Curtis Freeman, Research Professor of Theology at Duke Divinity School, has written widely on Baptist origins, theology and ecumenism, and describes himself as an ‘Other Baptist’, questing for a third way between liberal and conservative positions. His anthology of women's prophetic writings of the seventeenth century, containing the complete text of works by Katherine Chidley, Sarah Wight, Elizabeth Poole, Jane Turner, Anna Trapnel, Katherine Sutton and Anne Wentworth, bears the signs of this tension in his thought. In his preface, the author argues that these visionary women challenge both traditionalist assumptions about the ‘biblical warrant for women preachers’, while continuing ‘to endorse patriarchal theology and the subordination of women’, thus subverting the modern feminist critic's appropriation of their voices (pp. ix, xii). The introduction which follows underlines, however, the undeniable theological and political radicalism of some Baptist prophetesses, from the intriguing universalist Mrs Attaway, who (according to the heresiographer Thomas Edwards) championed Milton's tract on divorce to the extent of abandoning her ‘unsanctified husband’, to the singing Fifth Monarchist Anna Trapnel, accused of witchcraft and sedition by the Cromwellian authorities. Indeed, Freeman is explicit about his intention to take these writers seriously as in some meaningful sense ‘prophetic’, enabled to see beyond temporal institutions and gendered spheres, as they understood it, ‘by the in-breaking of the new age in which the Spirit authorized them to speak’ (p. 37). Although a helpful review of critical scholarship, an index of biblical references, a full bibliography and detailed index are provided, this volume is not exactly a ‘critical edition’. No annotations to the texts are provided, so that all the historical background is supplied in the introduction and the brief biographical outlines. This background is not always reliable: it is implied, at the outset, that the English Baptists originated in the 1640s, and one is left wondering who the ‘prelates’ that met with defiance from the Quaker visionaries Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole in 1655 might have been (p. 10). Freeman's priority is to reconstruct an alternative ‘Baptist vision’ from the perspective of these founding mothers, for the benefit of a popular (presumably Baptist) audience. For this reason, the anthology is unlikely to be used by scholars beyond the Baptist seminaries, and many questions are left unanswered – why, for instance, were these particular titles selected from the available possibilities? How does a distinctively Baptist identity emerge in these writers, and how is this identity shaped by female authorship? What role was played by male editors and mentors, among them the husbands and ministers who authorised publication? Despite these unresolved problems, it is not to be regretted that the starkly oppositional and independent voices of Trapnel, Wentworth and the other women may find a new audience through this volume, if their imaginative hermeneutics and political courage help to explode conservative myths about Baptist origins.