‘Take no distaste of my words, though they be a woman’s writing’

Written by Dr Naomi Baker, Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Manchester

Rose Thurgood believed herself equal in God’s eyes with the wealthy men who felt entitled to offer spiritual instruction. This belief prompted her to write one of the earliest known English conversion narratives. As a result, this 17^th-century woman, a woman on the brink of starvation, occupies a pivotal place in the history of English autobiographical writing.

In the late 1990s, an academic visiting the John Rylands Library for a single day made a remarkable discovery. Working in the old reading room, he opened the obscurely titled ‘Miscellanea’ (English MS 875). Within its pages, he discovered not one but two previously unknown conversion narratives. Both date to 1636-7, and both were written by women.

In England, similar personal testimonies of spiritual experience began to be printed in the 1650s. The Rylands looks after a collection of manuscript testimonies from the 1700s, digitised and transcribed in the Rapture and Reason project. The two accounts in this volume, copied by a scribe known only as ‘E.A.’, are very early examples of the genre. They were an incredibly exciting find, one that Jeremy Maule – the visiting academic – generously shared with me. I began researching these fascinating narratives and the inspiring women who wrote them.

The narratives were written by Rose Thurgood and Cicely Johnson. They lived in Colchester, Essex, moving in the same radical Protestant circles. Their writings give us rare insight into religious women’s lives and beliefs in the decades before the English Civil War.

Rose Thurgood’s narrative

Rose Thurgood’s narrative, ‘A Lecture of Repentance’, is particularly striking. Thurgood writes that in her youth she associated with ‘them that belonged to the king’s court’. But she had fallen on hard times. Her ‘bad husband’ had sold his land, leaving her and her four children ‘nothing to live on’ but her ‘poor labours’. Hearing her children cry for food – and fearing that they would starve to death – Thurgood reached breaking point. ‘I began to rage at God himself’, she writes, ‘saying to myself, what a God is this? What doth he mind to do with my children? Surely they will die’. Her husband’s choices were to blame for their situation (‘the poorer he was the worse he was’, she writes), but she also feared that God had inflicted poverty upon her as a punishment for her sins.

I began to rage at God himself saying to myself, what a God is this? What doth he mind to do with my children? Surely they will die.

Rose Thurgood, 1636-7.

Writing her story, Rose Thurgood began to process her traumatic fall into poverty. Accusing those in the established Church of ignoring the needs of the poor, she highlights a parable in Luke’s Gospel in which God welcomes a ‘beggar in his rags’ and rejects a ‘rich man in his perfumed robes’. Thurgood presents her poverty as a sign of her virtuous refusal to benefit from unjust social and economic hierarchies.

Rose Thurgood and Cicely Johnson were influenced by two radical Protestant preachers, the self-proclaimed prophets Richard Farnham and John Bull. Originally weavers from Colchester, the two men taught unorthodox doctrines, including antinomianism (the belief that those who are ‘under grace’ are not constrained by the moral law). Ultimately, both men were imprisoned – in Farnham’s case for bigamy, after he married a woman while her husband was away at sea. The woman he married was Elizabeth Addington. Could she be the ‘E.A.’ who copied this manuscript?

Echoing Farnham’s and Bull’s teachings about conversion, Thurgood describes the moment – 8 a.m. on 4 November, four months before she writes her narrative – when she suddenly knew that her soul was saved. Lying in bed listening to her children cry with illness and with hunger, she was desperate. But out of nowhere she felt a ‘sweet flash coming over [her] heart’, causing her to cry out ‘now God is my God, Christ is my Christ’.

A woman’s writing

Rose Thurgood addresses the narrative to her mother, but she later refers to her ‘sisters and friends or whatsoever thou art’, indicating that she is writing for a wider readership. She describes herself as ‘a poor woman’ and a ‘weak woman’, acknowledging that her readers will find ‘no scholarship’ in her words. She is painfully aware that people will ‘scorn’ her, but she warns her readers not to despise her for her poverty, pointing out that the Bible teaches that God often uses unlikely instruments for his work.

I am in good hope you will accept of this my Lecture of Repentance, and take no distaste of my words, though they be a woman’s writing

Rose Thurgood, 1636-7.

Rose Thurgood is one of a dozen seventeenth-century women whose incredible stories I tell in Voices of Thunder: Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century (Reaktion Books, 2025). It might have taken centuries for us to hear Thurgood’s story, but her plea that we listen to her words is finally being heeded.

---

All images unless otherwise stated are copyright of the University of Manchester and can be used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike Licence.