Flesh and Spirit: An anthology of seventeenth-century women's writing

By Manchester University Press

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526111005

Book preview

Introduction

In a 1629 letter written to her mother, Lady Joan Barrington, Lady Elizabeth Masham, wife of the MP for Colchester, commented that ‘all the distempers of our bodies, which must need be many while we live here [on earth], may be a […] means of the curing the great distemper of our souls, and may make us long for that home where all sorrows have an end and we shall triumph in joy and glory forever more’.¹ The occasion of Masham’s letter seems to have been concern for her mother’s health (both spiritual and physical) following the sudden death of her husband in the previous year.² Lady Joan’s grief, which included questioning why God had punished her in such a way, manifested itself in a deep melancholic illness, which was rationalised in the seventeenth century as a physical reflection of her troubled soul. Belief in God’s displeasure could often cause men and women to question whether they were beloved of God, and whether they were among his chosen people. Masham’s remark, made by a daughter seeking to reassure her mother, explains that bodily discomfort was to be expected while on earth, as God deadened sin within each individual believer, before they were made ready for eternal life. While staying healthy meant taking appropriate care of both the body and the soul, the flesh and the spirit, resignation to illness was often conceived as a way of showing your acceptance of God’s will. This meant that, for some of the women anthologised here, a miscarriage, for example, was taken as a sign of God’s displeasure over a lack of piety, or a reminder that life and death were both subject to God’s ordinance and pleasure. In her letter, Lady Masham reassured her mother that illness could serve as a way of reminding a woman that her earthly suffering would end when she was admitted to heaven. This anthology will demonstrate several of the ways in which early modern women, of varying religious beliefs, lived in, cared for and accounted for a body in which spirituality and physical health were intrinsically interconnected.

In the seventeenth century, England was a Protestant country and the nature of worship was controlled by the Church of England, the state church. At church, on Sunday, every person in the country (provided they had not absented themselves, illegally) would have heard the minister read from The Book of Common Prayer in English (rather than Latin), first introduced a century before as part of the Reformation in England. The only deviation from this was during the mid-century Civil Wars and Cromwell’s Protectorate. The Book of Common Prayer assumed that a connection between the flesh and the spirit was natural when it asked the congregation at Holy Communion to offer ‘ourselves, our souls, and bodies’, indicating that a human body was made up of these two interconnecting entities.³ Danger was often thought to threaten the soul and body simultaneously. A catechism added to the prayer book in 1662 indicated that the function of saying the Lord’s Prayer was to ‘pray unto God, that he will send us all things that be needful both for our souls and bodies; […] and that it will please him to save and defend us in all dangers ghostly [spiritual] and bodily’.⁴ How to combat these threats to soul and body depended on how a believer viewed the relationship between the two entities, and where they thought the threats originated. For instance, depending on a person’s religious or medical beliefs, they might view melancholia (an illness which shares some symptoms with what we now recognise as depression) as a punishment from God which made the sufferer more prone to the temptations of Satan, as evidence of unpardonable sin, as an imbalance of bodily fluids or humours, as a result of spending too much time in private study or, most often, as a mixture of all these things. Women, however, were constructed by seventeenth-century ideologies as generally weaker and more dysfunctional than men in both soul and body, and so more susceptible to attacks on the spirit and the flesh. These understandings stemmed from Eve’s precedent, when she submitted to the Devil’s temptations in the Garden of Eden, meaning she and her female descendants were punished (spiritually and bodily) with painful childbirth. This anthology of women’s works seeks to foreground women’s explorations of the relationship between their bodies and souls partly in order to contrast them with these male-authored ideologies, but also to highlight contemporary understandings of the relationship between the flesh and spirit during important life events and religious awakenings. For instance, did women always believe that their bodies were sinful? Were pain and despair always understood as punishments? And if illness was understood as both a spiritual and a bodily problem, how was it cured? The selected women’s writings included in this anthology go some way to answering these important questions.

This anthology of seventeenth-century women’s writings makes use of often overlooked or underutilised works to highlight religious and bodily contexts, while also making them easily accessible, and in some cases newly available, to scholars and students of the early modern period. The prose writings of Lady Mary Carey, the commonplace book of Brilliana Conway (Lady Harley) and the anonymous female deathbed testimony Conversion Exemplified, have never been extracted in modern editions, and the writings of Harley, Lady Elizabeth Delaval and Gertrude More have appeared only in nineteenth- and twentieth-century editions. Considering these particular works through religious and medical frameworks will not only add to scholarship’s understanding of the full historical context of the ways in which women related to religious doctrine in the period, but will also indicate how they saw their bodies as spiritually endowed. That is to say, for many early modern people, physical bodily change was thought to be the result of God’s agency acting directly upon them. In recent times, scholars have drawn attention to both ‘the turn to religion’ and the ‘return to the body’ in early modern studies, in order to understand and more accurately explain the explorations of human experience that the period produced. Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti’s well-known article ‘The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies’ recognised that religion constituted ‘a deep psychological and emotional experience’, as well as a political and social one, and recognised that in order to understand more fully religious experience in this period, scholars should ‘acknowledge the need to incorporate the imagination and the physical in cultural-historical analyses’.⁵ This anthology does so by drawing attention to the importance of studying representations of the fleshly, physical senses in works that sought, predominantly, to communicate the vividness of religious experience, and also explores the significance of the religious imagination in medical treatises. It will highlight, in particular, how women experienced spiritual and physical changes and contribute to ongoing explorations of whether religious experience was gendered. These extracts demonstrate the various ways in which early modern women negotiated the relationship between their fleshly, physical suffering and their spiritual state.

The dialogue between flesh and spirit

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

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

Both body and soul were believed to be corrupt until a regeneration process had taken place within the believer, equivalent to putting ‘on the new man’ of Ephesians 4:24. For Calvin, following St Paul, flesh and spirit did not refer directly to body and soul but to the ‘two ways of life which the whole man can choose to follow’.⁸ Galatians 5:17 depicts a warring of flesh against spirit (‘For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other’), where the ‘Spirit’ referred to a group of people who are spiritually regenerate, who ‘tend towards what is good’.⁹ Therefore, ‘the Spirit is not from nature’, Calvin writes, ‘but from regeneration’.¹⁰ The conflict between flesh and spirit is also described in Romans 7:22–3: ‘I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see another law in my members [limbs], warring against the law of my mind’. For Calvin, only those who were ‘regenerated by the Spirit of God’ experienced such a struggle between flesh and spirit within themselves.¹¹ In the literature of the seventeenth century, however, body and soul, flesh and spirit, could be used interchangeably as both concrete, literal terms and as figurative representations of the war against sin inside each individual believer.

By the early seventeenth century, English Protestantism, influenced by both Calvin’s doctrinal arguments and Greek thought, was encouraging believers to look inside themselves in order to discern the conflict between the sinful flesh and the regenerative spirit. This kind of introspection produced a growing number of poetic dialogues, often didactic in tone, that positioned the flesh and spirit in the midst of an argument about which one was the dominant force. For instance, the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet included one such dialogue between ‘The Flesh and the Spirit’ in her Several Poems (published posthumously in 1678), where the two entities fought against each other as sisters: one was Flesh, ‘who had her eye / On worldly wealth and vanity’, and the other, dominant sister was ‘Spirit, who did rear / Her thoughts unto a higher sphere’.¹² Body-and-soul dialogues had also been popular in the medieval period, but these staged arguments were mostly presented taking place after death and before the Last Judgement. Seventeenth-century dialogues tend, instead, to focus on the struggle going on inside living believers, and are therefore similar to spiritual autobiographies of this period. Indeed, as the writings of Lady Mary Carey and Elizabeth Major included in this anthology show, a spiritual autobiography could be constructed using just such a dialogue. Bradstreet’s poem depicts this struggle in miniature, giving Spirit the space to dominate the argument and have the last word, though also admitting that the conflict will continue until Flesh is ‘laid in th’ dust’:

    Spirit:   Be still, thou unregenerate part,

Disturb no more my settled heart,

For I have vowed (and so will do)

Thee as a foe still to pursue,

And combat with thee will and must

Until I see thee laid in th’ dust.

Sisters we are, yea twins we be,

Yet deadly feud ’twixt thee and me,

For from one father are we not.

Thou by old Adam wast begot,

But my arise is from above,

Whence my dear father I do love.

(37–48)

Here, Flesh (sin) is inherited from Adam, while the Spirit (the regenerative part) can only originate from God. The two are twins, usually thought to represent harmony, yet these twins have different fathers and war with each other over who inherits the whole man.¹³ Spirit demonstrates that she comes from God, and according to Puritan thinking was created first, so is the ‘elder’ of the twins. Two stanzas from another poetic dialogue, ‘A Short Dialogue between Flesh and Spirit’, written in the 1660s by Sarah Davy, who had joined a Puritan ‘gathered congregation’ which worshipped separately from the state church, also demonstrate the inner conflict between unregenerate and regenerate states of being:

    Flesh:   Fond soul what aileth thee thus low to deem,

Our pleasure and our comforts here below,

And that thou dost so highly them esteem

As if thou didst not care such things to know

Is it not better mirth for to enjoy,

Which maketh fat the bones and glads the heart,

Then in thy musings thus thy self annoy

At last persuaded be with them to part.

    Spirit:   Fond fleshly part this all thou hast to say

Cease now with all specious flattering speech,

And never think by all thy pleas to sway

A soul that now is got above thy reach,

All thy suggestions I cannot approve

Seeing in earth thy comforts all do lie

But I much live in flames of heavenly love

With heavenly comforts which will never die.¹⁴

Akin to Bradstreet’s poem, Davy’s poem in its entirety gives more space to Spirit’s argument, as well as the most powerful lines. However, Flesh voices a well-known criticism of religious introspection which Puritans, in particular, encouraged. Self-examination was part of the process of conversion, where believers were meant to look for signs of God’s grace and then to record and interpret them. Many undertaking this path became melancholy and ‘annoyed’ by these ‘musings’, leading others to observe that the process did more harm than good, but still others, including Davy, were of the opinion that faults could be mended only if they were identified. Davy’s conversion narrative, to which this poem is appended, includes her self-examinations as she struggled to fix her faults and rid herself of sin, and giving this advice to the tempting Flesh is therefore significant. Lady Mary Carey’s conversion narrative, extracted in this anthology, also utilises a dialogue between Soul and Body, but is remarkable for its comparatively sympathetic treatment of the desires of the Body. However, in Carey’s work Body’s desire for earthly things is actually a representation of her own desire for God to restore her dead children that he had taken from her. Her conversion narrative is a dramatisation of the struggle to accept God’s providence, and to eliminate her own ‘selfish’ desires, though her way of understanding grief might seem strange to us now. The anonymous devotional poet who has come to be known as ‘Eliza’ also aligns the ‘unruly passion’ for ‘earthly love’ to a dangerous infection that ‘wrought distraction in my Soul, and bred distemper in my body’.¹⁵ Body and Soul, though often presented as opposites, shared their destination for eternal salvation or damnation (because they would again be united at the Day of Judgement) and so relied on and sympathised with each other. Most of the extracts that follow present the struggles within individual believers as they sought to overcome sin by denying the body’s selfish urges.

The process of regeneration was thought particularly important for women, because they were understood to be more prone to sinful behaviour. Eve’s biblical precedent indicated that women were more susceptible to the temptations of Satan and therefore spiritually weak. Connected to this was a belief that these temptations could lead women to seduce and deceive men (like Adam), provoking them to sin against God; the Old Testament, in particular, contains many examples of disruptive, seductive women. John Calvin’s sermon on St Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians explained that:

there is none other shift but women must needs stoop, and understand that the ruin and confusion of all mankind came in on their side, and that through them we be all forlorn, and accursed, and banished [from] the kingdom of heaven: when women (say I) do understand that all this came of Eve and womankind, […] there is none other way for them but to stoop, and to bear patiently the subjection that God hath laid upon them.¹⁶

In physical terms women were also believed to be the weaker sex, constitutionally made up of cold and wet humours rather than of the dominant hot and dry humours of men. Dorothy Leigh, the author of The Mother’s Blessing (1616), explained in her treatise that it had pleased God to give women ‘a cold and temperate disposition’ to remind them to live chastely, in deference to their husbands.¹⁷ Female children were thought to be the product of cold wombs, ones which lacked sufficient heat to produce ‘perfect’ male children. Medical authorities, developing the work of Aristotle, also linked the state of the womb to sexual desire: according to the prolific medical writer Nicholas Culpeper, writing in the mid-seventeenth century, ‘hot’ wombs (thought to be healthier than cold) caused women to ‘desire copulation sooner and more vehemently and are much delighted therewith.[…] The hot and moist are not tired with much venery’.¹⁸ Though sex within marriage was encouraged in this period, in moderation, the desires of women were often said to be disruptive and in need of containment. These cultural beliefs led some contemporaries to joke (some perhaps more seriously than others) that women did not possess immortal souls at all. Poet and clergyman John Donne asked, as the essence of the soul was not passed through women (an Aristotelian belief not taken up by the seventeenth-century midwife Jane Sharp, discussed below, or indeed, Lady Mary Carey, the focus of chapter 1), and souls were denied to beasts ‘equal to [women] in all but in speech’, then ‘Why Hath the Common Opinion Afforded Women Souls’?¹⁹ On the other hand, an anonymous writer arguing for women’s religious liberty asked indignantly why women should not partake in voting on church matters: ‘have Women no Souls or no Faith?’²⁰ Essayist William Austin presented an even more positive view, writing that the difference between men and women was ‘only in the body. For, she hath the same reasonable soul; and, in that, there is neither hes, nor shes; neither excellency, nor superiority: she hath the same soul, the same mind; the same understanding; and tends to the same end of eternal salvation that he Doth’.²¹ That women had an immortal soul seems to have been generally accepted by the mid-seventeenth century, though many continued to ascribe to their soul unequal intellectual powers and, in body, women were unquestionably thought of as the ‘weaker vessel’ (1 Peter 3:7). As Thomas Edgar, a lawyer at Gray’s Inn, maintained, when a woman ‘hath lost her husband; her head is cut off, her intellectual part is gone, the very faculties of her soul are […] so that she cannot think or remember when to take rest or reflection for her weak body’.²²

Given the prevalence of these cultural ideas, male-authored writings exploring the relationship between the body and soul often associated the fleshly, sinful body with femininity. As Roy Porter observes, the dialogues between body and soul were clearly gendered: ‘typically, the body was identified with sensual Eve and the soul, or reason, with Adam’.²³ The subordinate female body would tempt the immortal, male-gendered soul, while the dominant rational soul was in danger of submitting to fleshly desires. The Anglican preacher Jeremy Taylor likened this relationship to that of husband and wife: ‘The Dominion of a man over his Wife is no other than as the Soul rules the Body’.²⁴

For then the Soul and Body makes a perfect Man, when the Soul commands wisely, or rules lovingly, and cares profitably and provides plentifully, and conducts charitably that body which is its partner, and yet the inferior. But if the Body shall give Laws, and by the violence of the appetite first abuse the Understanding, and then possess the superior portion of the Will and Choice, the body and the soul are not apt company, and the man is a fool and miserable.²⁵

Here, a good relationship between body and soul is related to a successful marriage, following the words of St Paul in Ephesians 5:22–9, especially 23: ‘For the Husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body’. Conflict between body and soul was viewed as the inheritance of original sin, which would be removed completely at the Day of Judgement, when body and soul would reunite in harmony. Likewise, Calvin described an unhappy marriage as the ‘fruits of original sin’. The wife, in particular, was asked to remember: ‘good reason it is that I should receive the payment that commeth of my disobedience towards God, for that I hold not myself in his awe’.²⁶ Women writers tended not to associate the body and soul with man and wife, preferring to emphasise their own possession of a soul equal to those of men. Lady Frances Pelham, the older sister of Brilliana, Lady Harley, anthologised here, handwrote an instructional legacy to her children entitled ‘Expression of Faith’ in which she explored the relationship between body and soul:

The Soul and Body make but one Man; yet each of them severally receive their Being, and enjoy their lives by different nourishments, harm, destroy, preserve, and maintain each other’s comforts in the goodness of will and agreement in obeying it. The Soul is the divine and understanding part, the Body is the help by which it acts, without which it had no power amongst men to express the glory of the Creator: And being from Man it brings with it a see [seat] which ever springs to overcast and distract the glory of the better part: Whereas it ought to know it is made inferior to it, a helpful companion in all good, by which they both shall enjoy eternal happiness. But when it yields or tempts to Sin the stronger part should mend those faults, find out the weakness, give strength to it and employ the other’s strength that both may live in peace on Earth, and possess joy in Heaven for ever.

A man and woman being man and wife are still but one until the day of death. The Woman is a helper for the Man and he an honour, strength, and safety to her. Her part is to obey and act his will, give her advice, leave the allowance of it to him; in love and faithfulness perform her part, speak her opinion but not control his act. The Man should love, respect, and hold her dear; not suffer any blemish to be seen in her, take her advice and counsel with his own and follow it when ’tis a help to his. Woman is not a help to Man as body to the Soul, she brings with her from God a part Divine to his which is only subdued to him by reason of her Sex; a punishment that lasts but in this life, increased or lessened by his good or ill. In heaven her part shall be as free as his.²⁷

While Pelham acknowledges that women should subordinate themselves to men during their lives, typical of a work that seeks to educate younger family members, she is keen to deny that women can easily be equated with the sinful body. Here, women have souls which they unite with their husbands’ upon marriage, where they become ‘one’, though they are subdued until after death, when they would have equal inheritance of eternal life. The writings of women included in this anthology all engage with these debates in various ways, putting across arguments that women were equally beloved of God, with many suggesting that they should be able to praise him by publishing their work. Lady Mary Carey, for example, addresses her conversion narrative to her husband so that it may help him if she should die at the imminent birth of her fourth child; in it, she identifies herself with the nurturing, advisory voice of the Soul. It is clear from these women’s writings, as well as those collected hereafter, that women were subverting existing ideologies about their bodily and spiritual states.

Sin and childbirth

As has already been shown, in both spiritual and medical discourses women were constructed as inferior beings. They were thought to be imperfect creatures in body and mind, as well as more prone to sin and temptation. Painful childbirth, in particular, was understood as the curse inherited by all women from Eve. The midwife Jane Sharp, writer of the first female-authored English-language midwifery guide (1671), comments that:

The accidents and hazards that women lie under when they bring their Children into the world are not few, hard labour attends most of them, it was the curse that God laid upon our sex to bring forth in sorrow, that is the general cause and common to all as we descended from the same great Mother Eve, who first tasted the forbidden fruit.²⁸

Such was the acceptance of the conflation of labour pain with Eve that women would often offer a specific prayer while in labour to recognise this. One such prayer read:

I acknowledge, O Lord, that justly for our sinful transgression of thy commandments, thou saidst unto the first woman, our grand-mother Eve, and in her to us all […]. All our pains therefore that we suffer in this behalf, are none other thing, but a worthy cross laid upon us by thy godly ordinance.²⁹

In the period under consideration in this anthology, it was not just labour pains that were thought to be have resulted from Eve’s transgressions but also menstruation. John Marten, an early eighteenth-century physician, and author of A Treatise on the Venereal Disease (1711), which went through several editions, paraphrased a treatise by Johannes Baptist van Helmont (1579–1644). Marten explains:

That if the first Woman Eve, had not sinned, she had never been exposed to the Pangs of Child-birth, nor to the Shame, nor Confusion of seeing herself defiled once a Month with her own impure Blood: But as soon as she had eat[en] of the forbidden Fruit, she presently on a sudden, says Helmont, felt her Concupiscence [desire for earthly things] roused within her, nor was she any longer Mistress of her own Desires; she ran to look for her Husband Adam: She solicited, she pressed the poor Man so much, that being thereby moved with her Weakness, and embracing him to Comfort her, the pleasure they reciprocally felt was the Cause of Original Sin, which was afterwards entailed on all the Posterity of Adam.³⁰

In this reading, then, menstruation is clearly seen as part of the punishment given to Eve, in which she is to be ritually ‘defiled’ and shamed once a month. This sense of spiritual and bodily defilement associated with menstrual blood can be seen in John Oliver’s Present for Teeming [pregnant] Women, which is a set of meditations for women to use in labour, printed and published by two women. One meditation refers to the medical belief that the baby was fed menstrual blood for its nourishment in the womb, as part of the punishment of Eve:

I find that the child in my womb brings many weaknesses and aches upon me; but oh how sad and deplorable are those deeper sicknesses and maladies, which I have brought upon it? Its body partaking of my substance, partakes unavoidably of my natural pollution [menstrual blood]. Its Soul, though it come immediately from the Father of Spirits, yet (I know not how) is upon its infusion into this tender infant, subjected to the common misery of the Children of Adam; who having lost the image and likeness of God, sin and corruption must needs follow. I am an unclean vessel, and how can any clean thing come out of me?³¹

Though a child in the womb will cause some discomfort to its mother, the meditation suggests that this is nothing compared to the sin and corruption the child receives from its mother’s body. It was believed that God would infuse the infant’s developing body with a soul at the moment it was felt to ‘quicken’ in the womb, that is, when the mother felt the child move. At this point, though, the child’s perfect soul was polluted with the sin of mankind, transmitted directly by menstrual blood, which cushioned and nurtured the growing infant. Woman was believed to be not only the original root and cause of this corruption (via Eve) but also the first means of transferring this sin to the child.

As Roy Porter has written, the way people in any era have a ‘sense of [their] bodies, and what happens in and to them, is not first-hand but mediated through maps and expectations derived from the culture at large’.³² These expectations are formed from all aspects of cultural assumptions, from medical models to theological beliefs, to folklore and beyond, as reflected in the meditation above. In this way, the fact that Christian writings can be seen to relate a negative view of women necessarily affected how women came to view their bodies. As has been shown, even the normal physiological events of women’s lives were the topic of theological debate. As the meditation above further demonstrates, menstruation and childbirth were both occasions of bleeding about which the Bible had plenty to say. After the birth of a baby, a woman is said in the Bible to have a period of time during which she is considered to be spiritually unclean. In seventeenth-century England, this time ended in a special church ceremony, colloquially known as ‘churching’, which was thought of as either a service of thanksgiving for a safe delivery, or a process of purification from the pollution of birth. The event was deeply politicised in the early modern period, banned altogether in the Interregnum and restored by Charles II.³³ A woman would go for churching with her husband, her midwife and her ‘gossips’ (the female friends present at the birth of her child) when she was well again after the birth, usually around a month after the delivery. This practice was based on the instructions of Leviticus 12:1–5, which Jane Sharp discusses: ‘We read in Leviticus 12 that a woman delivered of a Boy, must continue in her purification thirty-three days, and for a girl sixty-six days’.³⁴ Sharp points out, however, that this rule was meant for ‘the seed of Abraham’ (i.e. Jews) abiding by the Old Testament law (which included circumcision) rather than the New Testament teachings, and so does not have to be observed so precisely by women in England. Similarly, women would hear preachers regularly use the biblical metaphor that the fallen condition of man meant that human righteousness was so worthless that it could only be likened to the filthiest of items, such as a cloth used to absorb menstrual blood. Isaiah 64:6 states that ‘thy righteousness is but a menstrual cloth’. It seems inescapable, then, that the scripture about the female body selectively cited in the period was a site of negativity. How did women feel when routinely hearing sermons from the pulpit in which their unavoidable, normal bodily functions were vilified? Certainly, many women questioned these received beliefs.

This questioning of the position of women at the creation as an inferior version of the man, and one who would be inevitably tainted by original sin, was seen as early as 1589, when Jane Anger (a possible pseudonym, as the author admits writing in a ‘choleric vein’ in which ‘Anger shall reap anger’) wrote a spirited defence of her sex:

The creation of man and woman at the first, he being formed In principio of dross and filthy clay, did so remain until God saw that in him his workmanship was good, and therefore by the transformation of the dust which was loathsome unto flesh, it became purified. Then lacking a help for him, God making woman of man’s flesh, that she might be purer than he, doth evidently show, how far we women are more excellent than men.³⁵

The reason for female superiority, Anger writes, is that