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God As Androgyne: Jane Lead’S Rewriting Of The Destiny Of Nature, Sylvia Bowerbank

Quidditas

Jane Lead [or Leade] (1624–1704) was one of the few seventeenth-century Englishwomen bold and radical enough to engage in "God-talk"—to used Rosemary Ruether's term. When the power of the English king and church was restored in 1660, radical millenarians were repressed and had to face that the English revolution—“God’s cause”— had failed politically, at least temporarily. In her recuperation of God’s cause, Lead argued that the revolution, properly understood, would be “intrinsical.” In her prophecies, Lead unites a radical hermeneutics of Scripture with Jacob Boehme’s concept of God as androgyne in order to reconfigure both God and divine history. According …