Jane Lead

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Jane Lead was an English visionary and devotional writer who, in the closing decades of the seventeenth century, kept a vast spiritual diary recording what she took to be direct encounters with the divine Wisdom, and who became the guiding figure of the small London circle known as the Philadelphian Society. Born Jane Ward in Norfolk in 1624, married young, and widowed in her mid-forties, she turned in her later years to the writings of the German theosophist Jakob Böhme — and there she found a frame for the visions that had begun to come to her.

The visions were the center of her work. From 1670 she recorded them in a journal she would publish, late in life, under the title A Fountain of Gardens — a sprawling record of dreams, openings, and figures seen with the inner eye. The recurring presence in them was Sophia, the divine Wisdom, whom Lead described not as an abstraction but as a person: a feminine aspect of God who appeared to her, spoke, and led her deeper. That a woman without theological training claimed such instruction, and published it at length, was itself part of what made her conspicuous. She wrote in the plain register of someone reporting what she had seen rather than arguing a position, and her followers read the diaries as a living scripture of the inner life.

Two convictions organized the teaching she drew from these experiences. One was that true religion is inward — a matter of regeneration and direct illumination rather than of doctrine or church order. The other, held with some boldness, was the doctrine of universal restoration: the belief, taken from Böhme and reaching back to Origen, that in the end every fallen creature would be restored to God. That hope ran against the settled Protestant teaching on eternal punishment, and it drew the charge of enthusiasm. After the death of the clergyman John Pordage, whose community she had joined, leadership of the circle passed to Lead; the scholar Francis Lee, who married into her household, organized it and carried her books to the Continent, where they found readers among German and Dutch Pietists.

Her contemporaries were divided. To her admirers she was a genuine seer in the line of Böhme; to her critics she was a credulous woman mistaking reverie for revelation, and the society’s public meetings drew ridicule. Modern scholarship sets the question of the visions’ source to one side and reads her instead as the most prolific English voice of the Böhmenist current — a writer who gave the speculative theosophy of the Continent an English literature of its own, and who kept the figure of a feminine divine Wisdom in circulation long enough for it to surface again in later visionary Protestantism. She went blind in her last years and died in London in 1704, in poverty, the diaries still being copied and translated. The organized society did not long outlast her; the books did.

→ Related: Philadelphian Society · Christian Theosophy Boehmean · Russian Sophiology · Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon · Quietism