Prophetesses & she-preachers of the 17th century
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Welcome back to the History Extra podcast, a very happy 2026 to you. From the prophetess who warned Cromwell against killing the king, to the Yorkshire maidservant granted an audience with the Ottoman Sultan, the religious tumult of the seventeenth century gave ordinary women opportunities to have their voices heard more than ever before. Naomi Baker profiles several such women in her book Voices of Thunder, and Ellie Cawthorne spoke to her to find out more. Naomi, in your new book Voices of Thunder, you look at radical religious women of the 17th century who took on some roles in society that people might not expect. So what kinds of things
Did these women get up to? Well, they preached and they travelled independently of men and above all they wrote. They wrote many different forms of text, but especially about their own lives. So in my book, I look at some of the very early forms of autobiographical writing that we have in English in the form of conversion narratives. But these are women who are writing about their lives, who believe that their lives have vast eternal spiritual significance and therefore that it's important to tell their stories.
So they tell their stories. They also interpret the Bible in all kinds of new ways. That's one of the unexpected discoveries as I was writing the book, really, the extent to which these women are theologically innovative and write about new interpretations of the Bible. So they they are involved in all kinds of areas that we may not have expected them to be. So this explosion of women's voices in the religious sphere, it doesn't come from nowhere.
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