ABSTRACT
This introduction provides an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the political element of women's prophetic writing, suggesting that the public exposure of their texts was in itself a form and a practice of political activism, especially when women faced confrontation and a defence of their own positions. It concerns the prophetic content of much of Puritan narratives and devotional writing of the mid-1650s, and explores how the woman prophet negotiated her own conscience with that of God. The book concentrates on the expressive abilities in the construction of a radical language to convey the prophetic experience. Women who assumed a prophetic role learned to go beyond the boundaries of religious propriety by speaking in public locations. Phyllis Mack in her seminal study that theorized women's spirituality in seventeenth-century England, taking as particular object of study the Quaker community, "pleaded for the soul as a category of historical analysis".
