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Patriarchal Negotiations: Women, Writing and Religion 1640-1660 Ward Lowery, Nicholas J Patriarchal Negotiations: Women, Writing and Religion 1640-1660 Ward Lowery, Nicholas J. L. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author For additional information about this publication click this link. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/jspui/handle/123456789/1682 Information about this research object was correct at the time of download; we occasionally make corrections to records, please therefore check the published record when citing. For more information contact [email protected] Patriarchal Negotiations: Women, Writing and Religion 1640-1660 A thesis submitted for the degree of Ph.D in the University of London by Nicholas J.L. Ward Lowery of Queen Mary and Westfield College, October 1994. ( LC Patriarchal Negotiations: Women, Writing and Religion 1640-1660 1 'Speaking nothing for favour relation or flattery': 5 reading early modern women writers 2 Gifts beheld in a mirror: prefacing women writers 49 3 'Wearying him with her words': Katherine Chidley's 78 metonymic separatism 4 'The thriving trade of considerate collection': 114 distribution and consumption in the theology of Elizabeth Warren 5 'That it may be put out of question': Mary Pope's 140 patriarchal constitution 6 'The Woman (that is the Church or Saints of God)': 175 prophecy and justification in the work of Mary Cary 7 Generating sufficiency: the spiritual autobiography of 205 Jane Turner 8 'Christ is thine and thou are his': reciprocal relations 228 in the work of Anna Trapnel 9 Saintly spouses and heavenly husbands: masculine and 252 feminine models in Dorothy White and Abiezer Coppe 10 'Husband to the desolate widdow': the politics of 281 gender in Quaker polemic 11 Conclusion: Hermaphrodite Councils 303 Bibliography 308 2 Abstract Women were prominent in the Lollard movement in the fifteenth century, but it is only in the mid-seventeenth century that women begin to produce theological texts which contribute to the controversy over popular religious expression and women's part in religious culture. After 1640 women began to publish on a number of theological issues and in a wide range of genres: prose polemic, prophecy, autobiography and spiritual meditation. Subject to widespread criticism, they quickly had to fashion a rhetoric of justification with which to defend their intervention in print and pacify male critics. This thesis shows that they achieved this in two ways: by producing a literature which complied with the expectations of masculine theological culture and by manipulating these assumptions so as to create space for a female symbolic language of piety. They developed a literary self-consciousness which depends on the idea of subjectivity as a gendered experience and they often resisted their detractors by valorising denigrated forms of female subjectivity and pursuing theological conclusions irrespective of normative ideas of gender. Women did not engage in theological debate in isolation, however. They often intervened as committed members of religious sects and thus deserve to be read as representatives of corporate and communal theologies. In contrast to earlier studies which have sought to recover neglected women writers as early feminists, without reading their work historically, this thesis seeks to uncover the social and the theological rather than the authorial origin of much early modem women's writing and to measure its engagement with early modem debates on women and religious culture. It seeks to challenge the increasingly dominant view of early modem women writers which invests them with too modem an authorial presence, by reconstituting the seventeenth-century debates which gave rise to their work and by bringing modem French feminist perspectives to bear on a period largely untouched by theoretical approaches to literature. To this end it proceeds by way of several close readings of women who wrote as women and as Baptists, Independents, Levellers, Presbyterians and Quakers. 3 Abbreviations BIHR Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research CH Church History DNB Dictionary of National Biography ELR English Literary Renaissance GAH Gender and History HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly HWJ History Workshop Journal JEH Journal of Ecclesiastical History JLT Journal of Literature and Theology JMH Journal of Modern History JOFHS Journal of Friends Historical Society JOHI Journal of the History of Ideas JSH Journal of Social History JTS Journal of Theological Studies NLH New Literary History PMLA Proceedings of the Modern Language Association P&P Past and Present RQ Renaissance Quarterly RS Renaissance Studies SCJ Sixteenth Century Journal SH Social History SIE Studies in English 1500-1800 SJT Scottish Journal of Theology SQ Shakespeare Quarterly TSC The Seventeenth Century TSWL Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature For all references the place of publication is London unless otherwise stated. All quotations from the Bible are from the King James unless otherwise indicated. 4 1 'Speaking nothing for favour relation or flattery': reading early modern women writers You taught me language; and my profit on't Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language. The Tempest Act 1, Scene 2, 11. 365-367.' Caliban's tormented and paradoxical position, that the language he speaks to curse Prospero both liberates and imprisons him, is shared by many of the groups contesting the right to distinct literary development in the modern world. Post-colonial writers are painfully aware that to write in the language of former colonisers is partly to repeat, if not wholly to accept, the political realities of colonial oppression. Postmodernists struggle to fmd value in the alienating formal innovations of Modernism, unwilling to accept its often reactionary political ideologies. Feminists worry that to write out of an almost exclusively male literary tradition does a disservice both to history and to the utopian aims of the Women's Movement (in all its forms). Readers of twentieth century English Literature are familiar with the ambivalent feelings of working class writers towards the cultures which produce and educate them. For these writers, the path through school and university produces the desire to testify to the veracity of their cultural roots but compromises their ability to describe them authentically. All these binary oppositions characterize Caliban's paradox. The argument of this thesis is that women's religious prose of the mid-seventeenth century illustrates the same paradox. Despite the widespread belief that women's place in culture differed from men's, they nevertheless wrote within a largely male literary tradition whose readers were conditioned to expect masculine texts. Their writings articulate a response to the problem of representing the views of women which takes three different, though inter-related, forms. 5 Either they could pretend a textual masculinity, mimicking the techniques and conventions of ordinary theological dispute so as to appear male in everything except the accident of biological gender, or they could adopt the opposite approach by mobilising the most powerful - if patriarchal, and in male writers often misogynist - stereotypes of femininity. The former strategy seeks acceptance in masculine terms, while the latter demands notice in stereotypically feminine terms: one pursues the abolition of difference to prevent marginalisation, while the other exaggerates difference to create feminine space. The third tactic falls somewhere between these two extremes, combining weak claims for the social value of contemporary representations of femininity with pleas for authority on the basis of masculine writerly traits such as sobriety, clarity and rationality. In the chapters that follow the religious prose works of several mid-seventeenth-century women writers are analyzed using this theory of textual production. The aim is descriptive rather than evaluative; not to judge the success or failure of each strategy and so declare one of the three the most effective, but to examine them as they are particularly expressed by different texts and to analyze the way in which each negotiates with prevailing patriarchal lore. I have restricted the content of this thesis by cultural provenance, and to some degree by social class. All the women whose works I examine in the following chapters were literate - unlike most women in this period - but they were not members of the aristocracy. Some were referred to by contemporaries as 'gentlewomen', but most are likely to have been privileged members of a merchant or artisan class. A few of them could read Latin, notably Elizabeth Warren and Mary Pope, but they were mostly women whose entry into print was enabled by a vernacular Bible and the evangelizing culture of puritan devotion. Many of them, like Katherine Chidley, Anna Trapnel, Mary Cary and the Quakers, were social revolutionaries; all belonged to a sectarian religious group. 6 Hoping to change the society in which they lived they challenged the theological orthodoxies of the day, disrupted the lectures of the ungodly and went 'gadding to sermons', often travelling large distances on foot to hear particular preachers. The literature they produced is concerned almost exclusively with the personal and social politics of prevailing theological trends. There is another literature produced by women and men in this period which grew out of a classical genre of misogynist slander
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