Quidditas Volume 24 2003 Article 2 2003 God As Androgyne: Jane Lead’s Rewriting of the Destiny of Nature Sylvia Bowerbank McMaster University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/rmmra Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, History Commons, Philosophy Commons, and the Renaissance Studies Commons Recommended Citation Bowerbank, Sylvia (2003) "God As Androgyne: Jane Lead’s Rewriting of the Destiny of Nature," Quidditas: Vol. 24 , Article 2. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/rmmra/vol24/iss1/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Quidditas by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact
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[email protected]. God As Androgyne: Jane Lead’s Rewriting of the Destiny of Nature Sylvia Bowerbank McMaster University ANE LEAD [OR LEADE] (1624–1704) was one of the few seventeenth- century Englishwomen bold and radical enough to engage in “God- J talk”—to use Rosemary Ruether’s term.1 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.2 In her recuperation of God’s cause, Lead argued that the revolution, properly understood, would be “intrinsical.”3 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 to Lead, Wisdom’s disciples and eventually all of creation were to be—to use a Behmenist key- word—“tinctured” by the Virgin Wisdom’s creating power, until a critical mass was made ready for revolutionary change.