This publication issues one among early sleek England’s so much prolific lady authors, Jane Lead (1624–1704).  Well-researched and obviously written, those essays specialise in elements of Lead’s notion together with her attitudes in the direction of Calvinism, mysticism, androgyny and the apocalypse, her function in the Philadelphian Society, and her transnational legacy - fairly within the German-speaking global and North America.

This publication means that Lead used to be way more radical than has been intended. It argues that her spiritual trip had staging posts, particularly an preliminary Calvinist obsession with sin and predestination wedded to a standard Protestant figuring out of the arrival apocalypse, then the advent of Jacob Boehme’s teachings and accompanying visions of a feminine personification of divine knowledge and eventually, the adoption of the doctrine of the common recovery of all humanity.  It locates Lead inside a continual culture of puritan pastoral concept, exhibiting how her personalized view of the millennium differed from such a lot of her contemporaries and discussing her effect on Pietists and their conceptions of physically transmutation. It additionally discusses options to be had to girl authors and manuscript circulate in its place to print and examines her preliminary continental reception, relatively inside Pietist and Spiritualist circles.  finally, it lines her afterlife during the dating among the Philadelphians and the French Prophets, the curiosity in Lead one of the fans of Joanna Southcott and her successors, and the appropriation of Lead’s prophecies by means of 20th century routine: Mary’s urban of David and the Latter Rain movement.