Contemporaries noticed it, membership lists confirm it: women were a majority in the Dutch Reformed Church during the long seventeenth century. Why, then, is the history of this Church predominantly one of men? Amanda Pipkin, associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, foregrounds the patriarchal character of Protestantism. Yet her study is about six women who made their mark in this Church as authors of published religious books. They are the “dissenting daughters” in the title. Building upon the long tradition of lay religiosity in the Low Countries, they studied, taught, wrote, hosted religious meetings, and admonished lax Church members, including ministers. Pipkin presents them as militant reformers, defying the limitations of their gender.

In four chapters, she analyzes the lives and work of the sisters Cornelia and Susanna Teellinck, Anna Maria van Schurman, Sara Nevius, and Henrica Hoolwerff with her friend Cornelia Leydekker. All six came from wealthy burgher families and were closely related to local magistrates and prominent ministers. All were well educated, Van Schurman a famous savante. According to Pipkin, they assumed leadership positions in their communities through their writings, which circulated in manuscript form before they were published, often posthumously. Prominent ministers supported them in their work, either in person or through the publication of domestic advice books that gave mothers an equal role with men in fostering devotion within their households.

The roles they assumed and the literary genres which they produced varied. Cornelia Teellinck left a written confession of faith, produced for her admittance as Church member as well as devotional poetry, stamped by the enduring memory of martyrdom in the first generation of Protestants, and edited by her sister Suzanna. Van Schurman's oeuvre contained letters on religious topics exchanged between her and several of the most learned scholars of her time, as well as devotional poetry. Nevius had religious songs published during her life, and left a substantial handwritten volume of meditations—still in print—that was published after her death. Hoolwerff and Leydecker anchored a literary circle of friends who sent each other letters, poems, and books, and met at the home of the bedridden Hoolwerff for pious and literary conversation. Both published volumes of poetry, songs, prayers, and meditations.

Presenting the variety in the lives and work of these female authors, Dissenting Daughters is a valuable contribution to a growing body of studies of the importance of lay ministry and more specifically of women in Reformed religious culture. Most previous work focuses on one specific woman, but since almost all of it is in Dutch, it is not easily accessible for an international audience. Throughout, Pipkin justly emphasizes how devout women built networks of influence in the local church, among family and friends, and in their households. Repeatedly, however, she echoes the hagiographic style of her subjects’ obituaries. Moreover, she makes far-reaching claims, such as that Van Schurman, through her correspondence, “impacted foreign and domestic reformed theology,” and that ministers’ daughters like Nevius “studied for the ministry” and for a future as an active ministers’ wife. These claims that cast women in male roles are not really substantiated, contrast shrilly with the main argument, and undermine its credibility.

A second point of criticism concerns the title. Admittedly, Pipkin uses the label dissenting in a very general sense, for women who do not resign themselves to passive piety. Yet in selecting women from the Further Reformation, a purported movement to foster greater piety in Church and society and with a predilection for conventicles, she does little to avoid the association with Anglo-Saxon Puritanism. None of these women fit the label dissent in the usual sense, as denoting movements that secede from the public Church. Recent research—notably by Fred van Lieburg, whose work she justly and frequently refers to—has exposed the Further Reformation as an invention of tradition. Rather than militantly Reformist (dissenting) exceptions, female authors of devotional literature and women active in lay ministry belong to mainstream Dutch Reformed religious culture that also produced Enlightenment figures like Elisabeth Wolff and Agatha Deken. These active women deserve to be studied within that wider context.