Deborah’s Ghost

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Notes

1. ¹For the best synthetic account of this debate, see Winship.

2. ²This preference for masculine role models anticipates the rhetoric of female Quaker preachers, who Phyllis Mack notes likewise preferred comparisons to male prophets (141).

3. ³Judges 4:4. While some today may find the term “prophetess” demeaning or belittling, I use it in this article because there is no simple English substitute; the Hebrew word used here is not the same as that used to describe male mouthpieces for divinity, hence the decision by King James Version translators to differentiate between prophet and prophetess.

4. ⁴Citations of Bradstreet’s poetry are from The Complete Works of Anne Bradstreet. However, because this edition of Bradstreet’s poems does not include line numbers, all references to Bradstreet will cite page numbers. After consulting a 1650 edition of Bradstreet’s poems, I have changed the word “with” in the line above to “wish”; despite the care of McElrath and Robb, I believe that this particular word has—understandably—been mis-transcribed due to a worn-out typeface that exaggerated the similarity of the long s to the lower case t in seventeenth-century publishing (The Tenth Muse 188).

5. ⁵Scholars who emphasize Bradstreet’s orthodoxy include Daly and Hammond; the more recent trend in Bradstreet scholarship has accentuated her rebellion against Puritan doctrine and culture; see Harvey, Oser, and Ditmore’s “Bliss Lost, Wisdom Gained: Contemplating Emblems and Enigmas in Anne Bradstreet’s ‘Contemplations.’”

6. ⁶On Bradstreet’s navigation of the public/private binary, see also Hall and Schweitzer. Alice Henton stresses the “female voice” of Bradstreet’s public, predominantly secular poems in The Tenth Muse (309).

7. ⁷Beyond any potential biblical resonances, Bradstreet certainly thought of the title virago as an appropriate honorific for pagan queens; she applied it to Sisigambis (Works 96) and Cleopatra (Works 135, 476) in “The Foure Monarchies.”

8. ⁸David and his royal descendants in the Israelite house of Judah are commonly identified with lions in the Bible, at least in part because of a prophecy in the book of Genesis: “Judah is a lion’s whelp” (49:9). In the context of Bradstreet’s poem, David’s actions also recall the proverb, “As a roaring lion … so is a wicked ruler over the poor people” (Proverbs 28:15).

9. ⁹Simon’s concern that Hutchinson might give offense is specifically reminiscent of Romans 14:21—“It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor any thing whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak”—but the larger sentiment is certainly that of Samuel speaking to Saul.