The Life of Rachel Speght

In 1617, Rachel Speght caused a sensation when, at the age of nineteen, she published a polemic in defence of women under her own name. Daring to identify herself as a ‘forward’ woman, she repudiated the prevailing misogyny of her day. However, the power of her words died with her, and, for over 350 years, she was lost from view. Since the rediscovery of her works in the 1980s, Speght has become a familiar name in Renaissance literature. Nevertheless, almost fifty years after her re-emergence, the woman behind the works remains little known.

This book explores Speght’s life, from her formation in the turbulent world of Jacobean London to her last years as a displaced person within a Suffolk community torn apart by religious strife. Considering her as a writer and polemicist but also as a ‘public housewife’, the book reveals a courageous thinker and protagonist. One of the defining authors of what Christina Luckyj has described as the ‘radical politics of the female voice’ in early-Stuart England, and one of the few clergy wives to speak out in defence of her faith amid the chaos of the Civil War, Rachel Speght emerges as one of the most compelling female personalities of her age.