The Sexual Politics of Mourning in the Prophecies of Eleanor Davies
Journal article by Teresa Feroli; Criticism, Vol. 36, 1994
Journal Article Excerpt
The sexual politics of mourning in the prophecies of Eleanor Davies. by Teresa Feroli With the publication of A Warning to the Dragon and All his Angels in 1625, Eleanor Davies becomes perhaps the only one of the Civil War prophets to launch her literary career prior to the easing of censorship restrictions in 1641.(1) The boldness of her decision to have her exegetical treatise on the visions of Daniel printed may have been mitigated by the position of her then-husband, the poet and prominent barrister, Sir John Davies, who could have shielded her from legal sanction.(2) Still, the claims she makes for her prophetic authority demonstrate the sort of intellectual daring that would come to characterize religious radicals of the Civil War period such as the royalist prophet Arise Evans who, in 1653, described himself as "a man to whom God hath given foreknowledge."(3) In A Warning, she professes to have determined the meaning of the final vision of Daniel, denied to the prophet himself,(4) which enables her to predict that "the day of Judgement" will take place "nineteene yeares and a halfe" from 28 July 1625.(5) (Her later texts identify the execution of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, in January of 1645 as ringing in the "day of Judgement" anticipated by A Warning.)(6) Within the context of seventeenth-century women's writing, the real surprise of A Warning is that Davies does not apologize for her gender but explains her reasons for writing in terms of a simple, yet powerful, assumption of authority: "And I thinke that I have also the Spirit of God."(7) However, some fifteen years into a prophetic career that ended, with her death, in 1652, Davies claims the legitimacy of her visions by attempting to appropriate the political authority accorded to the name of her father, George Touchet, Baron Audeley and Earl of Castlehaven. In large measure, her struggles with civil and ecclesiastical authority in the years between 1625 and 1641 shape her new prophetic identity. For instance, in 1633, when she publishes her visions for the second time, she pays for the audacity of both her words and her deed with two years in jail. Unable to find a willing printer in England, she travels to Amsterdam. Once she begins to distribute her newly printed treatises, Laud orders them burned because they presumed to interpret "the new laws and some of the prophets."(8) Beyond destroying her books, Laud oversees her trial before the Commission for Causes Ecclesiastical(9) at which the judges determine that her writings "much unbeseemed her Sex."(10) Her two years in prison did not deter her, and she was jailed again in 1638 for banding together with a group of women to protest the "Romish" rituals practiced at the Cathedral of Lichfield. The spectacular nature of her defiance--she occupied the bishop's throne, declared herself "primate and metropolitan," and defaced the Cathedral's tapestries--only served to reenforce earlier accusations of her madness and resulted in her being committed to Bedlam.(11) As a woman who "violated social conventions and expressed religious ... [and] political dissent," Davies, according to her biographer Esther Cope, was only too likely to have her contemporaries deem her insane. The early years of her prophetic career taught Davies that her social milieu had little tolerance for a woman who professed to be the messenger of God. What makes Davies such a fascinating literary figure is that her identification of her prophetic authority with the name of her father does not come as a quick antidote to her political dilemma but through a careful manipulation of the language of prophecy. Her struggle to interpolate herself into the structure of political authority takes place in her repeated(12) and varied renderings of the moment on 28 July 1625 when she realizes that "There is nineteene yeares and a halfe to the day of Judgement." Over the course of her career, she dramatizes this statement and transforms it from an intellectual accomplishment into a visionary experience. Once the result of laborious study, the "nineteene yeares and a halfe" comes to be represented as deriving from a "Heavenly voice."(13) This moment of recognition is at the center of what I shall call her vocation narrative. Through its various transmutations, her restaging of her call to prophesy gives her a name as it registers her resistance to the very structures of political authority that constitute the power of her father's name.Even prior to claiming her rights to the authority of the patriarchal signifier, Davies represents the proper ... |
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