Naomi Baker

A quick reminder that we'll be joined by Joe Davidson tomorrow for a special talk hosted by the EACW Radical Formations and Cultural Materialisms research group. We'd love to see you there!

Women should have a share in “directing the destinies of nations and governing the world, which is composed of females as well as males”

~ Shaker document, early 19th century

#internationalwomensday #iwd #earlymodern

Happy International Women’s Day - today I’m celebrating Rose Thurgood, a poor woman with a “hard and hungry” stomach who supported her four children alone after being abandoned by her husband - and found the inspiration and courage to write one of the earliest English autobiographies in the 1630s

Ann Lee’s marriage certificate, marked by her with an X.

Held in Chetham’s Library, Manchester, it’s the only surviving hand-written mark of the Shaker leader #thetestamentofannlee #shakers #manchester

We don’t need to “diagnose” early modern religious radicals according to our own criteria. Lee didn’t want to get married in the first place and was always committed to her autonomy and celibacy, so the film gets this wrong and undermines how radical she was. But otherwise it’s brilliant! 2/2

I loved #thetestamentofannlee - it’s immersive and celebratory and captures the spirit of radical religion. My only gripe is that Shaker celibacy is presented as Ann Lee’s personal response to trauma rather than a theological choice - this is the one element of condescension, a shame! 1/2

Voices will always resonate more loudly than “men’s great cannons” - the words of Anna Trapnel, which gave me the title of my book and remain truer than ever

A fitting pick for International Women's Day also! #IWD

God’s Impertinent Prophets | Erin Maglaque A new history brings to light the dissenting women who wrote, preached, and testified during England’s tumultuous seventeenth century, claiming the standing to speak as excluded outsiders who had un u...

A well-deserved, excellent review by @erinmaglaque.bsky.social in @nybooks.com of @drnaomibaker.bsky.social's 'Voices of Thunder: Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century', which I edited for @reaktionbooks.bsky.social. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Thank you for being such a great editor!

Thank you, you’ve captured the book so brilliantly

God’s Impertinent Prophets | Erin Maglaque A new history brings to light the dissenting women who wrote, preached, and testified during England’s tumultuous seventeenth century, claiming the standing to speak as excluded outsiders who had un u...

Am absolutely thrilled with this incredible review of my book in the New York Review of Books! Thank you @erinmaglaque.bsky.social for capturing so brilliantly the inspiring essence of the radical women in Voices of Thunder

@nybooks.com

Manifestly worth making time to visit the Glass Corridor Gallery on UoM campus for this exhibition over the next few weeks ✨ Really excellent!

It’s #worldbookday and so here’s a book I wrote! It introduces a dozen radical 17th women who have been ignored by history books for far too long ✍️📚#voicesofthunder #newbook

Thank you @katherineharvey.bsky.social for this brilliant review of Voices of Thunder!

Very well put!

Fennell’s #wutheringheights has far too many scenes indoors and misses the point that the moors are not only a crucial setting in the novel but its most important character. Sylvia Plath gets it better in her poem “Wuthering Heights”

#womenshistorymonth

It’s Women’s History Month, with the theme “leading the change”, and I want to celebrate all the unsung women who innovated, resisted and risked their lives to pave the way for the freedoms we cherish today. My book introduces 12 of these women from the C17th but there many more stories to be told

A Trumpet of Sedition Making History

I don’t share the same view of radical religion as this blog, but I love the comment that my book has “rescued a significant number of radical women of the seventeenth century from what E.P. Thompson once called the “enormous condescension of posterity #voicesofthunder

atrumpetofsedition.org/blog/

#emilybrontë, the most monstrously misrepresented of all our great writers. Her writing shattered the mould and we have yet to scratch the surface #wutheringheights #emilybronte

Back in the time when the sun was pink

"Voices of Thunder: Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century," by Naomi Baker, University of Chicago Press, 2025

Today's featured title:

"Voices of Thunder: Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century," by Naomi Baker, University of Chicago Press, 2025

@uchicagopress.bsky.social @drnaomibaker.bsky.social

press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Today’s the day! 🎉 We're in Sam Alex SG.16 4–5pm for an EACW research seminar 'The Sweet Taste of Empire' - @profkfh.bsky.social in conversation with @fredschurink.bsky.social on sugar, empire and race. Join us!

A bunch of “greedy dumb-dogs”, men who “never have enough, and love greeting in the marketplaces … and the upper seats at feasts, and to be called … masters; they are filthy brute beasts” - Hester Biddle’s account of powerful men in the 1660s. How very little things have changed #earlymodern

So the Epstein scandal is about politics? Silly me for thinking it’s about the mass abuse of women and girls | Marina Hyde Obsessing over individual players and political chaos leaves less time to focus on the misogyny. And that’s for the best, isn’t it guys, says Guardian columnist Marina Hyde

Exactly this

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again.
#Pinks #ProudBlue

Is the real issue the implications for the careers of yet more powerful men? So tired of this being the only story that counts

A strange feature of #hamlet is the fact that the villain - Claudius - speaks a lot of sense. Here he is on the relationship of money and corruption - ring any bells??

“In the corrupted currents of this world/ Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice”