This deeply thoughtful and thought-provoking book offers a powerful re-evaluation of the late seventeenth-century flowering of prophetic women's writing. There is no shortage of publications devoted to the early feminist writers of this period, and Apetrei is careful to locate her own analysis within existing interpretations. The novelty of the volume, however, lies in Apetrei's emphasis on the centrality of religion and interior spirituality, rather than arguments for civil rights or racial equality, as the inspiration for what modern historians now identify as feminism, that is the insistence upon the dignity of women's nature and the pre-eminence of the female sex. Rather than focusing on a particular brand of female piety – Quakers, Philadelphians, Behmenists or High Church Anglicans – Apetrei identifies a common critique of the social order in response to a sense of moral, political and social crisis, which in turn drew its strength from a deeply held belief in inward spirituality and women's importance as agents of spiritual renewal and moral reform. This was no organised feminist movement: although Mary Astell had a following amongst enthusiasts and millenarians as well as Anglican moralists, the other women who are the subject of this study had a more restricted following and some, such as the visionary M. Marsin, were scarcely even known to their contemporaries. Yet Apetrei's argument is that taken together their writings constituted a ‘real and coherent protest’ against the tyranny of custom; that these women (and some men) were united in a belief in the equality of the sexes in marriage, society and religion that was instituted by God at creation and restored by Christ. Astell's jaded views on the marital estate are, of course, well known, but their origin in her conviction that the restoration of prelapsarian equality was essential for the reformation of Christian society is less widely recognised. It was men, not women, who were the victim of brute passions and it was they who were responsible for the infidelity of the age, of which women's oppression was a visible symbol. Apetrei's determination to put religion centre-stage defamiliarises some well-known narratives and offers a convincing explanation for the origins of feminist thought, overturning the conventional whiggish narrative which seeks to associate the arguments for sexual equality with those for political rights and liberty. Barbara Taylor, as she notes, has similarly sought to trace the inspiration of Mary Wollstonecraft's social and political critique in religiously inspired utopian radicalism. But one is none the less left wondering what happened in the interim, after the peculiar social, political and religious ferment of the Williamite era died away. Astell's work was regularly anthologised, but denuded of much of its critical force. Karen O'Brien has recently traced the relationships between Astell and her contemporaries, their eighteenth-century blue-stocking heirs and the feminists of the early nineteenth century, but the legacy of the religiously inspired egalitarianism that Apetrei portrays so powerfully seems to have dissipated rapidly. This is a hugely impressive piece of scholarship and the implications of Apetrei's argument deserve to be traced through the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries to develop an alternative perspective on the origins, development and meaning of feminism and feminine identity.