ABSTRACT
Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England is a study of agency. More specifically, it offers a series of case studies of the ways in which groups of non-aristocratic women responded to an assortment of assumptions about (and interdictions or prohibitions against) female participation in the pamphlet culture of revolutionary England. This may seem a curious enterprise since pamphlets, and pamphlet culture more generally, have frequently been located amongst the most inclusive or democratic aspects of early modern English society. Milton's vision of a freeborn English people was famously based upon an emancipated readership, citizens whose inalienable democratic rights were best expressed through the ability to read pamphlets freed from the tyranny of pre-publication licensing. In a passage that pledges a belief in the potential of the popular political imagination he maintains:
Nor is it to the common people lesse than a reproach; for if we be so jealous over them, as that we dare not trust them with an English pamphlet, what doe we but censure them for a giddy, vitious, and ungrounded people; in such a sick and weak estate of faith and discretion as to be able to take nothing down but through the pipe of a licenser.1
