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This paper reconsiders the 1645-1646 career of Elizabeth Attaway, known primarily to scholars as an early reader of Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce or as evidence of General Baptist congregations' openness to women's preaching. Evidence of Attaway's career survives primarily in the three parts of Thomas Edwards's 1646 Gangraena, a polemical source that distorts her career even as it provides valuable information. This paper gives an account of the apocalyptic theology that shaped Attaway's decision to "divorce" her husband. It also argues for the independence of Attaway's preaching from established congregations, highlighting her role as the instigator of perhaps the first public preaching by women in civil war London-which happened not in gathered churches, but in public, revival-style exercises. Accordingly, it establishes Attaway as a more significant figure in the religious landscape of 1640s London than previously thought.

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If Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana has fostered debate about his theological positions, this essay argues that, in terms of the treatise, his theological process takes on greater importance than its results. Milton’s treatise theorizes a model of interpretative liberty rooted in his understanding of a Father and Son who differ in both number and essence, but who are unified through participation in the same process of profession. In a similar vein, human unity requires freely engaging in the process of working out one’s beliefs for oneself, even if the process invariably produces divergent results. The key to unifying these divergent results is the same “rule of charity” that Milton had articulated in the divorce tracts of 1643–45. As an illustration of Milton’s process, this essay probes his practice of rendering scripture into Latin, which brings out the complexities of the agency that engaging in this process of charitably liberated interpretation requires.