“God is not the Supporter of Tyranny”: Prophetic Reception and Political Capital in Elizabeth Poole’s A Vision (1648)

Abstract

The political agency and authority of seventeenth-century dissenting women who wrote prophecy is perceived in writings that show an awareness of the common good beyond an abstract religious ideal. In line with Kevin Sharpe’s view that religion was not just about doctrine, “but a language, an aesthetic, a structuring of meaning, an identity, a politics”, this article explores the dialectical tensions generated by prophetic speech when it did not conform to political correctness or interest. By paying attention to how the prophetess Elizabeth Poole elicited a reaction from an audience and responded to the audience’s resistance to her message, a degree of conscious public intervention beyond the mandate to prophesy emerges. I suggest that Poole’s exposure of her textual production was a form of activism, especially when it involved a public defence of her anti-regicidal ideas, when she was challenged on those ideas, or when these articulated a vision on behalf of the common good. Poole’s case study helps understand the ways radical prophecy permeated seventeenth-century politics through its mandate of projecting private spiritual experience towards public life, and the manner in which seventeenth-century prophetic discourses secularized a religiously charged publicum.