Author Description

Eleanor Davies was one of the most prolific women writing in early seventeenth-century England. This volume includes thirty-eight of the sixty-some tracts that she published. Inspired to prophecy by a visionary experience in 1625, the year of Charles I's accession to the throne, she devoted herself to warning her contemporaries that the Day of Judgement was imminent. Her zeal and her intricately constructed tracts confounded contemporaries who called her mad. She experienced repeated imprisonment and also confinement to Bedlam, London's mental hospital. The tracts tell her own story as woman and prophet. They offer an opportunity to study her experiences as wife, mother, and widow; they also exhibit her extraordinary intellect, extensive education, and her fascination with words. In showing how England's history was fulfilling the biblical prophecies in the book of Daniel and Revelation, she commented about the political and religious controversies of the turbulent period preceding and during the English Civil War and Revolution.