It now seems that if we wish to unearth the roots of Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminism we need to go back exactly a hundred years, to an earlier cataclysmic decade of political and intellectual turmoil and religious questioning. This at least is the argument of Sarah Apetrei’s important and timely study of visionary women in the period from the 1690s to 1710s. The Williamite revolution, she argues, was a time of moral reformism and apocalyptic fervor, opening up a space for what she describes as “religious feminism” in which the earlier rhetoric of the querelle des femmes was transposed into the discourse of Protestant devotional culture.

Apetrei sets out her argument in a long introduction that is both lucid and wide ranging. The rest of the book is structured into two parts that deal with two types of feminism, the “Platonick” feminism of Mary Astell and the “prophets, mystics, and visionaries” (47, 153) to be found among Quaker and millenarian women. There is space for one man, Richard Roach, Anglican clergyman and member of the Philadelphian Society that flourished between 1694 and 1704, as a prophetic “Society for the Reformation of Manners.”

Although a great deal has been written about Mary Astell, Apetrei has found something new to say. Astell’s Christian Platonism, she argues, has not been sufficiently mined for clues about her feminism. Her feminist polemic was a defense of the marriage of Right Reason and Revelation against Socinian and Spinozan rationalism and Lockean epistemology. Far from echoing those schools of Cartesian thought that identified female nature with the brute passions, Astell argued that women were closer than men to their prelapsarian rational status. Her celibacy was less a rejection of the body than a quest for liberty, as it was only through a denial of the material world that women could discover their true dignity. A study of her previously unexamined correspondence with the nonjuring clergyman and Anglo-Saxon scholar George Hickes shows that she was at the moderate end of the Jacobite spectrum. She did not see Anne as a usurper and at least during her reign believed that it was possible to accept the ministrations of a “complying” clergyman. Her spirited dismissal of Hickes’s hard-line rejectionism shows a tension between her deference to the universal church and her refusal to call any man master, even when he was a priest.

On the face of it, the “enthusiastic,” socially radical women who appear in the second part of the book have little in common with the Tory high-churchwoman, Mary Astell. She would not have wished to be associated with the “disreputable” Quakers, and her refined Platonism would have been revolted by the unabashed carnality of the mystical visions of the elderly prophetess, Ann Bathurst. However, the Second Part of her Serious Proposal to the Ladies found a sympathetic readership among some Philadelphians, the most scholarly of the millenarians. A sea change was taking place in English Protestantism as Quakers and Platonists in their attacks on Calvinist elitism put forward startlingly original claims for full female equality. In this religious subculture, the boundaries between “learned” and “vernacular” discourses broke down. In support of this argument, Apetrei raises the attractive hypothesis that the Philadelphian, Jane Lead, might have “popularized Origenist universalism among the bakers, clockmakers and peasants who formed the prophetic circle around the Philadelphians” (231).

Not all these women were sympathetic characters. The prophetess Joan Whitrowe, in particular, comes over as a solipsist of a high order, and she broke with the Quakers after they understandably accused her (in effect) of being a megalomaniac. On the other hand, the woman only known to us as “M. Marsin” was a particularly innovative thinker. Whereas the Socinians denied the divinity of Christ, she doubted his full humanity and identified him with the personification of Wisdom, gendered as female. Marsin’s feminization of Christ, Apetrei argues, brought the feminine into the deity in a way that anticipates modern feminist theology. A common thread linking otherwise diverse groups and individuals was the teaching, derived from both Platonist and Behmenist systems, about spiritual flesh, a coming together of alchemical principles and mystical theology in a doctrine of “celestial flesh” that was inherited from the radical sixteenth-century Reformer, Caspar Schwenckfeld.

Whereas many historians have located the “enthusiastic” doctrine of millenarian inspiration within the Protestant antirationalist tradition, Apetrei argues that the religious epistemology of the Philadelphians had strong ties with the Platonist doctrine of Right Reason. In this at least, they shared a common language with Mary Astell. Yet, Apetrei admirably resists the temptation to tidy up her picture by simply introducing a new set of dichotomies. Astell, she insists, “upsets our vision of political and religious symmetry in the era.” Even the nuanced concept of a “spectrum of opinion” will not do (152). The implication is that we need a complete rethink of our categories.

This point lies at the heart of Apetrei’s taxonomic problem: how to define the period and its religious, intellectual, social, and political trends. Although the title pays lip service to the “early Enlightenment,” stretching that already elastic term to a breaking point, the issues discussed fit more easily into other concepts that are better integrated into the book’s argument: Platonism, the “Long Reformation,” and the already mentioned querelle des femmes. Running through it all is a discourse on human reason governed, on the one hand, by sensual nature but with the potential to be liberated by the divine intellect.

Apetrei’s subtle and sophisticated argument has opened up new ways of looking at the religious culture of the 1690s and the following decades, providing a necessary backdrop to the work of Phyllis Mack and Barbara Taylor. Not before time, the “religious turn” is being integrated into feminist historiography.