The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture : From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn [1 ed.] 9789048551118

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G E N D E R I N G T H E L A T E M E D I E V A L A N D E A R LY M O D E R N W O R L D

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Gary Waller

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture : From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn, Amsterdam University Press, 2020.

Copyright © 2020. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture : From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn, Amsterdam University Press,

Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World Series editors: James Daybell (Chair), Victoria E. Burke, Svante Norrhem, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks

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This series provides a forum for studies that investigate women, gender, and/ or sexuality in the late medieval and early modern world. The editors invite proposals for book-length studies of an interdisciplinary nature, including, but not exclusively, from the fields of history, literature, art and architectural history, and visual and material culture. Consideration will be given to both monographs and collections of essays. Chronologically, we welcome studies that look at the period between 1400 and 1700, with a focus on any part of the world, as well as comparative and global works. We invite proposals including, but not limited to, the following broad themes: methodologies, theories and meanings of gender; gender, power and political culture; monarchs, courts and power; constructions of femininity and masculinity; gift-giving, diplomacy and the politics of exchange; gender and the politics of early modern archives; gender and architectural spaces (courts, salons, household); consumption and material culture; objects and gendered power; women’s writing; gendered patronage and power; gendered activities, behaviours, rituals and fashions.

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture : From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn, Amsterdam University Press,

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn

Copyright © 2020. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

Gary Waller

Amsterdam University Press

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture : From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn, Amsterdam University Press,

Copyright © 2020. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

The publication of this book was aided by a conference travel grant from Purchase College Faculty Development funds.

Cover illustration: Artemisia Gentileschi, ‘Self-portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura)’, 1638–39 (oil on canvas). Bridgeman Images. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 143 1 e-isbn 978 90 4855 111 8 doi 10.5117/9789463721431 nur 685 © G. Waller / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture : From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn, Amsterdam University Press,

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For Katie

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture : From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn, Amsterdam University Press,

Copyright © 2020. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved. The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture : From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn, Amsterdam University Press,



Table of Contents

Introduction and Acknowledgements

9

1. The Labyrinthine Baroque

17

2. The Female Baroque

47

3. Catholic Female Baroque

75 115

5. The Female Baroque in Court and Country

163

6. Lady Mary Wroth: The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

205

7. From Baroque to Enlightenment: Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn

235

Postscript

277

About the Author

283

Index

285

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4. Protestant Baroque

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Introduction and Acknowledgements

The initial phrase in my title is adapted from Julia Kristeva, whose complex insights and uncannily Baroque-like speculations have danced across most of my thinking and writing ever since, fascinated but at that point largely uncomprehending, I first heard her speak at a conference in the late 1970s. Thirty years later, comprehending a little more and with increased admiration, I encountered, first in French and then translated into English, the book she describes – again not a little Baroquely – as a ‘novel’ based on the life of Saint Teresa, in which she remarks that the saint of Avila reveals that ‘the secrets of Baroque civilization are female’.1 Throughout this study I approach, move away from, and variously return to Kristeva’s terminology. I have chosen ‘Female’ rather than ‘Feminine’ Baroque for my title because all my subjects were (by the admittedly unscientific and culturally problematic criteria of the time) perceived as women, and their struggles against the gender ideologies of their time were forced upon them by both phallocentric discourse and authority figures who were all (also problematically) assumed to be ‘male’. I have especially wanted to avoid the problematically reified concept of ‘Woman’, since I am concerned with real historical subjects who were – some very consciously, others implicitly – rebelling against what today we see as the ideological constructs of gender. Their varied frustrations and rebellions constitute an important dimension of their Baroque-ness, illustrating in multiple although often contradictory ways how marginal or dispossessed members of a society struggle to locate spaces of resistance within dominant or oppressive ideological structures. The primary, though not exclusive ‘textual’ focus of this study is not art or music or architecture – cultural activities to which the label ‘Baroque’ is conventionally attached – but writing. The more prosaic descriptive phrase in my title points to an area of research to which I have been grateful to contribute for many years: the revival (or in some cases the discovery) of early modern women’s writings in English. My interests in what then were still termed ‘Renaissance women’ go far back, to the late 1960s, when as a 1

Kristeva, Teresa, p. 20.

Waller, G., The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. doi 10.5117/9789463721431_intro

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The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Liter ary Culture

student I met John Rathmell, the first modern editor of Mary (and Philip) Sidney’s Psalms, who was the internal examiner of my Cambridge PhD. Later, despite some slight disapproval from senior colleagues, I taught a few poems by Mary Sidney and her niece Mary Wroth in ‘Renaissance’ literature courses, the texts for which had by long tradition been almost entirely written by men. The residual scepticism about what we eventually came to call ‘early modern’ women’s writings was reflected in the response I received in the 1970s from a major academic publisher to my book proposal: that – this without their even viewing the manuscript – they did not see there would be an audience for a scholarly study of Renaissance women writers, especially, I suspected, one that used phrases like ‘gender construction’ and showed signs of responding positively to the emerging invasion of ‘Theory’, especially French feminist theorists like Kristeva. Much of this material had to wait until the eighties (and after) before it was published. The Female Baroque gratefully builds on the work by those who, in the past thirty and more years, have increasingly constituted a powerful community of scholars advocating for the study of early modern women’s writings and their related cultural productivity. Their work has permanently altered how we picture the period and the perspectives we bring to our reading of it. I attempt, then, to bring together theoretical and empirical modes of literary and cultural analysis and to broaden my analysis to the surrounding structures of the culture, and particularly to set English culture – too often, in my view, trying to exist in anticipatory Brexit-like isolation – in a broader European context. Chapter One surveys what seem to me to be the most pertinent current theories of Baroque culture. I draw on a variety of philosophers, historians and theorists, but most particularly José Antonio Maravall. I advance a schema of recurring Baroque characteristics that are most applicable to writing – fictionalising, hyperbole, melancholy, kitsch, and plateauing. Some of these concepts will seem unfamiliar to scholars used to considering the Baroque as primarily concerned with music, painting, or sculpture, or seeing it inextricably connected with the Counter-Reformation. They are meant to point not so much at the surface characteristics of the period’s culture and more to underlying ideological trends. I also ask how we can speak of the ‘English’ Baroque, since it has long seemed an alien concept to the residual tradition of English literary and cultural history. In Chapter Two I focus on the chief contribution of this study, the notion of the Female Baroque, in which the influence of Kristeva and other feminist historians and theorists leads me to examine the distinctive contribution of women writers and artists, thus pointing to a recurring gap in previous scholarship on the Baroque, which has been focused primarily – though

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Introduction and Acknowledgements

11

certainly not irrelevantly – on the objectification of ‘Woman’. Along with the historical realities of patriarchal exploitation of early modern women, I explore the emergent energies of women’s writings, speculating – with what I hope are sufficient material examples given the increasing number of women writers whose work in recent years has come to light or simply been accorded greater attention – on the question of whether there were distinctive ‘female’ experiences articulated in or behind early modern discourse. Kristeva’s emphasis on ‘intimate revolt’ and her famous distinction between the ‘semiotic’ and the ‘symbolic’ are frequently in the vicinity of that discussion. After the two predominantly theoretical accounts of the Female Baroque, the third chapter starts with the seemingly natural association of the Baroque with the Counter-Reformation and looks at two English Catholic women writers, Gertrude More and Mary Ward, both of whom were exiled in Catholic Europe during the early seventeenth century. While More and Ward have attracted some attention within the history of religious devotion, until very recently neither has been widely viewed in broader cultural, let alone specifically ‘literary’ contexts. I then move in Chapter Four to a topic that much traditional scholarship on the Baroque may see as paradoxical: the notion of the Protestant Baroque. I introduce the concept of ‘emergent’ or ‘partial’ Baroque characteristics in the writings of two Protestant poets, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, and Aemilia Lanyer. This is followed by a discussion of the Protestant women of Little Gidding, the women of the ‘Arminian nunnery’ whose ‘storying’ and remarkable creation of biblical harmonies show how the broader cultural dynamics of the age could permeate even a seemingly marginal group of remarkable women who have only recently attracted attention outside the history of devotion. I then look across the Atlantic to examine the English equivalent to the colonial Baroque so prominent in discussions of Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic culture, and question the extent to which New England – looking briefly at Anne Bradstreet and more thoroughly at Anne Hutchinson – can be set within the scope of not just colonial but specifically Protestant colonial Baroque. I turn in Chapter Five to what I term Court Baroque, focusing on the explosion of cultural activities in the Jacobean and Caroline courts before, during, and after the Civil War, looking specifically at the place of women writers and performers. My discussion is centred on James I’s and Charles I’s Catholic queens and the court activities over which they presided before the displacement of the English court during the Commonwealth, and then, following the Restoration, when the English courts of Charles II and James II came under the influence of more prominent manifestations of continental

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The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Liter ary Culture

Baroque culture. I examine a number of entertainments, poems, plays, stories, and treatises produced in and in relation to the Court; I also look at some of those produced on its fringes, in ‘little courts’ like the Sidneys’ Penshurst or the Cavendish residences, both in the English ‘country’ and in exile in Antwerp, which were separate from but deeply influenced by the metropolitan court culture. I conclude the chapter with a discussion of Hester Pulter, whose writings exemplify aspects of the court Baroque even in an isolated country home in a period of increasing suspicion regarding the morals of the royal court. In Chapter Six, to illustrate a major courtly Baroque writer, I turn to Lady Mary Wroth’s prose romance, The Countess of Montgomeries Urania, and its associated poetry collection, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. Wroth obsessively pursues multiple narratives, crossing back and forth over the barriers between fiction and history, and establishes the contours of a female Baroque subject, who has to both be subjected to and attempt to transcend enculturation by the dominant male discourses. In Chapter Seven, I turn to two women writers whose work marks a transition from the Baroque to the Enlightenment. Margaret Cavendish figures prominently in two diverging intellectual worlds. Her life and writings unquestionably contain multiple rich, if often contradictory, aspects we can certainly usefully describe as Baroque. However, especially in her later writings, she developed an eager if ambivalent relationship with the new empirical science and ‘natural philosophy’, the dynamics of which point us beyond the Baroque to the Enlightenment. Along with Cavendish, viewed (as she would wish) as a ‘she-scientist’, I consider Aphra Behn’s groundbreaking writings, frequently described by Restoration scholars as demonstrably Baroque but, as with Cavendish, moving into a new cultural paradigm. Thus, just as at the beginning of the period the Baroque spasmodically surfaces in the predominantly Renaissance work of Pembroke and Lanyer, so in the late seventeenth century, some of its characteristics blaze spectacularly even as they are challenged by Enlightenment culture. As Behn’s dedication to The Fair Jilt puts it, ‘this is reality, and matter of fact, and acted in this our latter age’.2 A brief Postscript concludes the study. Throughout I have used Kristeva’s far-ranging discussions of language and the ‘writing woman’ as central to my analysis of the Female Baroque. Teresa of Avila represents, Kristeva argued, ‘multiple facets, plural transitions’; like the era itself, Teresa was ‘inconstant, mobile, playful, reinvented on the go’; she affirms the ‘triumph of the as-if, celebration of the inconstancy 2 Behn, Oroonoko and Other Writings, p. 74.

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Introduction and Acknowledgements

13

of objective reality’. Teresa is, Kristeva affirms, ‘in a word, Baroque’.3 The great precedent of Teresa as the Female Baroque was not simply to ‘feel rapture’ but to tell it and write it down. 4 In the Baroque, women were able, to a greater or lesser extent, not only to accept (however necessarily) their assigned places within a residual masculinist discourse, but to discover and to give voice to counter-dominant surges and explorations of ‘intimate revolt’.5 They discovered ways by which the residual patriarchal realm might be undermined, and by which both women’s voices and what lies behind or accompanies those voices, might be opened up.6 The Female Baroque, I argue, is where we can discover emergent counter-discourses in which, in different ways, women writers were challenged to find devious, subversive, and oppositional spaces for themselves. Kristeva’s distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic therefore informs my discussion throughout. The semiotic, Kristeva argues, is found in the rhythms of art, music, poetry, and prophetic discourse, or as Freud insisted, in dreams or aporias in ordinary language, in bodily drives, erotic desires, even seemingly random or irrational noises uttered in melancholia or hyperbole, disruptions of sense, syntax, or grammar emerging from a variety of psychic spaces which often threaten to emerge and engulf the speaking subject. It is the semiotic dimension of female speech that Kristeva singles out as the distinctive feature that makes Teresa the epitome of the female Baroque and which in varying forms and to varying extents, I have tried to locate in the texts I have examined. Ranging from pre-linguistic emotional traces to linguistic representations, and thence connecting to broader ideologies, we can therefore attempt to interpret traces that may lie quietly below the surface or might threaten to emerge, even endanger, the surface rationality of everyday existence.7 In looking for examples where the Baroque speaks through the surface narratives and reaches back deeply into the unconscious at points of seeming inaccessibility, I have focused on that most distinctive Baroque figure, the ‘writing woman’. Placing women writers inside the challenges of their historical moment, showing them trying to give voice to desires that transgress the residual class and gender norms provided by society, family, and despite the felt inadequacy of available language, we can see signs of 3 Kristeva, Teresa, pp. 9, 561, 563, 113. 4 Kristeva, Teresa, p. 67. 5 Kristeva, ‘New Forms of Revolt’, pp. 1–19. 6 Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, pp. 13–35. 7 Kristeva, Beginning, p. 6.

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The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Liter ary Culture

how a new subjective space is being built. Such analysis allows us to see the exclusivity of patriarchal discourse being undermined, even partly or potentially, by what Kristeva calls a woman’s body’s ‘greedy void’ with its ‘insatiable cry for more’.8 I have read my chosen women writers through a taxonomy of fictionalising, hyperbole, melancholy, and kitsch, but throughout, I have argued that what I call ‘plateauing’ – adapting the term from the visionary Anglo-American anthropologist Gregory Bateson – is a particularly distinctive Baroque trait that applies with special force to the women of the era. Characteristically, the Baroque falls short of and implicitly challenges residual beliefs in what Gregory Bateson terms traditional Western culture’s ‘orgasmic culmination toward an excess of the idealised apex’; for the Baroque, the residual but increasingly problematic promise of transcendence is challenged, even replaced, by plateauing, seen or at least sensed in a widespread melancholy that the ‘idealised apex’ may be a delusion.9 Typically, Baroque surfaces are deceptive masquerades, pointing only to ambiguous hinterlands, not to a reassuring transcendent world but to a world of further recessive spaces. Even a rapture seemingly achieved lasts only briefly, as a Catholic mystic like More or a Protestant visionary like Anne Hutchinson acknowledges. Viewed as a cultural phenomenon, the excitement of the Baroque is ‘forever wanting’ and always ‘a bit further on’ so that by its very nature consummation or finality continually escapes.10 Plateauing is an intensely felt present absence grounded in an insurmountable lack, caused by the reluctant and sometimes despairing bewilderment before the disjunction of self and world, between hyperbole and melancholic actuality, and increasingly revealing a cosmos that is gradually being dismantled. Behind the absolutist facade of the Baroque is a major cosmological and theological crisis, a conflict between the gradual fading of the metaphysical world on which the traditional world depended and what Kristeva terms humanity’s incredible need to believe.11 My debts to the community of scholars working on both early modern women and on the mysteries of Baroque culture (and the difficulties of pinning down that elusive term) have accumulated for many years in writing, at conferences, in classrooms, and many conversations; such colleagues, fellow scholars, and friends include, though certainly are not limited to, the following: Bill Baskin, Ilona Bell, Diane Bornstein, Bradley Brookshire, 8 Kristeva, Teresa, pp. 95, 350, 401. 9 Bateson, Ecology of Mind, p. 113. 10 Kristeva, Teresa, pp. 350, 401. 11 Kristeva, Incredible Need.

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Introduction and Acknowledgements

Andrew Brown, Andrea Clough, Craig Dionne, Susan Donahue, Alison Findlay, Mary Ellen Lamb, Arthur Marotti, Margaret McLaren, Naomi Miller, Susan Morrison, Michele Osherow, Paul Salzman, Anne Shaver, Rob Stillman, and Susanne Woods. A few of these were once students of mine; other students from whose insights I have especially benefited include Leyla Gentil, Sadie Kalinowska-Werter, Kimberly Love, Gayle MacDonald, Maeve O’Neill, Susan Rudy, Stacia Vigneri, and especially Emma Steen, as well as the members of a ‘Renaissance in England’ class at Purchase College, who worked through Wroth and Cavendish (along with Philip Sidney and Spenser) with me in Spring 2018. Two students, Emma Steen and another who preferred to remain anonymous, provided me with important suggestions for some specific references in the book. I am also grateful for the very existence and the aid of the Cambridge University Library, the assistance of the expert Purchase College Library Inter-library Loan staff, especially the ingeniously persistent Kristen Heinrich, and for permission from the Librarian of my old College Library at Magdalene, Cambridge, where I was able to consult archival material on the Ferrar/Collet families. In Cambridge, Glenys Self planned a delightful trip to Little Gidding, while Parker’s Piece, Midsummer Common, Laundress Green, the River Cam itself (especially Magdalene Bridge), and the Orchard in Grantchester have also provided many occasions for inspiration. In later stages, I have appreciated the close and helpful readings of the work by Amsterdam University Press’s anonymous readers and especially (continuing a long and supportive association) the encouragement of AUP’s Commissioning Editor Erika Gaffney and the expertise and remarkable thoroughness of the Press’s editors. I am grateful to Mary Ellen Lamb, editor of the Sidney Journal, for inviting me to contribute an early version of material that is found in various parts of chapters one, two and six, based on exploratory papers presented to Sidney at Kalamazoo in 2018 and the Renaissance Society of America in 2019. Her close attention to some vagueness and argumentative sloppiness on my part is greatly appreciated. The cover illustration, ‘Self-portrait as the allegory of Painting (La Pittura)’, 1638–39 (oil on canvas) is reproduced by permission of Bridgeman Images. By far my greatest debt, which includes scholarship but extends infinitely beyond that, to heights not even matched by the most soaring aspirations of the Baroque itself, is to my colleague, a scholar, pedagogue, writer of novels and extraordinary ‘storying’, and wife, Kathleen McCormick. As has been the case with every book for almost forty years, this book is because of and dedicated to her.

Cambridge, England

Rye Brook, New York

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Works Cited

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Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko and Other Writings, ed. Paul Salzman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Kristeva, Julia. Women’s Time’ Signs 7.1 (Autumn 1981), 13–35. Kristeva, Julia. In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Kristeva, Julia. This Incredible Need to Believe, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Kristeva, Julia. Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila, trans. Lorna Scott Fox. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Kristeva, Julia. ‘New Forms of Revolt’. Journal of French and Francophone PhilosophyRevue de la Philosophe Française et de la Langue Française 22.2 (2014), 1–19. Kristeva, Julia. ‘Adel’s Body (Conversation)’. http://www.kristeva.fr/2017/AA_text_ JK_english.pdf. Accessed November 2019. Loerke, Mogens. ‘Four Things Deleuze Learned from Leibniz’, in Deleuze and the Fold: A Critical Reader, ed. Sjoerd van Tuinen and Niamh McDonnell, pp. 25–45. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. Maravall, José Antonio. Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986.

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1.

The Labyrinthine Baroque Abstract This chapter surveys current theories of the Baroque, distinguishing between those that see it historically and those that view it as a recurring stylistic quirk. I draw particularly on José Antonio Maravall to advance a schema of recurring Baroque characteristics – fictionalising, hyperbole, melancholy, kitsch and plateauing. Some concepts will seem unfamiliar to scholars used to considering the Baroque as primarily concerned with music, painting or sculpture, or inextricably connected with the Counter-Reformation. These concepts are concerned less with the surface characteristics of the period’s culture and more with underlying ideological trends. I also ask how we can speak of the ‘English’ Baroque, since it has long seemed an alien concept to the residual tradition of English literary and cultural history. Key words: Theories of the Baroque; hyperbole, melancholy, English Baroque; early modern women writers

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The baroque revolution … a continuous state of budding emergence, alluring and infectious … a prodigious subjective space is being built. — Julia Kristeva 1

The concept of the Baroque is notoriously difficult – or, perhaps the same thing, too easy – to define. A long-standing problem in early modern studies is the attempt to elucidate its ‘inherent slipperiness’,2 a goal, I have discovered, that is as compulsive as it is illusory. After over 150 years of sometimes irascible controversy, and especially after the definitive studies in the late nineteenth century by the German scholar Heinrich Wölfflin, the 1 Kristeva, Teresa, pp. 5, 113, 449. 2 Braider, Baroque Self-Invention, p. 7.

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The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Liter ary Culture

term is still used haphazardly in popular lexicon: there are Baroque colours, remarks, fashion, even Baroque ice cream; in more scholarly contexts it is used to describe both a style and a period, to delineate both individual subject positions and shared ideologies; it is usually connected with music, art, architecture, although (at least in Anglo-American scholarship) less with literature, and somewhat infrequently with writing specifically in English.3 The origin of the term is obscure but much speculated about; it is conventionally related to the Spanish barrueco, an irregular pearl, but it has increasingly acquired a multiplicity of other alleged origins, predominantly derived from the history of art and architecture, frequently pejorative, often suggesting perversity, anachronism, bizarreness, unpredictability, individuality, irrationality, rebellion, theatricality, ornamentation, or oddity, and even simply bad taste, particularly in reaction to classical reason and constraint. For some scholars, it is essentially (a problematic word, as will be repeatedly shown) a stylistic marker; for others, especially in the history of the visual arts and music, it is a term useful primarily for differentiating historical periods: thus, conventionally, Raphael is Renaissance, Michelangelo Mannerist, Caravaggio Baroque. Within such vague differentiations in art history, specific characteristics of style may be gathered together under the label of ‘Baroque’, including tendencies towards both extravagant irregularity and realism. Such contradictory descriptions frequently produce not so much a useful set of stylistic characteristics as impressionistic suggestions of a liminal experience, during which the limits of reality are seemingly transcended: an experience related to what I term plateauing. In the history of music, scholars point to vaguely analogous stylistic modifications of the principle of harmony by distortion, dissonance, eccentricity, and enormity, overlapping with the breaking up of traditional polyphonic composition and the exploration of new resources such as chromaticism, tonality, monody, recitative, and new vocal and instrumental combinations. Peter N. Skrine, whose overview of Baroque literary and artistic culture has been a useful reference source, is typical of modern scholars of the Baroque when he asserts that it is ‘no coincidence that the age between Galileo’s telescope (1609) and the establishment of the Royal Observatory (1676) was also the age of the great antiphonal choruses in sacred music and echo effects in profane song, and of the vast ceilings opening up into painted skies in the churches and chambers in which they were sung’. 4 3 Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque; see also Warnke, ‘The Concept of Baroque’, pp. 77–109. 4 Skrine, Baroque, p. 47.

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The L abyrinthine Baroque

19

To further complicate the struggle to define the term, throughout its history there has been a recurring argument that ‘Baroque’ represents not so much a set of historically locatable characteristics, but a permanent potentially disruptive dimension of the human spirit that recurs, often cyclically, in all art forms and all cultures. Eugene d’Ors writes of the perpetual coexistence ‘all throughout history’ of the ‘Classical’ and the ‘Baroque’: one distinguished by stability and harmony, the other by dynamism and change. In yet another variant, theorists of contemporary ‘neo-Baroque’ have attempted in the so-called ‘return of the Baroque’ to connect features of early modern culture to contemporary culture, creating a trans-historical global Baroque or a multiplicity of Baroques –‘supra-historic as against historic’– or even seeing the term as a lens by which we can examine the cultural phenomena of any historical period.5 My goal in this opening chapter is not to advance a new theory of the Baroque but rather to locate my reading of the ‘Female Baroque’, on which I focus in the second chapter, within the recurring tension between the Baroque as a recurring or ahistorical mode of organisation (or at times an unpredictable disruption of organisation) and as a historical period. To avoid both aesthetic universalism and a narrow historical period, I have turned primarily, though certainly not exclusively, to one particular discussion (and certainly with some qualifications implied by my focus on the Female Baroque). This is La cultura del Barroco. Análisis de una estructura histórica by José Antonio Maravall (1975; English translation, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, 1986). By setting the Baroque within a history of mentalities – akin to the French Annalles school of historians – Maravall has sometimes been accused of focusing on broad overarching epochal structures and ignoring both individual agency and cultural contradiction, and my analysis occasionally reflects such concerns. But although his work focuses mainly on Spain, it opens questions across the whole of Europe, and is not restricted to the more conventional focus on art, architecture, and music. Most importantly, he avoids limiting the discussion of the Baroque to formalist aesthetic categories and instead puts ideological questions, including those concerning political power, media, and developments in the technologies of communication, at the heart of his discussion. Underlying Maravall’s concept of the Baroque ‘structure’ is a secular version of the Hegelian argument about historical periodicity, emptied of its transcendental metaphysics: that is, an age’s religion, art, politics, and literature all manifest a pervasive unifying quality. 5 Warnke, ‘Concept of Baroque’, p. 82; Spahr, ‘Baroque and Mannerism’, p. 78.

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Although never explicitly aligned with a Marxist reading of post-medieval history – for Maravall, culture and mentality are never simply the ‘reflection’ of the material basis of society – his concept of ‘historical structure’ draws partly on Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, one of the major influences in modern Marxist cultural theory, and his methodology opens spaces (arguably more than he himself acknowledged) for the insertion of counter-hegemonic discourses. The closest analogy to Maravall in Anglo-American scholarship is the work of Raymond Williams, especially his concept of a period’s ‘structure of feeling’, also derived from Marxist ideological analysis (in Williams’s case from the writings of Louis Althusser and Pierre Macherey). Maravall’s concept of the Baroque as an underlying epochal structure is akin to Williams’s more materialist and more flexible view of culture as an apprehended, but not necessarily fully articulated (or articulable) structure, to which all the characteristics of an age, not merely those articulated in the documentary culture, must be referred. Williams offers a more nuanced understanding of the ideological contradictions of an époque and to the coexistence of what he terms archaic, residual, emergent, and even pre-emergent dimensions of the ‘whole area of lived experience that constitutes an age’s structures of feeling’.6 I am looking, in short, at the Baroque as part of the history of early modern ideological transitions, while acknowledging that it is at best a temporary label, and always admitting the presence of multiple counter-movements. Baroque ontology, Braider observes, differs ‘from analogous historico-aesthetic formations’ by defying ‘ready subsumption under a single, stable doctrine or ideology’.7 Because the Baroque is therefore not a precisely identifiable period, as Bernard C. Heyl points out, ‘the problem of the degree to which any particular seventeenth-century artist is Baroque’ is always present. That is a crucial insight for my analysis of the Baroque elements of the women writers of the era. An important lesson from Williams is that we should talk of writers, artists, and cultural movements that may show Baroque tendencies or what I term in some of my chapters, ‘nearly’, ‘approaching’, or ‘fading’ Baroque – thus echoing Peter Davidson’s argument that we should consider the Baroque as a ‘flexible and permeable’ system that ‘operated in different degrees’ within different communities and individual artists.8 Much of my analysis of particular writers proceeds by distinguishing an author’s or a work’s 6 Williams, Marxism, pp. 126–34. 7 Braider, Baroque Self-Invention, p. 8. 8 Heyl, ‘Meanings of Baroque’, p. 283; Davidson, Universal Baroque, p. 19.

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dominant characteristics from those where ‘Baroque’ would be an inappropriate term: typically, perhaps inevitably, products of the Baroque are never pure. It would not be meaningful to label all early modern women writers (or their writings) as ‘Baroque’: what I am concerned with here are those tendencies within the period where that label would be useful to highlight the distinctive characteristics of women writers, and the varied ways they both write about, and are written by, the dynamics of their cultural moment. I am particularly focused on the ways by which women writers sought to find their own voices in opposition to, or at the very least negotiating with, an inherited dominance of patriarchal assumptions, thus contributing to what in the following chapter I analyse as the ‘Female Baroque’. Considered historically then, the Baroque is therefore not so much a period as an ongoing transition, indicating places when Europeans began to feel, if not always to articulate, the implications of the accumulated social, intellectual, religious, and geographical shocks of the century of Reformation and the early seventeenth century. It is ‘only now’, as Braider puts it, that the ‘moral and ontological consequences’ of new philosophies and their underlying economic and social movements have started to ‘sink in’. Rupert Martin terms the Baroque the last period in which the secular and religious are in equilibrium, and in which cultural movements can still be confidently associated with the remnants of a metaphysical view of the world.9 In that sense the Baroque may be seen, as some historians suggest, as one of the last and sometimes desperate manifestations of the pre-secular universe before the onset of Enlightenment, and a crucial part of the long – and still ongoing – ideological transition from feudalism to capitalism, conveyed in Max Weber’s over-general, yet still alluring and still influential concept of ‘dis-enchantment’. Charles Taylor speaks of the Reformation as ‘an engine of disenchantment’ that brought about ‘the abolition of the enchanted cosmos’, while Walter Benjamin, who referred to his The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1922) as his Barokbuch, also sees the Baroque as an age in which the transcendent existence of truth may still be affirmed but alongside, even entangled with, the growing recognition of its potential or actual absence. The Baroque is, he argues, the earliest manifestation of the ‘emptying’ of the hereafter.10 Against its inherent unpredictability and restlessness – what Braider terms its ‘recursiveness’ – we need to focus instead upon what Maravall documents 9 Braider, Baroque Self-Invention, p. 10; Martin, Baroque, p. 119. 10 Weber, Essays in Sociology, p. 155; Taylor, Secular Age, p. 77; Benjamin, German Tragic Drama, pp. 66–67.

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in detail, the Baroque’s associations with varieties of absolutist mentalities and political structures as exemplified by monarchy, the Church, the Court, or the Family.11 In particular, the Baroque has been consistently associated with the newly ebullient Catholic Church of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, still often referred to, not totally anachronistically, as the CounterReformation, and in particular with the emergence of Jesuit-inspired visual art and architecture, which were centrally important in the development of propagandist strategies to forward the Church’s post-Reformation agendas. As scholars attempted to define the cultural contradictions of early modern Europe, ‘Jesuit style’ became for a time the dominant label for what gradually, following Wölfflin’s definitive intervention into the debate, became accepted, whether positively or negatively, as ‘Baroque’. The Baroque does indeed seem to incorporate a seductive substratum of transcendental beliefs and practices, reflected, paradoxically, in both affirmations of and reactions against Catholic belief and devotion. The Council of Trent provided a powerful impetus to the development of the emergent Baroque sensibility, and the presence of European Catholicism echoes uncannily throughout Baroque culture, even among its varied manifestations in English-speaking and Protestant contexts. In fact, the more we look at the emergence of Baroque culture, the more unmistakable is the presence (or polemically exorcised absence) of Catholicism. Skrine pointedly asks: ‘Indeed, is baroque culture truly possible in a non-Catholic environment?’12 We should initially focus, then, on the combination of confidence and crisis represented by the Catholic Church’s landmark Council of Trent, and the long shadow it cast over Baroque culture. Late in its proceedings, in December 1563, the Council tackled one of the most insistent Protestant criticisms of the Church by issuing an edict on the place of sacred representations in Christian devotion. Maravall points out that, while the Reformation was unable to dissolve the Catholic Faith, virtually every religious symbol and practice was under attack and a process of ‘subjective validation’ was seen as a necessity for faithful Catholics.13 Moving aggressively against what it saw as the threat of Protestant expansion, the Council encouraged the Church to use the emotional and pedagogical powers of the arts to convey the truths of the faith, to stress not only doctrinal clarity but, at least as importantly, emotional impact. Sacred images, the Catholic faithful 11 Braider, Baroque Self-Invention, p. 8; Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, pp. 82–90. 12 Skrine, Baroque, p. 106. See also the relevant comments in Grady, John Donne and Baroque Allegory, p. 17. 13 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, pp. 19–26.

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were reassured, were the primary means by which feelings of empathy and piety could be developed: the spiritual benefits of images arise from their ability to evoke deep feelings, not only because the faithful could thereby be instructed, but ‘by means of paintings or other representations’, they could be ‘instructed and confirmed in the habit of remembering’ the miracles God had performed, so they ‘may order their own lives and manners in imitation of the saints’.14 Artists were, however, discouraged from contributing merely decorative or frivolous additions to creedal or devotional truths, and some specific traditional images – the pregnant Virgin, the Madonna del parto, for example – were discouraged or forbidden. The Society of Jesus took immediate advantage of Trent’s propagandist challenge. The Jesuits had an extraordinary impact on the arts and architecture of the expanding Catholic world, not only as part of their educational mission but in stylistic trends, changing the ways the laity were encouraged to use devotional art by employing its affective and didactic potential in a more systematic, sequential, and experiential manner.15 Central to Jesuit devotions were the Ignatian techniques of structured meditation on concrete images and imagined events, which not only provided a practical handbook ‘for assisting the participant towards heightened knowledge of self and of God’,16 but also gave guidance for both the production of and, from the viewpoint of the faithful, interpretation and emotional response to art. The eye, writes Christine Buci-Glucksmann, is the ‘central physical organ of the Baroque system’;17 motivated by Ignatius’s passionate belief that sight was the most powerful of the senses, intense meditation on the mysteries of the faith became a key method by which the sights, sounds, and feelings of a devotional scene or sacred personage were placed at the centre of personal and collective devotion. Nowhere is the Baroque obsession with intense visuality, with its unmistakable tendencies to scopophilia, more evident than in Ignatian meditation. Following Trent, detailed ecclesiastical guidelines spelt out the implications for the Catholic Church’s commissioning of artistic works. Gabriele Paleotti of Bologna’s Discorso interno alle imagini sacre et profane (1582) stressed that it was the unlettered (gl’idioti) who should especially be kept in mind in visual images. Carlo Borromeo’s Instructiones intorno Fabricae et 14 The directives from the Council on representation can be found in Schroeder, Canons and Decrees pp. 214–217. 15 Bailey, Between Renaissance and Baroque, p. 125. 16 Smith, Sensuous Worship, p. 35. 17 Buci-Glucksmann, Madness of Vision, p. 2.

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Supellectis (1577) laid down the preferred style for building churches, stressing the need for magnificence and splendour. Images, whether buildings or representations (and, as it turned out, an enormous and seemingly everexpanding multiplicity of reproductions, prints, cards, visual and printed texts) could be even more effective than spoken or written words: painters and sculptors were called upon to be ‘silent preachers’ as what Luther dismissively labelled the ‘seeing-kingdom’ of Catholicism pressed art into the service of the Church’s evangelical and counter-heretical initiatives.18 The ‘most effective’ means of achieving ‘what the baroque strove for’, Maravall argues, were ‘visual’. What Althusser famously defines as the ‘interpellation’ of pious spectators is perhaps seen most spectacularly in the sensationalist hyperbole of Spanish art: Christ displayed as an ecstatic martyr or erotically depicted lover, streams of blood and sweat, vaginal-shaped wounds with saints or believers touching, poking, or sucking.19 Chapter Three will contrast two women, Gertrude More and Mary Ward, who developed deeply contradictory responses to the Jesuit focus on images, yet both are clearly manifestations of the Baroque. A much-discussed issue was the degree to which the representation of the detailed physical characteristics of holy personages was morally appropriate, and the extent to which what would otherwise be viewed as erotic art might be put to religious ends. Are the forms and conventions of classical statuary, for example, able to be put to pious uses? One of the ambiguities within Tridentine theology and devotion was a tension between vaghezza, pleasure, and devozione, devotion. The pleasure of an affective representation might be stimulated by devotional contemplation, but (using an ambiguity in the term vaghezza itself) it might also encourage the contemplation of a loveliness involving sexual and not just religious feelings, thereby offering different kinds of frisson hovering between metaphor and eroticism. ‘An effective synthesis’ of the two was considered ‘extremely difficult […] and yet increasingly deemed necessary’, comments Stuart Lungo; how one generates chaste vaghezza in the sense of spiritual pleasure became a recurring challenge to Catholic artists.20 The post-Tridentine Catholic Church, with its renewed and incessant desire (as it was widely put) to re-convert Europe for the Faith is one striking 18 Koerner, Reformation of the Image, pp. 41–42. 19 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, p. 253; Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, p. 126. 20 Lungo, Frederico Barocci, pp. 126, 148. For more detailed analysis of the ambiguities surrounding ‘pleasure’ and the general impact of Trent on the history of representation, especially in Counter-Reformation art, see Waller, Annunciation, pp. 113–116.

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example of Althusser’s concept of the Ideological State Apparatus, just as the clearest historical instance of what he terms a Repressive State Apparatus is the growth of absolutist political regimes. The Baroque likewise was intimately connected with absolutism, most spectacularly the regime of Louis XIV of France, which assumed authoritarian control of subjects and mounted repeated and often brutal actions against both religious heretics and the emerging intellectual forces of Enlightenment.21 In England, the Europe-wide conflicts between varieties of absolutist thought and what becomes loosely seen as ‘liberal’ thought took a number of forms, which focused especially on the controversies concerning the traditional analogy between the family and state. Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha: The Natural Power of Kings, written in the 1620s but not published until 1680, articulated a theoretical justification for a still-dominant paradigm of a divinely ordained pattern of authority, set down in the Bible, granting paternal, monarchical, and ecclesiastical power. In the second half of the century, however, absolutism evoked a series of challenges, both in the Civil War and from Enlightenment thinkers including Hobbes, Algernon Sidney, and Locke, who argued that the consent of the governed was the grounds of political power, not hierarchy or divine designation. As Michael McKeon observes, the publication of Filmer’s treatise late in the century ‘marks not the triumphant ascendancy of patriarchal thought’, but rather is a sign of ‘its demise as tacit knowledge, the fact that it is in crisis’.22 I move now to ask how plausibly we can speak of the English Baroque. ‘Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque’, asked Louis L. Martz a generation ago, ‘when will we ever find a way to use these terms securely and aptly in discussion of English poetry?’23 Art in northern and predominantly Protestant countries, like the Netherlands, with very different political environments from those in the overwhelmingly Catholic south, developed what we may certainly call a Baroque style, thus suggesting, in line with Maravall’s history of mentalities and Williams’s structure of feeling, that there are common ideological dynamics (what an older historicism might have termed a common ‘spirit of the age’) that link Catholic and Protestant, northern and southern. We also need to acknowledge that the Baroque expanded spectacularly outside Europe. The French, Spanish and Portuguese diaspora into the New Worlds of the Americas and Asia opened up, conceptually and practically, a plurality of Baroques, some of which, especially those 21 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, pp. 98–104. 22 McKeon, ‘Historicizing Patriarchy’, p. 296. 23 Martz, From Renaissance to Baroque, p. 3.

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that crossed the Atlantic by ship, were themselves gradually transformed and adapted by indigenous peoples as assumptions about Europe’s moral and metaphysical centrality were called into question, or gradually modified by everyday material living. The English colonists – conventionally rarely seen in such a context – likewise took and modified certain characteristics of the Baroque, as I shall argue in a later chapter. Skrine comments that Britain’s cultural relationship with Baroque Europe is ‘a vexed and complicated one’, but ‘English Baroque’ has gradually acquired a slight degree of acceptability: Davidson notes that until the 1950s ‘the idea of English Baroque’ was treated with disparaging unease, probably based on a nationalistic, even xenophobic, identification of the term with continental Europe, and therefore with ‘the arts of the enemy, of a group of peoples against which Englishness defines itself by negation’.24 By the late seventeenth century, this separatist fantasy supposes, England had resisted the Counter-Reformation, triumphed over French absolutism, and in 1688 achieved a relatively peaceful political (and Protestant) coup. Within this nationalistic, even populist, mythology, in subsequent centuries English political thinking and eventually literary scholarship came to choose artistic labels based not on European-wide cultural affinities, but on reigning English kings and queens or historical events, such as ‘Restoration’ or ‘Victorian’. Within this insular model of stand-alone Englishness, which too often has been a recurring and regrettable characteristic of certain elements of nationalistic English culture – including the present – seventeenth-century English poetry, for example, has conventionally not been linked to European movements but considered separately as a native ‘Metaphysical’ tradition, what Hugh Grady calls ‘an arbitrary and somewhat happenstance coinage that became accepted for want of a better term in English literary history’.25 Those writers who, like Richard Crashaw, were most receptive to Continental influences have been widely seen as regrettable exceptions, especially if they went into enforced or voluntary exile either in Catholic Europe or the New World. Roy Daniells tartly notes the prejudice that the Baroque was foreign, even un-English, ‘more suitable for describing foreign achievements’, and asserts that ‘the commencement of English Baroque is not as hard to fix as at first appears’: by 1590, one might ‘drive in a tentative peg’ and by 1600 ‘there is a well-defined Baroque sensibility’.26 In his award-winning television series on the Baroque, the art historian Waldemar Januszczak – conventionally 24 Skrine, Baroque, p. 107; Davidson, Universal Baroque, pp. 4, 25–26, 28–29. 25 Grady, John Donne and Baroque Allegory, p. 17. 26 Skrine, Baroque, p. vii; Daniells, ‘English Baroque and Deliberate Obscurity’, p. 117.

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describing the term by such features as ‘bigness’, drama, waywardness, playfulness, inventiveness, grandeur, and restless transformation – traces what he sees as a historical development ‘from St. Peter’s to St Paul’s’, arguing for an evolution from sixteenth-century Rome to late seventeenth-century England that enables us, at least by the Restoration or the early eighteenth century (when Wren’s St Paul’s is completed), to speak legitimately of ‘English Baroque’.27 When we turn specif ically to the English women in this study, two generations of important feminist scholarship have demonstrated – despite, even as recently as the 1960s or 1970s, widespread scepticism, even hostility – that there were women artists, musicians, and writers working in England and, more broadly, in English. However, it remains true that they have rarely been viewed within a wider European and specifically a Baroque context. As Chapter Three will show, if we look to Catholic women such as Gertrude More and Mary Ward, it is relatively easy to make a case for their Baroque affinities; but with my other writers, any such connections with the Baroque, either stylistic or ideological, have traditionally been ignored or referred to only in offhand or pejorative terms. That degree of insularity is puzzling, since all the examples of the female Baroque in this study, whether Catholic, Protestant, or of more ambiguous (if any) faith, in fact maintained important connections with wider European trends, including across religious confessional boundaries. An important transitional, though never fully Baroque figure, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, models her psalm imitations on the poems of the French Protestant Clément Marot; her admirer, Aemelia Lanyer, looks to both Catholic and Protestant models for her biblical paraphrases, and writes hyperbolic encomia of prominent women through history whom she sees as forming a female prophetic tradition and encouraging a re-membering of cultural history. Mary Wroth sets her prose romance in a mythical Europe over which the two main characters, projections of her cousin/lover and herself, eventually rule. Gertrude More takes refuge within an English-speaking religious community in Europe; Mary Ward moves back and forth between what she experienced as an alien Protestant England and a suspicious Catholic Europe, trying to bring the two back together. The women of Little Gidding indirectly base their communal lifestyle on Spanish and Italian Catholic models of community. Hester Pulter responds imaginatively to the European-wide emblem tradition. Anne Hutchinson brings European religious tensions to the New World and contributes to the emergence of a Colonial Protestant Baroque. 27 Januszczak, ‘St Peter’s to St Paul’s’.

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Margaret Cavendish spends fifteen years in European exile from Protestant Commonwealth England, expressing nostalgia for the lost Caroline court and constructing fantasy scenarios of whole worlds she could, at least in her imagination, both invent and rule, and in which heroic figures of mixed and changing gender could triumph; her step-daughters Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, writing under siege in the Civil War, develop their own voices even as they look to their father, exiled in Europe, for approbation. In a seemingly more settled time after the Restoration, Aphra Behn’s stories and dramas look admiringly across to French neoclassical literary precedents and her poems link with French as well as English ‘libertine’ sexuality. By then, as the final chapter will show, ‘Baroque’ is gradually, if not entirely, ceasing to be useful as a descriptor of style or ideology. A seductive attempt to simplify the application of ‘Baroque’ to English literature has been proposed by J. Douglas Canfield. Over the course of this study I have been drawn to it, albeit again with some reservations. Canf ield is an unapologetic advocate of the ‘unexpected’ or occasional Baroque; he defines the term not as an epochal ideological development but as recurring stylistic quirks remarkable for ‘disorder, excrescence, exuberance, the irrational, the grotesque, the cryptic’. These are experiences, he argues, that almost arbitrarily may burst through a serene Renaissance or neo-classical surface: the Baroque ‘surprises. It puzzles. It pops up where we least expect it’, often with ‘unintended’ effects. 28 Canf ield’s is a temptingly easy solution to the frustration of def ining Baroque literature, and not without merit in that it points to stylistic characteristics that seem to distinguish the material culture of the era from earlier ‘Renaissance’, ‘Classical’, or subsequent ‘Enlightenment’ cultures. But its goals are limited and achieved without digging down into the age’s contradictory mixture of deeply rooted residual patterns and innovation, or speculating upon the pre-emergence or anticipations of later ideological shifts. That desire to stay on the cultural surface is problematic. While I will occasionally draw on particularities in Canfield’s arguments, I propose rather, following Maravall, to view the Baroque as correlating, however messily, stylistic movements with ideological ones. Within any hegemonic culture, dominant discourses are strained by emergent contradictions and clashes, as the consequences of scientific, social, geographic, religious and other upheavals sink into the consciousness, and certainly the lived experience – Williams’s underlying ‘structure of feeling’ – of the seventeenth century. 28 Canfield, Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature, pp. 15, 17, 30.

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The taxonomy used in my argument is therefore in part derived from Maravall, supplemented by some suggestions derived from Canfield and from Gilles Deleuze and the visionary Anglo-American anthropologist Gregory Bateson. These basic concepts, to which I refer throughout this book, are: fictionalising and discursive ‘folds’; the frequently interconnected hyperbole and melancholy; plateauing (a concept I derive from Bateson); and, from Maravall’s schematic, kitsch.29 To these I add, in Chapter Two, the central concept of my study, the question of gender, the Female Baroque.

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Fictionalising The first major characteristic of Baroque discourse is what Nandini Das terms the era’s ‘shifting and labile fluctuations between fact and fiction’:30 its obsession with the multiple narrative capacities of language, not necessarily as a means of affirming truths, but often remaining cryptic or openly imaginative. We encounter multiple and interweaving of acts of story-telling (what the Little Gidding women in Chapter Four term ‘storying’) across the culture, not only in the apparently marginal activities of the arts but in the more public areas of religion, politics, and aesthetics. We see such evidence in the multiple narratives in prose fiction, the mixing of history and romance narratives, the Puritan suspicion of frequent indulgence in fiction-making, the startling gap between ideals and political realities evoked by the elaborate narrative hyperboles of the Court masque, or Margaret Cavendish’s ‘hermaphroditic’ mixture of romance and scientific narratives. Just as Baroque art is notable for the contradictory combination of clear detail and exaggerated motion, a phenomenon that we see in drama, sculpture, opera, or architecture – including the interplay between light and dark in the high contrast dramatic atmosphere of Caravaggio or Artemisia Gentileschi – so Baroque narrative revels in dramatic juxtapositions, rhetorical surprises, the contradictory, the coincidental, the preposterous. The romances that ‘proliferated’ across the period, Skrine observes, ‘delighted in the violent separation of tender young lovers, the encapsulation of flashbacks in an exciting, forward-moving action, the suspense generated by frequent unforeseen reversals and dire threats to life and chastity, and by frequent recourse to disguise’.31 It is observable 29 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, p. 85. 30 Das, Renaissance Romance, p. 176. 31 Skrine, Baroque, p. 4.

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in conversation, political and religious manifestos, devotional meditations and letter-writing as much as in ‘literary’ works. Reversals, discoveries, coincidences and miracles are commonplace within the ‘storying’ of the period. While an obsession with multiple illusions seems to mirror the anxious Baroque subject’s unconscious dependence on such wish-fulfilment, it is also observable in material spectacles and what Mary Wroth frequently refers to as ‘enchantments’, in, let us say, both the imagined Europes of Wroth’s Urania or Cavendish’s Blazing World, and the material Europe of Versailles. It is endemic to the multiple kinds of theatricality, especially dramatic interactions of play, stages, and actors. The multiplicity of Baroque ‘storying’ emerges in an era when across the culture the reliability of what had traditionally been accepted as truths, in what were assumed to be historically accurate records of the Christian Scriptures, is slowly being questioned. An era-changing discursive form, empirical or ‘critical’ history, is struggling to be born, perhaps datable from Erasmus’ pioneering demystification in his translation of the Greek New Testament of some key incidents in the Gospel stories. Gradually, we see an increasing insistence on verifiable historical evidence and the emergence of contradictory manuscript sources undermining the residual authority of what had seemingly always taken for granted as historical. The more radical scepticism towards Bible narratives by Spinoza or Toland does not explode onto the intellectual scene until late in the seventeenth century, when it contributes to the emergence of Enlightenment culture, but the uneasiness about the reliability of biblical stories is starting to be articulated by Bacon, Descartes, and Pascal as well as among more radical voices in the Reformation and the Civil War. Incipient empirical history battles with multiple fictions as competing forms of knowledge, raising the question of the reliability of story and legend alongside what passes for historical fact, and producing what Margaret Cavendish calls ‘hermaphroditic’ storytelling.32 It even lurks behind the mild anxieties of the pious women of Little Gidding as they cut or ‘scissor’ and then reassemble textoids and pictoids from a variety of sources into narratives designed to affirm – and at the same time reassure themselves of – the reliability of the Christian Scriptures. For Kristeva, such enhanced blurring of the distinction between fiction and fantasy is quintessentially Baroque. She points to fiction-making as the period’s ‘vital element’ for giving language for ‘eternal truths’ that escape ‘instrumental rationality’. This predilection is not simply the privileging of illusion but rather the characteristic Baroque capacity to remain open to 32 Cavendish, Paper Bodies, p. 64.

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explore multiple ways to discover or create knowledge through varieties of story-telling, to ‘play around that exquisite border where the ‘“true” tips over into the “make-believe”’.33

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Le Pli (the ‘Fold’) As part of my consideration of Baroque fictionality, I occasionally turn to a term used by Gilles Deleuze in his commentary on Leibnitz, which has often proved helpful to an understanding of the Baroque: le pli, the fold or pleat. Deleuze defines the Baroque as involving an infinite movement of folds, considered both as philosophical concept and aesthetic affect, variously exemplified by architectural ripples, pleats in clothing, or psychological responses to rapidly changing spiritual environments. In this sense, the Baroque cannot be described simply by conventional aesthetic tropes but as the expression of an emergent philosophical concept of infinity, expressed by the vital movement of the fold transcending temporal (historical) and spatial distances. Deleuze speaks of singularities appearing into a ‘chaotic multiplicity’; the multiplicity of the Baroque, he argues, ‘not only has many parts but also […] is folded in many ways’. The Baroque ‘twists and turns its folds […] pushing them to infinity fold over fold’.34 For Deleuze the ‘fold’ is an image of optimistic celebration, a celebration of the infinite unpredictability of the Baroque; for Walter Benjamin, by contrast, the folds of the Baroque open up not a celebratory but a melancholic subjectivity, producing a hopelessly fragmented world that has lost any strict idea of the transcendent yet remains in its shadow, resting only on ‘theological hyperbole’.35 However evocative a metaphor, like ‘Baroque’ itself, the ‘fold’ is frustratingly indefinable. In art and decorative design, it is probably most easily seen in ever-multiplying waves, such as clothing disclosing or disguising a body. An obvious example, to which Kristeva repeatedly returns in her celebration of Teresa, is the marble folding in Bernini’s sculpture of the saint: Teresa’s implied body is indefinably ambiguous, with no obvious centre of gravity. In many paintings and buildings of the era there are analogous multiple and contradictory surfaces of shadow and light, with planes and 33 Kristeva, Teresa, pp. 92, 48; Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 11. 34 Deleuze, Fold, pp. 76, 3. For a suggestive treatment of Deleuzian folds in the Baroque, see Egginton, Theater of Truth, Ch 1. Egginton’s distinction between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ Baroque strategies provides a suggestive analogy to my discussion of ‘plateauing’. 35 Benjamin, German Tragic Drama, p. 67.

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spaces converging and extending in multiple directions. We can see the fold in undulating surfaces, in repeated and unpredictable proliferations of ornamental exteriors, and the undermining of implied straight lines, tantalizing with the promise of a further outside, even a transcendental outside, a suggestion to which I refer below as ‘plateauing’. Even Baroque still life representations, Deleuze observes, may open into folds suggesting movement: tablecloths, shadows, or transitions to further still life tableaux.36 Caravaggio’s bowls of fruit and vases notoriously are on the point of spilling or toppling over. In Vermeer’s painting Girl Reading a Letter At An Open Window, itself a narrative enfolding of a realistic portrait complete with an Annunciation motif, a carpet and a bowl of fruit on a cloth seem about to erupt into waves and folds.37 Such examples suggest that the Deleuzian fold is perhaps like a Mobius strip or a shifting collage, fascinating the viewer by providing an illusion of knowing, but never allowing meaning to be finally settled. In narrative, we see folds in the play of illusion and dissolution, slippages between appearances, multiple versions of truths half-truths and lies. Baroque ‘storying’ is not just committed to blurring illusion and reality, but to pleating, in Deleuze’s sense, thus bringing inside and outside together. Intriguingly, as later chapters will show, even the sober-minded Protestant women of Little Gidding may be seen in terms of buoyant folds: they play continually with the multiple stories they tell, and in the cut-and-paste techniques of their collage-making as they splice together multiple stories from the Bible, they present another striking instance of the Baroque speaking through otherwise resistant allegiances and biases.

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Melancholy and Hyperbole Among the recurring contradictions of Baroque culture, two powerful opposites stand out – the Baroque’s overwhelming reliance on hyperbole, not merely as a rhetorical device (certainly an insistent stylistic feature of the era) but serving to generate elevated emotionality and allegiance by means of extremity, exaggeration, excessiveness, and novelty; and at the other extreme (and almost inevitably accompanying it) a recurring, at times obsessive, melancholy. Among his key characteristics of the Baroque Maravall identifies artifice, exaggeration, heightening, and calculated rhetorical effect to stress novelty, rarity, outlandishness, and the breaking of expected norms. Gregg 36 Deleuze, Fold. pp. 122–123. 37 Waller, Annunciation, pp. 158–160.

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Lambert describes the Baroque affect as a feeling of dizziness, swooning, wonder and amazement, rapture and delirium.38 Braider speaks of the ‘typically exorbitant character of the visual experiences in which Baroque beholders reveled: anamorphoses, saintly visions, the theatricalization of martyred bodies, scenes of ‘wonder’ (mirabile) and madness ( furore)’. He mentions also the ‘operatic excess’ of public spectacles like the pyrotechnical volcanic mountain created to celebrate the birth of the heir to the French throne in 1661.39 Baroque culture, Maravall observes, is essentially theatrical, with examples ranging from the commonplace topos of the world as a stage and men and women merely players to the recurring emphasis on illusion, transitoriness, and the blurring of real and illusory interactions between actors and audiences. The associated elaborate architectural and ritualistic public displays range from Versailles to the Catholic Mass.40 Like the period’s dominant artistic trends, Baroque writing often encourages what Mieke Bal calls a ‘hallucinatory quality’, a sense of overflowing emotionally rather than intellectually related ornamentation.41 In poetry, it is the goal of both Italian Marinismo and Spanish Gongorismo to cause admiration and even cognitive dissonance, rather than making any verif iable truth claims, just as one of the most widely observed effects of English Metaphysical poetry is hyperbole or exaggeration. Bacon wrote of his age’s ‘speaking in perpetual hyperbole’, although he felt such excess was appropriate only in love. 42 Canfield’s sense of the surprise eruptions in Baroque poetry points in a similar direction, but hyperbole goes much more deeply than mere surface stylistic novelty. There is in Baroque culture a seemingly innate inclination that pulls the human being toward the new and impossible, with the aim of creating admiration or wonderment: ‘It is required you do awake your faith’, says Shakespeare’s Paulina in Shakespeare’s most Baroque play, The Winter’s Tale (V. iii. 94–95). ‘My ambition’, says the narrator in Cavendish’s Blazing World, ‘is not onely to be Emperess, but Authoress of a whole World’. 43 ‘Baroque’ therefore does not only point to a surface effect of the exhilarating blur of emotionally startling or incongruous multiple discourses. The hyperbolic conceit may appear as superficial ornamentation but in the Baroque it becomes a way of cultivating the contradictory and the impossible, and often the greater the contradiction, the greater the 38 Lambert, Return of the Baroque, p. 22. 39 Braider, Baroque Self-Invention, p. 68. 40 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, p. 199. 41 Bal, ‘Baroque Matters’, p. 183. 42 Bacon, Essays, p. 29. 43 Cavendish, Paper Bodies, p. 250.

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claims of its power. Reaching out to entice or even compel the spectator or viewer’s emotional response resembles Althusser’s more rigid concept of ‘interpellation’, communication is never simply a one-way process, but requires the response, even the allegiance, of the interpellated subject. So ideological interpellation is not irresistible: it creates a relationship that attempts to establish an obligation, but within which, as Judith Butler has argued, there remains the possibility of dis-identification. 44 Baroque hyperbole grows from and directs the major ideological transitions of the period. Buci-Gluckmann points out that the new empirical science becomes deeply suspicious of hyperbolic metaphor and analogy because of what is seen as their dubious ontological foundation – the artifice of linking universal micro- and macro-correspondences derived from the medieval worldview – which is paradoxically intensified in the Baroque’s enhancing and extending metaphorical language, and its willingness to entertain hyperbole as claiming to make plausible truth claims. 45 Hyperbole is a means by which the human imagination can attempt to close the gap between concrete reality and desire, the real and the ideal, and at root is an attempt to compensate for ‘the irremediable tension between the world and transcendence’, demonstrating that disproportion can ultimately be justified cosmically. Hyperbole is designed to evoke amazement and ambitiousness in an age in which residual cosmic correspondences may still be adhered to but which, at the very least, are felt to be under threat. 46 We should also note here, in anticipation of the discussion in the next chapter, the gendered aspect of hyperbole. Kristeva comments on the long tradition of female mystics and visionaries, including Teresa (who was often herself accused of hyperbolic language, avoiding the literal precisely to achieve emotional effects) that the hyperbole of the visionary or mystic, reaching beyond herself to explore the Other, is inevitably expressing itself in extremity, excess, in a sense as a kind of ‘secret laboratory’. 47 Melancholy, uncannily, often coexists with hyperbole in the age’s central structures of feeling; indeed, the Baroque trope of melancholia was an almost inevitable consequence of the recurrent, even obsessive, elevation of hyperbole. Baroque men and women were, Maravall remarks, ‘sad human beings […] who began to appear on European soil in the last few years of 44 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, pp. 126–131; Lampert. ‘Resisting Ideology’. 45 Buci-Glucksmann, Madness of Vision, pp. 140, 178. 46 Buci-Glucksmann, Madness of Vision, pp. 6, 84. For Baroque hyperbole, see Johnson, Hyperboles; for Melancholy, Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy, and Schiesari, Gendering of Melancholia. 47 Kristeva, Teresa, pp. 44, 43.

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the sixteenth century and who continued to be found until well into the second half of the following century’.48 He notes la Rochefoucault’s opinion that chagrin is the state of mind that saturates the whole world, while Shakespeare’s Hamlet is inevitably cited as indicative of the age’s obsession with the condition. 49 From a psychoanalytical perspective, Kristeva notes the linking of ‘despondency and exhilaration’ and that ‘bright and fragile amatory idealization’ so typical of the Baroque is ‘hardly dissociated’ from ‘the shadow cast on the fragile self’, melancholy alternating ‘more often than not with the so-called manic phase of exaltation’.50 Physiologically, seventeenth-century medical authorities still saw melancholy as reflecting an imbalance among the traditional four humours, manifesting itself in a variety of mental and physical symptoms ranging from hypochondria to flatulence. In his encyclopaedic Anatomy of Melancholy (1621, and many subsequent editions), Robert Burton saw universal melancholy as a consequence of the Fall, but more empirically also expressed the common assumption that melancholy, at least for men, could be seen as indication of philosophical thought – even genius. Juliana Schiesari notes that this view has a ‘venerable tradition’ but one that ‘privileg[es] a nostalgic ideal’ of the tormented male figure of genius, ‘plagued by moral scruples and self-doubt’.51 Burton’s Baroque self moves restlessly from one topic to another, back and forth from multiple examples to multiple ‘social contexts’, as Paul Salzman observes. For Burton, melancholy implied contradictory symptoms; Erin Sullivan points out that in addition to his exhaustive discussion of case-histories and speculations, his prefatory poem the ‘Author’s Abstract of Melancholy’, sets out a catalogue of contradictions: the admirable dimensions of melancholy are praised and then undermined by a reminder of its negative effects, and by the time he gets to the end of the poem it is the ‘dark and unsettling’ aspects of melancholy that dominate. In the final stanza the narrator, exercising Baroque hyperbole, is ‘terrified, frantic, and on the verge of suicide’: my paines past cure, another Hell I may not in his tormented well, Now desperate I hate my life, Lend me an halter or a knife.52 48 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, p. 149. 49 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, p. 150. 50 Kristeva, Black Sun, pp. 5, 9. 51 Schiesari, Gendering of Melancholia, pp. 6–7. See also the succinct discussion of the Anatomy in Salzman, Literary Culture, Ch. 2. 52 Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy, pp. 106, 130; Salzman, Literary Culture, p. 25.

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Baroque landscapes, fictional or ‘real’, are dominated by ‘startlingly frank depictions of mortality – decomposing corpses, grinning skulls, broken columns, mourning cherubs’ wherever ‘the baroque left its tangible and visible mark’.53 Like hyperbole, melancholy is also accorded a distinctive gendered dimension, with the melancholic male artist or scholar privileged alongside ‘Mistress Melancholy’ who is typically seen as a malign feminine force. Women’s religious melancholy is an aspect of Burton’s misogynistic suspicion of female bodies and their propensity to generate erotic melancholy.54 Noting the long-established association of the feminine and the melancholic, Kristeva argues that Western patriarchy has thus constructed yet another trap for women, whose bodies are seen as possessing malign, even demonic, power. In conventional folklore, melancholy women suffer the ‘complaint’ because females have ‘disordered and anatomically inferior bodies’; their melancholy arises from neither scholarly study nor piety. Schiesari argues that women were deliberately excluded from the ‘elite male affliction’, with women’s symptoms seen as less significant.55 Kristeva proposes a theory of melancholia in the tradition of Freud, identifying the sadness of individual depression as the mourning for the lost Other (the mother, the breast); linguistically, she relates it to the impossibility of representing the semiotic level of the psyche which both precedes and yearns to find language.56 The common denigration of female melancholy is both reinforced by and yet questioned in considerations of women’s religious experiences. As later chapters will show, the symbolics of religious struggle, pain and even violence, frequently self-directed, are all too readily attributed to women’s gender inferiority; it is, Ruth Stein suggests, as if an authoritarian masculinist God has taken over and dominates the psyche, so that the victim of melancholy is convinced that ‘He, God, will be content’ only by women’s self-abasement. The inner struggles of religion become concretised, with the evil projected onto not just infidels and heretics, but upon the self. A psychological need is fulfilled: sanctioned and thereby ‘holy’ violence, self-directed as well as other-directed, can be justified as sacrifice or martyrdom, the ultimate religious act, not as a death-directed aberration.57 What psychoanalysts 53 Skrine, Baroque p. 57. 54 Salzman, Literary Culture, p. 27. 55 Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy, p. 90; Schiesari, Gendering of Melancholia, p. 18. 56 Kristeva, Black Sun, Ch. 3. For a useful summary of Kristeva’s thought on melancholia, including her critique of Freud, see Kristeva, ‘Melancholic Imaginary’. 57 Stein, For the Love of the Father, p. 42.

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term Hörigkeit or ‘extreme submissiveness’, ‘thraldom’, or ‘emotional surrender’ becomes a key term in understanding the many manifestations of Baroque melancholy.58

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Kitsch Of the key terms I will use in elucidating the Baroque, the most provocative is what Maravall terms kitsch: an obsession with reproduction and repetition, most obviously seen in the multiplying of artistic reproductions, but having rich psychological and ideological connections. Kitsch is a term that in English certainly gains a degree of power from its shock value. Maravall sees it as distinctively, indeed triumphantly, Baroque. Mass production is normally thought of as a nineteenth-century phenomenon, the reproduction of cultural artefacts as a consequence of the industrial and marketing revolutions; however, he argues, ‘it is the seventeenth century that sees the development of a mentality and modes of life having a mass character, based on the distribution and multiplication of objects and experiences’, on ‘reiteration, sentimentalism, easy passions along with the development of manufacturing, even where industry scarcely reached such a level’. Further, ‘in previous epochs’ we might be able to dispense with analysing this component of the culture, but ‘in the Baroque, that would be impossible’; indeed, ‘there is scarcely a Baroque work of high quality that escapes being touched by kitsch elements’. ‘The sublime and the anti-climactic, the divine, and the vulgar’, Marivall comments, all ‘share a common space’, with religious and civil authorities creating or sanctioning cultural products that dress or disguise doctrine or ‘guidance’ in the guise of the ‘new and extraordinary’.59 In English, however, ‘kitsch’ often has pejorative associations, and we should perhaps consider Braider’s suggestion that we speak more neutrally of Baroque ‘multiplicity’. ‘We witness’, comments Braider, ‘the production and consumption of pictures on an unprecedented, quasi-industrial scale […] The output is indigestibly multifarious and vast, flooding the new market’ with visual and other material, ‘from every field of human interest, every sphere of human activity and every corner of the globe’.60 He argues that looking at more than just material objects, we should note how the Baroque is built upon an ideology of ‘recursiveness’ or ‘secondness’, involving recurrence, 58 Kaplan, Female Perversions, p. 210; Reich, ‘Extreme Submissiveness’, pp. 470–480. 59 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, pp. 90, 188, 230. 60 Braider, Baroque Self-Invention, p. 42.

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change and movement, manifested not just in the multiplicity of objects but in the continual movement of people, spectacles and roles; a term like kitsch therefore does not quite encompass the underlying psycho-social ideology of that broader cultural phenomenon.61 Jan C. Westerhoff suggests that ‘pansemioticism’ might be a more appropriate label for the Baroque fascination with multiple signs and symbols, ‘things as diverse as hieroglyphics, antique coins, epigrams, and emblems’, all of which could be found in reliquaries, albums, tapestries, crockery or domestic decorations as well as in books or prints.62 So we might take note of not only the multiplicity of objects but of such phenomena as Teresa incessantly moving around Spain founding enclosed nunneries, or Mary Ward’s near frantic establishment of multiple small communities and schools across Europe, even while she is being persecuted by the papacy and other ecclesiastical authorities. We can see Braider’s emphasis on Baroque multiplicity echoed, stylistically, in Mary Sidney’s obsessive experimentation with multiple verse forms in her psalms, or the fascination with the reproduction of nostalgic pastorals that dominated so much of the entertainment in Baroque courts. We see something comparable, too, in Mary Wroth’s characters, especially the women, who are victims of continual experiences of molestation, with the men – most notably her hero, Amphilanthus – constant only in their changing affections; her heroine, Pamphilia, is the ‘molested’ victim of his unpredictability, pinned down to isolation and silence. Multiplicity may be observed, too, in the restlessness of Margaret Cavendish, both in her life and her writings as she moved from one attempt to express and, in a sense, discover herself to another; and it is even seen, perhaps, in the compulsively recurring libertine plots and intimate scenes of Aphra Behn’s dramas, written as if she must outdo her male rivals. A distinctive Baroque cultural phenomenon that can be viewed, at least in part, as kitsch, was the remarkably popular emblem. Emblem books characteristically consisted of an image, often accompanied by didactic prose explanations or verses, interpretive mottos, or sayings. Henri Estienne explained that ‘the Embleme is properly a sweet and morall Symbole, which consist of pictures and words […] to instruct us, by subjecting the figure to our view and the sense to our understanding’.63 Originating with Andreas Alciati’s Emblematum liber (1537), emblematic thinking ‘was as pervasive 61 Braider, Baroque Self-Invention, pp. 8, 30. 62 Westerhoff, ‘World of Signs’, pp. 634–636. 63 Estienne, Making Devises, pp. 7–8.

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as a representational advertising is today and it helped to shape every form of visual and verbal communication’.64 It has been estimated that there were more than four thousand emblem books published in the period, influencing multiple combinations of image and language in poetry, moral tracts, and conduct books. Conventionally seen as Catholic in orientation because of the apparently uncritical embrace of the visual, as well as the widespread attribution of magical powers to relics and even reproductions of holy objects and scenes, in Chapters Four and Five, I will discuss how emblematic thinking also underlies the remarkable ‘harmonies’ produced by the Protestant women of the Collet/Ferrar family of Little Gidding, and the one emblem collection compiled by Hester Pulter, the only known example of emblem poems (without, in her case, accompanying images) authored by a woman in English.65

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Plateauing If there is one distinctive factor that I see as distinguishing Baroque culture (admittedly a dangerous claim) it is plateauing. The concept is originally derived from the anthropologist and ecologist Gregory Bateson: in using it as a key part of my argument, I extend Jaesik Chung’s suggestion that the ‘Deleuzian Baroque is a Baroque of Batesonian plateaus’. Deleuze observes that ‘the problem is not how to finish a fold but how to continue it, how to as it were go through the ceiling, how to bring it to infinity’. Bateson sees the Western philosophical tradition of seeking a level of transcendence that pre-supposes a climactic absolute, existing outside nature, as a ‘regrettable characteristic of the Western mind’. Baroque plateauing therefore challenges the dominant Western metaphysical aspiration for finality and transcendent certainty. Bateson proposes ‘the substitution of a plateau for a climax’, a process by which a ‘continual plateau of intensity’ avoids what he sees as the European obsessive fixation on the orgasmic climax and on ‘exterior and transcendent ends’.66 Characteristically, the Baroque falls short of any ‘orgasmic culmination toward an excess of the idealised apex’; rather it is replaced by recurring plateauing, accompanied by a melancholy awareness that the apex, the climax, however hyperbolically evoked or presented, is 64 Austern, ‘The Siren, the Muse, and the God of Love’, p. 95. 65 Freedberg, Prints and the Status of Images’, pp. 39–45. 66 Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p. 113; Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, p. 22. For the links between Deleuze and Bateson, see Chung, ‘Where Angels Fear to Tread’, pp. 125–128.

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a delusion. Bateson’s metaphor is echoed in Benjamin’s description of the Baroque world as haunted by feelings that there are still transcendental traces amidst a melancholic fear of nothingness. The religious man, Benjamin observes, ‘clings so tightly to the world because of the feeling that he is being driven along to a cataract’. After all, ‘as everyone knew, pyramids, arches, obelisks, what were they but the irregularities of vainglory, wild enormities erected in futile defiance of the inevitable?’67 The multiple versions of plateauing we encounter in the Baroque stress its centrality to the age. Whether in the soaring hyperbole of artistic representation, the Jesuit insistence on emotionally overwhelming the devotee, the exaggeration and yet the persuasiveness of poetic metaphor and narrative surprise, or intense theatrical revelations and transformations, the Baroque never hides its desire to move beyond the rational and envelop us in emotional allegiance to its seductive assurance that we can transcend the limitations of the ordinary. Yet inevitably, we plateau. The most striking aesthetic example of plateauing is perhaps the trompe l’oeil effects of Baroque architecture, in which illusionary ceilings point towards heaven but in which paint and architecture have been manipulated: they can never embody infinity, only its seductive suggestion, as in Rubens’s Whitehall ceiling with the apotheosis of James I rising towards heaven. The extravagant dramatization of Baroque architecture and illusionistic ceilings in so many post-Tridentine churches draw the viewers in to marvel at the glories of the divine, yet in fact what we are being encouraged to venerate is materially, stone, paint, shadow. The closer we look, the more the illusions dissipate into random brushstrokes or dabs of paint, with tantalisingly ambiguous promises that there may yet be an ultimate reality, perhaps in an inaccessible ‘beyond’. Maravall writes of the recurring Baroque trope of ‘incompleteness’; William Egginton similarly argues that ‘recipients are drawn in by a promise of fulfilment beyond the surface, their desire ignited by an illusory depth, always just beyond grasp’.68 How does the Baroque self receive assurance that plateauing can be overcome, that the transcendent is not an illusion? On the most material level, we will repeatedly note that it was ‘an age which adored exaggeration and grandeur but lacked the technological means to amplify vision and sound’.69 But the multiple layers and folds of Baroque culture are therefore not merely ornamental or the indulgent multiplicity of hyperbole, but an 67 Benjamin, German Tragic Drama, p. 66; Skrine, Baroque pp. 9, 145. 68 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, p. 212; Egginton, ‘Problem of Thought’, p. 144. 69 Skrine, Baroque, p. 30.

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image of emergent felt realities seeking f ixation and permanence and increasingly finding dizziness. The mirror and labyrinth, both representing intriguing optical effects as well as providing an inexhaustible reservoir of analogies and examples of multiple folds, are ways by which plateauing can be temporarily tricked. Mirrors reached their zenith in the outrageous Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, with its four hundred panels of reflecting glass and three thousand candles.70 Labyrinths are a particular obsession of Mary Wroth, and Maravall notes that Comenius wrote a major study of the labyrinth trope, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Soul.71 At the level of ideologies, the various guises of absolutism, whether of church or state, may also at least temporarily provide a glittering illusion of permanence. Canfield sees the Baroque as suited to the last phases of feudal aristocracy, manifest in absolutist regimes and ‘burning brightest and most extravagantly as it is about to expire’.72 The rise of empirical history produces observable and increasingly measurable distinctions between past, present, and future and a newly emergent sense of historical temporality, so that the permanence of any absolutist regime may be called into question, at least at the level of possibility. The uncertainty of the future as the explicit goal of all duration casts the future itself into the middle of every lived moment; the unpredictability of the future becomes the absent centre of every present instance. Thus the growing sense of the dominance of linear or historical time, which will eventually become a defining characteristic of the Enlightenment world, thrusts us headlong towards the future at the same time as the mythic time represented in the ‘magical’ medieval worldview is artificially perpetuated by public ritual and spectacle in courts and churches, including the ubiquitous court masques and entertainments to be discussed in Chapter Five. Time strikes the human beings of the Baroque, even those not fully caught up into this new awareness of temporality and historicity, as making them insignificant, transitory, alienated, and the Baroque sense of melancholy is reinforced by the inability to overcome the wholescale loss of the past – and the openness of the future. Shakespeare’s sonnets both fear and celebrate time’s irresistibility and openness; Donne registers the momentary fear of time’s unpredictability; later in the century, Marvell’s lovers peering into eternity connect the anxiogenic Baroque self with the uncertainty of the cosmos.73 70 Skrine, Baroque, p. 147. 71 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, p. 153. 72 Canfield, Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature, p. 16. 73 For more detailed examples, see Waller, Strong Necessity.

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Psychologically, plateauing is therefore grounded in an ‘insurmountable lack’ rooted in the reluctant and sometimes despairing sense of the disjunctions between self and world, time and a diminishingly felt eternity, between hyperbole and melancholic actuality. ‘A note of disenchantment was present in the Baroque from the Beginning’, comments Skrine.74 Even though the Baroque remains tied, seemingly inextricably, to the authority of the supernatural and transcendent, by the end of the seventeenth century, as we will see in the writings of Cavendish and Behn, as well as the panoply of European philosophers from Hobbes to Spinoza, the felt power of the supernatural is lessening. What the concept of plateauing highlights is that behind the absolutist facade of the Baroque is a major cosmological and theological crisis. In the many varieties of Baroque plateauing, as the following chapters will illustrate, we can see how early modern Europeans, including the English, gradually begin to digest the far-reaching implications of the accumulating social, intellectual, religious, and geographic revolutions of the preceding age, and how the unitary medieval world and the stories that display its apparent unity were slowly undermined so that any equilibrium of the self increasingly feels under erasure. We will also see how the women writers I discuss provide, even fitfully, an outsider’s perspective, and often a distinctively gendered perspective, as they participate in their struggles to go beyond residual gender differentiation and open the future to alternate possibilities. Religious plateauing is a particular phenomenon of the Baroque, encompassing all points of the confessional spectrum from More and Ward, the Catholic visionaries, to Hutchinson’s ‘antinomian’ spirit voices that she identifies with God. Religious writers – both Catholics and Protestants – offer special cases of plateauing in that they look incessantly for transcendence; yet the experience of the plateau frustrates their achievement, at least in the material world, creating or reinforcing an underlying anxiety that there may not be somewhere or something more than what can be materially represented.75 Kristeva sees this particular kind of restless anguish as always incipient in Christianity, in that it is based on the impossibility of human fulfilment of desire and needing the profound fantasy of the Father to reassure believers. Our needs will never be met completely and we will therefore always be desiring subjects, vacillating between lack and temporary fulfilment.76 Thus the Baroque religious self characteristically 74 Skrine, Baroque, p. xx. 75 Flanagan, ‘Free and Indeterminate Accord’, pp. 50–51. 76 Kristeva, Teresa, pp. 176–177.

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moves back and forth between hyperbole and melancholy, its subjects reaching towards God at the same time as bewailing their own sinfulness or inadequacy. Without using the term plateauing, Kristeva repeatedly points to the experience. In Black Sun, using the Lacanian concept of the ‘Thing’, she argues that the ‘real that does not lend itself to signification’ yet nevertheless has us wandering ‘in pursuit of continuously disappointing adventures and loves’, or else we retreat, ‘disconsolate and aphasic, alone with the unnamed Thing’. In Teresa, she quotes the saint as saying the Beloved is always elusive, that the Other ‘is always elsewhere’, always ‘a bit further on’, leading inevitably to the ‘insatiable cry for “More!”’77 It is a cry that vividly highlights the plateauing of the Baroque.

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Works Cited Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: New Left Books, 1971. Austern, Linda Phyllis. ‘The Siren, the Muse, and the God of Love; Music and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Emblem Books’. Journal of Musicological Research 18.2 (1999), 420–448. Bacon, Francis. Complete Essays. Mineola: Dover Publications, 2012. Bailey, G.A. Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565–1610. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Bal, Mieke. ‘Baroque Matters’, in Helen Hills, ed. Rethinking the Baroque, 183–202. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans John Osborne. London: NLB, 1977. Braider, Christopher. Baroque Self-Invention and Historical Truth: Hercules at the Crossroads. New York: Routledge, 2004. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. The Madness of Vision: On Baroque Aesthetics, trans. Dorothy Z. Baker. Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 2013. Canfield, J. Douglas. The Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature from Milton and the Wits to Dryden and the Scriblerians. Newark DE: University of Delaware Press, 2003. Cavendish, Margaret. Paper Bodies: a Margaret Cavendish Reader, ed. Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson. Peterborough: Broadview, 1999. 77 Kristeva, Black Sun, p. 13; Kristeva, Teresa, pp. 350, 401, 6.

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Chung, Jaesik. ‘“Where Angels Fear to Tread” in Deleuze and Bateson: On a New Baroque of Plateaus and the Ecology of Non-Human Ecstasy’. Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 41.2 (2015), 121–41. Daniells, Roy. ‘English Baroque and Deliberate Obscurity’. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 5.2 (1946), 115–121. Das, Nandini. Renaissance Romance: The Transformation of English Prose Fiction, 1570–1620. New York: Routledge, 2011. Davidson, Peter. The Universal Baroque. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Estienne, Henry. The Art of Making Devises, trans. T. B. 1650. Egginton, William. ‘The Baroque as a Problem of Thought’. PMLA, 124 (2009), 143–149. Egginton, William. The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Flanagan, Timothy. ‘The Free and Indeterminate Accord of “The New Harmony”: The Significance of Benjamin’s Study of the Baroque for Deleuze’, in Deleuze and the Fold: a Critical Reader, ed. Sjoerd van Tuinen and Niamh McDonnell, pp.46–64. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. Freedberg, David. ‘Prints and the Status of Images in Flanders’. Columbia University Academic Commons, pp. 39–45. n.d. Grady, Hugh. John Donne and Baroque Allegory. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Heyl, Bernard C. ‘Meanings of Baroque’. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 19 (1961), pp. 275–287. Januszczak, Waldemar. ‘St Peter’s to St Paul’s’. TV Miniseries, Timeline, 2012. Johnson, C.D. Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Kaplan Louise A., Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary. New York: Doubleday, 1991. Koerner, Joseph. The Reformation of the Image. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: a Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Kristeva, Julia. Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.

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Kristeva, Julia. ‘On the Melancholic Imaginary’, new formations 3 (Winter 1987), 4–18. Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Kristeva, Julia. Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila, trans. Lorna Scott Fox. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Lambert, Gregg. The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture. London: Bloomsbury, 2004. Lampert, Matthew. ‘Resisting Ideology: On Butler’s Critique of Althusser’. Diacritics 43.2 (2015), 124–137. Lungo, Stuart. Frederico Barocci: Allegory and Devotion in Late Renaissance Painting. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Maravall, José Antonio. Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. Martin, Rupert. Baroque. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989. Martz, Louis L. From Renaissance to Baroque: Essays on Literature and Art. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991. McDonnell, Niamh, and Sjoerd van Tuinen, ed. Deleuze and the Fold: a Critical Reader. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. McKeon, Michael. ‘Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Differences in England, 1660–1760’. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28 (1995), 295–322. Reich, Annie. ‘A Contribution to the Psychoanalysis of Extreme Submissiveness in Women’. The Psychoanalytical Quarterly 9 (1940), 470–480. Salzman, Paul. Literary Culture in Jacobean England: Reading 1621. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002. Schiesari, Juliana. The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolic of Loss in Renaissance Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Schroeder, H.J. Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent. Charlotte: TAN Books, 2009. Skrine, Peter N. The Baroque: Literature and Culture in Seventeenth-Century Europe. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978. Smith, J.C. Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Arts of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Spahr, Blake Lee. ‘Baroque and Mannerism: Epoch and Style’. Colloquia Germanica 1 (1967), 78–100. Stein, Ruth. For the Love of the Father: A Psychoanalytic Study of Religious Terrorism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Sullivan, Erin. Beyond Melancholy: Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Waller, Gary. The Strong Necessity of Time. The Hague: Mouton, 1977.

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Waller, Gary. Mary and the Annunciation: A Cultural Study from Luke to the Enlightenment. New York: Routledge 2016. Warnke, Frank J. ‘The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art History 5.2 (1946), 77–109. Weber, Max. Essays in Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946. Westerhoff, Jan C. ‘World of Signs: Baroque Pansemioticism, the Polyhistor and the Early Modern Wunderkammer’. Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001), 633–650. Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon. Glasgow: The Fontana Library, I964. Wroth, Lady Mary. The First Part of The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania. ed. Josephine A. Roberts. Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995.

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2.

The Female Baroque Abstract The concept of the ‘Female’ Baroque, derives from Julia Kristeva; the chief objective of this study is to examine the distinctive contribution of women writers and artists, thus addressing a recurring omission in previous scholarship. This chapter discusses major models for women: the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalen, and the ideal Petrarchan Mistress. Along with the historical realities of patriarchal exploitation of women in the early modern period, I explore the emergent energies of women’s writings, examining whether there were distinctive ‘female’ experiences articulated through early modern discourse. Kristeva’s emphasis on St Teresa of Avila provides a model of the Female Baroque; her concept of ‘intimate revolt’ and her important distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic also inform this discussion. Key words: Julia Kristeva; women writers and artists; Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalen, the Petrarchan/Courtly ideal; religious and erotic Hörigkeit

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The secrets of Baroque civilization are female. ‒ Julia Kristeva 1

Julia Kristeva cryptically but provocatively personifies the Baroque in the hyperbolically energetic and charismatic (and often obsessively melancholic) Saint Teresa of Avila, the Spanish Counter-Reformation ‘mystic’ or ‘ecstatic’ nun. Elsewhere, Kristeva draws attention to the striking gap in most modern theories of the Baroque, the issue of gender, as in the quotation above. In his study of Baroque ‘self-invention’, Christopher Braider does acknowledge the importance of analysing gender in order to understand the dominant pictorial regime of Baroque Europe, within an important but limited focus. 1 Kristeva, Teresa, p. 20.

Waller, G., The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. doi 10.5117/9789463721431_ch02

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He points to Rembrandt’s unusually sympathetic depictions of women victim figures like Susanna or Lucrece as ‘resisting the quasi-pornographic exposure that constitutes the Western norm’.2 His emphasis on the tradition of objectification and male dominance in Baroque art and culture is, however, broadly, if depressingly, accurate. Apollo’s attempted rape of Daphne, for instance, an obsessively popular subject for Baroque artists, inevitably displays Apollo’s disappointment and depicts Daphne’s reaction to his assault at best as indifferent, or even content: ‘very seldom, if ever, in Italian Renaissance art is Daphne allowed to convey fully the physical and emotional pain that she may have suffered as a result of the metamorphosis’.3 In most visual depictions – literally ‘depiction’ since painting is conventionally regarded as the quintessential Baroque art – women overwhelmingly emerge as objects of observation, analysis, and consumption within a masculinist discourse of domination, penetration, and violence. Recent feminist scholarship on the period has demonstrated that much of the experience of most early modern women suggests that they were only spasmodically possessors of their own voices, or indeed their own bodies. They were offered relatively little choice or deliberation in their gender roles – an ideological and psychological impasse often provoking frustration and anger, even if the causes of their dislocation seemed mysterious, inevitable, even (apparently) God-given. It is a stance vividly represented in Bernini’s sculpture of Teresa in the Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, in Rome, before which the spectator is positioned to watch the ecstasy of the saint and at the same time encouraged to make her orgasmic raptures a matter of objectification – a pressure reinforced by the figures representing the family who commissioned the statue, and who stand at the sides, likewise watching and commenting upon the saint’s display of abandonment. She becomes an object that, at least for that moment, seems to complete not her own selfhood but rather that of the gazers. Aphra Behn’s novella, The Dumb Virgin, describes two women, one speechless but beautiful, the other articulate but deformed. As she is the woman who cannot speak, the beautiful Maria is an ideal reflection of the desires of her male admirer. Caught between the sublime and the abject, the traditional representations of women overwhelmingly ensured they would be subordinated. Such a repressive ideology was not invented by the Baroque; it was built upon assumptions so deeply rooted in our history’s dominant ideologies of perception and knowledge production that for much of our history they 2 Braider, Baroque Self-Invention, pp. 46, 53. 3 Even, ‘Daphne (without Apollo)’, p. 147.

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have seemed unassailably true. The incessant objectification of women by the controlling power of the male gaze, ‘seeing woemen butt like pictures to looke upon’, as Mary Wroth puts it in the Urania, is therefore vital, as Braider argues, to our understanding of the Female Baroque. 4 Furthermore, as a transitional epoch, the Baroque also coincides with the intensification of that objectifying gaze in the emerging empiricism of scientific philosophy and experimentation. Mieke Bal comments that there is unquestionably an implicit ‘semiotics of rape’ at the root of the Cartesian idea of mastery and possession, which depicts the mind as a mechanical device designed to fill the brain with ‘objective’ portraits of the material world, and frequently describes the investigation of nature in startlingly gendered terms, such as a woman concealing secrets that interrogators must wrestle from her.5 Such a view comes close to the assertions that Margaret Cavendish – the writer in this study most aware of this scientific revolution – made about the self-depicted ‘masculine’ scientists of the Royal Society. Part of the originality of my study is that I go beyond the portrayal of the Female Baroque as interpellating women as inevitably object, victim, or culturally marginal. I look for ways to display women’s struggles to discover more distinctive and less oppressed voices and ask about the extent to which the culture of the Baroque not only repressed but encouraged those struggles. Especially since the 1970s, scholars have highlighted (and thereby helped to ‘re-memorise’, as Kate Chedzgoy argues)6 the many early modern women who were writing, painting, sculpting, composing, and attempting to reposition themselves within the gradually changing gender politics of the early modern era. That emergent and continually expanding tradition of scholarship today in my view constitutes the most important change in the way we perceive the whole period, in relation to both English and European-wide culture. It is a remarkable development given the overwhelming inheritance, historically and even within some relatively modern scholarship, of women as inferior, morally corrupt (and corrupting), and the assumption and insistence that they should be confined to largely passive and domestic activities. Moreover, we now not merely acknowledge the presence but also the multiplicity and distinctiveness of women’s voices. Much recent scholarship has focused on the emergence of ‘women’s stories’, a category embracing narratives that range from what Mary Ellen Lamb, not without irony, terms ‘old wives tales’ to prophetic, religious, and what 4 Wroth, Urania, Second Part, p. 82. 5 Rembrandt, p. 61. 6 Chedzgoy, ‘Memory’, para 2.

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eventually came to be called ‘literary’ writing’. They include dramatic scripts, prophecies, letters, diaries, needlework, marginalia, aural story-telling, and conversation,7 thereby moving away from what Raymond Williams terms a ‘selective tradition’ to a far richer ‘documentary culture, from homes to buildings and dress-fashions’ – in short, hitherto supposedly subordinated women-authored discursive spaces by which women express, ‘more clearly than anything else’ their ‘life to us in direct terms, when the living witnesses are silent’.8 When we look broadly across European Baroque culture, a significant number of women writers, artists, and culturally active figures are now acknowledged and celebrated – and in many cases, their work has only in the last thirty or so years been revived or discovered. Perhaps the most relevant to consider as we unfold the Female Baroque in English culture is the remarkable Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–c.1656), not least because she spent four years in England (1638–1642), painting alongside her father Orazio (1563–1639), who had lived in London from 1626 as court painter to Charles I; he also worked for the Duke of Buckingham and Queen Henrietta Maria on such projects as the ceiling of the Queen’s House in Greenwich, designed by Inigo Jones. While in England, Artemisia presented La Pittura, the ‘Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting’, to King Charles, which from 1660 has been in the Royal Collection, and is reproduced on the cover of this study as an image of the focused creativity of the Baroque woman artist. As will be the case of many of the English women writers analysed in this study, it is only recently that scholarship has been able or willing to avoid demeaning Artemisia’s work as that of a mere woman, often by substituting salacious personal details (she was raped, and as a woman had to fight continuously to overcome prejudice and poverty to support herself by her art) for serious analysis of her work. All the women I discuss had to struggle for recognition and respect against disadvantages and slurs as they attempted to make claims for their rights, as women, to follow an artistic or prophetic vocation. Artemisia (conventionally referred to by her first name to differentiate her from her father, with whom, like most of the writers I discuss, she had a fraught relationship) had to battle against a number of male mentors and patrons, as well as the deeply-rooted masculinist prejudices regarding women’s inferiority in making art. Writing in 1649 to a patron, she asserted defiantly, ‘this will show your Lordship what a woman 7 Lamb, Popular Culture, Part One. 8 Williams, Long Revolution, pp. 65, 67.

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can do’, adding, ‘You will find the spirit of Caesar in this soul of a woman’. We will find these sentiments echoed by virtually every woman in this book. In her affirmation here, Mary Garrard notes, her play on words (Caesar’s animo, her anima) serves to underscore the gender difference that makes her claim a bold one for the age as ‘she applies to herself a literary formula that was typically used to describe important men in the Renaissance, in which the contemporary figure is compared to Alexander the Great, Caesar, or another antique luminary’.9 La Pittura – which was highlighted in the National Gallery’s London 2020 Artemisia retrospective – is an affirmation of the female artist as the embodiment of autonomous creativity. The painting is a self-portrait ‘action shot’, positioned as if we were invisibly observing her as she emerges forcefully from the chiascuro shadows around her. She is shown in profile, accompanied only by a brush in her raised right hand, a palette in her lowered left, and is focused not on being seen as an object of beauty or seduction but on the hidden work of art to which her energies are directed. The brightest point is her upturned face, lit in the Caraviggist manner from an unseen source, and possibly representing the light of inspiration or her own creativity. As Virginia Conn notes, ‘the genius’ of La Pittura was Artemisia’s affirming her vocation as an artist in ‘an allegorical self-representation by a woman, who deliberately manipulated traditional methods of symbolism to convey a revolutionary message’.10 Her famous action paintings of Judith’s slaying of Holofernes are sometimes read as an expression of revenge for her treatment by her rapist and the indifference or bias of the judicial system that convicted him only after she was tortured to supposedly validate her claim. We also need to note how, in characteristically Baroque fashion, Artemisia’s work shows her becoming a superb storyteller ‘whose representations of Biblical heroines […] reveal a woman’s perspective as never before’, and which ‘made the same narratives by male artists appear as fantasy’.11 Dominant ideologies speak through human subjects with the aid of culturally privileged models. Early modern women were interpellated into what it was to be ‘female’ or ‘feminine’ through a number of powerful figures – all complex composite fictional creations, even if behind all of them were, in varying senses, probably real women. They are the Virgin Mary (specifically the Catholic cult of the Virgin and, after the Reformation, the Protestant 9 Garrard, ‘Self-Portrait’, p. 108. 10 Conn, ‘Personal is the Political’, pp. 27–28. 11 Och, ‘Violence and Virtue’, p. 63. For an overview of the Holofernes paintings, see StraussmanPflanzer, Violence and Virtue.

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demystification of her cult), Mary Magdalen (also a partly invented figure based on a probably real but certainly historically conflated and continually blurred original), and – partly overlapping with both these Christian cults – a collective female figure, derived from the series of assertive Old Testament heroines like Deborah, Rachel, Miriam, Esther, Ruth, Judith, and even Eve. There is also the multiple figure of the courtly/Petrarchan mistress, the subject of hundreds of years of poetic tributes, most prominently Petrarch’s Laura, who was, if she existed at all, probably never directly associated with the originator of the poetry, and who in her nachleben accumulated attributes and narratives derived from long-standing cults of courtly love as well as the Virgin Mary. I turn first to the Virgin, an historical yet hyperbolically continually mythologised figure existing within what Kristeva terms the myths of identity that have shaped women’s lives across historical periods, and which triumphantly emerge in the remarkably varied and intense Baroque cults of the Virgin.12 The figure of the mother of Jesus is deeply rooted in complex human desires and fantasies that are both creative and destructive; the feminist theologian Tina Beattie looks at the process by which male Church authorities ‘created’ the Virgin in ways that involve the ‘erasure of the body and especially of the sexed female body’, and asks a question that gets to the heart of my study: can women have more adequate ‘access to the symbolics of their own subjectivity?’13 Such a question became especially urgent in the Baroque. Beattie’s claim that the Virgin was ‘eradicated’ from Protestantism is an exaggeration, but there undoubtedly is what Diarmaid MacCulloch terms a ‘general Protestant silence falling over Mary’.14 Among Protestants she is generally revered primarily because she is the Saviour’s mother – not for any inherent qualities and certainly not for the highly visceral projection of her body as the centre of theology and devotion that the reformers perceived, not inaccurately, in medieval Marian devotion and Baroque Catholic Europe. Following the Reformation, the ideal of women’s humility remains dominant among Protestants: in discussions of ideal female behaviour, Mary is the model of obedience and humility. Most Protestant commentaries on the Magnificat, the single substantial verbal expression attributed to Mary in the New Testament, stresses her exemplary lowliness 12 Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, pp. 13–35. 13 Beattie, God’s Mother, pp. 66, 32; Beattie, Eve’s Pilgrimage, p. 108. In these paragraphs on the Virgin Mary, I draw on two earlier studies: Waller, Virgin Mary, and Waller, Annunciation. 14 Beattie, Eve’s Pilgrimage, p. 138; MacCulloch, ‘Mary and Sixteenth-Century Protestants’, p. 213.

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and humility even, in the words of the seventeenth-century prophet Sara Wight, her being ‘an empty nothing creature’. Kristeva’s celebration of the Catholic St Teresa, by contrast, presents her ‘great exploit’ as taking up the challenge of the Lukan Magnificat and not just to ‘feel rapture’ but to ‘tell it; to write it’.15 Protestant women looking for alternative biblical models (and thereby justification for their own prophetic voices) increasingly turned, as Michele Osherow has shown, to the boldness of Old Testament figures like Miriam, Hannah, Deborah, or Judith. Aemilia Lanyer highlights Deborah, Judith, and Esther as models of defiance of the patriarchal silencing of women’s voices. Hannah was regularly championed in Reformed writings as the ideal biblical mother, and, as Osherow argues, in many senses ‘replaces the Virgin Mary in Protestant considerations of a motherly figure’.16 But in Catholic Europe, and later in the Hispanic Americas and parts of Asia, the cult of the Virgin remained the centre of popular devotion. The Catholic Church encouraged a militant Marianism that included many of the aspects of popular religion that Protestants found so objectionable. A typical Catholic formulation was that ‘we have resolved to particularly honor the Virgin, seeing that the heretics defame her and destroy her images’. St John Eudes, founder of the Society of the Heart of the Mother Most Admirable, and influential in the establishment of the feast of the Holy Heart of Mary in 1648, envisaged – in a typical burst of Baroque hyperbole – the Virgin looking down, as Queen of Heaven, at the ‘numberless multitude and frightful enormity’ of heretics and blasphemers who had rejected her: She sees this earth of ours which should be a paradise […] yet it is filled with ‘innumerable atheists and blasphemers […] who blaspheme […] without ceasing, even more than the devils and the damned in hell. For the devils, being deprived of liberty, cannot add to their sins, whereas living sinners heap crime on crime, impiety on impiety, murder upon murder, abomination upon abomination.

It is a statement redolent with the foregrounded hyperbole and background melancholy, both the ‘excess’ and ‘emptiness’, of the Baroque sensibility.17 The late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Catholic Europe see an extraordinary flowering of Baroque art, poetry, devotional tracts, images, 15 Crawford, Women and Religion in England, p. 97; Kristeva, Teresa, p. 69. 16 Osherow, Biblical Women’s Voices, pp. 40, 154. 17 Eudes, Admirable, pp. 140–141; Kristeva, Teresa, p. 35.

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and music centred on Mary – a clear instance of a spectacular explosion of kitsch. The Baroque Virgin is paradoxically both an increasingly material presence and yet intensely spiritual. Pierre de Berulle exclaims that meditating on Mary’s pregnant body, we should know ‘there are wonders that are in the Virgin’ which are even ‘not in heaven’. Being ‘in’ Mary ‘is like being in heaven’: she knows God’s secrets ‘since they take place in her’, and she accomplishes in conjunction with God’ in the Incarnation ‘what he accomplishes alone in eternity’.18 Eudes’s commentaries similarly combine Mary’s humility and exaltation with an intense degree of implied sexuality. She exemplifies perfect feminine reticence in not revealing the ‘tremendous mystery which exalted her to the highest pinnacle’, but her humility is combined with triumphant affirmations of her power as Queen of Heaven: ‘She considered herself as being the last’ [of all creatures] ‘even though she was in fact the first’. Eudes affirms that Gabriel ‘does not say she will be but that she is full of grace’. She is therefore to be accorded ‘absolute and sovereign power in heaven, on earth and in hell’ and we can ‘almost say’ that she herself ‘has given greater things’ to God even ‘than she has received’.19 The tone of such accolades suggests how, in Baroque Catholic devotion, Mary becomes revered primarily not just as the obedient and humble virgin so characteristic of medieval art and devotion; instead she is increasingly described and depicted in the light of more hyperbolic metaphors – as the Immaculate Virgin begotten before time, the triumphant Virgin of the Assumption, the victor of battles, scourge of heretics, figurehead of the Church Triumphant, the Queen of Angels, Queen or Empress of Heaven and even of Hell. The militant and transcendent Mary of the Baroque is not a new creation, but the emphasis in theology, devotion and representation marks a distinctive shift, in great part because of the threats of the Protestant Reformation, the fear of a Muslim invasion of Europe, and eventually the rationalist suspicion of the miraculous and even the Gospels that will increasingly be voiced by Enlightenment scholars. We can trace such a shift in a variety of commodified popular cultural forms that fulfil Maravall’s baroque category of kitsch. A popular Catholic literary form is the fictional life of the Virgin, often written by women. In Lucrezia Marinella’s version (1602), Mary is depicted with the cloying sentimentality of a genteel courtly romance. We are given melodramatic and voyeuristic detail in blazons of Mary’s childish charms – her bright tiara-like hair, her lips shining like cherubim wings, her cheeks trembling 18 Thompson and Glendon, Berulle, p. 161. 19 Eudes, Admirable, pp. 21,72, 217, 233; Eudes, Magnificat, pp. 9, 44, 56, 62.

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with ‘the tenderness of milk and blood’, and the ‘whole of her glorious body’ as a ‘composition of ivory’. In an especially prurient fetishistic detail, her father Joachim ‘seemed to become younger’ as he lays out her clothing that ‘maternal prudence’ wrapped around the child before offering her ‘milk’s sweetness, which gushed from the sources of her breast’. Mary’s extreme youth is explicit: reaching the age of thirteen, she is required to marry, we are told, but since ‘young girls, who gave birth before they were married, had to be stoned’, like the heroine of a romance, she is threatened with violent death and must be belatedly rescued by the Angel’s Annunciation message. Gabriel is described as ‘a most elegant and upright young man’ approaching a young virgin descended from a rich family of ‘illustrious and royal blood’, who is ‘accustomed to seeing Angels on other occasions’. The angel speaks of how she has ‘inflamed the heart’ of God, to which, in modesty, she ‘blushed deeply pink’, opened her ‘beautiful lips’, so that God’s spirit ‘penetrated lightly through all the inner parts and bones of the happy young girl’.20 The exuberant theatricality characteristic of Baroque Catholicism’s militant Marianism is also reflected in the popularity of another literary form, the biblical epic. In Sannazaro’s De Partu Virginis, Mary emerges again as a romance heroine, a frightened young girl abandoned on the shore; Gabriel is a descending godlike figure who calms the raging seas: ‘pale and alone she stood, like a little maid who, gathering sea-shells on the sands of some small Aegean isle’ sees a ship sailing towards the shore and who, frightened, could only ‘seek safety in flight’.21 Such accounts are dramatic stories of heroic figures engaged in larger than life episodes, which draw parallels with the classical epics and depict the world as a battleground between the forces of good and evil, the latter frequently identified with Protestants. Turning specifically to England, the 1630s saw a renewed Marian presence in both literature and popular culture associated with the Laudian High Church movement. As Chapter Three will show, Mary Ward, the founder of an order of sisters dedicated to Mary and a network of schools for Catholics on the continent, returned to England looking to continue her work in London – but eventually retreated to Yorkshire where, after the victories of the parliamentarians, she died in 1645. A high point of this period is the Anglican Anthony Stafford’s ebullient quasi-biography of Mary, The Femall Glory (1638). ‘I professe that I am her admirer, not her Idolator’, he writes of the Virgin, affirming that ‘the under-valuing of one of so great, and deare 20 Cox, The Prodigious Muse, pp. 67, 70; Haskins, Who is Mary? pp. 73, 123, 146–162, 164–167, 239. 21 Sannazaro, Major Poems, p. 13; Greene, Descent from Heaven, pp. 151–155.

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in Christ’s esteeme, cannot but to be displeasing to him’. He attacks the French Jesuit Justus Lipsius for asserting that as much grace proceeds from Mary’s milk as from Christ’s blood, but once he has established a few such distinctions designed to distance his views from papistry, Stafford’s praises are indistinguishable from Counter-Reformation popular portraits of Mary as the peak of creation, a ‘transcendent creature’, above ‘any of her sexe’, not a ‘mere woman’. They include an intense focus on the visual, the sensual, and the combination of intense physicality and highest spirituality.22 I turn again now, however briefly, to the visual arts, perhaps today the most widely known (and variously admired or deplored) expressions of Baroque Marian devotion. It is there that we see most spectacularly the impact of the new aggressiveness of early modern Catholicism, especially in the dramatic and supernaturally oriented events of the Virgin’s Immaculate Conception and Assumption. The hyperbolic conceits of Baroque religious art provide affirmations of the contradictory and the impossible, designed to evoke amazement and wonder in an age in which residual cosmic correspondences are increasingly felt to be under threat. Two Annunciations painted by Titian provide us with a brief indication of the Baroque transformation of Marian representations in Catholic art. An early version (1530, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice) has the traditional Renaissance landscape and loggia background, its floor of black and white squares drawing the viewer’s gaze across the horizon to the inscrutable, silent figure of the Virgin, whose impenetrable mystery is shown by formal folding of hands over her upper body. By contrast, in a later rendition (1559–1564, San Salvador, Venice), the meeting of angel and Virgin is surrounded by violent invasive revelations from above that replace the serene horizontal balanced representations of the classical style. It involves a radically Baroque presentation of sacred space, with a low horizon and the upper part of the painting filled with angels within a dramatic spectacle of dark clouds, and flaming lights more familiar in representations of Christ’s Passion or, staying within Marian iconology, the Assumption of the Virgin into Heaven (a doctrine highlighted in the Catholic Counter-Reformation in defiance of Protestant hostility). The accompanying dove descends, surrounded by bursts of white, its violent trajectory becoming the focal point of the painting. The Virgin is agitated, as if caught unexpectedly, her posture strikingly reminiscent of Lucretia’s in Titian’s painting of her attack by Tarquin; rape, Garrard notes, is imagined hyperbolically by many male artists as a ‘daring and noble adventure’.23 22 Stafford, Femall Glory, pp. 9, 219, 145–146. 23 Garrard, ‘Artemisia and Susanna’, p. 152.

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Titian observes the figures at a steep angle from below, so they look far above the ground, as if entering from another dimension, as if the earthly world in the painting, and by extension the spectator, is being overwhelmed by the diagonal sweep of Gabriel and his heavenly accompaniments. The painting stresses the dramatic, even apocalyptic, nature of the scene, in a style more typical of the Virgin’s Assumption or her glories as Queen of Heaven. In Spain, El Greco’s paintings of the Virgin, produced slightly later than Titian’s, are similarly distinguished by this characteristically Baroque visionary space, in which the protagonists are buffeted by supernatural cloud masses, hosts of angels, and spiralling bursts of colour. No longer is the illusory space of the painting an extension of the viewer’s physical reality; rather, the space evokes a transcendent realm impacting violently upon the world of the viewer, who is interpellated to embrace wonderment, the painting attempting to create an extra-rational level of response that would move the will to submission to the prevailing powers, whether the Church or the absolutist state.24 A central strand of fantasy behind the Baroque expansion of the cult of the Virgin is the highlighting in Catholic art and devotion of the central metaphor of Mary’s self-description (in Luke 1:38) as God’s slave, an intensification of the traditional humility topos which involves both hyperbole and melancholy, and certainly engenders multiple instances of frustrated plateauing. The relationship between the worshipper’s suppliance and the Virgin’s transcendence provides a crucial clue to understanding the Female Baroque, especially in relation to women’s positioning within a masculinist culture. Another key Marian episode in the Gospel of Luke (1.46–55) is the Magnificat, a celebratory canticle probably inserted in a late editing and incorporating lines from Hannah’s song in 1 Samuel 2:1–10, along with echoes of other women’s songs from the Hebrew Bible, including Miriam’s in Exodus 15:19–20. In some early manuscripts the Magnificat is attributed not to Mary but her cousin Elizabeth, most likely in order to stress Mary’s exceptionalism and thus to discourage speaking roles for ordinary women, but either way, most importantly, it is spoken or sung by a woman. It is ‘a narrative for and about women’, Beattie states, ‘in which women speak for themselves and proclaim their own salvation’, and so the episode raises the crucial issue of women’s language.25 While some of the later apocryphal Gospels (notably the Gospel of Mary) do elevate the status of women, in others, episodes have clearly been inserted to keep them subordinate. 24 Waller, Annunciation, pp. 123–128. 25 Beattie, Postmodernity, p. 371.

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Most influential throughout medieval and early modern Europe was the Protevangelium, composed early in the second century but not directly known in Europe until Guillaume Postel published a translation in 1552, which redistributed the powerful sentiments of the Magnificat to other, male, interlocutors. Raising a female voice ‘in a world fiercely dedicated to stifling it requires courage’, Osherow observes, and at least in revolutionary circles in the English Civil War, some women did turn to Mary’s prophetic speaking in the Magnificat as an empowering precedent. 26 The Puritan prophet Eleanor Davies, for instance, looks towards the coming of a new age when the Lord will ‘put his word in [women’s] Mouth. He powreth his spirit upon his hand-maidens’ and ‘the rich’ will be ‘sent emptie away’. Ronald Paulson quotes the Ranter Abiezer Coppe as ‘uttering a Magnificat’ as he calls for the levelling of ‘great ones’ as opposed to the ‘glory’ of the poor and rejected (‘mine own brethren and sisters’).27 I now move to the other New Testament Mary, Mary Magdalen, who has been termed ‘the favourite figure of all baroque Europe’, and her profile in the era certainly bears out many of what I have termed the characteristics of Baroque culture.28 As with the Virgin Mary, any historical origin for the cult of the Magdalen has been buried in multiple and contradictory stories. She features briefly but in telling events in the New Testament, and from evidence in some of the apocryphal gospels may well have had a prominent position in the development of the early Christian communities. But her emergence into Christian history was redirected drastically by Pope Gregory the Great, who in 591 decreed that she combined stories of different women in the New Testament, and, in particular, declared her to be a repentant prostitute, in which invented identity she developed into a provocative imaginary figure layered over by a millennium and more of patriarchal suspicion of women and female sexuality. The Baroque era inherited this composite figure and worked its own variations upon it. A few voices, notably that of the Renaissance humanist biblical scholar Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, questioned whether Gregory’s decision was historically accurate, but the embellishment of the long tradition of titillation and prejudice was too powerful to overcome – and played easily into the ideological and emotional contradictions of the period. The Baroque Magdalen’s medieval inheritance is probably summed up best in the influential version recorded in the Golden Legend of the twelfth century, 26 Osherow, Biblical Women’s Voices, p. 154. 27 Paulson, Hogarth’s Harlots, pp. 134, 135. 28 Skrine, Baroque, p. 138.

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which stresses her aristocratic lineage and her abandonment to sensual delight, but eventually also her conversion, after washing the feet of Christ with her tears. She fled from Palestine after the crucifixion, lived in Egypt and then drifted in a small rudderless boat to Provence, where she preached and lived in perpetual pain and deprivation to atone for her sins. She also wrought miracles, as celebrated, for example, in the Digby play of Mary Magdalen, where she is responsible for the resurrection of the dead queen of Marcylle and her baby, who had both died on board a ship, been cast out by superstitious sailors, and abandoned on a rock. In the story’s most popular versions, the Magdalen’s body ended as a holy relic – either as a whole or just her head – claimed by two rival churches in southern France. It is not until halfway through the twentieth century that the Catholic Church made any move to acknowledge the invented nature of many of these traditions. Such medieval and early modern accounts created multiple perspectives, multiple folds of narrative, for the Baroque Magdalen to extend and elaborate. Like the Virgin, she was the focus of intense fascination, all the more because of the ease by which what Mary Garrard calls ‘legitimized voyeurism’ could be combined with pious moralism, in both stories and visual representations.29 The seventeenth century saw an explosion of representations of the Magdalen (including paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi), usually combining eroticism and repentance, the brevity of life and the rejection of luxury (known as Vanitas images), and the Magdalen in ecstasy. There are more than forty paintings of the Magdalen by Titian alone, many produced for Catholic dignitaries including Philip II of Spain, Frederico Borromeo, Isabella D’Este, and the poet Vittoria Colonna. The Penitent Magdalen was particularly popular, these works usually featuring the saint melancholy and alone in a chiaroscuro darkened setting. Such paintings were clearly commissioned to be private devotional objects: viewing them suggests a contradictory mixture of prurient obsession and guilty contrition.30 She is typically pictured with long flowing hair and is frequently accompanied by a jar of ointment that signifies in multiple ways her potent combination of sensuality, penitence, eventual redemption, and continuing temptation. She was thus transformed from whore to mystic, to repentant sinner, and to celibate nun. The Baroque era even contains a number of references to the possibility of a sexual relationship between her and Jesus, and reproductions in which she appears half naked are common in the era. To stories of repentance were also added tales of miraculous visions, 29 Garrard, ‘Artemisia and Susanna’, p. 149. 30 Mann, ‘Caravaggio and Artemisia’, pp. 162–163.

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partly drawn from the Golden Legend, conveyed visually by repeating the gestures of mystical possession, with the ointment jar often used to remind the viewer of her sinful past. How do we account for these multiple narratives that, if anything, became even more complex in the Baroque era than in the medieval Golden Legend? In a more explicit manner than with the Virgin Mary, the body of the Magdalen became the centre of fascination and was always a potential trigger for moral and sexual tensions. Paradoxically, just as the Virgin was increasingly given a sexual dimension in the popular imagination, so the Magdalen acquires a level of spirituality, so that in the stories of these two figures that fuel the Female Baroque, the Church offered access to two ideals of the ‘Female’: the immaculate transcendence of the Virgin Mary and the reformed promiscuity of the Magdalen. The contemporary Jesuit theologian Francis de Sales proclaimed to an audience of women that both Maries, ‘these two grand queens, your mistresses and protectresses, which you should know[,] the sacred Virgin Mary your Mother, and Mary Magdalen, who are both named Mary’ should inspire them to become, ‘all of you Maries, that is to say lights by your good examples, and help others by your prayers and by succeeding in being the door of salvation’.31 Poetry written by English male recusants on both Maries is relevant here. As Arthur Marotti points out, English Catholics used Marian verse as a symbol of their persecution and hope for the re-conversion of Protestant England. Many focused especially on Marian doctrines and devotions that differentiated them from Protestants, like the Immaculate Conception, Assumption, and Mary as Queen of Heaven.32 The English Jesuit martyr, Robert Southwell, wrote lyrics with a dramatic, sensual, and intense focus on sight, so characteristic of the post-Tridentine Catholic initiatives, transforming Petrarchan motifs with the ‘Mariality’ in which he was trained in the English College in Rome. In the following generation, Richard Crashaw’s repeated celebrations of the Virgin, often termed excessive, extravagant, vulgar, shocking, eccentric, indecorous – and often described as un-English – demonstrate particular enthusiasm for the Immaculate Conception and Assumption to differentiate his devotion from that of his Protestant compatriots (including those of his own intensely Puritan background). In ‘The Himn O Gloriosa Domina’ he elaborates the traditional paradoxes of the Annunciation that the Virgin is the New Eve, her ‘healthfull womb’ a ‘new eastern window’. 31 Mann, ‘Caravaggio and Artemisia’, p. 167. 32 Marotti, Religious Ideology. For the Virgin Mary as the Queen of Heaven, see Grindlay, Queen of Heaven.

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Although she is hailed as ‘most high’, she is also ‘most humble’, embodying (literally) the paradox that ‘He that made all things, had not done | Till he had made Himself thy son’. Crashaw’s most strikingly Baroque Marian poem is the epigram, written first in Latin and published in 1634, and then made considerably more dramatic in its English version entitled ‘Blessed be the paps which Thou hast sucked’:

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Suppose he had been Tabled at thy Teates, Thy hunger feels not what he eates; Hee’l have his Teat e’re long (a bloody one) The Mother then must suck the Son.

Each detail is chosen precisely for its defiant hyperbole. Crashaw is particularly drawn to what Kristeva terms abjection, experiences that fuse attraction and repulsion.33 Abjection involves sidling up to the most intense and extreme experience – the blurring of the supposedly revolting and loathsome with the highest ecstasy, revulsion with transformation. The poem reaches to encompass as much sexual and bodily extremity as possible and at the same time to assert its intense spirituality.34 Crashaw’s most celebrated poem, the hymn to St Teresa, shares the characteristics of his Marian verse: a dynamic level of intensity toppling into anxiety and ecstasy, a strong, fetishistic emphasis on seeing physical details, repeated and accelerating excitement, masochistic exchanges, the interweaving of sexuality and death, the paradoxes of fire and water, pleasure and pain, and an attempt to achieve a climax of wonder through the evocation of spectacle. The extreme humility exemplified by the Annunciate Virgin and the self-laceration of the penitent Magdalen are instances of Hörigkeit, a term discussed in the late nineteenth century by Krafft-Ebbing and Freud and subsequently by a number of later psychoanalysts. Hörigkeit has no precisely agreed English translation: Kaplan suggests ‘extreme submissiveness’; others speak of ‘thraldom’, or ‘emotional surrender’.35 In psychoanalytical contexts, it has been predominantly associated with sexual behaviour, but it is also applicable more broadly to suggest ‘subservience and submissive dependency on an idealized authority’, including religion. Hörigkeit is not unique to the Baroque but it occurs with unusual ferocity in Baroque culture in the recurring fascination for being possessed by an overwhelmingly enthralling 33 Kristeva, Horror, p. 54. 34 Crashaw, Complete Poetry, pp. 14, 120. 35 Kaplan, Female Perversions, p. 210; Reich, ‘Extreme Submissiveness’, pp. 470–480.

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object, whether erotic or religious. In what the psychoanalyst Annie Reich sees as a ‘clear-cut clinical picture’, widely observed in both men and women, the enthralled subject regards the object of desire as an ideal self or egoideal and tends to lack or willingly give up any strong sense of their own independence and autonomy. Rather, they live through the Other, seeing them as everything and themselves as nothing, reflecting a feeling of their own insignificance and helplessness compared to the other’s magnificence and omnipotence. The lover or devotee believes that voluntary sacrifice and submission are ways to express unshakable love and loyalty, convinced that the more suffering they are willing to accept in their subordination to the worshipped Other, the greater the Other’s love must be.36 From different perspectives, Mary Wroth and Aphra Behn will provide my argument with striking examples of erotic Hörigkeit, while with Gertrude More and Mary Ward, it is central to a religious devotee’s attempts to achieve a mystical unity with the Other as the ultimate religious act, even when in More’s case it may seem more like a death-directed aberration. In the Hörigkeit scenario or script, it is crucial that the object of devotion cannot be blamed for the devotee’s pain or frustration. That acknowledgement of radical self-accusation is central to Baroque Marian devotion: Mary fulfils a blameless, an ‘immaculate’ role. Such intense self-abasement inevitably involves, as Frank Graziano puts it in his study of one of the most extremely masochistically inclined Baroque saints, Rose of Lima, a ‘high degree of pain, self-negation and suffering’, which always protects the blamelessness of the imagined Other so that the dominant partner is, or is imagined to be, continually needing to be ‘re-won with endless acts of submission and self-sacrifice’.37 The psychoanalyst Ruth Stein observes that many religions characteristically depict their origins through the symbolics of struggle, pain, and even violence, which is frequently self-directed; a psychological need is fulfilled: sanctioned and ‘holy’ violence, including selfdirected as well as other-directed, can be justified as sanctifying sacrifice or martyrdom. Pain is often disguised as a gift, as devotees, both men and women, put themselves in what is conventionally the female role, as the passive recipients of justified punishment. They are repeatedly drawn towards the object of devotion, and to embodiments, brief reminders, or tokens of her, such as relics and holy objects – more instances of kitsch – and are thereby made perpetually aware of their inadequacy before her, repeatedly providing instances of Baroque plateauing. Such abandonment, inspired originally by 36 Reich, ‘Extreme Submissiveness’ p. 470; Parkan, ‘Sexual Enthrallment’, pp. 336–356. 37 Graziano, Wounds of Love, p. 169.

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the Virgin’s own abnegation, can go as far as fantasies of self-mutilation.38 The fascination with martyrdom fantasies and the masochistic cultivation of pain and self-punishment crossed denominational boundaries in the period. Both Catholic and Protestant versions of hyperbole are inevitably accompanied with varieties of melancholy; how it is manifested may be very different, but all share the anxiety of recurrent plateauing, as Gertrude More, Mary Ward, and the Protestant women of Little Gidding will all show. Another crucial role model for early modern women also needs to be discussed in some detail. It is represented at its most influential in Petrarch’s Rime to Laura, and in England, in Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by Sidney’s niece Mary Wroth (to be discussed in Chapter Six). Petrarchism was a fashion that came to England late, and provided not just an infectiously popular literary tradition in courtly circles but, in effect, an implicit psychology and philosophy – and at times it aspired to be a substitute or at least a supplementary religion. It augmented the mixture of elevation and denigration of women in Baroque court culture with powerful language, and in particular, incorporated a strong measure of (largely fictionalised) Hörigkeit. Petrarchan poetry was predominantly written from the subject position of a suffering, usually (though not exclusively) male lover, contemplating a (usually female) beloved’s effects on him. Such hyperbole, based on deeply ingrained gender stereotypes, as has often been pointed out, is a form of ‘oppression through exaltation’.39 The Petrarchan poet focused on the beloved’s external beauties – eyes, hair, complexion, a multiplicity of seen or imagined body parts – or on her actions, possessions, surroundings or objects associated with her – a room, a favourite pet, her handkerchief, or other accoutrements – as well as on more apparently spiritual qualities such as her chastity, wisdom, virtue. But the real focus in Petrarchan poetry is on her effects on the poet himself, which lead him to continually question why the experience of love is so dislocating and why pain is so intimately mixed with pleasure. The poet’s broodings are typically described in contradictions, in the ubiquitous Petrarchan paradoxes like fire and ice, peace and war, blindness and vision, clarity and uncertainty. She has a cold heart that denies her fair outside; he has no peace and yet is at war; he burns and freezes. Despite such continual melancholy, he is helplessly drawn to her. Both her characteristics and the events of their relationship put him in a state of delicious anxiety, in which he maintains that the outcome of his love is never certain and his happiness, even his life, is entirely dependent on her. 38 Stein, For the Love of the Father. 39 Theweleit, Male Fantasies, I, p. 284.

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The self – the sense of being a self-conscious ‘subject’– that emerges from such poetry is consequently an especially insecure one, and the poem is an attempt to achieve some momentary stability, even at the cost of perpetual anxiety and pain. Petrarchism is therefore typically expressed as masochistic Hörigkeit, with the beloved depicted as the cause of the lover’s feeling cruelty, disease, sleeplessness, and distress; yet he rejoices in experiencing such continual pain and loss, the persistence of which at least gives him a sense of continuing identity. That impasse between the joys and the miseries of love defines the mental and emotional Petrarchan experience: delight countermanded by anguish, excitement by disappointment, achievement by loss, frustration by hope, the love of God by the love of the world, obscurity by fame, passivity by restlessness, public by private, icy coldness by the f ire of passion. Sexual consummation – sometimes even the beloved’s presence – only occasionally occurs. Indeed, there would be no need often to write if presence or consummation were attained: the hope for presence is always countermanded by the fear or actuality of absence, even death. Psychoanalytically, Petrarchism bears traces of the pains of the separation/ individuation process. The beloved takes the role of the all-powerful mother, simultaneously loved and hated, on whose nurturance he is totally dependent, and yet from whom he must break if he is to achieve individuation. The Petrarchan reverence for the beloved is characteristically accompanied by fear of her: when the speaker must leave the comfort of the mother and be thrown alone into the world, he finds himself inevitably drawn, in reality or fantasy, back to her, puzzled yet reassured by the familiarity of his tortures. She often seems especially arbitrary and cruel, but she is a projection of his own narcissism, a fantasy – or, as the Protestant reformers would say about the idolisation of the Virgin – a superstition, a blasphemy, an ‘image’, that torments him, even when he sleeps or is absent. 40 As with devotion to the Virgin, the predominant mode of perception of the Petrarchan beloved is sight. The male gaze is predominantly directed – most obviously in the blazon, the ubiquitous ‘list poem’ systematically describing the beloved’s features – at a woman conceived as the sum of separable parts. Nancy Vickers points out that the ‘whole body’ of Laura appears to Petrarch at times as ‘less than some of its parts’, and the technique of describing the mistress through the isolation of those parts ‘became universal […] When late Renaissance theorists, poets, and painters represented woman’s body’, she was assumed to be ‘available to be partitioned, with each of her 40 In the discussion of Petrarchism, I draw on Waller, English Poetry Ch. 3, and Sidney Family Romance, Ch. 4.

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features accorded object status separate from the totality’.41 The predominant codes of patriarchal representation in Petrarchan poetry are overwhelmingly invasive, even violent, both as an act of aggression and as a means of controlling the viewer’s own fears. The rhetorics of the veneration of the Virgin and Petrarchism are not identical, but the underlying connections between the two are startling. Central to both is a transcendent woman figure, a worshipper, and a relationship involving complex dynamics that are central to our understanding of desire, sexuality, and identity in the early modern period. We can see shared patterns of worship marked by fetishism and masochism, the Petrarchan beloved supposedly causing her lover to feel cruelty, disease, distress, and pain, just as separation from the Virgin causes anguish in the worshipper. As is the case with Baroque Marian devotion, plateauing is therefore crucial for our understanding of Petrarchism. The lover asserts the beloved to be – and in some sense needs her to be – beyond his reach, perfect, forbidden, unattainable, unapproachable, absent, or belonging to someone else. Such situations may inevitably lead to rejections and humiliations, but the yearning but unheeded lover takes these as unavoidable and apparently unavoidable, a phenomenon we will observe (with notable and often painful gender adjustments) in Wroth’s poems and Behn’s satiric depiction of the enthralled woman in her Letters to a Nobleman. The lover believes that voluntary sacrifice and submission are ways to express unshakable love and loyalty, over-valuing the worshipped person and the relationship in a way that is often incomprehensible to outsiders. Viewing it today, however important it is in literary history, Petrarchism and its reliance on an erotic version of Hörigkeit may seem to be a constricting, destructive distortion of human desires and possibilities. It reinforces gender hierarchies and dichotomies; it registers pain rather than fulfilment as the essential accompaniment to desire; it allows for autonomy to be ascribed predominantly to the beloved at the same time that it enacts the opposite; it over-values lack of fulfilment and avoids the possibility of mutuality as the basis for rewarding relationships. As both psychoanalytic and cultural studies of Petrarchism have shown, it is a predominantly male discourse, involving a rhetoric from which the male poet can escape even as he asserts his unavoidable enslavement on the beloved. When a woman enters the Petrarchan discourse as a writing subject, however, both psychological and cultural dynamics change. In Chapters Five and Six, where I discuss Wroth’s writings, I will explore the period’s most outstanding example of a 41 Vickers, ‘Diana Described’, pp. 265–279.

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woman writing within Petrarchan rhetoric and feeling materially, not merely rhetorically, entrapped. The places Petrarchism carves out for real women, as opposed to simultaneously ideal and denigrated fantasy figures, are no less destructive than the roles within the era’s religious discursive structures. There is, however, a positive side to my perhaps moralistic analysis of one of Western history’s longest-standing systems of erotic desire, in that within these discourses, seemingly so destructive and absolutist, there emerged tensions and gaps, not least when real as opposed to fantasy women make claims for their own language. Given the dominance of these largely oppressive models for women, a central question of this study therefore is: how were Baroque women writers and artists able to explore their own lived experiences as providing an ‘owned’ source of meaning if they were forced to depict themselves only within the dominant gender stereotypes they were offered? Women, argues Kristeva, ‘have the impression that they can no longer access language, and when they say that language is phallic, they believe they are more closely identified with this ‘archaic register’, which is poised at the frontier of individual biology and cultural meaning and manifests as ‘a preverbal semiology – gestural, motor, vocal, olfactory, tactile, auditory’. It involves a ‘whole dynamic of recollection that leads us at once to recall our traumas, the pains or pleasures, and the most archaic sensations’ in multiple ‘sublinguistic, vocal, tactile, and visual forms’, including religious mysticism, poetry, breaks and aporias in ordinary language; this register is found in frantic or hysteric activity, seemingly random or irrational noises uttered in melancholia or hyperbole, disruptions of sense, syntax or grammar. ‘Certain semiotic articulations are transmitted through the biological code or physiological “memory”’, and sensation in language: bodily drives, erotic desires, a variety of psychic spaces, including the mystical, may be censored, repressed, but may sometimes struggle through to release at least part of their energies into the symbolic. It is what she generally describes as poetic language that ‘awakens our attention to this undecidable character of any so-called natural language, a feature that local, national, scientific discourse tends to hide’. 42 If women are culturally positioned as marginal to the symbolic, Kristeva sees the semiotic as an attempt to return to the Mother. Her use of the ‘Mother’ as a metaphor has sometimes led to feminist concerns that she has invented a semi-mystical realm that amounts to another version of the 42 Kristeva, Interviews, p. 66, 55; Kristeva, Desire in Language, p. 135. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, Ch. 1 provides a detailed overview of the semiotic/symbolic distinction: see especially pp. 23–29.

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eternal feminine, but the ‘Mother’ is less biological and more emblematic of independence and potential subversion of the symbolic by primitive, pre-discursive experiences. As Alison Findlay comments – in a discussion of Mary Wroth which I will take up in Chapter Five – the Western philosophical tradition has developed a mythology whereby women are made to represent ‘home’, yet which ‘simultaneously confines’ real women ‘within walls and robs her of any sense of self-possession’. Kristeva’s theory is, Findlay argues, an important move ‘away from biologism and towards a metaphorisation of parental categories’.43 Kristeva sees the ‘cure by writing’ as a way for women to recapture, even if only partially, the pre-symbolic existence represented by the Mother or the Motherland which has been lost, so she may say ‘I have found her again in signs’. The signifying process incorporates both the semiotic and the symbolic as inseparable features of language: ‘because the subject is always both semiotic and symbolic’, no signifying system can be either exclusively one or the other. That should, she argues, encourage both men and women to listen to the ‘unspoken in speech’. 44 An important aspect of Kristeva’s study of Teresa is that it focuses on a real historical woman and thereby moves such insights away from an essentialist position. Gender markers shift historically: in the early modern period, where they are predominantly dependent on patriarchal models, Kristeva urges that we focus on the means by which women – historically real women, not manifestations of ‘Woman’ – attempted to enact what she terms ‘intimate revolt’, through which the control and oppression of the paternal realm may be circumvented, thereby opening up spaces for women’s voices. It was the Baroque, Kristeva argues, which provided an ‘unprecedented blossoming of representation’ for women. The variety of counter-hegemonic movements that help establish the writing woman of the Baroque is represented in the fascination with what the Collet sisters of Little Gidding call ‘storying’ – not so much a dutiful move to conform to residual masculinist literary and broader discursive forms (a tactic we see in Aphra Behn’s dramatic works), but exploring multiple modes of creating fictions, pointing towards possible, even impossible, even unsayable, forms of knowledge. Kristeva points to Teresa’s comments on her own theological and devotional works as novels and to her insistence on storytelling as a distinctive ‘female’ activity in the period: ‘women never stop telling stories’.45 43 Nikolchina, ‘The Lost Territory’, pp. 231–246; Findlay, ‘Dramatizing Home’, pp. 135–146. 44 Gambaudo, Kristeva, Psychoanalysis and Culture, p. 4; Kristeva, Black Sun, p. 43; Moi, Kristeva Reader, p. 38. 45 Kristeva, Teresa, pp. 457, 485.

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The Baroque was an era in which many women were struggling to achieve a kind of expression and communication by which they might circumvent the rule of the Father, and their writings allow us to test Kristeva’s assertions that a specifically female unconscious can be sensed emerging, even if sometimes only tentatively, sometimes in Canf ield’s ‘eruptions’, but in some cases in protracted, detailed and moving utterances. Skrine observes that ‘such ecstasies as [Teresa’s] pose the question “how to preserve them”?’46 One historical factor that makes women’s writing in English distinctive within Baroque culture is the religious confrontation that culminated in the Civil War. Religious language, as voiced by a variety of women across a broad confessional spectrum, and represented here by Pembroke, Lanyer, Ward, More, the Collet sisters, and Pulter, along with Hutchinson in New England – many of whom are rarely considered within the canon of English literary writings – constitutes a special case in the construction of the Female Baroque, in that their writings emerge from within the what seems to be the most entrenched repressive apparatus of the culture. For the Church authorities, both Catholic and Protestant, the danger of insistent and seemingly uncontrollable female desire is a strident challenge to an ordered universe. What was widely perceived as the treacherous eroticism of women’s bodies could too easily overflow into their language. Yet we nevertheless find women carving out spaces for the discovery and exploration of language, and bringing into at least partial consciousness levels of bodily experience prior to the sign. In the Baroque, counter-hegemonic discourse often may emerge in what are loosely termed mystical experiences, what Kristeva sees as ways by which the unconscious may erupt into and through language. What emerges, as we will see with both More and Ward, may seem at times nonsensical or, at best, irrational, sometimes producing only hints of meanings that may range from emotional traces to linguistic representations and, by extension, to broader ideologies, becoming less descriptive or informative and more an indication of the upsurge of the unconscious. The Female Baroque burrows down into the para-linguistic level of language’s origins, so that female mysticism can be seen as a relationship not so much to something transcendent as one that reaches internally, beyond the level of conscious perception. My discussion of More and Ward in Chapter Three particularly focuses on such questions, echoed uncannily by the proliferation of Protestant women’s prophetic voices (discussed in Chapter Four). 46 Skrine, Baroque, p. 56.

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Frequently, women’s entrapment within the dynamics of masculinist ideology is evoked or even explicitly described in the sado-masochistic language of religious devotion, for example with reference to the crucifixion, the death of saints or – as with many religious women, including Teresa herself and, among the subjects of my study, both Gertrude More and Mary Ward – a desire for martyrdom, as if searching for liberating or transcendent goals but finding only the plateauing temptation to self-destruction. Though biological factors enter into this process, what the psychoanalyst Louise Kaplan lists as women’s most characteristic perversion, ‘female masochism’ is predominantly the result of women’s culturally determined gender roles. However, as Judith Butler has frequently argued, it may paradoxically also become a means by which women struggle against fears of self-fragmentation and self-dissolution, and thereby find and affirm their owned voices. 47 Kristeva speaks of the need to acknowledge that the marginality of women could entail ‘a sort of vigilance, strangeness, as always to be on guard and contestatory’. 48 Recent feminist scholarship on early modern women has indeed come to maturity by, in Kate Chedzgoy’s words, ‘operating in the mode of counter-memory’ which ‘aspires to transform what we think, know and feel about the past by recovering women’s contribution to it, and revising dominant androcentric narratives to take that contribution into account’. 49 The dilemma for a woman in the Baroque was that she could not gain access to language except by identifying with predominantly alienating values. To varying extents, the women I analyse certainly absorb but also challenge and subvert the patriarchal ‘memory’ system that their era inherited. They have little choice but to find places within male dominance, for as John Berger ruefully observes on the dominance of the male gaze, ‘to acquire some control over this process’, to some extent women ‘must contain it and interiorize it’.50 Looking at Teresa and extending the argument to the female Baroque generally, Kristeva sees women’s crucial role as a kind of guerilla warfare. Each of the women I have chosen exemplifies different aspects of this deep resistance, which erupted through the Baroque to an extent not seen in Western culture again, except in isolated examples, until the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. All record and sometimes actively protest against the denigration of women, even the eminently 47 Kaplan, Female Perversions, p. 25; Butler, Psychic, p. 17. 48 Kristeva, Interviews, p. 45. 49 Chedzgoy, ‘Memory’, para. 2. 50 Berger, Ways of Seeing, p. 46.

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faithful wife and mother Hester Pulter. All the subjects of my subsequent chapters are outsiders, in different ways all ‘othered’; all provide sites of resistance to the imperatives of the patriarchal and absolutist ideology. Whether consciously or only spasmodically, the writings of these Baroque women seek, as Susan Donahue puts it, to install a new social subject into Western history: the writing woman, who could ‘release her will’ in her writing and show how women could take up positions as speaking subjects.51 That aspiration – though destined, perhaps, to plateau – is the basis of a struggle to articulate language, a goal that is not accessible only to women but is distinctively characteristic of women’s possibilities in the Baroque, and it is that cry for more that makes the study of these women’s lives and writings so fascinating and important.

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Works Cited Bal, Mieke. Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Beattie, Tina. Eve’s Pilgrimage: A Woman’s Quest for the City of God. Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 2002. Beattie, Tina. God’s Mother, Eve’s Advocate: A Marian Narrative of Women’s Salvation. New York: Continuum, 2002. Beattie, Tina. Theology after Postmodernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Service, 1972. Braider, Christopher. Baroque Self-Invention and Historical Truth: Hercules at the Crossroads. New York: Routledge, 2004. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Chedgzoy, Kate. ‘Remembering Aemilia Lanyer’. Journal of the Northern Renaissance 2 (2010), paragraphs 1–25. Conn, Virginia L. ‘The Personal is the Political: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Revolutionary Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting’. Kaleidoscope 8.6 (2009), 23–29. Cox, Virginia. The Prodigious Muse: Women’s Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Crashaw, Richard. Complete Poetry, ed. George Walton Williams. New York: New York University Press, 1972. Crawford, Patricia. Women and Religion in England: 1500–1720. Abingdon: Routledge, 1993. 51 Donahue, ‘Wroth’s Baroque Visions’, pp. 29, 31, 34.

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Donahue, Susan. ‘“My Desires … Lie … Wrapt up Now in Folds of Losse”: Lady Mary Wroth’s Baroque Visions of Female Community in the Enchantment Episodes of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621)’, in Female Communities 1600–1800: Literary Visions and Cultural Realities, ed. Rebecca D’Monte and Nicole Pohl. New York: Macmillan, 1999, pp. 28–52. Even, Yael. ‘Daphne (without Apollo) Reconsidered: Some Disregarded Images of Sexual Pursuit in Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art’. Studies in Iconography 18 (1997), 143–159. Eudes, St John. The Magnificat (Commentary). Toronto: Monastery of Our Lady of Charity, 1921. Eudes, St John. The Admirable Heart of Mary, trans. Charles di Targiani and Ruth Hauser. Boston: T.J. Kenedy, 1948. Findlay, Alison. ‘Dramatizing Home and Memory: Lady Mary Sidney and Lady Mary Wroth’. Home Cultures 6.2 (2009), 135–46. Gambaudo, Sylvie. Kristeva, Psychoanalysis and Culture: Subjectivity in Crisis. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Garrard, Mary D. ‘Artemisia and Susanna’, in Feminism and Art History, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, pp. 147–172. New York: Harper and Row, 1982. Garrard, Mary D. ‘Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting’. The Art Bulletin 62.1 (1980), 97–112. Graziano, Frank. Wounds of Love: The Mystical Marriage of Saint Rose of Lima. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Greene, Thomas M. The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963. Grindlay, Lilla. Queen of Heaven: The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin in Early Modern English Writing. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. Haskins, Susan. Who is Mary? Three Early Modern Women on the Idea of the Virgin Mary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York, Collier Books, 1961. Kaplan, Louise A. Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary. New York: Doubleday, 1991. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Marguerite Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Kristeva, Julia. ‘Women’s Time’. Signs 7.1 (Autumn 1981), 13‐35. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.

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Kristeva, Julia. In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Kristeva, Julia. Julia Kristeva: Interviews, ed. R. Mitchell Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Kristeva, Julia. ‘A Conversation between Julia Kristeva and Ariane Lopez-Huici’, in Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics, ed. Bill Beckley, pp. 325–330. New York: Skyhorse, 2001, Kristeva, Julia. Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Kristeva, Julia. New Forms of Revolt’. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy–Revue de la philosophe française et de la langue française 22.2 (2014), 1–19. Kristeva, Julia, and Catherine Clément. The Feminine and the Sacred, trans. Jane Marie Todd. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Lamb, Mary Ellen. The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson. New York: Routledge, 2006. MacCulloch, Diarmaid. ‘Mary and Sixteenth-Century Protestants’, in The Church and Mary, ed. R. N. Swanson. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004. Mann, Judith W. ‘Caravaggio and Artemisia: Testing the Limits of Caravaggism’. Studies in Iconography 18 (1997), 161–185. Maravall, José Antonio. Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. Marotti, Arthur. Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Moi, Toril, ed. The Kristeva Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Nikolchina, Miglena. ‘The Lost Territory: Parable of Exile in Julia Kristeva’. fa 86 (1991), 231–246. Och, Marjorie. Review of Straussman-Pflanzer, Violence & Virtue: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes. Woman’s Art Journal 35.2 (Fall/Winter 2014), 63–64. Osherow, Michele. Biblical Women’s Voices in Early Modern England. Farnham: Ashgate 2009. Parkan, Alan. ‘On Sexual Enthrallment’. Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association, 12 (1964), 336–356. Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth’s Harlots: Sacred Parody in Enlightenment England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Reich, Annie. ‘A Contribution to the Psychoanalysis of Extreme Submissiveness in Women’. The Psychoanalytical Quarterly 9 (1940), 470–480.

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Sannazaro, Jacopo. The Major Poems of Jacopo Sannazaro, ed. Ralph Nash. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996. Salvaggio, Ruth. ‘Aphra Behn’s Love: Fiction, Letters, and Desire’, in Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory, and Criticism, ed. Heidi Hutner, pp. 253–270. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. Skrine, Peter N. The Baroque: Literature and Culture in Seventeenth-Century Europe. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978. Stafford, Anthony. The Femall Glory, ed. Maureen Sabine. New York: Scholar’s Facsimiles and Reprints, 1988. Stein, Ruth. For the Love of the Father: A Psychoanalytic Study of Religious Terrorism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Straussman-Pflanzer, Eve. Violence & Virtue: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies, Vol I: Women, Floods, Bodies, Histories, trans. Steven Conway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Thompson, W. M. and L. M. Glendon, ed. Berulle and the French School: Selected Writings. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1989. Vickers, Nancy J. ‘Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme’. Critical Inquiry 8 (1981), 265–279. Waller, Gary. English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century. London: Longman, 1986. Waller, Gary. The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert and Early Modern Construction of Gender. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993. Waller, Gary. The Virgin Mary in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Popular Culture Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Waller, Gary. Mary and the Annunciation: A Cultural Study from Luke to the Enlightenment. New York: Routledge, 2016. Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2001. Wroth, Lady Mary. The Second Part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts, completed by Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller. Tempe: Renaissance English Text Society, 1998.

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3.

Catholic Female Baroque Abstract After two largely theoretical accounts of the Female Baroque, this chapter focuses on the seemingly natural association of the Baroque with Counter-Reformation Catholicism, looking at two English Catholic women, Gertrude More and Mary Ward, exiled in Catholic Europe. While More and Ward have attracted attention within the history of religious devotion, neither has been viewed in broader cultural contexts. I examine them through the Baroque taxonomy of fictionalising, hyperbole, melancholy, kitsch and plateauing, and show their distinctive contributions to understanding the Female Baroque, especially the distinctive religious variation of Hörigkeit—self-abasement verging on masochism. I contrast the spiritual quietism of More and the outward activism of Ward, though both are manifestations of these women’s participation in the culture of the Baroque. Key words: Gertrude More; Mary Ward; Recusant women in exile; Baroque Melancholy; religious Hörigkeit; women and the Counter-Reformation

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Women are the foremost architects of this new dwelling-place we call mystical experience: an erotic, lethal escalation propels them to the summit of excessus. ‒ Julia Kristeva 1

Until recently, most early modern Catholic women have received relatively little attention in English-language literary and cultural scholarship. As Jenna Lay points out, ‘Catholic women’s influence on mainstream literary culture beyond the sphere of the Stuart court’ has yet to receive sustained analysis. ‘To create a more complete picture of English literary history’, Lay argues, ‘we must ask how nuns and recusant women who were not central to 1 Kristeva, Teresa, p. 45.

Waller, G., The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. doi 10.5117/9789463721431_ch03

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England’s courtly life shaped its literary culture’.2 Chapter Five will discuss the two Stuart Catholic queens, Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria, and their influence upon the English court, but the two nuns with whom I open this exploration of the Female Baroque – Gertrude More (1605–1628), and Mary Ward (1585–1645) – have, by comparison, been sidelined in English literary and cultural history: by their religion (Catholicism), vocation (nun), abode (continental Europe, not England) and the fact that their writings are not novels, poems, plays, or treatises but biographical and autobiographical accounts, letters, and miscellaneous communications to their associates or followers. Neither could be seen as belle-lettrists but both were, in Kristeva’s phrase, writing women. Both More and Ward belong to what Mitchell Greenberg calls ‘an unprecedented explosion of devotional literature’ and an equally unparalleled ‘growth in religious (particularly female) orders’ in the Baroque.3 Both ordered their lives in part, although quite differently, by looking back to Teresa, whose example, indeed, hovers over the vocations of many of the English nuns who settled in Europe. Mary Ward experienced what were described as visionary or mystical revelations that led her to direct her energies to what she referred to the ‘other thing’, a Teresian active involvement in the material world. Inspired by the precepts and examples of the Society of Jesus, she believed she was called to establish a series of communities across Europe dedicated to the education of women. Her fellow recusant, Gertrude More, not only fought to establish her sense of self within the absolutist discipline of the post-Tridentine Catholic Church, but affirmed her calling by living in a restricted community behind enclosure walls and by the rigorous discipline of the contemplative life. Whereas Ward pursued a Teresa-like life of both contemplation and active involvement in the world, More chose the rival interior way of enclosure and contemplation, at first reluctantly, and with intense anxiety and struggle, seeking God deep in the hyperbolic (and intensely melancholic) recesses of her own psyche. Both More and Ward wrestled with an overwhelming absolutist patriarchal environment of authoritative male authorities, mentors, and opponents. Both, however, were accorded posthumous hagiographic tributes: More as a model practitioner of the via negativa, Ward for charting the mixed life for women religious. Each exemplifies different aspects of the female Baroque, with both obsessed with the connection between language and religious experience. Both show dissatisfaction when they discover, however partially, 2 Lay, Beyond the Cloister, pp. 3, 147. 3 Greenberg, Baroque Bodies, p. 161.

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that language pre-exists them, providing them with stereotypes by which they are interpellated into restrictive, largely male-dominated, discourses. However partially or painfully, both women search, even (perhaps especially) at an unconscious level to pursue their explorations of a Kristevan ‘intimate revolt’, which appears in multilayered upsurges of ‘mystic’ and visionary experience and also in the more mundane explorations of narrative and poetry, as well as in their contrasting actions in the world. 4

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Gertrude More By using her father’s money, funds that would have been set aside as her dowry, Gertrude More was able to help found the Abbey of Our Lady of Consolation at Cambrai in 1620. Located near the Channel in Flanders, and overseen by English Benedictines, it was primarily for English and Welsh women exiled by their religion, but once More was in Europe the only impact of her English background seems to have been through reading and writing; the reconversion of England, an ongoing goal of most English Catholic exiles, did not directly concern her. Kristeva notes how, ‘more than any other religion’, Christianity has relied on the ‘symbolic and physical importance of the paternal function’ in human life.5 Gertrude More’s short life was repeatedly haunted by powerful male authority figures. Trent had legislated the tightening of control over nuns by their spiritual directors and confessors; quiet apart from her ‘natural’ father, who was, More affirms, especially careful that she should be kept from sin, we owe most of our knowledge about her another father-figure, to ‘Father Anonimus’, the much revered, often self-serving, frequently exaggerating, obsessively speculative, Welsh Dominican Augustine Baker, who occupied in effect the place Kristeva assigns to the analyst, ‘the omnipotent author of my being or malady (my father or mother)’.6 Our understanding of More is both helped and hindered by what Anthony Low terms the ‘astonishing cultus’ of Father Baker, which developed after More’s death and has been periodically revived, including in the past century, when he has been praised by a variety of historians of devotion and mystical thought, including Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury.7 The difficulty of freeing More’s 4 Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, pp.13–35. 5 Kristeva, Teresa, p, 177. 6 Baker, Life, p. 329; Kristeva, Beginning, p. 2. 7 Low, Augustine Baker, p.130; Williams, ‘Introduction’, pp. 8–9

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voice – which, curiously enough, we will encounter in a similar manner with her confessional opposite, New England’s Anne Hutchinson – is only different in degree from most women in this study. Just as the Baroque is often seen as upsurges and contradictions within a dominant discourse, so with More we need to be sensitive to where and how her voice can be heard through her mentor’s filtering of her words, often well-intentioned, but sometimes self-justifying and consistently prurient. Baker was following a long tradition in which the intense experiences claimed by or on behalf of women ‘mystics’ were mediated through male confessors, ‘a relation’, Greenberg observes, ‘marked by a certain power struggle that without too much exaggeration one could define as both voyeuristic and sadomasochistic’.8 As we will see with Mary Ward, the role of male confessors often gave religious women a degree of legitimacy and authority in their writings; in return, the women offered their male confessors and mentors far more, including direct observations of an ecstatic form of religious experience probably more extreme than they had been taught in seminary or experienced themselves. The most reliable edition of Baker’s account of More, conventionally entitled (following one of the many and varied manuscripts) The Life and Death of Dame Gertrude More, brings together material from many published and manuscript sources to provide what Baker wanted to convey about a woman whose life (at least according to his account) serves as ‘a unique example’ of his doctrine and devotional activities in operation.9 The Life and Death was compiled shortly after More’s death but was frequently augmented and rewritten thereafter. It circulated in multiple manuscript copies with many variations, and has been printed, edited, and summarised for over three hundred years. Early twentieth-century editors further complicated matters by casually paraphrasing or adding comments from Baker’s own writings. Recent scholarly editions are more reliable but struggle to incorporate all of the many variants in the manuscripts, some of which may go back to More herself, but more likely to the multiple levels of oversight and rewriting by Baker (and possibly others). Presenting More as a model for the triumphant struggles of contemplative prayer and devotion, Baker’s account is a penetrating attempt to probe the psyche of an intelligent but often tortured young woman; at the same time, it is unintentionally a striking and disturbing instance of the epoch’s 8 Greenberg, Baroque Bodies, p. 168. 9 The most recent reliable modern editions are Baker, Life and Death, ed. Wekking, and More, Confessiones, ed. Clark. See also Baker, Inner Life, an adaptation and editing of some of the Confessiones, which, Wekking comments, ‘was never meant to be a scholarly work’ but at least ‘made Baker’s work accessible to a larger reading public’ (Baker, Life and Death, p. v).

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voyeurism, a typically Baroque objectification of ‘Woman’. The distinction between providing readers with a devotional model and inviting them to peer at her intrusively is continually blurred, as Baker focuses on the intimate behaviour (primarily mental but also physical) of his mentee. Kristeva imagines her Teresa acknowledging that ‘between ourselves, our rough habits never make us forget that we’re women. (Pause). There’s always something underneath’.10 Baker quite openly regrets that he cannot probe the ‘underneath’ of Gertrude More, and not only the ‘interior of a soule’. He repeatedly attempts to isolate her, not unlike an empirical scientist observing a specimen, and celebrates his successes in having her increasingly withdraw from family and other human friendships – including what she calls, perhaps coyly if the phrase was indeed hers, the ‘strang ffrindshipps’ among members of her community – in order that he might more closely describe her spiritual condition.11 He complains that he cannot tell if More suffered from unchaste thoughts but, more profoundly, as she nears her death he is frustrated that her spiritual condition is increasingly closed to him. He peers as closely at his female subject as he can but is disappointed that he cannot get to that ‘something underneath’.12 Outside of Baker’s biography and the detailed remarks, poems, and opinions attributed to her in his biography, we have two books ostensibly by More herself, although again, they were compiled and overseen by Baker, thirty years after her death. Printed in Paris in 1657, the first of these is an anthology of short, often ejaculative outbursts between the soul and God, titled The Holy Practices of a Devine Lover or The Sainctly Ideots Devotions. It is a hybrid text, predominantly Baker’s interweaving of her meditations and his interventions and editing, consisting of fifty-three monologues and a number of commonplaces collected from the Scriptures, St Augustine, and other devotional sources. The second work, which probably underwent less interference from Baker, is The Spiritual Exercises (1658), also designated as Amor ordinem nesat. This includes the Confessiones Amantis, as Baker described them, along with some miscellaneous writings, all of which were, he recounts, arranged by him the year after her death.13 In addition to her prose writings, More’s poems are scattered throughout these various works. They have gained some attention since Dorothy L. 10 Kristeva, Teresa, p. 479. 11 More, Confessiones, p. 21. 12 Baker, Life and Death, p. 215. 13 For Baker’s account of the origins of the Confessiones, see Marotti, Printed Writings, pp. ix–xxiv.

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Latz published a selection through the auspices of Salzburg University’s editions of early modern literary and devotional texts. Baker wrote of how More gravitated naturally towards poetry, and her verse might seem to be the obvious place to look for Kristeva’s semiotic surging into consciousness, disrupting meaning, and challenging the relationship between the necessity and the impossibility of speaking and writing. It is hard, however, to disagree with Arthur Marotti when he speaks of More’s poetry as ‘cliché-ridden […] a kind of devotional doggerel’:14 much of it is embarrassingly naive, with commonplaces and forced rhymes that contrast sadly with the soaring outbursts of ecstasy in her surrounding prose. Light and darkness, melting fires, darts of love, wounds, and the ascent of the soul are all familiar in Baroque poetry, but More’s poems generally lack a coherent structure or any engaging emotional coherence that would make them more than collections of clichés. As Kristeva comments on a remark of Teresa’s, to write about a woman’s inner life means ‘spewing out many superfluous and even foolish things in order to say something that’s right”’.15 At best, we can read More’s poems for the moments, albeit only occasional, when a powerful, arguably authentic, personal voice comes trickling (rather than Canfield’s ‘bursting’) through the limp surface. By contrast, what distinguishes More’s prose, especially in the Confessiones, are deep rhythmical surges that more surely can be seen in relation to the Kristevan semiotic. In the poems, the concepts are there but weak couplets and conventional rhymes turn the material into doggerel:

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My soul, where is thy Love and Lord Since him thou canst not find? O cheere up hart, be comforted for he is in thy minde.

We can see similar concepts, even similar sentiments, from her prose work – which turns out, paradoxically, to be the more poetic – but the visceral surge of the prose is lost: From all that doth displease thyne eyes, be pleas’d to sett me free For nothing ells in heaven, or earth, Do I desire but thee.16 14 Marotti, ‘Saintly’, p. 168. 15 Kristeva, Teresa, p. 456. 16 Latz, Glow-Worm Light, pp. 42–43.

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In addition to the personal quasi-mystic lyrics, there are a number of conventional, stilted tributes to the Virgin Mary, St Benedict, and her ancestor Thomas More, but throughout, by descending to the discipline of versification, More’s writing is robbed of her most powerful, and most Baroque, qualities. Nevertheless, More is emphatically one of Kristeva’s Baroque writing women. Her mentor, as Teresa’s were, was obsessed with the opportunity to observe how a woman wrestled with putting female experiences into writing. Baker states that a ‘soul pursuing such an interior course’ as hers should be setting down in writing what More herself terms ‘some things which I may peruse att other tymes’ so that ‘I enioy some more interior light’.17 Part of Baker’s power over her came from encouraging a love of reading. By the early seventeenth century, Catholics were able to take advantage of a half-century of approved vernacular Bibles, and More’s writings show how closely she studied the scriptures; she also read a selection of Christian mystics that Baker provided, writing back to England to his friend, the antiquarian Robert Cotton, for appropriate reading material for his charges.18 In accord with Baker, most scholars have therefore set More’s writings within the tradition of mysticism, in particular women mystics such as Catherine of Siena or, to take an English example, Julian of Norwich. Baker also singles out Teresa among the ‘others’ who helped Gertrude in the difficult transition he was nurturing in her. It is not my intention to set out in detail, let alone critique, the theological beliefs More and Baker shared. Rather, my guide will be Kristeva’s observations on the deep-rootedness of the ‘mystical’ in the human psyche and her sympathetic affirmation that religious language points to ‘those emotional traces that I call semiotic […] instinctual meaning, which records bio-energetic signals in the form of fluid but persistent psychological traces’.19Additionally, following Maravall’s focus on the culture of the Baroque, I will be looking not just to the psychological but to the cultural stories beneath the theological and devotional, and asking what broader cultural dynamics are operating in More’s life, including the assumptions by which Baker initiated and incorporated her into his own mystical way. Some of the devotional exercises espoused by Baker seem to have created psychological disruption in More: we watch her vacillate between vehemently opposing and embracing his authority, exhibiting characteristics 17 More, Confessiones, p. 79. 18 Baker, Life and Death, p. 279. For More’s reading, see Marotti, Printed Writings, pp. xiii–xiv. 19 Kristeva, Beginning, pp. 5–6.

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we might today label as borderline personality disorder. Baker was treated with suspicion by the predominantly Jesuit-trained authorities in Cambrai. He encouraged More and the other women who came to him to move away from Ignatian mediation and towards affective, interior-directed prayer. More herself spoke of being caught between contradictory authorities: sometimes this is the contradiction between her instincts and the discipline of the convent, but sometimes it is very specifically the conflict between Baker and other spiritual guides who directed her towards the positive use of ‘images’. By Baker’s account, More knew nothing of the mystical life to which he believed she was called until he was able, against her will at first, to instruct her. She was ‘comming into Religion […] as it were blindfolde […] ledde by imaginations, hearesaies and other things’.20 He presents her as having initially ‘not then much supernatural in her’ and as if ‘there had ben no braines at all in her head’ and a ‘heart as hard as a stone’. She herself acknowledged that she ‘scarse thought […] whether there was a God or not’.21 It is hard to escape the impression that God’s call to this young woman – on the one hand talented, judicious, highly spirited, yet on the other, one who turned what appeared to be the love of God into ‘an exercise of self-love’ – created painfully deep divisions in her. The story of what Baker calls ‘her amendement’ is a characteristic Baroque process of folding and unfolding: what starts as a personal narrative is transformed into multiple speculations designed to justify her mentor’s account of what he presents as the authentic mystical way.22 He acknowledges that she was not only ambivalent about entering the convent but was also drawn, as Jesuits advised their devotees, to ‘the volving and revolving’ of ‘sensable’ images, which in his view had to be replaced by ‘the exercise of Amorous affections’.23 He advocated instead slowly opening the soul to what he saw as the call of the divine, through higher forms of prayer. Most notable is his insistence that in order to seek a ‘simplicity […] a simplification of the soul’, More would need to acknowledge her own nothingness, with the goal of being ‘absorbed’ or ‘wholy possessed’ by God, using that concept literally, not merely as a devotional metaphor. The contemplative, Baker asserts, must open herself to the interior ‘divin lights and motions’ in herself in order to be carried up ‘into the Superior soule’.24 But even when the images were purged from 20 Baker, Life and Death, p. 19. 21 Baker, Life and Death, pp. 25, 332; More, Writings, p. 214; More, Confessiones, p. 91. 22 Baker, Life and Death, pp. 249, 49. 23 Baker, Life and Death, pp. 69, 36. 24 Baker, Life and Death, pp. 153, 247.

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her mind, and she gave herself to solitude, she would find herself ‘painfully molested with pernicious thoughts tending to much feare’.25 Yet eventually, Baker claimed, through his guidance, she proved to be malleable. He believed she had a ‘naturall propension’ that drew her soul more and more towards God, a process that involved abandoning meditation on material objects, events or even people.26 From his account, after some years of unsettled and most likely antisocial behaviour in the convent, she settled on a process of radical interiority, focusing on humility, obedience, and a ‘way of abnegation’, which involved the rejection of all material and worldly distractions, in order that the soul seeks ‘nothing to herself’ but God alone.27 This path that Baker asserts More herself eventually came to willingly pursue is a radical embracing of solitude, a losing of the self – paradoxically claimed as the greatest liberty in the world – by being swallowed in divine love. In the discipline of meditation advocated by the Jesuits, ‘the volving of images’, the postulant’s will is enhanced by focusing on material objects and events and by using the reason and imagination.28 By contrast, Baker’s via negativa abandons the effort to find divinity in any or all ‘natural motions’ and rather involves More’s transferring ‘her whole affections’ from ‘inordinate love to her selfe’ and other creatures’ to ‘melt wholy into’ God, breaking all ties to others and even to one’s own sense of self. Both Baker and More admit the difficulty of learning an internal life that is not only self-denying but self-abandoning: how, Baker ponders, can one live in the world while attempting to reject material matters, becoming ‘insensible to all created things whatsoever’ – with disgust and self-loathing, if necessary – in order to lay the self totally open to possession by God? Only by means of such intense contemplation would she find herself ‘swallowed up’ in God.29 Baker is probably trustworthy when he recounts the difficulties with which his pupil went about the tasks he set her. She acknowledges that her openness to surrendering to, being invaded by, or swallowed up into God was more difficult than ‘the exercises of her affective nature’ directed to herself and other creatures.30 Baker quotes from her confessions what appears to be a recurring and despairing cry: ‘O Love, love, Love, when shall my soule be swallowed up in thee, that I maie neither see, heare, nor tast 25 Baker, Life and Death, p. 86. 26 Baker, Life and Death, p. 348; for ‘multiplicity’, see Baker, Life, pp. 38–39. 27 More, Confessiones, p. 50. 28 Baker, Life and Death, p. 235. 29 More, Confessiones, p. 16. For More’s repeated metaphor of being swallowed by or absorbed into God, see e.g. Confessiones, pp. 31, 84. 30 More, Confessiones, p. 105; Baker, Life, pp. 354, 235.

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anie thing but my God himself’.31 Towards the end of her life, More moved away from reliance on all external authorities, including even Baker himself, as if he, too, had become part of the ever-frightening diversions of images, distracting from her voyage into the deepest layers of the self, involving a willed dissolution of the personal to effect a confrontation with self-rejection and nothingness that Kristeva terms the ‘jouissance of sacrifice, desired and submitted to that she calls “God”’.32 Concerned with the hyperbole of Baker’s claims, Marotti points out that there is ‘a discomfiting lack of specificity’ to both Baker’s and (reportedly) More’s accounts of these supra-rational experiences of self-rejection.33 In her classic study of mysticism, Evelyn Underhill sees More as exhibiting ‘the romantic and personal side of mysticism even more perfectly’ than Teresa, with her confessions representing ‘the most secret conversations of the soul with God’. It is, notwithstanding Underhill’s celebrated work, an indulgent view of More’s ‘little book’, which overlooks not just the ultimately constructed nature of her writings but her all too evident anguish. It is also a selective view of Teresa, whose spiritual life was mediated through the physical challenges of chronic illness, probably a severe neurological condition, including epileptic fits.34 Baker insists – and it is one of the most striking and somewhat suspect aspects of his doctrine, even according to some of his supporters – that it is only by means of a ‘Divine interior call or inspiration’ that the soul can be open to emptying in order to be granted unity with God. (Such a view, as the following chapter will show, uncannily echoes the ‘personal revelation’ of which Anne Hutchinson would be accused in Puritan New England). What Baker terms ‘the divin spirit’ which would ‘interiorly guide’ More provides signs of immediate communication with God, over which she has no control. God communicates immediate inspirations, and responding to and observing such divine calls is the essence of ‘moving of the will towards’ Him.35 Such reliance on individual calling and inspiration can easily give rise to doubt about its source, and a consequent need to distinguish between divine and seemingly diabolical suggestions: an anxiety also shared across denominations by More and Hutchinson. Baker affirms that the divine call might well be found even ‘in Heathens’ and ‘hereticks’, even though, he 31 Baker, Life and Death, p. 236. 32 Kristeva and Clément, Feminine and the Sacred, p. 24. 33 Marotti, ‘Saintly Idiocy’, p. 165. 34 Underhill, Mysticism, p. 88. For Teresa’s medical conditions, see Juárez-Almendros, Prostitutes, Duennas and Saints, Ch.4. 35 Baker, Life and Death, pp. 41, 92, 24.

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reassures his reader, they may be ‘wanting the light of faith, grace of God, and externall instructions, which are onelie had in the Catholick Church’.36 Being instructed by Baker that a ‘supernatural Discretion is imparted by God to a welminded soul that disposeth herself for it’, what More fears most, echoing Baker’s repeated concerns, is what she terms ‘multiplicity’, the ‘manyfoldnes of things’. Whereas God is ‘one thing, simplicity itself, or a singlenes’, the soul must become free of multiplicity, which is a ‘poison’ and ‘so apt to dim & obscure our soule’.37 The repeatedly expressed fear of ‘multiplicity’ and the ‘uncertainty, instability, & chaingeablnes’ of all created things shows how powerful the Baroque pressure of contradiction and variety must have been upon her: the postulant must prepare herself for the concentration necessary to a fiercely focused ‘way of abnegation’ involving a ‘spirituall life’ of ‘Praier and mortification’.38 For Baker, ‘mortification’ is a process of spiritual suffering, with all human consolations withdrawn: ‘It battereth, breaketh, and killeth the proprietie of corrupt naturall will’ by means of ‘abstaining, and suffering’.39 From what we have learnt over later centuries about the relationship between language and the unconscious, not to mention the complicated relationship between mysticism and what is often loosely called hysteria, how can we describe what surges through More’s language? In particular, the fraught term ‘mystic’, viewed from outside the hagiographic and devotional traditions in which she is usually seen, requires a significant degree of interrogation. Frank Graziano argues that, in assessing Baroque ‘mystics’, we cannot ignore the ‘theoretical and scientific advances that have radically altered human knowledge’ since the seventeenth century; rather, it is helpful to explore mysticism ‘as a trans-cultural phenomenon that in some cultures tends to be regarded as transcendental and in others, such as ours, as pathological’. 40 In More’s world, mystic visions were often accorded greater credibility largely because they were assumed to arise from a world of transcendence, which still underlay the age’s metaphysical assumptions. But as we read More in the context of the Baroque, they rather seem to erupt from the mysterious if suspicious depths of being female, and from a modern perspective, we can observe how in More’s writings there are spasmodic traces of the encroachment of the female unconscious wrestling 36 Baker, Life and Death, p. 49. 37 Baker, Life and Death, pp. 40, 38, 39; More, Confessiones, pp. 95, 98. 38 Baker, Life and Death, pp. 50, 79, 83. 39 Baker, Life and Death, p. 83. 40 Graziano, Wounds of Love, pp. 9, 15–16, 20.

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to find ways of expressing itself both by embracing and protesting against male-created discourse. More’s desired union with the divine spouse is not expressed through the explicit sexuality of a Catherine of Siena or a Rose of Lima, but she does describe Christ as a divine lover and, especially in her poems, echoes Teresa’s assertion that the mystic relationship is appropriately expressed in terms of the conventional piercing, darts, and melting hearts of erotic poetry. She speaks repeatedly of how God has inflamed her heart and begs him to take possession of her. Baker’s account of her desired preparation for mystical unity has an ecstatic pattern of sexually tinged build-and-release of tension, as if he is responding to something he perceives in her, or perhaps wishes he did. But where Teresa affirms that the mystic must resort to material imagery to rise to the plateau of ecstasy, Baker’s goal for More was what later ages would see as sublimation, a desire to be united with God without the intermediary of the body, forcing all material or ‘sensible’ images, both good and bad, to be eliminated. Yet what More’s life and writings imply over and over is that the body insists on reappearing, whether in ecstasy, possession, illness, or deprivation, urging the self to resist (whether ‘knowingly or unwittingly’) the painful insertion into an unaccustomed order of being. 41 De Certeau speaks of the ‘hidden alliance between mysticism and torture’:42 we can hear how More’s body cries out at the pain it is forced to endure and in those cries we hear the humanity that is being subdued, or even destroyed, but which still shines through. Like every other woman in this study, Gertrude More’s life and work therefore matches some categories of the Baroque more than others. It is not difficult to pin Maravall’s category of ‘kitsch’ upon her if we see her writings simplistically, as derivative of and reproducing Baker’s work, or else as pale imitations of Baroque ‘mystical’ poems like Crashaw’s. But other Baroque categories work better, some uncannily well. Like so many other women who find themselves ‘spoken’ by their male confessors or mentors, More struggles to find language with which she can explore and, in a sense, create her inner subjectivity, and in her struggles she gives voice to counter-dominant desires of a distinctive female identity. She finds herself trapped and molested, most notably by the multiple stories her male authority figures wish to write her into. She suffers repeatedly from deep and anxiety-ridden melancholy; multiple hyperboles of visionary extremity, self-abuse, and desires for martyrdom erupt in response to her situation; and, perhaps most powerfully among the women in this study, 41 Greenberg, Baroque Bodies, p. 164. 42 De Certeau, Heterologies, p. 40.

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she undergoes the experience of plateauing – the yearning, constant search for the Other, with ‘an open womb that quivers for the brotherhood who was ever present’ yet without ever actually ‘being there’. 43 In a characteristically Baroque move, More indilges over and over in a variety of hyperboles. Her prose reaches for extremity, frequently verging on the hysterical, despite the acknowledgement that such discursive extravagance could be seen as indulging in the ‘multiplicity’ of images. For Baker, a person who is tormented by God rejoices in suffering as an active undertaking, thereby demonstrating not so much humility but the desire to be humiliated. Throughout the Baroque period, many zealous nuns took action, often violently, against their own bodies in the hope of achieving even some moments of transcendence: More’s cousin, Frances Gascoigne, gives some examples – ‘miraculous fastings, abstinces, watchings, and other corporall and externall doings’ are, she asserts, accompanied by ‘rapts and Extasies, visions, and promotions, and revelations, and other supernaturall and extraordinare operations’, all held together by a compulsion to suffer pain and degradation. Observing the extreme hyperbole of the metaphors by which both Baker and More try to convey the mystic unity that they believe the postulate must strive for, a modern clinical view might well be that such a goal involves a high degree of psychological fragmentation, symptomatic of a poorly structured and incomplete self. 44 From a worldly viewpoint, ‘Torment by God’ (interpreted as an occasion to rejoice) and the recurring desire to be humiliated are more evidence of a ‘direct assault on the self by doing that which is not natural’. 45 As is typical of the Baroque, such examples of hyperbole seem inevitably to be accompanied by persistent and deep-rooted melancholy observable from both her own and Baker’s writings. The unhappiness and rebellion she consistently displayed to her fellow nuns and spiritual mentors might be interpreted not so much as being obdurate but rather as signs of the body crying out against the sacrifices it has supposedly chosen to make. More seeks to be absorbed into Perfection with a chiascuro of the spirit: Baker points to her vacillation of mood, lurching between ‘rapts and Extasies, visions and apparitions’, between the clarity of ‘perspicuous and cleere lights’ and the ‘great obscurities and desolations of soule’. She looked back at her early years in the convent and saw herself, at least as Baker perceived it, as having not yet found a method of prayer suitable for her, and so when 43 Kristeva, ‘Phallic Matron’. 44 See Dunn, ‘Mysticism, Motherhood’, pp. 642–656. 45 Yamamoto-Wilson, Pain, Pleasure and Perversity, p. 65.

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she bewailed that she was ‘as great a stranger’ to God as she had been in England, he eventually persuaded that she must move from the necessary stage of desolation and her residual reliance on images to abandoning herself to God without reservation. ‘Those who truly endeavor to please thee’, More cries out to God, ‘would obey a worme if it could command in the name and power of thee’. 46 She repeatedly asks to ‘simplifie my soule, that it may be able to adheare to thee, my God, transcending all created things’ and so that ‘I may glory in thee alone’. 47 The goal of emptying the soul, turning it into a vacuum or a void and removing from it all material manifestations of the world, applies even, finally, to raising her ‘affection towards God by discourse’, so that she yearns to find a language beyond human communication. 48 Richard Lawes has traced a typical Baroque combination of hyperbole and melancholy in Baker’s account of More. Observing a pattern of alternating heightened perception and increasing desolation, Lawes observes that the ‘initial euphoria, heightened sensory perception and sense of having unusual mental powers’ can be explained diagnostically, just as the desired association of body and mind in contemplation can be classified in modern terminology as depersonalisation, pointing out that many experiences of mystics or saints may not be very different from modern self-harmers. Both pathological and sacred pain arise, clinically, he observes, from a very similar interior landscape, and today we might well see such a development as advanced depression. 49 We might also read More’s gratification at her own self-deprecation as strikingly narcissistic, not only affirming that she is the lowliest wretch in the world, but holding that judgement alongside an aspiration to perfected goodness and total surrender: Graziano comments on a similar pattern in Rose of Lima, that ‘profound worthlessness fluctuates with grandiose ideations, the one announced publicly the other celebrated privately’.50 The religious variety of Hörigkeit is therefore strikingly illustrated in More’s writings and reinforced in Baker’s accounts of her. Her desire for her individuality to be dissolved in complete union with the Other matches exactly with submission as a consequence of religious enthralment. Reich observes that ‘the submissive woman’ is inevitably viewed ‘against the 46 More, Confessiones, p. 38. 47 More, Confessiones, p. 137. 48 Baker, Life and Death, pp. 61, 66. 49 Lawes, ‘Modern Psychology’, p. 219. 50 Graziano, Wounds of Love, p. 168.

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background of anxiety, despair and helplessness which are experience when she is separated from the object of her love’; whereas in the erotic version of Hörigkeit – as will be shown with writings by Wroth and Behn – there is a tendency towards extreme self-censure, with the longed-for self-surrender diverted into the gender stereotyping and masochistic transference that permeates Petrarchism – ‘Petrarchism as perversion’, as I have argued elsewhere51 – religious Hörigkeit sees self-sacrifice as a means of fulfilling the divine will. Both varieties are on the verge of destructive masochism, the desire for absolute love threatening to lead to self-contempt and selfannihilation. In erotic versions of Hörigkeit, masochism may be a goaloriented means by which the love-object will continue their obsession; in the religious variety, it is justified by divine command. In his classic study of the ‘varieties of religious experience’ William James describes the founder of the Order of the Sacred Heart, Saint Madeleine Sophie Barat, as follows:

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Her love of pain and suffering was insatiable […] She said that she could cheerfully live till the day of judgment, provided she might always have matter for suffering for God; but that to live a single day without suffering would be intolerable […] she was devoured with two unassuageable fevers, one for the holy communion, the other for suffering, humiliation, and annihilation. ‘Nothing but pain’, she said continually in her letters, ‘makes my life supportable’.52

More’s extreme self-effacement may at times be seen as similarly pathological, or at the very least as illustrating the Baroque tendency to hyperbole. She expresses gratitude for ‘all crosses, miseries, paines, disgraces & temptations’ and describes herself as the ‘lest and most contemptible’. She imagines herself deservedly being ‘shutt up in a place […] only bigge enough to conteine me […] yet this were little to endure’.53 What then of More’s contribution to our understanding of the specifically female Baroque? More seems to fit the category of a woman melancholic, as described by Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy: many of them cannot tell how to express themselves in words, or how it holds them, what ails them, you cannot understand them, all well tell what to make of this saying is; so far gone sometimes, so stupefied and 51 Waller, Sidney Family Romance, Ch. 4. 52 James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 249. 53 More, Confessiones, pp. 22, 27, 45–46.

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distracted, they think themselves but which, they are in despair […] Yet will not, cannot again tell how, where, or what offends, though they be in great pain, agony, and frequently complain, grieving, sign, weeping, and discontented’.54

The inarticulateness that Burton claims is characteristic of women – in Kristeva’s schemata, a woman’s lack of an owned place in the symbolic, by which melancholy is legitimated only ‘as a debilitating disease and certainly not as an enabling ethos’55 – is echoed in Baker’s observation that More is but ‘a silly woman’, and in his excusing some of her reluctance to embrace what he sees as a God-given vocation by ‘being of a sexe, that is more fearfull’. More has absorbed the residual assumption of women as weak, vacillating, and given to idleness and triviality, and Baker frequently reinforces such a view. Yet Baker also saw women as ‘naturally… devouter […] then men’, and therefore able to seek the perfection he advocated by their ‘more then womanly fortitude and couradge’.56 What we can see emerging from More’s own writing, however, is something more radical and more characteristically Baroque: the sense of being inhabited by that which cannot be possessed, and which comes seemingly from a source other than the self. For Baker, More, and early modern Catholicism, this source is of course the transcendent God; in Lacanian or Kristevan terms it is the jouissance of the unconscious, what Kristeva (in her role as a psychoanalyst) would ‘willingly’ call ‘incarnated fantasies’ in which all the senses perceive an ‘enveloping, reassuring presence […] one doesn’t feel anything, we take pleasure without knowing what we’re taking pleasure in’.57 Some modern studies of the psychodynamics of religious mystics suggest that symptoms of chronic free-floating anxiety, compulsive neuroses, and intensive emotional vulnerability, ranging from anger to depression, are characteristically projected onto salvation figures whose essentially magical attributes are evoked by the devotee as a defence against the melancholia of doubt and anxiety. Kristeva writes of how ‘visions’ like Ward’s in effect offer her conscious thoughts to the emerging work of the unconscious. A wish for unification with a god figure might be termed crypto-sexual, but it could be also called ‘crypto-infantile’, a distinction that Freud and Breuer were to argue over in the 1890s: either way, such a wish may be seen as part 54 Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Vol I, p. 416. 55 Schiesari, Gendering of Melancholia, p. 15. 56 Baker, Life and Death, pp. 55, 168. 57 Kristeva, ‘Passion’, p. 102.

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of an effort to create a wholeness of self against the threat of fragmentation. Kristeva warns that ‘the turn toward a fixed Great Other that cannot by definition disappoint’, that overwhelms and self-immolates, is characteristic of a protracted adolescent personality.58 Kristeva speaks of the female Baroque as being revealed above all through language. But here, as so often will be the case, we need to ask: whose language? Whose is (or are) the voice(s) we are hearing? As with Teresa herself, for More, the encouragement and approval of male authority figures seems necessary to justify her searches for an owned voice. Inevitably, and with an unavoidable sense of being interpellated into protracted voyeurism, we are drawn into Baker’s complicated and to some extent self-serving biographical exposure of More; even what we read as More’s own writings have been edited and in places rewritten by him. To what extent are women’s ‘mystic’ or prophetic utterances distinctively those of the female subject? In More’s case, the voice is always conflicted, never unified, as if she is being written by multiple discourses, some of which we can identify as produced by what Maravall terms the ‘guided culture’ of patriarchal authority.59 But to what extent can we, tentatively, identify beneath the collapsing ego an exploration of the Other – not coming from a Beyond but emerging from the depths of the unconscious? Kristeva’s influential discussion of how language functions in articulating the Female Baroque is fundamental here. In perhaps the purest example of the distinction between semiotic and symbolic among the women featured in this study, we can sense it in More’s frequent invocations of God’s love in her hyperbolic determination to open herself to divine possession. Such short verbal ejaculations and injections create a breathless rhythm in her writing, crudely and frustratingly punctuating her thoughts by repetitive images of being drowned or swallowed or melted: ‘o Love, Love, Love! […] nothing cane satiate my soule […] but to be swallowed up in thee for all eternitie’.60 Baker speaks of the ‘utterance & venting fourth of Certain Various Words fit one after another; & they had no sence in them, & were words of two Syllables, & proceeded from the Spirit’. More’s God is thus what the mystic Meister Eckhart termed a ‘strange and desert place’ in which the contemplative is enabled to go ‘completely out of yourself’.61 The soul must be free of knowledge, even of God. 58 Kristeva, Revolt, p. 14; Dunn, ‘Mysticism, Motherhood and Pathological Narcissism’, pp. 650–651. 59 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, Ch. 2. 60 More, Confessiones, pp. 31, 129. 61 Baker, Life and Death, p. 45. For Eckhart, see Conty, ‘Eckhart and the Mystical Unconscious’, p. 27.

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If we place More within the context of the resurgent mystic traditions and the turbulent ecclesiastical crises of the seventeenth century – embracing not only Catholic but also (as the next chapter will show) various strands of Protestant experience – we can see her contributing to the emergence of a new kind of religious inner life. This was a time when, in the wider scientif ic world, scepticism concerning religious experience was growing as a new conf idence in the powers of natural reason emerged, and suspicion of the supposed mystical powers associated with women was increasing. In 1655, Isaac Casaubon linked together Catholic mysticism and Protestant enthusiasm as equally superstitious eruptions – ‘strange raptures and enthusiasms’ – against reason and common sense, seeing them as especially associated with the ‘melancholick’ and the ‘devout Maide’.62 The slow emergence of such Enlightenment scepticism undermining and transforming the Baroque will have a major place in my final chapter. More’s most striking Baroque characteristic is that she provides multiple examples of plateauing. Plateauing seems to be inherent in Baroque religion: a transcendent God cannot be approached in or through the world, yet the Christian soul must strain to do so. Kristeva speaks of how religion and psychoanalysis are both ‘discourses of love directed to an impossible other’ – an uncanny description of plateauing.63 The anxiety of plateauing becomes all the more intense in Baker’s account of the days leading up to More’s death. It is here where we see his most invasive editing of her words as he crafts a narrative that would justify what he wants to see as her triumphant transition to possession by and oneness with God. Insofar as we can reconstruct her voice from beneath his editing, she is moving further and further from any human contact, including his. Frustratingly, not least for Baker himself, how More ‘stood with God’ was a matter ‘onlie God was privie to’. Baker is confident that More ‘finished [her] days in silence […] wholie to attende to aspirations toward God […] in [her] interior’.64 That presumed evolution of her spiritual state is presented as a triumph of his method. Yet his prose is full of hesitation, puzzlement, anxiety, as if there emerges from his own unconscious a sense that what looks like a triumph of his method is actually beyond his control, betraying yet another anguished plateauing. Annie Reich, discussing the religious variety of Hörigkeit, writes of how ‘mystic’ union can be understood as a 62 Apetrei, ‘Gender, Mysticism, and Enthusiasm’, pp. 116–128, esp. p. 122. 63 Kristeva, Beginning, p. 7. 64 Baker, Life and Death, pp. 301, 364.

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desire to relapse ‘to a time when the boundaries between the ego and the outer world were still blurred’.65 More is undergoing a process of returning to the origin of the self, before it became differentiated as a human subject, a ‘return to the origin of the souls before it became differentiated cogito, an anarchic state prior to both God and creature’.66 Baker would maintain that that is how it should be. Yet there is a degree of anxiety in his writing that suggests he, too, is uneasy about her subjection. He is especially struck by her refusal to see him in her last days – a development confirmed by other witnesses. He attributes it to her successful focus on God alone. But through her scrupulous self-scrutiny there emerges signs of self that is crying out for rescue even as she submits willingly to repression and finally to silence. More actually died of smallpox but the trajectory of her last few weeks points to her acceptance of, even perhaps her desire for, self-destruction. Of course, that is not how Baker describes the process: for him it is a matter of triumph over the body and the ultimate openness of the soul to being filled with or absorbed into God, in the most extreme manifestation of religious Hörigkeit. But even Baker is not entirely unaware of how he is losing control of his pupil: one hesitates to say ‘victim’, but that is in effect what More becomes. In extreme cases, Kristeva notes, ‘mystics have gone as far as to reject’ even ‘the very act of prayer’. That goal would certainly seem to be Baker’s desire for More, that there would be ‘total divestment of all ties to other people and even to one’s own narcissistic identity’.67 Nevertheless, he constructs a narrative of her final hours without witnessing the events he presents: More’s prayers, kissing the crucifix, lifting her hands when she could not speak, and her insistence upon isolation. He quotes, as if to reassure himself, a letter from ‘the Ladie Abbesse’ who was ‘verie inwarde’ with More at the end: when he asked if she wished to speak with him, she reportedly said ‘a little more loudly and endlessly […] No, with no man’, thus refusing to speak but being able to convey that only by means of speech itself. They asked ‘if she would have God, and she answered yea’. ‘There cannot, therefore, be a greater or surer token of a happy death than that which I have alleged in the case of Dame Gertrude’, Baker pronounces confidently. Yet his confidence in his guidance (or manipulation) of More’s process of dying – both physically and to the world – is undermined by repeated insecurities in his account: by ‘what external act’ he asks, without 65 Reich, ‘Extreme Submissiveness’, p. 475. 66 Kristeva, Black Sun, p. 53. 67 Kristeva, Beginning, pp. 31, 47.

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further knowledge of a person’s ‘interior life’, can we measure the internal sanctity of another person?68 Is this remark an example of the ultimate Baroque plateau, pursuing the way of ‘unknowing’? Baker did not know, and nor can we.

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Mary Ward The militant and triumphant Virgin Mary of the Baroque CounterReformation makes a powerful return (though perhaps a more decorously English one than we saw previously with More) in the life, writings, and nachleben of Mary Ward. Like More, Ward has been accorded a place in the history of religious communities but has rarely been set among early modern women writers in English. She exemplifies a distinctive aspect of the female Baroque, not least because of her absorption and adaptation of Counter-Reformation beliefs and devotions but also because of the variety of writings by her and by her followers and later admirers. Ward did not write treatises on prayer or elaborate allegories of mystical experience designed to avoid the Inquisition, like those for which Teresa is famous, nor even record anguished deep-seated personal revelations like those attributed to More. She produced accounts of her religious experiences, largely autobiographical responses to other writings; however, they begin to explore the encounter of language and ‘mystical’ inspiration. While not as scholarly as More, Ward may well have read a life of Teresa in English translation by the Jesuit William Malone, published as Lyf of the mother teresa of Iesus (1611). With her Teresa-like perpetual activity in the world, she provides a striking comparison with More and gives us a second perspective on the English Catholic version of the Female Baroque. Born into a prominent Yorkshire Catholic family, baptised Jane but adopting the name Mary as a statement of her Catholic dedication, Ward’s Marian allegiance is a reflection of the increasingly militant Baroque Virgin. According to one probably apocryphal anecdote, she aggressively defended the Virgin’s honour in the Guildhall during a surreptitious visit back from the Continent to London: when a Protestant uttered blasphemies against the Virgin, Ward ‘with great courage reprehended him most undauntedly for his blasphemous words, saying ‘What! a miserable man […] to blaspheme and revile the most holy and divine Mother, the Queen and Lady of all

68 Baker Life and Death, pp. 302, 315, 318.

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creatures!’69 Ward herself claimed that at the age of ten the Virgin had rescued her and a young sister from a house fire. Later in life, she frequently she visited a shrine of the Virgin’s at Monte Givino near Rome, and chose the Virgin of Loreto as her special Marian focus, visiting the famous shrine ‘with unspeakable devotion’ during her peregrinations to and from Rome.70 The export of replicas of Loreto’s Holy House throughout northern and central Europe (and eventually the Americas and parts of Asia) became a major phenomenon of Counter-Reformation kitsch. In the Americas, shrines and churches dedicated to the Loreto Virgin multiplied, with the number of apparitions supposedly exceeding those of the mother shrine. The transference of Marian miracles stressed that Mary could affect history when and wherever she wanted, an especially important characteristic as the Faith was spread across the world.71 In her twenties, Ward founded a series of communities of women dedicated to the Virgin: for most of their long history they were named the Schola Beatae Mariae, before becoming known as the Loreto Sisters and continuing today as Congregatio Jesu, the name-change a posthumous acknowledgement of Ward’s early attraction to Jesuit discipline. In founding her communities, Ward continually skated along the boundaries of orthodoxy, risking condemnation from political and ecclesiastical authorities for her determined proposals for advancing the causes of women. During her frantic lifetime, a number of her communities survived despite official opposition and continued active after her death in a handful of places, particularly in Germany and, ironically, near York (and therefore close to her birthplace). Eventually, the Sisters of Loreto prospered and became primarily dedicated to the education of young girls. It took until 1909 for Ward to be acclaimed by the Catholic Church as a pioneering figure in the development of women’s education; more recently, in 2009, she was accorded the status of ‘Venerable’ by Pope Benedict XVI. There is still an active movement within the Church – the institution that in her lifetime declared her life’s work heretical and abominable – to have her declared a saint. Like the saint of Avila, Ward was acting and writing at a time of religious crisis: Teresa spent many years reforming the Carmelite order, making convents and converts, attracting many followers but also provoking deep 69 Littlehales, Pilgrim and Mystic, pp. 86, 96, 110. Biographical discussions of Ward are primarily hagiographic and include the introductions to Ward, A Briefe Relation and Till God Will. See also Wallace, Strong Women, pp. 133–200. 70 Ward, Briefe Relation, p. 24. 71 Vélez, ‘Resolved to Fly’, pp. 266–268.

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opposition from religious authorities. She was aware she was following the pattern provided by the medieval legends of Mary Magdalen, journeying and preaching, despite being a woman. Less spectacularly and even under greater ecclesiastical disapproval, Ward lived a frenetic, restless, contradictory life, beset by illness, blurring physical and psychological pain, continually testing her vocation with a firm sense of discipline learnt from the Jesuits. As was the case with Teresa, the activities the papacy condemned in 1630 as heretical and perilous to the faith were motivated by private visions. Ward had an unshakable belief that she was repeatedly called by God to found what Church authorities pronounced deviant and heretical religious communities. Like Teresa, Ward was reluctant and yet determined to put into discourse her completely unassailable belief in her vocation, which had started with her defying the conventional expectations for women, rebelling against her family’s exhortation to marry, and battling against persecution by both the Protestant authorities in her native land and hostile Catholic authorities abroad, including the Inquisition, which demanded that she be convicted of heresy. Like Teresa, Ward was always working and writing under pressure: she was often told to desist from her activities, put under virtual house arrest, ordered not to write, and to close her communities. Ward was also a writer. Inevitably, she encountered the misogynistic prejudice that meant women were not encouraged and seldom allowed to enter theological debate. Nonetheless, we have a variety of sources that include both her own private writings – journals, retreat notes, letters, instructions to her sisters and plans for the Institute – and two major fragments of autobiography, some of which was written in English, covering her early years, and twenty pages in Italian (the longest of these scattered fragments) that were probably dictated to her secretary Elizabeth Cotton in Rome, between 1624 and 1626. These documentary sources for reconstructing Ward’s life and career have for the most part become accessible only in the early twenty-first century, when most of her correspondence and the records of the Inquisition have been made available. Dating from late in the seventeenth century, though with some parts harking back to Ward’s last years in the 1640s, is another composite work that triumphantly fulfils Maravall’s definitions of both hyperbole and kitsch: a pictorial account of Ward’s life, the Gemaltes Leben (Painted Life), put together by some of her devotees in Germany, where her communities were supported by local authorities despite papal condemnation. It consists of fifty primitive paintings, some of which may even date from her lifetime, which were eventually collected in an Augsburg convent in the early eighteenth century. The collection was hidden during the Second World War and is now

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displayed in the Mary Ward Hall in Augsburg. They constitute a romantic hagiography, stressing the highlights of her vocation through a series of visions and miracles, focusing on the years before she received a series of reprimands and, eventually, stern reprimands from Rome – there are only four, somewhat vaguely designated, paintings covering the last fifteen or so years of her life, when she was under the Church’s heavy censure. Ward was also written about. Immediately after her death in 1645, the first biography appeared: a collaboration by two of her followers, Winifred Wigmore and Mary Poyntz, entitled A Briefe Relation of the Holy Life and Happy Death of our Dearest Mother, usually referred to as the Briefe Relation. It warrants some attention here, not just as a biographical source but because, like Baker’s accounts of More, it is itself a typical hyperbolic Baroque narrative of a holy woman, clearly preparing its readers for her ascent to sainthood. Also referred to as the English Life (as opposed to her own Italian-language fragments), generically it is a narrative caught, as David Wallace notes, between romance and hagiography, which proliferated in the Counter-Reformation and became such a prominent part of Catholic propagandist kitsch.72 Accounts of children’s upbringings from the Baroque period, including both Gertrude More’s and Mary Ward’s, contain what to most modern minds is a shocking preponderance of stories about their desires for self-punishment, flagellation, even martyrdom, fantasies clearly reinforced by exemplary narratives. We learn how, as a child, Ward spent ‘much time in reading the Lifes of Saints, particularly Martyrs, Which so inflammed her well prepared Hart, as nothing cou’d satisfy her, but a Living or Dying Martyrdome’. She recalled that ‘the sufferings of the martyrs appeared to me delightful […] my favourite thoughts were how? And when?’73 Only martyrdom ‘could satisfy her religious calling’ – a sentiment hyperbolically illustrated in Picture 10 of the Painted Life. As John Yamamoto-Wilson comments, ‘images of children hiding away in order to inflict pain on themselves are distressing in themselves’; the idea that such images were offered to children as admirable models ‘is almost inconceivable’. Nevertheless, we can see how such attitudes fulfil the requirements of the characteristic Baroque combination of melancholy, hyperbole, and kitsch.74 The Briefe Relation tells that as a child, Mary was excited by a childhood lesson that ‘perfection is measured by the practice of austerityes’. Suffering, sickness (especially her recurring eating disorders) 72 Wallace, Strong Women, pp.140, 151. 73 Ward, Briefe Relation, pp. 7, 124. 74 Yamamoto-Wilson Pain, Pleasure and Perversity, p. 64.

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and deprivation are seen as means to salvation: ‘She and hers must suffer’ and ‘be trampled on’. Such hyperbolic, formulaic narratives of childhood experiences often involved not only masochistic self-destructive ideation, but often hallucinations and fantasies connected with the child Jesus – whose name was reputed to have been Ward’s first spoken word – along with notions of deserved and even sought-after bodily penetration or invasion. A strong strain of the masochism and self-abuse of religious Hörigkeit is found throughout Ward’s life, not untypical of Baroque Catholic devotion, and (as we shall see with the Little Gidding women) not unknown among Protestants. Contrasts between being big and small, mighty and helpless, being penetrated and overwhelmed are recurring aspects of such narratives. Blame and suffering belong, according to the genre, to the mortal subjects themselves: after all, ‘he who laid on the burden, also carried it’.75 Throughout her life, Ward found herself in tension with the discipline imposed by a variety of paternal figures. Her vocation clearly caused her father anguish. Her mother died when she was a child, most likely worn out by repeated childbearing; Mary was pressured by her father to marry into a Catholic family and so increase the numbers of the faithful in England. Both the English Life and the illustrations in the Painted Life record that at ten and again at fifteen, she was being urged to marry. But even by the age of ten, she says that she ‘immediately conceived’ a singular love and esteem of religious life, and Divine Providence, ‘having designed this selected Soule for a higher State, would not let this Love, though so innocent, have longer place in her Hart reserved to Himselfe’.76 She was so stressed at being pressed to marry that she fell dangerously ill; her father came to fetch her home, the English Life affirms, but ‘having not yet prevented her little heart with [God’s] extraordinary wealth, she innocent meant the said party should be her husband’, but God, ‘whose works are ever admirable weaned her from this beginning love’. Throughout Ward’s life there were tensions with other authorities, including her confessors and a succession of popes with whom she tried to justify her ‘mixed’ communities. Notwithstanding difficulties with these recurring father figures, Ward was, we are told, ‘amiable and aggreable to all […] as if God would by her make appeare the Lovelynes of virtue’ who, ‘young and beautyfull […] most perfectly shaped, her complexion delicately beautyful […] with I know not of what excellent mixture that noe Painter […] cou’d expresse or describe’.77 75 Ward, Briefe Relation, pp. 30, 138. 76 Ward, Briefe Relation, pp. 3–4. 77 Ward, Briefe Relation, pp. 4, 10, 75.

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In accord with the conventional saint’s life formula, the Briefe Relation paints an idealised view of Ward’s piety from her earliest years – an impression which she herself slightly contradicts in her autobiographical writings by hyperbolically insisting (as Teresa did) on her extreme wickedness and repeated temptations during her youth. Like Teresa, she moved easily among the rough and poor, often disguised in poor women’s clothes, but sometimes adopting dress of her own class, a repeated ‘cross-dressing’, Wallace comments, ‘of almost Shakespearean complexity’78 She and her associates, the autobiography recalls, went around, ‘sometimes disguised, sometimes in their own clothes’.79 Her recoveries from many illnesses throughout her life are described as being beyond human care or understanding, with miracles, conversions, healing, the punishment of enemies by death, sickness or sudden repentance all attributed to her prayers or just her presence,all presented as evidence that ‘doubtles it was gods devine Providence, who had his blessed and high designes’80 Even avoiding the clearly legendary aspects of the biography and the Painted Life, her background undoubtedly contributed to her sense of independence and resourcefulness as well as the religious and political alienation which was doubtlessly intensified by some of her relatives being involved in or related to participants in the Gunpowder Plot. In her writing, she reflects on her earliest years and how God’s intervention started her on her spiritual journey at the age of four. God gave her power against wickedness in man or devil, her first biographers recalled; she herself records that she took a vow of chastity at around the age of eight, particularly after what she records as a series of temptations by a kinswoman ‘light of carridg and the cause as I saw of utter perdition’, whose offences included having a man in her chamber. She records that at that point she again made a vow of perpetual chastity, a hyperbolic pursuit of an absolute that was repeated throughout her life. It was this sense of vocation that contributed substantially to an unusual degree of independence. Growing up in an alien environment, frequently having to change her dwelling place, she developed greater autonomy than most English women would have enjoyed. Marotti points out that Catholic women constituted a significant source of resistance to the absolutist tendencies of the English Protestant state, none more so than those who, like Ward, were actively moving from place to place, publicly (albeit at a distance, across the Channel) carrying out clearly subversive activities.81 Ward left for the 78 Wallace, Strong Women, p. 160. 79 Ward, Till God Will, p. 55. 80 Ward, Briefe Relation, p. 12. 81 Marotti, ‘Alienating Catholics’, p. 4.

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continent in 1606, thereafter going back and forth across the Channel and bringing about, according to the Painted Life, many conversions of other English girls. Like other English Catholic children of her generation – but in marked contrast with Gertrude More – she was primed for another very practical task: working towards the re-conversion of England, a goal she pursued all her life with ‘an unspeakable Zeale’. In one of her petitions to Pope Urban VIII to recognise her Institute, she describes herself as one of ‘a number of English women who had been called by God to a state of perfection that could not be put into practice in their own country, so unhappily tainted with heresy’, who ‘crossed the sea and reached Flanders, willingly giving up all the consolations that homeland and family might grant them, to seek in foreign countries the greater honour and service of God’.82 Despite spending much of her life out of England, what she saw as the plight of her fellow countrymen motivated most of her commitments. She had grown up surrounded by priest holes, disguises, and aliases, and as she increasingly underwent persecution from the Catholic hierarchy, she turned to similar subterfuges to avoid detection. Life in recusant England necessitated continual adaptability, finding methods of communion and communication that defied official prohibition. Both the life-writings and life-paintings celebrate (again, according to the characteristic hyperbole of a saint’s life) her miraculous facility to escape from enemies. The most spectacular story of avoiding persecutors, an elaborate tale typically combining romance and hagiography, is a (probably apocryphal) attempt to confront the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace in 1617. While the English authorities were attempting to arrest her, she went to confront the archbishop at his house, ‘with noe small apprehension to her Companions, but to herself a real recreation. God permitted he was not at home, but she left her name written in the glasse Window with a Diamond’.83 Similarly, and again seemingly miraculously, when she was served with a hostile papal edict forbidding her activities, she was able to continue them even with surreptitious (and providentially directed) papal support. The hagiographic tradition, in both the romantic biographies and the crude kitsch of the Painted Life, also depicts Ward as a Teresa-like ‘mystic’, motivated throughout her life by a series of visions. The Painted Life shows a number of pictures in which God, Jesus, or the Virgin appears in the background to inspire or instruct her. But Ward’s experiences, about which 82 Ward, Briefe Relation, p. 149. 83 Ward, Briefe Relation, p. 22.

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she herself writes – that is, they are not simply the products of the hagiographic accounts – again raise the question of the relationship between women and their visions. Her experiences are very different from More’s: like Teresa and the Jesuits, her visions directed her out into the world towards action rather, than towards passivity and obedience; as the saint of Avila put it in The Way of Perfection, ‘God walks among the pots and pans’, a note frequently echoed in Ward’s encouragement to her followers.84 The first ‘visionary’ experience she recorded occurred on the feast of St Athanasius in May 1609. She had spent two years as a member of the Poor Clares in St Omer, but now she experienced certain glimpses in her mind that God would ‘somewhat else with her’. She interpreted the experience as ordering her, contrary to her original intention, not to be ‘of the Order of St Clare’, nor (another possibility) to enter the order reformed by Teresa, the Carmelites. Anxious about how to live with these two contrary options, to enter the Teresians or ‘not to be a Teresian but some other thing’, the vision had intervened: ‘I had a second infused light, in manner as before, but much more distinct: that the work to be done was not a monastery of Teresians’. Nothing more specific broke through her consciousness until, in London, she received (and again wrote down) her next spiritual experience, sometimes referred to as the Vision of the Just Soul or the Glory Vision. She describes the experience as being almost beyond words, but it forced itself upon her as a repetition of ‘Gloria Gloria Gloria’ – we might read it as an instance of Kristeva’s observation that the unconscious forces its way into language, however partially or incoherently, a phenomenon we have encountered with More. Teresa opens her Interior Castle with the confession that while she beseeched God to speak to her, she could not herself find a thing to say, but then something was presented to her, in her case the recurring metaphor that the soul is like a castle, a diamond, a paradise within which God takes his delights. Ward’s writings give us no such dominant metaphor but she is equally convinced that the words and images appearing in her language came directly from God. How, Kristeva’s recurring fascination with the relationship of the semiotic to the symbolic prompts us to ask, does one translate these pre-linguistic experiences into language? Ward understood this ‘visionary’ experience as one in which God showed her, in practical terms, the state of a redeemed soul, adorned with glory and in complete union with the divine, detached from worldly things and focused on openness and justice: ‘it tooke away the sight of her corporall eyes, and in her Eares sounded nothing but glory glory glory; 84 Kristeva, Teresa, p. 185; Tyler, Teresa, p. 92.

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and this impression and sound in her Eares lasted for many Dayes’.85 It is important to note how directly Ward, unlike Gertrude More, was influenced by the Jesuit insistence that we can approach God through images. In 1611 Ward experienced a third vision. In letters written some years after, she recorded how she felt invaded, physically overwhelmed; again, inevitably, she attributed these feelings not to herself but directly to God. She describes herself as being ‘alone in some extraordinary repose of mind’, hearing distinctly, not by a ‘sounding voice’ but through intellectual understanding, practical words that she saw as finally settling her vocational direction: ‘what I had from God touching this’, she frequently affirmed, was the command, ‘take the same of the Society’. This experience she interpreted as a command to establish some religious institute based on the constitutions of the Jesuits. What forced itself to the surface of her mind, she says, ‘appeared wholly divine and came with such force that it annihilated and reduced me to nothing […] there was no other operation in me but that which God caused’: namely, to see ‘intellectually’ what ‘was done and what was to be fulfilled in me’.86 The certainty of a voice thrusting itself to the surface from the unconscious becomes one of the recurring characteristics of the Baroque woman’s sense of self, and it is shared by both Catholic and – again, anticipating my later discussion of Anne Hutchinson’s shocking claim (to her Puritan judges) of an ‘immediate revelation’ from God – Protestant women. From a modern clinical perspective, the certitude with which Ward and other ‘mystics’ of the Baroque era justify their revelations may reflect a classic narcissistic personality disorder involving an unshakable sense of grandiosity; but Kristeva offers a more humanistic perspective, seeing the mystic reaching into ‘the greedy void of a woman’s body’, forever pursuing her jouissance with its ‘insatiable cry for more’, and choosing (or being chosen by) the language that her upbringing and ancestry permitted her. 87 Ward had now to ask herself how she might begin to reconcile this revelation with her confessor’s instructions, since her new orders had come, she believed, directly from God. In 1621, replying to one priest’s attack on her work, she argued that ‘God and not man should give vocations’. According to her own account and reflected in the crude pictures of the Painted Life, she saw this last vision as reinforcing her revelations into the need to adapt the details of the Ignatian rule for women, in a manner that, most importantly – and in the end, most dangerously for her goals – avoided the 85 Ward, Briefe Relation, pp. 18–19. 86 Ward, Till God Will, pp. 24, 29. 87 Kristeva, Teresa, pp. 95, 401.

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Tridentine insistence on strict enclosure for women religious. Her objective was in effect to undermine the exclusively male world of theological and institutional power that excluded women from preaching, converting, and exercising ecclesiastical authority. It would be this deviant intention that dictated the rest of her life. She struggled with Father Lee, her Jesuit confessor and mentor, to draw up plans for an institute by which young women could be led to transform ‘the unhappy state of England’ through the creation of unenclosed communities dedicated to women’s education. In England, establishing any enclosed order would have been impossible after the Reformation, and an ‘apostolic’ freedom of movement might prove effective in dealing with what she saw as the apostasy of England. Hence the choice of ‘the mixed life’.88 Ward’s plans to adapt the Society’s inspiration and her perception of her divine calling to her circumstances in Europe emerged in a series of proposals to the Church authorities.89 Her earliest attempt was a ‘School of Blessed Mary’ that would function like a cloister, with a traditional regime of enclosure in keeping with Tridentine laws on monastic life for women religious. By 1616, however, following the eventual revelation to ‘Take the Same of the Society’ she had developed a major revision – the proposal to establish a Ratio Instituti. Addressing her followers in St Omer in 1617, she summoned them to a vocational path for women that was neither cloister nor marriage, preparing for a public life in the world while at the same time belonging to a religious order. Even more radical was the plan finally presented to Pope Gregory XV in December 1621 – Supplicato Virginium Anglicanarium, her first systematic attempt to gain the approval from authorities of the Church hierarchy. The members of Ward’s community would wear secular dress, not a special religious habit; there would be rules and procedures modelled on those of enclosed houses but, most importantly, its members would not be enclosed, though they would have a common discipline. They would be subject to the Pope alone and not to any local bishop’s jurisdiction. Her overall goal was women’s education, providing women with access to language. ‘We have in mind’, Ward writes, ‘the mixed life, such a life as we learn Christ Our Lord and Master taught his chosen ones […] so that in this way we may more easily educate maidens and girls’.90 Her aim certainly fitted the evangelistic spirit of the Catholic Reformation, but was not in 88 Ward, Till God Will, p. 34. 89 Ward’s series of three plans are summarized in Till God Will, pp. 34–38, 43–46, 64–65. 90 Lux-Sterritt, Redefining Female Religious Life, p. 36.

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accord with Trent’s emphasis on enclosing women who wanted to enter the female religious life. Her insistence on not having the community subject to enclosure was unusual but not totally unique. Across Europe, notably in Italy and France, a number of initiatives were developing whereby women followed such a pattern, ministering to the poor, educating young girls, without being under the strictures of enclosure. Greenberg comments that ‘a new type of female religious order was trying to emerge’, somewhere between the family and the convent, but such endeavours, as Ward found, met with ‘almost unanimous outrage’.91 One of the greatest successes of the Catholic Reformation occurred on the frontiers of European colonialism in the Americas, where nuns were able to take advantage of their isolation from papal control. In French Canada, for example, an order of apostolate nuns, les Filles de la Charité, escaped the persecution Ward suffered, evading Trent’s forbiddance of the mixed life, becoming a model for other cloistered communities in the colonies.92 Ward’s very publicly expressed convictions and visibility to the ecclesiastical authorities drew attention to her project. The history of the opposition to her repeated proposals and justifications is a tribute not only to Ward’s persistence but her persuasiveness. In one of her pledges to the Pope in 1622, she reverts to her childhood fantasy of martyrdom, pledging to be sent ‘to whatsoever provinces’ present and future popes ‘may choose to send us – whether they are pleased to send us among the Turks or any other infidels, even to those who live in the region called the Indies’. She certainly underestimated the opposition not only from the papal office but even among her own English seminary clergy, who in 1622 presented their strong opposition to ‘a certaine societie of women’, arguing that it was never heard of in the Church ‘that women should discharge the apostolic office’. What were referred to pejoratively as the ‘Jesuitesses’ were seen as embarrassedly insinuating themselves into houses of noble Catholics, sometimes travelling in coaches or carriages – all indications of how their mobility was seen as indicative of their rebelliousness. Thomas Rant, a member of the English secular clergy, complained that the Jesuitesses ‘run about all over England and associate with men. They refuse to pray in quire or to follow conventional practices’ and they trained their pupils in a ‘daring way of life. In doing so they are a threat to the women of England and a scandal to Catholics’.93 These women had arrogated to themselves ‘the power to speak of spiritual things before grave men and priests’. Ward may 91 Greenberg, Baroque Bodies, p. 175. 92 Dunn, ‘Mysticism, Motherhood and Pathological Narcissism?’, pp. 642–656. 93 Bicks, ‘Staging the Jesuitess’, p. 464. See also Gallagher, ‘Mary Ward’s “Jesuitesses”’, p. 202.

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have underestimated this opposition but always encouraged her followers to press on; writing to one in 1625, she exclaims ‘everything cries out to me that I should go forward with it, especially when being sent to those who would like to strike it dead’. Reassuring another follower, she writes that men may look critically upon them – others esteem us ‘but women’ she remarks – but ‘all look upon you as new beginnings of a course never thought of before’, and they would be ‘aiming at greater matters than was ever thought women capable of’.94 As Laurence Lux-Sterritt observes, Ward’s proposals increasingly revealed a further controversial demand: the right for the new Society to be designated, like the Jesuits, by the name of Jesus. Over three-quarters of the text of her final proposal derived from the Jesuit Formula Instituti (1550), but choosing the Jesuits as her model, regardless of her conviction regarding her own personal ‘revelation’, was, however, politically naive. The Society was certainly dedicated to the reconversion of Europe, especially the parts of Europe lost to Protestantism, but in the 1620s they were in a long-running dispute with secular clergy, specifically in relation to the reconversion of England. Despite receiving some support from individual Jesuits, Ward’s plans (even though they were authored with the Jesuit Father Lee) would not have met with the Society’s approval. The Jesuits themselves warned potential supporters not to ‘meddle with anything belonging to the temporals of Mrs Mary Ward, or any of her company’.95 In her insistence on developing unenclosed communities, Ward was in this case very unlike Teresa who, notwithstanding her own continual movement around Spain to found new communities, always agreed with the Church’s insistence on women’s communities being enclosed. Nevertheless, until 1631, when she was emphatically forbidden to pursue her goals, Ward not only sought approval from three successive popes (Paul V, Gregory XV, and Urban VIII) but was able to form a network of informal communities and schools across Europe, continually travelling (again, like Teresa) in order to found and encourage them while continuing to petition the Holy See for approval. She travelled back and forth across Europe, from Yorkshire to Naples and even approaching the Islamic frontier; she travelled mainly by walking, all the while encouraging her companions, raising funds, and continually drawing opposition, her followers branded ‘apostolic viragos’, ‘wandering gossips’, and ‘galloping girls’.96 94 Ward, Till God Will, pp. 65, 74, 59. 95 Lux-Sterritt, Female Religious Life, p. 35. 96 Ward, Till God Will, p. 50.

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Not only did Ward offend against the Tridentine decree requiring enclosure for women religious, but behind that decree lay the Pauline forbiddance against women preaching and teaching. Again, she had a precedent in Teresa, one of whose enemies had branded her ‘a restless vagabond, rebellious and headstrong, who invented twisted doctrines she called devotions and gave herself a licence to teach, which the apostle Paul had forbidden to women’.97 Ironically, as modern apologists for Ward have pointed out, while she was certainly challenging over fifteen hundred years of institutional gendered prejudice, she was also, without necessarily aware of it, returning to a pattern established by Christian communities in the early church, one often associated with Mary Magdalen and systematically excluded by what became the canonical view of Christian communities. Like those early heretical or ‘gnostic’ groups, she wanted to avoid male dominance and give women permission to teach, which (as modern scholarship has shown) was commonplace in the early Church. The 1631 decree seemed to be a final blow. Meeting with her in Rome in 1630, Pope Urban VIII supposedly treated her courteously, even reverently, but nonetheless issued her with a stern reprimand for ‘arrogantly and obstinately’ disobeying repeated papal warnings. The decree described her work as a ‘poisonous growth’: it spells out that ‘certain women or virgins […] having taken the name of Jesuitesses, have lived together for some years without any particular approval of the Apostolic See’; above all, they were free from the laws of enclosure. Their pedagogical activities, Ward was informed, illegitimately put the capabilities of girls on equal footing with those of boys, and scandalously avoided traditional concerns over the limitations of ‘women’s intellectual or moral disposition for the acquisition of knowledge’. The decision acknowledges that Ward ‘possesses great power’, but declares that she and her followers were usurping patterns of life appropriate only for ‘men of knowledge in the Holy Scripture’, and unsuitable for a sex limited by ‘mental weakness’, and undermining appropriate (and God-decreed) ‘womanly modesty’. Her communities were condemned to ‘perpetual abolition’ and removal ‘from the holy Church of God’.98 During the 1630s, Ward was imprisoned for some months in Munich in a house of the Poor Clares – ironically her original community when she first left England. Like the long tradition of martyrs before her, her biographers relate, she accepted her enclosure in a filthy and oppressive atmosphere with patience. She was able to communicate, at least according to the English Life, 97 For further discussions of Ward’s nuns as ‘galloping girls’, ‘galloping nuns’, their ‘riding hither and thither’, see Littlehales, Pilgrim and Mystic, pp. 66, 111, 135, 251. 98 Littlehales, Pilgrim and Mystic, p. 213.

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by means of letters written in lemon juice on wrapping paper. At one point we are told that ‘I must write in such haste as God knows what I shall say. I have yours today, and the lemon. By chance we have kept some fire and so have read yours’.99 In the long run, Ward’s stay in Munich represented a small degree of success: it was the only house to escape the dissolution order of 1631 and continued to be supported by the city’s rulers to balance what was happening among their Protestant communities. Released after impressing the authorities with her piety, she returned to Rome, where she was assured that she was not regarded as a heretic and, although restricted in her movements, was even supported materially by the Holy See. In 1637, she successfully petitioned to leave Rome for recuperation from illness, and she resumed her pilgrimages, visiting Spa near Liège, and eventually returning to England just as the Civil War broke out, where she founded yet another community, this time in Yorkshire. Here she died, continually revered and supported by the remnant of her communities scattered across Europe. In what particular ways can we describe Ward as contributing to the ‘Female Baroque’? Despite her differences from Gertrude More, on one level it is easy to equate the two: Ward is clearly a product of the Catholic Reformation and repeatedly demonstrates the characteristic Baroque combination of hyperbole and melancholy, not only in her writing but in her combination of intense commitments and overwhelming adversities, many of which seem deliberately sought after. As she wrestled with her vocation, Ward recorded her recurring sense of anxiety. Initially entering a closed community, she recalls ‘such aversion and grief that death by any kind of torment that I could imagine to myself appeared most sweet to me’.100 The repeated frustrations of finding her comfort in the community (an experience she shares with More, although with very different responses) produced a restless melancholia – what Kristeva terms the ‘black sun’ of melancholic introversion. Hyperbole seems inevitably to be accompanied by the melancholy that the English Life declares ‘suited exceedingly with her disposition’.101 Often Ward comments on mood swings that include ‘extreme aridity’. She saw her frequent physical ailments as reminders of her vocation: ‘in illness and deprived of all human aid, I turned to God, my only help, who without delay, and as if he had waited a similar privation, favoured me with frequent and clear lights’. Stories of illness and frustration recur throughout the Painted Life and haunt her all her life. She hopes that it ‘please God to 99 Ward, Till God Will, p. 106. 100 Ward, Till God Will, p. 17. 101 Kristeva, Teresa, p. 228; Ward, Briefe Relation, p. 98.

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the present to moderate the vehemence of these aspirations, in order, as I believe, that I might take breath and apply myself to follow religious life’. To counter the fear of death, and the tiny deaths and losses of every kind throughout life, the Baroque melancholic passionately looked toward a major consolation: the afterlife, a Beyond where the ideal Father awaited.102 Yet Baroque melancholy, however prevalent in her life, was not the whole story. The Baroque was also a culture of hyperbole, distinguished by miracles, divinely directed coincidences, signs and visions. Ward’s childhood desires for martyrdom, echoing those of Teresa, reflect characteristic such hyperbole. Continual persecutions engendered further extremity, just as, more broadly, Protestant opposition to the excesses of Marian devotion helped stimulate more and more spectacular expressions of Mariology. Relying on special visions gave women a privileged place in that culture, a model by which the Baroque woman could reconstitute herself through transference onto the Other and, penetrating below the threshold of consciousness, explore the contours of her own identity. Unlike More, Ward saw the inescapable model for this reaching beyond the self as that constructed by Jesuit devotion. The revelation to ‘follow’ the Jesuit way – to ‘take the same of the society’ – was, she affirmed, heard ‘distinctly’, and ‘so changed the whole soul that it was impossible for me to doubt’ their divine source; ‘it only remains that I be faithful on my part’. Here she is again echoing Teresa, whose order she may have left but whose vision sustains her throughout her life: ‘I saw Him with the eyes of my soul more clearly than I could help with the eyes of my body. And this vision left such an impression on me that, though more than twenty-six years have gone by, it seems to me it is still present’. This is the essence of religious hyperbole, in which the individual seems to lose the contours of her identity: one ‘sees oneself carried away and does not know where’.103 Also characteristically Baroque is Ward’s role as Kristeva’s iconic ‘writing woman’. Witness Ward’s response to an instruction by her Jesuit confessor: ‘I was commanded three or four years since by my confessor, father Roger Lee of the holy Society of Jesus, unto whom I vowed obedience, to set down in writing all that I could remember to call to mind of my life past […] Two years after […] He gave me a more absolute charge to do it […] Jesus give me grace to set down truly as it passed’.104 Like Teresa, Ward writes against the constant background of the Pauline strictures enjoining women’s silence; each had to justify their writing by alluding to commission or compulsion from a 102 Ward, Till God Will, pp. 19, 11; Kristeva, Teresa, p. 52. 103 Ward, Till God Will, p. 29; Kristeva, Teresa, pp. 168, 93. 104 Littlehales, Pilgrim and Mystic, p. 78.

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male authority figure.105 In the introductory remarks to her autobiographical fragments, Ward makes it very clear that she is deliberately appropriating what her society saw as the male privilege to control language, and like Teresa was claiming the right to do so on the authority of her confessor. By writing, she is defying male authority, whether represented by the Pope or by the Jesuits who opposed her, and in her assertions of individuality she not only discovers a degree of self-analysis but points to a broader struggle, the dilemma of being a writing woman caught in the nets of the patriarchal control of language. Like Teresa, however, she sees her writings as merely incidental: having no one, she said, to teach me, ‘I wrote down from time to time what happened to me concerning them. And having noted them down, I took pains not to think any more of them, fearing that if they act as all my thoughts I should be less observant of the ordinances and the exercises of the place where I was’.106 Following ‘the way of the Society’, adapting the teaching of Ignatius and Jesuit discipline on the use of images, became a way of avoiding a surfeit of personal emotion; Ward was thereby able, paradoxically, to write with felicity. Women, Ward argues, ‘may be perfect as well as men’ and therefore might ‘do great matters’; here she echoes Teresa’s affirmation that if women ‘do what lies in their power’ that ‘they will astonish men’. In similar vein, responding to a man who insisted that ‘a woman could not apprehend God’, Ward stated: ‘I answered nothing but only smiled, although I could have answered him by the experience I have of the contrary’.107 At times she argues strategically, writing that women’s lack of access to humanist education might be seen as freeing them to be more receptive to God’s will and more open than educated men to such virtues as sincerity, justice, and constancy. ‘When all is said and done, they are but women’, one of her denigrators is reputed to have said – to which she replied, ‘I would know what you think he meant by this speech of his, “but women”’. It was not because they were simply women: No, but because we are imperfect women […] it is not veritas hominum, the verity of men, nor the verity of women, but veritas Dominum, and this verity women may have as well as men. If we fail it is for want of this verity, and not because we are women […] I hope in God it will be seen that women in time will do much.108 105 Kristeva, Teresa, pp. 20, 15. 106 Littlehales, Pilgrim and Mystic, p. 43. 107 Kristeva, Teresa, pp. 291, 42, 50; Ward, Till God Will, p. 58. 108 Ward, Till God Will, p. 57.

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As so often, Teresa is her model: if women ‘do what lies in their power […] the Lord will make them so strong that they will astonish men’, Teresa declared. Kristeva points out that Teresa’s phrase here, varoniles (‘strong’) is more accurate translated as ‘manly’.109 Maravall speaks of the Baroque as a state of continuing restlessness, the self continually in motion seeking to achieve what is inevitably impossible. By examining the ideological movement and the habits of mind underlying his somewhat pejorative concept of kitsch, we can see how movement and adaptation are part of the Baroque insistence on multiplicity, its attempt, however futile, to reach for the impossible. Plateauing operates not just in architecture or art, but can be strikingly seen in the actions of these devoted, dedicated women, persistently aspiring to eternity. Throughout Ward’s life, in its combination of self-abnegation and certainty of belief, we can see the essentials of Baroque plateauing. Her continual petition is that God would give her grace to achieve her vocation, ‘at least to some degree’. Beneath the boldness and confidence there are doubts and anxieties such that ‘the power and violence of her Ennemyes seemed to shut up all recourse but to God’, and even then, in her fifteen years of censure and imprisonment, she is still ‘exposed to the most horrid apprehensions of being abandoned and forsaken by God’. Ward’s whole career, from the time she fled Protestant England for the Catholic continent until her return as she neared her death, was one of continual confidence in the face of persecution, failures, and her own inherently impossible desires. Kristeva comments of Teresa: ‘her race through the world crosses with her surge toward the Beloved’; she must not ‘fasten on anything […] for the Other is always elsewhere, a bit further on, a step ahead, go on, keep going!’110 If the Catholic Female Baroque may be characterised by the plateau, Ward’s presumptuousness saw her riding the waves right to the end.

Works Cited Apetrei, Sarah. ‘Gender, Mysticism, and Enthusiasm in the British Post-Reformation’. Reformation & Renaissance Review 17 (2015), 116–128. Baker, Augustine. The Life and Death of Dame Gertrude More, ed. Ben Wekking. Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universität, 2002. Baker, Augustine. The Inner Life of Dame Gertrude More ed. Benedict Weld-Blundell. London: R. & T. Washbourne, 1910. 109 Kristeva, Teresa, p. 250. 110 Kristeva, Teresa, pp. 348–349.

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Baker, Augustine. ‘To the Reader’. Introduction to Gertrude More, Life and Death, in More, Printed Writings, 1641–1700, ed. Arthur Marotti. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2017. Bicks, Caroline. ‘Staging the Jesuitess in “A Game at Chess”’. Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 49 (2009), 463–484. Braider, Christopher. Baroque Self-Invention and Historical Truth: Hercules at the Crossroads. New York: Routledge, 2004. Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. London: J.M. Dent, 1932. Conty, Arianne. ‘If you Could Naught Yourself for an Instant: Meister Eckhart and the Mystical Unconscious’. Medieval Mystical Theology 24 (2015), 23–44. de Certeau, Michel. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Dunn, Mary. ‘Mysticism, Motherhood and Pathological Narcissism? A Kohutian analysis of Marie de l’Incarnation’. Journal of Religion and Health, 52 (2013), 642–656. Gallagher, Lowell. ‘Mary Ward’s “Jesuitesses” and the Construction of a Typological Community’. In Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England, ed. Susan Frye and Karen Robertson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Graziano, Frank. Wounds of Love: The Mystical Marriage of Saint Rose of Lima. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Greenberg, Mitchell. Baroque Bodies: Psychoanalysis and the Culture of French Absolutism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York, Collier Books, 1961. Juárez-Almendros, Encarnación. Prostitutes, Duennas and Saints: Women and Disability in Early Modern Spain. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017. Kristeva, Julia. In the Beginning was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Kristeva, Julia. ‘The Passion according to Teresa of Avila’, in Carnal Hermeneutics, ed. Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor, pp. 251–262. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Kristeva, Julia. ‘The Impenetrable Power of the Phallic Matron’, Liberation 2008. n. p. http://www.kristeva.fr/palin_en.html Accessed August 2019. Kristeva, Julia. Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila, trans. Lorna Scott Fox. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Kristeva, Julia. ‘New Forms of Revolt’. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy–Revue de la philosophe française et de la langue française 22.2 (2014), 1–19.

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Kristeva, Julia, and Richard Kearney. ‘Mysticism and Anatheism’, in Richard Kearney’s Anatheistic Wager, ed. Chris Doude van Troostwijk and Matthew Clemente, pp. 68–87. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2018. Kristeva, Julia, and Catherine Clément. The Feminine and the Sacred, trans. Jane Marie Todd. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Latz, Dorothy L. ed. ‘Glow-Worm Light’: Writings of 17th Century English Recusant Women from Original Manuscripts. Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanstik Universität, 1989. Lawes, Richard. ‘Can Modern Psychology help us understand Baker’s Secretum Sive Mysticum?’, in That Mysterious Man: Essays on Augustine Baker, ed. Michael Woodward, pp. 211–234. Abergavenny: Three Peaks Press, 2001. Lay, Jenna. Beyond the Cloister: Catholic Englishwomen and Early Modern Literary Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Littlehales, Margaret Mary. Mary Ward Pilgrim and Mystic 1585–1645. London: Burns & Oates, 2001. Low, Anthony. Augustine Baker. Boston: Twayne, 1970. Lux-Sterritt, Laurence. Redefining Female Religious Life: French Ursulines and English Ladies in Seventeenth-Century Catholicism. New York: Routledge, 2005. Maravall, José Antonio. Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure. trans. Terry Cochran. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. Marotti, Arthur F. Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Marotti, Arthur F. ‘Saintly Idiocy and Contemplative Empowerment: The Example of Dame Gertrude More’, in Mysticism and Reform, 1400–1750, ed. Sara S. Poor and Nigel Smith, pp. 151–176. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. More, Gertrude. Confessiones Amantis: The Spiritual Exercises of the most Virtuous and Religious Dame Gertrude More, ed. John Clark. Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universität, 2007. More, Gertrude. The Writings of Dame Gertrude More, ed. Benedict Weld-Blundell. London: R. & T. Washbourne, 1910. More, Gertrude. Printed Writings, 1641–1700, ed. Arthur Marotti. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2017. Reich, Annie. ‘A Contribution to the Psychoanalysis of Extreme Submissiveness in Women’. The Psychoanalytical Quarterly 9 (1940), 470–480. Schiesari, Juliana. The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Tyler, Peter. Teresa of Avila: Doctor of the Soul. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Underhill, Evelyn, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness. London: Methuen, 1970.

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Vélez, Karin Annelise. ‘Resolved to Fly: The Virgin of Loreto, the Jesuits and the Miracle of Portable Catholicism in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World’. PhD Diss., Princeton University, 2009. Wallace, David. Strong Women: Life, Text, and Territory 1347–1645. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Waller, Gary. The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert and Early Modern Construction of Gender. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993. Waller, Gary. Mary and the Annunciation: A Cultural Study from Luke to the Enlightenment. New York: Routledge 2016. Ward, Mary. A Briefe Relation […] with Autobiographical Fragments and a Selection of Letters, ed. Christina Kenworthy-Browne CJ. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008. Ward, Mary. Till God Will: Mary Ward through her Writings, ed. Gillian Orchard IBVM. London: Darton Longman & Todd, 1985. Ward, Mary. ‘Painted Life’. Pictures. http://www.congregatiojesu.org/en/­maryward_ painted_life.asp. Accessed November 2019. Williams, Rowan. Introduction to Woodward, Michael, ed. That Mysterious Man: Essays on Augustine Baker, pp. 8–9. Abergavenny: Three Peaks Press, 2001. Yamamoto-Wilson, John R. Pain, Pleasure and Perversity: Discourses of Suffering in Seventeenth-Century England. London: Taylor and Francis, 2016.

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4. Protestant Baroque Abstract Much traditional scholarship on the Baroque sees the notion of the Protestant Baroque as contradictory. This chapter explores ‘emergent’ or ‘partial’ Baroque characteristics in two Protestant poets, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer, followed by the Protestant women of Little Gidding, the ‘Arminian nunnery’, whose ‘storying’ and biblical harmonies show how broader cultural dynamics could permeate even a marginalised group of women, who have only recently attracted critical attention. I look across the Atlantic to examine the English equivalent of the colonial Baroque prominent in Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic culture, and consider two New England writers – briefly, Anne Bradstreet and more thoroughly, Anne Hutchinson – to analyse the extent to which New England can be set within the scope of not just colonial but specifically Protestant colonial Baroque. Key words: Theory of Baroque Culture; Speaking, Prophesying, and Writing Women; The Countess of Pembroke and Aemilia Lanyer; The Ferrar/Collet Women of Little Gidding; Colonial Female Baroque; Anne Hutchinson

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The Protestant Baroque … splinters of Divinity harkening back to the source. ‒ Julia Kristeva.1

The Protestant Baroque? If, as is conventionally assumed, the Baroque is closely aligned with the Catholic Reformation or Counter-Reformation, the phrase ‘Protestant Baroque’ sounds paradoxical, even impossible. The combination of ‘Protestant’ and ‘Baroque’ has become commonplace in the history of music: witness the works of J.S. Bach, in which the term loosely indicates that the composer was a Protestant, and that he wrote within 1

Kristeva, ‘Adel’s Body’, p. 64.

Waller, G., The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. doi 10.5117/9789463721431_ch04

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what is even more loosely termed – indeed, this looseness is probably more pronounced than in any other area of cultural production – the Baroque period in musical history. Given the conventional association between the Catholic Reformation and the Baroque, and relentless Protestant attacks on Catholic representational ‘idolatry’, how can the Baroque and Protestantism, and in England in particular, be associated with one another on any substantial basis? Peter D. Skrine, normally ingenious and flexible in defining the Baroque, further asserts that ‘a parliamentary system is by nature incompatible with the baroque, and doubly so in an increasingly middle-class and anti-Catholic country like England’. Yet he points out that near the end of the seventeenth century, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress uncannily shares, ‘across a gaping cultural chasm’, sentiments that create ‘a synthesis of some of the most fundamental features of the baroque’.2 In accord with Skrine’s observation, central to my quest for the Female Baroque is the awareness that even in the midst of overwhelming and often intensifying patriarchal assumptions, the Reformation generated an unprecedented emergence of women’s voices claiming the authority to speak, preach, and write, and they vividly demonstrate some of the characteristics we can usefully label ‘Baroque’. Maravall notes that ‘the conflictive situation was a normal ingredient of the Baroque’.3 The major ‘conflictive situation’ of the seventeenth century in England was unquestionably the Civil War and the subsequent, if temporary, overthrow of the monarchy. Absolutism, one of Maravall’s criteria providing the structural ethos of the Baroque, is therefore an issue in seventeenthcentury England, but the battles between the Stuart monarchs and their political (and eventually religious) opponents take different forms from comparable struggles in France or Spain. Crucial to our understanding of the Protestant Baroque in English culture is the large number of women writers and prophetic speakers responding to the political struggles during and after the English Revolution. The religious zeal of a generation of Protestant women established a new degree of authority for women’s voices. In this chapter I look for traces of the female Baroque within the Protestant tradition, including the striking emergence in the Civil War of independent prophetic figures like Anna Trapnell and Margaret Fell, as well as Baroque features in the writings of poets like Aemelia Lanyer and Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, both of whom express their Protestant convictions within a courtly environment. On both sides of the Atlantic, royalist, republican, and puritan responses by women to the era’s political 2 Skrine, Baroque, pp. 106, 159. 3 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, p. 39.

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turmoil display in multiple ways Kristeva’s claim that the ‘great exploit’ of the Female Baroque ‘was not so much to feel rapture as to tell it; to write it’. 4 At the end of the chapter, I therefore cross the Atlantic and analyse the emergence of a colonial Female Protestant Baroque in the person of Anne Hutchinson and, to a lesser extent, her compatriot and fellow Protestant writer, Anne Bradstreet.

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Speaking Women, Writing Women What models did Protestant women have, either in their residual culture or emerging from the Reformation turmoil, that might open them to the Baroque? Unlike Catholic art and devotion, in which she fulfilled multiple functions, the Virgin Mary’s role in providing an aspirational model for women was significantly muted in Protestantism. Prominent Marian Feasts like the Assumption, which inspired so much Baroque Catholic art and devotion, received hostile and frequently derisive attention from Protestants. There was no Protestant Queen of Heaven, except in parody and polemic: the traditional emphasis on women’s humility – represented ideally in the figure of the humble obedient Virgin, rather than the militant Catholic queen of the universe – remains dominant among Protestants.5 Though both Luther and Calvin comment on Mary’s suitability as a model for women, it is because of her humility and obedience, not her power or authority; as Beth Kreitzer points out, in his one sermon on the Annunciation, Luther insists that the angelic greeting should be translated not by voll Gnade (full of grace) but simply as holdselige (lovely and gracious).6 For the reformers, the angel’s words to Mary are merely, if reverently, a greeting, not a prayer, and any petition to Mary based on what – for Protestants – could only be imputed grace was highly idolatrous.7 As we have seen with Ward and More, a significant barrier to women’s writing was the seemingly unambiguous condemnation by Saint Paul of women’s speaking in churches. But in revolutionary circles during the Civil War, some women insisted that the Pauline prohibition should be read as applying only to particular situations in the early Christian churches; in some cases they countermanded the prohibition with other instances in the 4 Kristeva, Teresa, p. 69. 5 Grindlay, Queen of Heaven, Chs. 2 and 3. 6 Kreitzer, Reforming Mary, p. 32. 7 For more detailed discussion on the Protestant demystification of the Virgin, see Waller, Virgin, Ch. 5.

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Gospels where Jesus seemed to give permission to women to speak. Some read the Pauline references to ‘women’ being instructed to keep silent metaphorically, as representing general human weakness, a characteristic that both men and women might demonstrate. Others use the rhetorical device frequently favoured by Teresa, that of women’s own lowliness providing a distinctive perspective and therefore a justification for speaking. Women’s acceptance of their subordination could thereby be transformed into the unique presence of the divine spirit and thus become a vehicle of authority; in some cases, their supposedly natural emotionalism was seen as making them especially privileged vehicles of the spiritual. Women’s ecstasies were frequently interpreted as expressing a divine presence inhabiting, dwelling in, or invading women’s bodies. Women’s conventional identification as weak, prone to irrationality verging on the hysterical, paradoxically provided the very framework to make prophetic revelations plausible, even if it rendered them suspicious to men. Conventional misogynistic prejudice towards women could thus potentially allow them to give voice to areas of experience that were culturally as well as individually repressed. In Womens Speaking Justified (1667), Margaret Fell argued that in the last times, which many believed they were entering, God took no respect of gender and so did not deny women the divine gift of prophecy. Fell’s argument was that women, especially Mary Magdalen, were the first to preach the Good News of the Resurrection. Some Protestant women did turn to the Virgin Mary’s prophetic words in the Magnificat for an empowering precedent. The Puritan prophet Eleanor Davies looks towards the coming of a new age when the Lord will ‘put his word in [women’s] Mouth’ and ‘powreth his spirit upon his handmaidens’; Davies again quotes the Magnificat when she pronounces that ‘the rich’ will be ‘sent emptie away’. In another common rhetorical move, Fell argued that the Pauline prohibition on women’s speaking did not apply to ‘such as have the Power and Spirit of the Lord Jesus poured upon them’, especially as throughout the Old Testament God ‘gave his good Spirit, as it pleased him, both to man and woman’. She, too, instances the Magnificat as an indication that the spirit of the Lord ‘was poured forth upon daughters as well as sons’, and uses the fact that the Magnificat was central to Evensong in the Anglican prayer book as an indication that the Church was ‘beholding to the woman’. Fell sees the women around Jesus, ‘Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James’, and other women, as the earliest witnesses of the Good News of the Gospel – ironically a position that is very familiar today in feminist New Testament scholarship.8 8 Paulson, Hogarth’s Harlots, pp. 134, 135; Fell, Womens Speaking Justified, pp. 168, 171–172, 157.

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The characteristic Baroque blending of melancholy and hyperbole is a fundamental characteristic of women’s religious language, with many Protestant woman visionaries no less extreme in their emotional outbursts than Catholics. Imagery shared across the divided Christian Churches stresses what would be seen as familiar female experiences: the hope to lie in God’s arms, visions of being impregnated by, betrothed, or giving birth to Jesus. Motifs such as the ecstatic bride, mother, or lover of Christ recur in these spiritual confessions and autobiographies. Paradoxically, while metaphors of betrothal or marriage to Jesus might seem more natural for a woman, if the New England accusers of Anne Hutchinson are any indication, a woman’s appropriation of the marriage metaphor might be especially suspect to men since it could be read as a sexualised blasphemy. Expressions of ecstasy – often communicated in trances, speaking in tongues, under the influence of fasting and bodily mortification, or authenticated by being spoken through illness and physical deprivation – were shared by both Catholics and Protestants. Sarah Wight, for instance, like both Ward and More, believed that illness and physical weakness were necessarily accompaniments to her status as a prophet. Versions of religious Hörigkeit likewise abound across confessional divides. In her spiritual autobiography, The Exceeding Riches of Grace, Wight describes how she often attempted ‘to destroy herselfe, as by drowning, strengthening, stabbing, seeking to beat out her braines, wretchedly bruising, and wounding herself’.9 Her goal was to produce a state that authenticated her privileged prophetic role by hovering between life and death; as Diane Purkiss comments, this spectacular self-denial became a quasi-magical or even sacramental act. In such struggles we can see the body providing a central element of the prophetic process, including explicitly visceral experiences, even a striking degree of theatricality: speaking in tongues, spontaneous singing, shaking and re-enacting what was experienced in visions, all in keeping with what the women saw as the gift and inspiration of Old Testament prophets who could then be called upon to justify their felt experiences.10 The accounts some women prophets give for the process of inspiration and the onset of their visions come uncannily close to Kristeva’s account of the semiotic– symbolic relationship. Elinor Chanel, according to her scribe, or ‘relator’, Arise Evans, was ‘very sensible and profound’ in ordinary conversation, but ‘when she is dumb, all her senses are taken up, and then the matter which troubles her mind, is dictated and made plain to her by the Spirit of God’. 9 See Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue, p. 103. 10 Purkiss, ‘Producing the Voice’, p. 150.

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Trapnell’s ‘relator’ listens to her singing and prophesying and acknowledges that what emerges seems to include slips, gaps, and incoherence that, as Marcus Nevitt comments, amount to a narrative of ‘its own prehistory as a series of heroic if faltering steps towards the effect of transcription of speech and song in text’.11 Trapnell also expresses an awareness of the ‘multiple and concealed agencies that facilitated her work and words’, claiming that she was divinely inspired but reminding her audience that what she was conveying was only ‘an incomplete or corrupted narrative […] situated on the threshold between spoken and written word’.12 These instances are clear evidence for reading such utterances in terms of Kristeva’s semiotic–symbolic interaction. The hyperbole of religious ecstasy often combines with manifestations of deep melancholia. We may, as I noted in Chapter One, see melancholy both as an individual manifestation of a broader cultural phenomenon and as a way of entering as closely as possible into the psyche, perhaps bringing back distant memories of childhood or early family traumas, as we have seen with More and Ward. The characteristic Baroque vacillation between hyperbole and melancholy, which seems so central to the period’s religious experience, also invariably leads to plateauing, as ecstatic hope meets material reality, an outcome to which the pious Protestant gave a special interpretation, attributing it to mortal sin and the fear of being predestined to be cut off from God’s grace. In the Protestant sects the emotional roller-coaster of hyperbole and melancholy usually focuses on whether one belongs to the chosen or has been abandoned by God. The ultimate plateau, the cosmic anxiety about individual election, is thus inbuilt into Protestantism. Maravall’s category of kitsch is most obviously seen in the commodification of visual aids, relics, rosaries, scapulas and other material objects of Catholic popular culture, but the equivalent for the Protestant prophetic tradition was the multiplicity of printed books, pamphlets, sermons, and even (given residual Protestant iconophobia) visual aids to devotion designed to stimulate believers’ confidence in the mysteries of grace and election. Elizabeth Bouldin comments that, ‘from arcane religious treatises to cheap print aimed at the masses, the printed word’ was a vital forum for the spread of Protestantism. The Protestant prophetic tradition was spread, magnified, and reproduced, on both sides of the Atlantic, making kitsch an international as well as cross-confessional phenomenon, and what Carmen Font terms ‘a myriad of larger and smaller printing businesses’ created both a public space 11 Nevitt, Women and the Pamphlet Culture, p. 16. 12 Nevitt, Women and the Pamphlet Culture, pp. 9, 14, 16.

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for women’s writing, especially ‘prophesy as an act of private affirmation’, as well as stimulating the growth of a reading population.13

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Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke When we turn to writings on the shifting boundary between pious devotion and what, in later centuries, comes to be seen as ‘literature’, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (1561–1621) exemplifies among Protestant women writers Canfield’s observation that the Baroque tends to erupt through otherwise conventional or even undistinguished surfaces. The Countess of Pembroke’s major work, the versification of the Psalms of David, which she completed after her brother Philip’s death, is now widely acknowledged as a significant literary achievement that anticipates many effects of the ‘Metaphysical’ poets. Her translations of Petrarch’s Triumph of Death and Philippe de Mornay’s A Discourse of Life and Death are evidence of an obsession with the darkness of melancholia – especially since she was likely working on these volumes under the shadow of Philip’s death in the Low Countries. In the psalms, she gives voice to both distinctively ‘female’ perspectives and, at times, a style and approach to language we can label (even if such a designation is selective) as emergent or incipiently Baroque. We can, with caution, distinguish between Philip’s decidedly ‘pre-Baroque’ approach to the psalter and his sister’s. In general, Sidney chose to translate as accurately as possible rather than to create poems of any significant autonomy. Using the Marot/Beza psalter as a precedent, he was concerned to present an integrated, harmonious version of his original. In taking on the task of completing his work, his sister brought a less confident but more ambitious approach to language. She also took up the problem of learning the sweat and grind of actual composition, the search for apt metaphor, flexible versification, and appropriate tone, revising Philip’s texts (the first forty-three psalms) from a constant desire to practice the rudiments of verse construction and, eventually, to bring what was obviously an unfinished manuscript to completion. Coburn Freer blames her for stylistic unevenness and acknowledges only accidental anticipations of what spasmodically emerges as English Baroque, or what he conventionally terms ‘Metaphysical’ poetry. He downplays her skills, arguing that ‘when she strikes on a natural phrasing in her psalms, it is as much by accident as

13 Bouldin, Women Prophets, p. 57; Font, Women’s Prophetic Writings, p. 12.

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by design’.14 Certainly, some of her innovations come by accident, but others come through multiple experiments. Her very inexperience as a poet, and her relatively unsophisticated handling of poetic form in the beginning, make the relationship between her psalms and her originals less predictable and thus, in a sense, more open to development. She develops a poetic voice that is very different from Philip’s – at times narrower but, usually, more intense, certainly more inventive, and more adept (if at times accidentally, rather than consciously) at extending the metaphorical structure of the psalm or animating the original into surprising life. Mary Sidney’s continually changing and restless, even obsessive, experimentation with poetical forms is also striking and not unrelated to the Baroque fascination with Braider’s emphasis on Baroque ‘recursiveness’. Overall, not counting Sidney’s original forty-three versions or those to which she made only minor revisions, her Psalms contain 164 distinct stanzaic patterns, with only one repeated. There are, as well, ninety-four quite distinct metrical patterns. It is tempting to see the multiplicity of verse forms in her psalms as examples of Baroque exuberance but it is probably also frustration with finding appropriate words in dealing with the original texts: the experience of what we can see as plateauing in her sentence fragments, disruptions of syntax, and recurring incoherence as her words seem to reach beyond the original. In many cases a reader must puzzle over intentions not quite carried out, but these instances should not always be put down to poor technical competence. Often, rhetorical effectiveness coincides with idiomatic movement, but there are times when her enthusiasm overflows, perhaps to a greater extent than she herself is aware of – and it at is those moments when what we can tentatively call ‘Baroque’ elements surge through. Philip Sidney’s modern editor William Ringler termed the Countess a ‘tinkerer’: it is a somewhat pejorative epithet but one which nonetheless points to the Baroque writer’s obsessive inability to close, which we have also seen with Ward and More. Mary Sidney thus combines the unpredictability of Baroque experimentation with the multiplicity of kitsch.15 The Countess is, in many senses, one of Kristeva’s ‘writing women’. Looking closely at the multiple versions of her psalms, it is clear that she re-words and sometimes re-writes parts of her originals to stress what would be distinctly woman-centred expectations and experiences. In these cases, in large part she evokes predominantly conventional roles – birthing, mothering, domestic and craft interests. Even though David is ostensibly the author 14 Freer, Music for a King, p. 97. 15 Sidney, Poems, p. 502.

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of Pembroke’s originals, Michele Osherow argues that in Protestant writings David is frequently shown advocating female authority, and that a woman putting herself in David’s role is engaging is a kind of literary cross-dressing, thus adding masculine authority to her status as a woman.16 But sometimes, to give the urgent speaking voice of her psalm further particularity, Mary Sidney brings into the psalm a strand of domestic imagery, to suggest the speaker actually meditating in his (or her) room. The notion of a private space in which a woman might contemplate her own voice will be central to the consideration of Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, but it is no less important to some of her aunt’s psalms. Her versions point towards the Protestant ideal of absorbing the meanings of Scripture and finding one’s own spiritual choices and dilemmas in the Bible. Her often forced and broken syntax emerges as a sense of breathlessness and allows the contradictions to emerge, in much the same way as Kristeva argues ‘female jouissance’ can be sensed speaking through the surfaces of Teresa of Avila’s language or, in a secular context (as will be demonstrated in a later chapter), how the balanced Renaissance texture of the Sidneian Petrarchan lyric is undermined in Wroth’s poetry.

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Aemelia Lanyer When we turn to Mary Sidney’s near-contemporary, Aemilia Lanyer, née Bassano (1569–1645), we are struck immediately by contrasts in lifestyle, background and class, but there are similarities in the ways an incipient or ‘nearly’ Baroque sensibility erupts through the otherwise conventional surfaces of her writings. In the 1970s, A.L. Rowse notoriously made a case for Lanyer as Shakespeare’s ‘Dark Lady’, a view that has received a mainly sceptical and often scornful reception, but which certainly brought her to scholarly attention. Rowse made much of the probably exaggerated references to her alleged sexual activities in the diaries of the physician and astrologer Simon Forman, whom she consulted in the late 1590s and with whom she may well have been sexually involved.17 More reputable scholarship, both biographical and literary, has subsequently paid serious attention to her writings. Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) consists of an array of dedicatory epistles and letters, a verse paraphrase of the crucifixion narrative, along with a strikingly provocative justification of both Eve and a number of 16 Osherow, Biblical Women’s Voices, Ch. 5. 17 Rowse, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady.

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prominent women, mainly from the Old Testament but including some contemporaries. It was published along with what is generally seen as the first country house poem, composed about Cookham, the home of Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, where Lanyer spent some time, obviously very contented by the atmosphere and the support of the aristocratic lady. As a Protestant convert, married to an Italian musician, Lanyer seems to have brought both her Jewish background and, most importantly in the current context, an awareness of Catholic devotion, into her writing. Susanne Woods argues that while the topic of Christ’s passion may be commonplace, Lanyer’s writing possesses an undercurrent that is both radical and distinctively, if spasmodically, Baroque; the incorporation of historical and contemporary women into her narrative radically subverts the dominant Christian narrative tradition, including the Genesis narrative focused on Eve.18 Lanyer’s writings contain echoes of the Counter-Reformation in her references to characteristic Catholic themes of martyrdom, religious meditation, and the intense sense of the vivid presence of religious events associated with Jesuit devotion. As with Mary Sidney’s psalms, Salve Deus demonstrates a variety – even, as Elizabeth Hodgson suggests, a ‘chaotic’ array – of styles, voices, and moods.19 Just as Mary Sidney’s characteristic Elizabethan voice will suddenly erupt into a moment of Baroque extravagance, only sometimes suggested by the metaphorical structure of the psalm itself, Lanyer’s sometimes pedestrian verse can suddenly rise to melodramatic visual evocations: she evokes divine grace as an overwhelming ocean, or gives a striking hyperbolic description of Jesus’ ‘members torne’, or his bleeding wounds – all notes typical of Catholic poets like Southwell or Constable. In her dedication to the Countess of Suffolk, she depicts Jesus much in the style of an Ignatian meditation, describing how high-placed ladies like the Countess may ‘see him in a flood of teares’, along with the figure of death, ‘with grim and gastly look’ and the ‘Clowdes of Shame & Death’: No Dove, no Swan, nor Iv’rie could compare With this faire corps, when ‘twas by death imbrac’d; No rose, nor no vermillion halfe so faire As was that pretious blood that interlac’d His body, which bright Angels did attend Waiting on him that must to Heaven ascend.20 18 Lanyer, Poems, p. xxxix; see also Keohane, ‘That Blindest Weakenesse’, pp. 359–389. 19 Hodgson, ‘Prophecy and Gendered Mourning’, p. 101. 20 Lanyer, Poems, p. 39.

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As with Mary Sidney or Gertrude More (and, as will be shown later in this chapter, Anne Bradstreet in New England) Lanyer sometimes reaches awkwardly for a hyperbolic rhetorical effect and often her metaphors tumble over one another, conveying something of a Baroque quality. Again, we can ask: is this incompetence or an attempt to reach into the emotionally contradictory intensity of feeling that a meditation produces? Or perhaps both? The longest poem of dedication in the Salve Deus is directed to Queen Anna of Denmark, James I’s queen, whose court is discussed in the next chapter’s examination of Baroque court drama. The queen actually plays a minor role in Lanyer’s verse, though there was known no contact between the two: in fact, most of Lanyer’s dedications are what Debra Rienstra terms a ‘multiple-dedication scattershot at patronage’, hyperbolic pleas for support from well-placed ladies. It is the Countess of Pembroke herself who seems to offer her a particularly powerful precedent for claiming both political and prophetic authority for a female voice in religious verse, which Rienstra calls her ‘astonishingly radical exegesis of Scripture’. ‘The Authors Dreame to the ladie Marie, the Countesse Dowager of Pembroke’ suggests that she saw Mary Sidney as a ‘central figure in a pastoral literary kingdom of women’, both as a ‘woman artist’ and a ‘divinely sanctioned new-writer of Scripture’.21 The fact that Lanyer’s efforts to gain patronage were largely unsuccessful and her work virtually disappeared from view is likely a reflection of the closed world of the English court. But while it is easy to ridicule the dedicatory poems – addressed to Queen Anna, Princess Elizabeth, and the Countesses of Dorset, Suffolk, Cumberland, Bedford, Pembroke, and Kent – as naïve or sycophantic, Lanyer is nonetheless attempting to celebrate the existence of an alternative community of female poets and prophets and asking that she herself be considered as a member of such a community. Reaching even further back, Lanyer adapts traditional typological interpretation to set her contemporary would-be patrons in a tradition that both fulfils and yet goes beyond the limited or incomplete insights of the Old Testament heroines. She evokes women who have had problematic relationships with men, including Susanna, whose exploitation by the Elders was a popular subject of exemplary literature, and, perhaps surprisingly, the Queen of Sheba, who is singled out for expressing her sexual desire not for holy ends but to attract a particularly powerful man. Lanyer devotes more than a dozen stanzas to ‘that Ethyopian Queene’ who is praised for ‘not yeelding to the nicenesse and respect’ expected of women. She also singles out Deborah, she ‘that judged Israel’, Judith, who assassinated Holofernes, and Esther. From 21 Rienstra, ‘Dreaming Authorship’, pp. 80, 82, 87.

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the New Testament, she chooses Pilate’s ‘most worthy wife’, expanding the brief reference in the Gospel of Matthew to a dream in which Satan tried to make her dissuade her husband from condemning Christ (and thus foiling salvation) as a criticism of Pilate for ignoring his wife’s warning.22 Little space is given to Mary Magdalen: though she is mentioned, the traditional role of her as a penitent whore would likely not have supported Lanyer’s emphasis on the strength and integrity of her women models. Lanyer’s most radical theological intervention, however, is her attention to Eve and the Virgin Mary. She tackles head-on the orthodoxy that original sin derived directly from Eve, blaming ‘evilly disposed men, who forgetting they were born of women, nourished by women, and if it were not by the means of women’ would themselves be quite ‘extinguished out of the world’. She prefaces her work by proclaiming ‘this have I done, to make known to the world, that all women deserve not to be blamed’. In her interpretation of the Fall, in which Adam is said to have known fully the prohibition against eating the fruit, she asserts that since Eve herself was created from Adam, ultimately the responsibility for the Fall is his. Eve’s role was being ‘simply good’ in offering to share her discovery, her new female knowledge, with Adam; and if, as the traditional stereotype states, women are weaker, Adam then had both greater strength and authority to be able to resist. Eve’s only fault was that she loved too much. The man should have taken more responsibility: ‘Her fault though great, yet hee was most too blame’ and, unfairly, ‘we (poore women) must endure it all’.23 With the Virgin Mary, surprisingly for an apparently orthodox Protestant, Lanyer praises her in a tone more reminiscent of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, drawing (as Gary Kuchar points out) on a pre-Reformation tradition that became prominent in Baroque Catholic devotion: the Virgin as Queen of Heaven and, in effect, a priestly co-redeemer. This status is reinforced by Lanyer’s referring to Mary’s prominent role at the Crucifixion, describing her kneeling posture before Christ suggesting, as is common in Catholic devotion but certainly not among Protestants, that she occupies a priestly role: ‘what is at stake’, Kuchar argues, ‘is the value of physical, outward act of devotion – acts which covers performance often characterized as effeminate and excessively ostentatious’.24 But the importance of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum in the context of the Baroque is Lanyer’s bold advocacy not only of her own voice but rather a collectivity of women’s voices, both in the present and from the past. Kate Chedzgoy 22 Lanyer, Poems, pp. 114–118, 87–89. 23 Lanyer, Poems, pp. 48–49, 85. 24 Kuchar, ‘Lanyer and the Virgin’s Swoon’, p. 62. See also Grindlay, Queen of Heaven, pp. 121–132.

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defines that goal as an aspect of the recovery of a gendered counter-memory, an observation that can be extended to all the women analysed in the present study. Chedzgoy quotes Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith’s observation that what ‘a culture remembers and what it chooses to forget are intricately bound up with issues of power and hegemony, and thus with gender’. She argues that the feminist thrust of Salve Deus makes an intervention in the early modern querelle des femmes specifically by reimagining the dominant narratives of the past that shaped Lanyer’s world. It is, as the historical and mythical scope of her examples shows, a collective and not merely an individual matter.25 Lanyer, then, may be an occasional but certainly an emphatic revolutionary, with some (though by no means consistent) connections with the Baroque. She searches for the means to establish a gender identity whose authority is derived in ways other than via the male tradition of prophecy and poetry. The very variety of the women she evokes – both biblical exempla and her own contemporaries – involves a multiplicity of feminine roles and powers and creates a sense of a woman’s community, in which ‘women “read” each other rather than suffering themselves to be written and read by men’.26 She even incorporates Christ as a member of that female community – a Christ who is, Lewalski claims, ‘thoroughly feminized in demeanor and language’.27 As Suzanne Trill observes, Christ is depicted with mixture of conventional masculine and feminine characteristics, both masculine bridegroom and lover as well as a ‘feminized’ object of devotion. Trill suggests that Lanyer portrays both men and women as exemplary and so, while she may be ‘primarily concerned with reinserting women into the story of the passion, this is not her only interest’. Yet, by including women’s voices, Janel Mueller argues, Lanyer is a more radical reader of the Gospels than any other ‘English thinker or writer of either sex until a quarter century later, in the mid-century ferment of revolution and interregnum’.28 In her writing we can certainly see, even spasmodically, emergent affinities with the Baroque.

The Ferrar/Collet Women of Little Gidding Until recently, scholarship on Little Gidding has been overwhelmingly and uncritically hagiographic, and largely centred on the life and ideals of 25 26 27 28

Chedgzoy, “Memory’, paragraphs 1, 2, 4. Miller, ‘(M)other Tongues’, p. 150. Lewalski, ‘Seizing Discourses’, pp. 49, 112. Trill, ‘Reflected Desire’, p. 114; Mueller, ‘Feminist Poetics’, pp.106–107, 123.

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its central (male) figure, Nicholas Ferrar (1593–1637). Most accounts have been based upon the long-unpublished, although frequently referenced, biography of Nicholas written by his brother John in the 1650s. For three hundred years and more, the overwhelmingly dominant view has been a romantic portrayal of Nicholas and his family as a model of benevolently patriarchal Anglican piety. The outline of what Kate Riley – not unfairly – terms John’s ‘garrulous, adulatory’ portrayal of Nicholas and the Little Gidding community received significant reinforcement from the fourth of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, written after only a single visit by Eliot to the chapel.29 Today there are many sources available for a more penetrating cultural analysis of Little Gidding, including the extensive Ferrar family papers at Magdalene College, Cambridge, now digitised and widely accessible to scholars. The early twenty-first century has therefore seen the emergence of a more mature scholarship on the community, albeit some of it still hagiographic; in particular, the creative activities, the ‘scissoring’, of the Little Gidding women, have excited the interests of historians of book-making and early modern reading strategies. We are also now able to place Little Gidding within broader ideological currents rather than simply repeating the residual pious portrayals of Nicholas; above all, we can evaluate the roles of the women in the community, and show how, despite being isolated in the depths of the countryside, they both responded and contributed to broader cultural currents of which they were only partly aware.30 Little Gidding was a family religious community, described by Deborah Shuger as a blending of country manor house and religious foundation.31 It was established in 1625 when the Ferrar family, headed initially by the elderly widow Mary (1550–1634), purchased with the profits of their investment in the Virginia Company a dilapidated rural estate in a village 30 miles north-west of Cambridge. The property included a chapel being used as a barn, a common phenomenon in post-Reformation England (witness the Slipper chapel near the ‘abbey’ and shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, Norfolk, sacked on Thomas Cromwell’s orders in the late 1530s).32 Partly motivated by financial insecurity, partly by a desire to escape the plagueridden urban environment of London, Mary Ferrar (known within the first ten years of the community as the Mother) was accompanied by her 29 Riley, ‘Good Old Way Revisited’, p. i. 30 See, e.g., among many, Smyth, ‘George Herbert’, Dyck, ‘So rare a use’, Gaudio, ‘Looking as a Scholar’, Trettien, ‘Media, Materiality, and Time’. 31 Shuger, ‘Laudian Feminism’, p. 76. 32 Waller, Walsingham, p. 27.

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son Nicholas, then 32, and joined soon after by his brother John and his wife Bathsheba, and their five-year-old son Nicholas. The community was augmented by Nicholas’s sister Susannah and her husband John and their children. Quite soon after the move, Nicholas was ordained as a deacon, and since he was therefore in minor orders, he was qualified to oversee the life of piety around which Little Gidding built its activities – a regimen of devotion, including intense exercises in memory and recitation, worship, and charitable and educational enterprises. At its most active, in the 1630s, the community probably numbered about 40, half of whom were family; the remainder were servants and teachers, who were joined each day by local young people who came for education and to join in the everyday regime of prayer, recitation, and hymn and psalm singing. Although isolated in rural Huntingdonshire, the community did attract some wider attention. It was praised and visited by dignitaries, including Archbishop Laud and King Charles I, who in 1633 inspected and then borrowed one of the distinctive products of the women of the family: a biblical ‘harmony’ or concordance, the earliest one they had produced (1630). Some years later, after the death of Nicholas in 1637, the king was presented with a more elaborate example, based on the Old Testament books of Kings and Chronicles (1637), followed by another on Acts and Revelation (made in 1638). When the king again visited Little Gidding in 1642, with the country on the brink of Civil War, he viewed a further concordance that the Collet women were preparing for his son, the Prince of Wales (later Charles II). George Herbert was a close friend of the family, and was given yet another concordance (no longer extant), which he praised effusively. The Ferrars helped with the renewal of Herbert’s church of St Mary’s at Leighton Bromswold, a few miles from Gidding, and Nicholas was responsible for having Herbert’s posthumous collection of poems published, with his niece Anna Collet probably making the fair copy (now in the Bodleian) for the printer, and thus became the ‘midwife’ to the publication, as John wrote in his biography of his brother. Another contemporary visitor was Richard Crashaw, the high church Anglican fellow of Peterhouse and vicar of Little St Mary’s in Cambridge, who later left England and converted to Catholicism. His self-consciously English Baroque poetry, briefly discussed in Chapter Two, was mainly published after his death in 1648. The connections with King Charles, Archbishop Laud, and Crashaw raise the immediate question of how close the Little Gidding community was to what God-fearing Protestants would have seen as papistry, and the extent to which Counter-Reformation theology and devotions might have impacted on the ‘Arminian nunnery’, part of the title of a 1641 Protestant

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pamphlet ridiculing the ‘nunns at Gidding’.33 It was Laud who pronounced at his trial that ‘the Church of Rome and the Protestants did not differ in fundamentals, but in circumstances’, sentiments not likely to satisfy many Protestants in the 1640s, most especially those trying Laud for treason. A neighbour of the Ferrars was an anonymous Catholic priest who discreetly visited their chapel in disguise and was impressed with Nicholas; the latter, however, made it very clear – again, at least according to his brother John – that their devotional and liturgical activities were strictly in line with the Book of Common Prayer. But there are, nonetheless, enough documented hints that we can speculate that as leader of the community, Nicholas was certainly drawn to certain aspects of Catholic devotion – and the pattern of life at Little Gidding has many characteristics in common with the communities for young English-speaking Catholic women that Mary Ward was forming across Europe in the 1620s and 1630s. Just as Ward was accused by the Catholic hierarchy of having Protestant tendencies – a charge that Gertrude More and especially Augustine Baker did not entirely escape either – so the Ferrars were suspected of papistry. The Catholic recusants Mary Ward and Gertrude More, we have seen, both followed their religious vocations, and even as children had dedicated themselves to celibacy. Likewise, the Protestant Nicholas ‘fancied being a clergyman’ from a very early age and never married, and we are told that his nieces, Mary and Anna Collet, were ‘virgins, and so resolved to continue’.34 Like both Ward and More, the Little Gidding women shared the Baroque preoccupation with stories of extreme self-sacrifice, not only of celibacy and retirement from the world but, more extremely, of martyrdom, thus exemplifying a pattern of hyperbolic dedication in common with their Catholic contemporaries. While drawing many of the stories they collected and retold from solidly Protestant sources like Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and extolling the inerrancy of Scripture, they were not averse to recording and meditating on stories of medieval saints or celebrations of the Virgin, or even accounts of recent or contemporary Catholic public figures, including a sympathetic account of Catherine of Aragon’s resistance to Henry VIII’s divorce proceedings. Before the founding of Little Gidding and after a distinguished career at Cambridge, Nicholas had spent more than five years travelling in Europe, mainly in Protestant countries, but also in Italy and Spain. Not only did he bring back a significant collection of books – many of which became 33 Anon, Armininan Nunnery. 34 Muir and White, Materials for the Life, p. 129; Sharland, Story Books, p. viii; Riley, ‘Good Old Way Revisited’, p. 129.

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‘scissored’ and pasted into the community’s Bible Harmonies, which were augmented by many more books acquired on the community’s behalf by members of their extended family or agents – but he also encountered many distinctive Catholic institutional structures and devotions: a renewed focus on the interior life of prayer, austerity and dignity, and (as we have seen with Mary Ward) an increase in charitable works in education and caring for the sick. To show that even the enclosed communities like Gertrude More’s were not entirely alien to the beliefs and practices of the Ferrar and Collet families, A.M. Williams speculates that it was likely Nicholas learned of the Oratories established by St Philip Neri, and he certainly found himself attracted to the kind of community described in Juan de Valdes’s The One Hundred and Ten Considerations, which he translated from Spanish. Completed in 1632, and accompanied by a preface by Herbert, it was eventually published in 1638 after the deaths of both Nicholas and Herbert. The sentiments of the work influenced Ferrar’s determination that ‘a man should courageously, and generously resolve himself touching the world, turning his back to all the other thereof’. Valdes had established meetings of close friends in his house, where they had discussions that seem remarkably ecumenical: at one point Valdes states, in sentiments with which most Protestants would have agreed, that ‘one must believe as if by faith alone one could be saved, and one must work as if salvation depended on works’, sentiments which would have echoed favourably with a Prayer Book Protestant like Nicholas Ferrar.35 Such influences may well have provided a model for the Little Academy that Ferrar devised for the women of the Little Gidding Community, and even, to some extent, for the children of the village. Although Mary Ferrar was the initiator and for a few years the community’s matriarch, for twelve years before his death in 1637, the procedures and expectations of the community were largely laid down by Nicholas, who was designated in the allegorical nomenclature of the community as the ‘Visitor’, the term used in the sense of an overseer or ceremonial head of a college or ecclesiastical institution. The refurbished chapel became the centre of their activities. Partly in accord with Laudian aesthetic principles, blending Common Prayer and Catholic rituals, it was given restrained but rich decoration – green furnishings for weekdays, blue for Sundays and festivals – and a Catholic east-facing altar balanced by Protestant tablets proclaiming the Creed, Commandments, and Lord’s Prayer. Candles lit the chapel, including two upon the altar. The family followed set routines for all the days of the week. They rose at 4 or 5 a.m., and each hour mixed readings, prayers, singing, and 35 Williams, Conversations, p. liv.

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reciting hymns and psalms. Worship and devotions were for all members of the community, including servants. There was a strong emphasis on decorum. While Nicholas Ferrar warned his charges against courtly pretension, fashions and vanities, he nonetheless required a level of civility that would have been appropriate to modest courtiers.36 The establishment, variously referred to as a ‘college’ or ‘academy’, however, was paramount. Schoolmasters were part of the community, and scheduled classes went on throughout the week. Each Sunday children from the neighbourhood joined the family for the recitation of psalms. These activities continued after Nicholas’s death, into the early 1640s. In 1643, Nicholas’ brother John took his granddaughter Virginia (named after the source of much of the family’s wealth in the 1620s) and his one remaining niece, Mary, to the Low Countries. They returned two years later, and by the late 1650s John was still living there and writing the biography of his brother. I turn now specifically to the women of the community and their contribution to our broadening understanding of Protestant variations of the Female Baroque. In older scholarship on Little Gidding, they were often described as subservient to Nicholas, and their activities were dismissed by Thomas Hearne in the eighteenth century as ‘maiden-sisters exercises’, sentiments echoed in the scholarship until recently.37 In addition to the founding matriarch, the elder Mary Ferrar, in her seventies when they came to Little Gidding, what A.M. Williams terms the family’s other ‘quick-witted, strong-willed women’ made up the majority of the community.38 While Ward and More, discussed in the previous chapter, seem to fit into the category of the female Baroque category more naturally, my choice of Little Gidding, the Arminian nunnery, as a primary example of Protestant Baroque, allows not just confessional contrasts with the European nunneries and communities in which Ward and More lived, but also provides some striking ideological parallels. Restrained and disciplined by the well-intentioned but firmly patriarchal authoritarianism of Nicholas, whose role with his two nieces was not only reminiscent of Mary Ward’s Jesuit confessors, but more pertinently, uncannily close to Father Augustine Baker’s relationship with Gertrude More, the women had to struggle to establish any degree of autonomy. There are letters in the Ferrar papers in which both women consult their uncle regarding their desires to remain unmarried, and are encouraged by him. The women were, Nicholas himself said, ‘much more daughter then Neice’. 36 Ransome, ‘Courtesy’, pp. 411–431. 37 Riley, ‘Good Old Way Revisited’ p. 120. 38 Williams, Conversations, pp. liv, xliii.

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Riley suggests Nicholas had a ‘sort of anticipatory marital relationship’ with his two nieces; he was ‘a sort of proto-husband, not quite a husband, not quite a father and not quite a priest’.39 Like Ward’s Jesuit confessors and More’s Father Baker, Nicholas required the women, if not to think independently, at least to write. The dominant member of the community gradually became the younger Mary, Mary Collet, who was initially known in the community’s allegorical naming game as ‘Chief’ and later inherited the title of ‘Mother’. Like her sister Anna (‘the Patient’) she had chosen a life of celibacy and took over much of the original Mother’s responsibilities: these included supervising the surgery, coordinating the storytelling, and overseeing the book-making work. At times she seems to have struggled with her avocation of celibacy, perhaps sensing that it was uncomfortably close to papistry, despite Nicholas’s explicit disdain for nuns and nunneries. Other prominent women in the family included John’s wife Susanna (‘the Moderator’), Esther (‘the Cheerfull’), Margaret (‘the Affectionate’), and two younger girls, Joyce and Judith (probably ‘the Submisse’ and ‘the Obedient’, respectively), the names chosen possibly partly to designate their roles or personalities, but sometimes perhaps as acknowledging lessons they supposedly needed. Nicholas was harsher on the peripheral women in the community than on his nieces: typical is his 1636 letter to his sister-in-law Bathsheba advising her to be ‘more obedient and subject to your Husband’ than formerly, reminding her that she must settle herself ‘to the performance of duty’, according to St Paul’s ‘Prescript’ that wives must submit themselves to their own husbands. ‘Beleive it dear sister’, he concludes, ‘by this Rule you shall bee judged the Last day’. He laid down firmly patriarchal counsels to the women, warning that they could become ‘snares for lustfull soules’, and God would not acquit them from ‘the guilt of all these Adulterous Thoughts which the wanto[n] prostitutions of their hidden beautys stir up in others hearts’. 40 It is not difficult to trace the psychodynamics behind the nomenclature and the role-playing of the Little Academy. The Mother – literally in the person of the matriarch, Mary, and then metaphorically, by election, the younger Mary Collet – is the dominant figure. Traditional patriarchal clichés regarding women’s roles abound in the Academy’s discussions: there are frequent mentions, including by the women themselves, of women’s 39 Riley, ‘Good Old Way Revisited’, p. 172; see e.g. their letters in Blackstone, Ferrar Papers, pp. 251, 263, 265. 40 Ransome, ‘Courtesy’, p. 429. The confrontation between Nicholas and Bathsheba is set out in Blackstone, Ferrar Papers, pp. 292–295.

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inherent inferiority. Yet at the same time, especially as the women in the Little Academy grow more confident, their authority emerges more firmly: the Affectionate argues that women need not be ‘farre outrunne by men’ and, more generally, that although men ‘have taken away great matters from us’, they should encourage not hinder the exercise of women’s minds, since in the ‘imployments’ of women, ‘theres exercise of Invention, of Composition, of Order, and of all the other excellent operations of the Soule, and the Beauty. And Pleasure, and other good effects that arise from these Imployments’. ‘The Guardian’ (John) is taken aback by the Affectionate’s reprimand and by her subsequent sarcasm that men ‘would have us […] spend all our time and care upon our Servants and Children’; faced with her firmness, he concedes the point, although in part to placate her indignation. 41 Like Lanyer’s community of learned women across history, and Ward’s exhortations to her young women to rival men in their achievements, women are affirmed by the female members of the Little Gidding community to have a central role in both the production and dissemination of knowledge. As Shuger points out, there are discussions about authority and the emergence of a shared responsibility that potentially circumvented the hierarchical authority of the father figure, and established firmly that, however initiated and occasionally commented upon by the Visitor, the little Academy would be built by the women upon a ‘joint covenant between themselves’. 42 A firm assertion of women’s rights emerges when the Academy agrees it should choose a woman for its new leader: the Affectionate takes the lead arguing they should ‘goe immediately to the choice, not of a Lord, but of a Lady’, adding with an extra sarcastic note that ‘it being the woman sex that exceeds both in Number and faultiness amongst us’. 43 For the Christmastide feasts in the early 1630s, as we are told in John’s memoir, they met – occasionally joined by John (the Guardian) and Nicholas (the Visitor) – to recite and make transcripts of their dialogues, in a manner not unrelated to the activities that Mary Ward hoped would be occurring in her institutions. These activities constituted the Little Academy, which was primarily concerned with the education of young women, and the result was the remarkable collection of what John explains were ‘commonly known in our family’ as the ‘Gidding story books’.44 They called the folding in and out 41 Sharland, Story Books, p. 134. 42 Sharland, Story Books pp. 162–163; Muir and White, Materials for the Life, p. 17. For further discussion of the ‘incipient republicanism’ of the Little Academy, see Shuger. ‘Laudian Feminism’. 43 Sharland, Story Books, p. 163. 44 Muir and White, Materials for the Life, p. 61.

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of their multiple tales ‘storying’, a term I introduced earlier in this study to describe a recurring characteristic of Baroque narrative. Each participant had to create and commit to memory at least parts of the dialogue before they could be assembled. Occasionally some of the younger women were permitted to read them to the group and some might be left unfinished: on one occasion the Moderator agreed to ‘change the privilege’ to read a ‘story which shortness of time and other occasions had not given leave fully to finish, much less to commit to memory’. 45 While it would be stretching the point to call the recitation of stories theatrical, nonetheless there is an acknowledgement that they required a degree of performance, including the planned assignment of parts, and the embracing of different roles, with which they seemed quietly satisfied as they performed their dialogues before the extended family. ‘Weele now come downe to the representment of some of those things in Actions which you have heard of in the Abstract’, announces the Cheerful at one point, on the verge of approving of the performative dimension of their activities. 46 Unpublished at the time, different parts of the transcripts of the Story Books were printed separately in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They have never been adequately edited as a whole. They include narratives taken from the Bible and from both early Christian and classical sources; there are stories of Protestant martyrs taken from Foxe, along with accounts of recent European celebrities, including prominent Catholics, whose values seemed to map onto those of the community. The women’s goal was to discover the wisdom of these multiple and contradictory sources and how they might be reformulated and applied to their own age, even though (or perhaps because) they saw their own times as having tragically fallen away from all such virtues. Creating the dialogues was clearly designed to provide instruction for the community’s young women equivalent to the boys’ more academic pursuits; many of the girls, it was thought, might eventually be married to clergyman or become teachers. Their intention was expressed as ‘the Discoverie of those false Opinions wherewith the world misleads all Mankind, especially our weaker sex’. Mary Collet directed them towards the ‘Great but failing hope’ of living virtuously even while knowing that merely ‘the study of Wisedom, Searching & Enquiring diligently’ into the knowledge of those things which appertain to the condition of their Sex’ would not in itself achieve salvation in an unresponsive world. 47 45 Sharland, Story Books, p. 82. 46 Blackstone, Ferrar Papers, pp. 44, 184. 47 Blackstone, Ferrar Papers, pp. lii, 184; Williams, Conversations, pp. lxxvii, 4.

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The Little Academy was one arena, therefore, where the women of Little Gidding developed a degree of autonomy, a shared autonomy but nevertheless distinct, at least in part, from the masculinist world represented in the person of Nicholas. The transcripts of their discussions include conversations, active and often intense discussions of moral dilemmas, the corruption of courts with their ‘Adulterous Leagues of mistresship & service’, the worrisome lures of pleasure, food, drink (especially the question of whether wine was a food or a medicine) – and the temptation to enjoy leisurely activities as opposed to looking for lessons taken from history or current affairs. Yet, the community’s suspicion of imaginative writing notwithstanding – ‘Ballatemakers, Epigrammatists, & such as write Sonnets of & to their Mistresses, Satirs, Comoedies & the like’ are condemned and their works branded ‘sin & Folly disguized with a superficial varnish of Art & Eloquence’48 – they all spin their multiple narratives, folding them in and out in a way not unlike that Kristeva attributes to Teresa, who had a habit of proceeding ‘like the painter of a Baroque cupola: applying layer upon layer’ to her stories. 49 In the women’s quiet but firm authority we see not just what Riley calls ‘single women negotiating masculine power’,50 but also a shared, distinctively feminine, Baroque rhetoric of multiple levels of storytelling. Multiplicity in this case did not imply moral relativism. The stories convey an atmosphere of absolutist certainty that the women of Little Gidding were expressing universal truths and lessons. They studied and shared their stories without any sense that in the wider intellectual world the seeds of a new critical history were developing, that the New Testament Gospels had, from Erasmus a century before on, been gradually subjected to an unaccustomed degree of scholarly scrutiny: the Little Gidding community simply affirms ‘that which the Scripture teacheth must needs bee in all regards infallible’.51 The women did have some at least rudimentary suspicion of the accelerating cultural changes of the age, since part of the melancholy that insistently haunts all their storying is a lurking unease about the reliability of the historical record, which emerges as a suspicion of storying itself when it threatens to be generated beyond seemingly impeccably authentic sources. The participants in the Academy are partly aware that, regardless of any authority (excepting always the Scriptures, the only ‘uncontrollable record of Mens Actions’), ‘the substance and maine passages’ of their stories are 48 Williams, Conversations, pp. 93, 206–207. 49 Kristeva, Teresa, p. 559. 50 Riley, ‘Good Old Way Revisited’, p. 180. 51 Blackstone, Ferrar Papers, p. 126.

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true, even though ‘Every Circumstance’ they ‘dare not warrant’. At its most extreme, this fear of unauthenticated, even imaginative, stories that might challenge Scriptural inerrancy is represented in the community’s awareness that Nicholas had ordered that his private collection of romances – including the works of Ariosto and Spenser – were to be burnt after his death, since all seemingly feel that, even if not meant ‘in the Authors designes’, such storying may be pernicious, ‘certainly in the Devills application’.52 Other specifically religious stories that seem today no less romantic than the narratives of Spenser or Ariosto, such as the protracted discussion of Christian martyrs, are not questioned but hyperbolically decked out with flamboyant details of sufferings, torments, and the martyr’s willingness ‘to lay down his life for the purchase’ of Heaven. The pronoun in the phrase his life is no doubt meant to be gender neutral, but as is typical of Baroque accounts of martyrs, many examples are of young women abused by what their persecutors term ‘instruments of torture’, but which for the martyrs themselves are asserted to be ‘matters of delight’.53 As Skrine comments ironically, ‘the real martyrs of the baroque age were priests and soldiers; the martyrs so often depicted in its literature and painting, however, were beautiful young women’.54 Either way, details were enviously exhibited. The Cheerfull provides a long and detailed discussion of the torturing of St Laurence, followed the next day by the Mother (by that point Anna Collet) describing the ordeals of Theodora’s torture, their stories approved by the Guardian in one of his rare interventions as examples of ‘this grand desire of Martyrdome, and this holy contention for dying’, and regretting that ‘if there were as right tilth and as good husbandry used nowadays, why should there not bee as good a crop of fayith and vertue in our Childrens minds as was in theirs’.55 But as if the emotional and intellectually disruptive developments of the seventeenth century lurked somewhere in the background, behind the community’s pious dedication to knowledge production and dissemination of seemingly self-evident truths lay the epochal ‘structure of feeling’, the characteristic Baroque melancholy. Quite apart from expressions of selfcastigation, and at times desolation and despair – ‘From my youth up thy terrors have I suffered with a troubled mind’ writes Nicholas – there are not just pious commonplaces but a deep-rooted response to the age. The Little Gidding community resembled their own description of Henry IV of Spain: 52 Blackstone, Ferrar Papers, pp. 61, 121. 53 Blackstone, Ferrar Papers, p. 255. 54 Skrine, Baroque, p. 65. 55 Blackstone, Ferrar Papers, pp. 271, 255, 286.

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‘his heart is swallowed up with griefe & Melancholy, though hee knows not why’. One story after another teaches, ‘if neither Kings nor Popes can find Joy or Happiness, who can hope to doe it in this world?’56 Emperor Charles V is singled out as an overwhelming example of melancholic resignation as he separates himself from the prestige and burdens of his throne. And hanging over the whole experiment of Little Gidding are the shadows of exile, retreat, and very concretely, the coming Civil War. Melancholy and hyperbole are not merely categories of subjective experience but cultural tropes involving deep-rooted interrelations and disjunctions between self and world – both their immediate world of England and Christendom in the 1630s, and a broader world undergoing revolutionary changes. More strikingly reflective of the Baroque than the Academy’s storying is the other extraordinary activity of the women of the Little Gidding community, in which they once again took the initiative from the patriarch Nicholas but developed a striking degree of gendered autonomy and unpredictability – the production of at least fifteen ‘concordances’ or ‘harmonies’, created between around 1630 and the early 1640s. These consisted of hand-made books constructed of textoids taken from various versions, both English and Latin, of the Bible. They were cut out and pasted, along with a multitude of pictoids, illustrations taken from the community’s collection of books, many of which had been bought unbound. Most of the Harmonies (the Community preferred the term ‘concordances’) focus on the Gospels, although some are dedicated to the Pentateuch, and others are limited to Kings, Chronicles, and Revelation. There is an unfinished harmony of the Pentateuch, now among the Ferrar Papers at Magdalene College, and there was probably another unfinished one, seen in 1642 by King Charles, being prepared for his son as Civil War approached. The Little Gidding harmonies were unusual neither in their underlying rationale nor, in fact, as material objects. ‘Commonplacing’, the extracting or paraphrase of texts into a separate pedagogical or mnemonic document (‘a commonplace book’), was a widespread practice in the age. Especially for a godly Protestant, suspicious of any idolatrous inclination to revere the material world, the Gospel itself might be inspired, but words, let alone parts of words, even single letters, were not holy per se; they were material, ‘mobile’ objects, available to be manipulated and rearranged.57 Scriptural harmonies, indeed, had originated in the first centuries of the Christian Church; as the battles among the early Christian communities 56 Blackstone, Ferrar Papers, p. 6. 57 Smyth; ‘Little Clippings’, p. 602; Dyck, ‘So rare a use’, pp. 67–81.

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started to determine which records and stories found in the early Gospels and related documents were to be accepted, at least one attempt was made to harmoniously blend the Gospels – despite what modern New Testament scholars accept as inconsistencies, incompatible details, and major contradictions, some of which had started slowly to surface in scholarship from Erasmus onwards but which do not become prominent in philosophical or theological circles until later in the seventeenth century. But among Protestants, illustrated bibles and prayer books developed within a few decades of the invention of printing, and are found in England from the 1530s, especially as vernacular Bibles multiplied and, after some decades, were eventually approved for Catholics. The Little Gidding Harmonies are, however, distinctive, not least in that they illustrate in a spectacular way so many Baroque characteristics: their multiple textual juxtapositions; their interfolding stories; their attempt to overcome through activity what comes all too readily through storying: that is, both individual and communal melancholia; their obvious status as kitsch. Moreover, within the ideological history of the epoch, the Harmonies show the community’s attempt to shore up ancient authority against the emergence of disturbingly multiple ways of reading the sacred text, most importantly, how to circumvent the anxiogenic plateauing of human desire to combat the nothingness that lay behind the shifting currents of the Baroque century. The biblical textoids were cut out, often into minute fragments, and then pasted into the Harmonies. They were accompanied by myriad illustrations, extracted and reassembled, sometimes using tiny pictorial and verbal details (not only full prints), accumulated from a variety of sources that the women culled and repurposed, primarily from the countless number of prints and printed books that were flooding the European market.58 The emblem tradition, at which I glanced in Chapter one (under the heading of Maravall’s kitsch), may have emerged in Catholic Europe, but its influence was felt across the whole continent, not least in Protestant England. Prayer cards, pilgrimage pennants, reproductions of devotional prints, ‘touched-to’ relics may have been associated by pious Protestants with Catholic superstition, but sumptuously illustrated bibles and engravings of scriptural scenes nevertheless poured forth from Reformed sources in a major Protestant re-appropriation of the visual.59 58 For detailed discussion of some of the sources for the illustrations, see Henderson, ‘Biblical Illustration’, pp. 173–216. Gaudio, Scriptural Harmony, provides an admirable listing of actual and possible additional sources used in the construction of the Harmonies: see especially Ch. 1, ‘Rend and Repair’. 59 Freedberg, ‘Prints and the Status of Images’, pp. 40–41, 45.

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The pictoids used by the Ferrar/Collet women came mainly from sixteenth-century mannerist prints from the Netherlands that Nicholas continually sought after in the market, frequently using servants and agents to procure them. Instructions were sometimes given to seek out a specific scene; if the illustration itself was unavailable separately, then the whole book was to be purchased. The illustrations came from both Catholic and Protestant sources: included in the plethora of unused prints in the Magdalene Ferrar papers is a picture of Christ with the Virgin Mary and St Anne, originally illustrating a prayer for the remission of a thousand years in Purgatory by an indulgence of Pope Alexander VI, which was hardly an acceptable example for pious Prayer Book Protestants. The use of such a source shows that assembling the documents involved deliberate and sometimes contradictory choices, so that each of the books is distinctive, despite their overall structure being provided by the biblical narratives. Their sources included an existing English harmony, the Monotessaron (compiled by Henry Garthwaite in 1634), of which the community owned at least two copies, which were ‘scissored’ and incorporated into some of their own productions.60 The partly-used or neglected prints and illustrations built up into a collection of random leftovers, many of which are now assembled in the Magdalene papers. We can get a sense of how the Little Gidding women themselves saw their work from the earliest extant title page (c. 1630), which is in effect also an advertisement, and reads: ‘The Actions & Doctrine & other passages touching our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as they are related by the foure Evangelists, reduced to one complete body of historie’. A later volume, the one eventually presented to the King. is headed ‘THE ACTIONS & DOCTRINE & Other PASSAGES touching Our Lord and Saviour JESUS CHRIST, as they are related by the FOURE EVANGELISTS, Reduced into one Complete Body of HISTORIE’. From John’s biography, we can reconstruct something of the material details of how the work proceeded, and so examine at a micro level how Baroque ideology spoke through the everyday activities of this group of earnest Protestant women. John states that Nicholas sat in a ‘fair large room for one hour a day’, surrounded by sayings and quotations on the walls; this was named the ‘Concordance Chamber’. He gave directions how and ‘in what manner’ they needed to cut each piece, which was then ‘to be pasted down on sheets of paper’ and ‘pressed down’ to create ‘a new 60 Ransome, ‘Monotessaron’, pp. 22–52; for detailed analysis of the extensive borrowing – what might in a different context even be termed ‘plagiarism’ – see Cop, ‘Compositions for a King’, pp. 29–44.

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kind of printing’.61 But although Nicholas may have initiated the activity, and provided much of the material, the actual work was carried out by the Collet sisters. Some of their choices are quaintly personal, as when they illustrate a reference in Acts to four ‘virgins, which did Prophesy’ with some pictures of nuns which, as Henderson suggests, we obviously can see as references to themselves. Other illustrations show their habit of reading biblical metaphors literally, without any sense of incongruity (again, a distinctively Baroque blurring of contradictory planes of reality) as when the ‘beam’ in the eye in the Sermon on the Mount is rendered as a plank of wood floating in the air. Overall, we see here a Baroque folding of text as visuality and the visual as textuality.62 The illustrations raise a central question with regards to Protestantism and its relationship to Baroque culture: its unease about visual representations of sacred persons and events, a concern to which the Little Gidding community was certainly attuned. Whereas the Council of Trent’s emphasis that ‘great profit is derived from all sacred images’ and that the visual can legitimately portray ‘the stories of the mysteries of our Redemption’ had led to ‘the production and consumption of pictures on an unprecedented, quasi-industrial scale’,63 in Little Gidding, we can see how even in Protestant circles, there was an acknowledgement of the usefulness of both the production and consumption of visual aids. A 1636 Harmony, now in the British Library, has an extraordinary range of illustrations, typically created by bringing together different textoids cut from quite different sources. Nicholas, however, clearly disapproved of representations of God. The opening illustration of one Harmony is a depiction of the Annunciation: where we might expect to see, as in so many late Medieval and Renaissance paintings, the deity looking down benevolently over the scene, there is simply a tetragrammaton. But the choices of illustrations are otherwise broadminded, including distinctively – even provocatively – both Catholic pictures (for example, an engraving of the miraculous transport of the house of Loreto) and Protestant images, especially from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Many are from the prolific Dutch printmaking industry, which dominated the European market; some are edited versions and reprints by English printers like the Royalist Robert Peake, whose printing received a prominent mention in Laud’s trial. Maravall’s Baroque category of kitsch, then, is spectacularly illustrated by the Little Gidding harmonies. We can also observe the characteristic folds 61 Blackstone, Ferrar Papers, p. xxxi. See Smyth, ‘Little Clippings’, pp. 585–613. 62 Henderson, ‘Biblical Illustration’, pp. 173–216. 63 Braider, Baroque Self-Invention, p. 42.

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of Baroque narrative, especially as the ambitions of the Ferrars and Collets grew to incorporate a multiplicity of sources, a habit that increased as the 1630s proceeded and they added more Harmonies. An enormous amount of labour went into cutting up, choosing, rearranging, and glueing the text and illustrations, and most importantly for my argument, it was carried out by the women, acting with an unusual degree of autonomy, far more than their (clearly great) competence in domestic handiwork or their skill with needles and scissors afforded, however directly relevant those skills certainly were. Shuger perhaps exaggerates when she talks of the storybooks and the concordances making the Ferrar/Collet women ‘candidates for the single most important corpus of women’s literature in English from 1400 to 1650,64 but there is no question that, despite the tradition of hagiographical reverence for Nicholas, the material work for the Harmonies was done by the women and should be read as these women probing deeply into their feelings and desires to discover, communicate and in a sense actually create, aspects of their inner selves. Just as Mary’s appointment as the new ‘Mother’ in 1632 was an expression of the community’s (perhaps unconscious) rejection of the traditional gender-based hierarchy, so it is that creation of the Harmonies is an expression of the Female Baroque. In making these works, the women of Little Gidding were grappling with at least two major anxiety-generating issues common to the era, which I have already touched on in relation to storying and the reliability of the Christian gospels and historical records generally. First, reading different gospel accounts side-by-side might bring out disturbing and unacceptable contradictions, thereby raising the question of the reliability of the biblical text; second, it was unclear whether it was therefore desirable, or even possible, to direct or constrain readings of the biblical text to direct the faithful to come to an agreed meaning. These had been controversial issues for the early Church and became major concerns for biblical exegetes once again from the Reformation onwards, especially as competing versions of Christianity became part of the consciousness of the age. The consensus of today’s New Testament scholars is that there are obvious and significant contradictions among the four Gospels, reflecting different goals and audiences, and in many cases drawing on quite different oral and written traditions, including romantic fiction. By the mid-seventeenth century these controversies were starting to slowly surface. The question of how the Bible hung together for readers when different translations raised questions of meaning and 64 Shuger, ‘Laudian Feminism’, p. 70.

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intention, and the widespread adoption of the Protestant innovation of numbering verses, as well as the proliferation of marginal cross-references, all increasingly threatened to disrupt the narrative, and might well imply that there were multiple modes of reading. The Geneva Bible includes a very dense set of cross-references to guide the reader along approved paths of reading. Marginal cross-references were, at least in intention, one means of guaranteeing accurate or at least approved readings of the Scriptures. Commonplace books compiled by the pious would collect an assortment of textual quotations, often under particular headings for comfort, inspiration, prayer, or to provide doctrinal certainty. But such habits increased not only engagement with the Bible but also the tendency to see the Scriptures as a patchwork, and so encouraged individual rather than communal typological interpretation. Readers thus used personal variants of traditional typological reading to demonstrate God’s interventions into their individual histories. The goal of the Little Gidding Harmonies was clearly to set out an inspiring and reassuring view of divine revelation. But in the ‘Advertisements’ to some volumes, there is an acknowledgement that readers would find the ‘agreements & differences’ of the Gospels and that they might interpret them in different ways. Around the same time, this possibility was becoming a major matter of controversy in New England as the Puritan community wrestled with the disruptive presence of Anne Hutchinson. As the Little Gidding women became more ambitious – and more independent, following Nicholas’s death in 1637 – their Harmonies used increasingly elaborate methods to recreate the texts and illustrations. A British Library copy (C23e4) describes an especially obsessive rearrangement. What is termed the ‘comparison’ sets out in parallel columns verses from the gospels, which are labelled A (Matthew) B (Mark), C (Luke), and D (John). What the evangelists say in the different gospels is put ‘in their own words by way of COMPARISON’; they are then put together in a linear arrangement, ‘brought into one Narration by way of COMPOSITION’, then ‘Extracted into one clear Context by way of COLLECTION’, which puts together the full texts of each gospel; finally, anything left over, ‘whatsoever is Permitted in the Context’, is then inserted as a ‘SUPPLEMENT’. These categories are distinguished by typeface: black letter text provides the ‘context’, combining the various gospels into a single story; roman text is used for the ‘supplement’, text that has been supposedly omitted, much of this being only slightly varying repetitions of the same story.65 65 Gaudio, ‘Harmonies’, provides a similar analysis of the concordance at Hatfield House in Printed Image, pp. 28–30. See also Ransome, ‘Monotessaron’, pp. 22–52.

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At their most elaborate, then, the Harmonies fold back and forth not just among different texts and illustrations, but different narratives within the same text. Words and even narrative details could differ: pious Protestants believed that the language of the Scriptures could be reconciled either by constructing a single narrative or, as the women of Little Gidding do, by presenting conflicting accounts and accompanying the text with explanatory commentary. But these alternative ways of reading reveal not only a desire for comprehensiveness but also an underlying restlessness, as if the compilers were searching through these varied juxtapositions to find a perplexing, increasingly hidden, or oblique truth. Even while the compositions attempt to smooth over differences and contradictions, they are, in fact, juxtaposing different narrative strands that have been welded together, in the belief (or hope) that meaning could somehow be fixed. However, the very range of different shapes, scales, typefaces, pictorial scenes, emblematic symbols, spaces and blanks, and in a couple of cases different languages keeps the potential meaning always shifting, always ‘awkwardly placed on the border of destruction and creation’66 – an intimate example of what I have termed Baroque plateauing. ‘Scissoring’ became a key aspect of writing: Gaudio comments that ‘harmony’ is not an accomplished fact in these volumes but an on-going activity, ‘a way of thinking with scissors and paste’.67 Increasingly over the 1630s, the harmonies became increasingly complex, typically ‘moving from the presentation of a single collated text to a multiple text, one revealing its collation and offering the possibility of other collations’,68 opening connections not just within but beyond the limits of the text’s normal order. As Dyck notes, the process amounts to ‘an ongoing formation of the self by the text’ itself: ‘the many bits of paper that constitute the page are a steady witness to the mobility of the text’, what Smyth terms ‘toggling’ that creates a sense of oscillation between presence and absence. The story is never finished, but always invites multiple provisional completions.69 Two of the compositions are now available digitally, but to read them on line is to avoid yet another aspect of the very physicality of the continually multiplying ideological folds that the community’s obsessiveness reveals, much as the Countess of Pembroke’s tinkerings create an insecure, 66 Smyth, ‘Little Clippings’, p. 605. 67 Dyck, ‘So rare a use’, pp. 67–68; Gaudio, Scriptural Harmony, p. 144. See also Smyth, Material Texts, p. 53: ‘writing as the product of scissors and glue’. 68 Dyck, ‘So rare a use’, p. 81. 69 Smyth, ‘Little Clippings’, pp. 596, 604; Dyck, ‘So rare a use’, p. 78.

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continually shifting text in her Psalms. I will look in a little detail at one especially intriguing example, as it uncovers so many of the habits and unconscious assumptions of its compilers. This is the ‘Done at Little Gidding’ Pentateuch Harmony, found among the Ferrar Papers (Old Library 1852a) at Magdalene College. It is only partly finished: some of the illustrations and textoids may have become unglued; many had never been mounted but were interleaved (and are now collected in glasene envelopes). The collection conveys a sense of the repertoire of material from which the women would have made their selections. The arrangement of the Harmony as it stands suggests the snippets from the Old Testament Pentateuch would have been divided into three categories, Moral, Ceremonial and Political. The existing material does not exactly follow that order and most of the pages remain ruled in preparative double red lines, with most of the blank rectangular spaces set aside for text and pictures still unfilled. The material that accompanies the prepared but incomplete pages is a miscellany of large uncut illustrations and small textoids – some as tiny as one word, others as extensive as one or more verses. The pictures are likewise miscellaneous: they include large octavo size prints and a variety of tiny, immaculately cut-outs. Most look as if they were designed to eventually illustrate the Old Testament text, literally rather than typologically; they include scenes of battle, Jewish priests, and camels; some are more allegorical – for example, a print depicting forces representing Christianity battling pagans and being blessed by an angel, their arms and accoutrements labelled justice, truth, faith. Scattered around, seemingly arbitrarily, are tiny pictures of angel heads with wings, larger, more conventional angels, and an occasional dove to represent the Holy Spirit. In accordance with Nicholas’s prejudice, there are no representations of the deity. In addition to presenting the books of the Pentateuch according to this arrangement, the material is also arranged with various broad typological considerations in mind, wherein Old Testament events and characters are types anticipating later New Testament meanings. Typology is one of the oldest Christian ways of reading the Hebrew Scriptures, and was overwhelmingly the favoured form of early modern biblical commentary. On one early page in the Magdalene Harmony there is a set of quotations anticipating the birth of Jesus in the immaculate handwriting of Mary Collet: ‘These prophesys show’, she has written, the ‘place of his Birth’, while others explain the ‘manner how he hath appeared, partly glorious, and partly poore and inglorious’. Among the unmounted illustrations there are some that could be used to express the typological emphases of the Pentateuch

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text. These include a large illustration of the slaughter of the Innocents, three large manger pictures, with the Holy family, animals and the three Kings and shepherds. We can also see hints of a kind of personal typological thinking, typical of Protestant insistence that a typological reading of the Old Testament can reveal the salvation drama of every individual. What we see in this amalgam are multiple competing narratives. Taken all together, the material in the Magdalene Pentateuch can, not unfairly, be seen a classic example of kitsch; even fully assembled, it would have been no less so because of the incessant re-arrangement and detailed tinkering, which we can see in the production of all the Harmonies. It would have been designed to reveal the narrative the women wanted to communicate to the whole community as a reassuring expression of their shared beliefs. But the material also reveals other patterns that contradict those orthodox intentions. Psychologically, it is as if the given order of the Old Testament text needed be supplemented, as if its meanings no longer conveyed truth sufficiently clearly. The fear was that all around them, whether in the last days (a common Protestant belief) or at least as Civil War approached, the world no longer saw the inherent truth of revelation, which needed to be spelled out over and over in different ways, none of which was finally satisfactory. Once again, the experience of plateauing is both psychological and cultural. There is, in short, a level of anxious obsession in the over-coding of the Harmonies that not only betrays the personalities of the individual members of the community but reveals a sense of wider ideological forces. Setting out the multiple versions of the gospels, even if the pious intention is to demonstrate that they mean essentially the same, produces a striking juxtaposition of differences on a single page. To boldly see the gospels in ‘harmony’ was inadvertently opening up the issue of the textual integrity of the Bible and therefore the question of its reliability. The implication here is that the reader cannot take as given the stability of the text, but must rely on, if one is a good Protestant, the guidance of the Spirit, or in the case of the dutiful Catholic, the authority of the Church. Behind the intention of the Harmonies there is a nostalgia, looking back to ‘the childlike paradise’ from which not just the Little Gidding family but the whole epoch has been expelled. The 1640s sees a renewed burst of Protestant iconophobia in England and the Gidding ‘harmonies’ show the strains that, in Gaudio’s phrase, will both ‘unleash’ and ‘disenchant’ that development.70 But at a deeper ideological level, the most powerful absence that overshadows the Little Gidding community is the gradual fading of the 70 Gaudio, Scriptural Harmony, p. 163.

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traditional metaphysical world. They are, in one sense, concrete instances of disharmony: Gaudio quotes T.A. Birrell’s stray remark that they are instances of ‘High Anglican Baroque’, because ‘these fragments never let us forget that they cannot, finally, deliver on their promises’.71 The Harmonies reverberate with emotional and ideological power reaching deeply into not merely personal but epochal significance. The lack of completion in the very texture of the Harmonies is in itself Baroque, and underlines the frustrating plateauing incompleteness of the search for truth. What these texts betray, both in their language and their illustrations, are a number of absent presences both in the vicinity of the text and in relation to the broader epochal ideological contradictions. The melancholia of the stories in the Little Academy is echoed in the very present absences in the Harmonies – a title which we might see as ironic or as betraying far more than just the hyperbole of the Baroque. No less than with Gertrude More’s final ambiguous silence, it registers the age’s most defining Baroque characteristic – the plateauing of hope, expectation, a yearning for transcendence that seems increasingly illusory.

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Colonial Protestant Female Baroque The Collet women’s comfortable surroundings at Little Gidding were made possible by the family’s investments in the New World, in the Virginia Company. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European countries, especially those that both faced the Atlantic and were closely associated with the militant Catholic Reformation – most notably Spain and Portugal  – expanded beyond Europe, particularly across the Atlantic to the Americas. Today we can look back at the consequences, with no little apprehension, anger, and shame, but also see that along with the material and spiritual exploitation of the New World there was a compensatory and multi-layered symbolic transference. These developments were especially striking in Central and South America, where the culturally explosive confrontation of absolutist post-Tridentine Catholicism and indigenous cultures produced a remarkable upsurge of artistic hyperbole, melancholy, plateauing, and most visibly, kitsch – which we can label Colonial Catholic Baroque. Such cultural hybridity has played a major part in the modern redefinition of the traditional Eurocentric concept of the Baroque, showing that it is not simply stylistic extravagance, artificiality, and ornamentation associated 71 Gaudio, Scriptural Harmony, pp. 144, 166.

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with the ideological and iconographic strategies of the European CounterReformation. It incorporates an international dimension, derived from the host of cultural contradictions that emerged in the confrontation of Old and New Worlds. Can, however, we look to a parallel process in Puritan New England? Austin Warren’s pioneering 1941 essay on Edward Taylor’s poetry as ‘Colonial Baroque’ remains an isolated analysis of how the Baroque was translated into the New England context. Warren worked within the traditional classification of English Metaphysical poets, making the dual case that Taylor’s poetry, belatedly and on the most obscure geographical frontier, adapted the characteristics of Donne, Quarles, and Crashaw, and – a lesser but nonetheless explicit concern of his essay – established its links with broader European trends.72 An argument can be made for setting many of the dominant strands of New England Puritan theology and social structures within the Baroque model, including many of those characteristics I have highlighted throughout this study. The Boston congregation in which Anne Bradstreet’s father and husband held responsible positions, and which finally expelled Anne Hutchinson, was no less an absolutist community than the post-Tridentine Catholic Church. It was rigidly hierarchical, insisting on order and subordination, not least from women. What her opponents loosely labelled Hutchinson’s ‘antinomianism’, plus her level of local community support, however temporary, among both men and women, represented tangible threats to the authority of the Boston authorities as represented by Governor Winthrop and the Elders who tried her. Both the authorities and the ‘heretic’ herself expressed their views in the hyperbole of denunciatory absolutism. Baroque rhetoric, in short, was not simply the dogmatic propagandistic instrument of the European Counter-Reformation but was shared across confessional and geographical boundaries. The further category ‘Colonial Female Baroque’ is arguably relevant to a number of social formations growing from the European incursions into the Americas, from the French trading settlements in the St Lawrence River Valley, to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of Central and South America, and including the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam (by mid-century ceded to the English), the New England settlements and their eventual spin-offs in Rhode Island and Connecticut, as well as the older settlements in Virginia. All these areas faced the problems of maintaining their distinctive European identities, including their fears of being overwhelmed by degenerate and monstrous ‘Indianization’ (Cotton Mather’s phrase in his 72 Warren, ‘Edward Taylor’s Poetry’, pp. 355–371.

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1702 Magnalia Christi Americana), the possibility that the ‘wilderness’ would invade the godly Puritan settlements.73 Part of the wilderness became identified with the female. The behaviour of women, especially those claiming preaching or prophetic privileges, became an especially urgent concern in Puritan New England. Along with ‘Indians’, women are frequently characterised as evoking dark forces within the self that Protestant orthodoxy would inevitably blame upon women’s distinct degree of fallenness. Part of the Boston community elders’ reaction to Hutchinson was an anxiety about female otherness: nothing in the Scriptures had suggested the existence of innumerable people in any New World, just as, according to their exegesis, there was no justification for women’s preaching and teaching. When we look across the Atlantic to the English colonies, we find two women in particular whose lives and works can help broaden the conventional notion of ‘colonial Baroque’: Anne Bradstreet and Anne Hutchinson.

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Anne Bradstreet If ‘Baroque’ applies to Bradstreet at all, it would seem to be primarily on the level of affinities of her poetical style with those of the so-called Metaphysicals in her native England. She does at times seemed to exemplify Canfield’s concept of a Baroque spirit bursting (or, in her case, more accurately, just peeping) through the orderliness of a dominant discourse – if not with an excess of exuberance or grotesqueness, at least with occasional irregularity or asymmetry that suggests underlying tensions and contradictions. Most of her poems, even those distinctive lyrics of personal feeling and domesticity that are usually singled out for praise, approach without exceeding the degree of seriousness or wit typical of the so-called Cavalier poets – though with her characteristic subject matter she is closer to Herbert than to Herrick – so we might term her work pale Baroque, not unlike the woman poet with whom she claimed a distant family connection, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. Where perhaps we can most easily see Canfield’s ‘eruptions’ is in Bradstreet’s early poems where she is imitating Guillaume Du Bartas (whose works she read in the translation by Joshua Sylvester), particularly his enormously popular Works and Days, for which the pejorative associations of Maravall’s term ‘kitsch’ seems ready-made. In her elegy on the Huguenot poet, by means of what Louisa Hall suggestively terms ‘innovative errors’, Bradstreet cobbles together ‘an overlapping web of metaphors’, mixing 73 See Hilliker, ‘Engendering Identity’, p. 436.

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meanings ‘to create a state of fantastical uncertainty’, without (again, like the Pembroke psalms) knowing fully the origins or implications of what she is articulating.74 In the ‘Prologue’ to her imitations of Bartas’s ‘sugared lines’, she speaks of her ‘foolish, broken, blemished Muse’: ‘A Bartas can do what a Bartas will’, she affirms, ‘But simple I according to my skill’. In a poetic tribute to Philip Sidney, Bradstreet pursues hyperbolically mixed metaphors that try to echo his more coherent comparisons: her eyesight is dazzled by the lines; they cause ‘flowers and fruits soon to abound’– although in her barren case, she confesses, merely a daisy. In true Bartas style, the metaphors then rapidly shift to comparing her political skills to that of a child staring at the glittering fashions of the court, which remind her of his profound learning and ‘sweet influences’.75 What Hall calls Bradstreet’s ‘sliding metaphors’ may be merely a ‘failure of craft’, but her writing is best described as ‘accidentally’ Baroque – quite apart from its merits as personal lyric or as revealing the moving struggles of a woman exiled by religion and domestic loyalties far from her origins or desires. In the Sidney elegy, Bradstreet’s halting syntax conveys the sense that she is torn by contradictory discourses – perhaps, in this case, between Old and New England. Hall comments that Bradstreet’s ‘couplets seem to move in two directions at once’; she has an intellectual goal of placing her poetical voice alongside Sidney’s but her ‘ideas seem disobedient to the organizing force’ of her verse.76 In my discussion of Mary Sidney, I showed how Baroque stylistic effects similarly struggled to the surface of her psalm translations, paradoxically turning some of them into more independent poems, as well as making them more personally revelatory. Setting Bradstreet in the broader cultural context of the Baroque, we can see ways in which the characteristic discourses of Puritanism – its dark dualisms, its insistent combination of hyperbole and anxious melancholy, always on the verge of despair, and therefore most of all its recurrent plateauing – speak, however fitfully, though her. Part of the ‘unease’ that many readers sense in Bradstreet’s poetry comes from an experience related to a deep and almost cosmic melancholy, as she looks back to Old England. Torn between a nostalgia for Elizabethan aristocratic literature and her Protestant affiliations, she records her first reaction to New England as one of shock: ‘I found a new world and new manners, at which my heart rose’.77 We can see 74 Hall, ‘Innovative Errors’, pp. 1–28. 75 Bradstreet, Works, pp. 15–16, 192. 76 Hall, ‘Innovative Errors’, pp. 9, 16, 10. 77 Bradstreet, Works, p. 241.

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a Baroque pattern there as alternative narratives present themselves to her, and she clearly spent a number of years trying to negotiate among them. Specif ically, as a writing woman, does Bradstreet contribute to our understanding of the female Baroque? A recurring feature of that category so far has been both dependency upon and at least incipient rebellion against male authority or mentors, and the masculinist discourse that they seem to inhabit so naturally. All the women in this study – even including, as Chapter Seven will show, the outspoken and socially privileged Margaret Cavendish and the libertine Aphra Behn – lived and wrote under the shadow of women’s assumed inherent inferiority and had to struggle to find or invent their own language. In many cases, whether by direct confrontation or not, they affirm women’s right to both invade the sphere of masculine discourse and, in some cases, claim access to what they see as distinctive women’s experiences. Bradstreet’s sense of her inadequacy was reflected in her acknowledgement that, in the eyes of her fellow colonists, she was slandered by ‘each carping tongue | Who says my hand a needle better fits’.78 Robert Hilliker provides a useful context for analysing the New England Baroque tendencies by putting Bradstreet alongside another prominent woman of the seventeenth-century colonial expansion (already mentioned in connection with Gertrude More), Marie de l’Incarnation, a nun in New France, who established an educational mission for women. He sees them both as bringing from the European Baroque experience a repertoire of innovative gender-aware metaphors to the colonial experience: whereas early explorers like Sir Walter Raleigh employ a blatantly sexual language that portrays the discovery and conquest of a ‘Countrey that have yet her Maydenhead’, or seeing New England as ‘a rich widow, now to be tane up or laid downe’, Hilliker points to both Bradstreet and Sister Marie seeing the experience of the ‘new world and new manners’ in terms of a less victimized, feminine America.79 But there is a difference between the dutiful (if sometimes quietly rebellious) New England puritan matron and the dedicated nun of Nouvelle France, and it can be highlighted by putting Marie alongside not Bradstreet but rather her compatriot and, before their immigration, near neighbour in Lincolnshire, Anne Hutchinson. The Catholic nun, freed from the constrictions of the Old World and a willing vehicle of the Counter-Reformation beyond Europe, shows some uncanny affinities with the radical female heretic of New England. 78 Bradstreet, Works, p. 16. 79 Hilliker, ‘Engendering Identity’, p. 439.

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Anne Hutchinson Since the seventeenth century, the trials and expulsion of Hutchinson (1591–1643) have been rewritten from very different perspectives. Was she anarchically undermining the authority of a godly community identified with the panel of sincere male elders who judged her? Was she articulating a Protestant variation of medieval mysticism? How do we respond to her distinctive Calvinist variation of Hörigkeit, with its stress on the glorification of God alongside her own total worthlessness, and the shared sense among all the New England settlers that suffering was a means by which God distinguished them as a chosen people? Or do we see Hutchinson as a proto-feminist, enacting an eruptive revolt against patriarchal absolutism, rejecting a male-dominated view of religion and turning to long-standing traditions of female spirituality rooted in informal house meetings, visions, and prophesying? Do we get hints of that mysterious emergence of a women’s language that often surges up within the Baroque? Can we state that masculinist piety and devotion, as exemplified by the Boston Elders, was apparently public, rational, and authoritative, while any emergent female discourse must be viewed as merely private, intuitive, and emotional? Like the other Baroque women, Hutchinson is spoken by a multiplicity of discourses. Unlike Bradstreet, but ironically very much like the Catholics Gertrude More and Mary Ward, an initial problem in analysing Hutchinson and trying to unpack the emergent discourses that speak through her is that we do not have direct access to her writings or speeches. Ironically, the woman who most clearly exemplifies the female Baroque in Colonial New England left us no direct language, and so we are forced to read her stories beneath and through those of others, including her interrogations by the Puritan elders in 1636, and the narratives recorded and at times ruthlessly redacted by Governor John Winthrop. The longest of these accounts is Winthrop’s; ironically titled A Short Story, it was published in 1644, but recounts the 1638 events as if they were still going on. It is, Deborah Schneider comments, ‘not an entirely reliable source’: Winthrop’s memories and justifications provide a remarkable instance, typical of the absolutist regimes of the age, of ‘formidable spin control’ and Baroque polemical style.80 Additionally, there are some anonymous notes made at or after Hutchinson’s trials, along with a later account by a male descendant claiming (with some plausibility) to reproduce an original document authored by her. As with the other women 80 Schneider, ‘Hutchinson and Covenant Theology’, pp. 485–486.

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in this study, the phenomenon of a male presence in various senses behind explosions of women’s language seems to be near universal. As Kristeva comments ironically of Teresa, ‘a tenderly strict paternalism is indispensable, and will be needed for a long term to come, mark my words’.81 Among recent scholars, Michael Winship has led a revisionist revaluation of the whole antinomian controversy in New England (which he re-names the ‘free grace’ controversy), pointing out how all sides relied on the same repertoire of reading and interpreting the Scriptures, and how many of the issues at stake were not native to New England but went back to the early years of the Reformation. In what follows, therefore, I make no claim to any original analysis of the theological or institutional aspects of Hutchinson’s two trials. I largely follow Winship’s account in order to bring out the Baroque characteristics of the events as they erupt through the stolid prose of the trial reports. The theological charges against Hutchinson amounted to an accusation that she believed and proclaimed that the elders of the community were teaching a Covenant of Works not Grace. Hutchinson asserted (in the context of looking for proofs of election) that evident sanctification or observable Christian behaviour was neither cause nor proof of Christ’s free gift of redemptive grace. The community’s ministers saw that position as both theologically unacceptable and a challenge to their civil and religious authority. Using what became an iconic if unspecified label, they accused her of Antinomianism. The term means lawlessness, but at the time it was used broadly and often indiscriminately as a pejorative term for the alleged teaching that Christians, once justified, were under no obligation to obey the law. In many of his early letters, Paul asserts that we are saved by the uninformed grace of God, not by our own works, described by the term ‘freedom in Christ’ (Galatians 2:4). If God chooses the elect, from all eternity, what exactly is the disadvantage in sinning? Is there any reward for obedience to a community, such as a Church or, in this case, the elders of the New England congregation? This was a view the early Church attributed to some of the so-called Gnostic sects; following the Reformation, it was frequently attributed by the Catholic Church to the general Protestant doctrine of salvation by faith alone and, by polemical extension, to the Protestant rejection of the sacramental structure and authority of the Church. Pejorative use of the term Antinomianism further suggested that such a doctrine leads inevitably to various sorts of licentiousness, or at least an indifference to and even deliberate opposition to the community of the faithful. In New 81 Kristeva, Teresa, p. 533.

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England, it was a label that was thrown around randomly, but it landed on what many felt were fundamental aspects of the Christian doctrine of justification and salvation. There is, however, little evidence for the existence of the ‘Hutchinsonians’ that Winthrop claimed were undermining the order of the whole community and, in doing so, breaking the fifth commandment to honour one’s parents. This commandment, Winship points out, became ‘a standard justification for deference to rulers’: Anne Hutchinson was, in their minds, the ‘breeder and nourisher of all these distempers’, and the ‘root of all these troubles’.82 Minister John Cotton, who had been Hutchinson’s mentor, possibly even before she left for New England, acknowledged to her that ‘yow have bine an Instrument of doing some good amongst us, yow have bine helpfull to many’, in matters appropriate for a woman, such as instructing children, servants, as well as other women, especially ‘in the times of child-birth’, and also being helpful ‘to your husband in the Government of the family’.83 But it was, or at least had been, Cotton’s theological position that was closest to the one Hutchinson came to maintain: that the Holy Spirit spoke directly to the faithful, either through a direct revelation or something close to intuition – a position we have seen with both More and Ward – and that they were the beneficiaries of God’s promise to save his elect regardless of any actions they performed or merit they might claim. But when Hutchinson repeatedly affirmed that there was no difference between Cotton’s views and hers, it was pointed out to her that he had subsequently written expressly against some of the opinions she held and so she tried to distinguish between her expressions of her beliefs and her underlying judgements: ‘My Judgment is not altered’ but ‘my Expression alters’ seems to have been a repeated response in her final appearance before the elders.84 She asserted that what happened at the end of time was not a physical but rather a spiritual resurrection, and also denied the biblical events that saw Moses and Elijah and Enoch taken up to heaven in their physical bodies. She had precedents for such views. Historically, they were associated with the so-called Familists, the Family of Love, who were prominent in Germany in the early Reformation and still had some followers in the Netherlands and England well into the seventeenth century. At the end of the trial, Minister Shephard declared that she did not simply hold incorrect opinions, in which case she might have been brought back to the community: she was not merely a sinner but a heretic and a liar. 82 Winship, Times and Trials, p. 105; Adams, Antinomianism, pp. 157, 164. 83 Adams, Antinomianism, pp. 313, 158. 84 Adams, Antinomianism, p. 323.

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Hutchinson’s trials open up two issues central to this study: first, the anxiety created by a woman attempting – through hyperbole, or what she would see as inspiration – to establish an individual vision within an absolutist society, and second, the struggle to establish what women saw as specifically female experiences and language in such a society. When we look at her modes of rhetoric, they do not seem much different from those of her accusers: the inflamed language on both sides was an expression of the hyperbole of the whole age. Both sides claim to read the Scriptures literally, but embellished their readings as often as possible with typological application in order to show the continuities of divine revelation within the ongoing life of the community. Both Winthrop and Hutchinson agree that the Boston colony had been chosen especially by God and was the fulfilment of divine prophecies regarding Israel. Both pull hyperbolic insults from the salty rhetoric of the Old Testament text. If we can believe the transcript of the trials, especially the second trial, it is the allegorical applications that increasingly dominate the heated exchanges: as the hyperbole mounts and the expulsion of the outcast gets closer, so do the allegorical interpretations. When Winthrop starts to refer to Hutchinson as an American Jezebel, or Hutchinson is called a ‘dog which has returned to its vomit’, her accusers are making an allegorical gloss on biblical references; in response, Hutchinson refers to Winthrop and his followers, and indeed the whole Boston church, as a ‘whore’ and ‘strumpet’.85 But what Hutchinson and her accusers disagree on is her status as a woman within the New England community – specifically, the place of women and women’s claims to speak and prophesy. Hutchinson saw herself as being called to be a prophet in the new Israel of New England, but for Winthrop it is the New England community itself – not any individual member of it, and most especially not a woman – whose voice is privileged and must rule on the legitimacy of language, what Kristeva terms the ‘symbolic’ world. For the elders, all citizens must govern themselves through unquestioned obedience to the will of the community, embodied in the (male) authorities, and those refusing to do so risk divine punishment. Ben Barker-Benfield points to the uncanny connection between Hutchinson defining Christ’s call to her as ‘the voyce of my beloved’, and Winthrop’s ecstatic, even erotic, account of the elect’s relationship with God, especially his own. Winthrop seems to have sensed – perhaps not consciously, but certainly viscerally – the inherent sexuality in the claims of both sides. His reaction, Barker-Benfield argues, was deeply influenced by what he perceived as a sexual threat to 85 Adams, Antinomianism, pp. 232, 89.

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masculine individuality, a prejudice that was intensified by Hutchinson’s role as a midwife, which directly thrust the physicality of a woman’s body and her ‘doubly reproductive powers’ as mother and midwife into the supposedly gender-neutral (i.e. masculinist) discourse of theology.86 The visible signs of the female experiences of gestation and birthing possess subversive potential; psychologically, we see in the mother’s body an intrusion into the masculine control of time, and therefore an affront to an absolutist male community designed to restrict and rule over any pre- or extra-symbolic dimension of experience. The pregnant body traditionally struck many men as fearsome, challenging the common male fantasy that men must struggle to become independent of the functions of the female body; and female speech, when not under the control of the male community, was seen as irrational and anarchic. Much of the discussion in the trials centred on the meetings that Hutchinson had held in her house, at which some men as well as women came to hear her speak. Absolutist government – as powerful and important to New England as in post-Tridentine Rome – was constituted first by a hierarchy of ministers, elders, teachers, and deacons, all male, and all chosen by the men of the community; second, behind that, it was constituted by the authority of a male God. The ministers controlled who was admitted into church membership – a status that was not merely social but provided formal recognition of visible salvation and was attributed to God’s own authority. As a woman, Hutchinson had clearly exceeded the duties of her prescribed gender role within the community. At one point, Wilson demands she reveal the number of ‘poore sowles yow have mislead’ within ‘that filthie Sinne of the Communitie of Woemen’. She is, Minister Shephard similarly proclaims, a dangerous woman of a ‘haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit, and a very voluble tongue, more bold then a man’.87 It seems that Hutchinson’s meetings might well have consisted of sixty, even eighty persons at a time – mainly, although not always exclusively, women. Since there were often occasions when even a small number of men were present, she could be seen as guilty for instructing those who, in the God-given hierarchy, were meant to be the instructors. There is a specially gendered danger that with her ‘most dayngerous Spirit’ she is ‘likely with her fluent Townge & forwardness in Expressions to seduce & draw away many, especially simple Weoomen of her own sex’. Regarding the men in her meetings, Hutchinson defended herself vehemently: ‘I call them 86 Barker-Benfield, ‘Anne Hutchinson’, p. 78. 87 Adams, Antinomianism, p. 158.

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not, but if they come to me, I may instruct them’, she claimed.88 Bringing together women for instruction – let alone the further sin of men and women being assembled and instructed together, and by a woman – was seen not only as an affront to good order but an inevitable pathway to what the ministers saw as the extremities of the Anabaptists and Familists. Peter Bulkeley asked explicitly whether she agreed with the ‘foule, gross, filthye and abominable opinion of sexually shared women’. Hutchinson’s meetings, according to this view, only just fell short of such a ‘promiscuous and filthy coming together’ and in the opinion of the shocked ministers, a further level of perversity would necessarily follow.89 Her followers’ vulnerability to Hutchinson’s alleged sexual powers was a persistent point of reference for Winthrop. As his hyperbolic rhetoric mounts, he starts to create allegories of scripture specifically in sexual terms. Cotton, matching the extremity of his rhetoric with that of his fellow elders, likewise claims that, inevitably, ‘more dayngerous Evells & filthie Uncleness other Sines will followe than yowe doe nowe Imagine or Conceave’.90 Like the Familists before them, the Hutchinsonians would, it was feared, bring abominable perversions into New England, including ‘the Community of Weomen’ and other such travesties derived from female sexuality. Winthrop compared her to Old Testament ‘harlots’ (even though, as Barker-Benfield points out, the biblical story in Proverbs 7:21 mentions only one harlot).91 We can translate such hyperbolic anxieties easily as a fear that male authority would be emasculated, a sense underlined by the common Puritan metaphor for understanding union with God in terms of a marriage where the elected man was a bridegroom of the Lord. As Barker-Benfield comments, Winthrop is typical in representing himself, in effect, as a bride being embraced by Christ; betraying anxiety about the perception that a woman might have a more natural claim for employing such a metaphor ‘required him to change his view of himself (from male to female) – something Hutchinson did not have to do’. All human beings, male or female, had access to God but only through their natural male superiors, whereas Hutchinson was arguing for the priesthood of all believers to be body-blind.92 Winthrop’s judgement upon Hutchinson was that if she ‘had attended her household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as 88 Adams, Antinomianism, pp. 306, 168. 89 Adams, Antinomianism, pp. 290, 314, 301. 90 Adams, Antinomianism, p. 314; for the multiple harlots, see Burnham, ‘Anne Hutchinson’, p. 353. 91 Adams, Antinomianism, p. 77; Barker-Benfield, ‘Anne Hutchinson’, p. 79. 92 Barker-Benfield, ‘Anne Hutchinson’, p. 73.

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are proper for men, she had kept her wits, and might have improved them usefully and honorably in the place that God had set her’. An outspoken woman’s voice was socially disruptive: ‘About three years ago we were all at peace. Mrs. Hutchinson from the time she came hath made a disturbance’. As Winthrop saw it, Hutchinson was a ‘great imposter, an instrument of Satan […] trained to his service […] poysoning the Churches here planted’.93 There is a further offence of which Hutchinson was accused that reinforces her Baroque affinities, one that uncannily connects across the confessional spectrum with the Catholic Mary Ward. At a key moment in her trial, Hutchinson claimed that she had experienced an ‘immediate revelation’ from God, ‘by the voice of his own spirit to my soul’. Protestants, and not just Puritans, were suspicious of such individual revelations, and it was an admission that was seized upon by her inquisitors. She is asked ‘how by’ an ‘immediate revelation?’ and ‘How do you know that was the spirit?’ She replies that God communicated ‘by the voice of his own spirit to my soul’, and claims that the Spirit had given her the ability to distinguish among ‘all those voices are spoken of in Scripture’, and therefor to know true from false: ‘he has left me to distinguish between the voice of my beloved and the voice of Moses, the voice of John the Baptist, and the voice of antichrist’.94 Challenged on how she would know ‘that it was God that did reveale these things to her, and not Satan’, she claims the precedent of the prophet Daniel, arguing further that she ‘expected to be delivered […] as Daniel was’.95 Ironically, back in ‘Old’ England, by the 1640s, despite a degree of hostility, as I demonstrated earlier, a growing acceptance of women’s prophesying had developed. ‘Female prophecy’, observes Font, ‘stands out as a particular genre that is gendered’, and women’s prophecies could thus be ‘porous to women’s viewpoints and particular circumstances’, enabling them to establish ‘forms of authority for themselves in a male-dominated society’.96 Not so according to the authorities of New England. Beneath the multiple anxious hostile reactions to Hutchinson is the issue we have repeatedly encountered with other Baroque English women: the authoritarian male fear of an alien, female level of experience threatening to break through the fragile surface of male-constructed discourse, which emerges from the cultural and individual layers of the unconscious or – as a ‘mystic’ like Gertrude More or Anne Hutchinson would claim – directly from God 93 Adams, Antinomianism, pp. 243, 228. 94 Adams, Antinomianism, pp. 226, 269; see also pp. 108, 184. 95 Adams, Antinomianism, pp. 175–176. 96 Font, Women’s Prophetic Writings, pp. 3, 1.

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as an ‘immediate revelation’. Hutchinson’s claim became a major affront to the elders, especially when she elaborated by appealing to precedents provided by Moses, Abraham, and Daniel. Claiming predominantly male prophets as her authorities was also seen as an unwarranted arrogance. Theologically, the New England authorities did not believe in direct revelation to individuals. The concept of ‘immediate revelation’ circumvented the authority of the ministers, and may have even been seen to echo Catholic beliefs. Any individual revelation went against the notion of Scripture as the sole centre of authority. Hutchinson never disagreed with the elders’ claim that the Boston community had been chosen by God, but she read the Scriptures to prove that she herself was a prophet in the new Israel, alluding, like Lanyer, to a series of Old Testament women as models: ‘it is said, I will poure my Spirit upon your Daughters, and they shall prophesie […] if God give mee a gift of Prophecy, I may use it’. The Lord, Wilson proclaims near the end of the trial, ‘is just in leaving owr Sister […] to fal into Errors & divers unsound Judgements’, which have turned her into ‘dayngerous Instrument of the Divell raysed up by Sathan’. Minister Peters provides a stern summary that ‘her opinions are dayngerous & fundamentall & and such as takes downe the Articles of Religion’. Looking back, at root her crime is having a ‘voluble’ female ‘tongue, more bold then a man’.97 In the statement of excommunication, Wilson pronounces ‘I doe account yow from this time forth to be a Hethen & a Publican & soe to be held of all the Bretheren & Sisters, of this Congregation, & of others’. In effect, we see here two versions of Baroque hyperbole – masculinist absolutism and female revelation, the dominance of the symbolic and the intimate revolt of the semiotic – in open conflict.

Works Cited Adams, Charles Francis, ed. Antinomianism in the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, 1636–1638. Boston: The Prince Society, 1894. The Armininan Nunnery: Or, A Briefe Description and Relation of […] the Arminian Nunnery at Little Gidding in Huntington-Shire. 1641. Barker-Benfield, Ben. ‘Anne Hutchinson and the Puritan Attitude toward Women Author(s)’. Feminist Studies 1.2 (Autumn 1972), 65–96. Blackstone, Bernard, ed. The Ferrar Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938. 97 Adams, Antinomianism, pp. 158, 331, 336.

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Bouldin, Elizabeth. Women Prophets and Radical Protestantism in the British Atlantic World, 1640–1730. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Bradstreet, Anne. The Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Jeannine Hensley. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Braider, Christopher. Baroque Self-Invention and Historical Truth: Hercules at the Crossroads. New York: Routledge, 2004. Burnham, Michelle. ‘Anne Hutchinson and the Economics of Antinomian Selfhood in Colonial New England’. Criticism 39 (1997), 337–358. Chedgzoy, Kate. ‘Remembering Aemilia Lanyer’. Journal of the Northern Renaissance 2 (2010), paragraphs 1–25. Cop, Michael. ‘Compositions for a King: Little Gidding’s Use of Henry Garthwait’s Monotessaron’. Script & Print 40 (2016), 29–44. Dyck, Paul. ‘“So rare a use”: Scissors, Reading, and Devotion at Little Gidding’. George Herbert Journal 27 (2003), 67–81. Dyck, Paul. ‘“A New Kind of Printing”: Cutting and Pasting a Book for a King at Little Gidding’. The Library, 7th Series, Vol. 9 (2008), 306–333. Fell, Margaret. Womens Speaking Justified and other Pamphlets, ed. Jane Donawerth and Rebecca M. Lush. Toronto: Iter Press, 2018. Ferrar, Nicholas. Materials for the Life of Nicholas Ferrar, ed. Lynette R. Muir and John A. White. Leeds: Philosophical and Literary Society, 1996. Font, Carme. Women’s Prophetic Writings in Seventeenth-Century Britain. London: Routledge, 2017. Freedberg, David. ‘Prints and the Status of Images in Flanders’. Columbia University Academic Commons, n.d., pp. 39–45. Freer, Coburn. Music for a King. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972. Gaudio, Michael. The Bible and the Printed Image in Early Modern England: Little Gidding and the Pursuit of Scriptural Harmony. New York: Routledge, 2015. Grindlay, Lilla. Queen of Heaven: The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin in Early Modern English Writing. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. Grossman, Marshall, ed. Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998. Hall, Louisa. ‘The Influence of Anne Bradstreet’s Innovative Errors’. Early American Literature, 48 (2013), 1–27. Henderson, George. ‘Biblical Illustration in the Age of Laud’. Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 8.2 (1982), 173–216. Hilliker, Robert. ‘Engendering Identity: The Discourse of Familial Education in Anne Bradstreet and Marie de l’Incarnation’. Early American Literature 42 (2007), 435–470. Hodgson, Elizabeth M.A. ‘Prophecy and Gendered Mourning in Lanyer’s “Salve Deus Judaeorum”’. Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 43 (2003), 101–116.

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Hull, Suzanne. Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475–1640. San Marino: Huntington Library, 1982. Keohane, Catherine. ‘“That Blindest Weakenesse Be Not Over-Bold”: Aemilia Lanyer’s Radical Unfolding of the Passion’. ELH 64 (1997), 359–389. Kreitzer, Beth. Reforming Mary: Changing Images of the Virgin Mary in Lutheran Sermons of the Sixteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Kristeva, Julia. Julia Kristeva: Interviews, ed. by R. Mitchell Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Kristeva, Julia. Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila, trans. Lorna Scott Fox. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Kristeva, Julia. ‘Adel’s Body (Conversation)’. http://www.kristeva.fr/2017/AA_text_ JK_english.pdf. Accessed November 2019. Kuchar, Gary. ‘Aemilia Lanyer and the Virgin’s Swoon: Theology and Iconography in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’. English Literary Renaissance 20 (2007), 47–73. Lanyer, Aemelia. The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, ed. Susanne Woods. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Lewalski, Barbara K. ‘Seizing Discourses and Reinventing Genres’, in Grossman, Lanyer, pp. 49–59. Mack, Phyllis. Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Maravall, José Antonio. Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure. trans. Terry Cochran. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. Miller, Naomi. ‘(M)other Tongues: Maternity and Subjectivity’, in Grossman, Lanyer, pp.143–166. Janel Mueller, Janel. ‘The Feminist Poetics of ‘Salve Deus Judaeorum’. In Grossman, Lanyer, pp. 99–127. Muir, Lynnette R and John White, ed. Materials for the Life of Nicholas Ferrar. Leeds: Philosophical and Literary Society, 1996. Nevitt, Marcus. Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640–1660. Farnham: Ashgate, 2006. Osherow, Michele. Biblical Women’s Voices in Early Modern England. Farnham: Ashgate 2009. Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth’s Harlots: Sacred Parody in Enlightenment England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Pembroke, Mary Sidney, Countess of. The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Purkiss, Diane. ‘Producing the Voice, Consuming the Body: Women Prophets of the Seventeenth Century’, in Women, Writing, History 1640–1740, ed. Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman, pp. 139–159. London: Batsford, 1992.

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Ransome, Joyce. ‘“Courtesy” at Little Gidding’. The Seventeenth Century 30 (2015), 411–431. Rienstra, Debra. ‘Dreaming Authorship: Aemilia Lanyer and the Countess of Pembroke’, in Discovering and (Re)Covering the Seventeenth Century Lyric, ed. Eugene R. Cunnar and Jeffrey Johnson. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001. Riley, Kate E. ‘The Good Old Way Revisited: the Ferrar family of Little Gidding, c. 1625–1637’. PhD diss., University of Western Australia, 2007. Rowse, A.L., intr. The Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. New York: C.N. Potter, 1978. Schneider, Deborah Lucas. ‘Hutchinson and Covenant Theology’. The Harvard Theological Review 103 (2010), 485–500. Sharland, E. Cruwys, intr. The Story Books of Little Gidding. London: Seeley and Co, 1899. Shuger, Debora. ‘Laudian Feminism and the Household Republic of Little Gidding’. The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 44 (2014), 69–94. Sidney, Sir Philip. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Skrine, Peter N. The Baroque: Literature and Culture in Seventeenth-Century Europe. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978. Smyth, Adam. ‘“Shreds of holinesse”: George Herbert, Little Gidding, and Cutting Up Texts in Early Modern England’. English Literary Renaissance 42 (2012), 452–481. Smyth, Adam. ‘Cutting and Authorship in Early Modern England’. Authorship 2.2 (2013), 1–9. Smyth, Adam. ‘Little Clippings: Cutting and Pasting Bibles in the 1630s’. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45 (2015), 585–613. Smyth, Adam. Material Texts in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Trettien, Whitney. ‘Media, Materiality, and Time in the History of Reading: The Case of the Little Gidding Harmonies’. PMLA, 133 (2018), 1135–1151. Trill, Suzanne. ‘Reflected Desire: The Erotics of the Gaze in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Judaeorum’, in Women and Culture at the Courts of the Stuart Queens, ed. Clare McManus, pp.167–192. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003. Waller, Gary. Walsingham and the English Imagination. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Warren, Austin. ‘Edward Taylor’s Poetry: Colonial Baroque’. The Kenyon Review 3 (1941), 355–371. Williams, A.M., ed. Conversations at Little Gidding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Winship, Michael P. The Times and Trials of Anne Hutchinson: Puritans Divided. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005.

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5.

The Female Baroque in Court and Country Abstract The Courtly Baroque focuses on the place of women in the Jacobean and Caroline courts. The discussion centres on James I’s and Charles I’s Catholic queens and the entertainments over which they presided, first before the exile of the English court and then following the Restoration. These include masques, poems, plays, stories, and treatises in the Court, and other works on the fringes of the royal court, in ‘little courts’ like the Sidneys’ Penshurst, or the Cavendish residences (in both the English ‘country’ and in exile in Antwerp). I conclude with a discussion of Hester Pulter, whose writings exemplify the courtly Baroque even in an isolated country home amid increasing suspicion of the morals of the royal court. Key words: women actors; Court and Civil War Women writers; Baroque culture; Mary Wroth; Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley; Hester Pulter

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People tell each other fictions and it makes them feel better, period. ‒ Julia Kristeva 1

In his account of the English Civil War, looking back at his youth and attempting to make sense of the years we now acknowledge as one of the cataclysmic eras of English history, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, focused on the institution that had dominated his public life. The Court, he wrote, like ‘a mirror’, ‘measured the temper and affection of the country’.2 ‘Court’ was a powerful word as well as a powerful institution in the Baroque era; it accumulated around itself ideas and feelings that were often contradictory, 1 Kristeva, Teresa, p. 175. 2 Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, pp. 5, 10.

Waller, G., The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. doi 10.5117/9789463721431_ch05

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but were always compelling. Men and women ‘swarmed’ to the Court (the hyperbolic metaphor is a favourite one) for power, gain, gossip, titles, rewards, and entertainment. The Court is Gabriel Harvey’s ‘only mart of preferment and honour’; it is Donne’s ‘bladder of Vanitie’; it is one of the places of ‘wickedness and vice’ for inhabiting which Raleigh in his execution speech prays he will be forgiven; it is the precarious place in which Mary Wroth was accused of ‘dancing in a net’.3 What powers, real or imputed, did the Court have over the destinies and allegiances of men and women? How did this dominant cultural apparatus control the specifics of living? What underlying and recurring anxieties and affirmations are associated with the Court? Under what constraints and with what possibilities did the women in the court, in particular, choose (or were forced) to live within the Court or at least within its ideological reach in what was often depicted as the ‘country’? How were they thought of, written about? How did they attempt to write and speak about themselves? And how does studying both the surface and the underlying cultural dynamics of the court help us elucidate the Female Baroque? The hegemonic power of courts all across Europe shows that the Catholic Church was not the epoch’s only institution to use the arts for propagandist purposes. As Maravall argues, early modern Europe was dominated by court regimes that aspired to be, or were in fact, no less absolutist than the Catholic Church. The Court (and the absolutist state of which it was the ideological centre) attempted to use both the elite arts and the increasing commodification of popular culture to control and even create the tastes, habits, beliefs, and allegiances of their subjects. While the Baroque court reach its zenith at the Sun King’s Versailles, even in peripheral England the Court displayed its power through the ‘guided culture’ of the Stuart dynasty. 4 In his award-winning television series on the Baroque, the art historian Waldemar Januszczak traces what he sees as a historical development ‘from St. Peter’s to St Paul’s’, stressing that Baroque art and architecture came to the English court late and somewhat spasmodically.5 The most important figure early in this evolution was Inigo Jones. Although his early career was focused primarily on court entertainments, on a series of visits to Italy Jones acquired a familiarity 3 References to the court are discussed in Waller, English Poetry, p. 14, on which I draw for material in this opening paragraph; ‘dancing in a net’ is a cliché applied to Mary Wroth by, among others, John Chamberlain: see Chamberlain, Correspondence, Vol. II, p. 427. 4 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, p. 57. 5 Januszczak, ‘St Peter’s to St Paul’s’.

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with Palladian and other neo-classical architecture, which he brought back to England. After his appointment in 1616 as Surveyor-General of the King’s Works, he designed and built a number of important buildings, most admittedly more neo-classical than Baroque, although the Queen’s House in Greenwich (1616–1619, 1629–1635) is often described as the first Baroque building in England. He also oversaw the rebuilding of the Vitruvian double cube of the Whitehall Banqueting House, one of the four or five performance spaces in the Palace of Whitehall, for which Peter Paul Rubens designed and constructed (initially in his Antwerp atelier) a genuinely Baroque ceiling, commissioned by Charles I to commemorate the glorification of his father. The ceiling Apotheosis of James celebrates the divinely-appointed Stuart monarchy with a flamboyant, hyperbolic gesture towards James, picturing him carried into Heaven by angels and celebrating him as a peacemaker, wise ruler, and patron of the arts. Ironically, it was from the Banqueting House, beneath Rubens’s ceiling, that Charles walked to the scaffold erected outside the building in 1649.6 English culture was, however, strikingly advanced in what Maravall argues was central to Baroque court culture: the theatre.7 Central to Maravall’s thesis is that that Spanish Baroque drama was a privileged instrument of state-orchestrated ideology; in Spain, comedia, he argues, was central to the absolutist regime’s push to support the interests of the ruling class, but staged in such a way that they appeared to be to the advantage of all classes of society. Sophie Tomlinson argues that ‘the idea of Baroque style is equally relevant to European drama and theatre as it is to music art and architecture’; she points to such stylistic characteristics as the development of proscenium stages, perspective scenery, multiple illusions, the elevation of spectacle over plot and character, and the insistence on performance as designed to overwhelm the emotions. Likewise, for Ronald Huebert, Baroque drama – in his study, the plays of John Ford – is notable for powerful emotional impulses, the fusion of erotic and mystical feeling, and especially the tragic plots centred on the melancholic anguish and hyperbolic rhetoric of persecuted and suffering women characters.8 Like the court itself, the theatre was not just a place, a building, an institution, but an extraordinarily powerful metaphor that served as an apparatus of control. Beyond the actual theatre spaces, public or private, a remarkably self-conscious sense of theatricality and role-playing also dominates the 6 Martin, Ceiling Decoration; Millar, ‘Whitehall Ceiling’; Sturgess, Private Theatre, pp. 151–159. 7 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, Ch. 2. 8 Tomlinson, ‘Actress’, p. 368; Huebert, John Ford, pp. 12, 18, 47.

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supposedly more serious world of political decision and machination, in which we can observe that there are also clashes of style, rhetoric, and accent, as well as multiple roles, all of which create the many self-presentations of aspiring courtiers who presented themselves self-consciously as actors on the great stage of the wider world. The Baroque, Peter Skrine argues, was ‘an age which accorded disguise and dressing-up an importance not enjoyed before or since’, and which universally indulged ‘a compulsive longing’ for experience that would simultaneously ‘dazzle the eye, beguile the ear, entertain the mind, and involve the body’.9 Players act; the theatre company stages; above all, men and women are, as the over-worked Renaissance cliché had it, actors on the great stage of the world, occupying places in the theatre of the everyday. A complicating factor in tracing cultural change is that all cultural practices – a term that includes a multiplicity of activities including theatre, poetry, sculpture, and painting, as well as printmaking, the production of prayer cards, miniatures, needlework, harmonies, and many other products which might easily be labelled as kitsch – inevitably have a life of their own that ultimately cannot be completely controlled by the apparatuses of control and oppression. John Beverley modifies Maravall’s argument on the Baroque as a culture of control by insisting we acknowledge that texts can be rewritten differently by different audiences: ‘if we take seriously Maravall’s very fruitful idea that the Baroque is a form of mass culture’, Beverley argues, then we also need ‘to pay attention to the question of reception’.10 In England, the Jacobean and Caroline courts undoubtedly worked to create ideological harmony, but would-be dominant ideologies never operate directly but, rather, through over-determination, in clusters, and by association and nuances. There is also something inherently open-ended in the very process of representation itself – whether in sculpture, on frescoed walls, or in the theatre, even in the seemingly private activities of the women of Little Gidding which, however distanced, were not unconnected to the values and demands of the court – that, quite apart from any modes of surveillance and the reinforcement of an acceptable repertoire of subjects, materials, or motifs, could potentially open multiple possibilities of interpretation for both artists and audiences. All stories are to some extent about storytelling, theatrical pieces are in part about the unpredictability of performance, and visual representations are partly about the making of art and how it may be interpreted. In an age where social control was so obsessively 9 Skrine, Baroque, pp. 25, 28. 10 Beverley, Literary Baroque, p. 14.

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pursued, of all the arts, the theatre is arguably the one least able to control its audience’s reactions yet most able to undermine orthodoxies, both during and after a performance, something the English Protestant opponents of medieval religious plays grasped when they sought to abolish them and a fear that also lay behind the Puritans’ ban on public theatre during the Commonwealth years. These observations are particularly relevant to our understanding of how Court culture was mediated through the turbulent seventeenth century: we have already seen how gender as a factor produced unpredictable specificities, and how the various systems of representation designed to make sense of the conditions of material existence were subject to strain and, at times, quite radical contradiction. In England the most distinctively Baroque dramatic form, in which the epoch’s ideological contradictions between control and subversion were most flamboyantly expressed, was not the powerful tragedy of passion or revenge (even though many, those by Middleton or Webster for instance, did centre on powerful women variously objectified, tormented, or vilified, even when they attempted to rise above such denigration). Rather, it was the ubiquitous court entertainments and the elaborate masques in particular, in which in a couple of hours’ performance involving ‘spectacles on a scale of hitherto unimagined lavishness and ostentation’ were designed to conjure up ‘splendours that momentarily outshone by far the realities of the everyday world’.11 The seventeenth-century French court, in Paris and eventually Versailles, increasingly set the fashion for seventeenth-century Europe, but even in the English courts of James I and Charles I court entertainments had a powerful ideological intention. Masques and – moving beyond the royal court into more peripheral places, the ‘little courts’ of the aristocracy – less elaborate courtly entertainments like Mary Wroth’s Loves Victory, or those penned and possibly staged by women in the Cavendish family before, after, and even during the Civil War, have traditionally been treated as mere entertainment, echoing Bacon’s disarming comment that ‘these Things are but Toyes, but Princes will have such Things’.12 However trivial masques and court entertainments might seem today, as recent modern scholarship has shown, they were far from mere diversions – mere kitsch, as Maravall would have it – but crucial articulations of political policy. These powerful reminders of the location and distribution of cultural capital and political power recruited the overwhelming wonder of dramatic illusion to activate unreflective political and social allegiance, but we also need to recognise 11 Skrine, Baroque, pp. 60, 20. 12 Bacon, ‘Of Masques and Triumphs’, Essays, p. 124.

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that they also included, or implied, or were read as containing subversive or at least oppositional social forces. Masques and similar entertainments were employed by all the absolutist regimes of the period, displaying a shared system of visual, poetical, and verbal symbolism to image the greatness of each regime and its values, and were presided over by ‘the ruler as performing artist before a captive and obsequious audience, as a virtuoso in the sphere of social entertainment as well as in his true domain of kingship’.13 They served to promote political agendas on behalf of either the monarch or a particular faction within the court; in the English court, this included the agendas of successive queens, James’s consort Anna of Denmark and Charles I’s French Medici queen Henrietta Maria, while for a few years under James there was a powerful third court group centred on Henry Prince of Wales, before Henry’s unexpected death in 1612. The court entertainments of the Christmas season, for instance, were not simply (and perhaps rarely) convivial occasions for merriment, but ritual occasions for announcements of policy and sumptuous assertions of allegiance. Writing on the role of poetry in the court, George Puttenham repeatedly stressed the duty of the ‘Civill Poet’ to celebrate the values and acts of the Court just as the ‘embroderer’ sets ‘stone and perle or passements of gold upon the stuff of a Princely garment’.14 Althusser’s celebrated formulation of how ideological state apparatuses work to ‘interpellate’ members of a society by ‘hailing’ and incorporating them – in a sense, calling them into existence within the presence of the court – finds its perfect manifestation in the Stuart court entertainments, a ‘serial display of visual and aural imagery carrying the spectator from the world of comic grotesque to a ritual assertion of extravagant sublimity’. It momentarily crystallised apparently incontrovertible truths, revealed in a hierarchy from the king – the ‘ultimate transcendental fantasy image’, the ‘preeminent avatar of the absolute’ – down to the least and most insecure gentlemen and ladies.15 One of the unpredictable and contradictory factors in analysing the structures of feeling of the Baroque is gender, and specifically the roles played by women. In the English court, the expansion of female roles in entertainments under the sponsorship and tutelage of the two Stuart queens is crucial to our understanding of the era’s gender dynamics. In the Baroque court, Greenberg points out, ‘the political is never separable from 13 Skrine, Baroque, p. 118. 14 Puttenham, Englishe Poesie, pp. 50, 137–138. 15 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, pp. 127–186; Sturgess, Private Theatre, p. 158.

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the sexual and the sexual attaches itself to a large panoply of ideologically invested signifiers of gender differences and social empowerment’.16 We can trace the emergence of what Clare McManus terms ‘an emergent semiautonomous female court’ as early as between 1604 and 1611, when Queen Anna commissioned a series of masques at Whitehall and, to varying extents, actually directed their writing and staging.17 She had a love of spectacle, costume, dancing, and also a desire to reproduce in England the opulence and indulgence of continental courts. As James’s consort in Scotland, she had assembled a number of women to help mount court entertainments, and even as the royal cavalcade came south from Scotland, she was recruiting a similar group of English noblewomen. In approaching court entertainments from four hundred years ago, we are faced with difficulty, for the most part, in reconstructing the details of performance. Always a joint collaboration of commissioner, author, choreographers, and designers, what we understand as the masque or pastoral entertainment often left behind only partial records – anything from a gossipy report to an ideal construction of what may well have been far from the actual performance. A masque was often performed just once and often the records provide merely gestures towards what may or may not have actually happened. For some, we do have scripts, for others, detailed accounts and illustrations of the costumes and sets, and for still others, simply descriptions of the action. And then there was the unpredictability of performance itself. The elaborate stage machinery might not always work and scripted changes of scenery might not occur. In his Works of 1616, Jonson provided long and detailed descriptions of performers, machines, and spectacle, as if trying to fix what was essentially ephemeral, let alone how it was actually decoded by the audience. The unpredictability of reactions and behaviour from the king himself – perhaps the frequently irascible James more so than Charles – would make the impact of the text more open to the frisson of the occasion. During the performance of Jonson’s Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618), James intervened and angrily demanded ‘what did they make me come here for? Devil take you, all dance’, which presumably they did.18 The masques and entertainments are saturated by the characteristic Baroque combination of hyperbole and melancholy. Maravall identified exaggeration, hyperbole, and the preference for rhetorical effect over substance 16 Greenberg, Baroque Bodies, p. 7. 17 McManus, Stuart Queens, p. 4. 18 Orgel, Jonsonian Masque, p. 71.

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as a distinctive feature of both performance and the court ‘realities’ they celebrated. Performative hyperbole serves an ideological purpose: its goal was to circumvent rationality and overwhelm any potential critique and any underlying melancholy by the heightened arousal of feelings of wonder and admiration. At the same time, however, hanging over the performances, especially given the political realities of England in the 1630s, when the court was increasingly isolated from the gradually changing world of politics, is a melancholy not only regarding the ephemerality of court entertainments, but also the increasing gap between them and the political dissent and cultural fragmentation gathering impetus beyond the self-protective limits of the Banqueting Hall, and other venues where they were staged. The illusion of the masque reflected the irrelevance of Charles’s political gambles: the Star Chamber decrees, by which he was able to avoid parliamentary scrutiny, were, Stephen Orgel comments, ‘as unreal as Inigo Jones’s victory over gravity’,19 both striking examples of Baroque plateauing. Charles and his queen brought elevated but ultimately self-destructive religious ideals to the masques. The cults of platonic love and beauty were often joined with explicit Mariological associations, and by continual references to the harmonious marriage of the king and queen that frequently implied the anticipated harmony of their religions reuniting. These were all occasions for celebrations of unity within the court, but often provoked deep suspicion beyond the inner circle. Henrietta Maria brought an explicit agenda – restoring England to the Catholic Church – to the court entertainments she mounted. As Rebecca Bailey has shown, the court of the 1630s provided a ‘space’ where the ambitions of the Catholic community could be staged and where Henrietta Maria increasingly openly acted as a ‘Counter-Reformation champion’, so that women’s participation in the court dramas both encouraged the emergence of women on stage and advanced the staging of Counter-Reformation ‘triumphs’. Her confessor was the prominent Jesuit-educated Pierre de Berulle (whose intensely hyperbolic enthusiasm for the Virgin Mary was highlighted in Chapter Two), who constantly reminded the queen of her crucial role in returning England to the Catholic Church. An anonymous broadsheet (1640) proclaimed ‘doth not all the world know that She is a Papist, and by means of her example, Chappels, Priests, Friars, are not too many thousands, both in Court and City, and other places, brought into that Snare’.20 Yet in the barely disguised allegorical pastorals of the late 1630s, the Court and its values were being 19 Orgel, Jonsonian Masque, p. 175. 20 Bailey, Staging the Old Faith, pp. 2, 217, 221; Britland, Drama at the Courts, p. 31.

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celebrated only to its own satisfaction. What we can see now as the inevitable cultural detumescence of those years is an instance of Baroque plateauing. For however unique each event was, court entertainments were built on the despairing recurrence of the impulse to turn triviality into something immortal, and the inevitable failure to do so. One question that stands out about Maravall’s analysis of the Baroque is therefore whether we should regard court entertainments as kitsch – high class, aristocratic kitsch, perhaps, but kitsch nonetheless. The term does not apply only to objects but also to events, and arguably to derivative literary genres like the masques and the closely related pastoral drama – a fashion that incorporates a collage of elements from dramatic comedy, prose romance, music, and dance and an atmosphere of melancholy platonic idealism, sentimental supernaturalism, and the pale echo of bucolic Petrarchan rhetoric. The pastoral is a perfect exemplum of Braider’s suggestion of cultural ‘recursiveness’ and ‘secondness’ as characteristic of the Baroque and of course is parodied in Polonius’s taxonomy of dramatic kinds in Hamlet.21 Crucially for my argument, the court masques were not only scripts – including poetry, dance, acting, music – for court entertainments, but also scripts of the age’s gender assignments. At the heart of masculinist fantasy is the active male body; by contrast, the fantasy female body as constructed by male hegemony is a body on display, available to be observed, dominated, and (by implication) touched at will by males. In The Masque of Queenes (1609), Jonson had introduced court ladies as silent presences, to be gazed at but not to speak, with men or boy actors playing the active roles, male and female, in the anti-masque. Bel-Anna, Queen of the Ocean, personifying the queen herself, is described as simply reflecting her husband’s masculine virtue, ‘humbling, all her worth | To him that gave it’. She is, the king (witnessed by the spectators) is told, ‘a spectacle so full of love and grace | Unto your court’.22 . What McManus terms ‘the courtly or royal performing woman’ became characteristic of all Anna’s masques.23 When Daniel presented his Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (1604) and Jonson the Masque of Blackness (1605) there were criticisms of Anna’s participation, particularly in contravention of court decorum: in Daniel’s piece, she dressed in a costume taken from the late Queen Elizabeth’s wardrobe, but remodelled to reveal her legs; in Jonson’s, not only was she disguised in blackface, along with her court ladies, but she was rebuked .

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21 Braider, Baroque Self-Invention, p. 8. 22 Jonson, Plays and Masques, p. 332; see also Gossett, ‘Man-Maid, Begone’, pp. 96–111. 23 McManus, ‘Woman’, pp. 450, 452.

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for showing her arms, as one observer put it, in a ‘curtizan-like’ manner. When, in 1626, Charles’s French Catholic Queen Henrietta Maria likewise started commissioning dances, entertainments, and eventually (from 1631) complete masques, the presence of women within the staging area became even more common. Influenced by her experience in the French court, Henrietta Maria brought to England an unaccustomedly flexible view of decorum, breaking down the distance between the aristocratic actors in the masque and the men, in the anti-masque (who were often common players), and also intensifying the high Platonism of the masque. In Montague’s The Shepherd’s Paradise (1633), she abandoned the tradition of silent women participants and enacted the speaking role of Bellesa, Princess of Navarre, with other female parts also played by women. The masques and related court entertainments therefore provide us with striking contributions to our understanding of the Female Baroque. There was a strong strand of pastoral literature in England long before Henrietta Maria brought it into court entertainment as a mode of commentary on political and religious matters. What was distinctive about her initiative was that women participants played an unprecedentedly active role. Behind the commonplaces of elevated feminine beauty on which much of the weight of their emotional effects was made to rest is the Baroque obsession with the objectifying gaze. We see the staging of court hegemony through the display of women’s bodies, ominously illustrating Maravall’s insistence that Baroque absolutism ruthlessly attempted to subordinate the individual to the residual social order. Court ladies were required to embody extreme demands of both transcendent beauty and unimpeachable chastity, while at the same time being expected to display their bodies in ways that outside the court would have been seen as reprehensible. Participation in court performance was designed to position women as acquiescent members of the social order and unchanging emblems of the idealized beauty of the court itself. Their role was to display the availability of the female body in the daily life as well as the rituals of the court. Yet, paradoxically, while demanding women’s acceptance of restricted roles within a patriarchal social and gender hierarchy, the court entertainments provided opportunities for a certain degree of female autonomy. Even while being positioned as largely silenced objects on display, women were given, at least potentially, access to a whole new social arena, thereby exemplifying Judith Butler’s observation that often liberation emerges from within structures of oppression: as ‘awkward and embarrassing’ as this discovery might be, she argues, we may need to acknowledge that ‘the subject might yet be thought as deriving its agency from precisely the power

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it opposes’.24 As Clare McManus notes, ‘within the very discourse that attempted to constrain the significance of the female’, confining participation to physical display, the female masquer represents a privileged ‘place’ of ‘expressive possibilities’ implicitly challenging women’s predetermined roles and put pressure upon the ideological assumptions upon which masculine dominance rested.25 It has been further argued that the 1630s in particular sees a revaluation of the place of women characters in public drama, partly stimulated by the presence and performances of women in court drama and the queen’s ‘feminized court’, especially the figure of the ‘heroic woman’ as the central focus of melodramatic tragedies, which became increasingly popular.26 As modern scholarship has increasingly expanded our awareness of the place of women in court entertainments, it has also become clear that Clarendon’s observation – that it was specifically the court that ‘measured the temper and affection of the country’ – needs to be broadened by revisiting his term ‘the country’. There were other cultural apparatuses that played major parts in the sustaining and reproducing of the dominant ideologies, by providing imaginary depictions of existence by which both collective and subjective lived experiences should be interpreted. In recent scholarly discussions, ‘Family’ and ‘Place’ have been picked out as particularly important subsidiary ideological structures, often depicted in current scholarship with a striking degree of nostalgia, especially in the cases of the Sidney and Pembroke families. The Sidney family’s very continuity between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries has, for example, reinforced what Balabar terms a ‘retrospective illusion’ that ‘the generations which succeed one another over centuries on a reasonably stable territory’, constitute ‘an invariant (historical) substance’. ‘Place’ has also been strikingly reified: Penshurst Place, the ancestral home of the Sidney family, still exists both as a residence and a tourist attraction, also providing a seemingly unchanging system of representation.27 24 Butler, Psychic Life, p. 17. 25 McManus, Renaissance Stage, p. 14. 26 Collins, ‘Heroic women’, p. 221. 27 Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, p. 86. My discussion here also owes much to Stuart Hall, ‘Signification, Representation, Ideology’, pp. 91–114. An instance of retrograde nostalgia can be found in some of the essays in the two-volume Ashgate Research Companion to the Sidneys, 1500–1700, ed. Hannay, Brennan, and Lamb, with its repeated obeisance to the family’s prestige, their ‘Sidney-ness’, their’ ‘striking and idyllic’ and ‘idealized family home’, even Philip’s ‘martyrdom’. ‘Just to be a Sidney’ clearly still has a prime value for many modern devotees (Vol. 1, pp. xviii, 153; Vol. 2, pp. xviii–xix). See my review in Early Modern Women, pp. 248–252.

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Dramatic works involving women, including masques and entertainments, were written and performed in country houses across England before and even during the Civil War. The texts for most of these events are no longer in existence and we have to rely on incidental remarks in diaries or manuscript records, but there is no question that they were widespread among the aristocratic houses in England. Many entertainments were mounted to celebrate royal visits, for instance Campion’s Masque for the King at Brougham Castle in 1617, or his entertainment for Queen Anna for a visit to Bath in 1613. The best-known is probably Milton’s A Masque presented at Ludlow Castle (1634), presented typically as part of a special celebration, in this case the Earl of Bridgewater’s installation as Lord President of Wales. As part of an analysis of ‘place’ and ‘family’ in relation to women’s dramas, Alison Findlay has drawn on the philosophical and psychological definitions of ‘home’ in Irigaray’s critique of Western philosophy, and Elizabeth Grosz’s work on women and dwelling, both of whom are reacting to Kristeva’s elaboration of the platonic chora as a maternal space (as I discussed in Chapter Two). Findlay sees the writing and likely performances of women’s dramas in domestic settings – her examples are the Countess of Pembroke’s The Tragedy of Antony and Mary Wroth’s Loves Victory – as opening up the possibility for a culturally subversive ludic space, an ‘incubator’ in which new worldly forms, new places, and identities for women might be engendered and brought into material existence, however briefly and however marginal they may have appeared to the overwhelming dominance of metropolitan court culture.28 To illustrate how the masques and court entertainments of the Baroque courts of Europe permeated beyond the metropolitan court environment, I have chosen one of the dramatic pieces Findlay analyses, Wroth’s Loves Victory, plus two others written and conceived for performance, even if there no evidence for any actual performances: The Conceal’d Fansyes and an associated Pastoral (c. 1643–1646), written by Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, the daughters of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle. These plays (which did not receive adequate scholarly editions until the late twentieth century) were written in the ‘country’ but deeply influenced by the ‘court’, and all three simultaneously reinforce and subvert the dominance of court culture. To conclude my analysis of women’s roles in the maintenance of English court culture during the Interregnum, I will look at another relatively recent discovery: Hester Pulter’s poems and emblems, written in the absence of any ‘court’ life but with the memory of court privilege and assumptions still in the background. 28 Findlay, ‘Dramatizing Home’, pp. 135–146.

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Mary Wroth: Loves Victory The emergence of Mary Wroth (c. 1586–1652) as a major figure in early seventeenth-century English literary culture has been a striking phenomenon in scholarship since the late 1970s, prompting scholarly editions of her works along with multiple books and articles on her life and writings. Her career exemplifies the fragility as well as the striking achievements of being a woman both within and in the vicinity of the court. Born in 1587, a year after her uncle Philip’s death at Zutphen, she was the eldest child of his brother Robert (who inherited Penshurst Place on Phillip’s death), and the niece of Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, whose psalms were discussed in Chapter Four as an early instance of the signs of an emergent Protestant Baroque. Her long-lasting relationship with her cousin, the Countess’s son William Herbert, who in 1601 became third Earl of Pembroke, has been central to scholarly discussion of her writings. Her major works, The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, will be the focus of the following chapter. As early as 1595, when she was aged eight or nine, her father mentioned her as a ‘fit maid for the Queen’.29 The austere court of the last years of Queen Elizabeth is where Robert Sidney first sent his daughter ‘Mall’ at the age of fifteen, but in the new reign, he was created Baron Sidney of Penshurst, and elevated to the place of the Queen Anna’s lord chamberlain and surveyor, the second highest official in her household, thus giving his daughter greater prominence. The Sidneys and Pembrokes were all frequent players in Queen Anna’s court activities. Sidney’s frequent correspondent Roland Whyte commented that in that first year Mary had ‘dawnced before the Queen two galliards with one Mr Palmer, the ablest dawncer of this tyme; both were much comended by her Majestie; then she dawnced with hym a corante’.30 Those are precisely the terms on which a daughter of a family like the Sidneys would be most advantageously displayed at court. She was to be decorative, an embodiment of the graces and accomplishments provided by her class and education, qualities that would make her a fitting companion to royalty and mark her as a good match, thus anticipating a marriage that would be beneficial to the family. Aristocratic women were required to consider themselves as family commodities, detachable parts that could be traded, sold, given and received in return for security, comfort, and advancement. The blazon – the ubiquitous list-poem that so often surfaces 29 Hannay, Kinnamon, and Brennan, Domestic Politics, p. 17. 30 Brennan, Kinnamon, and Hannay, Whyte, p. 552.

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as courtly kitsch, blatantly articulating an objectifying focus, part by part, on the beloved’s features – can thus be seen as a discursive homology to such social rituals as the marriage negotiations to which Mary was subjected by her father, prospective husbands, and (since he had substantial financial support involved in the marriage) her older cousin with whom, as we can tell from early versions of some of her poems, she probably had started an intimate liaison. After her marriage in 1604 to Sir Robert Wroth, a rich Essex landowner and hunting companion to King James, the new Lady Wroth continued to feature in court life. She was given a role as the nymph Baryte in Jonson’s Masque of Blacknesse (1605), processing with Lady Walsingham, who played Periphere, carrying ‘an urn, shered with wine’, to signify the earth’s fruitfulness. Other women taking part included Pembroke’s future sister-in-law Susan, her cousin Anne Herbert, and Philip Sidney’s likely model for his sonnet-mistress ‘Stella’, Penelope Rich. Each lady appeared as one of the twelve daughters of Niger, dressed in blue and gold, with peacock feathers in their hair, carrying fans inscribed with names and imprese. Audience and masquers alike celebrated the occasion with various manifestations of conspicuous ostentation, although Dudley Carleton disapproved of the performance, saying that ‘their Apparrell was rich’ but it was ‘too light and Curtizanlike for such great ones’. Three years later Mary Wroth’s participation in the sequel to Blacknesse, The Masque of Beauty, was commented upon by the Italian poet, Antimo Galli, in a narrative poem dedicated to Pembroke and including a stanza each to his wife and his cousin.31 In her prose romance Urania, probably written at the end of the next decade, Mary also refers to Lord Hay’s Masque (1607) by Campion and possibly Tethys Festival (1610) by Daniel. She was thus both a participant in and a keen observer of the theatrical effects achieved in the masques. Mary Wroth’s cousin William was also an active participant in court entertainments. In 1606 he appeared in the masque for his brother Philip’s wedding, an occasion distinguished by ‘no small losse that night of chains and jewells, and many great ladies were in shorter than their skirts’. In the 1606 season, Honour Triumphant, a pageant written by John Ford, was performed in which four knights errant – played by the Duke of Lennox, the Earl of Arundel, Pembroke, and his brother Philip, now Earl of Montgomery – defended four idealistic propositions: that ‘knights in ladies service have no free-will’, ‘Beauty is the maintaineer of valour’, ‘Fair Lady was never false’ (Pembroke’s), and ‘Perfect lovers are only wise’. A month later the challenges 31 Orgel and Strong, Theater of the Stuart Court, p. 90; Hannay, Wroth, pp. 130–131.

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were answered by four more cynical knights with counter-propositions, the counter to Pembroke’s hyperbolic misogyny being: ‘Fairest Ladies are falsest, having fairest occasion’.32 As a lady-in-waiting and occasional masquer, then, Mary Wroth played an appropriately decorative and silent part in the spectacles mounted in the court. Her role was to be seen as a graceful contributor to the dazzling visual displays that mirrored for the participants (and beyond) the gloriousness that was a central part of the court’s self-image. By contrast, as a man, Pembroke took on more active roles as a dancer, tilter, and challenger, as well as having highly visible public roles in the ‘plays’ of court and national politics. In fairness, his interest in the drama was not simply that of a dilettante or ambitious politician: when the actor Richard Burbage died in 1619, Pembroke wrote of having not participated in a ‘supper given by the Duke of Lennox’ which, ‘being tenderharted’, he said could not attend ‘so soon after the loss of my old acquaintance Burbadg’. His connection with Burbage, a principal actor in Shakespeare’s company, bears out the First Folio’s dedication to the two ‘incomparable brethren’, Pembroke and his brother, the Earl of Montgomery, the husband of Mary Wroth’s friend, Susan, Countess of Montgomery.33 Court, place, and family permeate all of Wroth’s writings as well as her activities, whether in the court circles centred on King James or Queen Anna or in the ‘little courts’ of Loughton (her husband’s estate north of London) or the Sidney family home of Penshurst, as well as Pembroke’s dwellings, Baynard’s Castle in London, and Wilton House in the country. Throughout her writings, Wroth evokes the multifarious theatricality of the courtly lifestyle. Several episodes in the Urania occur in places that are described as theatres, depicted not merely as sites of dramatic entertainment but of helpless enchantment, as if one of the functions of court artifice and role-playing were to tie the destinies of the actors to the residual values embodied in the court. The melancholy queen Pamphilia and, indeed, every other woman in the romance are constantly on display, arranging scenes to deport themselves as surely as the Jacobean court ladies in their elaborately staged performances, on stage and off. The commonplace metaphors of the world as the theatre of God’s glory or the court as a theatre of power and magnificence assume a correspondence between court surfaces and underlying cosmic reality, where everything acted, on stage or off, is part of a providential order. 32 For the accumulated sources of contemporary gossip as well as records of these court events, see Waller, Sidney Family Romance, p. 307, nn. 17–19. 33 Waller, Sidney Family Romance, pp. 226, 306, n. 9.

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Less well known than the Urania or her poems, but now widely available in print and in recent years occasionally staged, Wroth’s pastoral drama Loves Victory exists in at least two versions, one of which (found in the Huntington Library and frequently published since the 1980s) is has been variously speculated to have been an early draft, an acting script, or possibly a reconstruction of a performance. Marta Straznicky observes that Wroth’s compositional habits show that the piece was probably written and revised at various times, and that it was a ‘kind of detachable text’. Blank pages, spaces for songs, and the rewriting of the ending all suggest, in Tiffany Stern’s phrase, we should regard what we have of the work as a ‘patchwork construction’.34 The shorter version (the ‘Huntington’ text), ends with the principal lovers in a ritual suicide; in its fuller version (the so-called Penshurst text, first published in a limited edition in 1988) it is a pastoral drama in five acts with additional dialogue between Venus and Cupid about how to rescue the lovers, and it has a conventional transformative happy ending in which they are revived. The two manuscripts indicate that perhaps Wroth may have rewritten the play for different occasions or audiences. Like her aunt’s ‘tinkering’ with the psalms, Loves Victory has a typically Baroque restlessness, its unfinished nature also echoing the broken endings of both parts of the Urania. The ‘patchwork’ quality of the various drafts and versions suggest that at Wroth (and perhaps others) gave some thought to its performance. There is at best only the most ambiguous evidence that it was staged, but some Wroth scholars speculate that it could easily have been presented at Penshurst, Wilton, or Baynard’s Castle, the great country houses associated with the Sidney and Pembroke families. It has also been speculated that it might have been staged in a particular private performance for Sir Edward Dering (1598–1644), a near neighbour of the Sidneys at Penshurst, well known as a collector of plays and known to present private performances, some of which may have included women actors. Dering probably owned the Huntington Library version of the play, which lacks the satisfyingly romantic pastoral ending.35 At first glance – an impression reinforced by modern productions of the piece – Loves Victory is a light, even frothy, pastoral courtly entertainment.36 Whether or not it was ever staged there, the idealised ‘place’ of Penshurst 34 Straznicky and Mueller, Household Drama, p. 30; Stern, Documents of Performance, p. 5. 35 For updated accounts of the controversies over the relationship of the two (arguably three) versions of the work and their possible performances, see Findlay, ‘Manuscripts’, and Salzman, ‘Possession, Access and Online Editing’. 36 Miller, ‘Playing’.

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(so adulated in much modern Sidneian scholarship) certainly permeates the play, providing a nurturing atmosphere of aristocratic hospitality and civility, values associated with the reification of the Sidney family’s ‘little court’ as a ‘striking and idyllic’ residence and ‘idealized family home’.37 The generic convention within which Loves Victory primarily operates is pastoral tragicomedy, putting into dramatic form the typical atmosphere and themes of aristocratic pastoral eclogues like Tasso’s Aminta (1580) or Guarini’s II Pastor Fido (1590). Mary Wroth’s uncle, Philip Sidney, had disparaged such mixed works that brought together dialogue, lyrical songs and choruses, stock characters, and the archetypal miraculous ending of romance stories. But in an idiosyncratic Baroque combination of narrative opposites, what Sidney had dismissed as inappropriate had, by the early seventeenth century, become fashionable, and tragicomedy in particular had become a respectable narrative form and – if we include related and equally mixed works like Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale – a popular dramatic kind. But it is intriguing to see how Wroth’s piece, written most likely at the end of the second decade of the century, also anticipates many of the fashions that became popular in the court ten or more years later. The paraphernalia of Cupid’s arrows, love’s secrecy, hope, jealousy, impossible chastity, and fortuitous interventions of the deities are commonplace ingredients of 1630s court entertainments, just as they had been in the romance stories, poems and dramas in the previous half century and throughout the long tradition of romance narrative dating back to the Greeks. There are protracted discussions among lovesick nymphs and shepherds; the clichés of their talk are familiar from court poetry: love is ‘a paine which yett doth pleasure bring’, at once a mystery, a gift from heaven, and a perpetual betrayal. These undemanding paradoxes are dressed up in conventional pastoral landscape: ‘Forrest, Hils, Vallies, Cottages, A Castle, A River, Pastures, Heards, Flocks, all full of Countrey simplicity’, as Jonson describes it in The Sad Shepherd.38 Loves Victory has four pairs of lovers, all suffering to varying extents from unrequited or forbidden love. As part of the multiple interwoven narratives so typical of the Baroque, ‘family’ plays a prominent role in creating the play’s distinctive mix of idealism and satire. Wroth incorporates various family references in their names and relationships. The most prominent male lover, Philissus (Philip Sidney?), is in love with Musella (Muse+Stella?), but fears, wrongly as it turns out, that she loves his friend Lissius (possibly, it has been suggested, Matthew Lister, Pembroke’s mother’s physician who 37 Hannay, Brennan, and Lamb, Sidneys, Vol. 1, p. xviii, 153; Vol. 2, pp. xviii–xix. 38 Wroth, Urania First Part, p. 314; Jonson, Works, Vol. 7, p. 395.

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was, it was gossiped, seen as a possible second husband for the dowager countess) who in turn comes to love Philissus’s sister Simeana (perhaps Mary Sidney?). Many such identifications, often contradictory or confused, have been suggested by modern Sidneians keen to interweave family histories into the play. But at the very least there are references to Wroth herself as well as to her recently deceased husband in the character of Rustick, who is presented as unsophisticated and vulgar, only fit to ‘marke a beast, or Drive a cowe’ and unaware of the love between Musella and Philissus.39 Finally, in the longer version, acknowledging his ignobility, he obligingly allows a wish-fulfilment ending to occur by abandoning his claims to Musella. His gesture is perhaps a wistful fantasy on Wroth’s part as she looks back on the relations between herself and her father, cousin, and husband. Silvesta loves Philissus, but also renounces her love for him in favour of Musella; she rejects the love of the unsophisticated Forester, but they come together at the play’s end, at least in the Penshurst version, when the flirtatious Dalina and the boorish Rustick are also united. The most important characters in the play’s scheme, however, are the two gods, Venus and Cupid, who both preside and quarrel over the activities of the mortals. The invocation of Venus and Cupid – ‘those tutelary deities of the baroque world’, notes Skrine40 – is a typical piece of pastoral kitsch, but (again in the longer version, and in what may be later additions), Venus expresses annoyance that her plots are not working out. When Lissius scorns the power of love, Venus angrily orders Cupid to become more actively intrusive. She announces at the end of Act One that she ‘would have all to wayle, and all to weepe’. All the lovers, Cupid assures Venus, ‘shall both cry, and sigh, and waile, and weep, | and for our mercy shall most humbly creepe’41 By the end of Act Three, Venus is dissatisfied that some of her victims are barely affected. Finally, however, she intervenes in the lovers’ favour, even claiming that the miraculous uniting of Philissus and Musella is her benevolent work: ‘Louers bee nott amas’d this is my deed | who could not suffer yo[ur] deere harts to bleed’. 42 The apparent tragedy of the ending of the shorter Huntington version is transformed in the Penshurst text by the intervention of two female figures, the shepherdess Silvesta, prompted by the goddess Venus, who oversees the whole play and creates the ‘pathways for the fulfilment of female 39 Straznicky and Mueller, Household Drama, p. 102. 40 Skrine, Baroque, p. 115. 41 Straznicky and Mueller, Household Drama, pp. 60–61. The Penshurst text may be found in Loves Victory, ed. Brennan. A scholarly edition, to be edited by Alison Findlay, is eagerly awaited. 42 Straznicky and Mueller, Household Drama, p. 134.

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desire’, an ending that (if there was any autobiographical wish-fulfilment projected upon the action) no doubt also expresses, at least in fantasy, the desires of the author.43 At the end, again at least in the longer version, like the monarch mingling with the dancers at the conclusion of a court masque, the mythological figures appear to join with the mortals. The play’s concluding scenes can be read as a sentimental celebration of true love or, as Margaret McLaren argues, an ironic demonstration of the power of Venus and Cupid to humble everyone in the play, even those who seem most immune to love. 44 What is particularly attractive about the work is its varied humour. Rustick is the recurring butt of lighthearted joking: he expresses his love for Musella in terms similar to those of Sidney’s Mopsa in Arcadia: with parodic pastoral comparisons not just between Musella’s complexion and ‘lambs wull’, but less complementary, the redness of her cheeks with the ‘okar’ dye on a sheep’s back.. 45 But beneath the conventional clichés of love’s pains and pangs of anguish are wider cultural contradictions. The animus of Venus’s and Cupid’s commands, as they order ‘Love, jealousie, malice, feare’, 46 reflects a level of anxiety shared by the women as they struggle with insecurity and the oppressive presence of male authority figures, notably fathers – a feature that would have reflected something of Wroth’s own family situation as far back as her girlhood preparation for her arrival at court as well as her relationship with her cousin and marriage. There is a strong emphasis on female friendship, as a womanspace not ruled by men, a motif we will see recur in both Urania and Wroth’s poems. The sharing of stories, games, and gossip – something to be benevolently exchanged among both men and woman, though initiated and presided over by the women – is reflected in Arbella Stuart’s tart remark about Queen Anna’s ladies (most likely including Wroth herself) indulging in the kind of entertainment favoured by Wroth’s characters: certain childe playse remembred by the fayre ladies. Viz. I pray my Lo. give me a course in your park. Rise pig and go. One peny follow me. &c. and when I cam to Court they weare as highly in request as ever crackling of nuts was […] till that day I never heard of a play called Fier. but even persuaded by the princely example I saw to play the childe againe. 47 43 44 45 46 47

Findlay, ‘Dramatizing Home’, p. 142. McLaren, ‘Loves Victorie’, pp. 276–294. Straznicky and Mueller, Household Drama, p. 60. Straznicky and Mueller, Household Drama, p. 61. Steen, ‘Fashioning an Acceptable Self’, p. 84.

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In Act Three, such a game is played by the women characters, who share their stories of past loves. Dalina tells stories of her fickleness, in activities presumably acceptable for men, but forbidden to women: voicing such desires may lead only to pain, and thus a woman is well advised to accept her place within a benevolent marriage. Simeana then tells of her constancy and of her secret hopes regarding a new unnamed lover. Fillis tells of her unrequited love for Philissus. Climena relates how she followed a lover who later rejected her, and reveals her present love for Lissius. In these stories, the women assume that they occupy subordinate roles to men. As John Berger notes on the dominance of the male gaze, ‘Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to women themselves’. 48 While there are warnings that each may not necessarily be telling the whole truth about their experiences, the scene is a touching and (especially when Simeana and Climena quarrel) amusing revelation of the mixture of subjection and fantasy of autonomy that was seemingly characteristic of court ladies’ lives; it also indirectly offers some degree of realism regarding women’s roles in courtly society as they try to find alternative spaces within gendered scripts they did not write. In the equivalent scene in Act Four, the lovers play at riddles, and slowthinking Rustick is laughed at in a jest probably alluding to Wroth’s husband who, if we believe Jonson’s poetical encomium to him, preferred the company of rural friends and hunting and may well have been impatient at such women-centred courtly pastimes. Trivial though they may have been (though presumably no more so than the gossip and games of rivalry played by male courtiers), such activities served to integrate courtiers into fashionable court assumptions, and when exclusively the province of women, might also be read as part of an attempt by the politically powerless to carve out a space of pleasure and discovery for themselves. Wroth’s pastoral thus provides not just a celebration but a critique of courtly entertainments, and in particular of the gender conventions of the court as experienced by a woman who took part in the characteristic activities of court ladies. Shortly before she wrote the piece, she may herself have suffered some setback at court, like her character Lindamira in the Urania, who regrets that ‘all her favour was withdrawn as suddenly and directly, as if never had: Lindamira remaining like one in a gay MASQUE, the night pass’d, they are in their old clothes againe, and in the appearance of what was’. 49 48 John Berger, Ways of Seeing, p. 46. 49 Wroth, Urania, First Part, p. 500.

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These episodes serve as a metaphor of escape from the unpredictability and violence in the world outside; this attitude is taken to an extreme by Folietto (a shepherd rather like Rustick), who asserts that even the sufferings of love are largely fictional. But one woman, Silvesta, vows to remain dissociated from men and marriage – ‘I have wunn chastity in place of love’ she affirms, since ‘love’s as farr from mee as never knowne, | then bacely tied, now freely ame mine owne’. The emphasis on being ‘mine owne’ is clearly an affirmation that defies Venus’s warning that unless the mortals follow her dictates, they ‘will butt frame | words against your selves’.50 Given the dominant assumptions of the court, being ‘mine owne’ may not be an easily sustainable fantasy. Musella’s joy at being finally married to her beloved is brought about by a miracle: apparently sacrificed to love to avoid an odious marriage ‘to one she hates’, and ‘laid vpon loues alter’, for a ‘wedding bed a tombe obtained’, the lovers are revived and blessed by Venus, who warns all others who ‘your blessed states annoye’.51 The dominant ideology of pastoral romance is that life represents a harmonious movement, despite misprision and misfortune, leading to a happy celebratory marriage in which individual desires are reconciled with social stability. Here, the central lovers achieve their desires through the approved social ritual of marriage, while the one character who does claim some degree of sexual autonomy, Dalina, finally abandons her desires for independence. The happy ending in the Penshurst version’s Act Five, achieved against all possible odds, including apparent death, probably embodied a common fantasy for Wroth and her circle, living with tensions between duty and love, family and individuality, reason and passion. Yet, at least at the level of fantasy, and as it were in the margins, something even more intriguing than a miraculous rescue from death and an unloving marriage is implied. Silvesta’s stance may present a utopian ideal, but it also marks a woman’s assertion of the kind of individuation that is assumed to be natural to men. As her other writings repeatedly show, the desire for being ‘mine owne’ is at the core of Wroth’s gendering of the self: it includes a melancholic awareness that being a man involves a degree of autonomy rarely presumed or achieved by a woman. That such desires plateau here as well as in Wroth’s other writings is further evidence of her affinities with the ‘intimate revolt’ we observe in some manifestations of the Female Baroque. What we have seen as characteristic Baroque notes are evident throughout the work, especially the blend of hyperbole and melancholy, extremity and pain, and the amusing yet frustrating labyrinth of contradictory human 50 Straznicky and Mueller, Household Drama, pp. 51,74. 51 Straznicky and Mueller, Household Drama, pp. 124, 126, 128, 137.

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desires and possibilities. Masque-like elements include the dramatic appearances of Venus and Cupid, musical serenading by Venus’s priests, and the final spectacular revelation that the hero and heroine are still alive. Loves Victory actually has a more complex narrative than most of the court masques, with its multiple and contradictory narrative levels, and incorporation of biographical projections and fantasies. In short, there is a level of ethical seriousness even within the seemingly trivial pastoral mode in which Wroth is writing. The same utopianism that is hinted at here, however superficially, haunts Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and the Urania, Wroth’s major writings and the longest and most intriguing expression of the hyperbole, melancholy and plateauing of the Female Baroque, to which I will return in the following chapter. Worth mentioning as another woman-authored courtly entertainment, near-contemporary with Loves Victory, in this case written by a fourteen year-old girl and performed by a group of aristocratic children, probably in May 1627, at Apthorpe Hall, Northamptonshire, is Rachel Fane’s wedding masque, found in a manuscript notebook along with other dramatic pieces, poems and miscellaneous observations. Perhaps, by Maravall’s taxonomy the material counts as ’Baroque kitsch’ but it is also an indication of the greater part women were playing in writing and court theatricals. As in Loves Victory, the action of Fane’s masque is presided over by Venus and Cupid, and the piece reads like a typical courtly entertainment, with a pastoral setting, music, dance, an opening anti-masque, and a plot that leads its protagonists towards considerations of love and marriage. Kate Chedzgoy comments that Fane’s masque gives us the perspective of ‘a young girl approaching marriageable age’, revealing ‘a remarkably acute awareness of the complex relations among love, kinship, marriage’, and the issues of desire and reproduction that shaped the adult life course awaiting an aristocratic young woman’ like the author herself. By its presentation in a rural rather than a courtly setting, it provides links with Loves Victory and also with the next pieces to be considered, written some thirty years later by the two Cavendish sisters.52

The Court in Exile: Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley’s The Concealed Fansyes, and A Pastorall The family of the first Duke of Newcastle, William Cavendish (1592–1676) is celebrated for its long-lasting connections with English court culture but 52 See O’Connnor, ‘Masque at Apethorpe’ and Chedzgoy, ‘Playing with Cupid’.

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also for establishing a distinctive ‘country’, ‘place’, and ‘family’ presence in the turbulent period between the 1630s and the 1670s. The writings (and unquestionably Baroque self-presentation) of William’s second wife Margaret will be discussed in my final chapter. William himself was what his modern biographer Lucy Worsley describes as a typical cavalier – ambitious and charming, a ‘womaniser’, an ambitious but somewhat untrustworthy courtier, a prolific although mediocre poet.53 He was also a moderately successful playwright whose social standing undoubtedly enabled his plays to be staged. They included The Country Captain, on which he collaborated with James Shirley, and The Humorous Lovers (both of which were staged before the Civil War); after the Restoration, he wrote The Triumphant Winner. In addition to his activities as a writer, he was also an active patron of the arts, whose literary acquaintances included Ben Jonson and William Davenant. He encouraged his children, and later his second wife, to become writers. He wrote to his daughter Jane that she was a ‘rare Indicter’, who had ‘the Pen of a most ready writer’, and encouraged the younger daughter Elizabeth to ‘write but whatt you think’, since she was a girl, thus providing another variation of the Baroque woman writer having a male authority figure in the background.54 By the 1630s Newcastle had established a lavish ‘little court’ in his properties in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, establishing his reputation in horsemanship and manège, and entertaining and commissioning masques including Jonson’s Welcome to Bolsover (1633), for a visit from King Charles, and for another royal visit in 1634 – hoping (largely unsuccessfully) for further court advancement – the King’s Entertainment at Welbeck. Many years later, in her adulatory biography of her husband, Margaret Cavendish regretted the enormous cost of these ventures but attributed the expenditure to his love for the monarch. During the Civil War, Newcastle led the royalist forces in the north, but after a military defeat at Marston Moor he went into exile, taking refuge in Paris and Antwerp. Here, in a house once owned by Rubens, he and Margaret established a salon and attracted many intellectuals and artists, with other royalist exiles; they also entertained the exiled Charles II, who had established himself in The Hague.55 Meanwhile, his three daughters (by his first wife) bravely maintained a presence in the family properties in Derbyshire, despite spasmodic parliamentary occupation, and kept up the semblance (even if only imaginary) of pre-war courtly life. 53 Worsley, Cavalier, pp. 105–106. 54 Ezell, ‘To be your Daughter’, pp. 292–294. 55 The Cavendishes’ life in Antwerp is documented in Van Beneden and De Poorter, Royalist Refugees.

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Two of the Cavendish daughters, Jane (1621–1669) and Elizabeth (1626–1663), compiled a manuscript book, probably prepared as a presentation copy for their exiled father. It contains a collection of eighty-five poems, mostly by Jane, addressed to family members, friends and acquaintances, as well as meditations on romantic and religious themes. It would be unnecessarily hyperbolic to call the poems anything more than occasional, but they have stylistic affinities with typical Cavalier verse and so could, stylistically, arguably be called at least ‘pale’ Baroque. In the longer of the two extant copies of the manuscript, the poetry is accompanied by two dramatic pieces written collaboratively by the Cavendish sisters; the shorter work is a pastoral that includes two rambling anti-masques, but the longer work, an intriguing part pastoral, part masque titled The Concealed Fansyes, has attracted significant recent scholarly and critical attention. The material threat to the Cavendish family, the subversion of a stable ‘place’, is poignantly foregrounded in both Pastorall and Concealed Fansyes. They were written with the Civil War not merely as a background but while Welbeck was actually occupied by the parliamentary forces from early August 1644 until November 1645. Jane and Elizabeth probably composed both dramatic scripts as a means of entertaining themselves, apparently by writing alternating scenes, and no doubt doing so because creating a courtly entertainment, even on paper, was one defiant means of establishing continuity with a way of life under grave threat. Consequently, what emerges in both works are projections of their fears and their determination to maintain family and courtly values under siege. Lisa Hopkins and Barbara MacMahon argue that, because of the turbulent political and domestic circumstances against which they wrote (and particularly given the absence of their father), the prospect of seeing a performance would have seemed unlikely; however, there are textual hints that performance was certainly in the minds of the two authors, as a bold gesture towards a hoped-for return to normality at the Cavendish family’s little court.56 A Pastorall may appear sketchily put together, but in fairness its linguistic and dramatic coherence is not unlike the extant scripts of many betterknown court masques and entertainments. It roughly follows the outlines of a masque, along with some of the common characteristics of a pastoral entertainment like Loves Victory, with shepherds and shepherdesses and melancholic love sentiments. It contains two anti-masques. One is a lively discussion among a group of witches about the ways they will ‘metamorphise every body’ and especially (ironically given both the gender and besieged situation of the authors) how they make ‘Ladyes Captives’ by tying their 56 Hopkins and McMahon, ‘Come, what, a siege’, pp. 1–20.

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‘tongues’. In the second, four country gossips gleefully plot the plunder of a besieged house. Following that occurs a meeting of shepherds named Confidence and Persuasion, and two shepherdesses, Vertue and Innocence, who, as in the longer play itself, look forward to the return of an absent father figure. Innocence mourns:

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His absence makes a Chaos sure of mee And when each one doth lookeing looke to see They speakeing say, That I’m not I. Alas doe not name mee for I desire to dye.57

Unlike the typical court masque, A Pastorall has no triumphant ending, no successful wooing or marriages to celebrate. The traditional authority figure presiding over a celebratory ending for a masque is absent: the frequently lamented father is missing, does not return, and his absence brings the performance to an unsatisfying close. Both Cavendish sisters include dedications to their exiled father, appealing to his judgment on their authorship, and making frequent references to their melancholy at his absence: ‘Not knoweing when hee’le come, or stay how longe’, the three sisters in A Pastorall are ‘three Devinities of sad’. Where courtly pastorals move towards fulfilment and harmony, here the second masque by the country folk reinforces the melancholy lesson that they can sing only ‘a songe of all our losses’.58 The longer work by the sisters, The Concealed Fansyes, gives voice to similar preoccupations about the disintegration of court and family life and the disruption of their treasured place of residence, thus indicating the undermining of the key constituents of court culture. It is also a striking example of women-authored drama, undertaken in challenging material circumstances as an expression of female independence, offering us some subtle but distinctive commentary on how an absolutist court culture was being both eroded and transformed. Drama during the Civil War was seen as ‘a specifically royalist form’ in part because, as Alison Findlay points out, of ‘the continuity of private performances in aristocratic homes’ like those of the Cavendishes.59 But the sisters’ writings also indicate some of the forces undermining that court culture, most importantly the emergent relative autonomy of the women writers lamenting its demise. Sara Mueller comments that it was the circumstances 57 Straznicky and Mueller, Household Drama, pp. 178–180, 192. 58 Straznicky and Mueller, Household Drama, pp. 192, 194, 184. 59 Findlay, ‘World’s Stage’, p. 69.

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of their confinement and separation from their father ‘that allow the young women at the centre of the play’ – not to mention the authors – ‘freedoms and opportunities they might not have had without the war’.60 A more complex and somewhat more finished work than the Pastorall, Concealed Fansyes has two parallel plots: one focuses on two sisters, Luceny and Tattiney, concerned for the fate of their exiled father, Lord Calsindow (clearly once again a reference to the authors’ father’s exile in Antwerp); in the other, their three cousins (also projections of the authors), besieged in the castle of Bellamo, also look forward to their father’s return to their family houses, which are obviously based on Cavendish’s Welbeck Abbey and Bolsover Castle. Given the circumstances there is an understandably deep melancholy throughout, relieved only by the fantasy ending in which the father, representing order in the family, the nation, and the universe, returns. Other incidental effects are familiar from Baroque cultural paraphernalia. Hovering almost inevitably in the background is the fascination for the rituals and trappings of the Catholic Church. The two sisters at one point go into further exile as ‘Nunns in mallenchollie’, in a genteel and somewhat nostalgic reference to the religiosity that haunts even the secular manifestations of the Baroque. This nostalgia is also found in the poems in the manuscript that refer to the absent father:

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What makes a Hell I am sure Diuines do say The presence of God’s light depriued away. Our heavenly ffather, then our earthly may, Make Hell on Earth to his Children the same way.61

The pastoral setting, instead of hosting courtly celebrations, becomes a retreat, like a nunnery or a religious sanctuary, for prayer and mourning, rather than a carefree escape to romance – or in this case, a return to the pre-Civil War solidarity of court, family, and un-besieged or captured place. That outcome seems impossible: ‘Our Summer is, if that could bee | Father, Brothers, for to see’. One of the play’s young courtly suitors, named Proper, voices the mix of melancholy and defiant hyperbole when he jokes ‘Come, what, a Siege?’ as though the very thought was impossible; he expresses the authors’ incredulity at what has happened not only to them but to their father and their whole traditional ordered society.62 Worsley suggests this 60 Straznicky and Mueller, Household Drama, p. 164. 61 Straznicky and Mueller, Household Drama, p. 231; Cavendish, Collected Works, p. 53. 62 Straznicky and Mueller, Household Drama, pp. 193, 222.

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contradiction is best represented by a scene in the play in which a captive, frustrated, and powerless Royalist soldier observes the family’s enemy, a ‘hostile but chivalrous’ Roundhead soldier whom they observe ‘walking in their own water garden as if he possessed it’.63 Living under siege and occupation by the enemy provided an unusual opportunity for the Cavendish women to develop experience in holding together their family home, which in turn might well have led them to critique some of the values of the royalist aristocracy that they would have taken for granted, and which on a conscious level they were attempting to uphold in their play. The women characters are clearly presented as affirming what remains of a traditional way of life but also discovering an unaccustomed degree of empowerment. They mock the inferior mind-reading capacity of the men and at times appear to be infuriated by them. When the men commence their courtly version of marital ‘besieging’, the women can resist because they have, as Luceny says, ‘beene brought upp in the creation of good languages, which will make us ever our selves’. Luceny, referring to the quickly rejected suitor Corpolant, says ‘Alas, he understands not; you must name my name, or els his dull braine understands not’.64 Fansyes is centred on the absence and yearned for triumphal return of the much-revered father who, as in A Pastorall, generically and cosmically performs the same function as the King in a court masque, as the virtual vanishing point of the performance outside its frame, to whom it is dedicated and by whom its vision would then be blessed. Here, only the father’s return would restore the local, national and cosmic order required by the court masque. The Yale Manuscript version makes this very explicit: My Lord: As nature ownes my creation from you, & my selfe my Education; so deuty inuites mee to dedicate my workes to you, as the onely Patterne of Judgement, that can make mee happy, if these Fanceys may owne sense, they wayte upon your Lo[rdship]: as the Center if witt, I humbly thanke yr Lo[rdship]; & if a distinction of Judgement, God reward your Lo[rdship]. For in a word, what I haue of good, is wholly deriued from you, as the soule of bounty and this booke desires no other purchas, then a smyle from yo[ur] Lo[rdship] or a word of like, w[hi]ch will glorifie your creature; That is affectionately Your Lo[rdship]’s. most obliged obedient Daughter. Jane Cauendysshe.65 63 Worsley, Cavalier, p.188. 64 Straznicky and Mueller, Household Drama, pp. 219, 221. 65 Bennett, Introduction to Cavendish, Collected Works, p. 51.

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But if the key absence of the monarchical figure dominates the play, Cavendish’s influence on his daughters may also be seen in the remarkably advanced views these aristocratic young women seem to have towards marriage and sexuality, at least as expressed in their play. The elevated platonic love of courtly pastoral romance, which provides the attractive (if slightly culturally retrograde) combination of melancholy and hyperbole of Loves Victory, is contradicted in Concealed Fansyes by a restrained but clear affirmation of female sexuality and gender equality within marriage. In part, Catherine Burroughs speculates, the Cavendish sisters’ boldness was influenced by their awareness of their father’s sexual reputation, that he was apparently given (even in his seventies) to making sexual advances to the servants.66 There is an acknowledgement, perhaps even a degree of pride, regarding his conquests of women, which is expressed in the play through the gentlewoman servant Toy. As we can see from evidence in Jane’s poems both daughters seemingly felt sufficiently relaxed to freely use what the play terms the ‘monkey’ and ‘Toy’ as epithets in their own anticipated sexual lives as married women. At the same time, the men’s wooing is portrayed, slightly maliciously, as indulging in platonic clichés: Courtly wants a ‘wife or mistress’ to be a ‘pretty monkey’, implying an external propriety but allowing for a more liberal private sexuality. Luceny and Tattiney mock their suitors’ conventional views of marriage along with their hyperbolic and idealistic rhetoric, which incidentally makes the men in a sense more superficially Baroque than the women, whose views on love and relationships emerge as commonsensical and rational, eschewing the rhetorical hyperbole of their suitors. ‘Away, away, with your Hippopocriticall language, for I am not yet soe vaine as to beleive your dissembling Romances’, exclaims Luceny, mocking the pretensions of Courtly’s rhetoric: ‘I could not love soe dull a braine as hee had, alwayes to repeate hee loved mee. I have rather have him say hee hated mee, for that would bee some variety!’67 Yet even though the Civil War paradoxically opened possibilities for women’s voices, there is a limit to the women’s revolutionary views: the play provides a reassuringly decorous fantasy comic ending by giving the returning father the final right of approval of the women’s marriages. At the end of Fansyes, the daughters, with the assistance of an Angel, demand that the father also take an appropriate wife. The angel sings: Fye, fye, let marryage life Plant virtue in you, take a wife 66 Burroughs, ‘Hymen’s Monkey Love’, pp. 21–31. 67 Straznicky and Mueller, Household Drama, pp. 211, 209.

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That’s truly virtuous and fair Hansome & innocent as the chast Ayre.68

Whether Margaret Lucas, at least in the eyes of the two Cavendish daughters, would have fulfilled those requirements might be in doubt: in the play, the presumptuous Toy is rejected and the conclusion fondly but firmly, as Marion Wynne-Davies notes, makes their fictional father ‘question his complacent assumptions about women and their sexual identities’ and, by extension, about male sexual privileges, with the goal of warning against the conventional Cavalier libertinism represented by the authors’ own father.69 By the end of the play, as in the court masque, all are married or are on the way to being so, as courtly decorum would insist – but only on the women’s terms. Tattiney affirms: ‘this, you may see, is an equall marryage, & I hate those people that will not understand, matrymony is to joyne Lovers’.70 While it is a long step from the play’s embrace of female sexuality to the explicit embrace of libertinism for women in the Restoration (for this and a discussion of Aphra Behn, see Chapter Seven), Concealed Fansyes represents an unusual degree of explicitness in presenting women’s sexual feelings in a work by women authors. It includes scenes in which the heroines firmly reject marriage on economic grounds and affirm their belief that women have a duty to influence the rigid views that men seemingly have of marriage, so that friendship and companionship, rather than family alliances, can become the basis for marrying. The flirtatious servant Toy embodies a libertine ethos and claims that Lord Calsindow loves her and not his Lady, but the situation is resolved and lightly dismissed through the assumption of conventional gender and class privileges, much as similar situations in Caroline and Restoration comedies are, including William Cavendish’s own plays or Behn’s The Rover. For Cavendish and for the Caroline cavalier ethos generally, sexual adventures (both in reality and in drama or poetry) can be accepted as part of a comic narrative stressing masculine dominance, where even rape or supposedly playful coercion can be contained through class privilege, money, and the comic ending of marriage. Baroque multiplicity is transitioning into the libertine sophistication of the Enlightenment. An amusing sideline in the play’s treatment of marriage is the character of Lady Tranquillity who, the sisters clearly believe, has designs on the exiled Lord Calindow. Almost certainly she is a caricature of the woman who was 68 Straznicky and Mueller, Household Drama, p. 249. 69 Wynne-Davies, Women Writers and Familial Discourse, p. 161. 70 Straznicky and Mueller, Household Drama, p. 252.

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rumoured at the time to be plotting to become authors’ future stepmother. Early in the play she is ridiculed for her flashiness, obsession with fashion, and specifically for taking five hours to dress. At the end of the play she is married off to the obnoxious soldier Corpolant, perhaps a mischievous expression of wish-fulfilment on the part of the daughters, fearing that a woman around their own age had seduced their middle-aged father. Around the time the play was being written, their father was indeed courting and marrying the young Margaret Lucas. Ironically, Cavendish himself did not return to England until after 1660, by which time Jane had died (Elizabeth died shortly after) – and he returned with that young wife by whom, they suspected, he was being pursued while they were writing their plays. By then, she had indeed assumed the persona of Margaret Cavendish: the ostentatiously Baroque personality, dramatist, philosophical writer, and ‘she-scientist’, who will be discussed in detail in the final chapter. Marion Wynne-Davies argues that in these scenes concerning sexuality and marriage, especially the libertine assumptions about Cavalier ‘illicit sexual encounters’, we can sense not only the deep-rooted ‘changes in the Cavendish familial discourse provoked by the Civil War years’, but signs of a major shift in sexual and familiar discourse more broadly. Such a shift increasingly undermines the absolutism of the rigidity of the ideologies of court, place, and family and links with the epistemological revolution of the Enlightenment, voiced by Aphra Behn two decades later.71

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Hester Pulter: Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda Another woman whose writing shares many Baroque characteristics and who has real claims to being seen as a distinctive instance of the English Female Baroque is Hester Pulter (1605–1678). The manuscript of Pulter’s writings was found in Leeds University library only in the mid-1990s. It consists of a collection of over sixty poems and fifty-four emblems (without images), and two unfinished parts of a romance, The Unfortunate Florinda, loosely based on events from medieval Spanish and Islamic history. The poems are a mixture of devotional, domestic, and stridently royalist political affirmations, mainly written during the 1640s, with a few examples as late as the 1660s. Pulter’s writing career largely coincided with her later pregnancies (she had fifteen between 1624 and 1648), and throughout, the poems are intensely preoccupied with child-rearing and especially the deeply-felt deaths of many of the children, only two of whom survived her. 71 Wynne-Davies, Women Writers and Familial Discourse, p. 159.

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The manuscript itself was prepared, perhaps by a daughter, around 1661–1662, with one final poem inserted by Pulter herself in 1665, when she was in her early sixties. It was never published at the time. Stylistically, Pulter’s writings frequently exemplify Canfield’s observation that the Baroque ‘surprises […] puzzles [and] pops up where we least expect it’, particularly illustrating his definition of the ‘occasional Baroque’ that may burst through a serene Renaissance or neo-classical surface.72 Pulter indulges in extended conceits, reworking her extensive classical learning, frequently choosing metaphors of violence, martyrdom, disease, and other kinds of emotional extremity. A poem lamenting the death of a daughter compares smallpox sores to roses on lilies, the soul to an embryo, death to the circles of the new atomism or the Copernican universe. In ‘Tell me no more [On the same]’ she takes a conventional set of Petrarchan comparisons and adds images of martyrdom, physical torture, and abandonment. It is not clear whether such hyperbole is for rhetorical effect or as a therapeutic rejection of such artificial formulations of desire, especially when we consider her personal situation as a burdened wife and overwhelmed and tragedy-afflicted mother. Strikingly Baroque as well is a bizarre combination of sacrifice and martyrdom in the torture and the threatened death of Florinda, the ravished heroine of the part-finished romance, with ‘her hair disheveled, her neck and arms naked, in each arm a vein pricked’, with her parents draining blood into ‘two huge golden bowls’ which become a ‘horrid health’ for family and friends vowing revenge on her ravisher.73 More significantly than such local ‘eruptions’, however, Pulter’s work reflects underlying aspects of the Baroque structure of feeling – a nostalgia for absolutism, alternations of melancholy and hyperbole, and an exploration of the dark interiority of being female, which falls well short of the mystical or visionary but nonetheless expresses a fragile individuality in the face of a rapidly changing ideological landscape that includes disturbing challenges to received notions of creation and divine providence. In Pulter’s manuscript she describes herself as ‘the noble Hadassus’, a persona originally adopted by the Old Testament Esther, who used her intelligence and cunning to persuade King Ahasuerus to restore good government to Israel, a subject matter found in the work of a number of seventeenth-century painters, including Artemisia Gentileschi. Catherine 72 Canfield, Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature, pp. 15, 17, 30. 73 Pulter, Poems, Emblems, pp. 82, 361. Quotations from her writings are generally taken from this edition, except where, because of idiosyncratic editorial policies, they vary from the University of Leeds MS lt q 32, reproduced in the Pulter Project.

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Coussens points out that when she became Charles I’s queen, Henrietta Maria herself had been urged by the Pope to take on the role of Esther for the English Catholics.74 Pulter never had the opportunity to enter such court circles, nor can we designate her husband’s estate, Broadfield House, in Hertfordshire, as even a ‘little court’, but court values permeate her writings. Her father, James Ley, had been a civil servant under James, rising to become Lord Treasurer; in 1626, Charles created him the first Earl of Marlborough. In 1620, aged fifteen, Hester had married Arthur Pulter, who held various local public offices but decided to live a relatively isolated life with his wife and family, especially once the Civil War commenced. Many of her poems grew very directly from her life experiences as a wife, and most especially as a mother, but by the 1640s her sense of her life was overwhelmingly one of confinement and entrapment, ‘shut up in a country grange’, expecting ‘no liberty’ until ‘I find my freedom in my grave’. She turned to writing. She laments that the natural world, animals, birds, plants, even spiders and scorpions, have a freedom she has lost, beset by ‘Sorrow and Fear’ and ‘Despair’..75 As well as being confined by her loyalty to the values of the banished court, she was what she variously called ‘trapped’ or ‘imprisoned’ by a succession of fifteen pregnancies, which limited her movements but also provided her the opportunity to write. ‘Thus have I lived a sad and weary life, | Thirteen a maid, and thirty-three a wife’, she writes in the early 1650s. Many of the poems record her distress at the deaths of most of her children: ‘Death has already from my weeping vine | Torn seven fair branches’, one poem records, about halfway through her seemingly relentless process of their deaths.76 Writing was a consolation and a process of self-discovery. The poems show her enjoyment at being able to express what was clearly an extensive classical education and, like Mary Sidney, she was fascinated, even obsessed, by experimenting with multiple stanzaic and metrical forms in her poems, including long and short stanzas, tercets, even shaped poems a little like George Herbert’s. They also indicate her search for therapeutic and creative relief from the entrapment of her domestic life. Her enthusiasm for emblems (her poem manuscript includes over fifty emblem verses) probably grows from the same need to focus on disciplined writing as both spiritual and physical therapy. The emblem was a means for her to affirm her need for a world that afforded clear moral guidance and predictability. There 74 Kaufmann, ‘Esther’, pp. 165–169; Coussens, ‘Virtue’s Commonwealth’, p. 29. 75 Pulter, Poems, pp. 166, 168. 76 Pulter, Poems, pp. 128, 121.

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are no visuals attached to the emblems in her manuscript – whether that was by choice at the time of composition or because they were unavailable to a scribe copying her manuscript is impossible to say – but emblematic thinking was another means by which she could grasp at a belief in a fading ordered world that could offer a clear moral guidance. She makes each poem a meditation and an opportunity to affirm her belief in a traditional hierarchical courtly world in the face of unpredictability and what, as a royalist, she saw as political chaos. By the outbreak of the Civil War, Pulter’s work echoes that of the Cavendish sisters in reflecting less nostalgia than anger at the exile and fall of the royal court. Although her Hertfordshire residence was never occupied like the Cavendish houses, as known royalists she and her husband were compelled to stay within five miles of their home – and she makes her royal allegiances very clear in her poems, castigating Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentary forces for having poured filth over England, her frankness indicating she was likely writing not for a wider public but for herself, or at most her most immediate family. She sees the murder of King Charles as a blasphemy, caused by the insubordination of lower orders, the ‘tinkers and cobblers’ of Parliament. She writes four poems specifically on the ‘martyred sovereign’. She broods angrily over the fate of the royal martyr:

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Let none presume to weep; tears are too weak Such an unparralled loss as this to speak Poor village girls do so express their grief And in that sad expression find relief When such a Prince in such a manner Dies’.

Another poem laments the death, of Margaret Cavendish’s brother Charles Lucas, executed by Parliamentary forces. ‘Had not lords in noble breeding failed’, she laments, ‘Tinkers and cobblers never had prevailed’.77 In line with a number of royalists, Pulter views her poetry as continuing the battle against the usurping and murderous parliamentarians. To what extent, then, can we speak of Pulter as ‘Baroque’? Her writing is dominated by the characteristic Baroque combination of affective hyperbole and melancholy, mixing heightened emotion, loss, devastation, abandonment, and melancholic weeping or helplessness, marked by variety and complexity, and alternately attracted by fascination and fear. The ‘malignant, melancholy star’ of Saturn, the planet of melancholia, has dominated her 77 Pulter, Poems, pp. 106, 210.

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since birth and she provides almost a chiaroscuro effect as she describes Nighttime, when ‘Pale, ghastly, shuddering Horror, lost Despair | And sobbing Sorrow, tearing off her hair’ stirs her fears. ‘Night’s associates’, the ‘infernal brood’, and ‘strange Chimerian sights’ repeatedly appear to her ‘troubled fancy’ and ‘of my reason straight they make a rape’, frequently presenting death before her eyes. At times she needs to take refuge desperately in being ‘petrified’, experiencing numbness, since otherwise, ‘else with grief | long ago I have died’.78 Above all, and again quintessentially Baroque, Pulter’s fascination with death is unmistakeable, and despite her stolid Protestantism is at times uncannily reminiscent of Gertrude More’s Catholic devotion. Erupting through her domesticity are extreme yearnings for bodily annihilation: Dear Death, dissolve these mortal charms And then I’ll throw myself into thy arms; then thou mayest use my carcass as thou lust Until my bones (and little luz) be dust.

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Many poems do yearn to look beyond dying, but their emotional emphasis is overwhelmingly just to break free of the body – a desire, perhaps, to welcome a spiritual plateauing, rather than any transcendence. Some poems yearn for her daughters to look towards their own deaths since ‘earth (alas) nought but affliction brings’. She sees how death has taken so many of her children, young and fair And leavst me here with hoary hair, They, lovely, fair, with snowy skin, Did too, too soon [Death’s] favor win.79

The poems that express a longing for death, for herself and her children, constitute a striking example of Baroque plateauing, even verging on a desire for self-annihilation. Especially when contemplating her children’s death, but frequently with the royal martyrdom in her mind, she petitions God to ‘irradiate my sad soul’; she has to repeatedly comfort herself about her own ‘life’s sad story’ and must believe that she will ‘fly higher | Till I dilate myself to f ire’ and see her ‘saviour with these eyes’. 80 But 78 Pulter, Poems, pp. 71, 153, 116, 58, 113. 79 Pulter, Poems, pp. 180, 148, 141–142. 80 Pulter, Poems, pp.162, 147,110, 150.

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that desire is never rewarded. Repeatedly she aff irms ‘on soft Mercy’s wings I’ll mount above’, but here, in the world, she knows ‘fancies are’ her ‘melancholy soul’s’ only consolation in a world where ‘Conspiring Death and Time’ cuts off her ‘story’.81 Perhaps hearkening to current scientific and religious controversies over the nature of Creation, she broods over the nature of the afterlife: ‘whether dissolution, | Or transmigration, | Or rolling revolution’ – ‘I gladly would transmigerate’, she exclaims.82 In one of her last poems, she acknowledges that we ‘Cannot attain thy radiant throne above’; a poem she entitles ‘The Hope’, dated when she is almost sixty, concludes with a poignant half-line, ‘I know not how’.83 At times she places such meditations within a contemplation of the cosmos, simultaneously aware of both the comforting Ptolemaic universe and the disturbing yet alluring new heliocentric universe. She even ponders the wider possibility of infinite worlds ‘of which we have so small a notion’, but the thought of which excites the possibility that she might ‘fly above the highest star or pole’ and so ‘Turn my sad nights into the brightest days’.84 A Copernican afterlife becomes a metaphor for a level of freedom and randomness that her material life, trapped in the recurring demands of her procreative cycles, could not provide. Even tucked away (or imprisoned) in her rural grange, the philosophical contradictions of the age peek through the fragile fabric of her verse.85 Recent scholarship on Pulter – including the innovative online ‘Pulter Project’ – has stressed her perspective as a woman. Alice Eardley, her modern editor, claims a ‘proto-feminist’ tone for her writings, and Pulter’s voice matches many aspects of what I have isolated as the ‘Female Baroque’ in other writing women of the age. The partly-finished romance Florinda focuses repeatedly on disparities between men and women in love relationships. Although Pulter’s writing never becomes devotional or ‘mystic’ like Gertrude More’s, when she broods over intimate experiences – especially when faced with maternal grief, the melancholy of pain, or ageing – we sense the Baroque excavation of the depths of the female self at a singular level of self-exposure and self-exploration. Alison Shell describes some religious writing by early modern women as ‘private verse as a means of 81 Pulter, Poems, pp. 134, 156, 135, 67. 82 Pulter, Poems, pp. 137, 165, 138. 83 Pulter, Poems, pp. 126, 135, 134, 67, 110, 158, 165, 181. 84 Pulter, Poems, pp. 135,137, 175. 85 Pulter, Poems, pp. 158, 181. Karin Britland speculates on possible connections between Pulter and local literary and philosophical circles in the late 1640s and 1650s, and some specific echoes with poems by Marvell, among others: Britland, Drama at the Courts, pp. 832–854.

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letting off steam’, a phrase that I suggest is too dismissive.86 Like Gertrude More, trapped by choice in her own confinement, when Pulter writes of her own enforced isolation and ‘sad confinement’, being ‘enslaved to solitude’ or ‘being buried thus alive’, she is being forced to look deeply inside herself and to use writing as a way of giving her threatened self some sense of stability, as her body cries out against the deprivations she has in part chosen but which have also been forced upon her.87 As Ruth Connolly demonstrates, she reappropriates a traditional patriarchal metaphor for the poet by making explicit ‘the maternal body’s centrality to creative experience’, reworking the trope of the ‘pregnant body’, not as a ‘site of eroticism or pathology, but as a normative space of creation’.88 It is in that conflict that her best, most clearly Baroque writing is to be found. Only by class background and political loyalties can Pulter be called a ‘court’ woman. But she represents a common retreat from the royal court into the country – by choice or political necessity – on the part of many aristocratic and royalist families from the 1640s onwards, and her poems and emblems are unambiguously royalist, aff irming even from within her melancholy the absolutist court values of order, hierarchy, and tradition, and attacking the sacrilege of both regicide and social rebellion. As Coussens comments, ‘Royalist women came to stand for the survival and resilience of court culture during the Interregnum, maintaining conservative ideals’ that they believed would be returned with the Restoration of Charles II.89 In her poem ‘On that Unparalleled Prince Charles the First, His Horrid Murder’, Pulter exclaims that the Roundhead ‘devils’ will ‘turn this place to hell | unless our God doth a second Charles illustrate, | (Which oh, deny not!) all our hopes are frustrate’. She imagines the River Thames crying, ‘Thy king restore’, adding ‘call home his queen again’.90 In 1660 Charles II did return. But so far as we can tell from the few poems and Florinda, after the Restoration Pulter experienced some degree of disillusion with what she saw (or heard about) in the court. Some poems call her daughters back home from London, partly to escape the immorality of the Restoration court with its ‘puppet plays, masques, court buffoons’ where ‘virgins lose their honored name, | Which doth forever blur their 86 Shell, ‘Often to my Self’, p. 259. 87 Pulter, Poems, pp. 167, 168, 166. 88 Connolly, ‘Childbirth Poetics’, p. 287. 89 Coussens, ‘Virtue’s Commonwealth’, p. 30. 90 Pulter, Poems, pp. 79, 60.

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fame’.91 She warns women, and especially her daughters, not to encourage immorality in their husbands through their own behaviour, noting:

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Then if your husbands rant it high and game Be sure you double not their guilt and shame; Leave off Hyde Park, Hanes, Oxford John’s, and Kate, Spring, Mulberry Garden; […] These places I know only by their names, But ’tis these places which do blast your fames.

Instead, the poet invites her daughters to return home and like her, ‘chastely live and rather spend your days | In setting forth your great creator’s praise, | And for diversion pass your idle times, | As I do now, in writing harmless rhymes’.92 Even more revealingly, Peter Herman has argued that in Florinda, probably among the latest of Pulter’s writings, not only does she point to the ‘temptations of an opulent and licentious court’, but she modifies the horror at regicide found in some poems: here, an immoral and exploitative monarch deserves to be overthrown by virtuous courtiers. ‘The restored king’, comments Herman, failed to match Pulter’s hopes and she creates ‘a romance with distinctively republican overtones, in which chastity is the highest value, sexual corruption the lowest vice, and rulers who commit such crimes forfeit their right to rule’ and even ‘their right to live’.93 The courtly women writers examined in this chapter demonstrate to varying extents how both the surface incidentals of Baroque style and the affirmations and contradictions of Baroque ideology permeated English court culture, in the Court itself and outside. There appears to be no evidence that these four women ever met. Their life spans only minimally overlap. Wroth died in 1653, but her writing career was likely over by the 1620s, and so it is possible the Cavendish sisters or Pulter could have read Urania and the accompanying Pamphilia to Amphilanthus poems (to be discussed in the next chapter). Jane and Elizabeth Cavendish were active writers during the mid-1640s; Hester Pulter lived until 1678, writing predominantly from the 1640s until the early 1660s. But what unites them is their struggle with the ethos of the court, often in distinctively gendered ways, and with generic, stylistic, and broader intellectual affinities with what we can legitimately label as varieties of English court Baroque. 91 Pulter, Poems, pp. 213, 49. 92 Pulter, Poems, pp. 212–213. See also Britland, ‘Conspiring with friends’, pp. 847–849. 93 Herman, ‘Pulter’s Unfortunate Florinda’, p. 1240.

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Works Cited Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: New Left Books, 1971. Bacon, Francis. ‘Of Masques and Triumphs’. Complete Essays. Mineola: Dover Publications, 2012. Bailey, Rebecca A. Staging the Old Faith: Queen Henrietta Maria and the Theatre of Caroline England, 1625–1642. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Balibar, Étienne and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1991. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Service, 1972. Beverley, John. Essays on the Literary Baroque in Spain and Spanish America. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2008. Braider, Christopher. Baroque Self-Invention and Historical Truth: Hercules at the Crossroads. Routledge, 2004. Britland, Karen. Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Britland, Karen. ‘Conspiring with “friends”: Hester Pulter’s Poetry and the Stanley Family at Cumberlow Green’. Review of English Studies, n.s. 69 (2019), 832–854. Burroughs, Catherine. ‘“Hymen’s Monkey Love”: The Concealed Fancies and Female Sexual Initiation’. Theatre Journal 51 (1999), 21–31. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Canfield, J. Douglas. The Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature from Milton and the Wits to Dryden and the Scriblerians. Newark DE: University of Delaware Press, 2003. Cavendish, Jane. The Collected Works of Jane Cavendish, ed. Alexandra G. Bennett. London: Routledge, 2018. Chamberlain, John. The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman E McClure. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939. Chedgzoy, Kate. ‘Playing with Cupid: Gender, Sexuality, and Adolescence’, in Alternative Shakespeares 3, ed. Diana E. Henderson, pp. 138–157. London: Routledge, 2007. Clarendon, Henry Hyde, Earl of. History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England. Oxford, 1839. Collins, Eleanor. ‘Changing Fashions: Tragicomedy, Romance and Heroic Women in the 1630s Hall-playhouses’, in Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse, ed. Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper, pp. 217–236. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Connolly, Ruth. ‘Hester Pulter’s Childbirth Poetics’. Women’s Writing 26 (2019), 282–303. Coussens, Catherine. ‘“Virtue’s Commonwealth”: Gendering the Royalist Cultural Rebellion in the English Interregnum (1649–1660)’. Çankaya Üniversitesi FenEdebiyat Fakültesi, Journal of Arts and Sciences 6 (2006), 19–31.

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Ezell, Margaret. ‘“To Be Your Daughter in Your Pen”: The Social Functions of Literature in the Writings of Lady Elizabeth Brackley and Lady Jane Cavendish’. Huntington Library Quarterly 51 (1988), 281–96. Findlay, Alison. ‘Dramatizing Home and Memory: Lady Mary Sidney and Lady Mary Wroth’. Home Cultures 6.2 (2009), 135–146. Findlay, Alison. ‘“Upon the world’s Stage”: The Civil War and Interrregnum’, in Alison Findlay and Stephanie Hodgson-Wright, with Gweno Williams, Women and Dramatic Production 1550–1700, pp. 68–85. Harlow: Longman, 2014. Findlay, Alison. ‘The Manuscripts of “Loves Victory”’. http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/ shakespeare-and-his-sisters. Accessed October 2019. Gossett, Suzanne. ‘“Man-Maid, Begone”: Women in Masques’. English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988), 96–111. Greenberg, Mitchell. Baroque Bodies: Psychoanalysis and the Culture of French Absolutism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Hall, Stuart. ‘Signif ication, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the PostStructuralist Debates’. Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2 (1985), 91–114. Hannay, Margaret. Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Hannay, Margaret, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan, ed. Domestic Politics and Family Absence. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Hannay, Margaret, Michael G. Brennan, and Mary Ellen Lamb, ed. Ashgate Research Companion to the Sidneys, 1500–1700. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Herman, Peter C. ‘Lady Hester Pulter’s The Unfortunate Florinda: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Rape’. Renaissance Quarterly 63 (2010), 1208–1246. Hopkins, Lisa and Barbara McMahon. ‘“Come, what, a siege?” Metarepresentation in Lady Jane Cavendish and Lady Elizabeth Brackley’s The Concealed Fansyes’. Early Modern Literary Studies 16: 2 (2013), 1–20. Huebert, Ronald. John Ford: Baroque English Dramatist. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977. Januszczak, Waldemar. ‘St Peter’s to St Paul’s’. TV Miniseries, Timeline, 2012. Jonson, Ben. Works, Vol. 5, ed. C.H. Herford and Percy Simpson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937. Jonson, Ben. Ben Jonson’s Masques and Plays, ed. Robert M. Adams. New York: Norton, 1979. Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta. ‘Esther before Ahasuerus: A New Painting by Artemisia Gentileschi in the Museum’s Collection’. Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, n.s. 29.4 (1970), 165–169. Kristeva, Julia. Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Kristeva, Julia. Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila, trans. Lorna Scott Fox. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

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Maravall, José Antonio. Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. Martin, Gregory. The Ceiling Decoration of the Banqueting Hall. London: Harvey Miller, 2005. McClure, Norman E., ed. The Letters of John Chamberlain. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939. McLaren, Margaret. ‘An Unknown Continent: Lady Mary Wroth’s Forgotten Pastoral Drama, “Loves Victorie”’, in Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama: Criticism, History, and Performance 1594–1998, ed. S.P. Ceresano and Marion Wynne-Davies, pp. 219–233. London: Routledge, 1998. McManus, Clare. Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. McManus, Clare. ‘Introduction: The Queen’s Court’, in Women and Culture at the Courts of the Stuart Queens, ed. Clare McManus. pp. 1–17. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. McManus, Clare. ‘When Is a Woman Not a Woman? Or, Jacobean Fantasies of Female Performance (1606–1611)’. Modern Philology 105 (2008), 437–474. Millar, Oliver. ‘Rubens’s Whitehall Ceiling’. The Burlington Magazine 149: No. 1247 (February 2007), 101–104. Miller, Naomi J. ‘Playing with Margaret Cavendish and Mary Wroth: Staging Early Modern Women’s Dramatic Romances for Modern Audiences’. Early Modern Women 10.2 (2016), 95–110. O’Connor, Marion. ‘Rachel Fane’s May Masque at Apethorpe 1627’. English Literary Renaissance 36 (2006), 90–113. Orgel, Stephen. The Jonsonian Masque. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Orgel, Stephen, and Roy Strong, ed. The Theater of the Stuart Court. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Pulter, Hester. Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda, ed. Alice Eardley. Toronto: Iter Inc, 2014. Pulter, Hester. The Pulter project: Poet in the Making: http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/. Accessed September 2019. Puttenham, George. The Arte of Englishe Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936. Salzman, Paul. ‘Possession, Access and Online Editing’. www.academia.edu / 27720331. Accessed November 2019. Shell, Alison. ‘“Often to my Self I make my Mone”: Early Modern Women’s Poetry from the Feilding Family’, in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing, ed. Jonathan Gibson and Victoria E. Burke, pp. 259–278. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Steen, Sara Jayne. ‘Fashioning an Acceptable Self: Lady Arbella Stuart’. English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988), 78–95.

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Stern, Tiffany. Documents of Performance in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Straznicky, Marta and Sara Mueller, ed. Women’s Household Drama: Loves Victorie, A Pastorall, and The Concealed Fansyes. Toronto: Iter Press, 2018. Strong, Roy. Splendour at Court: Renaissance Spectacle and the Theater of Power. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973. Sturgess, Keith. Jacobean Private Theatre. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987. Tomlinson, Sophie. ‘The Actress and Baroque Aesthetic Effects in Renaissance Drama’. Shakespeare Bulletin 33 (2015), 67–82. Van Beneden, Ben and Nora De Poorter, ed. Royalist Refugees: William and Margaret Cavendish in the Rubens House 1648–1660. Antwerp: Rubenhuis & Rubenianum, 2006. Waller, Gary. English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century. London: Longman, 1986. Waller, Gary. The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert and Early Modern Construction of Gender. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993. Waller, Gary. Review of Margaret P. Hannay, Michael G. Brennan, and Mary Ellen Lamb, ed. Ashgate Research Companion to the Sidneys, 1500–1700. Early Modern Women, 11 (2016), 248–252. Worsley, Lucy. Cavalier: A Tale of Chivalry, Passion, and Great Houses. London: Bloomsbury, 2007. Wroth, Lady Mary. Lady Mary Wroth’s Loves Victory: the Penshurst Manuscript, ed. Michael G. Brennan. London: The Roxburghe Club, 1988. Wroth, Lady Mary. The First Part of The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania. ed. Josephine A. Roberts. Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995. Wroth, Lady Mary. The Second Part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts, completed by Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller. Tempe: Renaissance English Text Society, 1998. Brennan, Michael G., Noel J. Kinnamon, and Margaret P. Hannay, ed. The Letters (1595–1608) of Rowland Whyte. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2013. Wynne-Davies, Marion. Women Writers and Familial Discourse in the English Renaissance: Relative Values. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007.

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6. Lady Mary Wroth: The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus Abstract Mary Wroth’s major literary works, The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania and the poetry collection Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, are distinctively Baroque: Wroth repeatedly, obsessively, demonstrates a fascination with multiple narratives, the blurring of fiction and history, and eruptions of magical or miraculous interventions. She establishes the contours of a female Baroque subject, who has to absorb and attempt to transcend enculturation by the dominant male discourse. What happens when a woman enters the predominantly male discursive poetical playground of Petrarchism? Could a woman envisage anything more than her own fragmentation? Would hers be the ‘same’ anguish as that articulated on behalf of the dominant male subject position? What cultural forces speak through her in addition to those she attempts to control?

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Key words: Mary Wroth; Urania and Romance narrative; Baroque culture; Petrarchism and women writers; Pamphilia to Amphilanthus; ‘female’ experience in poetry.

Let’s tell stories. Let’s write them down …women never stop telling stories. ‒ Julia Kristeva 1

The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania I turn now to Mary Wroth’s most substantial and most spectacularly Baroque work, The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania. My recurring (some might 1 Kristeva, Teresa, pp. 457, 485.

Waller, G., The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. doi 10.5117/9789463721431_ch06

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say hyperbolic and to an extent melancholic) obsession with the ‘female Baroque’ is strikingly appropriate for elucidating the Urania and deepening the links between Wroth’s writing and broader cultural developments. I do not pretend to provide a definitive reading of the Urania, or indeed of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus; I am concerned primarily with the islands of utterance Wroth’s writings share with the Baroque, and therefore with the wider ideological movements of the age. Clearly some Baroque characteristics f it different women’s writings more easily than others. In this case, it would be straining my argument to speculate on connections between the Urania and Catholic piety, although in the Urania we can see hints of the obsession with scenes of martyrdom and torture shared by Catholics and Protestants alike, especially where women are exhibited as victims, as an indicator of Baroque hyperbole. These aff inities are most notably seen early in the work in the story of Limena, who suffers a brutal physical attacks and torture by her husband for presumed inf idelity. The story seems to indulge (and even at times entice) readers’ prurient interests with protracted descriptions of violence and sexual display: Limena offers her ‘wretched and unfortunate body’ to her abusive husband: ‘“See here”, said she, the breast (and a most heavenly breast it was”’, which was ready ‘to receive that stroke shall bring my heart blood’. Similar scopophilic details include Limena’s ‘soft, daintie white hands’ fastened with painful cords as ‘testimony of her cruellest Martyrdome’.2 The episode provides, Helen Hackett comments, ‘some of the most graphically sado-masochistic scenes of male domination and female submission that the seventeenth century has to offer’, though (let us hope) it may have been meant to evoke indignation at the objectification of women. Mary Ellen Lamb suggests that it might be read both as female heroism and as titillating for a certain kind of male reader – although as Hackett observes, regrettably perhaps not only for male readers.3 Other characteristic Baroque notes certainly fit Urania more directly. ‘Believe this butt a fiction and dunn to please and pass the time away with’, we are told. 4 Wroth repeatedly demonstrates the Baroque fascination with multiple narratives, the manifold blurring of fiction and history, and sudden eruptions of magical or miraculous intervention. Readers have made various attempts to find a coherent narrative order in the book, mainly settling for a 2 Wroth, Urania, First Part, pp. 13, 84. 3 Hackett, ‘Torture of Limena’, pp. 93–111; Lamb, Gender and Authorship, p. 109. 4 Wroth, Urania, Second Part, p. 10.

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unity based on multiplicity. A number of commentators have observed that the experience of reading the text echoes the varied paths that await the couple approaching the bridge in the frontispiece illustration. Throughout, Pamphilia and her fellow queens, along with their lovers, husbands, brothers, and friends, tell stories to and about one another. Lamb points to the many instances where the narrative voice shifts, often featuring narrators within narrators, stories within stories, with frequent contradictions or multiple perspectives, thus providing recurring examples of Baroque narrative folds; she observes that such a ‘rejection of perspective or unity of form is essential to the aesthetics of organizing, or refusing to organize, Urania’.5 Victor Skretkowicz speaks of Wroth’s device of revisiting key emotional episodes with different casts of players; Rahel Orgis speaks of the ‘arrangement of narrative strands in patterns of convergence or fan-like designs’.6 Moreover, it is often observed that most of the narrative strands, especially in the Second Part, do not converge or climax but lead only to continually postponed resolutions, the repeated opening of possibilities, only some of which are followed – in short, to narrative plateauing. Throughout, Wroth mingles fact and ‘quasifactual’ fiction, altering (or inventing) multiple reflections of reality, and then projecting them ‘out of the fiction upon and altering the original “reality.”’7 Mirroring is a recurring Baroque motif; mirrors and reflective surfaces recur throughout Urania. But if fictionalising is a mirror, in the Urania it is, as Carrell points out, a distorting mirror, a typical Baroque mise en abime, with pictures within pictures, mirrors within mirrors.8 Characters turn out to have multiple names and personalities. The foresters who rescue Urania turn out to be the princes Steriamus and Salarines. Bellamira tells us a very different account from her father about her marital trials. In the episode of the Enchanted Theatre, Urania and Veralinda discover their conf licting stories recounted in a golden book. The result is an inextricable tangle, as characters change their stories and, in the overall structure, Wroth herself neglects to sort out facts from stories, rendering the seeming authority of each story ephemeral and transient. The stories are also endless – literally so, because of the open-ended nature of the romance, both parts of which end with unfinished sentences. In Part One, Pamphilia and Amphilanthus prepare to visit his mother: ‘all now merry, 5 Lamb, Gender and Authorship, pp. 143–144. 6 Skretkowicz, Erotic Romance, p. 295; Orgis, Narrative Structure and Reader Formation, p. 10. 7 Carrell, ‘Pack of Lies’, p. 80. 8 Carrell, ‘Pack of Lies’, pp. 88, 90

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contented, nothing amisse; greife forsaken, sadness cast off, Pamphilia is the Queene of all content; Amphilanthus joying worthily in her […] And’; Part Two likewise ends in a sentence fragment: ‘Amphilanthus wa[s] extremely […]’.9 Wroth’s preoccupation with multiple facets and contradictory transitions in her narratives seems to mirror the Baroque subject’s shifting and contradictory individual wish-fulfilment, but it is also a reflection of the way fantasies are reproduced more publicly in the world of absolutist courts, in such events as court spectacles, in order to obscure what might be conceived as ‘fact’. What Wroth terms her ‘enchantments’ exist both inside and outside her fiction, whether in the Europe of the Jacobean court or Versailles, or the fantasy Europe of Urania. At one of its multiple levels, the work functions as a political fantasy, involving the imaginative creation of a revived Holy Roman Empire, with Pamphilia herself ruling a kingdom (also named Pamphilia) in what approximates to the ‘real’ Asia Minor. Like dreams, the multiple narrative folds of the Urania are at once all different and yet strangely the same. They resemble the seemingly infinite but in fact radically limited number of compulsively repeated stories we all have, which originate in our earliest desires and relationships as a variety of tales of adventures, miraculous achievements and tragic losses, and which we project over and over into our adult experiences. In the case of Urania, the stories return, again and again, to the events of Wroth’s own upbringing, marriage, family relations, and her obsession with her cousin’s love, his fickleness, and in particular his autonomy and power as a man. Like the wars Perissus describes to Urania, Wroth’s stories are ‘a little ceased though not ended’.10 The goal of these interwoven folds of embedded narratives is to further wrap readers in folds of emotion and wonder, not unlike the way in which the complexity of Baroque visual representations of religious mysteries (like the Virgin’s Assumption or the Annunciation) catches our attention through multiple angles, dramatic diagonals, ecstatic facial gestures, and bodily contortions. In some of her descriptions of places, Wroth in fact comes close to some of the effects of Counter-Reformation illusionary trompe l’oeil ceilings when she repeatedly describes spaces opening into further and further vistas. Amphilanthus comes to a cave, which leads him to a river described as blacke ‘or the darkenesse of that shadowed place made appeare so’; the cave then opens into a vault and a bridge across the 9 Wroth, Urania, First Part, p. 661; Urania, Second Part, p. 480. 10 Wroth, Urania, First Part, p. 5.

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river, which (in a chiarascuro effect) gave them light to see a door. Beyond that he sees

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a dainty Garden, and so into a faire Pallace of Alabaster, incompassed with Hilles, or rather Mountaines, of such height, as no way was possible to bee found come at it […] Divers Gardens and Orchards did surround this pallace: in every one was a fountaine, and every fountaine rich in art, and plentifully furnished with the virtue of liberalitie, freely bestowing water in abundance.

Similarly, in the opening of Part Two, Selarinius and ‘a sivile young maiden’ descend into a rock and, with similar effect, go through ‘a fine and rare dore’ into a cave, at first dark and narrow, and then opening into the ‘cleere light’ of a ‘most glorious pallace built of white Marble’, thence into ‘a brave square Court’ decorated with precious stones and containing a fountain made like an assembly of water nymphs, and finally into a ‘sumptious hall’ where they encounter a ‘grave Lady’ playing with a child. The desired effect upon the readers is summed up by Salarinus, who bewails that lovers become ‘inchaunted, and but for ever for any thing wee know’. What ‘old fables blind you’, he asks, when we are continually ‘led by enchauntments?’11 The fold or pleat which, according to Deleuze, is a central Baroque characteristic, connects directly to one of Wroth’s most characteristic obsessions: the labyrinth. Deleuze points out that the labyrinth contains multiple folds, twists, turns, folds opening into yet other folds.12 One interwoven pattern of labyrinthine fiction-making is Wroth’s own participation in her fiction – not just writing versions of the same story over and over, but specifically fragmenting and elaborating particular aspects of her own life into multiple characters and events. Both Wroth’s romance and her poems provide so many references to the relationship between the two cousins that the narratives seem continually to hover between fiction and personal revelation. The insistent secrecy about the cousins’ relationship lasts even after the two have concluded a public vow of commitment: it is as if they both are and are not committed to each other, just as their love both is and is not secret. As many commentators have noted, many of Urania’s stories are, in fact, rather thinly disguised rewritings of episodes in Wroth’s own life, for example the tale that Pamphilia tells of Lindamira – obviously an anagram of Ladi Mari – referring to the story about Wroth’s own withdrawal from court. In 11 Wroth, Urania, First Part, pp.138–139, 411; Urania, Second Part, p. 4. 12 Deleuze, Fold, pp. 122–123.

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another clearly autobiographical incident, Bellamira is taken to the court by her father, and it was there that ‘before I knew what love was, I was his prisoner’. She had fallen in love with a man other than her husband, who loved a princess – although, as the narrator snidely comments, no doubt echoing Wroth’s own reactions to her cousin, he was able to be faithful ‘no more then’ men ‘generally do’. ‘Never’, we are told, was a man ‘Lord of so many womens soules, as this my Lord had rule of, who without flatterie, did deserve it, never being unthankfull for their loves’, a trait which, like Pamphilia and presumably the author of Urania herself, Bellamira excuses. We are then told how, soon after, like the author herself, Bellamira becomes a widow when her husband dies; his death is followed not long after by her only son, again like Wroth herself. We have seen her somewhat spiteful projection of her late husband in Loves Victory and we should not forget Jonson sniggering at Robert Wroth’s preference for the company of local squires and huntsmen when we read that Bellamira confesses she would ‘dissemble’ when her husband ‘praised rude sports, or told the plaine Jests of his Hunts-men’. Also easily discoverable is the story of Amphilanthus rescuing Bellamira from the perils of widowhood by returning her to her father, who had originally forced her to marry Treborius, whose name suggests ‘forest dweller’. Treborius, we are told, frequently entertains the king: ‘going to see his Country in Progresse, my husbands house was found fit in his way, so as he lay there, and was by him freely, and bravely entertained, he being as bountifull in his house, as any man’.13 The final pages of the Second Part give another barely disguised (though rather contradictory) account of the events of Wroth’s own marriage, where we are told of the death of Pamphilia’s son and husband and how on her return home to her father she is accompanied, in a somewhat ambiguous arrangement, by Amphilanthus, with whom she seems to both be and not be on intimate terms. Among the contradictions of the Baroque, I have argued, two opposites stand out – its fascination with hyperbole and, at the other extreme yet often in combination, its recurring, even obsessive, melancholy. Urania features both multiple flames of hyperbole and floods of melancholia. In the Second Part, Floristello, who is ‘fettered in the strongest bonds of cruell slavery to the cruellest destinie of loving’, gives voice to the experience of love all the characters share: ‘O miserable creature […] what see I here butt as miserable a wante as my most miserable misfortunes have plung’d mee into […] thus to bee made baren of the whole earthes happiness, in being without you’.14 13 Wroth, Urania, First Part, pp. 379–391. 14 Wroth, Urania, Second Part, pp. 334, 332.

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Baroque culture, Maravall observes, is essentially hyperbolic and theatrical. Just as Baroque art combines the clear detail and exaggerated motion that we can observe in drama, sculpture, opera, architecture – including of course the interplay between light and dark in the high contrast dramatic atmosphere of Caravaggio – so Baroque narrative revels in the contradictory, the coincidental, the preposterous. The main plot of the Urania reads like a melodramatic opera, an art form that was gradually taking shape in the period, originating probably in the 1590s but emerging most prominently in the works of Monteverdi in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Emotions are high, expressions of passion exaggerated. One such instance is Parselius, whose ‘man-like conversation’ scorns love, but now ‘cries on nothing but Urania, thinks of nothing, hopes for nothing, but the gain of her perfections’. Amphilanthus, charged with ‘neglective forsakennesse’, asks ‘Can noblenesse bee, where deceit rules? Can justice be where cousonage governs […] landing can resist his conquering force in love, nor for seeking him: for whose soule would not covet him?’ Another operatic event, among many, is Urania complaining that ‘how doth miserie love thee’ and how love is ‘delightfull paine, a sought, and cherish’d torment’ – and the poems by Pamphilia, Antissia and even the few attributed to Amphilanthus in effect serve as arias and intermezzos. In the First Part, Pamphilia and her female companions are shipwrecked, and then a spontaneous apparition, like the transformations that staged in a Jacobean court masque, instantly appears. Later, in the Second Part, ‘a rare Poett’ is commissioned to ‘write som invention ore other’ for the court; at Pamphilia’s coronation Veralinda (one of many avatars for Wroth herself) finds herself being dressed and so brought on the stage ‘like a player acting an other part […] fouled by mine owne phansy immagining this wowld make mee what I desir’d’.15 With such a bewildering array of verbal prompts, the reader’s perspective is made to blur and change, often phrase by phrase. The parallels with trompe l’oeil hyperbolic illusion are juxtaposed with melancholia verging on paralysis. Both extremes of the emotional spectrum, melancholy and hyperbole, generate frustration, leading that other distinctive feature of the Baroque, plateauing. Sheila Cavanagh provides an insightful overview: ‘while a great many things happen to the various lovers in the Urania’, the two main characters ‘remain painfully enraptured with each other, with no hope of any resolution to the romantically unsatisfying circumstances’.16 The book itself plateaus, in that it concludes by not concluding: ‘The great Inchantment 15 Wroth, Urania, First Part, pp. 25, 26, 113; Urania, Second Part, pp. 17, 127. 16 Cavanagh, ‘Endless love’, p. 93.

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will nott bee concluded these many yeeres; nay nev[er], if you live nott to assiste in the concluding’.17 Throughout the multiple adventures, many of which are never concluded or may simply be simply left aside, Pamphilia’s thoughts and lamentations are inevitably described as endless, her love as ‘restles yet fruictless’, the ‘true perfection of love’ as ‘endless, fruictless, and above all most Vaine’. The narrator can even exclaim that Amphilanthus, although ‘most excellent in all things’, justifies his inconstancy by claiming that his ‘often change’ proceeds ‘wholy’ from his ‘desire to knowe the best’, a culmination that inevitably is never reached.18 A transcendent goal is frequently projected and always seems to fall short. When the beloved is praised that ‘her Verie eyes carry Dietie about them’, inevitably the eruption of feelings will plateau as the deity fails to appear, satisfy, or last.19 ‘When’, asks Veralinda, ‘did you ever knowe any man, especially any brave man, continue constant to the end?’ – a lesson that occurs in repeated plateaus. Plateauing is also seen in the repeated love scenes which mount in excitement and intimacy but rarely culminate. A comic variation is a scene where Philarchos enters a lady’s room at night to warn her against her passion for him and finds himself having to reluctantly resist breaking his word to his ‘faithfull Orilena’.20 More serious, and central to the work, is the insistent pattern of rising intimacy between Pamphilia and Amphilanthus: they are repeatedly described as coming together, and Pamphilia welcomes his love as they ‘familiarly did’ and they ‘were as free as if never laid aside’. But their love culminates in ‘discourse’ rather than intercourse: Pamphilia dreams ‘that shee had him in her armes, discoursing with him’.21 Is ‘discoursing’ a metaphor for sexual consummation? A substitute for it? It perfectly illustrates Baroque plateauing: fulfilment inevitably tails off into language. Writing itself is a vulnerable place where meaning is elaborated and destroyed, where it slips away just when one might think that it is revealing the real. The residual transcendent subject of the medieval cosmos has been called into question; there is no privileged source of truth or essence beyond the ever-changing phenomenal world. When we turn to Urania as an example of the specifically Female Baroque, we repeatedly see how the period intensifies the enduring depiction of women as passive objects of visual analysis and consumption. These 17 Wroth, Urania, Second Part, p. 418. 18 Wroth, Urania, Second Part, pp. 27, 28, 81. 19 Wroth, Urania, Second Part, p. 76. 20 Wroth, Urania, Second Part, pp. 110, 130. 21 Wroth, Urania, First Part, pp. 568, 581.

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attitudes do not just continue and endorse the near-universal patriarchal objectifying gaze at the female form in poetic descriptions or portraiture, but also bring it to close to the emergent Cartesian rhetoric of mastery and possession, the empirical reworking of the traditional trope of Creation or Nature as female (a motif that will also be central to the consideration of Cavendish in the next chapter). Seventeenth-century empiricists frequently describe the investigation of nature in startlingly gendered terms. Mieke Bal’s comment, cited in Chapter two, that implicit in the Cartesian mastery of Nature, especially among the self-depicted masculine scientists of the Royal Society, is a metaphor of violence and rape,22 reinforces the sense that nature is a woman concealing secrets that must be violently wrestled from her. We can sense this obsession for (in Wroth’s phrase) ‘seeing woemen butt like pictures to looke upon’ as a craving for visual knowledge,23 but not only does it seem to inevitably involve compulsion, but inevitably, for the gazer, it seems accompanied by anxiety about whether what is being represented, what appears, is reliable and trustworthy or deceptive. This insecurity degenerates into accusations of the female as monstrous and diabolic, an element no less misogynistic in the age of emergent empiricism than in the Middle Ages. It seems that only two gender positions are possible: aggressive domination and docile submission. At times, the passivity and weakness of ‘womanish lamenting’ seems to be taken for granted, as is the conventional restlessness of men, what Paul Salzman terms ‘the endless lack at the heart’ of the masculine quest.24 ‘O rare constancie in man’, the narrator exclaims in the first few pages of the Second Part, ‘can non of you remaine steddy to the end?’25 Carrell calls the settings of these multiple folds of narrative ‘no-woman’sland spaces’, and points out that ‘the author of and authors in the Urania continually tell tales that both relate and distort their own “realities”’. 26 Geraldine Wagner, surveying the multiplicity of plot lines in this most conspicuously Baroque narrative, suggests that the ‘plethora of alternately vulnerable and predatory female characters’ who continually interact with adventuring protagonists are a clue to both the multiple interacting narratives and to the vulnerability of the women as they represent sites of ‘emergent subjectivity’ as alternatives to the dominant ‘masculinist sexual 22 Bal, Reading Rembrandt, p. 61. 23 Wroth, Urania, Second Part, p. 82. 24 Salzman, Literary Culture, p. 75. 25 Wroth, Urania, Second Part, p. 6. 26 Carrell, ‘Pack of Lies’, p. 80.

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politics of traditional romance conventions’. The romantic illusions of Pamphilia are contrasted with the succession of ‘seduced, betrayed and abandoned’ women whom we encounter exiled from or voluntarily living away from society. Wagner cites a long list: Alarina, alias Sylviana, who eventually devotes herself to Diana; Liana, lover of Alanius; Alena lover of Lincus; Emilina, princess of Stiria, undone by a pretended Amphilanthus; Pastora, who literally merges with her friend, Silvarina, through a series of pronoun slippages; and Dolorina, the abandoned ‘Lady from Brittany’ encountered in a Morean grove by the queens of Naples and Sicily. To the list we should add Limena, the victim of the previously discussed opening sequence, who is unusual in that she is rescued from her abusive husband by a lover who fortunately but unusually turns out to be trustworthy. All have chosen to defy masculine figures of authority, whether family, parents, or husbands; many have been abused or tortured; all defy convention by actively choosing to defy their allotted place within a patriarchal world, and the absolutism which has entrapped them and which they must defy to achieve any degree of self-affirmation. Wagner argues that these women victims not only evoke sympathy but are placed in the narrative to comment upon the major romantic stories:

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The knights and ladies who beg stories of these shepherdesses ought to be altered by the experience of the radical Otherness that confronts them, but they are not. Their typical response is empathy, from which they derive only sentimental pleasure but no further insights into female subjection.27

How can such subordination and submissiveness create any real power for women? Wroth is masochistically fascinated by strong heroines who seek power yet are made to think that it was their destiny to be dominated. These are stories of dominant women who assert themselves, take control, rule, or conquer kingdoms, but they can also be kidnapped by pirates, locked up by fathers, abandoned or betrayed by lovers. So Urania is built on contradictory romance patterns – at root, it is taken for granted that while women may supposedly make men suffer, a constant lover like the heroine herself finds a core part of her identity in melancholic acceptance, constant represented by ‘molestation’. In both roles, a woman is schooled to accept the world as depicted by men’s eyes, and hence pressured to see herself performing her own melancholy for the patriarchal gaze, rather than representing her own – her owned – concerns. 27 Wagner, ‘Contesting Love’s Tyranny’, pp. 577–601.

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Wroth, not entirely unlike the Catholic rebel Mary Ward or (as the next chapter will show) the mercurial and ultra-Baroque figure of Margaret Cavendish, has to struggle to define her own voice in her writings against overwhelming gender stereotypes. What emerges from the Urania is indicative of my study as a whole in that, despite the seemingly monolithic masculinist discourse within which women writers had to struggle, the Baroque nevertheless provided, as Kristeva puts it, an ‘unprecedented blossoming of representation’ for women. In the Urania more than a dozen women are described as producing writing – in addition, more than one hundred poems are attributed to Pamphilia herself within the romance, which are designed to ‘make others in part taste my paine, and make them dumbe partakers of my griefe’. Much of Pamphilia’s desire emerges as pain, deprivation, and molestation, by which sexuality is experienced as harm, shame, even self-obliteration. Women’s writing, women’s speech, and even (in the frustrating and often repressed suggestions of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus), the spasmodic language of the unconscious, are all emerging through the rhetoric of what Urania terms ‘poore silly brainsick poetts’, whose discourse Wroth inherits and attempts to transform.28 What autonomous space is Urania trying to carve out, for its protagonist, for its author, and for the language – and beyond that, the praxis – of women’s desire? If writing is an act – or at least an enacted fantasy – of agency, what of the ‘owned’ nature of women’s desire itself? Wroth is trying to establish the contours of a female Baroque subject, one who necessarily has to absorb and find substitute metaphors to replace those that have been enculturated by male dominance. We can see the fitful but significant development of a number of womanspaces. We encountered one such in Loves Victory: the sense of community and mutuality, independent of supposedly inherent masculine concerns, afforded by family life or friendship. It is unlikely that a man writing at the time would have paid detailed attention to such matters as the emotional interdependence of women cousins, or the closeness of (and rivalries between) brothers and sisters. While Philip Sidney’s Arcadia explores the relationships between Euarchus and his son and nephew, and between the sisters Pamela and Philoclea, they are generally set in terms of political or moral issues. Even the Arcadia’s examination of Basilius’s family, involving intergenerational tensions, sibling relationships, and adultery, is described largely in terms of authority, governance, and obedience. In Urania, especially the Second Part, there seems to be an obsession with a sense of community afforded by family and networks of friends, which 28 Wroth, Urania, First Part, p. 92; Urania, Second Part, p. 49.

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is possibly provoked, Lamb speculates, by Wroth’s long-lasting fantasy of a closer family relationship with Pembroke, one eventually including their two children – who, as was all too typical, in reality received no legal recognition from him.29 The story of Pamphilia illustrates the close association of woman, writing, and melancholy: more broadly, Wroth articulates the difficulties of constructing a subject position for a woman in the early modern period. Writing of a woman’s feelings may endanger privacy and rupture the fully obedient silence expected of a woman. At times, all Pamphilia can hope for is to withdraw into her private musings on her losses, even in public: ‘shee could bee in greatest assemblies as private as her owne thought, as if in her Cabinet’. Both Pamphilia and her creator (whose identities continually blend and blur) use writing to carve out a private space in which some sense of an integrated identity can be maintained. Apparently abandoned by her lover, she confesses ‘such is my sad, and soe determined to bee sad lyfe […] a booke and solitarines beeing the onely companions I desire in thes my unfortunate days’. Her poems are often written in the ‘delicate thick wood’ to which she continually retires: she carves verses on trees or writes them on sheets of paper, destroying some, showing some to a few close friends, including Amphilanthus, but denying that he is referred to and even at times that she herself is the author.30 Silence and reticence are expected of women. But often silence as a metaphor points to a terrain of meaning that is outside the verbal control represented by male-dominated discourse. In the secret life afforded by her writing, a woman is striving, however fitfully, for her own language.

Pamphilia to Amphilanthus Almost totally neglected for over three hundred years, since it was essentially rediscovered in the 1970s by scholars and eventually other readers, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus – the collection of poems Wroth appends to the romance, attributing them to its heroine – has increasingly become seen as a major text of the late Petrarchan poetical tradition. Petrarchism came to England late, gradually becoming a central part of Elizabethan Renaissance court culture, especially associated with the charismatic figure of Wroth’s uncle, Philip Sidney. Only superficially more 29 Lamb, Urania, p. 21. 30 Wroth, Urania, Second Part, pp. 271, Urania, First Part, pp. 459, 460.

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‘Renaissance’ than ‘Baroque’, Wroth’s adaptation of the Petrarchan inheritance illustrates Douglas Canfield’s argument, cited in the introduction, that the Baroque ‘surprises. It puzzles. It pops up where we least expect it’, often with ‘unintended’ effects.31 But more germane to the present study, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (along with Wroth’s other writings) is a prime source in which we may attempt to read, today, what it was to be gendered as a woman in early modern England and how the female poetic (and erotic) subjectivity of the Baroque age was constituted. Wroth’s poems enable us to raise a multiplicity of questions about the emergence of Kristeva’s distinctive ‘writing woman’. What opportunities did a woman at this time have to discover a voice that she herself owned, as a woman voicing both her own subjectivity and one shared with other women? In a poetic tradition where male formulas of desire were so dominant, could she settle for (or even envisage) anything more than fragmentation or absence? Would hers be the ‘same’ anguish and fragmentation as that articulated on behalf of the dominant male subject position? What cultural forces speak through her, in addition to those she attempts to control? To what extent are Pamphilia’s struggles those of her creator? In Pamphilia’s poetry, it seems that Wroth is writing out her own struggles to find a poetic (and beyond that, a personal) language that can be independent of the fantasies that are overwhelmingly constructed by male desire. They record, as we will see, the stirrings to establish equivalent female subject positions as they emerge in the Baroque – in some instances, it needs to be stressed, against significant odds. My outline of the psychology and the underlying ideological structures of Petrarchism in Chapter Two shows how it was adaptable to Baroque Catholic culture, and there is a rich tradition of erotic lyrics in Catholic Europe, including many by women poets and many that combine Petrarchism with Marian devotional rhetoric.32 In Wroth’s poems, however, while there are a few obligatory references to saints of love and occasional anti-Catholic references (there is a sideswipe at ‘popish law’ in one of her sonnets, for instance), such remarks are no more than Protestant commonplaces. Towards the end of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, she brings together a ‘crowne of Sonetts dedicated to Love’, the title a distant echo of the Little Crown of the Blessed Virgin, a devotional chaplet or string of beads like the Rosary: the reference is based on the woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and a crown of twelve stars on her head (Revelation 12:1) which Catholics 31 Canfield, Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature, pp. 15, 17, 30. 32 See e.g. Stortoni, Women Poets of the Italian Renaissance, and Jones, Currency of Eros.

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read as embodying the Virgin’s motherhood and queenship.33 Such possible echoes of Counter-Reformation spirituality are, however, superficial. The poems’ Baroque nature is revealed more clearly in their exploration of the struggles of a woman writing within an overwhelmingly male discourse and repeatedly trapped in submissive, even abusive, impasses. Wroth’s poems afford us further evidence of Canfield’s observation that the Baroque poetical style erupts through otherwise conventional surfaces, and they contribute signif icantly to our understanding of the Female Baroque by her rewriting the Petrarchan love poetry tradition from the viewpoint of a woman. Analysing Wroth’s re-constitution of the Petrarchan tradition, we have the rare advantage of two versions of her poems: on the surface largely similar, but separated by time and, at least in some cases, by apparent intention. In her provocative 2018 edition, Ilona Bell argues that by focusing on the manuscript version of the poems (Folger manuscript V.a.104), most of which was probably completed well before the poems’ publication appended to the Urania in 1621, and with some originally written perhaps as early as before Mary’s marriage to Robert Wroth in 1604. We can thus examine the poems as they took shape initially, before they were recast or augmented in subsequent years. The Folger Manuscript itself does not date from 1604; rather, it is what Ilona Bell terms ‘a composite collection of poems and groups of poems written at different times’. It is clear – and in some poems explicitly so – that the subject or the point of origin of most of the collection is the relationship, real or fantasised, between Wroth and her cousin, William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke. But if, as Bell implies, some poems indeed had their origins around the time the (at most) sixteen- or seventeen-year-old Mary Sidney came to court, they may support the theory that she had already developed some kind of an intimate relationship with her cousin. Bell speculates that the original versions of the poems are Wroth’s side of ‘a private lyric dialogue’ with Pembroke that explores ‘the joys, risks, and ethics of conducting a premarital or extramarital affair’, and thus giving her reactions to a ‘torrid, tormented love affair’ contrasted with ‘the misery of a distasteful arranged marriage’.34 It is a melodramatic story that finds many parallels in the Urania, where many of the melancholic love affairs are between cousins and involve both psychological as well as familial obstacles, misunderstandings, and frustrations. A key piece of Bell’s speculation is a comparison of the manuscript versions of two poems: an ‘Elegy’ by Pembroke that opens ‘Why with unkindest 33 Wroth, Poems, pp. 127–134. See also Bell, Pamphilia, pp. 157–166. 34 Bell, Pamphilia, pp. 4, 38.

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Swiftnes doest thou turne’, and Wroth’s ‘Penshurst Mount’, which starts ‘Sweete solitarines, joy to those hearts’. Bell reads Wroth’s poem autobiographically, as a direct poetic reply to her cousin/lover’s angry accusation of infidelity and his expectation of her future promiscuity, which ends with a vicious dismissal:

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Thus doe I leave thee to the multitudes That on my leavings hastily intrudes Injoy thou many or rejoice in one I was before them, and before me none.35

In her reply, according to Bell’s autobiographical reading, Wroth appears to protest her innocence, affirming both her fidelity and her ‘vassall’-age to Cupid, and her awareness of being a victim of ‘loves strange deceipt’; she accuses her lover of abandoning her and forcing her to take refuge in sorrow, memory and patience. Wroth’s choice of title, ‘Penshurst Mount’, with its multiple geographical and erotic suggestions, literally refers to that part of the Penshurst estate where, Bell (and originally, Garth Bond) argue the two lovers most likely consummated their passion, and which therefore may well have triggered powerful and painful emotions, especially if, after the event, Pembroke was indifferent, even derisive or insulting about her commitment to their relationship. While omitting the title (and thereby discreetly obscuring the topographical reference), Wroth evokes the event in the Urania: Dolorindus broods over a ‘Mount cast up by nature’, a stone table, and trees on which lovers carved their names; he proceeds to ‘frame some verses in his imagination’, and later gives them to Amphilanthus.36 A detailed discussion of the autobiographical interpretation of Wroth’s poems is not strictly relevant to my analysis of her Baroque characteristics, and Bell’s enthusiastic speculations have proved controversial, some readers pointing out that there is no direct evidence for the many of the connections she makes and that many of the tropes that she reads as directly autobiographical are conventional. Margaret Simon has observed that an aubade highlighted by Bell as evidence for an ongoing clandestine affair ‘lacks representational certainty; we cannot even be sure they are in the same bed’, and the poem may be more poignantly read as a fantasy, imaging ‘a future process whose fruition is not absolute or recorded’.37 The 35 Bell, Pamphilia, p. 41. The two poems are printed and discussed by Bond, ‘Amphilanthus to Pamphilia’, pp. 51–80, with the texts reprinted in Bell, Pamphilia, pp. 267–273. 36 Wroth, Urania, First Part, p. 133. 37 Simon, ‘Re-Reading Mary Wroth’s Aubade’, pp. 58, 61.

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melancholy of this aubade, as elsewhere in the collection, may well reflect the complications of Wroth’s own emotional allegiances, but the pain of unrequited love draws on a long tradition, and is made more intense by Wroth’s own gendered position. Given Pembroke’s philandering reputation – already well established by his affair with Mary Fitton, her pregnancy, and his refusal to marry her, just before he likely became involved with his cousin – Anna Reich’s comment on Hörigkeit, based on clinical experience, that potentially submissive or (in this case) inexperienced women tend ‘to fall in love with men who abuse and humiliate them’, may be apposite here.38 If we identify Amphilanthus with Pembroke, superf icial and wavering commitment would seem perfectly in character in that he clearly expects her to be faithful and overwhelmed by him; however, while he may vow his eternal devotion, he would be unwilling to make any further or inconvenient commitment. But given the degree of intimate revelation in these two poems, to what extent can the same be claimed for the remainder of the collection? Apart from the references to Penshurst Mount, do the poems give us, as Bell argues, a ‘dialogic poetics of secrecy’ that ‘offers a validation and methodology for reading Pamphilia to Amphilanthus as one side of a covert lyric exchange between’ the two cousins?39 Some probably do; it may even be quite likely that many of them supply starting points for the whole collection of poems; but to say this is true of all of them is probably less likely. Bell notes that since the 1970s many of Wroth’s poems have often been regarded as incoherent, syntactically obscure, metaphorically confused where, for instance, a ‘perfectly lucid octave’ culminates in a ‘baffling sestet’. She sees such roughness as evidence of the poems’ autobiographical origins and in particular, Wroth’s attempts to obscure those origins, where she is ‘negotiating something too vital or audacious to express openly’ and expressing ‘carefully coded ways’ to avoid openly revealing ‘nights spent making love with Amphilanthus and evading her jealous husband’. 40 In order to explain these apparent lacunae, Bell’s readings tend to elide the differences between Wroth and her character: the relevant absences or silences, to use Macherey’s distinction, are all or mainly (auto)biographical. 41 38 Reich, ‘Extreme Submissiveness’, p. 573. 39 Bell, Pamphilia, p. 10. 40 Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 11; Bell, Pamphilia, pp. 45, 46, 51. Bell’s methodology is necessarily speculative since there is a frustrating lack of evidence about when the poems were reorganized or revised, a process Bell calls ‘bowdlerized’ (p. 51), which, given the history of the term, seems an unfortunate choice of word. 41 Macherey, Theory of Literary Production, p. 132.

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In her analysis of the Female Baroque, Kristeva offers an alternative mode of reading the poems. She observes that women’s writing plays ‘around that exquisite border where the “true” trips over into the ‘make-believe’, 42 and reading Wroth’s poems autobiographically is certainly a useful starting point for assessing them. But we need to ask questions that go beyond autobiographical reductionism and place Wroth’s poems in a broader cultural context. They raise the question of what happens when a woman enters the predominantly male discursive playground of Petrarchism. What were her options in writing? Could she simply attempt to write, as it were like a ventriloquist, from the interpellated male default position and seemingly not notice the contradiction? But what happens when a woman does become aware that she is interpellated to be simultaneously both the object of the male gaze, and the subject of the poem, its speaker and observer? What opportunities did that split position afford? How do women artists explore the desires of the feminine body as an owned source of meaning if they are forced subsist as ‘other’ within a phallocentric language system? To answer such questions, simply seeing the poems as autobiography is not enough. Wider cultural dynamics are at work. In Pamphilia to Amphilanthus the poems’ surfaces are disrupted by multiple signs of what Louise Kaplan terms the ‘characteristic female perversions’, particularly the metaphorical ‘kleptomania’, by which a woman ‘steals’ and adapts the male Petrarchan subject position. 43 Whereas Bell suggests changes by Wroth in the 1621 versions are conscious attempts to transform painful feelings into a more public discourse, a ‘work suitable for public consumption’, 44 we might see them, rather, as the poet’s bold effort to re-appropriate herself as a writing subject, distancing herself from the personal involvement in entrapment, loss, and bondage, and instead creating – still not always syntactically or metaphorically coherent, and with some characteristic Baroque contradictions disrupting the surface as the ‘semiotic’ presses itself into the poem. We are seeing close up the process of emotional plateauing: a struggle to bring the unconscious to the surface in language that is always going to fail, create frustration, and yet provide readers with an engrossing disclosure, not just as autobiography, but evoking broader cultural dynamics. Such a mode of analysis enables us to bring something more substantial than mere impressionistic reactions to the juxtaposition of Wroth’s and Pembroke’s early ‘Penshurst Mount’ poems, by looking for signs of the presence of the 42 Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 11. 43 Kaplan, Female Perversions, Ch. 9. 44 Bell, Pamphilia, p. 10.

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body pressing through the poem’s surface: however seemingly definitive the poetic outburst, ‘the psyche and its libidinal weight always precede and inform it’. 45 Kristeva is therefore a suggestive guide to how we might read Pamphilia to Amphilanthus as a Baroque text when she asks us to look at the ways unconscious drives and primary processes emerge through and around speech and topple into textual ambiguities. If we read symptomatically, and see rough or confusing syntax and cryptic references as inviting explanations other than technical incompetence or autobiographical obfuscation, something far more culturally rich emerges. We can read raw personal emotions struggling, in characteristic Baroque manner, to break through the surface rhetoric of conventional love plaints. Language, argues Kristeva, may be seen as pointing to ‘those emotional traces that I call semiotic […] instinctual meaning, which records bio-energetic signals in the form of fluid but persistent psychological traces’. 46 It points to a mode of reading poetry that seems spectacularly appropriate for avoiding reducing Pamphilia to Amphilanthus to evidence for celebrity gossip or sentimental historical romance, to what has been described to me as the Real Great-House-wives of Loughton. 47 What are some of these primitive conflicts and logical gaps which emerge disruptively and yet provide Wroth’s poems with such energy? In conventional Petrarchan verse ‘she’ is a product of the discourse that she supposedly shares. She apparently controls her lover’s destiny, and yet she is allowed to operate only within a structure of control and domination. Despite ‘his’ assertions of despair and dependence, rarely does ‘she’ ever feel she is an agent: at times, she seems to accept she has no choice but to acknowledge herself as a sexual object without being accorded reciprocal power. If she ‘move’, a recurring anxiety in Wroth’s poems, she is fickle, whereas if the ever-restless he does so, it is part of the necessity and indeed privilege of being male. What were Wroth’s options? She could simply write in the interpellated, default male position and deliberately not notice – a stance we will encounter in the writings of Aphra Behn. Or she could notice, in which case she becomes an uncomfortably split subject. Or she may resist, even if with great difficulty. In Wroth’s poems there is evidence of all these strategies. In particular, there is a masochism born of frustrated wishes to emulate the 45 Gambaudo; Kristeva, Psychoanalysis and Culture, p. 18. 46 Kristeva, Beginning, pp. 6–7. 47 I owe this witticism to one of my students with far more knowledge of popular television than I, who asked for the acknowledgement but also to remain anonymous.

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male autonomy that the roles in which she finds herself caught continually deny her. The space Wroth is trying to establish is for a female subject, one who has to absorb metaphors that have been enculturated by dominant male activities, such as hunting (her husband’s favourite occupation): ‘When others hunt, my thought I have in chase’.48 As we know from her life, sexual assault and molestation of various kinds may well have been part of Wroth’s own experience as a daughter, wife, cousin, and lover, but she evokes as well, as part of a cultural unconscious, a resentment at being assaulted by her positioning as a woman reader in an at least partly alienating discourse. But, as well, in Wroth’s writings, we observe the slow and contradictory emergence, however fitfully, of alternative gendered subject positions. If there is, as many have argued, the emergence in the Baroque era of a new aggressive assertion of male subjectivity, a claim for a unique and essential interiority. Here we see the attempt, fitfully but powerfully, to assert a distinctive female subject position. The voices that haunt Wroth’s poems are therefore inevitably conflicted, and rarely giving a sense of a unif ied subject, as if they are written by multiple discourses some of which we can identify, others of which seem to come surging up, like the elaborations of Baroque art or architecture, to undermine the conventional surface. As we saw earlier with Gertrude More, we encounter a revealing case of a woman attempting to burrow deeply into her own unconscious despite the felt inadequacy of language available to her, trying to give voice to desires that transgress class and gender norms provided by her society, her family, and (in Wroth’s case) a restrictive poetical tradition handed down to her from her father and her famous deceased uncle. How do women artists explore the feminine body as an owned source of meaning if they are forced to accept themselves only within alienating modes of representation, rather than in representations rooted in their own experience of the body? How can the possibility of mutual constancy be generated in such a situation? Wroth is attempting to find language for what Michel de Certeau’s ‘islands of utterance’, those special times and places in women’s discourse to which Luce Irigaray points in which ‘words begin to fail her. She senses something remains to be said that resists all speech, that can at best be stammered out’. 49 The experience of most women in the early modern period seems to have been that they were rarely possessors of their own bodies, even in mystical or sexual ecstasy. Wroth explores a series of narrative situations in which 48 Wroth, Poems, p. 100; Bell, Pamphilia, p. 99. 49 de Certeau, Heterologies, p. 68; Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, p. 193.

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her protagonist searches for the causes of her melancholy, and it is that lack of bodily ownership to which she returns repeatedly. In some poems she focuses on the very institution that from early in her life had reinforced her gender role, the Court, with a recurring insistence that it is alienating and so should be abandoned ‘to faulscest lovers’.50 Such rejection conventionally suggests that the true lover may find happiness in the country, but some poems suggest that there, too, one will find infidelity and, especially in Wroth’s case, imprisonment and frustration. Love is fundamentally deceptive, whether in the Court or the ‘little courts’ of the country. A woman is happy only when alone, in some rare private space – which may be only inside her head, within what Margaret Cavendish will describe as a ‘cabala’ of the imagination – where she can be silent with her memories and fantasies. Even there, in the supposedly comforting stability of her mind, however, she discovers she cannot escape. Pamphilia (and arguably by extension her author) believes that perhaps by voicing her miseries, pursuing love, or going abroad, she might overcome her paralysis, but instead she accepts her gendered destiny of silence, isolation, and frigidity. Her posture is frequently described as sleeping, or near sleep, or lying down in a small space, and addressing the shadows around her as comforting, if confusing. The intense melancholy of the sequence is more focused than the usual betrayal of the Petrarchan plaint. Psychologically, Pamphilia is overwhelmed by her oppression. Her innermost thoughts, stolen from the public world in which she must perform demeaning roles, are hers only when she is alone. The poems thus present a specifically gendered variation of a common Petrarchan paradox: she is trapped yet free. The sonnets that show Pamphilia withdrawn to her bed, both night and day, brooding over her misery and her lover’s absence, may be tactical and not merely reactive: in which case it might be seen as an attempted act of agency. Reich points out that extreme submissiveness in women includes the acceptance of personal entrapment along with rejection or infidelity by lovers – in Pamphilia’s case, the continual movement of Amphilanthus – ‘as an inseparable part of their love life’.51 The ninth sonnet of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus records a protracted degree of bitterness at such entrapment, as it caustically describes the lover ‘married’ only to ‘sorrow’ in a socially constructed world where faithfulness is imposed as a duty and a sign of belonging to a male lover: ‘Then if with griefe I now must coupled bee | Sorrow I’le wed: Dispaire thus governs mee’.52 The poem is racked by a deep 50 Wroth, Poems, p. 93; Bell, Pamphilia, p. 87. 51 Reich, ‘Extreme Submissiveness’, p. 473. 52 Wroth, Poems, p. 91; Bell, Pamphilia, p. 83.

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helplessness, even more focused and intense than in the Urania, where the delight of multiple stories lightens the mood. Demands are made upon the speaker of the poems that are seemingly irresistible; petulant defiance seems the most positive alternative to helpless acquiescence. The submissive woman, deeply entrapped (at least in this poem) in her version of Hörigkeit, ‘tends to endow her [love] object with a special greatness and an extreme overvaluation’.53 Love is presented not only as deceptive and disruptive, as so often to a male Petrarchan lover, but here with added gender-specific helplessness and passivity. A woman is a ‘stage of woe’54 writes Wroth, on whom others’ desires rather than her own are acted out; meanwhile, her constancy, the virtue with which her heroine is most identified (and by what she is imprisoned), opens her to further pain. She addresses the darkness:

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How oft in you I have laine heere opprest, And have my miseries in woefull cries Deliver’d forth, mounting up to the skies Yett helples back returnd to wound my brest.

She can complain only that she has lain down in order ‘to ease my paine’, but she still is trapped and can rise only by the aid of Fortune, who is interestingly described as a fellow woman lover, who ‘in her bless’d arms did mee inchaine’. She acknowledges that even with another woman, she responds rather than initiates: ‘I, her obay’d, and rising felt that love I Indeed was best, when I did least itt move’. Within the Petrarchan framework, however much a man may protest, he has the autonomy to love or leave, to write or be silent. But a woman? If she is not accorded her own desire, what role can she claim? Repeatedly she is ‘in chaines’ or trapped within a labyrinth.55 The recurring Baroque labyrinth metaphor represents the nightmare underside of a woman’s desire for private space. The private chamber should be an area of orderliness and control, however compromised by its surroundings in a great house or court; the labyrinth consists of potentially infinite attempts to find an escape: it constructs a series of blind spaces that produce incessant, frustrated, restless movements to escape. Petrarch had used the labyrinth as an image of the cognitive and emotional confusion in love, and there were a number of commonplace analogies between the labyrinth and the sonnet itself.56 The 53 Reich, ‘Extreme Submissiveness’, p. 477. 54 Wroth, Poems, p. 111; Bell, Pamphilia, p. 122. 55 Wroth, Poems, pp. 104, 105; Bell, Pamphilia, pp. 225, 226. 56 Cipolla, ‘Labyrinthine Imagery in Petrarch’, pp. 263–289.

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labyrinth is, despite its emphasis on puzzlement and entrapment, an apparent metaphor of action: one enters a labyrinth and tries to find a way out, or to its heart, or both. Pamphilia, surrounded by alternatives, nonetheless insists that contradiction and difficulty offer her more fulfilling choices. ‘In this strang labourinth how shall I turne?’, she asks, observing only that if she turns ‘to the right hand, ther, in love I burne; | Lett mee goe forward, therin danger is’.57 In many of the poems, the incessant objectification of women by the controlling power of the male gaze creates a discomforting sense of being positioned as a being-to-be-seen, even as she fantasizes about appropriating the male gaze. In the dominant discourse, the activity of seeing, of using the gaze as a means of intimidation of control, can be a threatening substitute for (and sometimes a preliminary to) actual physical control. In his study of paraphilia, Robert Stoller argues that scopophilia is predominantly a gender disorder (that is, a disorder in the development of masculinity and femininity) constructed out of a tradition of male fear and subsequent hostility, involving ‘rage at giving up ones earliest bliss and identification with the mother, fear of not succeeding in escaping out of her orbit, and a need for revenge for her putting us in this predicament’. In Petrarchism (and Stoller’s observations have an ominous relevance to the seemingly omnipresent and controlling male gaze in Baroque culture) the lover’s admiring eye attempts to fix the mistress not just as a beautiful object that he desires, but as a guarantee against the threat she represents. Psychoanalytic studies of scopophilia see the gaze embodying a ‘pre-oedipal fear […] of merging and fixing with the mother’, which may be protected against only by incessant watching. The viewed object is thereby detoxified, relieving the voyeur of his fear either directly or by being projected upon, and so shared with, another. The viewer enjoys closeness without the fear of engulfment. Scopophilic pleasure can be secretive, or the man can make sure that the woman ‘exhibits’ like Teresa in the Bernini statue: that is, she knows she is being seen, and her knowledge represents his superego giving permission for his own look/show impulses. Stoller’s remarks are irritatingly essentialist but nonetheless accurately point out a seemingly fixed aspect of Western patriarchy – a little boy’s assumed ‘right to sexual looking and a little girl’s training that she is not to permit that looking’.58 The oppression of being available to be looked at, inspected, and evaluated by externals is all too evidently depicted in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. Baroque Hörigkeit is frequently represented in the positioning of women 57 Wroth, Poems, p. 127; Bell, Pamphilia, p. 157. 58 Stoller, Perversion, p. 99, 105, 90; Socarides, ‘Demonified Mother’, pp. 192–193.

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as objects of the male gaze and their absorbing the unchanging nature of that positioning, even perhaps their thrill at being such an object. The dominant code by which women have historically been made available for male pleasure rather than their own (or even mutual pleasure) is based on a reification of a woman’s unchanging allegiance – the ‘constancy’ many commentators have emphasised as central to the both the romance’s and the poems’ explorations of erotic melancholy. Even more intensely than in Pamphilia’s stories in the Urania, in Wroth’s poems, constancy often seems to be a role forced upon a woman in a dangerous environment; it is a defensive posture at best, an assigned and unavoidable defensiveness within an aggressively patriarchal situation. In one sonnet Pamphilia acknowledges that ‘No time, noe roome, no thought’ or even ‘writing’ can give her ‘loving hart’ contentment, and yet she is powerless to give up her love.59 Beneath the language of sexual dependence, excessive admiration, and even (occasionally) sexual reciprocity to which the Petrarchan lover lays claim, there is a predominantly one-sided emphasis on domination and submission though the power of the controlling gaze. But one of the poems in Wroth’s opening sequence is a remarkable critique of this whole tradition that implies an awareness of the toxicity of the male gaze and a woman’s desire to repulse it. It attempts to subvert the dominant male subject position by appropriating not only the gaze, but its pleasure: Take heed mine eyes, how you your lookes do cast Least they beetray my harts most secrett thought; Bee true unto your selves for nothings bought More deere then doubt which brings a lovers fast. Catch you all waching eyes, ere they bee past, Or take yours fixt wher your best love hath sought The pride of your desires; lett them bee taught Theyr faults for shame, they could noe truer last; Then looke, and looke with joye for conquest wunn Of those that search’d your hurt in double kinde; Soe you kept safe, lett them themselves looke blinde Watch, gaze, and marke till they to madnes runn, While you, mine eyes injoye full sight of love Contented that such happinesses move.60 59 Wroth, Poems, p. 141; Bell, Pamphilia, p. 181. 60 Wroth, Poems, p. 106; Bell, Pamphilia, pp. 227–228.

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The poem opens with a warning against indiscretion, but the tone is unusually paranoid, as if guarding not just against betrayal of a secret with which the woman has been entrusted, but of the multiple selves in which she lives. The tactics of the poem, indeed, are not passive – slipping into the role of a secret lover or of the modest object of another’s forbidden desire – but become more aggressive, ‘catching’ or trapping and defeating ‘all watching eyes’. It is a matter of self-identity, not merely of love; primarily the speaker’s stance becomes a matter of acknowledging how the self is constructed. Given that identity consists of a multiplicity of roles, that very multiplicity and its contradictory assigned positions will, she determines, become her basis for action. Another recurring Baroque motif in the poems, as in Urania, is that Pamphilia repeatedly feels molested. Variations on that reaction occur in virtually every poem: Pamphilia is wounded, martyred, tormented, disdained, bereaved, deceived, deluded, famished, distressed, shunned, abandoned, sacrificed; even when there seems to be a happy outcome, deception is always present: ‘His sight gives Lyfe unto my love-ruld eys | My love content because in his, love lies’.61 Again, are we witnessing a note of autobiography or does it have broader (and deeper) ramifications? Even in an absolutist society like the English court circles, once a woman starts to resent being regarded as the property of a man, she might well understandably regard the proprietary sexual actions of a husband not just as oppressive but as invasive and molesting in a direct physical sense. We can return to Bell’s powerful biographical argument about the lovers’ interchange of poems: is there a sense of molestation that motivates Wroth’s riposte, part indignant, part defensive, to her cousin? Among commentators on Pamphilia to Amphilanthus there seems to be a widespread sentimental temptation to see the cousins as two young people in love and thwarted from their mutual desires. But she would have been fifteen or sixteen, he ten years older and with, we should note, a notorious sexual reputation – including the recent scandal of a pregnant court lady – and so might be more easily viewed as exercising his assumed male prerogative over a younger socially inferior cousin, a droit de seigneur. Part of a sense of agency is the right to say no; to have refusal taken as rebellion, or as in fact saying yes, or (as we are aware today) being pressured by a superior, however apparently willingly, is part of molestation. Conventional art history has traditionally taught us to view the preponderance of sexual violence in Baroque art – rapes, seductions, voyeurism – as 61 Wroth, Poems, p. 111; Bell, Pamphilia, p. 176.

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aesthetic, disconnected from what today we would call domestic abuse; but as Mieke Bal points out, we need to acknowledge that compulsion and harassment did not occur only at the level of poetic or artistic expression, where it was celebrated or (as I suggested in Chapter Two, in the case of Rembrandt) only mildly called into question, but constituted a material threat and the reality for most women. The molestation Wroth explores is both personal and a consequence of being a woman within a masculinist culture, in which the enforced oppression of sexuality was an ever-present reality.62 What emerges occasionally, as in some of the stories in Urania, is a counter-discourse of indignation at men’s autonomy and movement, what are termed their ‘adventures’. Pamphilia yearns for her own adventures. In one of the labyrinth poems, her determination is to ‘take the thread of love’, to be constant to her growing sense of self, to ‘feele the weight of true desire’, and to search for a mutual, united love. Such agency within contradiction allows her to open herself to previously unforeseen possibilities: ‘Itt doth inrich the witts, and make you see | That in your self, which you knew nott before’. So, at least at times, stasis – what she terms constancy – is not necessarily the end. The final poem of the Crown points to the self-exploration that love has opened up, not to achieve a final goal so much as to begin a never-ending search: ‘Soe though in Love I fervently doe burne, | In this strange labourinth how shall I turne?’63 Again, however, the impression is of a woman overcome by an adventurous and entitled male. Voyeuristic appeal of female vulnerability is a pastoral commonplace and indicative of the incipient romantic treatment of rape shared by Baroque art (including, as we have seen, court entertainment). ‘Romantic rape’, coercion depicted as consent, is a recurring phenomenon of Baroque iconography, both religious and secular, seen for instance in Bernini’s statue of Apollo and Daphne. Psychologically and historically, treating force as a metaphor for repressed attraction is a recurring masculinist strategy that, however distasteful today, at least to most of us, was certainly not much scrutinised in the characteristic tone of Petrarchan love poetry. Rape narratives typically ignore the victim’s feelings, providing legitimacy for coercion or violence by asserting that the victim’s ‘real’ desires have been expressed by the dominance of the lover. Lurking in the cultural background of such metaphors is the intense cult of the Virgin Mary, which though less directly relevant to Wroth, certainly 62 Bal, Rembrandt, p. 61. For a discussion of molestation in Wroth, see Fienberg, ‘Poetics of the Self’, p. 129. 63 Wroth, Poems, pp. 127, 128, 130, 134; Bell, Pamphilia, pp. 157, 158, 160, 165.

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connects her themes to an important aspect of Baroque culture. What Betsy Bauman-Martin terms the ‘assumptions, language, and archetypes of romantic rape’64 are uncomfortably close to the surface in Baroque readings of the the Annunciation scene in the Gospel of Luke, which can all too easily be read as a romance of a frightened girl, her body taken over by divine powers, consenting immediately to the use of her most intimate parts, and then ultimately accepting that she must rejoice in her fate. As the Catholic theologian Sarah Jane Boss comments, the ‘points of correspondence between ‘the Annunciation story and rape narratives, even pornography’ are disturbing, especially when so much emphasis has traditionally been put on the ‘maleness’ associated with God and ‘a particular importance is attached to Mary’s femininity’, a situation mirrored readily in Wroth’s attempted rewriting of the Petrarchan situation. As Klaus Theweleit observes, such characteristic ‘male fantasies’ share a historically recurring pattern that it is tempting to describe with a term like ‘universal’, but which is especially intense in the Baroque.65 One wonders, indeed – perhaps a subjective speculation, but born out in many modern clinical studies – whether part of the continuing appeal, in their different but uncannily related situations, of both Petrarchan poetry and Baroque Mariological devotion might well rest on a further male fantasy that merely appearing before a woman and being articulate, witty, demanding, or otherwise supposedly attractive, guarantees a favourable response to a sexual proposition – what might be termed, with Twelfth Night in mind, the Orsino syndrome. Seen within the history of gendered roles within Baroque culture, Wroth’s Pamphilia marks an attempt, however spasmodic and isolated, to break with such a pattern of discursive (and material) entrapment. She has started to re-appropriate herself as a subject, distancing herself from the narcissism of self-involvement. But because on occasion she appropriates both traditional gender roles, and thus sees both with the eyes of a woman and the gaze of a man, by involvement and reflection, she acquires a secret authority unknown to the men who gaze on her and think they control her. It is the clearest expression of the fantasy of emulation; or, more optimistically put, she has asserted her right to gaze back, just as her poems assert the right to talk back. The role of Kristeva’s Baroque writing woman is therefore powerfully evoked in all of Mary Wroth’s writings. We should never understate the 64 Bauman-Martin, ‘Mary and the Marquise’, p. 227. 65 Boss, Empress and Handmaid, pp. 10, 12; Theweleit, Male Fantasies, I, p. 88.

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importance of writing as an act of self-affirmation, even a defiance of patriarchy, both encouraged by and yet despite being a member of the Sidney family. Even though her family probably encouraged her to see herself as a writer, Wroth took that familial permission far more daringly than, say, her aunt, the Countess of Pembroke, had. To write a prose romance, a pastoral play, and, perhaps above all, a collection of Petrarchan love poems, was to go well beyond what the family might have seen fit – and it is significant that it was in part because she exceeded what were felt to be the decorous precedents of translation and devotional works set by her pious aunt that Wroth was bitterly attacked by Lord Denny upon the publication of Urania.66 Pamphilia’s speaking out, even to herself, is like Wroth’s writing, an act of self-assertion. But it is never an easy achievement: the more agency is affirmed, the more she finds that, because she is a woman, she is unavoidably caught up in discursive positions that a woman occupies only at the cost of self-violation. Yet she struggles against those restrictions. As in the Urania itself, we see Pamphilia struggle in the variety of melancholic moods ranging from passive uneasiness to outright anger at the treatment that she, as a woman, receives. Some of these feelings are common to male protagonists of Petrarchan poems, but others seem to grow more directly from becoming conscious of what it is to be assigned the woman’s part in a relationship within a restrictive seemingly absolutist male-created culture. In both the Urania, and in the poems Wroth collected and attributed to her semi-fictional character Pamphilia, women seem inevitably punished for making sexual choices, yet what comes through is an insistence on making them since, however dimly, it is through such choices that they are offered the possibility of creating a new sense of self within the Female Baroque. Despite the felt inadequacy of language available to both Pamphilia and her creator, we can see signs of how a new subjective space is built. Wroth’s writings are full of dreams of independence and power that far transcend what her material life in and round the Court or its offshoots in the country could provide, except fitfully. They are also haunted by wistful, and sometimes angry, dreams of frustrated mutuality. They open for us a gendered dimension of the female Baroque self that through varieties of ‘intimate revolt’ starts to question and even undermine the masculinist-dominated culture of the Baroque.

66 For the details of Denny’s reactions to the Urania, see Wroth, Poems, pp. 31–36.

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Works Cited Bal, Mieke. Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Bauman-Martin, Betsy J. ‘Mary and the Marquise: Reading the Annunciation in the Romantic Rape Tradition’, in R. S. Sabbath, ed. Sacred Tropes: Tanakh, New Testament, and Qur’an As Literature and Culture, pp. 217–231. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Bell, Ilona. Pamphilia to Amphilanthus in Manuscript and Print, ed. Ilona Bell with Steven W. May. Toronto: Iter Press, 2017. Boss, Sara Jane. Empress and Handmaid: On Nature and Gender in the Cult of the Virgin Mary. London: Cassell, 2000. Bond, Garth. ‘Amphilanthus to Pamphilia: William Herbert, Mary Wroth, and Penshurst Mount’. Sidney Journal 31.1 (2013), 51–80. Canfield, J. Douglas. The Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature from Milton and the Wits to Dryden and the Scriblerians. Newark DE: University of Delaware Press, 2003. Carrell, Jennifer Lee. ‘A Pack of Lies in a Looking Glass: Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania and the Magic Mirror of Romance’. Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 34 (1994), 79–107. Cavanagh, Sheila T. ‘Endless Love: Narrative Technique in the Urania’. Sidney Journal 26.2 (2008), 81–98. Cipolla, Gaetana, ‘Labyrinthine Imagery in Petrarch’. Italica 54 (1977), 263–289. de Certeau, Michel. Heterologies, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Fienberg, Nona. ‘Mary Wroth’s Poetics of the Self’. SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 42 (2002), 121–136. Gambaudo, Sylvie. Kristeva, Psychoanalysis and Culture: Subjectivity in Crisis. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Hackett, Helen. ‘The Torture of Limena: Sex and Violence in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania’, in Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen and Suzanne Trill, pp. 93–111. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Jones, Ann R. The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Kaplan, Louise A. Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary. New York: Doubleday, 1991.

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Kristeva, Julia. Tales of Love. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Kristeva, Julia. In the Beginning was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Kristeva, Julia. Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila, trans. Lorna Scott Fox. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Lamb, Mary Ellen. Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Lamb, Mary Ellen, ed. Mary Wroth: The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (Abridged). Tempe: ACMRS, 2011. Macherey, Pierre. Theory of Literary Production. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Maravall, José Antonio. Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. Orgis, Rahel. Narrative Structure and Reader Formation in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania. New York: Routledge, 2017. Reich, Annie. ‘A Contribution to the Psychoanalysis of Extreme Submissiveness in Women’. The Psychoanalytical Quarterly 9 (1940), 470–480. Salzman, Paul. Literary Culture in Jacobean England: Reading 1621. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002. Simon, Margaret. ‘Re-Reading Mary Wroth’s Aubade’. Sidney Journal 36.1 (2018), 53–67. Skretkowicz, Victor. European Erotic Romance: Philhellene Protestantism, Renaissance Translation and English Literary Politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Socarides, Charles W. ‘The Demonified Mother: A Study of Voyeurism and Sexual Sadism’. International Review of Psychoanalysis 1 (1974), 187–195. Stoller, Robert. Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred. New York: Pantheon, 1975. Stortoni, Laura Ann, ed. Women Poets of the Italian Renaissance: Courtly Ladies and Courtesans. New York: Italica Press, 1997. Theweleit, Klaus, Male Fantasies, Vol I: Women, Floods, Bodies, Histories, trans. Steven Conway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Wagner, Geraldine. ‘Contesting Love’s Tyranny: Socially Outcast Women and the Marginalized Female Body in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania’. English Studies 87 (2006), 577–601. Wroth, Lady Mary. The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine A. Roberts. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. Wroth, Lady Mary. The First Part of The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania. ed. Josephine A. Roberts Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995. Wroth, Lady Mary. The Second Part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts, completed by Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller. Tempe: Renaissance English Text Society 1998.

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7.

From Baroque to Enlightenment: Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn Abstract Here I consider two women writers whose work marks a transition from the Baroque to Enlightenment. Margaret Cavendish figures in two diverging intellectual worlds. There are multiple rich, if often contradictory, Baroque aspects to her life and writings. However, she later developed an ambivalence towards the new empirical science, the dynamics of which point us beyond the Baroque to the Enlightenment. Aphra Behn’s groundbreaking writings are frequently described as Baroque but she, too, is moving into a new cultural paradigm: just as, at the beginning of the period, the Baroque spasmodically surfaced in Pembroke and Lanyer, in the late seventeenth century, some Baroque characteristics blazed spectacularly before merging into Enlightenment culture and literary neo-classicism. Key words: Baroque to Enlightenment; Margaret Cavendish; Aphra Behn and Baroque Hörigkeit; Women and Restoration Libertinism; women in early modern science

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Multiple facets, plural transitions …. mobile, playful, reinvented on the go. ‒ Julia Kristeva.1

Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing Baroque World Of all the women studied here, Margaret Cavendish, second Duchess of Newcastle, is at first sight the most obviously Baroque figure, not only in her writings but also in her personal ambitions and self-presentation. 1 Kristeva, Teresa, pp. 9, 561.

Waller, G., The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. doi 10.5117/9789463721431_ch07

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But it has also been argued that Cavendish may be seen specifically as a Baroque writer rather than merely demonstrating a Baroque personality. Her poems bear examples of what Canfield sees as characteristic ‘Metaphysical’ conceits – mixed metaphors that sound like parodies of Crashaw’s blending of blood, ice, tears, and dust – and her prose works and plays feature recurring dramatic upsurges of ‘astonishing, bizarre Baroque’ twists of plot or situation.2 However, the Baroque tendencies in both her life and writings deserve a more serious analysis, as does her distinctive contribution to how we might analyse the Female Baroque, especially given her frequent, though contradictory, comments on women and women’s writings. Unfortunately, there is no modern standard edition of her voluminous writings: modern scholars must make do with a mix of original publications, often confusingly presented and falling far short of modern editorial standards, and a variety of miscellaneous selections by modern scholars and teachers, compiled with different goals (albeit near-indistinguishable titles), and inevitably, given the bulk of her writings, highly selective and rarely complementary. In my analysis, therefore, I have found it necessary to use a mixture of sources: modern editions where available, and ‘original’ versions, including a number of facsimile reprints, when necessary.3 There are some connections between Cavendish and the other examples of the Female Baroque I have so far discussed. As I showed in Chapter Five, her husband’s daughters from his first marriage penned what is probably a slightly malicious depiction of her in The Concealed Fansyes, which she probably read and by which she might well have been annoyed. Cavendish makes reference to Mary Wroth’s defiance of the Jacobean court’s hostility to publishing the Urania, and acknowledges that she, like Wroth, might well be reviled by hostile male courtiers as a ‘hermaphrodite in show, in deed a monster’, 4 since she, too, frequently rewrote personal and family history as romance. Unlike Wroth, the gender-bending implied by ‘hermaphrodite’ was clearly titillating to Cavendish, who indulged her interest in gender ambiguity in a number of her writings. So far as connections with the religious women studied so far are concerned, unlike More and Ward, Cavendish in her writings searches not for a mystical path to God, but for ways of avoiding arranged marriages 2 Canfield, Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature, p. 36. 3 I am especially grateful for the University Library, Cambridge, and its staff for providing relatively easy access all in one place to this ‘olio’ (a favourite Cavendish phrase meaning a stew or mixture) of her publications. 4 Quoted in Cavendish, Paper Bodies, p. 64.

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and to imagine alternative spaces for women to be educated and cultivate their own pleasures and intimacies. Her distinctively secular convents, particularly her ‘convent of pleasure’ in the play of that name – again, a characteristic flirtation with an obvious Catholic symbol – envisage a protective environment for women in which they might please themselves outside the control, if not entirely beyond the observation, of men, and to indulge their tastes for study, dance, singing, plays and fashion. The Convent of Pleasure can usefully be read in relation to Mary Ward’s communities dedicated to women’s education, with the ‘convent’ in part a rollicking parody of the enclosed Catholic community – the inverse of communities such as that in which Gertrude More wrestled with the creation of a very different Baroque self. Cavendish’s play The Female Academy is not set in a nunnery but a school, even though in her biography of her husband she writes that she had ‘made her house her Cloyster, inclosing herself’, and asserts that she would be content to live secluded with her husband, ‘inclosing my self like an Anchoret, wearing a Frize-gown, tied with a cord about my waste’, focusing characteristically on fashion and image and not religious dedication.5 However different in detail, the underlying structures of the ‘little Academy’ of the Collet sisters, Ward’s ‘mixed’ communities, Hutchinson’s meetings for New England women, even the Sidney family coteries – Mary Sidney’s Wilton meetings were in fact entitled a ‘little Academy’ – are all various responses to the continuing suppression of women’s voices, and all were labelled in some sense aberrant, deviant, immoral, or ‘unwomanly’. Cavendish did not escape similar disapproval, even (in her case) ridicule. All these examples have also raised the question whether the female Baroque emerges only under the tutelage of male discourse so that women’s energies and their striving for independence are inevitably coerced into the habitual world of male-authored power. Or can womenspeak take the shape of a distinctive, even if socially marginal, alternative? Cavendish provides both real and fantasy examples of both. For more than thirty years, as if she were a living embodiment of Baroque experimentation, she inscribed a series of selves into both her writings and her broader lifestyle, subverting any possible stability or continuity, let alone a single identity. Throughout her career, both as court lady (a status she gloried in, and unashamedly advertised by means of many real and fictional honorific titles, such as Duchess, Princess, and others) and as a writer, she self-consciously set herself up as a Baroque personality. With some trepidation – because of personal timidity, her autobiography rather implausibly leads us to believe – she joined the English royal court 5 Cavendish, Paper Bodies, pp. 48, 63.

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in exile as a lady-in-waiting, first in Oxford and then on the continent. But she taught herself to respond to her contemporaries’ fascination for her many publicly enacted dramas, especially after marrying the older cavalier William, Duke of Newcastle. Living in exile in Antwerp with her husband, Cavendish created a court-like salon, took carriage rides around the town, dressed ostentatiously – unquestionably hyperbolically – in cavalier clothes, and then retired to her closet to contemplate and write. The couple was familiar with artists, sculptors and writers, and held balls and dinner parties, including elaborate entertainments for the exiled Charles II, who mainly lived relatively close by, in The Hague. She frequently turned her public appearances into carefully controlled shows, not unlike those mounted by her character of the Empress in The Blazing World, who conceives and presides over pyrotechnic displays designed to impress both her subjects and enemies into awe and obedience. Both William and Margaret continued to look back nostalgically to the once glorious Caroline court – in Margaret’s case, largely in fantasy rather than in reality since she never actually experienced it, except in exile in Oxford – and even after the Restoration, both were to live out the remainder of their lives ‘as conscious symbols of a past order, one that existed chiefly in the communal realms of the mind’.6 Contradictorily, she said she preferred melancholy solitude, proclaiming ‘Fame is nothing but a great Noise’, simultaneously boasting she was climbing ‘fames tower’. As Anna Battigelli puts it, she was ‘open in acknowledging and exploring the fluid, elusive, and erratic reshapings of the self’.7 Such behaviour on the personal level repeatedly attracted both curiosity and disapproval, not least from other women. Mary Evelyn wrote with evident distaste that she was ‘surprised to find so much extravagancy and vanity in any person not confined within four walls’.8 Such a view is often echoed in modern criticism of her writings as incoherent, even self-parodying. But she longed to be taken seriously as a writer and a thinker, not just as a fashionable presence. One of the most widely published writers of the century, male or female, she repeatedly thrust herself against the dominant prejudices of her age to ensure that what she ingenuously termed the ‘harmlesse Recreations of my idle time’ or the ‘harmless pastime of Writing’, would nevertheless be the basis of a concentrated ‘endeavor to be worshipt’.9 In addition to more than twenty books, often ostentatiously printed in elaborate folios, her 6 Battigelli, Exiles of the Mind, p. 11. 7 Battigelli, Exiles of the Mind, p. 10. 8 Mary Evelyn, quoted in Cavendish, Paper Bodies, p. 91. 9 Straznicky, ‘Reading the Stage’, p. 372.

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writings – which she termed, acknowledging her lack of children, her ‘paper bodies’10 – were often accompanied by multiple prefaces, justifications, and tributes (some of which were written by herself, often providing complex but marginal details and always designed to promote her celebrity). She shifted authorial position and changed the names of characters or settings as easily as she blurred genres. Sociable Letters and World’s Olio are, for instance, rich mixtures of fiction and quasi-autobiography, amusing and satiric and yet with serious passages, creating one ‘olio’– a stew consisting of many ingredients – after another.11 There are, however, some important consistencies in her writings. The absolutism that Maravall sees to be so central to the political environment of the Baroque (and for which we have seen parallels even as far away as New England’s pious Protestant community or the retreat from the court overseen by Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding), is an ideal that haunts Margaret Cavendish’s writings and actions. She would certainly have encountered the trappings of aristocratic Catholicism and royal absolutism in Paris during the Interregnum, at the exiled court of Charles II and Queen Henrietta Maria; she probably responded with fascination to the external sensuality of the architecture and art of French and Netherlandish Baroque Catholicism, particularly the cultivation of ‘luxury, magnificence, and conspicuous display, presented in a framework of refined aestheticism’.12 She seems to have been excited by the masochistic extremity of female heroism in stories of Catholic martyrs and passionate virgins suffering and dying to glorify God. The She-Anchoret – part story, part treatise, part drama – indulges in a hyperbolic celebration of the heroine’s virginity and self-sacrifice and the scene of her death as a romantic martyr parodically echoes Counter-Reformation depictions of female sainthood and martyrdom. Cavendish imagines the ‘outcries and lamentations, and mournings’ for her heroine: she is given a ‘Statue of brasse’, and finally the Church ‘Deified her a Saint, for her Virtue and Piety; and the Clergy raised Altars […] and the Historians writ her Life and Death in Golden Letters, and recorded them in Fame’s Brazen Tower: that all the World might know and follow the Example of her Heroick Spirit, Generous Soul, Chast Body, Pious , and Voluntary Death’.13 However slightly parodic, Cavendish’s fascination with 10 Cavendish, Sociable Letters, p. 203. 11 Cavendish, Sociable Letters, p. 12. For useful extracts from the Worlds Olio, see Cavendish, Essential Writings, pp. 22–39. 12 Chao, ‘Representations of Female Sainthood’, p. 745. 13 Cavendish, ‘She Anchoret’, p. 706.

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the convoluted process by which Catholic women achieved the status of martyrdom was, it should be noted, not matched by an equal enthusiasm for Protestant prophetic ‘preaching sisters’ who ‘for the more Nonsense they Deliver, the more they are Admired by their Godly Fraternity’ and who interpret the Scriptures only according ‘to their Factious Humours and Designs’.14 However frequently she flirts with the Baroque externals of Catholicism, the institution that attracts Cavendish is not the Church but the Court, even if it partly represents yet another lost ideal – in effect acting out a cultural plateauing by which she hearkens back to her memories of (and fantasies about) the court of Henrietta Maria. where, as the self-confessedly timid Margaret Lucas, she first encountered court culture in a somewhat diminished form before it was exiled to the continent. In The Convent of Pleasure, Lady Happy stages a masque featuring Neptune the Sea God and water nymphs that is reminiscent of the elaborate Caroline court entertainments of the 1630s. But at times, Cavendish could mock such court entertainments. In The Presence (1668) she pokes fun at the Platonic idealism of the Caroline court: the Princess has an ‘Idea she met with in a Dream in the Region of her Brain’ that becomes in actuality a sordid passion for a sailor.15 But the satiric note is gentle. More typical is the grandiloquent Baroque description in The Blazing World of the Emperor’s court, a palace decorated with ‘diamonds, pearls, rubies, and the like precious stones’, its room of state ‘paved with green diamonds (for in that world are diamonds of all colours) and the black marble floor and mother-of-pearl roof’ of the emperor’s bed-chamber where ‘the moon and blazing stars were represented by white diamonds, and his bed was made of diamonds and carbuncles’. The Empress designs two chapels, one lined with diamonds, the other with the magical ‘Fire-stone’ native to the Blazing World.16 Into this extraordinary atmosphere, decked out flamboyantly in upper-class kitsch, comes the ‘Emperess’ herself, who out-dazzles even these marvels in a hyperbolic expression of her author’s own fancies. After the Restoration, Margaret Cavendish was able to revel in in her own little court as she and the Duke worked to restore their former fortunes and privileges, renovating their properties in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire and in London. In all these manifestations of her aristocratic ideals she looked back to what 14 Cavendish, Sociable Letters, p. 131. 15 See the accounts in Findlay, Playing Spaces, and Miller, ‘Playing with Margaret Cavendish’. 16 Cavendish, Paper Bodies, pp. 46, 192. Quotations from Blazing World are taken from this edition.

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she saw as the destruction of order and hierarchy that occurred under the Commonwealth: whenever any suggestion of egalitarianism or democracy is mentioned, she is invariably hostile. As I suggested in my analysis of the Jacobean and Caroline court and its provincial satellites, including the Sidneys’ Penshurst and the Cavendish properties – which Margaret came to preside over through her marriage – central to the court ethos was the contradictory positioning of women as both objects of the male gaze and yet struggling to achieve some degree of independence. The Convent of Pleasure challenges the residual gender dynamics of female display and male domination associated, in Cavendish’s memory, with the Caroline court. In an environment in which women were meant to be simultaneously modest yet readily available to be looked at, she ostentatiously displayed herself, and parodically describes many of her women characters as objects to be gazed upon – not least by one another, by displaying their fashions or performing in dramatic entertainments. In The Female Academy there is, however, an apparent concession to men’s voyeurism – a grate allowing men to provide an audience to the seemingly indifferent but nonetheless calculated entertainments and displays by the women. With the women not dependent on the presence of male onlookers, at least on the surface, it is the men who are kept outside the convent and are presented as insecure and frustrated. The Convent of Pleasure and The Female Academy therefore move ambiguously between different attitudes to the male gaze. Such ambivalence, as we have seen, is typical of the Baroque. Caprisia in The Several Wits announces coquettishly that ‘My smiles shall be as Baits, my eyes as Angels, where every look shall be a hawk to catch a heart’. In the story ‘The Contract’, by contrast, the heroine tries to disguise her beauty: ‘But if I be, said she, thought handsome, what then? […] Then I shall have all eyes stare upon me; and whatever the better, unless their eyes could infuse in my brain, wit and understanding? Their eyes cannot enrich me with knowledge, nor give me the light of truth’.17 Such episodes embody both Cavendish’s nostalgia for the partly remembered, partly invented atmosphere of the Caroline court, and her ambition to shine like her Empress in The Blazing World at the centre of her own court. The fantasy of female autonomy is in some instances aggressively and even violently pursued. At the outset of the Civil War, Henrietta Maria herself had taken initiatives that went well beyond merely presiding over court entertainment. In fact, she assumed quasi-military leadership; in a letter to 17 Cavendish, Severall Wits; Lilley, Blazing World, p. 11.

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her husband the king, she described how in his absence she had become ‘her she-majesty Generalissima’, and marched to Oxford with her own troops, which were actually drawn from the forces led by William Cavendish.18 In Margaret Cavendish’s Love’s Adventures, likewise, the heroine dresses in men’s clothes, saves her intended husband, and (for good measure!) the Republic of Venice from the threatening Turkish forces; she then, much as Margaret herself would have wanted to do, instructs the College of Cardinals on theological matters. In Bell in Campo, the heroine likewise takes on a military role. She surveys wives’ reactions to their husbands’ departure for battle, which range from horror to defiant acceptance; the principal ‘heroickess’ creates an army of ladies, equal to the men, and triumphantly concludes the military action by rescuing them. The Lady Victoria affirms that although ‘the Masculine Sex is of an opinion we are only fit to breed and bring forth children’, if ‘we would but accustome our selves we may do such actions, as may gain us such a reputation as men might change their opinions’.19 Sometimes, however, silence is seen as an appropriate tactic for women in an overbearing masculinist world. In the play The Publick Wooing, Lady Mute confesses that ‘I have practis’d silence […] I had rather be thought ignorantly simple for being silent, than to express folly by too much speaking […]. But ’tis a sign of a foolish Age, when silence is thought ignorant simplicitie, and modesty accounted a crime’.20 Most often, however, Cavendish’s rebellion was manifest in the delight with which she flouted social conventions with her striking dress and eccentric behaviour, using fashionable non-conformity as the basis of her attack on conventions. In The Blazing World, the soul of her character the Duchess of Newcastle explains to her alter ego, the Empress: ‘my nature is such, that I had rather appear worse in singularity, than better in the mode’.21 One consistent feature of Margaret Cavendish’s life and writings is her acceptance of and even indulgence in the privileges of her class. In The Blazing World the Empress asks her subjects why they preferred the monarchical form of government before any other: ‘They answered, as it was natural for one body to help but one head, so it was also natural for politic body to have but one governor, and that a Commonwealth which had many governors was like a monster with many heads: besides, said they, a monarchy is a divine 18 Battigelli, Exiles of the Mind, p. 19. 19 Shaver, Plays, p. 119. 20 Chalmers, ‘Politics of Feminine Retreat’, pp. 81–94. 21 Cavendish, Paper Bodies, p. 245.

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form of government’.22 For Cavendish, the residual powers of absolutism provided the only possible model for the liberation of ‘the absolute self’; as Catherine Gallagher points out, ‘the seventeenth-century women whom we think of as the forerunners and founders of feminism were, almost without exception, Tories’.23 Cavendish scholarship has generally viewed contradictions between individualism and hierarchy in her life and works as proceeding from a confused and overambitious personality – the Mad Madge of much pre-feminist Cavendish scholarship – but in the context of this study, it is more illuminating to see her as being written by contradictory discourses arising from the broader Baroque culture. Another aspect of Cavendish’s nostalgia for the absolutist court, an attitude shared (as Chapter Five showed) by her two (eventual) step-daughters, is her reliance upon the benevolent father-figure of her husband. At the age of eight she lost her biological father, but clearly found a father-substitute in her elderly husband – who, ironically, outlived her. Her story ‘The Contract’ advises ‘that woman is the happiest that marries an ancient man, for he adores her virtue more than her beauty, and his love continues […] when a young man thinks it a gallantry and a manly action, to use his wife rudely’. As Anita Pacheco points out, as a member of a landed royalist family whose estate and assets were seized and a woman who lost two brothers in the conflict, and spent years in exile, the circumstances of her life may well have intensified her loyalty to traditional patriarchal order which, validated the authority of the king as father of his people and of the paterfamilias as king of his household,24 and in her case involved wifely subservience and self-display as an appropriate way of supporting a noble husband’s social status. Perhaps Cavendish’s best-known work, and certainly one in which her courtly Baroque characteristics are evident, is The Description of a New World Called The Blazing World, first published in 1666 and issued as an appendage to her scientific treatise Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. The combination thus flamboyantly put natural philosophy alongside fiction, insisting they should be read together as if they represented complementary ways of approaching truth. Frequently classified as utopian fiction and described by Cavendish herself as an ‘hermaphroditic’ text, The Blazing World blends romance fiction, autobiography, and commentary on current events. In the preface, obviously written with a learned audience in mind, 22 Lilley, Blazing World, p. 164. 23 Gallagher, ‘Embracing the Absolute’, p. 133. 24 Lilley, Blazing World, p. 34; Pacheco, Early Women Writers, p. 12.

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she advises the reader, ‘if you wonder, that I join a work of fancy to my serious philosophical contemplations’, to recall that while the end of reason is ‘making truth’, nevertheless the end of fancy is making fiction, which is different from ‘rational search and inquiry into the causes of natural effects’. The world of Blazing World is, she disarmingly affirms, ‘a world of my own creating’, partly ‘romancical’, partly philosophical, and partly ‘fantastical’.25 Nicole Pohl points out how the work ‘corresponds in an exemplary fashion’ to the criteria of Baroque narrative with ‘stories enclosed one in the other’, clearly invoking a Deleuzian ‘multiplicity that makes for inclusion’.26 At one point, Cavendish’s central character, the ‘Emperess’, wishes to construct a cabala, a definitive revelation of an authoritative insight into all knowledge; however, she settles for an ‘imaginative’ cabala, a poetical creation which will use ‘Metaphors, Allegories, Similitudes etc’ and which are open to observers to ‘interpret them as you please’.27 The Blazing World itself can be seen as a kind of imaginative cabala. Cavendish is giving voice to the familiar hyperbolic Baroque insistence on metaphor and story as revealing deeper truths than empirical observation and measurement can provide. The elaborately folded plot begins as a melodramatic romance: the kidnap of a young woman is followed rapidly by a shipwreck in which everyone but her is drowned, opening up to a perilous adventure near the North Pole, where the adjoining Pole of a connected but invisible ‘blazing’ world suddenly appears. The woman next encounters a series of strange hybrid creatures who courteously escort her, one by one, until she reaches the capital city, which is named Paradise. She is introduced to an emperor who immediately falls in love with her and appoints her the empress of that world, giving her ‘absolute power to rule and govern that world as she pleased’. She learns about both the world itself and how to arrange it, making each kind of creature responsible for different tasks and areas of learning. The Bear-men become her experimental philosophers, the Bird-men her Astronomers, the Ape-men her chemists, and so forth. She creates herself head of a new state religion, making all who see her think that she is a goddess. She then desires to make a cabala but to do so she needs a scribe, who turns out to be ‘Margaret Newcastle’ herself.28 The Empress and Margaret become intimate friends through their souls, each confiding their ambitions to the other: Margaret’s turns out to be that she might rule 25 Cavendish, Paper Bodies, p. 153. 26 Pohl, ‘Of Mixt Natures’, pp. 53, 63. 27 Cavendish, Paper Bodies, p. 210. 28 Cavendish, Paper Bodies, p. 208.

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a kingdom, just as her friend the Empress does. But she learns that rather than achieving that by conquest, she can create (and destroy) worlds in her mind, making and remaking multiple worlds. Together they visit Margaret’s estate, where their two souls ‘inhabit’ the body of the Duke. The Duchess then becomes an advocate for her husband against his past mistreatment under the Interregnum. The brief Part Two opens with the Empress worrying about the political situation in her original home; calling upon her friend Margaret to help, she organises the Fish-men and other composite beings to make a journey into the kingdom of ESFI, which stands for the England marred, as Cavendish sees it, by the Puritan revolution and the consequent move towards rule by the people, rather than by the more ‘natural’ aristocratic leaders. She successfully overcomes the rebellion: in fantasy, a woman achieves for the exiled monarchy what could not have been done in the real world of revolutionary England. The empress then returns to her own Blazing World, and with her adoring emperor and her friend Margaret establishes a ‘theatre for Plays’, particularly to stage masque-like entertainments written by ‘Margaret Cavendish’. The emperor requests ‘directions how to make Plays’, despite being told that the Duchess’s plays were not highly regarded by ‘the Wits of these present times’. The Duchess wishes that there could be a constant passage between the two worlds, but above all else, she wants only to be ‘with her dear Lord and husband’.29 The Duchess of Newcastle – again, as the author, not (or not completely) as her character – adds an afterword: By this Poetical Description, you may perceive, that my ambition is not onely to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole World, and the Worlds I have made […] are framed and composed of the most pure, that is the Rational parts of Matter, which are the parts of my Mind; which Creation was more easily and suddenly effected, than the Conquests of the two famous Monarchs of the World, Alexander and Caesar. Neither have I made such disturbances, and caused so many dissolutions of particulars, otherwise named depths, as they did; for I have destroyed but some few men in a little Boat.

Of the world of the fancy she has created, she asserts in conclusion that she, ‘Honest Margaret Newcastle’ would not give it up for ‘all this terrestrial World’. She is ‘Emperess of it my self’.30 29 Cavendish, Paper Bodies, pp. 247, 249. 30 Cavendish, Paper Bodies, pp. 250–251.

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Women and their imaginative capacities to create worlds of their own are clearly central to The Blazing World. But can we speak of Cavendish’s ‘feminism’, which Lisa Sarasohn and others have attributed to her, or are we, rather, seeing what has been termed a more ‘indirect flanking attack’ on traditional masculinist authority?31 Cavendish certainly asserts that ‘men from the first Creation usurped a Supremacy to themselves, although we were made equal by Nature’. In The Female Orations, addressed to ‘Ladies, Gentlewomen, and other Inferiours’, she satirically sets out a variety of attitudes towards the status of women. Her first interlocutor states that men ‘Bury us in their Houses or Beds, as in a Grave: the truth is, we Live like Bats or Owls, Labour like Beasts, and Dye like Worms’. By the time we reach a fourth interlocutor there is a change in tone, claiming on behalf of women: ‘let us Converse in Camps, Courts, and Cities, in Schools, Colleges, and Courts of Judicature, in Taverns, Brothels, and Gaming Houses, all which will make our Strength and Wit known, both to Men, and to our own Selves’. The participant who seems most accurately to represent Cavendish’s opinion, at least in this work, argues that women must strive to improve themselves, through speech and exercise ‘all which will make our strength and wit known, both to men, and to our selves: for, we are ignorant of our selves, as men are of us. And how should we know our selves, when we never make a trial of our selves?’32 Some of the fantasy selves and scenarios Cavendish creates in her romances and plays exploit the traditional ‘feminine’ roles of display, flirtation, and calculated subservience, though they appear alongside threats of abduction and sexual assault. In a letter she comments that if ‘Nature had not befriended us with Using, and other good Graces, to help us to insinuate ourselves into men’s Affections, we should have been more inslaved than any other of Natur’s Creatures’ and since nature has been ‘so bountiful to us […] we oftener inslave men than men inslave us’. Lady Mediator in the Convent of Pleasure comments on men: ‘Men are Obstructers; for instead of increasing Pleasure, may produce Pain; and, instead of giving Contents, they increase Trouble’. Hence the women in the Convent ‘have banished the Masculine Company for ever’.33 On the other hand, scattered throughout her plays and stories there are fantasy figures of women with striking independence and power. Many of Cavendish’s writings describe 31 Sarasohn, ‘Science Turned Upside Down’, p. 302. 32 ‘Cavendish, ‘The Contract’, in Lilley, Paper Bodies, p. 5; ‘Preface to the Worlds Olio’, in Cavendish, Essential Works, p. 23; Female Orations’, in Cavendish, Paper Bodies, pp. 143–147. 33 Convent of Pleasure, in Cavendish, Paper Bodies, pp. 104, 66.

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the adventures and achievements of women who more often than not, triumphantly appropriate aspects of conventional male identities. She thus allows her readers to imagine escaping women’s material restrictions by providing fantasies of gendered possibilities that are exempt from conventional limitations. The heroine of Loves Adventures becomes ‘Mistriss of my self, and fortunes, and ha[s] a free liberty […] I love an easie, peaceable and solitary life, which none injoys but single persons’; she concludes that ‘to prevent all inconveniences, and discontents, I will live a single life’.34 The She-Anchoret affirms its heroine’s independence and integrity represented by her heroic honour and determined chastity; the Empress in The Blazing World develops extraordinary powers that she uses to further herself and her friends (who include one Margaret Cavendish). Yet, contradictorily, one of the interlocutors in the Female Orations argues that ‘to have Female Bodies, and yet to Act Masculine Parts, will be very Preposterous and Unnatural’, and would create neither ‘Perfect Women, nor Perfect Men, but Corrupt and Imperfect creatures’.35 The heroines of Bell in Campo likewise find difficulties in maintaining their independence. Lady Victoria does for some time create an alternative women’s world but at the end still returns to her husband, having gained a degree of autonomy (perhaps like Cavendish herself) over such matters as household management, authorship, and recognition by fashionable society. Notwithstanding her vehemence and often indignation about the denigration of women’s experiences and powers under patriarchy, Cavendish’s aim, as Lesley Peterson comments, is to ‘unsettle patriarchy without overturning it’.36 As is characteristic of the Baroque as a whole, retrograde and nostalgic cultural activities co-exist with emergent and even radical developments. Thus, one of the many continually interfolding discourses that speak through Cavendish’s works – in contradistinction to her image either as a liberated woman, a refugee from the control of men, or the bold critic of empirical science – is a recurring insistence on her own willing wifely subservience. Notwithstanding the repeated fantasies throughout her writings of escaping marriage and the control of men, she consistently saw her own conventional marital situation as distinctive and positive. The goal of the Female Academy, it turns out, is to educate young women to be to be good wives. One of Cavendish’s last published works was a biography of her 34 Cavendish, Sociable Letters pp. 67, 142; Cavendish, Loves Adventures, in Shaver, Plays, pp. 50–51. 35 Cavendish, Paper Bodies, pp. 242; Convent of Pleasure, in Paper Bodies, p. 104. 36 Peterson, ‘Defects Redressed’, p. 9.

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husband, designed not only to justify his nobility and his unjust treatment by a series of authorities, including Charles I (on whose behalf she believed he had sacrificed himself and his fortune), but also to insist that her multiple acts of display and self-advocacy were only for him, as an admirer and supporter, and that her writing career always depended on his approval and inspiration. She writes, ‘if I had never married the person I have’, she would not have been successful; indeed, it is it his ‘Approvement’ which gave her the confidence and resolution to write and ‘to put them to the Press’. She describes him as the ‘husband-master’ to her role as a humble ‘apprentice’, who supported her against the fear that ‘learned professors’ would assume that ‘nothing coming from the pen of a woman could be worth serious attention’. It is her husband who allows the multiplicity of her selves to ‘Travel through the World amongst mankind, | And then Return’.37 At the end of the Convent of Pleasure, the charismatic Princess with whom the Lady Happy has fallen in love turns out to be a man in disguise, who will now set about, in an admittedly chivalric way, to reorder and take control of her life. There is no sense that the ‘Princess’, now revealed to be a man, has undergone any conversion to a more flexible gender politics or gained any awareness of the social construction of gender. Some modern readers see this weakness as a consequence of Cavendish’s husband’s intervention in the final version of the play, which became, at least in its finale, a joint work of ‘Peg’ and ‘Will’ (the terms of endearment by which they sometimes referred to each other). There is no evidence that she raised any objection to receiving his additions, however much today we regret what can be seen as a regression. Some modern readers argue that it is possible, even desirable, for productions of the play to adapt its ending to a more openly feminist conclusion.38 Throughout her writings Cavendish moves, occasionally uneasily yet rarely abandoning her characteristic hyperbolic tone, among such multiple narrative folds, in plot, structures and settings. Assaulted and Pursued Chastity has a characteristic Baroque spatial flourish when she describes the king’s palace wall, which ‘presented millions of forms from one object’ with open passages, arched like gates; from those passages went walks, and on each side of these walks were trees, the barks thereof shadowed with hair colour, and smooth as glass, the leaves of a perfect grass-green […] 37 Lilley, Blazing World, p. 31. 38 See the account of a modern production in Paper Bodies, p. 20. I am grateful to Emma Steen for (almost) persuading me that we should read the inserted ending as false to Margaret Cavendish’s best intentions.

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these walks lead to another court, which was warned about with agates, carved with all imagery, and upon the ridge of the wall were such agates chose out as most resemble the eyes […] as if so many sentinels lay looking and watching round about

– and so it continues for another four pages.39 The two conjoined worlds of The Blazing World fold in and out of each other: the lady who becomes the ‘Emperess’ enters the strange world and meets ‘wonderful kind of creature[s]’, varying according to climate, diet, language and body form. She eventually enters the Emperor’s land through a ‘Labyrinth, so winding and turning among the rocks, and no other vessels that small boats, could pass’, discovering a palace with a broad arch, supported by several pillars, and ‘every half mile was a gate to enter, and every gate was of a different fashion’. 40 If Cavendish’s life and writings show many obvious Baroque characteristics, to what extent does she exemplify Kristeva’s argument regarding the ‘writing woman’ of the Female Baroque? Is she staking out distinctive positions for women in relation to the language of the imagination and the possibilities of their own language, either at the conscious and unconscious level? To what extent does she articulate any kind of ‘intimate revolt’? Cavendish repeatedly suggests that women’s education is key to their advancement: women are subordinated by the masculinist control of language, but beneath the chatter that men dismissively believe constitutes female discourse, her heroines define themselves by their dominance in language and often their facility in learning unfamiliar languages (as in The Blazing World), or even inventing new languages. But does such a view of language make it purely instrumental? Crucial to Kristeva’s argument is what she depicts as the distinctive characteristic of the Female Baroque: reaching into the unconscious. Whether that feature is unique to women is highly debatable, but her assertion is that the Baroque provided an unprecedented blossoming of representation specifically for women, placing the ‘turbulence of desire in full view’. 41 Cavendish does not have access to or even provide the equivalent to modern psychoanalytic terminology. She necessarily draws on the impoverished vocabulary of the seventeenth century, and in particular the relationship of what her age saw as ‘fancy’ to ‘reason’. In one of her early poems, a dialogue between Thoughts and Reason shows Thoughts claiming that ‘Nature gives us the ability to run, | Without a Check more 39 Cavendish, Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, in Lilley, Blazing World, pp. 66–67. 40 Cavendish, Paper Bodies, pp. 160–161. 41 Kristeva, Teresa, p. 47.

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swift far then with the Sun’.42 What Cavendish termed ‘fancy’ offers a way of creating an alternative reality in which women have more power, in which they could explore imaginative worlds as compensations for their lack of autonomy in the real world. In such cases therefore, she sees ‘fancy’ not as a way of imitating nature but rather of creating a different nature. Creating and then governing an imaginative world meant that women could draw upon the protean nature of the imagination. So can we therefore see her view of writing as close to l’écriture féminine of Kristeva or Irigaray? That is a temptation, but as Marina Leslie points out, for Cavendish the idea of the body (as opposed to the soul) ‘speaking’ is contradicted by her insistence that it is ‘only when the body is bypassed and transcended’ (as The Blazing World illustrates) that ‘female autonomy and parity are attained’.43 She never abandoned her nostalgia for the dim echoes of the aesthetic Platonism she recalled (or imagined) from the court of Henrietta Maria. Cavendish’s articulation of a distinctive Baroque experience takes shape, however haltingly, in the exploration of multiple narrative strands, self-reflective mirrors, labyrinths, and in her multiplicity of contradictory discourses. In a poem called ‘Upon her Excellency the Authoress’ – published, Anne Shaver notes, as an ‘unsigned dedication to herself’ – she speaks of her mind as being plural and repeatedly travelling ‘through the world against mankind, | And then Return’. She shifts and often jumbles narrative voices; like Wroth, her stories constantly open into new stories, often without consistency or apparent logic. As Cavendish herself comments, ‘some of my Scenes have no acquaintance or relation to the rest of the Scenes, although in one and the same Play, which is the reason many of my Playes will not end as other Playes do’.44 She moves flamboyantly and happily from romance to scientific observations, history to utopia, folding fact and fiction together, joining what were widely seen as ‘feminine’ forms to empirical observations that claimed, at least to members of the Royal Society, a ‘masculine’ objectivity. She describes her Blazing World as a hermaphroditic text, a term Nicole Pohl observes, that is a perfect application of Deleuze’s ‘multiplicity that makes for inclusion’ so characteristic of the Baroque. 45 With Cavendish, it suggests a mixture of playfulness and seriousness, what in an ordered world might be seen as belonging apart, the blurring effect of multiple and changing roles, most especially in the ambiguities of gender. Even in printing 42 Cavendish, Poems and Fansyes, sig B3v. 43 Leslie, ‘Gender, Genre and the Utopian Body’, p. 20. 44 Cavendish, ‘To the readers’, in Shaver, Plays, p. 256. 45 Pohl, ‘Of Mixt Natures’, p. 63.

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her works, Cavendish constantly intervened during the printing process to add qualifications, explanations: as Pohl notes, even her self-acknowledged textual errors ‘become an authenticating gesture, preserving the trace of singular authorship and the time of composition’. 46 What of the other recurring characteristics of the Baroque sensibility I have traced in all of the other writers: melancholy, hyperbole, plateauing? If multiple enfolding narratives and rapidly shifting discursive positions are the most obvious Baroque characteristic of Cavendish’s work, her stories and plays – not to mention her public appearances – are so obviously hyperbolic that it is almost unnecessary to comment. As Lilley notes, The Blazing World ‘is an extravagant text which revels in the self-consciously fantastic representation of opulence, ornament, novelty and variety as well as the rhetoric of description and amplification, counting and recounting’.47 All of Cavendish’s heroines express extreme passions, have grandiose ambitions, and reflect her own repeated goal of creating worlds of her own by means of their distinctively female minds or fancies. Cavendish’s assertion of the female unfettered imagination, however, seems to be accompanied inevitably with melancholy. More than an understandable anxiety about the dangers of public display for a woman, melancholy seems to have been a lifelong concern for her, and at times a debilitating experience. Cavendish described herself as having a ‘very melancholy humour […] most of my contemplations are fixed on nothing but dissolutions, for I look upon this world is on death’s head for mortification, for I see all things subject to alteration and change’. She describes what permeates many of her stories: ‘Surely an evil fate hangs over me, for I am so dull, as if I were a piece of earth, without sense; yet I am not sick, I do not find my body to stand, then surely it is in my mind’. 48 In Antwerp she tried many medicinal remedies for the condition, ranging from music to crushed dried frogs.49 Her heroines are like their creator: sometimes striking examples of utopian optimism, but more often than not retreating into a sort of hopelessness regarding actually being able to make a change in the real world. Lady Contemplation says ‘I love melancholy so well as I would have all as silent without me as my thoughts are within me’; the heroine of ‘The Contract’ is typical in that ‘her countenance was sad’, and spirits ‘dejected, a colour faded’. She has been educated not in ‘romances, nor such light books’; 46 Pohl, ‘Of Mixt Natures’, p. 53. 47 Lilley, Blazing World, p. xxiv. 48 Lilley, Blazing World, pp. 8, 21. 49 Van Beneden and De Poorter, Royalist Refugees, pp. 89, 184–185.

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instead it is ‘moral philosophy’ that has been ‘the first of her studies’. She goes to ‘lectures of physic, and lectures of chemistry, and lectures of music and so divers others […] But never to courts, masques, plays, no balls; and she always went to these places masked, muffled, and scarfed’. She writes that she herself could be a ‘happy creatoress’ if her readers receive satisfaction; but if not ‘I must be content to live a melancholy life in my own world’.50

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Margaret Cavendish, ‘She-Scientist’ Cavendish’s Baroque-ness is therefore like the epoch as a whole, continually revealing conflicting discourses. Yet Margaret Cavendish is a transitional figure, as it were gradually leaving the Baroque; she occupies, at the end of the period, a position analogous to the one the emergent or timidly Baroque Mary Sidney and Aemelia Lanyer occupied at the beginning. Her life and work, her writings, and her aspirations also incorporate stylistic and philosophical elements that seem to gesture beyond the Baroque, at times displaying what we can fairly call neo-classical or Enlightenment characteristics. In the background of the Baroque – as we have so far seen, sometimes contributing to it, sometimes undermining it – are the seventeenth century’s ominous revolutions in cosmology, geography, historiography, medicine, and empirical science. It was a time of extraordinary intellectual revolution; perhaps the only major paradigmatic shift in the century to which Cavendish did not respond in detail (even though she had rather dubious expertise in some cases) was the revolution in historical methodology, and there are even indirect hints of a passing interest in that. In analysing her scientific opinions, modern scholars have found her to be materialistic, spiritualistic, mathematical, anti-mathematical, mystical, Hobbesian, Cartesian, Naturalist, supernaturalist, Aristotelian, and mechanistic, with her writings incorporating many other positions – in short, as hybrid a creature as any in the Blazing World itself. What we see here is the Baroque sensibility in action, but alongside it, perhaps undermining it, emphatic trends betraying the emerging strength and persuasiveness of what will be labelled the Enlightenment. Cavendish dedicated the second edition of her Philosophical and Physical Opinions to the ‘two Most Famous Universities of England’, and her Grounds of Natural Philosophy to ‘all the Universities in Europe’, clearly aware of her status as an outsider yet aspiring to be appreciated by leading intellectuals. 50 Cavendish, ‘To the Reader’, in Lilley, Blazing World, p. 124.

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Her prefatory comment to the scholars of Oxford and Cambridge, that she was ‘sure to receive so much Courtship from this sage society, as to bury me in silence; thus I may have a quiet grave’, is an indication she was aware of her marginal intellectual status but nevertheless signals her ambition to overcome it.51 Throughout her career, even going back to her life in Paris and Antwerp, alongside the mercurial personality and succession of public performances Margaret Cavendish’s consistent aim was to belong to the rational, reasoning world of the emerging new natural philosophy and science. As hostess to her husband’s circle of scientists and philosophers, and as she started to write herself as early as Poems and Fancies – a collection of repetitive doggerel couplets (and occasional triplets) written in exile in 1653 – she had discoursed on atomism, motion, creation, heat, light, and a miscellany of scientific and quasi-scientific topics. It became increasingly obvious to her that she had to master the intellectual world of the natural philosopher if she was to achieve the fame she claimed to want, the fame accorded to a serious writer, not simply the notoriety accorded to what the intellectual world could easily dismiss as the pretentious ramblings of a foolish woman. Examining the dichotomy in the title and the majority of the subject matter in Poems and Fancies, we can see not only the split in Cavendish’s own career and ambition, but the broader discursive contradictions beneath the surface – in effect, how the culture of the Baroque was gradually transitioning to a different world. Cavendish, like the later stages of the epoch itself, is caught between Baroque and Enlightenment. Sarasohn speaks of Cavendish as a ‘female scientist’, arguing that her philosophical writings constitute an ‘attack on the authority of a male-dominated science, and, by implication, an attack on all male authoritarianism’.52 Given Cavendish’s fondness for neologisms, she certainly aspires to be a ‘she-scientist’. Through her marriage, she came into at least social contact with a number of philosophers and scientists whose work contributed to the emergence of Enlightenment thought. It is likely that the Duke of Newcastle’s own enthusiasm for the scientific revolution and its proponents, along with that of his more scientifically expert brother Charles – who accompanied Margaret on a long trip back to England to attempt, unsuccessfully, to reclaim her husband’s estates – awakened her interest in natural philosophy. The Newcastles’ circle in Paris and Antwerp included Thomas Hobbes, 51 Cavendish, ‘To the Two Universities’, in Philosophical and Physical Opinions, in Cavendish, Essential Writings, p. 41; Cavendish, Grounds of Natural Philosophy, in Cavendish, Essential Writings, p. 130. 52 Sarasohn, ‘Science Turned upside Down’, p. 294.

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who enjoyed the Duke’s patronage for many years, while both Descartes and Gassendi also dined with them in Antwerp.53 Once they returned to England, Margaret became associated with a number of the members of what would later be the Royal Society. Sarasohn’s claim that we should see her as a ‘female scientist’ is based on a series of works written in the 1660s, including Philosophical Letters: or, modest Reflections upon some Opinions in Natural Philosophy, maintained by Learned Authors (1664), and Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1664). The latter’s typically elaborate continuing title – Devided into Thirteen Parts: with an Appendix containing five Parts, and Observations upon Experimental Philosophy: To which is added, The Description of a New Blazing World (1668) – illustrates clearly the blurring of science and romance in her work. Predictably, Cavendish’s specifically scientific writings are themselves a ‘hermaphroditical’ combination of assertion, speculation, half-formed notes, stray remarks, editorial afterthoughts, and fanciful metaphors. Nevertheless, what she passes off as natural philosophy is no more fantastic than the notions of some of her male contemporaries; likewise, to speak of her philosophy as incoherent, as her contemporaries generally did, may be accurate, but we should not overlook some important indications of how connected, whether consciously or not, she was to the wider intellectual and ideological currents of the age. She enthuses over the newly fashionable mechanistic atomism of Hobbes although perhaps does not see, as Hobbes certainly does, the challenge of reconciling that philosophy with religion. The atoms of matter, at least as she described them, seem to act out of their own volition; whether they are ordered by God is left a very open question. Her husband was a patron of and showed some intellectual interest himself in accounts of natural phenomena without any reference to supernatural or occult forces. Whether Cavendish herself saw or approved of such a development cannot be exactly established, given the contradictions throughout her work, but unquestionably such gaps in her thinking point towards a gradual change in the age’s structure of feeling. Some Cavendish scholars have argued that when her later writings are compared to her earlier ones there is a subtle (although typically inconsistent) change in orientation, which can be explained by her increasing preoccupation with making an intellectually acceptable intervention into the community of natural philosophers. She confesses that she set her 53 On William Cavendish’s acquaintance with European philosophers and scientists such as Descartes and Van Helmont, in addition to the exiled Thomas Hobbes, see Phillips, The Scientific Lady.

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early philosophical views in Poems and Fancies into rhyme because any ignorance or mistakes would then be attributed to poetry rather than her understanding of philosophy: ‘the Reason why I write it in Verse, is, because I thought Errours might better passe there, then in Prose; since Poets write most Fiction, and Fiction is not given for Truth, but Pastime’.54 She frequently excuses her writings for being seemingly caught between ‘fancies’ and philosophy, believing that, although she feels she is not sufficiently skilled in the language of natural philosophy and sometimes her meanings require greater clarification, placing fiction alongside philosophy will nonetheless help to clarify both. In her later works, however, Cavendish tends to separate philosophy from fiction, and increasingly reveals her ambition to be taken seriously as a philosopher. Within the dominant intellectual circles in which she hoped to make her mark, the boundaries between science and imagination, which in characteristic Baroque manner she provocatively blurred, had become more settled into what becomes a characteristic Enlightenment dichotomy. This change is largely because of the efforts of the Royal Society, which not only rejected figurative language but also demanded a clear distinction between the products of reason and the products of the imagination, a distinction that Cavendish, notwithstanding her playful satire on the Society, seems willing to embrace. When she asserts in the preface to The Blazing World that the side-by-side publication of a philosophical and a fictional text could illustrate the differences between philosophy and poetry, rather than their similarities, she has started to question her own earlier proceedings. Earlier, poetical fancy was not bound by any restrictions of rationality or reality, but philosophical reason is now accorded a higher status in that it has to agree with the laws of nature. Cavendish’s argument in this preface is structured by what are gradually becoming the classic hierarchies of Enlightenment rationality: reason is superior to fancy, empirical truth to fiction, investigations of nature to free creations of the fancy. A key to her increasing anxiety to be taken seriously as a scientific thinker and not just as a public personage is her changing relationship with what comes to be described as Cartesianism. Cavendish was certainly one of the earliest English female authors to have some substantial understanding of Descartes’ thinking. He had been part of the Cavendish Circle in Europe, and in Philosophical Letters (1664), she wrote that she was ‘reading now the works of that Famous and most Renowned Author, DesCartes, out of which’, she acknowledges, she intended ‘to pick out onely those discourses 54 Cavendish, Poems and Fancies, ‘To Natural Philosophers’, sig 2 v.

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which I like best, and not to examine his opinions, as they go along from the beginning to the end of his books’.55 A selective rather than a systematic reader, she observed frequent occurrences of disagreement, more often felt rather than argued systematically. She is uneasy about Descartes’ crucial body–mind split, asserting with a degree of swashbuckling bravado, that she cannot ‘apprehend, that the Mind’s or Soul’s seat should be in the Glandula or kernel of the Brain, and there sit like a Spider in a Cobweb’, or that ‘the sensitive organs should have no knowledg in themselves, but serve onely like peepingholes for the mind, or barn-dores to receive bundles of pressures, like sheaves of Corn’, and so she concludes that ‘sense and knowledg cannot be bound onely to the head or brain’.56 While resisting Cartesian dualism, even if inconsistently, Cavendish was clearly attracted to one aspect of Descartes’s argument for rationality as the universal basis of individual identity; it was a position that enabled her, however intuitively and at times contradictorily, to argue for the existence of equal legitimacy for both male and female modes of consciousness. Descartes was at least by implication opening an argument for gender-neutral rational abilities. Whether or not his intention was to do so, his argument provided Cavendish (and by extension, other women in seventeenth-century England) with a philosophical position from which they might argue that women’s rational capabilities were no less or greater than men’s, thus at least potentially opening up areas of discourse and of activity from which they were previously excluded. Women, she had asserted throughout her writings, were held back by custom. She acknowledges that women themselves were partly responsible for perpetuating the belief that they were irrational, and saw the consequences of this misplaced modesty: ‘we out of a custom of defectednesse think so too, which makes us quit all industry towards profitable knowledge being imployed onely in loose and pettie imployments, which takes away not onely our abilities towards arts, but higher capacities in speculations’.57 In taking over the rationalism of Descartes, however, Cavendish’s philosophical position as well as her rhetorical style was moving beyond what we can usefully term as Baroque. Her most obvious anticipation of post-Baroque and Enlightenment views of the world is in a change in attitude towards language. The Female Baroque, 55 Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, in Essential Writings, p. 71. 56 Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, in Essential Writings, p. 74. 57 Cavendish, Philosophical and Physical Opinions, ‘To the Two Universities’, in Essential Writings, p. 40.

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I have argued, has been most revealingly expressed in writing – both the surface textuality (Kristeva’s ‘symbolic’) and the accompanying if inexpressible associations and psychological origins (the semiotic) – may be seen in its experimentation, flamboyance of style, and at times the underlying psychological and ideological dynamics it brings to the surface. These features have been illustrated by all of the women I have so far presented including, even if spasmodically, Cavendish herself. Yet she was writing in a period in which the attitude towards language was changing, in great part because of the new science, and she was keen to be accepted by the makers of the new norms. The Royal Society’s attitude towards rhetoric and its rejection of the extravagant claims for metaphor and allegory – so central to Baroque style – can be seen in Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667). In a passage on the Society’s ‘Manner of Discourse’, Sprat defined what was emerging as the new orthodox plain style as one that rejected the reliance of ‘the fabulous Age’ with its ‘thousand varieties of figures’ and ‘subtle webs’ which would be ‘fitter for a melancholy humorist’ than the needs of a society emerging from ‘our late Civil Wars’.58 Following this model, we can observe Cavendish increasingly, even if inconsistently, arguing against linguistic elaboration. In The Blazing World she depicted herself as the empress of an imaginary world who is also the head of an academy, a tongue-in-cheek fictional counterpart of the Royal Society. Of the several members of this academy, the so-called parrot-men represent the orators. One of them delivers a formal speech before the Empress, but it proves to be a failure, due not to a lack of rhetorical skill but to an adherence to an inadequate kind of discourse. Cavendish sketches the parrot-man as a philosopher who falls victim to his own linguistic ideals, and becomes entangled in his own linguistic web: one of the parrot-men rose with great formality, and endeavoured to make an eloquent speech before her Majesty; but before he had half ended, his arguments and divisions being so many, that they caused a great confusion in his brain, he could not go forward, but was forced to retire backward, with the greatest disgrace.

The flamboyant Baroque ideals of copiousness, variety and unpredictability have given way to perspicuity and clarity: a style that can be ‘understood by all’. She largely adopts the empiricists’ picture of the mind as a tabula

58 Sprat, Royal Society, pp. 6, 16, 26, 42.

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rasa, and in evaluating the parrot-man’s speech the Empress represents the rhetorical ideals of the Royal Society:

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[She] appeared not a little troubled, and told them [the parrot- men], that they followed too much the rules of art, and confounded themselves with too nice formalities and distinctions; but since I know, said she, that you are a people who have naturally voluble tongues, and good memories; I desire you to consider more the subject you speak of, than your artificial periods, connexions and parts of speech, and leave the rest to your natural eloquence; which they did, and so became very eminent orators.59

Although in The Blazing World Cavendish would mock the Royal Society, she was increasingly drawn to acknowledge the shift in power implied by the new linguistic norms. It is not that she wholeheartedly embraces all the ideas she picks up from overhearing or reading the works of the Royal Society philosophers. In addition to painting an amusing and at times satirical view of the Society in The Blazing World, she brings forward her concerns as a ‘female scientist’ to assert women’s rights to philosophical speculations, and in Philosophical and Physical Opinions extends her belief in the notion of female power by conceiving Nature itself as female, in effect as a goddess whose commitment to irregular motion and unpredictability lend her a terrible authority in the eyes of her creations. Cavendish often projected her fantasies about fame into the future, taking ‘steps to […] live by remembrance’, hyperbolically stating in her preface to The Blazing World, ‘I am not Covetous, but as Ambitions as ever any of my Sex was, is, or can be […] though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavor to be Margaret the First’.60 It is doubtful if she would even be satisfied with her posthumous fame, which includes a memorial in Westminster Abbey, and the striking modern revival of scholarly interest in her work. Prophetically, she wondered: ‘who knows, but, after my honourable burial I may have a glorious resurrection in following ages, since time brings strange and unusual things to passe’.61 With the rediscovery of hitherto neglected early modern women’s literature, at least part of this ‘Glorious Resurrection’ has finally taken place. 59 Cavendish, Paper Bodies, p. 188. 60 Cavendish, Paper Bodies, p. 153. 61 Cavendish, Philosophical and Physical Opinions, in Essential Writings, p. 41.

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Aphra Behn: Beyond Baroque Hörigkeit Margaret Cavendish’s increasing affinity with the emergent rationalism of the Enlightenment connects her with the Restoration woman writer who in standard literary histories often supplies the quintessential example of English Baroque – Aphra Behn. Given that Behn’s writings are habitual labelled as Baroque (usually because of her striking, even shocking, ‘libertine’ plots and characters, or what were regarded as provocative or obscene references in her poems), in the light of the elements of the ‘Female Baroque’ I have so far analysed, how accurate or useful is such a label? I will argue that, while Behn’s writings do demonstrate some surface manifestations of Baroque style, the intellectual substance of her writings puts her only ambivalently in the Baroque, and rather more within the emergent structure of feeling we identify as the Enlightenment. Such an observation in no way diminishes the importance of Behn as a dramatist, novelist, poet, essayist, or professional writer. What I wish to stress is that the distinguishing features of the Baroque are of less fundamental importance to our understanding of her place in cultural history. Along with Cavendish, Behn is certainly the most prolific and frequently noted woman writer in seventeenth-century England. As Virginia Woolf observed (her patronising tone notwithstanding), she was the first English woman to make a living by writing; in that superficial sense she is triumphantly one of Kristeva’s Baroque writing women.62 That her writings are often referred to as Baroque, however, seems in large part to reflect only her place within a loosely conceived notion of post-Renaissance cultural history. Just as Vivaldi, Handel, Bach, and Mozart are often described as Baroque composers within musical history, so a similarly rough historical taxonomy often includes Behn within a vague Baroque literary history. Like Margaret Cavendish, Behn presents herself as an object of cultural curiosity, what Ros Ballaster terms ‘an erotic object, a seductive hieroglyph, or more mundanely, a fascinating eccentric’.63 Among her poems, ‘To the Fair Clarinda, Who Made Love to Me, Imagined More than Woman’, and her imitation of Rochester’s poetic squib on male impotence, ‘The Disappointment’, have often been depicted as, in some superficial sense, Baroque. However, I want to put Behn’s writings within the model of the Baroque I have developed, which derives less from Canfield’s stylistic surface eruptions and more from Maravall’s ideological structures and Kristeva’s psychoanalytical insights. 62 Woolf, Room of One’s Own, pp. 77–79. 63 Ballaster, Seductive Forms, p. 70.

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Throughout her varied literary career, in drama, poetry, and prose, Behn was fascinated by the restrictions placed upon the female writing subject, and how she and other women might thrive within a predominantly masculine literary establishment. However, her affirmation of the figure of the female writer should not be reduced, as it has often been, to a matter of autobiography. Her work raises more general considerations of what it was to be a woman writer in the Baroque. In the preface to The Lucky Chance, a comedy of manners performed at the Theatre Royal in 1687, Behn defines ‘masculine’ writing in two ways. The first definition refers solely to the question of content, and she expresses scepticism towards her contemporaries’ double standard for a woman playwright. Sexual explicitness is conventionally only permissible, she complains, for the male author. Addressing her female audience, Behn writes: ‘Had I a Day or two’s time […] I would sum up all your Beloved Plays, and all the Things in them that are past with such Silence by; because written by Men: Such Masculine Strokes in me, must not be allow’d’. Behn’s second definition of ‘masculine’ writing, however, raises more complex issues. This time addressing her male peers in the theatre, she writes: All I ask is the Priviledge for my Masculine Part the Poet in me, (if any such you will allow me) to tread in those successful Paths my Predecessors have so long thrived in, to take those Measures that both the Ancient and Modem Writers have set me, and by which they have pleas’d the World so well; If I must not, because of my Sex, have this Freedom, but that you will usurp all to your selves; I lay down my Quill, and you shall hear no more of me, no not so much as to make Comparisons, because I will be kinder to my Brothers of the Pen, than they have been to a defenceless Woman;for I am not content to write for a Third Day only. I value Fame as much as I had been born a Hero; and if you rob me of that, I can retire.64

The goal that Behn adopted in her writings, besides supporting herself – hence the reference to getting beyond the ‘third day’, the conventional first performance from which the writer could count on income – was to lift the woman writer into a position that would go beyond the gendered limitations of the ‘feminine’. She was determined to see herself as the possessor of what she describes as ‘masculine’ poetical gifts, not as a muse or goddess. Behn’s reputation today rests primarily on her plays. Adapting easily to the fashion for libertine farce she became, in Todd’s phrase – and in more 64 Behn, Works Vol. 3, pp. 185–187. See also Ballaster, Seductive Forms, pp. 71–73.

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than one sense – ‘one of the boys’, adapting theatrically successful ‘male language with a freedom no proper lady could have allowed herself’.65 She established a reputation with her popular comedies that rivalled those of her male contemporaries, though often providing more aggressive roles for women. Her heroines act boldly, giving voice to desires and manipulating gender roles and their relationships, with both men and women, in attempts to circumvent the dominance of men and compulsive heterosexuality. Particularly noteworthy is the way in which, in The Rover, or the Banish’t Cavaliers (1677) and The Feign’d Curtizans (1670), she prefigures the recurring and evidently popular courtesan role in sexual comedy to illustrate how women might circumvent male directives. But such qualities of her plays are those of surface rhetoric and situation rather than the explorative introspection we have seen as characteristic of the Female Baroque. Canfield argues that Restoration dramatists, including Behn, move away from what he terms ‘Baroque extremism’, casting off ‘the monstrous, the grotesque, the macabre, the morbid, and the outrageous in favor of comic resolution’. In some plays and poems, Behn pokes fun at the emergent neoclassical aesthetic, and frequently her scenes erupt into a disruptive, often hysterical, explosion. Such an ‘aesthetic burst of the Baroque within an otherwise neoclassical project’ may usefully be read as a ‘symptom of generational anxieties’, reflecting not simply a stylistic fashion but a deep-rooted ideological change.66 Janet Todd, her modern biographer, comments that for Behn, ‘language did not refer to the inner life at all, but was always instrumental, social, and rhetorical’.67 Like her fellow dramatists writing ‘for bread’ in the public theatre, Behn responds to the tastes of the audience, using the stereotypes of the loose living rake, cavalier, or ‘gay’ heroine within a broadly misogynistic comedy. Aware of her skill, and unashamedly exploiting opportunities to cash in on it, she frequently revels in the comparison of playwright and whore, and sees her vocation as a writer as an exercise in commodification – being willing to respond to the marketplace. Behn’s plays are capable of pointedly challenging the conventional boundaries between normative and deviant categories for women, but even here, she stays broadly with inside a masculinist ‘libertine’ framework. Behn’s distinctive contribution to the Female Baroque comes less from her plays than from her writings of the 1680s, when there were fewer 65 Todd, Secret Life, p. 194. 66 Canfield, Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature, p. 15. 67 Todd, Secret Life, p. 337.

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opportunities in the theatre and she instead turned for her ‘bread’ to works of fiction and translation. She continued to write poetry, commenting on the increasingly tense political situation following the death of Charles II and the accession of his Catholic brother James II, of whom Behn was a strong supporter. Like Cavendish, she exhibited a growing interest in the new rationalism of the Enlightenment. In addition to her play Emperor of the Moon (1687), she composed poems celebrating Lucretius’s philosophy; she translated Bernard de Fontenelle’s A Discovery of New Worlds (1688) and Book Six (‘On Trees’) of Abraham Cowley’s Of Plants (1689); she also integrated a number of preoccupations from natural philosophy into her work, as seen in the zoological and botanical descriptions in Oroonoko (1688). Blanford Parker speaks of the gradual emergence of the most important discovery of the Augustans, ‘the literal’, reinforced by the accompanying newly fashionable mimetic fashions in drama, fiction and poetry. ‘Augustan culture’, argues Parker, ‘could not abide the hubris of an analogical age’ – that is, the Baroque’s claim to mediated knowledge of the transcendent by means of metaphor. Increasingly, late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers would mock the ‘acrostic land’, the ‘aeolist’ imagination, the ‘obsessions of the mystic; and the empty conceits of the analogists’.68 However, in what is both a splendid late flowering of the Baroque as well as a flamboyant undermining of it, a small group of Behn’s writings do make a major contribution to our understanding of the Female Baroque. The works in question are her long epistolary romance novel Love Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister (hereafter Love Letters) and the posthumously published Letters to a Gentleman (hereafter Gentleman), both of which lay bare many of the characteristics peculiar to the Female Baroque; together, they constitute a devastating critique of the powerful combination of hyperbole and melancholy, which I have labelled Hörigkeit, underpinning both erotic and religious manifestations of the Baroque. As Karen Gevirtz comments: ‘these seemingly harmless and escapist fictions of seduction and betrayal and tragic love do indeed address and rework a number of urgent ideological dilemmas’ of the cultural transition the Baroque undergoes in the late seventeenth century.69 The Gentleman, a short series of eight undated letters, was first included in the posthumously published Histories and Novels of the Late Ingenious Mrs Behn: In One Volume (1696). They were reprinted in the third edition of the Histories and Novels (1698) but there they were described explicitly as part of 68 Parker, Triumph of Augustan Poetics, pp. 9, 2. 69 Gevirtz, ‘From Epistle to Epistemology’, p. 81.

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‘The History of the Life and Memoirs of Mrs Behn’. The introduction to the 1698 edition, written by ‘One of the Fair Sex’, was an attempt to establish the author as a scandalously romantic heroine with much in common with the female characters in her plays. The standard modern biographies of Behn use the Gentleman letters for autobiographical insights; Todd even presents them explicitly as written by Behn herself. Germaine Greer, by contrast, is intensely sceptical about the authenticity of any of the posthumous publications attributed to Behn and suggests their publication was a calculated attempt to cash in posthumously on her notoriety as a loose-living ‘libertine’ woman.70 The forthcoming Cambridge edition of Behn’s works looks set to raise many questions of attribution and authenticity.71 Writing as ‘Astrea’, Behn’s frequently used pseudonym, the eight love letters in Gentleman are addressed to ‘Lycidas’, one of the poetic names she seems to have used for her friend and probable occasional lover, the Gray’s Inn lawyer John Hoyle. In Behn’s poems, many of which focus on the complications of sexual identity and sexual experience, Hoyle certainly appears under several names, including Amyntas and Lycidas. Behn probably met Hoyle in the early 1670s; he was widely reviled as ‘an atheist, a sodomite professed, a corrupter of youth, & a blasphemer of Christ’, and seemingly led a complicated libertine sexual life: he was prosecuted (unsuccessfully) for ‘buggery’ and was apparently as least as interested in men as in women; he may also have supported Behn f inancially as her theatrical career developed.72 Behn is often singled out as bold ‘libertine’ woman herself, a reputation that contributed to two centuries of moral disapproval and neglect of her writings. Duffy states that ‘Behn’s sexual ambiguity seems to have grown stronger as she got older, either because she was less attractive to young men or because of the whole John Hoyle complex’, which refers to the intense combination of painful passion and continual rejections that the letters present.73 Given what is now widely seen as the bold nature of Behn’s approach to writing about female sexuality, it is certainly tempting to see the letters somehow closely reflecting her life. They may or may not have been written to or about Hoyle, but either way they are an attempt, often conveyed in a frantic, even sometimes a desperate tone, to explore (or possibly register) a woman’s perspective on her obsessive and seemingly 70 Greer, ‘Honest Sam. Briscoe’, p. 41. 71 See Wright and Hogarth, ‘Editing Aphra Behn in the Digital Age’, Article 3. 72 For readings of Letters and Behn’s probable relationship with Hoyle, see Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra, pp. 189–204; Todd, Secret Life, pp. 176–184, 342. 73 Duffy, Passionate Shepherdess, p. 285.

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helpless erotic attraction for a reluctant or neglectful lover. In particular, the letters strive to show the struggle of women trapped in a misogynistic society to direct their own lives, rather than to serve predominantly as objects for male desires. The relationship in the letters reverses the conventional Petrarchan or courtly positioning of a woman: in this case it is she who is the supposedly helpless and rejected lover, turning to writing because of her beloved’s absence and indifference. Like the classic mistress, the male lover here is given no voice, and is repeatedly beseeched and castigated as cruel and unpredictable. But where the conventional male Petrarchan lover is, despite anguished protestations, finally in control of the relationship, Behn’s female protagonist finds herself trapped, but has learned to accept and even welcome that enslavement. Not unlike that in Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, indeed, perhaps more consistently painful, the overall tone of the letters is one of intense masochism. We infer – only from the woman’s perspective, since we are not given her lover’s responses, if there were any, real or fictional – that Astrea’s is a classic example of Hörigkeit, an intensification of extreme hyperbole and deep melancholy in sexual obsession and entrapment. In certain moods she shares with Wroth’s Pamphilia, Astrea takes refuge in writing, her letters serving as a therapeutic outlet for her pain and frustration. But she achieves no relief. She presents herself as passionate and infinitely self-sacrificing, but is forced to embrace the role of the masochistic, slave-like, willing victim of a lover who in turn seems both reluctant and perversely exultant in the torment he causes her: ‘My Lycidas says, he can be soft and dear when he please to put off his haughty Pride, which is only assum’d to see how far I dare love him’; ‘I am’, she assures him, ‘and ever will be yours, befal me what will […] Shew then […] my dearest Love, thy native sweet Temper: Shew me all the Love thou hast undissembl’d’ (Letter 5). She accuses him of publicly snubbing her, refusing to sit beside her at dinner, and giving her both hopeful and contemptuous hints about whether he loves her. In the seventh letter, she writes that she would ‘have gag’d my Life you cou’d not have left me so coldly, so unconcerned as you did; but you are resolv’d to give me Proofs of your No Love’. She is even willing to sacrifice her own desires and accept a set of ‘Laws and Rules’ for her behaviour towards him, which she knows are designed to have her keep her distance and yet be in thrall. Like Gertrude More, whose version of Hörigkeit originally followed a painful and at times self-destructive regime of rules and punishments, Astrea presents herself as a willing victim: she tries to follow her lover’s rules as if her obedience were proof that she loves him ‘more and more every Moment

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of my Life’ (Letter 7). Like More, she occasionally attempts to rebel and strike back at her dominating lover: ‘put off your foolish Fear and Niceties, and do not shame me with your perpetual ill Opinion; my Nature is proud and insolent, and cannot bear it: I will be used something better’ (Letter 6). She even can come to acknowledge the extent of the perversity of her situation. ‘What shall I do to make you know I do not use to condescend to so much Submission, nor to tell my Heart so freely?’ she asks of herself (Letter 7). Part of the thrill of Hörigkeit is being caught up in an on-off relationship, a combination of assurance and rejection, a frighteningly perverse version of Freud’s fort/da game where the lover’s anticipated presence compensates for the pain caused by their leaving or not appearing, despite promises to do so. Perversely, Astrea is willing to be thus constrained and dominated, not unlike the situation in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus – though to a greater extreme – and comparable to More’s anguish before the Otherness of God. In the final letter, Astrea acknowledges that the relationship renders her a conventionally oppressed ‘woman’: ‘whatever Resolutions I make in the absence of my lovely Friend, one single sight turns me all Woman, and all his’ (Letter 8). Quite apart from probably unsolvable autobiographical questions, what do these letters tell us about Behn’s exploration of this dark side of the Female Baroque? The letters are typical in the intensity with which melancholy and hyperbole combine in the extraordinary masochistic, even self-destructive, construction of the female protagonist, who repeatedly protests and yet is aware, in Louise Kaplan’s words, that her ‘torment is an essential ingredient of her sexual pleasure, and that she actively creates situations that will torment her’. She experiences an apprehension of failure and doom and attributes this to her own responsibility, but later feelings of panic occur whenever she is separated from her loved one: ‘when she is separated too long from the man that resurrects her being’, as a self-confessed ‘slave’ of fatal love, she inevitably ‘succumbs to a nameless and terrible dread’. The willing embrace of enslavement is a recurring note in the letters, intensified by the willingness to accept her extreme dependence, and even acknowledging and admiring her love-object’s ‘ingenuity in creating a situation of submission and dominance’. Kaplan’s phrases are uncannily relevant to Behn’s letters: her late twentieth-century analysis of Hörigkeit in her landmark study, Female Perversions, comments on just such a relationship, where ‘not infrequently, after the first days or months of ecstasy, the man pretends disinterest and becomes aloof and distant’, and ‘the more he neglects or threatens to leave her, the more she and submits to his power’. The submissive partner is nonetheless willing, even eager, to buy love with suffering in order to maintain a life-giving vital relationship with the ‘Almighty other’.

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There are moments of violent rage when the extremely submissive woman of Behn’s letters becomes conscious of her growing resentment and envy toward the man who has power to give or deny her his approval and love.74 Like Gertrude More wrestling with her desire to be swallowed up into God, she takes ‘pride in her self-inflicted suffering’: she ‘is waiting for all day’ for the ‘reunion with her Great Man, who might, just might’, provide an experience of miraculous transcendence – but the typical plateauing experience makes it an inevitably frustrating connection, especially if it lasts only ‘for one hour later that evening’.75 By reversing the usual gender roles and establishing the male lover – whether a real or fictionalised Hoyle – as a complicated, partly feminised subject, Behn arguably ventriloquises the ‘maleness’ of her own sexual desires, a view reinforced by other of her poems containing ambiguous gender references, and some directly addressed to a beloved who could be either male or female. Her affinities with the gender and sexual experimentation of Restoration libertinism is often offered as an explanation for the gender politics of her work, in that Behn’s plays have female characters who behave little differently from their male counterparts. Libertinism was supposedly a specifically masculine and aristocratic identity – and a frequently asked question is whether Behn provides a corrective or whether she is willingly absorbed into it? One of her closest associates was the notorious Earl of Rochester, whose amusing yet blatant misogyny was evidenced in both his writings and personal behaviour. One of the many puzzles about Behn’s career is whether she was offended by Rochester’s extremities, or whether she took the association as an encouragement to rival male dramatists by claiming comparable liberation for women. Susan Staves has argued that, while Behn was uneasy about the prevailing (and conflicting) gender ideologies of her day, the treatment of female characters in her plays certainly implies that she was unwilling or unable to imagine ‘alternative, less misogynist constructions of womanhood’. Moreover, to conform to the expectations of the audience and her fellow playwrights, she had to share the sexual and gender perspectives of her male counterparts. Especially given the emergent history of women writers and prophets throughout the century, there is unquestionably ‘something sad’, Staves argues, about the notion of women as ‘too feeble’ to resist the importunities of ‘fickle and perfidious rakes’.76 In Behn’s competition with the male dramatists, the 74 Kaplan, Female Perversions, p. 222. 75 My analysis here is drawn from Kaplan, Female Perversions, pp. 215–220, 222, 231–232. 76 Staves, ‘Behn, Women, and Society’, p. 27.

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residual gender stereotypes are hardened, with men exhibiting exuberant and uncritical sexual exploitation, built on unquestioned assumptions of aristocratic privilege and patriarchal custom. In turn, repeatedly, Behn gives her dramatic and fictional heroines the symbols of male power – weapons, riches and especially clothes and language, thereby attempting to co-opt the trappings of authority. But she does not question the hierarchies that establish the authority of these marks of gendered power. She makes no claim of a separate, let alone superior, source of women’s insights or experiences. Letters to a Gentleman, then, exposes a dark, destructive side to the Female Baroque. It presents a woman trapped in and yet adapting to a misogynistic society, seemingly without escape. The second of these two similarly-titled works, Love Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister, provides a more complex perspective. It is much longer and intellectually more complex; sometimes rambling, sometimes tightly plotted, this three-part work is today increasingly seen as one of the origins of the novel.77 Briefly, it is the account of the love affair between Philander and his younger sister-in-law Sylvia, and later a series of other relationships in which the pair gradually become involved. It starts as a series of letters describing an intense, courtly, mutual fascination that tips over into erotic idolatry between Philander and Sylvia, and ends with both of them cynically exploiting whatever erotic opportunities they find.78 Sylvia develops from helpless heroine to wilful woman, discovering ‘new desires’ and ‘unwonted wishes’ (pp. 60, 63), becoming ‘a soul doomed to eternal love’ (p. 85), and, finally, a ruthless conqueror of men through her blatant exploitation of her beauty and cunning. Behn joins her parody romance to an allegorical account of a very topical political and erotic scandal: an adulterous affair between two minor participants in the rebellion by the Duke of Monmouth – Charles II’s illegitimate son, a firm Protestant – which aimed to overthrow the Catholic James II but ended in Monmouth’s execution. There are parallels between Monmouth and the character of Cesario in Behn’s story, and Philander’s support for rebellion is presented as the corollary of his seduction of his sister-in-law. Behn modelled the work on French epistolary romance novels, particularly the notorious Portuguese Letters (published in France in 1669 and translated into English by Sir Roger L’Estrange in 1678), which relates an affair between a Portuguese nun and her French soldier lover; Behn combines the story of the tragic romantic love affair with elements drawn from picaresque or 77 See e.g. Gardiner, ‘The First English Novel’, pp. 201–222. 78 Quotations are taken from Behn, Oroonoko: subsequent page references will be given in the text.

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‘rogue’ tales, and draws on her dramatic gift for hilariously farcical scenes. As she turned from drama to prose fiction, she brought in a number of both thematic and narrative interests from her stage experience. Joanna Fowler points out that just as in the plays Behn uses asides to engage the audience, so in her epistolary fiction she frequently uses ‘frame-breaking’, when the words of her narrators are delivered parenthetically; at times, most notably in the third part of Love Letters, a first-person narrative voice intrudes, as if the narrator is witnessing the events, authenticating what she purports to be reporting, even when the events in question seem to be farfetched.79 With its shifts and surprises, the narrative structure may therefore be seen as clearly if superficially Baroque, promiscuously mixing multiple perspectives and narrative modes, including letters, which predominate in the First Part, third person narrative in the Second Part, and intrusions of first-person reportage in the Third Part. The narrative flows at different paces, slowing for the letters or rushing through events to link one episode to another, and increasingly includes scenes of high camp. The work attains a level of rhetorical hyperbole that can certainly be termed Baroque, combined with a dose of picaresque realism drawn from the tradition of ‘rogue’ literature and from the brusque cynicism of Restoration ‘libertine’ writing, on which Behn had already proved herself an expert in her stage plays. The opening section shows Philander and Sylvia expressing themselves with stylistic extravagance in a series of interchanged letters. Here Behn indulges in a parody of the Baroque struggle to find words for complex and incoherent feelings. As Stephen Ahern points out, she combines ‘hyperbole with a typographic and grammatical vocabulary of commas, dashes, and broken phrases’ that don’t just ‘imitate but hilariously mimic’ both lovers’ most intimate words and thoughts, and also echo the tradition of Baroque religious writers struggling to f ind discourse for feelings that lie deep within or beyond consciousness. 80 Behn’s lovers write of the ‘dear but fatal business of our souls’ and the ‘thousand despairs, difficulties and disappointments’ they encounter (pp. 6–7). To enhance the scandal of the encounter, Behn carefully notes the legally incestuous nature of their relationship. Philander insists that ‘no brother ever loved a sister with so criminal a flame’ (p. 5). Sylvia fearfully guards her honour, and Philander is thereby ‘kept from the site of my heaven, my eternal bliss’. In rising anguish, she in turn discovers unforeseen feelings and also starts to yearn for the ‘criminal flames’ he raises in her: ‘I languish, faint and die with pain’ 79 Fowler, ‘Dramatic and Narrative Techniques’, p. 98. 80 Ahern, ‘Glorious Ruine’, p. 30.

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(p. 76). The erotic and the religious are fused in their desires and rhetoric. The lovers’ devotion has continual associations of the trappings of Catholic devotion – he speaks of her as the ‘dear Victor of my soul’ and he sees her as ‘adorned’ with ‘crowns and scepters’ (p. 18). The ‘soft easy arts of love’ are compared with religious ecstasies: ‘the rhetoric of love’ he exclaims, is ‘half-breath’d, interrupted words, languishing eyes, flattering speeches, broken sighs, pressing the hand, and falling tears’ (p. 26). Sylvia offers her ‘sacred and inestimable treasure’ of her virginity to her lover, who in turn is described as a ‘trembling victim to the overjoyed and fancied deity’ that he finally possesses (p. 50). This motif continues later in the novel, when Sylvia’s other major lover, Octavio, is dedicated to God in an elaborate religious ceremony; outside, the triumphant amorality of Sylvia and her legal husband Brilliard are conquering a series of lover-victims. Behind the Baroque there may shimmer a brief reminder of the transcendent, but in Behn’s world it barely flickers. What appears initially to be a conventional romance proves to be radical and subversive. The erotic rhetoric is heightened in order to mock the pretensions of erotic love. A woman’s sexual awareness starts as being identified with the protection of physical virginity, and moves to Sylvia wanting to ‘bless’ her lover with what she otherwise ‘must some time or other sacrifice to some hated, loathed object’ (p. 8). We are presented with a comedy of plateauing, with rising desire and then frustration – explicitly so in the hilarious scene in which Philander suffers impotence (or premature ejaculation, a recurring subject of scornful poems by Behn), so that with the ‘treasure which [he] toil’d for […] A heaven of joy and beauty exposed to view’, he falls limp and unfulfilled, ‘gazing only, and no more’, and ending in humiliation by ‘fainting before the surrendering gates, unable to receive the yielding treasure’ (pp. 51, 64). Sylvia is also depicted parodically, with dishevelled hair, crying eyes, wounded breast, and a language of sentiment and emotion that will distinguish virtuous fictional heroines for the following century and more. When she makes the discovery ‘that I have wishes, new, unwonted wishes’, she knows how easily she can provoke successive lovers with ‘only her night-gown thrown loosely about her lovely body, and which left a thousand charms to view’ (pp. 63, 149). But increasingly Sylvia starts to represent a new kind of woman, anticipating figures such as Miranda in Behn’s own story ‘The Fair Jilt’ (1688), a woman who – in striking contrast to the protagonist of Letters to a Nobleman – takes vindictive revenge on lovers who reject her advances, and so prefigures other fictional rogue types, including Moll Flanders. Nora Gilbert argues that the mature Sylvia represents a new, more liberated woman, who possesses both mobility and

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choice, reflecting a social trend of women claiming the right to choose their relationships and reject the pressure of parents over their desires.81 Behn takes special aim at what I have identified as the intensification of Hörigkeit that is specific to and emblematic of both courtly and religious Baroque. As Letters to a Nobleman demonstrates so painfully, it involves a cultivated masochism, both a fear and a fondness for being ‘undone’ (p. 43), and an intense sense of pain combined with its enjoyment. In the longer work, this sense of helplessness of the victim is replaced by Sylvia’s gradually learning to make ‘as absolute a conquest as it was possible for her supposed to sex to do over a man’ (p. 114). Using ‘all the tenderness and little affectations her subtle sex was capable of’ (p. 193), she is portrayed as irresistible and aware that all men ‘that do but look on you become your slaves’. She is repeatedly referred to triumphantly as the ‘cruel’ Sylvia; Octavio speaks of her as ‘that Sylvia born eternally to enslave Octavio’. A willing victim, he exclaims that he would rather lie eternally at her feet, gazing, doting. For her part, taking the dominant role, she resolves that she might ‘more safely disdain, or at least assume a tyranny which might render perfect you glorious’, while at the same time keeping him ‘her slave on all occasions when she might have need of his service’ (p. 157). When Behn writes, ‘The business of your love-sick slave will be only to give you proofs how much he does adore you, and never to taste a joy’ (p. 180), it is an apt summary of erotic Hörigkeit. There is always pain accompanying pleasure: Octavio cries ‘be false, be cruel, and deceitful, yet still I must, I am compelled to adore you’. Since ‘it was a greater glory to be a slave at her feet’ (pp. 279, 287), he ‘vowed myself her slave, all sacrifice’; for her part, she is ‘loving the triumph, though she hated the slave’, and she is convinced that ‘all men were born to die her slaves’ (pp. 360, 260, 188). Behn’s ridicule of the extremity of both religious and courtly Hörigkeit is openly undertaken from a libertine perspective. Female libertinism also includes a radical scepticism towards marriage and motherhood, with marriage regarded only as a political or strategic move. We are informed that both Sylvia and Calista become pregnant but while their confinements are mentioned, it is only in passing, and the offspring involved are seen as totally incidental, detracting nothing from the women’s charms: the babies are barely mentioned, and thwart neither Sylvia’s erotic ambitions nor Calista’s religious vocation. Of the male libertines in the Restoration plays, we are told that repetition ‘of what he had been feasted with before […] was no new treat, but, like matrimony went dully down’ (p. 356). Men in Behn’s world are ‘naturally’ promiscuous as a ‘man’s hours are very dull, when undiverted 81 Gilbert, ‘Impatient to be Gone’, pp. 1–27.

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by an intrigue of some kind or another’, and they are always looking for ‘a remedy against loving one in particular’ (pp. 143, 221). And so why should not women have the same views? Sylvia looks for a remedy against any ‘loving one in particular’, for ‘in love as in religion too’, there is nothing that makes their ‘votaries truly happy but being well deceived’. By Behn’s pragmatic perspective, it is equally natural for women to ‘play the jilt’ (pp. 221, 228, 355). Love Letters clearly intrigued not only Behn’s contemporaries but a number of later generations. Ros Ballaster points out that only six books that went into more than ten editions before 1740, two of which were by Behn – her collected Histories and Novels, and this work.82 Its popularity was perhaps an indication that it touched a level of both recognition and fear within the post-Baroque structure of feeling – ‘post’-Baroque because she lays bare the extent the Baroque sensibility was capable of both liberating and limiting women’s material experiences. Behn’s work constitutes the most powerful critique of what I have identified as the Female Baroque, both courtly and religious. It does so with a variety of techniques that certainly reinforce Behn’s claim to be one of Kristeva’s ‘writing women’, but which make her ‘Baroque’ only in a marginal, predominantly parodic, sense. Even more emphatically than Margaret Cavendish, Behn gives voice to a view of women and ‘female’ experience more in tune with Enlightenment thinking, and one that historically is eventually more akin to modern understanding of women as both sexual and social beings. Her views give good reason to see her as a feminist, to more than an honorary extent, and far more so than in is voiced in Virginia Woolf’s tribute, much quoted but undeniably tinged by class bias. The point is not just that Behn was the first woman to make her living from writing, but that her writing was culturally prophetic to an extent not approached until the early twentieth century. The disturbance and disapproval she met with for two hundred years reflects not merely the unease towards what were felt to be immoral or unladylike sentiments, but a still deeper cultural disquiet for which she was finding language. In an obvious yet partly superficial sense, then, Behn is clearly a ‘Baroque’ writer. But rarely does she see women’s writing as a mark of spiritual autonomy or even giving voice to a distinctively female creativity, as opposed to a means of earning ‘bread’. Occasionally she does embrace an affirmation of women’s distinctive insights. Her poem ‘The Golden Age’ hails women’s creativity as not limited by what she implies is the neurotic insecurity of being male. As Ballaster notes, this poem is a ‘conventional piece of Tory nostalgia’, incorporating a vision of Nature as female and creating: ‘Without 82 Ballaster, Seductive Forms, p. 77.

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the Aids of men | As if within her Teeming Womb | All Nature, and all sexes lay | Whence new Creation every day | Into the happy World did come’.83 She exposes the pretensions of residual gender roles, ridiculing the libertine convention of ‘(male) initiative and (female) response’, but at the same time her reassignment of these conventional gender roles implicitly reinforces a cynical, loveless code that, in her world at least, continued to provide a privileged retreat for men; she gives no set of alternative values, as if gentleness, subtlety, or mutuality were merely to be dismissed as ‘feminine’. Ballaster points out that ‘feminocentric fiction’ like Behn’s did not, regrettably, produce ‘the according of a full subjectivity and autonomy to women in general’. Indeed, in Letters, Sylvia represents a reactionary rejection of what Kristeva would see as distinctive of the intimate revolt central to the ‘Female Baroque’, the willingness to reach down into the psyche and find not simply material desires but the opening of the psyche to less egocentric, more compassionate (and companionate) values. Such discoveries can be erotic or religious, but they are inevitably associated with struggle and crisis. Not for Behn. The Enlightenment concept of the free subject remains primarily the traditional masculine construct, with women left in a state of either imitation or supposedly natural subordination.84 In exposing the pretensions of masculinist rhetoric with its religious aura and claims to give substance to ‘ineffability, inexpressibility’ and ‘glamorous vastness’, but which serves only to mask libertine desire, Behn in effect empties the Baroque reliance on hyperbole, acknowledging that ‘it can neither know nor speak the ultimate Eros towards which it aspires’.85 Her Sylvia is a symbol of a broader cultural shift. It is by virtue of its reliance on extremities of melancholy and hyperbole that we see attempts to reshape the dynamics of desire. Donald Wehrs concludes that Behn ‘stands, historically and intellectually, between the conceptual horizons of Renaissance humanism and New Scientif ic modernity’. 86 She praised the young Oxford scholar Thomas Creech’s versification of Lucretius’ celebration of philosophical materialism, De Rerum Natura, though it is unclear whether its philosophical radicalism or the youthful attractiveness of the poet attracted her.87 In his Pulitzerwinning study of the iconic influence of Lucretius in early modernism, Stephen Greenblatt argues that Lucretius’s materialism lies behind the 83 Ballaster, Seductive Forms, pp. 74–75. 84 Ballaster, Seductive Forms, p. 78. 85 Turner, Schooling Sex, p. 382. 86 Wehrs, ‘Eros, Ethics, Identity’, p. 462. 87 Todd, Secret Life, p. 313.

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Enlightenment’s gradual separation of natural law from supernatural religion. Even if Greenblatt’s brilliant avocation for the direct influence of Lucretius on the modern self is excessive, unquestionably a major shift is occurring in the late seventeenth-century structure of feeling.88 But it involves not only the fading of the supernatural world but the fading of the Baroque. The late flowering of the Baroque in Behn’s fiction opens a new world of ordinariness, pointing to a major cultural shift that may have to wait some generations, as the Baroque itself had done, to come to the fore. Beneath the hostility to Behn in the next two centuries may have lurked the fear that her work points so threateningly to the disenchantment of Western culture. As her dedication to The Fair Jilt puts it, ‘this is reality, and matter of fact, and acted in this our latter age’.89

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Works Cited Ahern, Stephen. ‘“Glorious Ruine”: Romantic Excess and the Politics of Sensibility in Behn’s “Love-Letters”’. Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700 29 (2005), 29–45. Ballaster, Ros. Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Battigelli, Anna. Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998. Behn, Aphra. The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Montague Summers. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967. Behn, Aphra. Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister, ed. Maureen Duffy. London: Virago,1987. Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko and Other Writings, ed. Paul Salzman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Canfield, J. Douglas. The Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature from Milton and the Wits to Dryden and the Scriblerians. Newark DE: University of Delaware Press, 2003. Cavendish, Margaret. Philosophical and Physical Opinions. London,1655. Cavendish, Margaret. ‘The She Anchoret’, in Natures Pictures, 1656. https://quod. lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A53048.0001.001/1:11.1.4?rgn=div3;view=fulltext. Accessed October 2019. Cavendish, Margaret. Philosophical Letters. London, 1664. Cavendish, Margaret. Observations on Experimental Philosophy. London, 1666. 88 Greenblatt, Swerve. 89 Behn, Oroonoko and Other Writings, p. 74.

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Cavendish, Margaret. Poems and Fansyes, intr. George Parf itt. London: Scolar Press, 1996. Cavendish, Margaret. Paper Bodies: a Margaret Cavendish Reader ed. Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson. Peterborough: Broadview, 1999. Cavendish, Margaret. The Convent of Pleasure and Other Plays, ed. Ann Shaver. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Cavendish, Margaret. Sociable Letters, ed. James Fitzmaurice. Peterborough: Broadview, 2004. Cavendish, Margaret. Essential Writings, ed. David Cunning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Cavendish, Margaret. The Severall Wits. https://digicavendish.github.io/ed/texts/ ComedyofWits /. Accessed October 2019. Chalmers, Hero. ‘The Politics of Feminine Retreat in Margaret Cavendish’s The Female Academy and The Convent of Pleasure’. Women’s Writing 6 (1999), 81–94. Chao, Tien-yi. ‘Representations of Female Sainthood and Voluntary Death in Margaret Cavendish’s “The She-Anchoret” (1656)’. English Studies 92 (2011), 744–755. Clucas, Stephen, ed. A Princely Brave Woman. Farnham: Ashgate, 2003. Duffy, Maureen. The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn 1640–89. London: Jonathan Cape, 1977. Findlay, Alison. Playing Spaces in Early Women’s Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Fowler, Joanna. ‘Dramatic and Narrative Techniques in the Novellas of Aphra Behn’. Women’s Writing, 22 (2015), 97–113. Gallagher, Catherine. ‘Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England’. Genders 1 (1988), 24–39. Gardiner, Judith Kegan. ‘The First English Novel: Aphra Behn’s Love Letters, The Canon, and Women’s Tastes’. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 8 (1989), 201–222. Gevirtz, Karen. ‘From Epistle to Epistemology: Love-Letters and The Royal Society’. Women’s Writing 22 (2015), 84–96. Gilbert, Nora. ‘“Impatient to be Gone”: Aphra Behn’s Vindication of the Flights of Women’. Eighteenth-Century Life 42 (2018), 1–27. Goreau, Angeline. Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn. New York: Dial Press, 1980. Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World became Modern. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011. Greer, Germaine. ‘Honest Sam. Briscoe’: A Genius for Letters: Booksellers and Bookselling from the 16th to the 20th Century, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris, pp. 33–48. Newcastle DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1995. Kaplan, Louise A. Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary. New York: Doubleday, 1991.

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Kristeva, Julia. Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila, trans. Lorna Scott Fox. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Leslie, Marina. ‘Gender, Genre and the Utopian Body in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World’. Utopian Studies 7 (1996), 6–24. Maravall, José Antonio. Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. Miller Naomi J. ‘Playing with Margaret Cavendish and Mary Wroth: Staging Early Modern Women’s Dramatic Romances for Modern Audiences’. Early Modern Women 10.2 (2016), 95–110. Pacheco, Anna, ed. Early Women Writers 1600–1720. London: Longmans, 1998. Parker, Blanford. The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Peterson, Lesley. ‘Defects Redressed: Margaret Cavendish Aspires to Motley’. Early Modern Literary Studies, Special Issue 14 (May 2004), pp. 1–30. Phillips, Patricia. The Scientific Lady. A Social History of Woman’s Scientific Interest 1520–1918. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990. Pohl, Nicole. ‘“Of Mixt Natures”: Questions of Genre in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World’, in A Princely Brave Woman, ed. Clucas, pp. 51–68. Sarasohn, Lisa. ‘A Science Turned Upside Down: Feminism and the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish’. Huntington Library Quarterly 47 (Autumn 1984), 289–307. Sprat, Thomas. History of the Royal Society, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones. St Louis: Washington University Press, 1958. Staves, Susan. ‘Behn, Women, and Society’, in The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn, ed. Derek Hughes and Janet Todd, pp. 12–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Straznicky, Marta. ‘Reading the Stage: Margaret Cavendish and Commonwealth Closet Drama’. Criticism 37 (1995), 355–390. Todd, Janet. The Secret Life of Aphra Behn. Newark: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Turner, James Grantham. Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England 1534–1685. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Van Beneden, Ben and Nora De Poorter, ed. Royalist Refugees: William and Margaret Cavendish in the Rubens House 1648–1660. Antwerp: Rubenhuis & Rubenianum, 2006. Wehrs, Donald R., ‘Eros, Ethics, Identity: Royalist Feminism and the Politics of Desire in Aphra Behn’s Love Letters’. Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 32 (1992), 461–478. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Peterborough: Broadview, 2001. Wright, Gillia and Alan Hogarth. ‘Editing Aphra Behn in the Digital Age: An Interview with Gillian Wright and Alan Hogarth’. ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830 8.2 (Fall 2018), Article 3.

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Postscript In the process of negotiating among various definitions of the Baroque, I have tried to incorporate both stylistic and epochal approaches to this slippery concept, and most especially I have looked for places where gender plays an important role – or where issues of gender can be inserted into the discussion in places where it has hitherto been excluded or downplayed. Rather than being identifiable as a delimited historical period, the Baroque is a continuous transition, during which Europeans began to sense, if only rarely to fully articulate, the implications of the ominously emerging revolutions in cosmology, geography, historiography, medicine, and empirical science. The hyperbole and melancholy, the contradictory narratives and plateauing of Baroque culture, are the consequences of these underlying felt cultural changes, even among those individuals and communities resistant to or even ignorant of them. My argument has been centred on viewing the Baroque specifically in English culture, through a taxonomy in part derived from José Antonio Maravall’s Culture of the Baroque, supplemented by the concept of ‘plateauing’ derived from Gregory Bateson. Among the contradictions of Baroque culture, two powerful intertwined opposites have stood out – the Baroque’s overwhelming reliance on hyperbole, not merely as a rhetorical device (certainly a recurring feature of Baroque style across the arts and in many everyday contexts ) but as ideological practice designed to generate elevated emotionality by means of extremity, exaggeration, excessiveness, and novelty; and its ostensible opposite (although almost inevitably accompanying it) a pervasive, at times obsessive, melancholy, an almost inevitable consequence of the multiplicity of hyperbole. That corrosive combination has often led to the ‘plateauing’ I see as a distinctive tendency in Baroque culture. Above all, perhaps, it needs to be emphasised that the term ‘Baroque’ does not point merely to surface stylistic effects but brings with it both residual ideological stands from the medieval world, and also anticipations of Enlightenment and even modern ‘dis-enchantment’. Often these ideological contraries co-exist, frequently in the same work, even the same poem, even the same sentence.

Waller, G., The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. doi 10.5117/9789463721431_post

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I have largely restricted myself to what to many scholars will still appear limiting, the notion of an English Baroque. My study constitutes a kind of test-case for the positioning of seventeenth-century English literary and cultural production within European cultural history. suggesting, in line with Maravall, that there are underlying structures of feeling and common ideological dynamics (what an older historicism might have termed a common ‘spirit of the age’) that link Catholic and Protestant, northern and southern. The Baroque is also widely acknowledged to be a fruitful way of describing the Catholic diaspora into the New Worlds of the Americas and Asia. The major claim of my study, however, is in uncovering the multiple dimensions of the ‘Female Baroque’. Only in the past generation or two have scholars realised not only the existence but the multiplicity and distinctiveness of early modern women’s voices, and these new traditions of scholarship remain a lively, ongoing process, by which more women and more women’s activities have become part of our understanding of the early modern period. These developments have made Kristeva’s observations and speculations on the Female Baroque all the more suggestive: seeing her interpretation of the saint of Avila as an embodiment of the Female Baroque has provided a key to a period in which increasingly many women were on the verge of breaking out of their traditional positions within predominantly male-created discourses, even while having access only to language sanctioned by the era’s dominant authorities. Kristeva’s Teresa helps us understand that early modern women deserve special attention less for how they fulfilled residual gendered expectations (the goal of much traditional scholarship on ‘Renaissance women’) and more for their emergent (perhaps more important, what Raymond Williams terms ‘pre-emergent’) and ‘unprecedented blossoming of representation’.1 The great precedent of Teresa as the Female Baroque, she argues, in a phrase I have applied to all my writers, ‘was not so much to feel rapture as to tell it: to write it’.2 The preceding chapters have shown how in the Baroque, and in the special environment of English culture, women were able, to greater or lesser extents, to give voice to counter-dominant surges and explorations of ‘intimate revolt’, discovering many means by which paternal realms might be undermined and women’s language, and what lies behind it, opened up.3 We can discover emergent counter-discourses by means of which all the writers studied here were able to find devious, 1 Kristeva, Teresa, p. 47; Williams, Marxism, p. 126. 2 Kristeva, ‘Phallic Matron’; Kristeva, Teresa, p. 67. 3 Kristeva, ‘New Forms of Revolt’, pp. 1–19.

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subversive and oppositional spaces for themselves. Among religious communities, both Catholic and Protestant, women’s ecstasies were very rarely seen as expressions of individual insight, but rather as the experiences of a divine presence inhabiting, dwelling in, or invading their bodies and thus providing the authority to speak out, often in defiance of authorities. In the Protestant prophetic tradition, women’s rejection of their traditional subordination could become a vehicle of newfound spiritual authority, thus providing another distinctive instance of Kristeva’s ‘intimate revolt’. 4 Female discourse, so often accused of verging on or exceeding the hysterical, provides an example of how conventional misogynistic attitudes towards women could allow them to give voice to what were culturally as well as individually repressed areas of experience. Kristeva’s distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic, outlined in chapter one, has therefore been in the vicinity of my discussion throughout. It is the semiotic dimension of female speech that, for Kristeva, singles Teresa out as the epitome of the Female Baroque, and which in varying forms and to varying extents I have tried to locate in the writers and texts I have analysed. From the tissue of meanings, ranging from pre-linguistic emotional traces to linguistic representations and, by extension, to ideologies (symbolic representations), we can therefore attempt to interpret its traces that may lie quietly below the textual surface or, more extremely, might threaten to emerge and engulf the speaking subject – who may experience its upsurge as dangerous – and certainly threaten the surface rationality of everyday existence.5 In doing so, in the recurring iconic figure of the writing woman, we can see signs of a new subjective space being built. Such an analysis allows us to see the exclusivity of patriarchal discourse being undermined, even partly or potentially. Throughout, I have argued that what I have termed ‘plateauing’ is a distinctive characteristic of the Baroque that applies with special force to the women of the era. As I argued in Chapter Two, the Baroque characteristically falls short of residual Western beliefs in what Bateson terms ‘orgasmic culmination toward an excess of the idealised apex’ and is replaced by plateauing, seen most vividly in the melancholy awareness or suspicion (or fear) that the apex is both a philosophical and a psychological delusion. Typically, surfaces are deceptive masquerades, pointing only to an ambiguous hinterland, not to a reassuring transcendent world but a world of further recessive spaces. Kristeva quotes her saint as saying the Beloved is always elusive, that the 4 Mack, Visionary Women, pp. 113, 121, 123. 5 Kristeva, Beginning, p. 6.

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soul can no longer move forward or backward in ‘an insatiable orgasm of impossibility’.6 Even a seemingly achieved rapture lasts only briefly, as we can see from the texts of both Catholic and Protestant writing women.7 Plateauing is therefore an intensely felt present absence grounded in an insurmountable lack, caused by the reluctant and sometimes despairing feeling of disjunction between self and world, between hyperbole and melancholic actuality, and between a cosmos being gradually dismantled and what Kristeva calls humanity’s incredible need to believe.8 Behind the absolutist facade of the Baroque is a major cosmological and theological crisis, a transcendence slowly being called into question, eventually to be emptied of certainty: the gradual fading of the metaphysical world on which the traditional cosmos depended. Images in the Baroque may still retain their traditional roles as receptacles of the sacred, but there is a fear that they have become partially and increasingly severed from their sacred origin. There have become merely ‘splinters of Divinity harkening back to the source’, still residually powerful, but increasingly under pressure.9 Significantly, the emerging scientific discourses that fascinated Cavendish and Behn in the mid- to late seventeenth century tended, Kristeva observes, to ‘minimise the elements of the semiotic dimensions of language as far as possible’.10 Unquestionably, Cavendish’s life and writings contain multiple rich, and often contradictory, aspects that we can see as ‘Baroque’. However, especially in her later writings, we see how she develops an eager if ambivalent relationship with the new empirical science and ‘natural philosophy’, the dynamics of which point us beyond the Baroque towards the Enlightenment. We see an analogous development with Behn, the woman frequently described by Restoration scholars as demonstrably Baroque, but many of whose writings, as with Cavendish’s, have more affinities with new cultural paradigms. Kristeva’s ‘novel’ on Teresa of Avila ends with an address by her narrator, Sylvia Leclerc, to the Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot who, along with Leibnitz, she regards as a major philosopher of the transition from Baroque to Enlightenment, one who further ‘wakened humanity from its dream of transcendence’. Diderot’s rejection of the transcendent ‘was like a bracing wind that blew away the obscurantist miasmas battering like 6 Loerke ‘Four Things Deleuze Learned from Leibniz’, p. 59. 7 Kristeva, Teresa, pp. 349, 74. 8 Kristeva, Incredible Need. 9 Kristeva, Adel’s Body’, p. 64. 10 Desire in Language, p. 134.

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parasites on women’s bodies that exploited the quiverings of desire’. He wrote a satiric novel, La Religieuse, about the tragic distortion of humanity by the religious life, and while Kristeva shares the enlightened philosopher’s incredulity of fundamentalist religion, she ironically points out how she could still acknowledge affinities with belief, and specifically with a religious woman. Her character/narrator Sylvia Lector tells us that she began reading Teresa with some scepticism, in an attempt to confront a ‘UFO, a Baroque relic’. Like Diderot observing his nun, however, she discovered she had to turn more intimately to Teresa in order to get an indication of the complexity of psychic life or, in Teresa’s religious language, the exaltations the soul experiences when it unites with the Other: ‘I have tried to redirect your Enlightenment’, Sylvia tells Diderot, back into the ‘murky chambers of the female soul’. She attempts to open up the possibility of an alternative response, very different from that of the Enlightenment. ‘I’m not asking you to believe’, she muses; rather, she asks that we ‘reopen the God question that crystallized in the enlightened Encyclopedia and culminated, as I see it, with Freud’, thereby sounding ‘the knell of the mysticism of Being in favor of the mystique of the psychological ego’, and opening the irresistible need to explore the human and especially the female ‘talking subject’.11 It is that subject and its ‘murky […] soul’ that the Female Baroque at least partially recognized, explored, and opened for future men and women alike.

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Works Cited Braider, Christopher. Baroque Self-Invention and Historical Truth: Hercules at the Crossroads. New York: Routledge, 2004. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Kristeva, Julia. ‘Women’s Time’ Signs 7.1 (Autumn 1981), 13–35. Kristeva, Julia. In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Kristeva, Julia. ‘The Impenetrable Power of the Phallic Matron’, Liberation 2008. n. p. http://www.kristeva.fr/palin_en.html. Accessed October 2019. Kristeva, Julia. This Incredible Need to Believe, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. 11 Kristeva, Teresa, pp. 567, 568, 577, 582, 586. See also Margaroni, ‘Julia Kristeva’s Voyage’, pp. 83–104.

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Kristeva, Julia. Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila, trans. Lorna Scott Fox. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Kristeva, Julia. ‘New Forms of Revolt’, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy–Revue de la philosophe française et de la langue française 22.2 (2014), 1–19. Kristeva, Julia. ‘Adel’s Body (Conversation)’. http://www.kristeva.fr/2017/AA_text_ JK_english.pdf. Accessed October 2019. Loerke, Mogens. ‘Four Things Deleuze Learned from Leibniz’, in Deleuze and the Fold: A Critical Reader, ed. Sjoerd van Tuinen and Niamh McDonnell, pp. 25–45. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. Maravall, José Antonio. Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. Margaroni, Maria. ‘Julia Kristeva’s Voyage in the Theresian Continent: The Malady of Love and the Enigma of an Incarnated, Shareable, Smiling Imaginary’. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy–Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française 21 (2013), 83–104. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

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About the Author

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Gary Waller is Distinguished Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies Emeritus, Purchase College, SUNY. His books include English Poetry in the Sixteenth Century, The Sidney Family Romance, Walsingham and the English Imagination, The Annunciation: A Cultural History, and The Virgin Mary in Medieval and Early Modern Literature and Popular Culture.

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Index

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Absolutism 22, 25–26, 39, 41–42, 57, 66, 70, 76, 99, 111, 116, 136, 147–148, 152, 154–156, 164–166, 172, 187, 502, 198, 208, 218, 231, 239, 242–243, 280, 286 actresses 171–184, 203 Althusser, Louis 20, 24–25, 34, 43, 168, 200 Anna of Denmark, Queen 11, 76, 125, 168–169, 171, 174–175, 177, 181, 202 Antinomian Controversy 42, 76, 148, 153–159 Antwerp 12, 163, 165, 185, 188, 203, 238, 251, 253–254 Baker, Augustine Fr 77–94, 110–112, 130, 132–133 Bal, Mieke 49, 70, 213 Ballaster, Ros 259, 271–272 Barker-Benfield, Ben 155–157, 159 Baroque theory 8–10, 17–46, 212, 277–282 see also Female Baroque, Hyperbole, Melancholy, Narrativity, Plateauing Bartas, Guillaume du 149–150 Bateson, Gregory 14, 16, 39–40, 43–44, 277, 279 Battigelli, Anna 230, 273 Beattie, Tina 52, 57, 70 Behn, Aphra 12, 16, 28, 38, 42, 48, 62, 67, 69, 89, 151,199, 222, 235, 258–275, 280 Bell, Ilona 14, 218, 221, 228, 232 Benjamin, Walter 21, 31, 40, 42–43 Berger, John 69–70, 182, 200 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 31, 48, 226, 229 Berulle, Pierre de 53–54, 73, 170 Beverley, John 166, 200 Bond, Garth 229, 232 Brackley, Elizabeth 28, 163, 174, 184–192 see also Cavendish, Jane Bradstreet, Anne 11, 115, 117, 125, 148–152, 160 Braider, Christopher 20–21, 33, 37–38, 43, 47, 49, 70, 122, 160, 171, 200, 281 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine 23, 34, 43 Bunyan, John 160 Burton, Robert 35–36, 89–90, 111 Butler, Judith 34, 69–70, 172, 200 Calvin, Jean 117, 152 Canfield, J. Douglas 28–29, 33, 41, 43, 68, 80, 121, 149, 193, 217–218, 236, 259, 261 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 18, 29, 32, 51, 211 Casaubon, Isaac 92 Catherine of Siena, St 81, 86 Catholic Baroque see Counter-Reformation Cavendish, Jane 28, 163, 174, 179, 184–192, 243 see also Brackley, Elizabeth Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle 12, 15, 27, 30, 38, 42–43, 49, 151, 185, 191–192, 195, 213, 215, 224, 235–259, 262, 271, 273–276, 280

Cavendish, William, Duke of Newcastle 24, 184–192, 237–238, 240, 242, 245, 247–248, 253–254 Charles I, King 11, 128–129, 165, 167–170, 172, 194–195, 198 Charles II, King 11, 129, 163, 165, 185, 198, 238–239, 258, 262, 267 Chedzgoy, Kate 49, 69, 120–121, 184 Chung, Jaesik 39, 44 Civil War, English 28, 68, 116–117, 138, 163, 186–192, 195 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of 163, 170 Collet family 15, 39, 67–68, 115, 127–147, 237 Colonial Baroque 11, 101–115, 117, 147–161 Cotton, John 154, 157 Counter-Reformation 10, 22–24, 26, 47, 53–62, 104, 115, 147, 151, 170, 208, 217–218, 238–240 Court 11, 21, 38, 163–185, 198–199, 205–231 ‘Country’ 12, 124, 128, 163–164, 173–174, 177–179, 185, 187, 194, 198, 224, 231 Coussens, Catherine 194, 198 Crashaw, Richard 26, 59, 61, 70, 86, 129, 148, 236 Daniel, Samuel 158–159, 171, 176 Daniells, Roy 26, 44 Das, Nandini 29, 44 Davidson, Peter 20, 26, 44 Davies, Eleanor 58, 118 De Certeau, Michel 16, 86, 111, 223 Deleuze, Gilles 16, 29, 31–32, 39, 44–45, 209, 280 Dering, Sir Edward 178 Descartes, René 29, 49, 213, 252, 254–256 Diderot, Denis 250–251 Donahue, Susan 15, 70 Donne, John 41, 148, 164 Drama, Baroque 165–166, 176–192, 208, 211, 241, 245, 250 Egginton, William 31, 40, 44 emblems 27, 38–39, 43, 139, 174, 192–195, 198, 202 English Baroque 10–12, 17–18, 22, 25–28, 38, 42, 44, 49–50, 60, 68, 75, 115–116, 121, 129, 148, 158, 164–165, 192, 199, 259, 277–278 Enlightenment 12, 21, 25, 28, 49, 54, 92, 191–192, 235–275, 277, 280–281 Erasmus, Desiderius 30, 136, 139 Eudes, St John 53–54 Eve 52, 60, 123–126 Familists 154, 157 Fane, Rachel 184, 202 Fell, Margaret 116, 118

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Female Baroque 9–13, 19, 21, 27, 29, 34, 47–73, 85, 89–94, 107, 110, 116–117, 132, 142, 147–148, 152, 156–159, 164, 183–184, 192, 197, 205–206, 212, 215–218, 221–224, 230–231, 236–237, 249, 256, 259, 261–262, 265, 267, 271–272, 278–279, 281 feminist scholarship 8–10, 13–14, 27, 48–50, 69, 75, 106, 118, 175, 197, 236, 243, 258, 278 Ferrar, Nicholas 128, 131–138, 140–143, 145, 161, 239 fictionalizing 29–32, 59, 82, 92–93, 97, 120, 124, 135, 139–147, 151, 179, 184, 206–214, 229–231, 244, 248, 250, 268 see also narrative, storying Filles de la Charité 104 Filmer, Robert 25 Findlay, Alison 15, 67, 71, 174, 178, 180–181, 187, 201, 240 fold (le pli) 16, 31–32, 39, 44, 82, 134–135, 144, 209, 244, 249, 282 see also Deleuze Foxe, John 130, 135, 141 Freud, Sigmund 13, 36, 61, 90, 265, 290

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Gallagher, Catherine 243, 274 Garrard, Mary 51, 56, 59, 71 Gaudio, Michael 128, 139, 143–144, 146–147, 160 Gemaltes Leben see Painted Life Gentileschi, Artemisia 4, 29, 50–51, 56, 59–60, 71–73, 193 Grady, Hugh 22, 26, 44 Graziano, Frank 62, 71, 85, 88 Greenberg, Mitchell 76, 78, 86, 104, 111, 168 Gregory XV, Pope 103, 105 Hackett, Helen 206, 232 Hall, Louisa 149–150, 160 Henrietta Maria, Queen 50, 76, 168, 170, 172, 194, 239–241, 250, 286 Henry, Prince of Wales 168 Herbert, George 128–129, 131, 149, 162 Herman, Peter 199, 201 Heyl, Bernard C. 20, 44 Hilliker, Robert 149, 151 Hobbes, Thomas 25, 42, 252–254 Hopkins, Lisa–186, 201 Hörigkeit–37, 47, 61–65, 75, 88–89, 92–93, 98, 119, 152, 220, 225–226, 235, 259, 262–265, 270 Hoyle, John 263, 266 Hutchinson, Anne 11, 14, 27, 68, 78, 84, 115–116, 119, 143, 148–149, 151–162 Hyperbole 10, 13–14, 17, 24, 27, 29, 31–36, 39–40, 42–44, 47, 52–57, 61, 63, 66, 75, 84, 86–89, 91, 96–100, 107–108, 119–120, 124–125, 130, 137–138, 147–151, 155, 157, 159, 164–165, 169–170, 177, 183–184, 188, 190, 193, 195, 206, 210–211, 238–240, 244, 248, 251, 258, 262, 264–265, 268, 272, 277, 280

‘immediate revelations’ see private visions Interregnum 127, 151, 174, 185–193, 198, 238, 245 ‘intimate revolt’ 11, 13, 47, 67, 77, 159, 183, 231, 249, 272, 276, 278–280, 286 Irigaray, Luce 199, 223, 232 James I and VI, King 11, 40, 47, 125, 163, 165, 167–177, 185, 194 James II, King 262, 267 James, William 89, 111 Januszczak, Waldemar 26, 44, 164 ‘Jesuitesses’ 104, 106 Jesuits 22–24, 40, 43, 56, 60, 82, 94–95, 102, 105, 108–109, 124, 132–133 Jones, Inigo 50, 164, 170 Jonson, Benjamin 169–171, 176, 179, 182, 185, 201–202, 210 jouissance 84, 90, 102, 123 Kaplan, Louise E. 37, 44, 61, 69–71, 221, 265–266, 286 kitsch 10, 14, 17, 29, 37–39, 54, 62, 75, 86, 95–97, 110, 120, 122, 139, 141, 143, 146–149, 166–167, 171, 176, 180, 184 Kristeva, Julia 9–16, 30–31, 34–36, 42–45, 47, 52–53, 61, 66–72, 75–77, 79–81, 84, 87, 90–93, 101–102, 107–110, 117–120, 122–123, 136, 153, 155, 163, 174, 205, 215, 217, 220–222, 235, 249, 257, 259, 271–272, 278–281 labyrinth 17, 41, 183, 209, 225–226, 229, 249–250 Lacan, Jacques 43, 90 Lamb, Mary Ellen 15, 49, 72, 173, 206–207, 216, 233 Lanyer, Aemilia 11–12, 27, 53, 68, 115–127, 252 Latz, Dorothy L. 80, 112 Laud, Archbishop William 55, 128–131, 141–142 Lawes, Richard 88, 112 Lay, Jenna 75, 112 Lee, Fr Roger 103, 108 libertine 38, 151, 191–192, 259–272 Little Gidding 11, 15, 27, 29–32, 39, 63, 67, 98, 115, 127–162, 166, 239 Loreto, Our Lady of 95, 141 Louis XIV, King 25, 141, 164, 167 Lucretius 272–273 Luther, Martin 24, 117 Lux-Sterritt, Laurence 90, 105 Macherey, Pierre 20, 220, 233 Magdalene College, Cambridge 15, 128, 139–140, 145–146 Magnificat 52–54, 57–58, 118 male gaze 49, 64, 69, 172, 182, 214, 221, 226–227, 230, 241 see also scopophilia Maravall, José Antonio 10, 16, 18–25, 28–29, 32–35, 37, 40–41, 54, 81, 86, 91, 96, 110, 116,

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Index

120, 139, 141, 149, 164–167, 169, 171–172, 184, 239, 259, 277–278 Marie de l’Incarnation 111, 151 Marinella, Lucrezia 54 Marotti, Arthur 15, 60, 79–81, 84, 86, 111–112 Martyrdom 24, 33, 46, 60, 62–63, 69, 86, 97, 104, 106, 108, 124, 130, 135, 137, 141, 173, 193, 195–196, 206, 228, 239–240 Martz, Louis B. 25, 45 Mary Magdalen, St 47, 52, 58–61, 96, 106, 118, 126 masculinist discourse 13, 36, 48–50, 57, 67, 69, 123, 127, 133–134, 136, 151–152, 156, 159, 171, 173, 191, 213–215, 218, 226–231, 237, 242, 246–247, 249–250, 260–261, 266, 272 masochism 65, 69, 75, 89, 98, 222, 264, 270 masques 29, 41, 163, 167–177, 182, 184–189, 191, 198, 200–202, 211, 240, 245, 252 McLaren, Margaret 15, 181, 202 McManus, Clare 169, 171, 173, 202 melancholy 10, 13–14, 17, 29, 31–37, 39–45, 47, 53, 57, 59, 63, 66, 75–76, 86–90, 92, 97, 107–108, 111–112, 119–120, 136–139, 147, 150, 165, 169–171, 177, 183–184, 186–190, 193, 195, 197–198, 206, 210–211, 214, 216, 218, 220, 224, 227, 231, 238, 251–252, 257, 262, 264–265, 272, 277, 279–280 ‘Metaphysical’ poets 26, 33, 121, 147, 230, 236 Miller, Naomi 15, 161, 202 Milton, John 174 Montgomery, Susan, Countess of 177 More, Gertrude 11, 14, 24, 27, 42, 62–63, 68–69, 75–94, 97, 100–102, 107–108, 110–112, 117, 119–120, 122, 125, 130, 132, 138, 147, 151–152, 154, 158, 198, 223, 236, 264–266 Mueller, Janel 73, 127 mystical experience 47, 59–60, 62, 66, 68, 75, 77, 81–82, 85–92, 94–95, 100, 102, 106, 108–109, 111, 158, 193, 197, 223, 236, 252, 262, 286 see also private visions narrativity 12–13, 30, 32, 40, 49, 52–53, 57, 59–60, 69, 82, 89, 97–98, 120, 127, 135, 142–146, 151–152, 176, 179, 184, 191, 205–214, 229, 244, 248, 250–251, 268 see also fictionalising, ’storying’ Netherlands 25, 150, 154 Old Testament women 51–53, 119, 123–125 Orgel, Stephen 169–170, 202 Osherow, Michele 15, 53, 58, 72, 123 ‘Painted Life’ 96-100, 102, 107, 113 Pastoral 125, 169, 171, 174, 178–183, 186–188, 190, 229, 231 Paul, Apostle 106, 108, 117–118, 153 Paul V, Pope 105

Pembroke, William Herbert, third Earl of 175–179, 208, 216–220 Penshurst Place 12, 163, 173, 175, 177–180, 219–221, 232, 241 Petrarchism 47, 52, 60, 63–66, 89, 121, 123, 171, 193, 205, 216–232 plateauing 10, 14, 17–18, 29, 31–32, 39–44, 57, 62–63, 65, 69–70, 75, 86–87, 92, 94, 110, 120, 122, 139, 144, 146–147, 150, 170–171, 183–184, 196, 207, 211–212, 221, 240, 251, 266, 269, 277, 279–280 private visions 14, 33–34, 42, 59, 76–77, 84, 85–87, 94, 96–97, 101–108, 118–119, 129, 152 see also mystical experience prophecy, women’s 27, 49–50, 53, 58, 68, 91, 116, 118–121, 125, 149, 158–160, 240, 279 psychoanalysis 35–36, 45, 61–69, 72–73, 90, 92, 111–112, 201, 226, 249, 259, 281 see also Hörigkeit, Kristeva, semiotic/ symbolic Pulter, Hester 27, 39, 68, 70, 163, 174, 192–202 recusants 60, 75–113, 130 Reich, Anna 37, 45, 61–62, 72, 88, 92–93, 112, 220, 224–225, 233 Rembrandt van Rijn 48, 229, 232 Restoration 163, 185, 191, 198, 235, 238, 240, 259, 261, 266, 268, 270, 286 Riley, Kate E. 128–130, 132–133, 136 Rochester, Earl of 259, 266 Rose of Lima, St 62, 71, 86, 88 Rowse, A.L. 123, 162 Royal Society 49, 250, 254–255, 257–258, 274–275 Rubens, Peter Paul 40, 165, 185, 203 Salzman, Paul 15, 35–36, 45, 178, 213, 273 Sannazaro, Jacopo 55, 73 Sarasohn, Lisa 246, 253–254, 275 Scopophilia 23–24, 49, 56, 64, 69, 172, 175–176, 182, 213–214, 221, 226–227, 230, 241, 247 see also male gaze semiotic/symbolic 11, 13, 36–38, 66–67, 80–81, 91, 101, 119–120, 221–222, 257, 279–280 see also Kristeva, Psychoanalysis Shakespeare, William 33, 35, 41, 99, 123, 177, 179 Shaver, Anne 15, 242, 250 Sidney, Mary, Countess of Pembroke 10–11, 27, 38, 115, 116, 121–125, 149, 161, 175, 179, 181, 237, 262 Sidney, Philip 11, 15, 63, 122, 150, 162, 173, 175–176, 178–179, 181, 215–217 Sidney, Robert 175 Skrine, Peter N. 18, 22, 26, 29, 42, 68, 116, 137, 166, 180 Southwell, Robert 60, 124 Spinoza, Baruch 30, 42 Sprat, Thomas 257, 275

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Stafford, Anthony 55–56, 73 Staves, Susan 266, 275 Steen, Emma 15, 248 Stein, Ruth 36, 45, 62–63 Stoller, Robert 226, 233 ‘storying’ 11, 15, 29–30, 32, 67, 135–140, 195–196, 286 see also fictionizing, narrativity Straznicky, Marta 178, 203 Teresa of Avila, St 12–14, 17, 31, 34, 38, 43, 47–48, 53, 61, 67, 69, 75–81, 84, 86, 91, 94–96, 100–102, 105–110, 117–118, 123, 136, 153, 163, 205, 226, 235, 278–281 Titian 56, 59 Todd, Janet 261, 263, 275 Trapnell, Anna 116, 120 Trent, Council of 21–25, 40, 103, 106, 141, 147–148 Typology 125, 143–146, 155, 281 Underhill, Evelyn 84, 112 Urban VIII, Pope 100, 105–106 Versailles 30, 33, 41, 164, 167, 208 Virgin Mary 23, 47, 51–65, 94–103, 117–118, 126, 130, 140, 170, 208, 217–218

Yamamoto-Wilson, John 87, 92–93

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Wagner, Geraldine 213–214, 233 Wallace, David 69, 95, 97, 99, 113 Waller, Gary 24, 46, 52, 73, 164, 177, 283 Ward, Mary 11, 24, 27, 42, 55, 62–63, 68–69, 75–76, 78, 90, 94–113, 117, 119–120, 122, 130–134, 152, 154, 158, 215, 236

Warnke, Frank J. 18, 46 Warren, Austin 148, 162 Weber, Max 21, 46 Wekking, Ben 78, 110 Wight, Sara 53, 119 Williams, A.M. 131–132, 156 Williams, Raymond 20, 25, 28, 34, 46, 50, 137, 168, 193, 254, 259, 271, 273, 278 Williams, Rowan 77, 113 Winship, Michael 153–154, 162 Winthrop, John 148, 151, 154–155, 157–158 Wölfflin, Heinrich 17, 22, 46 ‘Woman’ 9, 11, 56, 65, 67, 79, 149, 156–157, 173, 213, 221, 226, 229, 231, 259, 265 Woods, Susanne 15, 124, 161 Woolf, Virginia 259, 271 Worsley, Lucy 185, 188–189 writing women 9, 11–13, 21, 33, 46, 49, 62–63, 65-67, 76, 78, 81, 91–96, 100, 108–109, 115, 117–122, 127, 133, 136, 141–142, 144, 151, 164, 183–184, 194, 197–198, 206, 212, 214–218, 221, 223, 230–246, 249, 253, 256–260, 271, 278–279 see also Kristeva, semiotic/symbolic Wroth, Lady Mary 10, 12, 15, 27, 30, 38, 41, 46, 62–63, 67, 71–73, 89, 123, 163, 167, 174–184, 199, 205–233, 236, 250, 264 Wroth, Sir Robert 176, 180–182, 210, 218, 220, 223

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture : From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn, Amsterdam University Press,

G E N D E R I N G T H E L A T E M E D I E V A L A N D E A R LY M O D E R N W O R L D

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture is a contribution to the revival of early modern women’s writings and cultural production in English that began in the 1980s. Its originality is twofold: it links women’s writing in English with the wider context of Baroque culture, and it introduces the issue of gender into discussion of the Baroque. The title comes from Julia Kristeva’s study of Teresa of Avila, that ‘the secrets of Baroque civilization are female’. The book is built on a schema of recurring Baroque characteristics – narrativity, hyperbole, melancholia, kitsch, and plateauing, pointing less to surface manifestations and more to underlying ideological tensions. The crucial concept of the book is developed in detail. Particular attention is given to Gertrude More, Mary Ward, Aemilia Lanyer, The Ferrar/Collet women, Mary Wroth, the Cavendish sisters, Hester Pulter, Anne Hutchinson, and finally Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn, whose lives and writings point to the developing cultural transition to the Enlightenment.

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Gary Waller is Distinguished Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies Emeritus, Purchase College, SUNY. His books include English Poetry in the Sixteenth Century, The Sidney Family Romance, Walsingham and the English Imagination, The Annunciation: A Cultural History, and The Virgin Mary in Medieval and Early Modern Literature and Popular Culture.

ISBN: 978-94-6372-143-1

AUP. nl 9 789463 721431

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture : From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn, Amsterdam University Press, 2020.