Sarah Apetrei’s remarkable book brings to light the long-overlooked contribution of women to radical theology. It is true that women’s exceptional involvement in the Civil Wars has received fresh attention since the 1990s, with figures such as Eleanor Davis, Anna Trapnel, Sarah Wight, Elizabeth Avery, and Mary Cary becoming more visible in the historiography of the English Revolution. Yet, as Apetrei points out, “the intellectual history of radical religion and the study of female participation have proceeded more or less along separate tracks,” despite the many connections between the two fields. This separation, she argues, is artificial, since women are among the most ardent adherents of what she calls the “religion of the heart” – an anti-formalist and egalitarian religion that developed in the ranks of the New Model Army as well as in Independent and Baptist congregations.

In her exploration of the “culture of radical theology” (p. 6), influenced by currents such as Paracelsianism and the Family of Love, Apetrei contends that the radical theology that flourished at the time of the English Revolution should be reassessed through the lens of gender. As she shows in six meticulously researched chapters, radical theology was far from gender-neutral in the sense that it promoted female activists (prophets, preachers, and pamphleteers) and integrated female symbolism to a greater extent than has often been acknowledged.

Apetrei focuses on the period 1646–1654, a time of intense religious enthusiasm between the end of the First Civil War and the dissolution of the Nominated Assembly. However, her study is not confined to this eight-year period and to England alone. She also engages with “European mysticism and radical reformation” (p. 21), as well as with post-Restoration theological literature. Apetrei’s impressive command of her sources and their contexts enables her to illuminate the specificity of women’s contribution to radical mystical religion. She maintains that despite their self-proclaimed passivity, female prophets actively took part in the theological debates of the mid-seventeenth century. Far from being mere “paraphrasers of Scripture,” they should be held as “active interpreters” (p. 19). According to Apetrei, women produced “original thought” in their prophetic works (p. 19). For example, with a view to developing a feminist epistemology, she demonstrates that universalist views of salvation may have been linked to “a distinctively maternal sensibility, namely a concern for the souls of lost infants” (p. 22). Another distinctive contribution of women prophets to radical theology was “the conceptualization of Jesus as a maternal figure” (p. 23), in sharp contrast to the patriarchal imagery that pervaded much of Reformed theology.

The book unfolds in six chapters that place women at the center of the theological debate. Chapter 1, “Incarnation,” examines the doctrines of the heavenly flesh and spiritual senses, both of which “provided part of the intellectual framework for the openness to women’s ministry and preaching among the radicals” (p. 26). These doctrines, indebted to the thought of Paracelsus and his followers, prevailed among mystical radicals and implied a form of intimacy with the divine. With these doctrines the “gendered distinction between matter and spirit” (p. 54), as well as between male and female bodies collapsed, as all bodies were “imagined as transmuted into a glorified, corporate body” (p. 54). Chapter 2, “Salvation,” deals with the issue of universal salvation as it appears in female prophetic writings, in reaction to Calvinist soteriology. With the exception of Jane Lead and Ann Conway, women’s participation in this key theological debate has been largely neglected by scholarship. Yet, this belief in universal salvation, rooted in Origen’s theology, was articulated in the writings of Eleanor Davis even before it was formulated by Gerrard Winstanley. Chapter 3, “Revelation,” refutes the idea that women prophets were only passive instruments of God and highlights “the radical critique underlying the rhetoric, the far-reaching challenge to dominant systems of knowledge” (p. 79). Women’s preaching and prophecy, Apetrei argues, can sometimes challenge “academic or scholastic ways of knowing,” with their emphasis on experiential knowledge, giving “significance and dignity to the spirituality of the unlearned” (p. 111). Chapter 4, “Grace and Sin,” deals with the doctrine of free grace, which became dominant in many antinomian circles from the 1630s onwards. By abolishing the distinction between persons “the new wave of free-grace spirituality” (p. 113) created new possibilities for women. Chapter 5, “Song,” examines the “significance of singing as a form of prophetic utterance, and especially women’s song in radical theology” (p. 138). For women singing was a more acceptable form of religious expression than rational argument, and it gave them full authority to speak. Chapter 6, “Church,” deals with the questioning of clerical hierarchies and governance by radical communities. By brilliantly uncovering female prophets’ contributions to the “mystical revolution” (p. 191) of the mid-seventeenth century, Apetrei suggests the need for a far more inclusive approach to seventeenth-century radicalism than has traditionally been favored.

In the conclusion, Apetrei addresses with hindsight and nuance an issue that is rarely tackled, namely the legacy of the female visionaries of the English Revolution at the time of the Restoration, when a strong movement developed against religious enthusiasm. Although she does not see these mystical women as “the direct ancestors of the feminist movement” (p. 197), she identifies feminist elements in their discourses and claims that they were actively involved in “the reformation of the heart, a leveling spiritual revolution transforming understandings of God, and of human experience.”

All in all, The Reformation of the Heart is a landmark contribution to gender history and women’s history. It is an invitation to consider women prophets of the English Revolution as theologians in their own right and to understand their writings in resonance with a broader radical tradition.