Entry on Elizabeth Warren in the Europa Biographical Dictionary of British Women

Warren, Elizabeth (fl.. 1646-49), religious pamphleteer, known only by three pamphlets which she published over the period 1646 to 49. She apparently lived in Woodbridge, Suffolk, and may have been the wife of the Rev. John Warren, headmaster of Woodbridge school from about 1632. Her first tract was a defence of the ordained clergy against lay preachers, The Old and Good Way Vindicated (1646, two editions), and in 1647 she issued a long work entitled Spiritual Thrift, comprising a series of meditations on religious themes. This reveals her to have been a well-educated woman who knew Latin and wrote well. Her third work, A Warning - Peece from Heaven against the Sins of the Times (1649), was a lament on the breakdown of authority in the home, church, and state.

Unlike many female pamphleteers of the 1640s, Elizabeth Warren seems to have accepted a subordinate role for women even in spiritual matters. She published only reluctantly, 'conscious to my mentall and sex-deficiencie', and believed that women were more susceptible to error than men: 'wee of the weaker sex, have hereditary evill from our Grandmother Eve' and so were 'created subordinate by divine institution'. She provides some insight into the difficulties faced by women who wanted to write: her own educational, social, and family commitments, together with poor health, she says, 'put mee continually upon such imployments, as straightens my leisure in affaires of this nature'.

See also K. Thomas, 'Women and the Civil War Sects', in Past and Present, 13, 1958; E. M. Williams, 'Women Preachers in the Civil War', in Journal of Modern History, I, 1929.

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