I Was Sent to Persuade You in the Name of the Lord: Public Self-Representation and Authority in Four Seventeenth-Century Women Prophets

Abstract

I Was Sent to Persuade You in the Name of the Lord: Public Self-Representation and Authority in Four Seventeenth-Century Women Prophets provides methodological and theoretical tools for analysing seventeenth-century women's prophetic writing by approaching four case studies from the perspectives of public self-representation and authority as a means for creating identity. Through the analysis of prophetic works by Elizabeth Poole, Anna Trapnel, Eleanor Davies, Katharine Evans and Sara Cheevers this thesis explores the specific nature of the interconnections between the act of prophecy and the intervention of women prophets in the early modern English public sphere. It identifies the particular ways in which prophecy could become, for women, a basis for political and religious authority as well as the strategic and rhetorical forms through which the woman prophet could make herself heard and define an audience for herself.

Date of Award	4 Mar 2011
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Department of English and German Studies
Supervisor	Joan Curbet Soler (Director)