The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558-1680

by Harris, Johanna; Scott-Baumann, Elizabeth

• ISBN13: 9781137503671
• ISBN10: 113750367X
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2015-06-29
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This is the first study of puritan women's place in early modern intellectual culture. Puritan women have suffered a double prejudice: that women were excluded from male culture, and that puritanism was hostile to many forms of culture. This collection argues that early modern women's puritanism formed and developed rather than prohibited their substantial and leading contributions to their culture. The essays introduce recently discovered writers such as Elizabeth Isham and Elizabeth Melville and new analyses of well-known writers such as Lady Mary Sidney Herbert and Anne Locke, and also highlight the local, national, and international dimensions of early modern puritan culture. With a foreword by N. H. Keeble and afterword by David Norbrook and fifteen essays by leading scholars of early modern literature and history, this collection reveals an intellectual culture characterized by networks of patronage, translation, manuscript circulation and correspondence.

Author Biography

Johanna Harris is Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at the University of Exeter, UK. She is the author of articles and chapters on Brilliana Harley, letter-writing communities, Andrew Marvell, English puritanism, and sectarian groups, and her monograph on puritan epistolary communities is forthcoming. She is the co-general editor of a project to edit Richard Baxter's correspondence.

Elizabeth Scott-Baumann is Lecturer in Early Modern English at King's College London, UK. She is the author of Forms of Engagement: Women, Poetry, and Culture 1640-1680 (2013) and has co-edited The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture (2014, with Ben Burton). She is editing Women Poets of the English Civil War (with Sarah C. E. Ross) and current research interests include gender and early modern literary criticism, Shakespeare's poetry, and poetic form.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
List of Abbreviations
Foreword; N.H.Keeble
Introduction; J. Harris & E. Scott-Baumann
The Exemplary Anne Vaughan Lock; S. Felch
The Countess of Pembroke and the Practice of Piety; D. Clarke
Imagining a National Church: Election and Education in the Works of Anne Cooke Bacon; L. Magnusson
Anne, Lady Southwell: Coteries and Culture; E. Clarke
Godly Patronage: Lucy Harington Russell, Countess of Bedford; M. O'Connor
'An Ancient Mother in our Israel': Mary, Lady Vere; J. Eales
'Give me thy hairt and I desyre no more': The Song of Songs, Petrarchism and Elizabeth Melville's Puritan Poetics; S. C. E. Ross
'But I thinke and beleeve': Lady Brilliana Harley's Puritanism in Epistolary Community; J. Harris
'Take unto ye words': Elizabeth Isham's 'Booke of Rememberance' and Puritan Cultural Forms; E. Longfellow
Anne Bradstreet's Poetry and Providence: Earth, Wind, and Fire; S. Wiseman
Viscountess Ranelagh and the Authorisation of Women's Knowledge in the Hartlib Circle; R. Connoll
Anna Trapnel's Literary Geography; D. Purkiss
Lucy Hutchinson, the Bible and Order and Disorder; E. Scott-Baumann
Pregnant Dreams in Early Modern Europe: The Philadelphian Example; N. Smith
Afterword; D. Norbrook
Bibliography
Index