'Qualities which many think most unlikely to be found in women': Genderfluid Textualities in Samuel Torshell's The Womans Glorie

The Church of England’s clergyman Samuel Torshell (1605–1650), preacher at Bunbury in Cheshire by the London Haberdashers' Company, showed a lifelong interest in the ethical dimensions of public life. In the early 1640s he expressed his support for parliament in two publications, The Hypocrite Discovered and Cured and A Case of Conscience, Concerning Flying in Times of Trouble, where he charged against the lack of conscience in politicians who traded sides too swiftly. His sermon delivered that year on the birthday of Princess Elizabeth was published as The Womans Glorie: a Treatise, Asserting the Due Honour of that Sexe (1645), in which he argued that ‘the whole Sexe [was] unduly reproached’. While Torshell took a positive view of women’s abilities, a number of fragmentary case studies have fashioned him as ‘conventional’ in his praise of women. However, a careful reading of Torshell’s Woman’s Glorie reveals a more nuanced train of thought. This article argues that The Womans Glorie is a rare text that has become invisible in the flow of misogynistic literature from the mid-seventeenth century. It is subversive in posing both a whole epistemology of female learning and the theological argument that gender equality is a ‘sanctifying spirit’ that should be reflected upon its material sexual manifestation. Torshell’s notion of equality can be realized through learning and an active participation in ‘civill or publicke offices’, a fluid line of argument going beyond gender injunctions and patronizing undertones to embrace a defense of women that overcomes the male/female duality.