Anna Trapnel perfectly fits the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series, and not only because she is a woman writer. Trapnel is indeed other to “almost all the centers of social, religious, political, and literary power in the mid-seventeenth century”; but as a prophet who claimed to speak “not of her own volition but at the insistence of God,” her voice is other even to herself (1–3). The recovery of Trapnel’s work by feminist historians in the mid-twentieth century inspired inquiry into a number of intersecting issues, including political authority, subjectivity, and print culture. Hilary Hinds’s edition of the Report and Plea (1654) continues this recovery and promises to bring the ephemeral prophetess into new orbits of early modern studies.

In the introduction, Hinds carefully situates the Report and Plea amid its biographical and historical contexts. Like other Baptists and Fifth Monarchists with millenarian beliefs, Trapnel criticized Cromwell’s acceptance of the protectorate and dissolution of the Barebones Parliament in 1653 for abandoning the godly republicanism it rhetorically deployed against Charles I and the Royalists. A conventional Puritan early in life, Trapnel increasingly saw herself as specially called by God to be his instrument in the temporal world. She famously fell into a prophetic trance at Whitehall in January 1654; witnesses recorded and circulated her prophecy (The Cry of a Stone) soon after. In the Report and Plea, Trapnel recounts her postprophecy travels to Cornwall at the request of friends and her subsequent trial for sedition and imprisonment. Generically, Hinds calls the Report and Plea a work of autobiographical life writing that, comprised as it is by “the forces of the divine and the human, the spiritual and the dispositional,” evinces the decidedly early modern interiority of its author (23).

The annotations do an excellent job explicating the theology beneath the surface of Trapnel’s writing. Hinds’s research is particularly impressive when the Report and Plea briefly shifts from narrative to dialogue in recounting her trial in Truro. Trapnel was interrogated by Justice James Launce, a Cornwall MP, and Justice Richard Lobb, the sheriff of Cornwall, both of whom participated in the early persecution of Quakers. The annotations bring to light Trapnel’s familiarity with legal proceedings, which affords a deeper appreciation of her attunement to, and navigation of, dynamics of temporal power. Trapnel’s lengthy period of imprisonment is a deeply moving account of suffering and isolation breeding so many millenarian visions of “joy unspeakable” (116) that she eventually ceases to report them. Appended to the Report and Plea is “A Defiance” against accusations of witchcraft, vagrancy, and whoredom, to name a few. These accusations, unfortunately, were ephemeral and have not survived; Trapnel’s defiance, nevertheless, is a fitting ensign for the “new nonconformists” (134) emerging in the 1650s that would gain traction after the Restoration into the Glorious Revolution.

Hinds’s edition of the Report and Plea is a boon to scholars of the English Revolution and Protestant dissent more specifically. The research supporting this volume is especially valuable for its illumination of the networks supporting and oppressing early nonconformists, as well as for its detailed insight into the legal procedures involved in cases such as Trapnel’s. A few more maps would have provided a richer sense of the sprawling geography of Trapnel’s journey (only one map of Cornwall is provided), which is difficult to fully appreciate by way of the footnotes. This volume will likely interest early modern feminist and gender scholars, but I anticipate the Report and Plea will speak loudest to scholars of early modern legal culture, social networks, and religious emotion. Predicting Trapnel’s future purchase in early modern studies, however, is a fruitless endeavor, perhaps, for the prophetess herself clues us in to the manner in which her unique singularity makes her work difficult to pin down. “I understand you are not married,” Justice Lobb says to Trapnel during her interrogation: “Then having no hindrance,” she replies, “why may not I go where I please, if the Lord so will?” (88).