Hester Biddle

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Standard Name: Biddle, Hester
Birth Name: Hester
Married Name: Hester Biddle
Indexed Name: Esther Biddle
HB is one of the most powerful as well as one of the more prolific seventeenth-century Quaker writers of polemical prophecies or tracts. She depicts in hypnotic, biblical language the imminent end of the world, repeatedly threatening her enemies with the flames. When she uses the first person singular it is often hard to tell whether she is speaking for God or herself.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Travel Mary Fisher
She and Austin were the first Quakers in North America, but all she saw of New England was the inside of a prison. After five weeks she and her companion were deported—apparently back to Barbados...
Textual Production Sarah Green
The eight-page pamphlet is entitled A Letter to the Publisher of Brothers 's Prophecies. Richard Brothers was a naval officer, as well as a millenarian prophesying the destruction of London quite in the style...
Textual Production Dorothy White
Rather in Hester Biddle 's manner, she addresses first London (which she calls Sodom) in prose and then the Heavenly City, mostly in verse, in A Trumpet of the Lord of Hosts, Blown unto the...
Textual Features Margaret Fell
The Citie of London Reprov'd adopts the same threatening, blood-and-thunder tone used by Hester Biddle for similarly-titled addresses to cities.
Reception Margaret Fell
This is not, as has been said, the first Quaker justification for women's preaching (which had been defended, for instance, by Hester Biddle in A Brief Relation of the State of Man before Transgression...
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Beverley
She takes as text the very alarming words of Jeremiah v. 29, in which God declares vengeance on the Jewish nation.
Beverley, Elizabeth. Modern Times. Printed for the author.
Her invocation of the prophet Jeremiah introduces a kind of jeremiad or prophecy of...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Biddle, Hester. A Warning from the Lord God of Life and Power. Printed for Robert Wilson, 1660.
Biddle, Hester, and Thomas Woodrove. “Something in Short”. A Brief Relation of the State of Man before Transgression, Printed for Thomas Simmons, 1659.
Biddle, Hester. The Trumpet of the Lord Sounded Forth unto These Three Nations. 1662.
Biddle, Hester. Wo to thee City of Oxford. 1655.
Biddle, Hester. Wo to thee Towne of Cambridge. 1655.