Flesh and Spirit An anthology of seventeenth century

women's writing 1st Edition

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Selection and editorial matter copyright © Manchester University Press 2014
All other matter copyright © as acknowledged

The rights of Rachel Adcock, Sara Read and Anna Ziomek to be identified as the editors of this work
have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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 Contents

Acknowledgements
Chronology

Introduction
The dialogue between flesh and spirit
Sin and childbirth
Signs of the times
Conversion and cure
Advising on body and spirit: women’s writing
Note on the presentation of the texts

Part I: Exemplary conversion narratives

1 Lady Mary Carey
Meditations and poetry (1647–57)
2 Elizabeth Major
Honey on the Rod: Or a Comfortable Contemplation for One in
Affliction; with Sundry Poems on Several Subjects (1656)
Sin and Mercy Briefly Discovered: Or, The Veil Taken a Little from
Before Both (1656)
3 Gertrude More
The Holy Practises of a Devine Lover or the Sainctly Ideots
Devotions (1657)
The Spiritual Exercises of the Most Vertuous and Religious D.
Gertrude More of the Holy Order of S. Bennet and English
 Congregation of our Ladies of Comfort in Cambray (1658)

Part II: Advising on body and spirit

4 Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln
The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie (1622)
5 Brilliana, Lady Harley
The commonplace book of Brilliana Conway (1622)
Letters (1625–43)
6 ‘Eliza’
Eliza’s Babes: Or the Virgins-Offering (1652)
7 An anonymous gentlewoman
Conversion Exemplified; In the Instance of a Gracious Gentlewoman
Now in Glory (1663)

Part III: Conversion and cure

8 Lady Elizabeth Delaval
Meditations and prayers (1663–71)
9 Katherine Sutton
A Christian Womans Experiences of the Glorious Working of Gods
Free Grace (1663)
10 Hannah Allen
A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian
Mrs. Hannah Allen (1683)

Bibliography
Index of biblical allusions
General index
 Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank several institutions for their help during the
process of compiling this anthology. The Bodleian Library, Oxford, has
kindly allowed us to quote from the original manuscripts, the ‘Meditations
and Prayers’ of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, and Charles Hutton’s transcription
of ‘Lady Carey’s Meditations and Poetry’. The University of Nottingham
(Manuscripts and Special Collections) has given us kind permission to
quote from Lady Frances Pelham’s ‘Expression of Faith’ and the
commonplace book of Brilliana Conway (later Lady Harley). We would
also like to thank the Royal Historical Society (successor to the Camden
Society) for its kind permission to quote at length from the Society’s edition
of the letters of Brilliana, Lady Harley, now published by Cambridge
University Press. Thanks, too, to the librarians at the above institutions who
have helped us find various materials along the way, and particularly those
at Canterbury Cathedral Library, who located the only known copy still in
existence of the 1663 edition of Conversion Exemplified. We would also
like to thank Professor Jane Stephenson, Aberdeen University, for the
information about Anne Ley’s commonplace book. Thanks must also go to
the Early English Books Online database, which continues to make all kinds
of work possible in our discipline.
We are also grateful for the support of our colleagues in the Department
of English and Drama at Loughborough University, the encouragement of
the Early Modern Research Group based in the Department, and especially
Catie Gill for suggesting several women’s works. Thanks must also go to
the publisher’s anonymous readers of this anthology, whose comments were
rigorous, enthusiastic and encouraging.
Rachel Adcock would like to thank, in particular, my parents, Alan and
Jane Adcock, for all their support and home cooking; Jo Fowler for her
unfailing encouragement; and Oliver Tearle for all his support in answering
my numerous questions about phrasing and presentation. Most especially,
however, I want to record a debt of thanks to Sara and Anna for their
enthusiastic work on this project, and for sharing with me their knowledge
of all things medical and spiritual in the early modern period.
Sara Read would like to thank Rachel for the initial idea that came to be
this book and both Rachel and Anna for making the process of compiling
this anthology such a pleasure. I have learned such a lot about religion and
spirituality from you both, for which I am grateful. I would also like to
record my thanks to my family for putting up with my fascination with
‘dead ladies’ (to quote my daughter directly). Especial thanks, as ever, to
Pete Read, for keeping me fed and watered and for everything else.
Anna Ziomek gives special thanks to Rachel and Sara for their
understanding, eagerness and the hard work that they have put into this
project. Thank you for your guidance, many stimulating discussions and
answering my countless enquiries. I would also like to thank my husband,
Jacek, for his constant support and encouragement.

This book is dedicated with much affection to the memory of the late
Professor Bill Overton, teacher, colleague, and friend, who dedicated much
of his career to recovering and studying women’s writing, and to Professor
Elaine Hobby, a pioneer of the study of early modern women’s writing, who
is responsible for sparking our love of all things early modern.
Thank you both.
 Chronology

1558 Accession of Elizabeth I (Protestant), causing restrictions for

Catholic and Puritan worship
1591 William Perkins’s A Golden Chain
1603 Accession of James I and VI of Scotland
1605 (Catholic) Gunpowder Plot
1610 Douay-Rheims translation of the Bible (Catholic) completed
abroad
1611 Translation of King James Bible completed
1620 Puritans leave for New England
1621 Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy
1622 Elizabeth Clinton’s The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie;
compiling of the commonplace book of Brilliana Conway (later
Lady Harley)
1623 Gertrude More co-founds Our Lady of Comfort at Cambrai,
France
1625 Accession of Charles I, married to a French Catholic
1629 Charles dissolves Parliament until 1640
1633 William Laud made Archbishop of Canterbury (executed 1645)
1636 Outbreak of plague
1642 Outbreak of First Civil War; theatres closed
1643 Solemn League and Covenant agreed between England and
Scotland; death of Brilliana, Lady Harley, following a siege at her
family castle at Brampton Bryan
1644 First Baptist Confession of Faith
1646 End of First Civil War
1647 Lady Mary Carey commences her meditations and poetry; the
Quaker George Fox begins public preaching
1648 Outbreak of Second Civil War; Westminster Shorter Catechism
presented to Parliament
1649 End of Second Civil War; Charles I beheaded for treason; England
becomes a Commonwealth
1649– Rump Parliament, later dissolved by Oliver Cromwell (Puritan)
53
1652 Eliza’s Babes
1653 Barebones Parliament; Oliver Cromwell then becomes the Lord
Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland
1656 Elizabeth Major’s Honey on the Rod
1657 Posthumous publication of Gertrude More’s The Holy Practises of
a Devine Lover
1658 Death of Cromwell; posthumous publication of Gertrude More’s
The Spiritual Exercises
1660 Restoration of the monarchy with Charles II; theatres reopened
1662 Act of Uniformity; Lady Elizabeth Delaval begins her meditations
1663 Katherine Sutton’s A Christian Womans Experiences published
abroad; the anonymous Conversion Exemplified published after
the author’s death
1665 Great Plague
1666 Great Fire of London
1671 Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book
1672 Royal Declaration of Indulgence (a measure towards some
religious liberty but withdrawn a year later)
1683 Hannah Allen’s A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings
1685 Accession of James II (Catholic)
1688 Glorious Revolution: accession of William III and Mary II
(Protestant)
 Introduction

In a 1629 letter written to her mother, Lady Joan Barrington, Lady

Elizabeth Masham, wife of the MP for Colchester, commented that ‘all the
distempers of our bodies, which must need be many while we live here [on
earth], may be a […] means of the curing the great distemper of our souls,
and may make us long for that home where all sorrows have an end and we
shall triumph in joy and glory forever more’.1 The occasion of Masham’s
letter seems to have been concern for her mother’s health (both spiritual and
physical) following the sudden death of her husband in the previous year.2
Lady Joan’s grief, which included questioning why God had punished her
in such a way, manifested itself in a deep melancholic illness, which was
rationalised in the seventeenth century as a physical reflection of her
troubled soul. Belief in God’s displeasure could often cause men and
women to question whether they were beloved of God, and whether they
were among his chosen people. Masham’s remark, made by a daughter
seeking to reassure her mother, explains that bodily discomfort was to be
expected while on earth, as God deadened sin within each individual
believer, before they were made ready for eternal life. While staying healthy
meant taking appropriate care of both the body and the soul, the flesh and
the spirit, resignation to illness was often conceived as a way of showing
your acceptance of God’s will. This meant that, for some of the women
anthologised here, a miscarriage, for example, was taken as a sign of God’s
displeasure over a lack of piety, or a reminder that life and death were both
subject to God’s ordinance and pleasure. In her letter, Lady Masham
reassured her mother that illness could serve as a way of reminding a
woman that her earthly suffering would end when she was admitted to
heaven. This anthology will demonstrate several of the ways in which early
modern women, of varying religious beliefs, lived in, cared for and
accounted for a body in which spirituality and physical health were
intrinsically interconnected.
In the seventeenth century, England was a Protestant country and the
nature of worship was controlled by the Church of England, the state
church. At church, on Sunday, every person in the country (provided they
had not absented themselves, illegally) would have heard the minister read
from The Book of Common Prayer in English (rather than Latin), first
introduced a century before as part of the Reformation in England. The only
deviation from this was during the mid-century Civil Wars and Cromwell’s
Protectorate. The Book of Common Prayer assumed that a connection
between the flesh and the spirit was natural when it asked the congregation
at Holy Communion to offer ‘ourselves, our souls, and bodies’, indicating
that a human body was made up of these two interconnecting entities.3
Danger was often thought to threaten the soul and body simultaneously. A
catechism added to the prayer book in 1662 indicated that the function of
saying the Lord’s Prayer was to ‘pray unto God, that he will send us all
things that be needful both for our souls and bodies; […] and that it will
please him to save and defend us in all dangers ghostly [spiritual] and
bodily’.4 How to combat these threats to soul and body depended on how a
believer viewed the relationship between the two entities, and where they
thought the threats originated. For instance, depending on a person’s
religious or medical beliefs, they might view melancholia (an illness which
shares some symptoms with what we now recognise as depression) as a
punishment from God which made the sufferer more prone to the
temptations of Satan, as evidence of unpardonable sin, as an imbalance of
bodily fluids or humours, as a result of spending too much time in private
study or, most often, as a mixture of all these things. Women, however,
were constructed by seventeenth-century ideologies as generally weaker
and more dysfunctional than men in both soul and body, and so more
susceptible to attacks on the spirit and the flesh. These understandings
stemmed from Eve’s precedent, when she submitted to the Devil’s
temptations in the Garden of Eden, meaning she and her female
descendants were punished (spiritually and bodily) with painful childbirth.
This anthology of women’s works seeks to foreground women’s
explorations of the relationship between their bodies and souls partly in
order to contrast them with these male-authored ideologies, but also to
highlight contemporary understandings of the relationship between the flesh
and spirit during important life events and religious awakenings. For
instance, did women always believe that their bodies were sinful? Were
pain and despair always understood as punishments? And if illness was
understood as both a spiritual and a bodily problem, how was it cured? The
selected women’s writings included in this anthology go some way to
answering these important questions.
This anthology of seventeenth-century women’s writings makes use of
often overlooked or underutilised works to highlight religious and bodily
contexts, while also making them easily accessible, and in some cases
newly available, to scholars and students of the early modern period. The
prose writings of Lady Mary Carey, the commonplace book of Brilliana
Conway (Lady Harley) and the anonymous female deathbed testimony
Conversion Exemplified, have never been extracted in modern editions, and
the writings of Harley, Lady Elizabeth Delaval and Gertrude More have
appeared only in nineteenth- and twentieth-century editions. Considering
these particular works through religious and medical frameworks will not
only add to scholarship’s understanding of the full historical context of the
ways in which women related to religious doctrine in the period, but will
also indicate how they saw their bodies as spiritually endowed. That is to
say, for many early modern people, physical bodily change was thought to
be the result of God’s agency acting directly upon them. In recent times,
scholars have drawn attention to both ‘the turn to religion’ and the ‘return to
the body’ in early modern studies, in order to understand and more
accurately explain the explorations of human experience that the period
produced. Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti’s well-known article ‘The Turn
to Religion in Early Modern English Studies’ recognised that religion
constituted ‘a deep psychological and emotional experience’, as well as a
political and social one, and recognised that in order to understand more
fully religious experience in this period, scholars should ‘acknowledge the
need to incorporate the imagination and the physical in cultural-historical
analyses’.5 This anthology does so by drawing attention to the importance
of studying representations of the fleshly, physical senses in works that
sought, predominantly, to communicate the vividness of religious
experience, and also explores the significance of the religious imagination
in medical treatises. It will highlight, in particular, how women experienced
spiritual and physical changes and contribute to ongoing explorations of
whether religious experience was gendered. These extracts demonstrate the
various ways in which early modern women negotiated the relationship
between their fleshly, physical suffering and their spiritual state.

The dialogue between flesh and spirit

Understandings of the relationship between the body and soul in the

seventeenth century were heavily influenced by early Greek philosophy.
Platonic philosophy held that the soul and body were two warring entities;
the body was like an earthly prison for the immortal soul before it was freed
on the body’s death. As Roy Porter has noted, ‘throughout medieval and, in
due course, Reformation and Counter-Reformation thinking, the human
animal continued to be defined as homo duplex, the union incurably
discordant, of earthly body and immortal soul’.6 Aristotelian theories of the
body/soul relationship, on the other hand, placed more emphasis on the
body working as an instrument of the soul. The two entities were believed
inseparable and therefore one could not function without the other. Whereas
in Plato’s works there was a moral distinction made between the corrupt,
earthly body and the immortal soul, in Aristotelian philosophy there was no
such moral distinction. At the Reformation, the theologian John Calvin also
denied the moral responsibility of body or soul, assigning to both the
responsibility for original sin inherited from Adam. He wrote:

Corruption commencing in Adam, is, by perpetual descent, conveyed

from those preceding to those coming after them. The cause of the
contagion is neither in the substance of the flesh nor the soul, but God
was pleased to ordain that those gifts which he had bestowed on the first
man, that man should lose as well for his descendants as for himself.7

Both body and soul were believed to be corrupt until a regeneration process
had taken place within the believer, equivalent to putting ‘on the new man’
of Ephesians 4:24. For Calvin, following St Paul, flesh and spirit did not
refer directly to body and soul but to the ‘two ways of life which the whole
man can choose to follow’.8 Galatians 5:17 depicts a warring of flesh
against spirit (‘For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against
the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other’), where the ‘Spirit’
referred to a group of people who are spiritually regenerate, who ‘tend
towards what is good’.9 Therefore, ‘the Spirit is not from nature’, Calvin
writes, ‘but from regeneration’.10 The conflict between flesh and spirit is
also described in Romans 7:22–3: ‘I delight in the law of God after the
inward man: but I see another law in my members [limbs], warring against
the law of my mind’. For Calvin, only those who were ‘regenerated by the
Spirit of God’ experienced such a struggle between flesh and spirit within
themselves.11 In the literature of the seventeenth century, however, body and
soul, flesh and spirit, could be used interchangeably as both concrete, literal
terms and as figurative representations of the war against sin inside each
individual believer.
By the early seventeenth century, English Protestantism, influenced by
both Calvin’s doctrinal arguments and Greek thought, was encouraging
believers to look inside themselves in order to discern the conflict between
the sinful flesh and the regenerative spirit. This kind of introspection
produced a growing number of poetic dialogues, often didactic in tone, that
positioned the flesh and spirit in the midst of an argument about which one
was the dominant force. For instance, the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet
included one such dialogue between ‘The Flesh and the Spirit’ in her
Several Poems (published posthumously in 1678), where the two entities
fought against each other as sisters: one was Flesh, ‘who had her eye / On
worldly wealth and vanity’, and the other, dominant sister was ‘Spirit, who
did rear / Her thoughts unto a higher sphere’.12 Body-and-soul dialogues
had also been popular in the medieval period, but these staged arguments
were mostly presented taking place after death and before the Last
Judgement. Seventeenth-century dialogues tend, instead, to focus on the
struggle going on inside living believers, and are therefore similar to
spiritual autobiographies of this period. Indeed, as the writings of Lady
Mary Carey and Elizabeth Major included in this anthology show, a
spiritual autobiography could be constructed using just such a dialogue.
Bradstreet’s poem depicts this struggle in miniature, giving Spirit the space
to dominate the argument and have the last word, though also admitting that
the conflict will continue until Flesh is ‘laid in th’ dust’:

Spirit: Be still, thou unregenerate part,

Disturb no more my settled heart,
For I have vowed (and so will do)
Thee as a foe still to pursue,
And combat with thee will and must