Anna Trapnel

Anna Trapnel (fl. 1642-1660) was a travelling Baptist prophet and Fifth Monarchist active in England in the 1650s.

Anna Trapnel

Early life

Trapnel was born in Poplar in the parish of Stepney to the east of the City of London to William Trapnel, a shipwright, and Anne.

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After her mother’s death, she began to experience religious raptures and visions; she attended the Baptist church and was involved with Familism before joining the Fifth Monarchists in 1652.

In April 1654 she was arrested on charges of witchcraft, madness, whoredom, vagrancy, and seditious intent; she answered the judges’ questions with parables and bible verses and managed to avoid the death penalty.

Most of her publications began as transcriptions of her sayings which were written down by a friend during her times of spiritual rapture.

Many of her works foretold the defeat of all political rulers due to Jesus’ victorious return to earth.

Works

• The Cry of a Stone, 1654
• Strange and Wonderful News from White-Hall: Or, The Mighty Visions Proceeding from Mistris Anna Trapnel, 1654
• Anna Trapnel's Report and Plea; or, a Narrative of Her Journey from London into Cornwall, 1654
• A Legacy for Saints; Being Several Experiences of the dealings of God with Anna Trapnel, 1654
• A lively voice for the king of saints and nations 1658

Further reading

• Lyn Bennet. ‘Women, Writing, and Healing: Rhetoric, Religion, and Illness in An Collins, “Eliza”, and Anna Trapnel’. Journal of Medical Humanities, vol. 36, 2015, pp. 157–70.
• Rebecca Bullard. ‘Textual Disruption in Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea (1654)’. The Seventeenth Century, vol. 23, 2008, pp. 34–53.
• Kate Chedgzoy. ‘Female Prophecy in the Seventeenth Century: The Instance of Anna Trapnel’. Writing and the English Renaissance, edited by William Zunder and Suzanne Trill, Longman, 1996, pp. 238–54
• Catie Gill. ‘“All The Monarchies Of This World Are Going Down The Hill” The Anti-Monarchism of Anna Trapnel’s The Cry of a Stone (1654)’. Prose Studies, vol. 29, pp. 19–35.
• Elspeth Graham. ‘“Licencious Gaddyng Abroade”: A Conflicted Imaginary of Mobility in Early Modern English Protestant Writings’. Études Épistémè, vol. 35, 2019, pp. 1–30.
• Hilary Hinds. ‘Soul-Ravishing and Sin-Subduing: Anna Trapnel and the Gendered Politics of Free Grace’. Renaissance and Reformation, vol. 25, 2001, pp. 117–37.
• Kevin Killeen. ‘“People of a Deeper Speech”: Anna Trapnel, Enthusiasm, and the Aesthetics of Incoherence’. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English, 1540-1700, Oxford University Press, 2022, pp. 203–16.
• Erica Longfellow. Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• Maria Magro. "Spiritual Biography and Radical Sectarian Women's Discourse: Anna Trapnel and the Bad Girls of the English Revolution". Journal of Medieval and Modern Studies, 2004.
• Susannah B. Mintz. ‘The Specular Self of “Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea’. Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 25, 2000, pp. 1–16.
• Marcus Nevitt. ‘“Blessed, Self-Denying, Lambe-like?” The Fifth Monarchist Women’. Critical Survey, vol. 11, 1999, pp. 83–97.
• Ramona Wray. ‘“What Say You to [This] Book? [...] Is It Yours?”: Oral and Collaborative Narrative Trajectories in the Mediated Writings of Anna Trapnel’. Women’s Writing, vol. 16, 2009, pp. 408–24.