What do Italian astronomers, cloistered nuns, levitating saints, and the “sexy dreams” of desert church fathers have in common? In the pages of the Review, they’re all the domain of the critic and scholar Erin Maglaque. Maglaque is a student of archival texts, often written by women, that challenge conventional secular and religious interpretations of early modern history and return to it an essential weirdness. In the Review’s March 26, 2025, issue, she turns her attention to the radical Protestant women of seventeenth-century England, whose “sermons and prophecies and pamphlets struck a deep fear in the established church.”

Erin Maglaque teaches history at Durham University in England. Since 2022 she has written for the Review on subjects ranging from Renaissance Italy to early Christianity and the history of miracles. Her criticism has also appeared in the London Review of Books and The New York Times Book Review, and she is the author of two books: Venice’s Intimate Empire (2018), which explores the family lives of Venetian noblemen, and Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body, which will be published in June. 

I wrote to Maglaque this week to ask her about radical Christianity, feminism, secularism, and whether the premodern world has anything to teach us about our uncertain future. 

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Chandler Fritz: Early in your essay you mention that the writings of radical Protestant women in the seventeenth century are not typically included in modern histories of feminism. Is that simply because these works are so religious?  

Erin Maglaque: That’s certainly part of it. Radical women wrote a lot, but as I mention in the essay, most of their published texts were prophecies. Prophecies, spiritual autobiographies, accounts of conversion, and so forth, are not normally understood as feminist. That is, in part, because of our expectation that feminist writing must be substantially political, and we tend to hold the political apart—even inherently opposed to—the spiritual. But that distinction would have made little sense to seventeenth-century women, whose religious radicalism led them to make vehement political critiques of their own society. 

The exclusion of radical religious writing from the feminist canon is also an issue of genre. When intellectual historians look for a developing feminist consciousness in premodern writing, they often turn to a genre known as the querelle des femmes: texts by both women and men engaged in a debate about the nature of women, their capabilities, whether it was right to educate them. Writers in this genre (like Christine de Pizan, for example, who is sometimes regarded as one of the first feminist authors) often attacked the misogynistic tropes common in the literature of their own time. 

One of my interests is in mapping feminism before the canon existed, in looking outside of the genres, like the querelle des femmes, that have typically been associated with feminist or proto-feminist writing. Does feminism have to cohere into a literary canon or an organized political program to exist? The work of Anne Wentworth, one of these radical women, is an important source for thinking about feminism before modernity. In her autobiographical Vindication (1677), she argued that marriage was blinding; her society valued marriage so highly that her neighbors didn’t bother to try to understand what was happening behind one another’s closed doors. Most afternoons I take my son to the playground after school, and when I talk with other mothers, I sometimes hear an echo of Wentworth’s complaint about the silencing effects of marriage.

In her book The Right to Sex, the feminist philosopher Amia Srinivasan writes that feminism asks us: “What would it be to end the political, social, sexual, economic, psychological and physical subordination of women?” You do not need the guardrails of genre to ask and answer that question (though it can help, of course). That is the question that Wentworth asked about her own abusive marriage—and marriage as an institution. It is the question I hear asked of marriage in my own conversations with women, and it places us all within a long, genre-defying history of feminist critique.

You’ve previously written about how the Catholic Reformation led to an astonishingly large number of women being locked away in cloisters—as many as one in five at one point in Florence. Yet at roughly the same time, in England, the Protestant Reformation led to women storming churches and dumping blood on altars. Does the oppression of cloistered women in Catholic Europe in any way connect to the liberation of dissenting women in Protestant Europe?  

In both Catholic and Protestant Europe, religion could be a source of catastrophic oppression for women as well as offering a way to imagine freedom. When I teach religion and gender in this period, I often encounter my students’ assumption that religion was uniformly bad for women, uniformly disempowering. But when we read the texts of mystics, the trial transcripts of women brought before the Inquisition, accounts of miracle-working women, and lives of female saints, we begin to see the intense imaginative possibilities of belief for early modern Catholic women.

Yes, the religious institutions of Catholic Europe could be oppressive. I think it’s probably still underrecognized just how deeply these institutions—convents, homes for “reformed” sex workers, foundling homes—shaped Catholic society, sometimes (like in Florence in the seventeenth century) effectively disappearing a substantial minority of the city’s women and children behind walls. And yet these same institutions could also be catalysts for energetic feminist analysis. Arcangela Tarabotti, a seventeenth-century Venetian nun who was put into a convent against her will, wrote a critique of coerced enclosure that begins by eviscerating the idea that men are by nature superior to women. “You are formed from earth’s dust,” she spits, “is there anything less solid? On the other hand, consider the strength of a rib—hard bone—from which we women were made.” 

I think my students like to believe that religion oppressed women because secularism seems a guarantee of our own freedoms. This makes us feel good about ourselves. It makes us feel modern. But seventeenth-century women like Tarabotti and Wentworth, women both Catholic and Protestant, teach us that religious language and religious imagery can be the sources of powerful feminist writing. And anyway, if secularism were such an ironclad guarantee of equality, how ought we explain the gender-based injustices of our own society? Assumptions about the intrinsically “backward” character of premodern religion not only leave the women of the past opaque to us but make the oppressions of our own time harder to see, too.

In an essay for our April 4, 2024, issue, you wrote about how scholars of the early modern world must contend with deeply strange things, like flying saints and levitating nuns, without getting stuck between “the dogmas of unconditional faith and unconditional secularism.” How can a scholar embrace those strange things without looking silly?

Historians of the premodern world must reckon with strange things all the time; it’s one of the delights of the job. For a long time, influenced by anthropologists, historians of premodern Europe tried to make these strange things make perfect sense. We tried to decipher the early modern past as if it were an alien planet; we tried to piece together the symbolism of early modern religious rituals; we tried to understand the social functions of various odd aspects of early modern popular culture. In short, we tried to smooth early modern belief into something rational. But this is not always satisfying, because people are not always rational—not then, and not now.

Some historians of a more conservative bent have reacted strongly against those earlier, broadly accepted cultural approaches. These scholars have argued that all those odd things—levitation, bilocation, miracles of all kinds, witchcraft—really did happen. To my mind that is bad history, not least because it puts us out of a job. If we accept that saints really did fly in the seventeenth century, what would be left to explain? I suppose the early modern past would become the intellectual terrain of gravitational physicists rather than historians. 

Influenced by feminist historians (who were themselves absorbing insights from psychoanalytic theory), I like to emphasize the irrational and the fantastical in early modern culture and religion, without trying to explain everything away as having a functional meaning. We don’t need to believe that early modern people flew. But neither must we rationalize flight, understand flight as fulfilling some social need. The fantasy of flight was important to early modern men and women—holy people flew, as did witches and demons, and even buildings flew, like the Holy House of Loreto—so it might be more useful to think about the texture of that fantasy and what it suggests about the interior lives of the people who believed it. 

As the historian Lyndal Roper writes in her book Witchcraze, “The very idea of flight implies a transformation of perspective”; for accused witches, “to imagine oneself flying requires the ability to dissociate oneself, and to see the world from the outside.” That act of imagination—that force of creative will, directed upon one’s own inner vision—is far more interesting to me than either a purely functionalist understanding of flight or a purely credulous one.

Artificial intelligence seems to be reacquainting much of the modern world with a sense of the unknown, perhaps even the unknowable. People’s interactions with these machines can resemble prayers to an omniscient oracle or god, and even computer scientists now talk seriously about things like “hallucinations.” Do you think early modern thinkers have anything to teach us about living in a world where mysticism and science comingle?

I think we ought to guard against an impulse to mystify artificial intelligence. I learned a lot from James Gleick’s piece in this paper (“Bad Readers”), in which he explains how artificial intelligence models “string together words based on comprehensive statistics on how people have previously strung together words”: there is no miracle here, only the “uncanny” appearance of one. AI is not an oracle and not a god, and to describe its effects in terms of either the human or the divine—hallucinations, for example—is imprecise. It is true that the textureless authority of AI-generated writing makes us feel as if we are in the presence of an omniscient being. But we lose something important about being human if AI becomes our primary contact with the unknown, our primary experience of the inexplicable. 

And what does that misplaced reverence say about us, about our capacity to contend with real mystery? AI is predictable by its design; that is how large language models work, through probability. Premodern mysticism was not concerned with the predictable or the probable, but with the opposite: with moments of irruption, of disabling wonder. Why do we want our gods to be so bland, our oracles so anemic? Do we get the gods we deserve? 

Your next book is largely about premodern European women’s relationships with their bodies. Given the predominance of religious writing among women at that time, was it hard to find women writing about their bodies? Or do these two subjects—the spiritual and the corporeal—often come together?  

In early modernity, the spiritual was corporeal, the corporeal sacralized. Think of the central miracle of premodern Catholicism: transubstantiation, the body of Christ consumed in communion. Even Martin Luther rejected the idea that the Eucharist bread was only a symbol, an abstraction of Christ’s body. “Who in the world ever read in the Scriptures that body means sign of the body?” he wrote, in his typically understated style. When women came to write spiritual texts—autobiographies, meditations, letters—their own bodies provided an imagery to describe the contours of their belief. Some of my favorite examples of this kind of writing come from the late-medieval nuns who entered into highly eroticized mystical union with Christ. 

Last year I wrote about some of their (quite explicit!) imageries of the body in a piece for the Review on sex and Christianity. Take the writings of the Belgian mystic Ida of Nivelles: Christ came to her with his lips smeared in thick white liquid that he dripped into her open mouth, sharing with her “this tastiest of honeycombs.” There was no contradiction for these women in using sacred imagery to dramatize erotic love, or Scripture to sanctify desire. On the contrary: religious belief provided an incredibly rich, provocative, powerful language to describe the surrender and union common to both faith and sex.

In my book, I’m especially interested in the desires of the more ordinary women of the early modern past who did not write, whose presence comes down to us only in scraps and fragments. These women, too, blended sacred imagery with the erotic. Take Juana Dientes, who came before the Inquisition in Castile in 1499 for conducting love magic. She recited her spell to the inquisitors:

You will go to Mount Sinai
And bring me nine staffs of love.
You will drive them into the head of the Holy Cross,
And from the head to the heart,
And from the heart to the kidney,
And to the spleen,
And all along the spine,
And the three hundred joints
Of his body:
So that he can neither eat nor drink
Until he comes to love me well,
And to take pleasure in me.

Dientes was a peasant, substantially illiterate and uneducated. But she described her love magic vividly: how she undressed, unbound her hair, and, in her incantation, mapped her lover’s body using the imagery of crucifixion. She would drive staffs of love into all of the organs and joints of his body. Magically compelling another, undoing his will, was contrary to the doctrine of free will held by the Church, so Dientes needed to be corrected by the inquisitors. But I think she has her own (sure, a little heretical) theology of the body, of erotic love and desire and surrender. Most of all, I like that she didn’t stop at his heart—she wanted his spleen too.