Forms of engagement : women, poetry and culture, 1640-1680

247 Pages·2013·0.938 MB·English

by  Scott-Baumann, Elizabeth

OXFORD ENGLISH MONOGRAPHS
General Editors
helen barr david bradshaw paulina kewes
hermione lee laura marcus david norbrook
fiona stafford
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Forms of
Engagement
Women, Poetry, and Culture 1640–1680
ELIZABETH SCOTTBAUMANN
1
3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
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© Elizabeth Scott-Baumann 2013
Th e moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2013
Impression: 1
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
ISBN 978–0–19–967652–1
Printed in Great Britain by
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Acknowledgements
Th is book began life as a doctoral thesis written with the generous fund-
ing of the AHRC and under the even more generous supervision of
David Norbrook, to whom I owe the warmest of thanks for being the
most kind, rigorous and inspiring of mentors. A James M. Osborn Fel-
lowship at the Beinecke Library, Yale University enabled crucial research,
and a fellowship at Chawton House Library provided precious time to
complete the book. I am grateful to the libraries and to their staff . Finan-
cial support for research trips was also given by Wolfson College, Wadham
College and the English Faculty, all Oxford University, and by Oxford
Brookes University.
Earlier versions of Chapter 1 appeared as ‘“Bake’d in the Oven of
Applause”: Th e blazon and the body in Margaret Cavendish’s Fancies’,
Women’s Writing, 15 (2008), 86–106, of Chapter 5 as ‘Lucy Hutchinson’s
Elegies and the seventeenth-century country house poem’, Literature
Compass 4 (2007), 664–76 and of Chapter 6 as ‘Lucy Hutchinson, the
Bible and Order and Disorder’ , Th e Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women ,
eds. Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Johanna Harris (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2010), pp. 176–89. I am grateful for permission to include versions of
this material here. I am also grateful to Th e Royal Collection for allowing
reproduction of Gerard ter Borch’s ‘Th e Letter’ on the jacket.
I have greatly appreciated the generosity, insight and conviviality of
many people with whom I have discussed the project: Sharon Achinstein,
Ros Ballaster, Caroline Boon, Cedric C. E. Brown, Elizabeth Clarke, Danielle
Clarke, Martin Dzelzainis, Alex Harris, Johanna Harris, Sarah Knight,
Kathryn Holland, Bonnie Lander Johnson, Katie Larson, Hermione Lee,
Kirsty Milne, Ankhi Mukherjee, Beth Palmer, Sarah C. E. Ross, Kate
Rumbold, Emma Smith, Nigel Smith, Aliza Watters, and Susan Wiseman.
For reading the whole book, more than once, I am hugely indebted to
Ben Burton and Alice Eardley. I owe most of all to my parents, Alison and
Michael Scott-Baumann, for bringing up their daughter in a house full of
books and for their unfailing energy and support, and to my brother,
James Scott-Baumann, for providing escapades away from the books at
key moments. For building shelves to hold those books, and for so very
much more, heartfelt thanks are due to Benjie Way.
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Contents

List of Abbreviations ix
Notes on the Text x
Introduction: Reading, Gender, and Form 1
1. Margaret Cavendish: Nature and Originality 31
2. Margaret Cavendish as Editor and Reviser 6 0
3. Katherine Philips and Abraham Cowley: Solitude, Dialogue,
and the Ode 81
4. Katherine Philips and Lucy Hutchinson Reading John Donne 1 13
5. Lucy Hutchinson’s E legies , the Country-House Poem, and
Female Complaint 1 44
6. Lucy Hutchinson, the Bible, and O rder and Disorder 170
Afterword: Untracked Paths 202
Bibliography 210
Index 2 33
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Abbreviations
BL Add. MS British Library, Additional Manuscript
CUP Cambridge University Press
CWKP Th e Collected Works of Katherine Philips: Th e Matchless Orinda , ed.
Patrick Th omas, 3 vols (Stump Cross, Essex: Stump Cross Books,
1990)
ELH English Literary History
ELR English Literary Renaissance
HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly
NQ Notes and Queries
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
OED Oxford English Dictionary
OUP Oxford University Press
PMLA Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America
RES Review of English Studies
RQ Renaissance Quarterly
SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900