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Richard Baxter's Gendered Political Theology of Consent

abstract:This essay draws out the challenge that Richard Baxter's A Holy Commonwealth (1659), read together with his writings on justification from the 1650s and those connected to the toleration crisis of the 1670s, offers to the legitimating, republican/proto- liberal model of consent, according to which the subjects' consent can potentially endow sovereigns with absolute power. Against such models, whose gendered problems the essay presents by reading the accounts in Livy and Ovid of Lucretia's rape, the article argues that after 1662 Baxter reframes consent around his ecclesiological practice of partial conformity. This reframing breaks the active- male/passive- female gender binary of legitimating consent by making consent something that is never wholly granted—with the consequence of putting sovereigns and subjects in a relation of mutual vulnerability.