‘Foretelling the judgements of God’: authorship and the prophetic voice in Elizabeth Poole’s A Vision (1648)

Abstract

A Vision: Wherein is Manifested the Disease and Cure of the Kingdome (1648) is Elizabeth Poole’s account of the prophecies she delivered before Cromwell and the Puritan Army’s General Council as they debated the regicide of Charles I at the end of the first English Civil War in 1648-49. This article discusses the prophetic voice in Elizabeth Poole’s texts as she uses strategies of ‘self’ and ‘others’ to establish her authority before her audience and her own sectarian group. While the circumstances surrounding Poole’s participation in the Whitehall deliberations are unclear, her appearance represents a rare case of a woman’s direct involvement in the mid-seventeenth-century discussions of the scope and legitimacy of government. With her defying anti regicidal speech, Poole builds her authorial voice beyond the divine mandate of her prophetic identity.

Keywords

• early modern women’s writing
• authorship
• prophetic writing
• seventeenth-century