In an effort to overcome the assumption, on the one hand, that early modern women were denied access to public forums and, on the other, that intellectual thought was anathema to the puritan charge, editors Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann have challenged us to see English puritan women involving themselves in key debates over the relationship between faith and reason, developing extended networks of influence, and actively rewriting religious practice for fellow believers. Running the gamut from orthodoxy to radicalism, from soteriology to political activism, and from elite to outlier, the case studies generated from this challenge come together in their historically savvy collection.
While all of the early modern women included in this important book share with one another the broad brushstrokes of a puritan faith bound by words, the scholarly accounts about them suggest additional correspondence. Five of the fourteen essays in this collection explore ideas of process as a source of power and productivity in matters of faith: Danielle Clarke on Mary Sidney's Psalms; Lynne Magnusson on Anne Cooke Bacon's translated Apologie … of the Churche of Englande; Erika Longfellow on Elizabeth Isham's “Booke of Rememberance”; Susan Wiseman on Anne Bradstreet's poetry; and Diane Purkiss on Anna Trapnel's The Cry of a Stone. Of these, three deserve special note.
Bringing together Bacon's Apologie, an early contribution to the establishment of the Elizabethan church, with her later purported radicalization, evidenced in a letter to Lord Burghley, Magnusson reveals Bacon as a learned reformist ideologue who anticipates a church that is “never fully erected” (43) and a Christian state that is never fully realized. Insisting that “the combined ideals in [Bacon's] education of civic humanism and Calvinist election shaped for her an energising sense … of a significant personal vocation and of an effectual imagined community” (42), Magnusson stresses in that blending Bacon's processual celebration of learning in the service of God.
Identifying Isham's “Booke” as the first recognizable autobiography in our modern sense, Longfellow's fascinating essay looks closely at narrative function to determine meaning. Retrospective, chronological, and descriptive of an evolving self, Isham's “Booke” illustrates how the processes of reading and reflection shape identity. Noting that Isham's musings provide evidence of rewriting, Longfellow illustrates how revision works to generate a narrative of self from the leavings of devotional exercises. Longfellow is particularly good here at pulling together the myriad influences that model a life: from clerical advice to reading materials, from familial pressures to the idiosyncrasies of predisposition.
In the last of five strong essays devoted to process, Purkiss uses ideas of geography to reconstruct the development of the prophet Anna Trapnel's belief. Noting that Trapnel's radicalism relies on the places and spaces that she traversed, the processes in which she participated, Purkiss reads the prophet's eventual religious identity as the culmination of that journey and the incremental nature of Trapnel's religious conversion from moderation to radicalism as a “series of theological steps” (163). Imagining a trajectory of religious perspectives that might move a believer like Trapnel from the rejection of infant baptism into anti-Laudian sentiment, from sentiment to sectarianism, from independency to radical separatism, Purkiss illustrates the physical and embodied nature of Trapnel's mysticism, reminding us along the way of what is to be gained by careful and exacting historical excavation.
Turning from process to engage more particularly with questions of belief and doctrine, two essays examine the particulars of a writer's religious life and values. The first, by Elizabeth Clarke, offers a detailed analysis of Anne, Lady Southwell's Puritanism, paying careful attention to the doctrinal aspects of the poet's religious catechism, while the second, by Nigel Smith, shares a predilection for careful religious definition. Exploring the writing of Philadelphian Society prophet Jane Lead, Smith's essay reanimates the space of Lead's spiritual mysticism. Describing the prophet's situational androgyny, in particular her idea of a profeminist God, Smith identifies in addition Lead's rejection of traditional ideas of Christian salvation, her questioning of the power of rational thought in faith, and her celebration of interiority and the dream state in concepts of redemption (Lead's blindness in later life may account for this turn). For Smith, then, Lead is not a formal puritan; rather she is a puritan enthusiast whose theosophical principles attracted both Anglicans and nonjurors.
Five essays in this collection explore early modern women's puritanism as a vehicle for thinking about patronage networks and lines of reception: Susan M. Felch documents Anne Vaughan Locke's religious legacy; Marion Connor, Lucy Harington Russell's courtly status; Jacqueline Eales, Mary Lady Vere and the long reach of the puritan letter writer; Johanna Harris, the family correspondence of Brillianna Harley; and finally, Ruth Connolly, the letters of Lady Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelegh. Where Felch, O'Connor, and Eales all use patronage structures in order to investigate the scope of women's puritan influence, Harris turns that model on its head, asking instead how wider networks may shape local practices. She begins by promising us that letter writing, in particular the letter writing of Lady Harley, offers modern readers the ideal vehicle through which to examine puritan thought as it is brought to bear on the intellectual/spiritual training of the individual. Providing doctrinal evidence of election, speaking to the need for constant daily affirmation of faith, and illustrating for believers a shared community of religious, Harley's letters were actively involved in monitoring puritan identity. While this exchange involved the sharing of books and relied in part on a Calvinist heritage developed on the Continent amid religious wars, Harley's letter writing often turned international events into opportunities for local religious instruction and advice.
In contrast, Connolly turns her sights toward a series of letters Ranelegh wrote between 1656 and 1657. The letters reappeared at a critical moment in late 1658 when the Hartlib circle was unraveling. Connnolly uses the strongly tolerationist missives to reflect on both the likely events that spurred the letters in the first place and their more timely and resonant call to unity amid moves toward war and dissolution. Ranelegh's letters “demonstrate the futility of relying on narrow politico-religious platforms to create universal Christian reform” (151) and posit ideal conditions where women become active participants in an international dialogue that extends “across doctrinal, political and religious divides” (152). Inveighing against military intervention and a dependence on public servants to achieve political ends, Ranelegh imagines in its place a godly community, a community that will effect universal reform through words not blows.
Two essays that consider issues of form, noting how textual decisions shape and are shaped by religious thought, are Sarah C. E. Ross's analysis of Elizabeth Melville's poetic oeuvre in light of 3,500 newly discovered lines and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann's thoughtful discussion of Lucy Hutchinson's Order and Disorder. In the latter, Scott-Baumann acknowledges the poet's ongoing dis-ease over interpretive intervention, but nevertheless illustrates how Hutchinson is able to inventory her own political interests through an unspoken and inventive amplification of biblical verse. Where Hutchinson's contemporaries actively used the marginalia of their religiously inspired works to interpret the Bible and apply its meaning to their world, Hutchinson instead warned listeners to privilege God's word, always stressing the limits of human understanding. Her own citational impulse continually directs readers back to particular biblical passages for clarification and enlightenment. Despite the poet's obvious mistrust of human judgment, then, Scott-Baumann insists that she cannot be dismissed as a noninterventionist.
“Was puritanism good for early modern women?” David Norbrook begins in his thoughtful afterword. Any attempt at a yes or no answer would be both incorrect and pointless. Underscoring instead the extent to which different religious dispensations created their own unique advantages and disadvantages, Norbrook reminds us that women invariably navigated accordingly, seizing opportunities and self-limiting as circumstances required. He asks that we do the same to better capture the sometimes-fraught and always-fascinating landscape that was early modern religious faith.
