Literary exploration of the writings of seventeenth-century women has lately become a genre in its own right. The standard format takes an arbitrary selection of female authors, discusses what they said and what later commentators have said of them, and considers to what extent they may or may not be seen as forerunners of modern feminist ideology. The question invites unending discussion. Feroli probes deeper, and sees in that century the beginning of a change in mentalities from women seen as incomplete creatures lacking manhood and the authority and independence that manhood gives, to the perception that women form a category in themselves and play roles that partly overlap with and partly differ from those of men. Her reading is wide, but she concentrates on three women authors of the mid-century period: Eleanor Davies, Anna Trapnell and Margaret Fell. Davies, the earliest, was thoroughly conservative; she justified her writing by her social status and deployed the traditional trope that her primary intent was to remind men of the duties they were proving too weak to fulfil. Trapnell was typical of the many prophetesses who arose in the period of apocalyptic confusion that followed the Civil War; she claimed to perform merely as a mouthpiece of the deity, her personal gender relevant only in that her physical weakness, accentuated by long periods of fasting, allowed easier passage to the messages she transmitted. Most interesting was Fell. Feroli shows that Quaker ideology, even as expressed by males like Fox and Farnworth, allegorised male and female as the saved and the reprobate, or as those in the Spirit and those under the law. Their object was to justify the licence allowed to Quaker women to preach as the spirit might move them. Fell went further, rejecting Pauline misogyny and highlighting the scriptural heroines who had played autonomous and essential parts in the unfolding dramas of the two Testaments. To Fell, the true Church, the congregation of the saints, was the bride of Christ, and her argument, in Feroli's formulation, considered women as a sex rather than as a gender. This proved a high-water mark: few writers, even long after, went as far as Fell in justifying women for their sexuality. Feroli provides a stimulating read, but the non-feminist, non-literary historian may be disappointed by the narrow limits of her study. A few data points are not enough to show a turning point in a long-term trend line. A broader and more general treatment would be welcome. But that would be asking for a different book.