Wollstonecraft, in the eighteenth—but Baker shows that to ignore this work is to ignore a set of idiosyncratic, clamorous, complex testimonies about what it was like to live then as a fierce female critic of one’s own society.

Early modern English is beautiful and strange anyway, but when written by unschooled women prone to particularly intense spiritual experiences and visions, it becomes even stranger, more vibrant and startling. Mary Cary understood her own prophecy as God speaking within her, her writing as giving “vent to the bubblings of Christ” within her heart. Sarah Wight counseled a woman whose husband had died months earlier; she had spoken cruel last words to him and was consumed by a guilt she described as fire going “down hot into my belly, and there went flutter, flutter.” Their inner spiritual journeys from damnation to salvation were often punctuated by an acute conversion that stretched their language to its limits. Anna Trapnel smelled “dead skulls” when she was sick with a fever, sure of her own sin; but saved by Christ, she walked with God, breathing in the scent of nutmeg and red cherries that evoked Christ’s blood, sitting down to “feasts full of marrow.” “What sparklings are there!,” she marveled. Jane Lead wrote that on Christmas Day in 1640, “a sudden grievous sorrow was darted as fire into her bowels.” She was sixteen. On a solitary walk she encountered a woman shimmering in “transparent gold”: this was Sophia, a feminized image of God.

I love the textures of their writing, their imageries so obviously derived from ordinary life—from the kitchen, the home, and the hearth—and blended with the natural world they saw from their windows. One critic scorned the idea that Christ could no longer be found inside a church but “without in woods, mills, by-stables, barns and haylofts,” and this is where radical men and women did indeed find him. George Fox, the Quakers’ founder, took to wandering around Derbyshire and sitting in hollow trees, waiting for God to speak. One woman who gave anonymous testimony, published in an anthology of conversion experiences in 1653, had watched her husband and one of her children die in the Civil Wars; she took to reading a “piece of an old bible” in a barn with her surviving children. “May I not speak in my chamber,” Anna Trapnel challenged, “and sing on my bed, and pray on my knees?” When Trapnel rode to Cornwall in a coach, the view passing beyond the carriage window was imbued with visionary meaning, and she took to “singing much of the creation excellencies, as trees, grass, and several plants, and corn grew as I went by.” (When she arrived in Cornwall she was accused of being a witch and stuck with a pin by the “witch-tryer.”) Trapnel imagined God as water: “deep and broad,” “rivers that the waters rise up to the ankles, yea to the knees, and so to the loins, and at length they become a flowing high spring, that runs over banks, and fills the meadows,” and “the soul swims in the broad rivers that are promised Zion.”

John Bunyan wrote that he preached “what I felt, what I smartingly did feel.” Women wrote what they smartingly felt, too: childbirth and breastfeeding, illness and hunger, envy and devotion and pleasure. In one vision, Jane Lead described Christ’s death in the language of her own labor pains: bleeding on the cross, “every pang and throw did open the birth of life.” In another, Christ’s body had pipes on his “breasts” that “sprouted milk.” Rose Thurgood wrote of the anguish of watching her four children go hungry after her husband had squandered their land. “Shall I always have the whip on me?” she pleaded with God, listening to her children cry. But then “a sweet flash” came over her heart; she saw her name written in the book of life, and “I was now become a new creature, and all things were become new to me.” (She dedicated her own book, A Lecture of Repentance, to her “loving mother, sisters, and friends.”) Another woman anonymously testified to a deep sadness after her husband abandoned her; she decided to drown herself and her baby in a pond, until she heard God speak to her. Another lost two children and was wracked with guilt; she asked, what if “I was the death of my children?” and sought relief in her community of radical believers.

Women’s homespun theologies of the body were riven by contradictions. Some glorified the body; others saw the body as “nothing but the beetle’s skin which is in the end to turn back into the mother-earth.” They starved themselves to make manifest their intimacy with God. Sarah Wight, a teenage girl, claimed, “I am so full of the creator, that I now can take in none of the creature.” She was sustained instead by Christ, his flesh her meat, his blood her water. “I do eat,” she insisted, “but it’s meat to eat, that the world knows not of.” The starving body was a sign of women’s authority and authenticity, body and word working together to prove that God used them to reveal his truth. Despite using the imagery of birth to describe Christ’s Passion, Jane Lead also knew that the prosaic body was fallen and would be nothing in the New Jerusalem: “All of that is done away, for signs and figures in this ministration do fly away like a cloud: male and female are alike here.” In the saved world, even gender was insubstantial enough to float away.

Radical women were sharp critics of social inequality, and they claimed the standing to speak—with colorful, artful disrespect—as outsiders, unlettered and excluded from formal education by both sex and rank. They came from all over England, and from across the social spectrum; they had sometimes experienced poverty firsthand. Thurgood, whose autobiographical narrative tells of her struggles, was furious at those clerics who taught that one may “lie upon beds of down and go to heaven.” She drew a distinction between those who wrote from “brain knowledge” and her own inspiration, drawn from “mine own experience, which the Lord hath wrought in me by his Holy Spirit.” Thurgood’s impoverished state, her hunger, allowed God to speak within her, “for though the world hate” poverty, she wrote, “yet God love it.” Anna Trapnel wrote of herself as a “poor nothing creature,” but it was precisely her poverty and nothingness that enabled her to prophesy with such conviction against the “wise, great scholars” who “have acted so sillily.”

For dissenters, England’s ancient institutions became symbols of formality and falsity: their elitism conferred status, but such status was hollow and a useful foil for the women’s unfiltered experiences of God. Trapnel defended her apocalyptic vision—in which Parliament would “burn to ashes”—by saying it would take more than “deep speech gathered up and fetched from both Cambridge and Oxford Universities” to frighten her off. Hester Biddle called the fellows of the Oxbridge high tables nothing more than “greedy dumb-dogs,” “filthy brute-beasts.” In 1653 the Quaker women Mary Fisher and Elizabeth Williams showed up at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and told the fellows that they were “antichrists,” that their college was “a cage of unclean birds and the synagogue of Satan.” When they were arrested, the magistrates asked for the names of their husbands. Mary and Elizabeth answered: Jesus Christ. They were stripped down and whipped in the marketplace as “whores” and expelled from the town.

Radical women asked inconvenient questions. “Why then should there be so much honour and respect unto some men and women,” wondered Biddle, “and not unto others, but they are almost naked for want of clothing, and almost starved for want of bread?” She foretold that the apocalypse, near at hand, would bring a new social order. The rich would be “uncrown[ed]”; God would “pluck” the elite from their nests and cast them down. The Quaker Mary Cary prophesied that in the New Jerusalem, people will “enjoy their houses and gardens which they shall build and plant for themselves”; that they “shall purchase estates, and they shall be long enjoyed by them and their children.” The women were scornful of stylish clothes, of the influx of beautiful things to be bought in London; they deplored the enclosure movement that joined “field to field until there is no place left for the poor”; they even criticized kings. That women were making such revolutionary complaints was itself apocalyptic; they were living through the reconstruction of social, religious, and political life, and in their writing they were prefiguring the New Jerusalem that would dawn on the other side. As Trapnel wrote, the “shaming, confounding, and casting out of all wisdom and power” that she was helping to bring about meant that “the summer is nigh at hand.”

That the poor, and poor women in particular, were suddenly commanding audiences for their radical sermons and prophecies and pamphlets struck a deep fear in the established church. The already active printing houses of seventeenth-century England ramped up to a frenzied pitch. Broadsides decried the “nailer-public-preacher,” the “baker-preacher,” the “plowwright-public-preacher,” the “audacious virago, a feminine tub-preacher,” the “illiterate, mechanic, nonsensical cobbled-fustian-tubbers, men and women” who sermonized—not in churches but in houses (“a very strange and unheard-of thing,” some complained, “for people to meet in a church with a chimney in it”). Instead of Oxford and Cambridge, radical women were said to have graduated from the universities of “Bedlam or Bridewell”: a hospital for the mentally ill and a women’s prison, respectively. Trapnel was called a “melancholy, distempered, crack-brained creature” in the typically restrained language of the time; Anne Wentworth recalled being slandered as a “black sinner, led by whimsies, notions, and kniff-knaffs of my own head.” Pamphleteers seamlessly blended women’s public speaking with their sexuality. Women preachers were said to leave their husbands to seek “copulation and conjunction” with other men, and to have had their illegitimate children. Elizabeth Poole, who marched into Whitehall and confronted Oliver Cromwell, was shamed for having gone “about seducing.”

“When women preach, and cobblers pray/The fiends in hell make holiday,” went one ballad. The preaching and writing of women and cobblers were signs to those in the established church of the deep wrongness of their own time, of a world turned upside down. And it’s true that seventeenth-century England was more than a little topsy-turvy. The women seemed to be both omens and authors of the violence and instability that troubled the kingdom. “If every Phaethon that thinks himself able may drive the chariot of the sun,” one critic of the radicals wrote in 1651, “no wonder if the world is set on fire.” Either the world was overrun with demons and aflame—or just maybe the women and the cobblers were right: the apocalypse was near, and it was the poor and the unlettered, the alienated and the powerless, who would be proven righteous. It was hard to say which would be worse. When the Quaker Hester Biddle was brought before the Old Bailey courthouse for attending a meeting and preaching, she defended herself: she wasn’t sermonizing but rather restating that “which cometh immediately from God.” Hadn’t the judge heard of the female prophets of the Old Testament? He spat, “That was a great while ago.”

Women’s illiteracy made God more likely to choose them to reveal his truth, because that truth would not be cluttered with falseness, with a love of worldly things: the material trappings of learning and status blinded Anglican elites to the unadorned teachings of Christ and to his elevation of the poor and the oppressed. For radical believers, this had tectonic consequences. God told the Diggers they ought to live communally on shared land. He told the Ranters that there was no such thing as sin, that expressive sexuality was a manifestation of spiritual freedom. He told the Levellers to expand the franchise. Quakers stripped naked in public in order to make manifest their spiritual equality. Such expressions of conscience were dangerous precisely because they rested upon the highest authority, so interior it could not be effectively questioned.

Women found God by sifting through their personal experiences for meaning. One clergyman, Isaac Ambrose, recommended “sort[ing]” daily experiences, “to mark things which fall out, to observe the beginnings and ends of matters, to eye them every way, on every side.” Deaths in the family, sibling rivalries, loving their husbands too much: all were emotional scenes into which God might enter. Women wrote down their dreams. They wrote down their children’s illnesses. “Oh what a knotty piece was I for the great Jehovah to work upon!” wrote Trapnel—they described just those psychic and emotional knots and how God loosened them. Men—stronger, smarter—were more likely to speak the “divinations of their own brains,” but women were passive, empty vessels who might speak “from the mouth of the Lord.” This was a complex view of female interior life, equally misogynistic and empowered. Their very weakness liberated them to speak; their exclusion from the institutions that might have educated them imbued their words with spiritual authority.

Their writing suggests something more complicated about the genre of autobiography, too. In a practical sense women did write these texts, although their authorship was often mediated in various ways by men. Sarah Wight’s visions were transcribed by her minister, Henry Jessey, and published by him as The Exceeding Riches of Grace Advanced by the Spirit of Grace, in an Empty Nothing Creature (1647). It is a rare testimony of the experiences of an adolescent girl in seventeenth-century England, arranged (and partly co-authored) by a middle-aged man. Many of the women’s texts under consideration here underwent similar paths to publication. Baker suggests that the anthologies of anonymous women were shaped by their male ministers and editors; nine pages later she says that this same material offers access to the “innermost thoughts and feelings” of these women. But she is right the first time; the stories cannot be read as transparent windows into subjectivity, if such a thing were ever really possible.

The question of authorship is complicated further by the women’s own insistence that it was God’s voice, not their own, that they heard and transcribed. In 1649 Elizabeth Poole received a message from God that Charles I ought not to be executed. Whether it was truly divinely inspired was of great interest to the army commanders who were planning the execution. Could she produce some “demonstration or token” to prove the authenticity of the message? She had no proof but the thing itself, she argued; she had not had a vision, or seen an angel, or heard a voice, but rather “my spirit being drawn out about those things, I was in it.” I was in it. God’s revelation and Elizabeth’s words were one.

But since God coauthored both women’s writing and their lives, what does the phrase “personal experience” mean? Did women even own it? Their souls were mysteries to themselves; writing was a way to pierce the veil. “O how great is the mysterious greatness of the soul, that liveth vailed, covered, and unknown to itself?” marveled Jane Lead. The texts written by radical women in the seventeenth century include some of the earliest female autobiography in English. But it is not autobiography in the way we think of the genre now, and their texts challenge assumptions about the subject of memoir and its authorship—and about whether women ever expected their writing to unmask the self.

Anne Wentworth’s husband, William, was a “scourge and lash” to her. He destroyed her “mind and body”; she lay her “body as the ground, and as the street for him to go over.” In 1671 she was forty years old and “consumed to skin and bone” by him, “unlike a woman.” She started to write. This is how she explained her decision to begin her book: “It was necessary to the peace of my soul, to absent myself from my earthly husband.” Like so many female authors before and after her, she made a new world in her “book of experience.” When William found out that she’d written it, he was furious, and so were his friends from their dissenting congregation. He brought men to their home to “fright, and amaze, and astonish” Anne; they tried “to make a rape of [my] soul,” as she described it. She suffered a miscarriage. Still she wrote. And then William stole the manuscript that Anne had been writing—a book dedicated to her daughter. Six years of writing were gone.

Anne spoke to God, and God spoke back. She was his “battle-axe.” God assured her: this “one thing, in taking the book away from [her] like a most wicked man,” was enough to ensure that William would be “shut…out of heaven” forever. God threatened William through Anne with eternal damnation: “If he do not repent, and deliver it to thee again, he shall never enter into my rest.” Anne burned with the injustice of it: abused by her husband, turned out of her home, then robbed of her work; her own congregation turned against her. God promised revenge. “As they have shed blood, so will I the Lord shed blood.” He vowed to “take care of thee, and I will pay the rent for thee.” For Anne, her brutish marriage was biblical in scale. Her battle was one of good against evil, of Zion against Babylon, conflicts that were foretold as signs of the apocalypse. That she would inevitably win—that her work would be published and God would smite William—meant the New Jerusalem was imminent. If readers wondered whether it was a little trifling that God “makes so much ado with Anne Wentworth’s personal condition,” it was precisely her oppressed and impoverished state that made her such a powerful receptacle for his message.

The imagery of the Book of Revelation attracted women writers with its intensely sensual language; for them, the New Jerusalem was an interior state. Babylon was the corrupt Catholic Church, but it was also internal confusion, mistaken belief, a violent marriage. “We cannot find in Scripture that the visible heaven and earth are to have an end,” Elizabeth Avery wrote. She believed a new heaven would form “within us.” (Her brother, a minister in New England, thought she was a heretic. “Your printing of a book,” he sneered, “beyond the custom of your sex, doth rankly smell.”) For Lead, too, revelation was internal; she withdrew into the deepest realm of herself and found there “a more pure air, than I could meet without me.” Personal experience wasn’t really personal but belonged to God, and was freighted with meaning on the vastest possible scale.

Wasn’t Anne’s marriage its own apocalypse? It doesn’t seem like conceit, to me, or arrogance to clothe an abusive marriage in an allegory of the end of the world. In Anne’s explanation of her turn to writing—“It was necessary to the peace of my soul”—I hear a proto-feminism, before the formation of the canon as traditionally described. Baker suggests that while the ideas of these women “continued to haunt” later suffragist and socialist movements, their writing did not directly contribute to them. But does such writing have to cohere into genealogy in order to count as feminist? A Vindication of Anne Wentworth (she rewrote her story by 1677)—a furious, righteous lightning bolt—is just that. People misunderstood her testimony, she argued, because they so sanctified the married couple that they could not see, did not want to see, what went on behind closed doors. The value accorded her as a wife by patriarchal society made her suffering invisible, unimportant; she wrote not only against her own marriage but against the silencing effect of the institution. She made a critique of marriage that still holds up.

The vision of selfhood in these women’s writings, on the other hand, does not sit easily with contemporary feminist thought. They are not arguing for autonomy as we understand it. Even their notion of self-expression is mediated; they were arguing not so much for their own freedom to write as for the freedom to write what God spoke within them. Much of their writing feels modern, with its close attention to the self and to the body, its careful analysis of emotion and psyche, its attempt to make deeper meaning from the chaos of intimate life. But this was not modern psychoanalysis. The self under the veil was nothingness—a vessel to be filled by God. The emptiness was the point; it was the achievement, the triumph. One anonymous woman testified that “when being seriously weighed” by God, “I became nothing.” Her entire selfhood was made from him: “I am, in and through God’s free grace, what I am; not for anything in me, or that I could do.” Theirs was a feminism that was predicated upon the total abnegation of the self, and it was precisely this vacuous selfhood that led women to make their most radical claims—against husbands, against established religion, against Parliament and king. God spoke revolutionary social critique directly into their consciences. Was God a feminist? To seventeenth-century radical women writers, he might have been. It was just as Christ told Anne Wentworth: “For I King Jesus come to give my children rest, and thou art a free woman.”