The Prophetess and the Patriarch: The Visions of an Anti-Regicide in Seventeenth-Century England Coming Soon

The publication of Katharine Gillespie’s excellent edition of Elizabeth Poole’s writings is a crucial intervention in early modern English women’s studies. Poole’s pamphlets and prophecies, collected here for the first time, were transgressive attempts to influence the revolutionary politics of mid-seventeenth-century England. Professor Gillespie’s edition does meticulous, expert work in situating the texts in their contemporary politico-religious contexts. It is vital reading for anyone interested in the history of English women’s writing and seventeenth-century culture, history, and politics.
-Marcus Nevitt, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Sheffield

In 1649, a seamstress named Elizabeth Poole appeared at the Whitehall debates in London to prophesy before Parliament’s army shortly after it had defeated the crown in the English civil wars. Invited to help deliberate the fate of Charles I, Poole advised the army to spare the king’s life but to put him on trial for tyranny and to enter into a new compact with the people. After her visions proved controversial, she was defamed as a whore and a witch. She retaliated by printing her prophesies, along with two new defenses of her original revelations. Published here for the first time in full, Poole’s writings reveal the startling role that a common woman played in England’s revolt against monarchy more than a century before the American Revolution.

KATHARINE GILLESPIE is Professor of Literature and the Humanities at Chapman University. Her publications include a facsimile edition of the writings of Katherine Chidley and two monographs: Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century: English Women Writers and the Public Sphere (2004) and Women Writing the English Republic, 1625–1681 (2017).