Jane Lead

Jane Lead (her original name was Jane Ward) was originally from Norfolk. She was one of nine children belonging to Hammond Ward, a magistrate, and his wife Mary, the daughter of Sir James Calthrope of Cockthorpe. When Jane was fifteen she had a profound spiritual experience which left her melancholic for the next three years. During this time she began to study the Bible closely, attending religious meetings and listening to a several preachers, most notably the antinomian Tobias Crisp. In 1644, she married William Lead, a distant cousin from King’s Lynn. Their marriage of twenty-seven years ended with her husband’s death on 5 February 1670. Later that year, she received a vision of the Virgin-Wisdom, a Sophia figure often characterized as the female aspect of God. Her husband’s death left her and her daughters destitute. In 1676, her brother offered to take care of her financial woes, but Lead refused, having already committed to live as ‘fellow labourers’ in the ‘Paradisical Husbandry’ with John Pordage, a Christian mystic who was prosecuted as a heretic by Cromwell’s government. He and Lead had met in 1663, but it was not until 1675 that the two mystics became cohabitants and co-seekers of Divine Wisdom. Pordage died in 1681, the same year Lead published Heavenly Cloud now Breaking, in which she explains the fundamentals to her theology, including Boehme’s cosmology and explanations on Divine Wisdom. In 1683 she wrote the preface to Pordage’s Theological Mystica. In 1694, Francis Lee found her living in a cell at a home for impoverished gentlewomen. Though partially blind, her charisma inspired Lee with her vision. He secured her a household and pension on married her widowed daughter Barbara Walton. They were soon joined by the Reverend Richard Roach and together formed an international theosophical movement that became known as the Philadelphian Society.

During the next decade, Lead published fifteen books, including The Enochian Walks with God, found out by a Spiritual-Traveller (1694); The Ascent to the Mount of Vision where many things were shewn (1699); and A Fountain of Gardens, or, A Spiritual Diary of the Wonderful Experiences of a Christian Soul under the Conduct of Heavenly Wisdom (1700), as well as updated versions of her previous works Heavenly Cloud and Revelation of Revelations before her death in 1704. Lead’s teachings were influential among the Pietists, Behmenists, and Christian mystics, including the German social reformer Nikolaus Zinzendorf. 

For more on Lead, see Julie Hirst, ‘“Mother of Love’: Spiritual Maternity in the works of Jane Lead (1624–1704),” in Women, Gender, and Radical Religion in Early Modern Europe (2007), 161-88; Julie Hirst, Jane Lead: Biography of a Seventeenth-century Mystic (Gower Publishing, Ltd., 2005); Julie Hirst, “Dreaming of a New Jerusalem: Jane Lead's Visions of Wisdom,” Feminist Theology 14.3 (2006), 349-365. For more on the visionary prophetesses of the seventeenth century, see Curtis Freeman, A Company of Women Preachers: Baptist Prophetesses in Seventeenth-Century England (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011); and Rachel Adcock, Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640-1680 (Farnham, Surry, UK: Ashgate, 2015).