Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century: English Women Writers and the Public Sphere

Katharine Gillespie examines writings by seventeenth-century English Puritan women who fought for religious freedom. Seeking the right to preach and prophesy, Katherine Chidley, Anna Trapnel, Elizabeth Poole, and Anne Wentworth envisioned the modern political principles of toleration and the separation of church from state, as well as the issues of privacy and individualism. Gillespie's analysis of "pamphlet literatures" of the seventeenth century contributes to the scholarship on revolutionary writings that emerged during the volatile years of England's mid-seventeenth-century Civil War.