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Jane Lead's Wisdom: Women and Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England

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SOURCE: Smith, Catherine F. “Jane Lead's Wisdom: Women and Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England.” In Poetic Prophecy in Western Literature, edited by Jan Wojcik and Raymond-Jean Frontain, pp. 55-63. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1984.

[In this essay, Smith analyses the marriage of feminine concerns and spirituality in Lead's works, focusing on the figure of Sophia, or Wisdom, who appeared to Lead in her visions. Studying several of Lead's writings, Smith notes how Lead's personal experience as a wife, an impoverished widow, and a disempowered women is reflected in the language she uses to articulate her prophecies.]

In the sevententh century, a time when we generally agree that religion served as idiom for nearly everything, certain women viewed their own spiritual crises as prophetic. As some of them (or their advocates) argued, God's wisdom had been directly revealed to them, who were among the weakest vessels. This was evidence that the millennium was near, when history's divine plan would be revealed to all.

These women prophets participated in several aspects of seventeenth-century culture. They spoke and wrote in the context of renewed interpretation of biblical prophecy and the apocalyptic as history, applied to contemporary events and personal affairs. Some of the women prophets were part of the lay-preaching movement. The separatist, gathered churches of the lay preachers held a spectrum of beliefs about spiritual equality of the sexes, and the women among them actively preached, wrote spiritual autobiographies, spoke and wrote prophecy, held office, and traveled to proselytize.1 As women, however, their social experience of preaching and prophesying differed from men's. They absorbed a different cultural doctrine, including authorization of feminine insight on the grounds of female “weakness,” and they perceived a different redemption, a wisdom uniting feminine soul with feminine will. Their own experience of victimization informed their prophecy. Beth Nelson's comment concerning one of the prophets, Lady Eleanor Davies—“She performs a simultaneous exegesis on the merged and single text of Scripture and her own history”—lucidly captures them all.2 By learning about these women prophets, we further refine our sense of the English history of what Blake calls “each Nation's different reception of the Poetic Genius which is everywhere call'd the Spirit of Prophecy.”3 The English women prophets of the seventeenth century are historical analogues of Blake's visionary daughters of Albion.

They are also the first large group of women authors in England. Socially diverse and variously literate, they suffered scandal and imprisonment to explore their experience in print for public audiences. They challenge limited concepts of the earliest modern women writers as exceptional, isolated women speaking to privileged, private audiences. Their writing style, indebted to Scripture, oral tradition, and their own dreams, expands the origins of modern prose narrative.4 Finally, their vision of feminine possibility is so close in impulse and vernacular to one tenet of recent twentieth-century feminism—the personal is the political—that a certain continuity in women's recognitions over time seems implied. Bringing that continuity to light, the study of one of these early women prophets—Jane Lead (1623?-1704)—is itself prophetic, a redemptive decoding.

In her journal A Fountain of Gardens, published between 1697 and 1701, Jane Lead reiterates certain prophetic claims.

Being Dead wherein we were held fast, we should serve in the Newness of Spirit; as being discharged from the Law of the first Husband, to which we were married, after the Law of a Carnal Command: Whence we are now free to be Married unto him that is raised from the Dead, and so shall become the Lamb's Wife, jointured unto all the Lands and Possessions that he hath. The Eternal Revenues are belonging to her, whether Invisible or Visible: all Power in Heaven and Earth is committed to her … whether it be Gifts of Prophecy, or of Revelation, or of Manifestation, or of Discerning of Spirits: or that high Tongue of the Learned, which only speaks from Wisdom's Breath.


At which Opening, my Spirit even failed within me, as desponding ever to get rid of my First Husband … that first Husband who so long hindered my Marriage with the Lamb. …


I resolve to make my Application, as not to be put off with anything less than the Kingdom and Reigning-Power of the Holy Ghost … and … to grasp in with Love-violence, this my fair, wise, rich and noble Bride, well knowing her Dowry was so great it would … set me free. …


This is the great Wonder to come forth, a Woman Cloathed with the Sun … with the Globe of this world under her feet … with a Crown beset with stars, plainly declaring that to her is given the Command and Power … to create and generate spirits in her own express likeness.5

The language of prophecy in these selections is traditional, yet significantly adapted. Apocalyptic marriage and the sun woman of revelation are common metaphors in prophetic literary tradition, but each here receives a striking emphasis. Like shadow defining the light, the laws and economics of actual marriage inform the image of ideal union; a large dowry renders the spiritual transcendence. I take these allusive references to law and economic arrangements as indications of this prophet's social vision. Noting that the apparent concerns in law, economy, and power are anchored specifically in probable experiences and fantasies of women, I sense in Jane Lead's style a remarkable, unexpected achievement: a record of early modern women's lives and perceptions expressed as prophecy. This is the achievement I will explore. I will suggest that Jane Lead, like other women prophets in seventeenth-century England, recognized corrupt reality in women's experience, glimpsed apocalyptic renewal in her own subjectivity, and redeemed possibility in ancient feminine imagery of the Wisdom tradition.

To recognize the achievement, it is necessary to document the circumstances. Born in Norfolk in 1623 or 1624, Jane Ward was the twelfth and youngest child of Mary Calthorpe and her husband, Hamond Ward.6 Descended through both parents from generations of landed families of Suffolk and Norfolk, Jane grew up in the prelude to civil war amidst gentry life undergoing profound social and economic change. Her family was Anglican in a Puritan county stronghold and agrarian in an emerging economy based on commerce and trade, although members seem to have joined actively in the new markets. By 1629, her father Hamond Ward (or her elder brother named for him) may have been trading in Virginia tobacco.7 Her brother Hamond, the second son and a London merchant, leaves records of trade in the Canary Islands suggesting that he may have been an early member of the East India Company.8 Her mother's nephew, Christopher Calthorpe, had emigrated to Virginia as early as 1622. Accumulating over one thousand acres in Charles River (now York) County, he established the Calthorpe branch of her family as major settlers in the Virginia colony, perhaps helping to initiate the Ward family's financial interests there.9 After Jane Ward's marriage in 1644 to her cousin William Lead, a merchant, she herself lived as partner and wife in mercantile London for twenty-seven years spanning civil wars, the regicide, Cromwell's rule, and the restoration of the monarchy.

After William Lead's death, Jane Lead entered a new relationship with her own power, a virgin widow native self. While walking in a country place in April 1670, two months after William died, she envisioned “an overshadowing bright Cloud and in the midst of it the Figure of a Woman.” Three days later a luminous reappearance gently commanded, “Behold me as thy Mother.” Six days later, in London, came the promise “I Shall now cease to appear in a Visible Figure unto thee, but I will not fail to transfigure my self in thy mind; and there open the Spring of Wisdom and Understanding.” It was a relationship that was to deepen over thirty-four years—“I have learned to observe her Times and Seasons, I witness her opening as in the Twinkling of an Eye, a pure, bright, subtil, swift Spirit, a working motion, a Circling Fire, a penetrating Oil.”10

But the encounter in April 1670 was not the first. At sixteen, among dancing and Christmas festivity in her parents' Norfolk hall, Jane Ward was suddenly overcome “by a warm, sensitive sadness”: “And softly I perceived the words: Withdraw from all this: I know of another dance I shall lead you to, for this is vanity.”11 The three-year depression that followed was lifted, again unexpectedly, during a visit to her brother in civil-war London of 1642, where Jane Ward searched in public and private religious meetings for resolution to her spiritual crisis. Perhaps the millennialism current in those gatherings or in the city prompted her decision not to marry and to be, instead, a bride of Christ. Though alterations in her circumstances and her choices determined that she did later marry William Lead, her inner life continued on its own course. When in 1663 she became a member of a private, nonconformist group gathered around Dr. John Pordage in London, she was recognized as a spiritual explorer “whose Extra-ordinary Gift of Revelation y Dr gave great regard to & Attended upon.”12

She brought to Pordage's group her own form of spiritual yearning and rejection of established society grounded in harsh experience of laws governing the economics of marriage, which left her destitute after her husband's death. To be able to recognize her particular spiritual experience, we need first to understand the laws and customs which virtually made an upper-class, seventeenth-century woman first her father's, then her husband's property.

Marriage, inheritance, and the customary and legal practices controlling their relationships had considerably evolved since the late Middle Ages and before the social upheavals, ecclesiastical reforms, and early capitalist economy of seventeenth-century England provoked further developments in them. From the thirteenth century, under the steadily increasing practice of primogeniture that settled impartible property (usually land) on the eldest son, the dowry or dotal portion given to daughters and, in some areas, younger sons, gradually became partible property—cash or goods—rather than land.13 Given to daughters at marriage, the cash dowry usually was a woman's entire inheritance from the parental estate, and it served as basis of her claim to support during marriage and widowhood.14

Under the legal doctrine of coverture, whereby the husband became in effect his wife's guardian, the husband had use of the dowry during marriage. Settlements made at the time of the marriage, however, prescribed a future annuity, or jointure, for the wife should she outlive her husband.15 Dower arrangements thus determined a woman's life in many ways. While the dotal portion of a younger son might go to initiate a mercantile life, a daughter's inheritance entered the web of conjugal finance in the sole approved vocation for women, wifehood. As described, her interests as a dependent were somewhat protected, though within severe limitations. Most obvious is the necessity for good financial husbandry of the dowry during marriage.

Developments in marriage-related inheritance patterns during the 1600s most likely to have adversely affected women were the sharp inflation of dowries by the end of the century and the increasing use of strict settlement in male lines.16 Both changes probably arose from pressure to find new sources of investment capital, and they contributed to a gradual contraction of women's economic independence begun in the late Middle Ages in Europe and transmitted to England as part of Reformation and Renaissance culture.17 Examples of the contraction appear in thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Italy, for example, where successive limitations of a woman's rights of inheritance and disposition of property and expansions of the husband's rights to control his wife's property can be traced.18 Dower and jointure rights in England during Jane Lead's time reflect these prior erosions and suggest a process of continuing restriction.

Jane Lead was covertly protesting these conditions for women as a group as she specifies for spiritual union “such a plenty of dowry Riches and Honour, that cannot be degraded nor plucked away”; the need for “a certainty” of “mutual Interest with him, in what the Father hath put into his Hand,” and a “jointure” not of part, but “of all the Lands and Possessions that he hath.” Demonstrably, she knew those needs firsthand. The availability of some of her personal records enables us to speculate concerning cirumstances that determined part of her prophetic vocation, the role of a woman envisioning change for women. Among the legacies to younger children in her father Hamond Ward's will, the oldest son and heir James is requested to pay “to my son-in-law William Leade of King's Lynn, merchant £110 in full recompense and discharge of his wife's portion according to certain articles between him and myself.”19 Since no copy of the marriage settlement itself survives, it cannot be known if the specified amount constituted Jane Lead's entire dowry agreed to at her marriage seven years before her father's death. (Though that is unlikely, her portion may not have been much larger, since willed portions for her brothers are approximately £100.) Conforming to practices already noted, the specified £110 is her only inheritance. Her husband William, an only son, was left by his merchant father a house, rents, and all the “goods, chattels, plate, ships and their stocks … not before given.”20 With this combined estate, the couple established an apparently successful mercantile life in London after their marriage in 1644. When William Lead died, at forty-nine, he left his wife, two surviving daughters, and no recorded will. Jane Lead was made administrator of the estate, but circumstances proved her legal powers meaningless. As she recalls in a brief autobiography written nearly thirty years later, “since he had entrusted most of his worldly possessions to a factor overseas, and they were received by the same, the widow and orphans were stripped of their rights. He did not relinquish anything. Due to these circumstances, I was left in dire and extreme want, which forced me even more to place my assets into Heaven. I decided to remain a widow in God.”21

When later on her prophetic vocation emerged and she wrote spiritual guides, Jane Lead took the language of commerce arrayed against her and other women of the day and transmuted it into spiritual metaphors. In The Heavenly Cloud Now Breaking, 1681:

Know in Truth and Verity, here is an eternal springing Bank, that will never be spent out, for it is the Generating-Revenue, which the Holy Trinity spends upon, and freely does receive the ascended into Community … the Lilly-time is now here come, that all of this kind will be supplied from God's flowing Fountain of precious Store, that will confer such a plenty of dowry Riches and Honours, that cannot be degraded, nor plucked away from the Ascended.

(31)

In The Enochian Walks with God, Found out by a Spiritual-Traveller, 1694:

Having given an Account of what the Spirit of Christ hath given in, as to what is expected and required for the accomplishing such as are to make up for an Espousal Bride to him … it is absolutely needful, that we should be furnished out with such Powers and Gifts, as may qualify for such a High Marriage-Union, with the First Begotten-Son and Heir of the High God, who doth most willingly give … that so a Stock of Spiritual Goods being taken in, may be to support, and carry on the Heavenly Calling withal; which if found diligent in, may mount to a mighty Encrease, for the making of a Dowry so great and large, as may somewhat agree with him, with whom we are to be matched unto: So here we see what is appointed … to be the Saints Business and Employment … answering to that of the glorified Saints in the World above, who will in this Holy Calling, our Factors and Correspondents be.

(30)

In A Tree of Faith, 1699:

Believe that Christ will settle upon this espoused Bride all that is his: that she shall have a mutual Interest with him, in what the Father hath put into his Hand, which is all Power, and Wisdom to manage that power; which reacheth to a dominion, and over all created Beings, and things, whatever: herein for a certainty she will be put into a Joint-possession, with the Lord her bridegroom, as her Propriety.

(24-25)

Lead's language is not unique, of course. Note has long been taken of the soul's accounting and other economic metaphors in both English and American spiritual autobiography, prophecy, poetry, and sermons of the seventeenth century. Further, Lead's exploitation of themes and imagery of apocalyptic marriage demonstrates a contemporary preoccupation shared, as M. H. Abrams observes, with Milton, Spenser, and a wide range of sectarian Ranters, Diggers, Quakers, and others.22 The internalization of Christian history as psychobiography that Abrams traces from seventeenth-century religious writing to nineteenth-century Romantic poetry is especially marked in Jane Lead's canon of spiritual writings at the early end of the continuum.

Still, Lead's vocabulary of stocks of spiritual goods, increase, saints' business and employment, factors and proprietorship clearly originated in her personal experience. By her transformation of this language, she established links between women's material and spiritual conditions.

In 1674, four years after her husband's death, Jane Lead joined Pordage's household. A former Anglican priest who may also have been an alchemist and astrologer, Pordage had twenty years earlier lost his parish through church censure of his own ecstatic practices and Ranter inclinations. When Jane Lead joined him, both were seasoned spiritual adventurers who became the centers of a fluctuating number of similar seekers. They viewed their relationship as spiritual union. In her journal from the years 1676-81, Lead mentions that her brother once “privately ordered” her to leave Pordage and to move into the brother's household or forfeit future offers of assistance. She refused, again guided by inner voices that told her to “go forward jointly with thy appointed Mate … to that work, which the present offer is far too low for to retard.”23 Lead and Pordage led their congregation, experienced sympathetic visions, studied, and wrote extended commentary on the work of the German innerlight theologian and mystic philosopher, Jacob Boehme (1575-1625).

One major construct of Boehme's philosophy permeated Lead's and Pordage's imagination. This was his adaptation of the mystical tradition of Wisdom, or Sophia. Briefly, Wisdom is in Boehme's theory of creation the primary, feminine, unconditioned ground of being out of which the masculine will-to-manifestation forms existence. As a daughter-fragment of this mother-ground, the spirit (imaged as feminine) reflects original, undifferentiated possibility within each individual form, thus linking all forms with each other and with their essential matrix of generation.

The Wisdom is the outflown word of the Divine Power … a Substance wherein the Holy Ghost works, forms, models. … For the Wisdom is the Passive and the Spirit of God is the Active. … She is the true Divine Chaos, wherein all things lie … a Divine Imagination.24

Boehme's syncretistic argument seems to have taken from later Hebraic theology the idea of Wisdom as divine principle prior to creation, retaining its further evolution in the Kabbalah and early Christian Gnosticism as an aspect of androgynous deity and expression of apocalyptic tradition. By the time of the writing of the Book of Daniel and Revelation, Wisdom had become the mediator of revelation, irradiating individual consciousness with a call for universal redemption.25 She was the Woman Clothed with the Sun. To this image with its already complex intellectual history, Boehme added elements of Reformation inner-light theology and sixteenth-century alchemy and astrology. Pordage expanded the Boehmenist conception in a volume of commentary on Sophia. Making her the principle and force of visionary knowledge, Pordage extolls her as “my divine, eternal, essential self-sufficiency … my wheel within my wheel.”26 In a letter of spiritual instruction to Jane Lead (whom Carl Jung describes as Pordage's soror mystica), Pordage exhorts

This true philosophy will teach you how you should know yourself, and if you know yourself rightly, you will also know the pure nature; for the pure nature is in yourself. And when you know the pure nature which is your true selfhood, freed from all wicked, sinful selfishness, then also you will know God for the Godhead is concealed and wrapped in the pure nature like a kernel in the nutshell. … The true philosophy will teach you who is the father and who is the mother of this magical child. … The father of this child is Mars, he is the fiery life which proceeds from Mars as the father's quality. His mother is Venus, who is the gentle love-fire proceeding from the son's quality. Here, then, in the qualities and forms of nature, you see male and female, man and wife, bride and bridegroom, the first marriage of Galilee, which is celebrated between Mars and Venus when they return from their fallen state. Mars, or the husband, must become a godly man, otherwise the pure Venus will take him neither into the conjugal nor into the sacred marriage bed. Venus must become a pure virgin, a virginal wife, otherwise the wrathful jealous Mars in his wrathfire will not wed with her nor live with her in union; but instead of agreement and harmony, there will be naught but strife, jealousy, discord, and enmity among the qualities of nature. …


Accordingly, if you think to become a learned artist, look with earnestness to the union of your own Mars and Venus, that the nuptial knot be rightly tied and the marriage between them well and truly consummated. …


O wonder of wonders! You have the tincturing Tincture, the pearl of the virgin, which has three essences or qualities in one; it has body, soul, and spirit, it has fire, light, and joy … even all these three, in one fixed and eternal essence and being. This is the Son of the Virgin. … For now the Man of Paradise is become clear as a transparent glass, in which the Divine Sun shines through and through, like gold that is wholly bright, pure, and clear, without blemish or spot. The soul is henceforth a most substantial seraphic angel, she can make herself doctor, theologian, astrologer, divine magician, she can make herself whatsoever she will, and do and have whatsoever she will: for all qualities have but one will in agreement and harmony.27

The exchange with Pordage are the immediate backgrounds of Jane Lead's idea of Wisdom, from which she went on to develop the conception in a lengthy commentary on apocalyptic, The Revelation of Revelation (1683). Wisdom as a metaphor evolved by Boehme, Pordage, and Lead again attracted passionate adherents in the scholar Francis Lee and the cleric-poet Richard Roach who, in the late 1690s, formed a new Boehmenist group called the Philadelphian Society around the visions and writing of Jane Lead. Though she was then in her late seventies, blind, and near death, those younger enthusiasts saw in her long and gainful spiritual journey a model and “type” of the divine Wisdom who, breaking through history “in the Female Denomination … will in an Extraordinary Manner Excite and Animate that sex whereby She is represented; and Endow then with her peculiar Graces and Gifts, in such degrees that they shall Out-run and Exceed the males themselves,” according to Roach.28

Though Roach and others identified the idealist construct, Wisdom, with an idealized view of Jane Lead, and though Lead herself believed strongly that “the pure in heart might come this Woman to be,” the prophet seems also to have located a more pragmatic merger of Wisdom and history. Although she might have simply substantiated her idea of spiritual marriage in the erotic and marital imagery she shared with Pordage, she does not. Alchemical and astrological marriages of the elements do not require dowries and jointures. Those are mortal necessities, and it is Jane Lead, not Pordage, who associates them with Christ's bride who understands mortal law and economics—“this my fair, wise, rich and noble Bride … her dowry so great it would … set me free.”

Lead's innovation in the imagery of Wisdom recalls the earliest form of the tradition, the body of Wisdom lore present in Hebraic epistemology for centuries before the late theological and apocalyptic adaptations. The Wisdom of Solomon, like its ancient predecessors in Eastern literature, offered empiric, pragmatic categorization of experience, especially paradoxical experience, in the absence of controlling, abstract explanations. Committed to living by means of rational observation in a world of paradox—“Bread of deceit is sweet; but afterwards the mouth is filled with gravel” (Proverbs 20:17)—this Wisdom is tempered vision. In William Blake's language, it is organized innocence. Acting neither as irradiation nor as external didactic guide, this pragmatic aspect of Wisdom is for Jane Lead a coherent mental and emotional understanding of paradoxical reality in which a feminine ideal might be bride of Christ while a female person might be essentially powerless.

The ambient lighting of vision and necessity in Jane Lead's thought is encapsulated, finally, in one further example. Gathering up many of the issues of inheritance, conflict, and limitation described for seventeenth-century English women in this discussion, Jane Lead's use of the biblical narrative of Rebecca, Isaac, Jacob, and Esau luminously expresses her Wisdom.

She said on this wise, That I was greatly beloved, and she would be my Mother, and so should I own her and call her, who would now be to me as Rebecca was to Jacob, to contrive and put me in a way how I should obtain the Birth-right-Blessing … Know then (said the same Voice) thou shalt supplant thy Brother Esau, who according to the Figure, is a cunning Hunter in the out-birth and field of Nature. While he with his subtility is seeking it abroad, in the wild Properties of the External Region; I will now help thee to it near at Hand, even in thy own enclosed Ground.29

Notes

  1. Keith Thomas, “Women and the Civil War Sects,” in Trevor Aston, ed., Crisis in Europe 1560-1660 (New York: Basic Books, 1965), pp. 317-40.

  2. Private communication, March, 1979.

  3. “All Religions are One,” in David V. Erdman and Harold Bloom, eds., The Poetry and Prose of William Blake (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965), p. 2.

  4. Statistics and commentary concerning women prophets' pioneering authorship may be found in Beth Nelson, Department of English, University of Colorado at Boulder, “Without Honor: Seventeenth-Century Women Prophets and the Emergence of the Woman Writer,” presented at the annual meetings of the Modern Language Association, New York, 1978. I have discussed their style in Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor S. McLaughlin, eds., Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in Jewish and Christian Traditions (N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, 1979), pp. 183-204, and in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, eds., Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), pp. 3-18.

  5. Jane Lead, A Fountain of Gardens Watered by the River of Divine Pleasure, and Springing up in all Variety of Spiritual Plants (London, 1697-1701), 1:69-71; 118; 77-78; 468-470. The selections concerning the Bride Woman are reconstructed from several neighboring passages in Lead's discursive development of the image.

  6. The Dictionary of National Biography mistakenly gives Jane Lead's father's name as Schildnapp Ward. I am grateful to Noel Currer-Briggs for genealogical research correcting the error and for adding helpful historical detail concerning Jane Lead's family and social background.

  7. Public Records Office, Ports Books. Exchequer 1/90/35/4. Folio 27. Port of London Book, Overseas Imports. Christmas 1629 to Christmas 1630: 8 February 1629/30.

  8. Calendar of State Papers (Domestic), Commonwealth vol. 5 (vol. 33), Council of State-Day's Proceedings 1652/3 February 7; 1653 March 28; vol. 10 (vol. 153/117) 1656 November 20; 1656/7 February 17.

  9. Taken from “Abstracts of Virginia Patents and Land Grants,” discussed in Nell M. Nugent, Cavaliers and Pioneers (Richmond, Va.: Dietz Printing Co., 1934), 1:12; 26; 34; 39; 44; query 322, 330.

  10. Fountain of Gardens, 1:27.

  11. “Life of the Author,” unpaginated.

  12. Désirée Hirst, Hidden Riches: Traditional Symbolism from the Renaissance to Blake (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964), pp. 107-8.

  13. J. P. Cooper, “Patterns of Inheritance and Settlement by Great Landowners from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries,” in Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson, eds., Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe 1200-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 212.

  14. Opinion differs on whether daughters' inheritance was restricted to their dotal portions. Cooper argues against this effect, ibid., p. 209. Goody, in “Inheritance, Property and Women,” argues that English rural practice excluded endowed children from further inheritance, in analogy to French practice, ibid., pp. 17, 26.

  15. In one aristocratic marriage late in the seventeenth century, for example, the husband agreed to a jointure of £730 a year, or approximately £100 for every £1,000 of his wife's £8,000 dowry, £5,000 of which was to go for purchase of lands to yield rents that would, it was hoped, pay the future jointure. Cited in G. E. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 35.

  16. Dowry inflation is discussed by Lawrence Stone in The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 632-49. Stone's findings are the basis of further treatment by Roger Thompson, Women in Stuart England and America: A Comparative Study (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974). Cooper critically assesses the effects of both dowry inflation and strict settlement in Goody et al., Family and Inheritance, pp. 221ff.

  17. Kathleen Casey, “The Cheshire Cat: Reconstructing the Experience of Medieval Women,” in Berenice A. Carroll, ed., Liberating Women's History: Theoretical and Critical Essays (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), pp. 224-49, esp. n. 3, p. 246. Casey discusses the European decline affecting women of all ranks by the sixteenth century. See also Joan Kelly-Gadol, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in R. Bridenthal and C. Koonz, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), pp. 137-64, and “The Social Relations of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women's History,” in Signs, A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1 (1976): 809-912.

  18. Eleanor S. Riemer, “Women and Capital Investment: The Economic Decline of Sienese Women at the Dawn of the Renaissance,” unpublished manuscript.

  19. Norwich Consistory Court 81 Battelle; made 26 February 1650/1; proved 28 March 1651 by Mary his relict, at Norwich.

  20. Prerogative Court of Canterbury 71 Harvey; made 1 November 1638; proved 18 May 1639 by William Lead in London.

  21. “Lebenslauff der Autorin,” attached to the German edition of six tracts by Lead, “Sechs unschätzbare durch göttliche Offenbarung und Befehl ans Licht begrachte mystiche Tractlein,” 1694-96. Herzogliche Bibliothek zu Gotha. A. 297 and 229 (Facsimilia collecta opera Ernesti Salamonis Cypriani, Coburg 1711). I am grateful to Annelies E. Gray for translating into English this sole extant version of Lead's “Life of the Author.”

  22. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 37-56.

  23. Fountain of Gardens, 1:328.

  24. The Clavis in William Law, The Works of Jacob Behmen, The Teutonic Theosopher, eds. George Ward and Thomas Langcake (London, 1764-81) 2:8.

  25. Discussion of Wisdom traditions is taken from Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, trans. D. M. G. Stalker (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962), 1:418-53, and The Message of the Prophets (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), pp. 271-81.

  26. Quoted in C. G. Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy, trans. R. F. C. Hull, in Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 16:297.

  27. Ibid., pp. 297-98; 301.

  28. Richard Roach, The Great Crisis; or The Mystery of the Times and Seasons Unfolded (London, 1727), p. 96.

  29. Fountain of Gardens, 1:25-26.

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