Clothed with the Sun: Apocalyptic Women in Seventeenth-Century England
Naomi Baker, Senior Lecturer in English Renaissance Literature, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester
While the ‘whore of Babylon’ is a relatively well-known character from the Book of Revelation, the ‘woman clothed with the sun’ (Revelation 12) is a less familiar ‘apocalyptic woman’. Identified as a ‘great wonder’, a heavenly woman who has ‘the moon under her feet’ and ‘a crown of twelve stars’, she gives birth to a ‘man child’ before being pursued into the wilderness by devilish forces. Analysing depictions of the woman clothed with the sun in biblical commentaries, sermons, autobiographies and prophetic writings in the Rylands Special Collections as well as in the recently acquired Dr Williams’s Library, this project will illuminate the significance of this figure for seventeenth-century women, particularly Protestant dissenters.
Associated with both the heavens and the earth, at once cosmically powerful and painfully vulnerable as she flees for her life after giving birth to a fragile promise of redemption, the woman clothed with the sun complicates the binary oppositions by which apocalyptic writing is usually characterised. For many seventeenth-century Protestants, she represented the true church under persecution. For others, she symbolised Roman Catholicism. Eluding simple interpretation, the woman clothed with the sun was read through the lens of competing ideas not only about religion but also about gender: representations of this figure in early modern texts illuminate a range of attitudes towards women, particularly mothers. Depictions of this figure also explore the relationship between humans and the wider natural world. Instead of participating in narratives of violent catastrophe, she evokes alternative apocalyptic scenarios of regeneration and renewal, suggesting the possibility of a positive relationship between humans - particularly women - and the natural environment.
Dissenting women in seventeenth-century England were strongly drawn to this apocalyptic character, repeatedly identifying themselves with her in their writing. Several women declared themselves to be the woman clothed with the sun, including the radical Protestant Mary Gadbury, who claimed to have experienced severe labour pains as she delivered a series of ‘spiritual’ births. For others, including the Quakers Hester Biddle, Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers and the Protestant mystic Jane Lead, the woman clothed with the sun was a source of visionary inspiration. Exploring the ways in which the woman clothed with the sun was deployed in the service of multiple political and religious agendas in seventeenth-century England, this project will highlight the extent to which women as well as men engaged with and shaped apocalyptic thought in this era.