ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the female presence in religious radicalism. Feminist scholarship has recently focused new attention on the women in radical religious movements in early modern England. In the words of Geoffrey Nuttall, separatists had a 'passionate desire to recover the inner life of New Testament Christianity'. Indeed, a major weapon in the contemporary attacks on the separatists was to depict them as a collection of impoverished men and unruly women. Individual groups defined themselves as a church and others as sectaries. Because a disproportionate number of women were active participants in the sects, a discussion of religious radicalism during the 1640s and 1650s thus provides an opportunity to examine a wide range of evidence about women's activities. The dreams and visions of women and men recorded in print were gendered. Even the most radical men shared the conventional assumptions about the different natures of the two sexes.
