ABSTRACT
In the seventeenth century the voices of dissent, raised against the established order and in opposition to dominant meanings, were raised neither in unison nor in harmony. Margaret Fell's text not only reinscribes female voices and positions whose scriptural authority she argues has been denied by centuries of misreading, but it also acts as a performative text, standing as the latest manifestation of divine truth communicated through the female voice. Women's actions in meeting separately have clearly threatened male structures of authority within the Church and, by extension, the order of the Church. The confident assertion of male authority and authorship and the attempted exclusion of the female voice may be read as producing figures of resistance. In her writing, Agnes Beaumont is presented as a female character whose actions are seen to threaten the precarious balance of patriarchal power relations within which John Bunyan's position of authority and her position of subjection are constructed.
