Communities of the Miraculous: Healing in Anne Wentworth and the Particular Baptist Tradition

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Notes

¹ My attention to the rhetorical development in the Baptist healing tradition complements recent work on the cultural significance of this religious sect in Early Modern England, especially as it relates to the emergence of Enlightenment skepticism (Shaw 21–50).

² Trapnel's, Sutton's, and Powell's texts were available before Wentworth began to write. Wentworth may also have had access to Knollys's healings accounts either by means of a manuscript or, and more likely, oral transmission. William Kiffin printed Knollys's autobiography with supplementary material in 1692, but Knollys stopped his life narrative in 1672, as the title page notes. Wentworth insists that she was once a member of Knollys's congregation and that he had supported her in the early 1670s (England's Spiritual Pill 5–6). He may even have known her since her childhood (Johnston 347-48), so it is possible that she knew by hearsay the healing stories preserved in his autobiography. Although writing after the Wentworth affair, in the early 1690s, Susannah Arch records hearing from another woman in her church about a “lame” maid spontaneously cured of a seventeen-year ailment (15). There is no reason not to think that similar healing stories passed around Baptist communities in earlier decades. Also, Arch's own case may be another of the post-1650 Baptist miracle healing accounts, for her account shares many of the same features with them, although hers would be a variation because her life-threatening leprosy was killing her slowly, whereas the others more frequently faced the risk of imminent death.

³ Public interest in healing stories—as a religious experience worth sharing—appears in some of Trapnel's and Knollys' accounts (A Legacy 29–30; Report and Plea 43; Knollys 8).