This page intentionally left blank WOMEN’S WRITING IN THE BRITISH ATLANTIC WORLD Kate Chedgzoy explores the ways in which women writers of the early modern British Atlantic world imagined, visited, created and haunted textual sites of memory. Asking how women’s writing from all parts of the British Isles and Britain’s Atlantic colonies employed the resources of memory to make sense of the changes that were refashioning that world, the book suggests that memory is itself the textual site where the domestic echoes of national crisis can most insistently be heard. Offering readings of the work of poets who contributed to the oral traditions of Wales, Scotland and Ireland, alongside analyses of poetry, fiction and life-writings by well-known and less familiar writers such as Hester Pulter, Lucy Hutchinson, Mary Rowlandson and Aphra Behn, the book explores how women’s writing of memory gave expression to the everyday, intimate consequences of the major geopolitical changes that took place in the British Atlantic world in the seventeenth century. Telling a story about women’s textual production which is geographically and linguistically expansive and inclusive, it offers an unprecedently capacious and diverse history of early modern British women’s writing as it began to take its place in a new Atlantic world. kate chedgzoy is Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Newcastle. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Queer Children: Sexual Politics and Contemporary Culture (1996), and co-editor with Susanne Greenhalgh of a special issue of the journal Shakespeare on Shakespeare’s incorporation into the cultures of childhood (2006). She is also co-editor of the volume Shakespeare and Childhood, with Susanne Greenhalgh and Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge University Press, 2007). WOMEN’S WRITING IN THE BRITISH ATLANTIC WORLD Memory, Place and History, 1550–1700 KATE CHEDGZOY University of Newcastle CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521880985 © Kate Chedgzoy 2007 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2007 ISBN-13 978-0-511-35461-8 eBook (EBL) ISBN-10 0-511-35461-4 eBook (EBL) ISBN-13 978-0-521-88098-5 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-88098-X hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Contents Acknowledgements page vii Introduction: ‘A place on the map is also a place in history’ 1 1 ‘The rich Store-house of her memory’: The metaphors and practices of memory work 16 2 ‘Writing things down has made you forget’: Memory, orality and cultural production 48 3 Recollecting women from early modern Ireland, Scotland and Wales 80 4 ‘Shedding teares for England’s loss’: Women’s writing and the memory of war 125 5 Atlantic removes, memory’s travels 168 Conclusion 198 Notes 200 Bibliography 235 Index 255 v Acknowledgements This book had its first beginnings in the archival research I undertook on women’s writing in early modern Wales, supported by a Leverhulme Trust grant in 1997–8. As it developed, I benefited from the financial support of the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Board, and I would like to acknowledge the immense intellectual value of the time to think and read that those relatively small amounts of money purchased for me. Those grants also funded research assistance from several people whose specialist expertise, energy and enthusiasm made vital contributions to the project: warm thanks to Cathryn Charnell-White, Francesca Rhydderch, Naomi McAreavey and Robin Kirschbaum. The research for this book was carried out in a number of archives and libraries, whose staff were generous in sharing their time and expertise: I am grateful to them for that, and also wish to acknowledge formally the kindness of the following libraries in allowing me to consult and cite manuscripts in their care: Beinecke Library, Yale University; Bodleian Library, Oxford; Cambridge University Library; Cardiff City Library; Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection; National Library of Scotland; National Library of Wales; Nottingham Record Office; Public Record Office of Northern Ireland; Trinity College, Cambridge. I am deeply grateful to the colleagues who have read and commented on drafts (there have been so many drafts), and whose encouragement and interest in the project have been endlessly sustaining: Dympna Callaghan, Kate Hodgkin, Julie Sanders, Suzanne Trill, Sue Wiseman and Ramona Wray. As always, thanks are also due to Kate McLuskie and Ann Thompson for their untiring support of my work. These specific acknowledgements need to be set in the context of an immense debt to the community of feminist scholars working on early modern women’s writing, so many of whom – too many to mention them all by vii viii Acknowledgements name – have helped me to formulate the questions that shaped this book, and to gather the evidence I’ve used to address them. Colleagues at the University of Warwick helped me talk through ideas in the very early stages of the book: Peter Davidson, Jane Stevenson and Dominic Montserrat deserve special mention. In the School of English at the University of Newcastle, I found a remarkably supportive and stimulating environment for thinking about the politics of memory: thanks are due above all to Linda Anderson, who has done more than anyone else to create and sustain that intellectual community. I am grateful to all the colleagues and students I have worked with on the MA in Literary Studies: Writing, Memory, Culture, and my undergraduate early modern women’s writing modules, who have helped me think through the ideas for this book. Special thanks to Anthea Cordner, Anne Whitehead, and in particular to Jenny Richards, colleague extraordinaire. In the later stages of research and writing, Sarah Stanton’s steady support and calm interest have kept me going, and helped me to do the best work I could manage. Reflecting on the comments of anonymous readers for the Press has been invaluable in bringing the project to completion. Finally, I owe most of all to Diana Paton. I started work on the research project that would eventually turn into this book soon after I met her. The example of her intellectual integrity and political engagement has helped me to make it into a book that asks bigger questions and envisages the early modern world in terms of more complex geographies than I first imagined. For this, and for so much else, I am more grateful to her than I can say. This book is for Polly Angharad and Miriam Rosa, who have helped me to remember that many things in life are much more important than writing books. Introduction: ‘A place on the map is also a place in history’ On 10 July 1666, Anne Bradstreet’s house in Andover, Massachusetts burned down. In a poem commemorating the loss of her home, she characterizes the smouldering ruins as a much-revisited site of memory, keeping all that she has lost painfully alive in her mind: When by the ruins oft I past My sorrowing eyes aside did cast, And here and there the places spy 1 Where oft I sat and long did lie: Representing a beloved home as a tenderly domestic memory theatre, Bradstreet makes an orderly inventory of the places in the ruined house where fond reminiscence belonged. Each of the objects carefully placed within it – ‘Here stood that trunk, and there that chest’ (l. 29) – summons up memories of love, hospitality, storytelling and sociable conversation. The house is presented not merely as a domestic space, but also as a site of familial memory and history. The poem itself is the textual trace of the continuing existence in memory of the house and the loving relationships associated with it. ‘Some verses upon the burning of our house’ was not published in Bradstreet’s lifetime. Its survival as a memorial to the domestic history recalled in it was ensured when Anne Bradstreet’s son Simon ‘[c]opied [it] out of a loose paper’ after her death, in an act of filial commitment to his mother’s emotional and literary legacy. The history of its transmission testifies both to the vulnerability of women’s compositions, which were so often lost to the documentary record – like Bradstreet’s late revision of her long historical poem the Four Monarchies, which ‘fell a prey to th’ 2 raging fire’ – and to their remarkably tenacious survival. The poem is thus a document of loss and survival; of memory and pleasure, mourning and hope. In its subject, its form and method, and the bare fact of its 1 2 Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World continued existence and circulation, it furnishes an apt emblem for this book’s examination of the intertwined histories of place and memory in early modern women’s writing. The first modern scholarly edition of Anne Bradstreet’s writings was introduced by the poet Adrienne Rich in 1967, just at the moment when feminist scholarship was beginning to restore women’s texts to the land- scape of the literary past. If, as Rich contends, ‘a place on the map is also a 3 place in history’, how does attending to the memories of women like Bradstreet change our understanding of the maps and histories of the world they inhabited? This book examines some of the many ways in which women writers of the early modern British Atlantic world imagined, visited, created and haunted textual sites of memory.