Jane Lead and her Transnational Legacy

Ariel Hessayon is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.  He is the author of ‘Gold tried in the fire’: The prophet TheaurauJohn Tany and the English Revolution (2007) and the co-editor of several collections of essays.  He has also written extensively on a variety of early modern topics: antiscripturism, book burning, communism, environmentalism, esotericism, extra-canonical texts, heresy, crypto-Jews, Judaizing, millenarianism, mysticism, prophecy, and religious radicalism.

• 1. Introduction: Jane Lead’s legacy in perspective by Ariel Hessayon. - 2. Lead’s life and times (part one): before widowhood by Ariel Hessayon. - 3. Lead’s life and times (part two): the woman in the wilderness by Ariel Hessayon. - 4. Lead’s life and times (part three): the Philadelphian Society by Ariel Hessayon. - 5. Jane Lead and the tradition of puritan pastoral theology by Amanda Capern. - 6. Jane Lead and English apocalyptic thought in the late seventeenth century by Warren Johnston. - 7. The restitution of ‘Adam’s Angelical and Paradisiacal Body’ in Jane Lead’s metaphor ofrebirth by Stefani Salvadori. - 8. Mystical divinity in the manuscript writings of Jane Lead and Ann Bathurst by Sarah Apetrei. - 9. ‘God’s Strange Providence’: Jane Lead in the correspondence of Johann Georg Gichtel by Lucinda Martin. - 10. Philadelphia Resurrected: celebrating the Union Act from Irenic to Scatological Eschatology by Lionel Laborie. - 11. Jane Lead’s prophetic afterlife in the nineteenth-century English Atlantic by Philip Lockley. - 12. ‘A prophecy out of the past’: contrasting treatments of Jane Lead among two North American twentieth-century millenarian movements – Mary’s City of David and the Latter Rain by Bridget Jacobs

“The collection originated in a conference, and Hessayon has preserved a sense of collaborative, dialogic, and supportive discussion throughout these chapters. Each chapter is generously footnoted and, where relevant, includes appendices, tables, and data that invite further enquiry. The breadth of research, historical and literary analysis, and the generous inclusion of data and references provide a thorough introduction to new students of Lead’s life and times that should inspire further investigation and inquiry.” (Kaley Kramer, Early Modern Women Journal, Vol. 13 (01), 2018)