Early modern women and affective devotional reading

Abstract

The devotional life of early modern women was marked by reading practices that were often meditative and affective, in the pursuit of divine inspiration. Early modern medicine, and philosophical theories of the passions, regarded women as particularly susceptible to excesses of passion, while conduct literature was anxious that women subdue sensuous appetites during devotional practice. There emerges, in the relation of passion discourse to female devotional reading, a tension between neo-Stoic concerns to eliminate the disruptive effect of passions upon the body and the mind, and Augustinian advocacy of well-oriented passions in devotional practice. A comparison of representations of female religious reading practices in exemplary literature, female autobiography and poetry reveals women negotiating relationships between desire and inspiration in their devotional reading practices, and achieving a passionate mysticism that challenged representation. In this way affective female reading, if successfully regulated, could be identified with special receptivity to grace.

Keywords:

• early modern women
• religious reading
• devotion
• affectivity
• Augustinianism

Notes

 1. Gilbert, Architectonice consolationis: or, The art of building comfort, occasioned by the death of that religious gentlewoman, Iane Gilbert…, sig. **v.

 2. Surviving meditation books written by women in manuscript include , Meditations on the Bible, and Prayers, Meditations and Devotional Pieces; Mildmay, Autobiographical and Spiritual Reflections; Rich, Countess of Warwick, Occasional Meditations; Sadleir, Papers, Trinity Cam., MS R.13.74 Wyvill, Devotional Miscellany, Beinecke Library MS b.222.

 3. Spinoza, The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. I, Ethics, III, 8.

 4. See particularly Abate, ed, Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England, 7. Cressy, “Response: Private Lives, Public Performance, and Rites of Passage,” 187–97; Jagodzinski, Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England, and Longfellow, “Public, Private, and the Household in Early Seventeenth-Century England,” 313–34.

 5. Lewalski has built on the work of Louis Martz to outline a Protestant meditative tradition, proposing alternative sources to the predominately Catholic, continental sources discussed by Martz. See Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric; and Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study of English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century.

 6. Culverwell, Time Well Spent in Sacred Meditations, Divine Observations, Heavenly Exhortations, 217, quoted in Lewalski, 457.

 7. Taylor, The Pilgrim's Profession, Or a sermon preached at the funerall of Mris Mary Gvnter, 158.

 8. Ewbancke, The Pilgrim's Port or the Weary Man's Rest in the Grave. Opened and Improved in a Sermon, at the Funeral of the Honourable Ms Margaret Marwood, 124.

 9. Stock, After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text, 6.

10. This occurs in I. 5 and again at IX. 1.

11. CSmH, MS HM 15369.

12. See for example Featley's popular meditation book, Ancilla Pietatis, Or, the Handmaid to Private Devotion, Williams, Three Small and Plaine Treatises. I. Of Prayer, or Active Divinitie. 2. Of Principles. 3. Resolution. Tr. And Collected out of the Auncient Writers for the Private Vuse of a Most Noble Ladie. By an Old Praebendary of the Churche of Lincolne; and the anonymous A Iewell for Gentlewomen containing divers godly prayers, fit to comfort the wounded consciences of all penitent sinners.

13. Molekamp, “‘Of the incomparable treasure of the Holy Scriptures’’: the Geneva Bible in the early modern household,”, 121–37.

14. BL, Add. MS 27352, fol. 3^r.

15. BL, Add. MS 27352, fol. 3^r.

16. Poems of John Milton (London, 1645), “Il Penseroso,” ll. 27–8; 40–41. Shannon Miller and Joseph Wittreich have made a case for early modern female readership of Milton, see Miller, Engendering the Fall: John Milton and Seventeenth Century Women Writers; and Wittreich, Feminist Milton.

17. Price, “Verse, Voice, and Body: The retirement mode and women's poetry 1680–1723,” 3. Price explores how the poets Mary Chudleigh (in the early eighteenth cenutury), Anne Finch, Sarah Fyge Egerton, Anne Killigrew, Katherine Phillips and Elizabeth Singer Rowe used the retirement mode.

18. BL Add. MS 27552, fol. 77^r.

19. BL, Add. MS 27552, fol. 3^r.

20. Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, 161.

21. See Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, vol. 1 of Philosophical Writings, 189; James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth Century Philosophy, 85–107.

22. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 84.

23. More, The Immortality of the Soul, 11.

24. The physician William Harvey (1578–1657) was a particular defender of the theory of uterine migration, declaring, ‘No one of the least experience can be ignorant what grievous symptoms arise when the uterus either rises up or falls down, or is in any way put out of place, or is seized with a spasm’. See Harvey, The Works of William Harvey, 542.

25. These ideas stemming from Plato, Aristotle and Galen were commonplaces of Renaissance medicine. See Tuana, The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious, and Philosophical Conceptions of Woman's Nature, 79–81, 21.

26. McLean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life, 41.

27. Elisabeth to Descartes, May 24, 1645, The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, ed. and trans. Lisa Shapiro. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007, 88.

28. Elisabeth to Descartes, August 16, 1645, Correspondence, 100 quoted in Broad, Jaqueline. Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 31. See Broad on the discussion between Elisabeth and Descartes concerning reason and the passions, and the soul and the body, 1–37.

29. Brathwaite, The English Gentlewoman, 43.

30. Stewart, “The Early Modern Closet Discovered,” Representations 50 (1995): 76–100 (p. 87).

31. Roberts, “Shakespeare ‘creepes into the womens closets about bedtime’: Women Reading in a Room of Their Own,” in Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces, 1580–1690, 43.

32. Ziegler, “My lady's chamber: female space, female chastity in Shakespeare,” 76.

33. Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, 137.

34. Rambuss, Closet Devotions, 107.

35. Fuller, The Mourning of Mount Libanon: or, The temples teares, A sermon preached…In commemoration of the right honourable and religious lady, the Lady Frances Clifton, 28.

36. Brooks, A String of Pearls: or, the best things reserved till last… a sermon preached at the Funeral of (that triumphant saint) Mris. Mary Blake, late Wife to… Mr Nicholas Blake, Merchant, with an Elegy on her Death, sig. C1^v.

37. Peter of Celle, “De afflictione et lectione.” In La spiritualité de Pierre de Celle, ed. Jean Leclerq. Paris: J. Vrin, 1946, 234.33, quoted in Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, rhetoric, and the making of images 400–1200, 108–9.

38. On these mystics see especially Graziano, Wounds of Love: The Mystical Marriage of Saint Rose of Lima; Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh; Staley, Margery Kempe and Dissenting Fictions; Tylus, Reclaiming Catherine of Siena: Literacy, Literature, and the Signs of Others.

39. Irigaray, “La Mystérique,” in Speculum of the Other Woman, 191–203.

40. Longfellow , Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England, 211. This book explores the metaphor of mystical marriage in works of Aemilia Lanyer, Lady Anne Southwell, Anna Trapnel, Lucy Hutchinson, and the anonymous author of Eliza's Babes (1652).

41. Lochrie, Margery Kempe, 61.

42. Achinstein, “Romance of the Spirit: Female Sexuality and Religious Desire in Early Modern England,” 421.

43. The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer : Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, ll. 1305–16, ed. Susanne Woods. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, 107.

44. McBride, “‘Upon a Little Lady’: Gender and Desire in Early Modern English Lyrics,” 145.

45. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 153–60.

46. Calamy, The Arte of Divine Meditation: A discourse of the nature, necessity, and excellency thereof with motives to, and rules for the better performance of that most important Christian duty: in several sermons on Gen. 24:63, 107.

47. Hall, The Arte of Divine Meditation: Profitable for all Christians to Know and Practice, 71.

48. Snook, Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England, 118.

49. Hall, Joseph. Christian Moderation. London, 1640, 5–6, 129.

50. On women and elegy see Hammons, Poetic Resistance: English Women Writers and the Early Modern Lyric, and Phillipy, Women Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England, 165–78.

51. Samways, The wise and faithful steward.

52. Bouwsma, “Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought,” in A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History, 25.

53. Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man, 48.

54. On Milton and the passions see Schoenfeldt, Michael.“‘Commotion Strange’: Passion in Paradise Lost,” in Reading the Early Modern Passions, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd Wilson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 43–68.

55. Bouwsma, 46–7.

56. Augustine, The City of God, 14.6, 14.7; Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance, 46.

57. On developments in Christian rhetoric in the Renaissance see Shuger, 55–117.

58. On this subject see Strier: “Against the Rule of Reason: Praise of Passion from Petrarch to Luther to Shakespeare to Herbert,” 23–42.

59. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, III, iii, 8., quoted in Bouwsma, 47.

60. Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, vol. I, xxxvii.

61. Katherine Parr, Jane Grey, Anne Askew, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth Fane, Anne Lock, and Mary Sidney Herbert all translated psalms. Micheline White has described communal psalm singing among women as ‘a liberating and pleasurable space for female voices’ in this period – see “Protestant Women's Writing and Congregational Psalm Singing: from the Song of the Exiled ‘Handmaid’ (1555) to the Countess of Pembroke's Psalmes (1599),” 61–82.

62. Augustine, Confessions, IV. 2.

63. Senault, Use of the Passions, sig. C1^v. Conflicting views of the functions of passions are discussed in James, Passion and Action, 10–15.

64. ‘The holie life and Christian death of Mistris Katherin Brettergh’, in Harrison and Leygh, Deaths Advantage Little Regarded, and the soules solace against sorrow, 8. This latter part of the work has been attributed to William Hinde: see Deaths advantage little regarded…a facsimile reproduction with an introduction by Retha M. Warnicke and Bettie Anne Doebler. Delmar, NY:Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1993, 12.

65. Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace, 333.

66. Trill, “Engendering Pentinence: Nicholas Breton and ‘the Countesse of Penbrooke’,” 29.

67. Wallington, “A record of God's mercies, or, A thankful rememberance,” MS 204. See also Seaver, Wallington's World: a Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London.

68. Quoted in Trill, 34.

69. Southwell, Robert. Mary Magdalene's Funeral Tears. London, 1591, 4–5.

70. Southwell, 59.

71. Irigaray, Speculum, 191–203.

72. Cummings 332–3.

73. On the tension between what he refers to as ‘Augustinian epistemology’ and ‘Aristotelian ethics’ in Southwell's text see Kuchar, “Gender and Recusant Melancholia in Robert Southwell's Mary Magdalene's Funeral Tears,” 135–58.

74. Kuchar, “Gender and Recusant Melancholia.”

75. The manuscript is Huntington Library, HM904.

76. “On the Passion of our Lord and sauiour Iesus.” In Verse Miscellany of Constance Aston Fowler : A Diplomatic Edition, ed. Deborah Aldrich Watson. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in conjunction with Renaissance English Text Society, 2000, ll. 36–9. All other quotations from this edition.

77. The section in the first hand has several pages missing, apparently clumsily torn out, which may mean that the first section was a draft, revised and rewritten by Constance. For a more detailed discussion of the collation and hands see Alrdrich-Watson, 17, see endnote 76.

78. Pores (OED).

79. Harrison, Death's Advantage Little Regarded, 70.

80. Phillipy, Women, Death and Literature, 221.

81. Mildmay, fols 687–8.