Introduction

This chapter presents a series of windows into the lives of women which reveal the character and extent of female involvement in the formative processes of religious renewal, reform, revolution and reaction. It considers the contributions of individual women to religious discourse and practice and the different social realities to which women were subject as a result of the changing religious landscape, and not only to consider change from the perspective of gender construction. This responds both to the challenging recent assertions that this was a century of discontinuity for religious mentalities and gender relations, and to the apparent lack of concern for the placement of women within these narratives. The backdrop to any consideration of gender, society and culture in the post-restoration period has to be, of course, the profound political and even spiritual trauma of the civil wars in the three British kingdoms, and the experience of the Interregnum.