Watt 1997

Watt, Diane. Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval & Early Modern England. Cambridge: D S Brewer, 1997.

1. Crossing the Great Divide: Continuity and Change in Women's Prophetic Experience

"Prophecy has however been dismissed by scholars as a marginal form, largely because religious conviction and religious discourse have been seen as subservient to separately identifiable political purposes. One of the central arguments of this book is that by the later Middle Ages, there existed in Western Christendom established traditions of popular and specifically female prophecy which, although open to appropriation by the various and often conflicting power structures, have their own partial autonomy which are, to some extent at least, independent cultural, and thus potentially political, forces." (2)

5. Alpha and Omega: Eleanor Davies, Civil War Prophet

"She saw herself variously as the type of Daniel, St John the Apocalypse, the Virgin, or the Woman Clothed with the sun, indirectly constructing her identities by metonymy. In all her tracts except for the first, she referred to herself in the third person" (122-3)

third person "is a strategy which potentially facilitates the dislocation of an authoritative and thus male voice frmo the female body. Davies, however, erases herself as subject only to place herself in the position of the objet of her discourse; in fact, she emphasizes her own status as both woman and aristocrat and the uniqueness of her role as prophet." (123)

strain of conformist conservatism in her writing (124)

control over printing process (134)