Flesh and Spirit

An anthology of seventeenth-century women's writing

Rachel Adcock, Sara Read, Anna Ziomek

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781526111005
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

This anthology makes accessible to readers ten little-known and under-studied works by seventeenth-century women (edited from manuscript and print) that explore the relationship between spiritual and physical health in the period. Providing a detailed and engaging introduction to the issues confronted when studying women's writing from this era, the anthology also examines female interpretations of illness, exploring beliefs that toothache and miscarriage could be God's punishments, but also, paradoxically, that such terrible suffering could be understood as proof that a believer was eternally beloved. The extracts in the anthology explore how illness was an important part of women's religious conversion, often confirming religious belief, but also how women could advise others about their physical and spiritual health in manuscript and print. The anthology includes a thorough introduction to the period's medical and religious beliefs, as well as an introduction to contemporary ideas about women's physical and spiritual make up. Each of the ten extracts also has its own preface, highlighting relevant contexts and further reading, and is fully annotated.

Part I
Exemplary conversion narratives

1
Lady Mary Carey

The manuscript writings of Lady Mary Carey (c.1609–c.1680), consisting of a conversion narrative, some meditations and poetry, all written between 1647 and 1657, are remarkable for their exploration of the relationship between her sinful, earthly body and her immortal soul. In introspective modes characteristic of Puritan writing, religious and bodily concerns are often set at odds. The body’s appetite for carnal pleasures was thought to tempt the soul from its spiritual path towards salvation, and during the process of conversion the body was often afflicted by various means that God used to mortify sin in his chosen people. In Carey’s conversion narrative, ‘A Dialogue betwixt the Soul, and the Body’ (1647), she noted in the margin that ‘in order to spiritual good the body often afflicted’ (14^r). When she was eighteen years old, Carey believed that God visited a sickness upon her to prevent her from pursuing pleasures like gambling and dancing, and throughout her life since he had continued to visit bodily suffering on her in order to refine her soul. The dialogue between the voices of Soul and Body that she uses as the basis for her conversion narrative is indicative of the struggle believers like Carey faced when confronted with what they thought were severe punishments: she lost at least five of her children during the time she wrote her surviving work and experienced at least one miscarriage. When she was writing the ‘Dialogue’, Carey was expecting her fourth child, Robert, who died soon after birth (in 1650), and two years later so did another newborn boy, Peregrine.¹ Despite these terrible losses, Carey wrote later in her meditations (between 1652 and 1657) that she trusted in God’s divine plan and counted her blessings:

I had tenderly loving Parents, good Husbands, the last is so, & good was it for me, that I was Wife to the first; God hath given me lovely Children, Sons, & Daughters, 5 in God’s Bosom, 2 yet with me; ’tis best for me, & them, that those that died, died; ’tis best for me, & them, that those that live, live; many were the Mercies of them that died; & (in some kind) more are the Mercies of these that live, & all the Mercies of them both were my Mercies. (99^r–v)

Carey consoles herself here that her children have gone to a better place, and that she has two children who have lived (Bethia, 1652/53–71, and Nathaniel, 1654/55–80?). Her conversion narrative, though written at least four years earlier than the meditations, depicts Body struggling to come to terms with losing such precious children, advised by Soul that ‘it is God’s Will, to which submit not one Word; and do not only yield, but approve; God is wise, and knows it best; God is loving; and therefore did it’ (7^v). In her poetry, too, Carey comes to the conclusion that God means her to exchange her children for greater knowledge of Jesus Christ: her son (‘my all’), she pleads in her elegy on the death of Robert, could be exchanged with God’s only son (‘thy all’).

‘A Dialogue betwixt the Soul, and the Body’ combines two important genres that seventeenth-century women utilised: the conversion narrative, where writers recall and recount their turn towards God; and the mother’s legacy, intended for use in place of the mother if she died in childbirth. In preparation for her forthcoming labour, Carey writes that she wanted to record all her assurances of salvation so that under severe bodily pain, when she was in greatest danger from the temptations of Satan, she could accept God’s will in all things, and face death happily. As Ralph Houlbrooke has noted, women could be said in some ways to have viewed childbirth ‘as a sort of rehearsal for the last act’, and certainly there are many similarities between this text and deathbed testimonies.² Satan also appears in Carey’s meditations; she records his accusations that she had given into him at times when she lacked God’s presence (the voice of God in her last poem bears fruitful comparison with Satan’s voice), but she proves him wrong by supplying evidence of her assurances, thus dramatising a struggle akin to that of her childbed. Certainly her writings are meant as advisory texts, as well as a means of introspection. ‘A Dialogue betwixt the Soul, and the Body’, in particular, is addressed to her second husband, George Payler, who was paymaster at the army garrison in Berwick and an officer of military organisation at the Tower of London. This and Carey’s avowal of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, part of an attempt by Parliament to reform the English Church from Charles I’s Laudian innovations, identifies her as a Puritan and on the side of Parliament in the Civil Wars.³ Though Carey writes enthusiastically that God had made their minds, judgements, wills and ‘Aims in Spirituals’ (6^r) one and the same, she hoped that her narrative would help her husband to accept God’s will and continue on his own spiritual journey. Payler’s own poem on the death of his son Robert is also written to advise and teach his spouse (whereas Carey’s poem on the same occasion focuses only on her relationship with God), showing that husband and wife helped each other in their spiritual duties, and supported each other in the knowledge that they must accept God’s providence.

As well as prose writings, Carey favoured the elegy as a way of exploring the loss of her children and attempting to find consolation. A characteristic of seventeenth-century child-loss poetry was the expression of belief that an unhealthy, deformed or dead child was God’s punishment for the sins of the parents, particularly the mother. As Pamela Hammons writes, the ‘intellectual, spiritual, and moral shortcoming of mothers were believed capable of replication in their offspring’s bodies and destinies’:⁴ in other words, the mother’s spiritual state could be mirrored by her child’s physical appearance. A connected medical belief concerned ‘maternal imagination’, by which the emotions of the mother during the formation of a foetus could affect the child’s appearance. The midwife Jane Sharp described this belief in her midwifery manual:

The child in the Mother’s womb hath a soul of its own, yet it is a part of the mother until she be delivered, as a branch is part of a Tree while it grows there, and so the mother’s imagination makes an impression upon the child, but it must be a strong imagination at that very time when the forming faculty is at work or else it will not do, but since the child takes part of the mother’s life whilst he is in the womb, as the fruit doth of the tree, whatsoever moves the faculties of the mother’s soul may do the like in the child.⁵

Mothers, therefore, were held responsible for their children as soon as they were conceived, and their writings show them drawing on these ideas to express their grief and find consolation.

These cultural ideas give some sense of what Carey encountered when she miscarried a child, causing her to write her last and most famous poem, ‘Upon the Sight of my abortive Birth the 31^st of December 1657’. She describes the child as ‘void of life, & feature’ (114^r), or form, suggesting that the child had been born dead before it could develop limbs or, possibly, that its body had developed but was deformed. According to early modern medical thinking, miscarriages occurred because the embryo had not developed properly, causing, as Nicholas Culpeper writes, ‘the exclusion of a child, not perfect nor living, before legitimate time’.⁶ He continues by writing that the appearance of an abortive birth altered according to how long the child had been nurtured inside the womb:

Some differences of Abortion are from the time and bigness of the child. For that which is cast out, is little and round, without distinction of members [limbs] at first, like a Grape. Sometimes as long as a finger, and members may be distinguished. And sometimes the child is almost perfect.⁷

Since Carey’s abortive birth was ‘featureless’, it is possible that hers was a very early miscarriage, like the one Culpeper describes above, and her poem interprets its appearance as a reflection of her own spiritual state. Asking God directly why he has punished her with such an experience, she has him berate her for her own ‘deadness’ and inactivity in spiritual duties: God says that she has presented him with ‘dead Fruit’ (115^v), so he is repaying her with a dead child in order to encourage her to subdue her sin. Carey then ends the poem by asking God to enable her to be both spiritually and physi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Introduction
• Part I: Exemplary conversion narratives
• Part II: Advising on body and spirit
• Part III: Conversion and cure
• Bibliography
• Index of biblical allusions
• General index