Joanna Southcott has been kept on the margins of English religious history for rather too long. In this intellectual biography, Matthew Niblett brings her if not centre stage, then at least much closer to it. Southcott was a redoubtable figure, one whose apocalyptic prophecies excited national attention and gave her an impressive public following. At least as remarkably, in her life-time she chose not to pursue a separatist path, but to operate within an essentially Anglican context. That choice was an embarrassment to the majority of the hierarchy then and subsequently, but she would not be provoked into breaking her own commitment to the national Church however much its leaders and her own followers tried. It took her prophetic failure to give birth to the divine child, the Shiloh (a king who would rule in preparation for the return of Jesus), followed soon after by her own demise in 1814, to reduce the number of her followers and divide the Southcottians who remained.

But in her heyday the popular influence and impact of this tenant farmer's daughter from Devon was appreciable. In the heightened apocalyptic atmosphere of the 1790s and 1800s Southcott's was the last and perhaps the greatest of the prophetical movements that then abounded, and she attracted more notice than her antecedent, Richard Brothers. As a young woman she explored various expressions of Christianity in Exeter, particularly Methodism, but it was the established Church (not least the cathedral) to which she was most drawn, even if the majority of clergy believed she was touched rather than inspired and that her letters were best ignored. The city provided, Niblett considers, ‘a critical environment for her transition from maidservant to prophetess’ (p. 33).

Unlike E. P. Thompson's Southcott in The making of the English working class, ‘who exerted upon the credulous a form of psychic blackmail’, Niblett takes seriously his subject's theology which had its origins in the various promises and curses made in the Garden of Eden according to Scripture (especially Genesis iii.15). Southcott had a profound sense of her divine mission and the female place at the heart of the redemption narrative, cloaking herself as the ‘Woman clothed with the sun’ foretold in Revelation 12, a second Eve who would complete the reversal of the Fall of Man and bind Satan. She rejected Calvinist emphasis on mankind's fallen nature, insisting that man had been created good, and that the blame for sin was solely attributable to the Devil. Her gendered understanding of the Fall caught attention but it also tended to disarm criticism because she was so careful to link her own writings to the Bible, a connection which Niblett thoroughly unpicks. Southcott always sought to demonstrate that throughout Scripture female prophets and women acting as agents of God such as Esther and Judith were nothing unusual. He also shows her habitual reliance on typology and contends that one might see it as a challenge to the newer hermeneutical conventions of her time espoused by such as Priestley and even Brothers.

Southcott had a flair for publicity, for winning an audience from all but the highest reaches of the social spectrum (Niblett says little in detail about readers’ responses). Hers was a mission in print. Southcott taught her doctrines through parables of her own that drew the curious to her. She wrote accessibly, even colloquially, priced her output competitively, with whole print runs sometimes distributed for free. Southcott was always aware that her detractors would take some convincing so she set up ‘trials’ of her writings by the clergy and the learned, occasions which in themselves brought her publicity. While Niblett refers to key Anglican supporters like the Revd Thomas Foley, it would have been interesting to know more about the bishops and clergy who tested her, those who accepted and those who rejected her invitations.

Matthew Niblett has produced a fine, economically written book that takes the study of Southcott onto a new level, well away from the lampoons of Rowlandson and Cruickshank, and the condescensions of twentieth-century social historians. Both through the study of her theology and the tracing of her distinctive confessional path he makes possible a clearer perception of her place in the religious life of England during the Napoleonic Wars. She was not some prophetical outcast but an anti-Calvinist, anti-Methodist Anglican familiar with the liturgy, lacking any sense of being heterodox, a woman who respected the hierarchy of the Church but would not be overawed or silenced by it. Even Niblett sounds surprised at discerning ‘the curious way in which prophetic activity was seen as rather less of a threat within the established Church than without’ (p. 179). Indeed, this regular Anglican communicant looked to the established Church as essential to the fulfillment of her ministry, for, as she wrote in The trial of Joanna Southcott (1804), ‘by the church ministers the good fruit would be brought in, and from them the good fruit would spring’. Southcott was not attempting to overthrow the existing order during the national wars against France (which she supported) unless placing female agency at the heart of the divine plan could be considered in that light. In coming to frame herself as the antitype of the Virgin Mary she occupied vacant Marian space within the contemporary Church and daringly compelled attention.