Ambrose employed the negative use of ravish only once. In describing the
struggles of Jacob in Genesis 34 he declares “after his first entry into his owne
country, his wife Rachel dyes, his daughter Dinah is ravished, his sonne Reuben lyes
with his concubine.”^4 Obviously, ravish is used here in its destructive sense of rape or
overpowering a person to harm or inflict pain upon her. This was the common
definition found in seventeenth-century dictionaries. Thomas Blount’s entry is
representative of this and declares that ravish, “signifies in our Law an unlawful
taking away, either a woman or an heir in Ward: Sometime it is used also in one
signification with Rape, (viz.) the violent deflouring a Woman.”^5 However, in
another seventeenth-century work, the spiritual meaning of ravish was conveyed
through the term rapture and understood as, “a snatching away by violence; also an
Ecstasie, or Transportment.”^6 According to the Oxford English Dictionary the
semantic range includes both the “mystical sense” to transport a soul and the
destructive expression “to ravage, despoil, plunder.”^7 Williams acknowledges the
ambiguous nature and tension that while ravishment has “dangerous associations with
rape or abduction” it also “expressed certain characteristics of ecstasy powerfully and
effectively.”^8 Thomas Vincent’s sermon on spiritual marriage reflects this same
negative usage as he warns young virgins “when otherwise the Devil and Sin would
ravish your Virgin affections.”^9 However, it is critical to recognize that the devil and
sin are violating the woman not God. Contemporary scholarship has made much of
4
(^5) Blount, Ambrose, GlossographiaUltima in Prima, Media, U, n.p.; Cockeram, ltimaEnglish Dictionarie (1654), 28.^ , second part, n.p.; and
Phillips, New World of English Words, n.p. also define ravish as rape. Cawdrey,
Table Alphabeticall, renders ravish as “take away by force,” n.p. Wilson, Christian
Dictionarie 6 does not include ravish.
Phillips, New World of English Words, n.p. Phillips also has entries for transport
and ecstasie. 7
8 OED, 13:235.^
9 Williams, “Puritan Enjoyment of God,” 201. Vincent, Christ the Best Husband, 18.