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An collins and the historical imagination
Abstract
The first edited collection of scholarly essays to focus exclusively on An Collins, this volume examines the significance of an important religious and political poet from seventeenth-century England. The book celebrates Collins's writing within her own time and ours through a comprehensive assessment of her poetics, literary, religious and political contexts, critical reception, and scholarly tradition. An Collins and the Historical Imagination engages with the complete arc of research and interpretation concerning Collins's poetry from 1653 to the present. The volume defines the center and circumference of Collins scholarship for twenty-first century readers. The book's thematically linked chapters and appendices provide a multifaceted investigation of An Collins's writing, religious and political milieu, and literary legacy within her time and ours.
... But they have been targets of harsh criticism: Simpson contends that these lines are 'platitudinous to say the least' and, beyond being 'intrinsically vapid' , are 'at best an uncomfortable participation in the language of naïve ballad conventions, at worst a total failure of poetic intelligence' . 15 Misgivings regarding Wordsworth's style here aside, dismissing in toto these lines that replicate social practice eschews analysis of what they contain. This presents a hazard of scholarly readers dismissing cultural analysis on the basis of aesthetic taste. ...
... (ll. [15][16][17][18] Simon Lee finds no joy in the present, and the occasional joy he does feel occurs when a symbolic sound returns him to his youth. Beyond indicating that nothing he sees, says, or does brings him happiness, this has two other purposes: it removes his agency over even passing moments of levity (he is not the one hunting with the dogs, they are not his dogs, and he cannot determine exactly when they will be hunting); and, being 'voices' that he hears, the dogs serve as an echo that reminds him that the source of his joy is far away and untraceable. ...
... 37 (ll. [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] Contemporary usages of key terms remind us that the construction 'vagrant dwellers' did not only refer to associations of 'vagrancy'; despite any fleeting 'dwelling' , to be 'vagrant' was to be in a constant state of change. 'Dweller' at this time could suggest 'inhabitant' , and contemporary uses of 'vagrant' as an adjective, excluding definitions that redundantly suggest vagrancy, include 'wandering about without proper means of livelihood' and 'wandering, straying, roving; inconstant, unsettled, wayward, etc' . ...
One of the defining attributes of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s 1798 Lyrical Ballads was the poets’ focus on subjects of ‘low and rustic life’, and especially on the potentials for enhanced human understanding accessed through the language of people of such social stations. This essay examines Wordsworth’s ‘Simon Lee’ and ‘Tintern Abbey’, two entries set in Wales that in contrast to the collection’s manifesto do not feature the voices of the local inhabitants. Recent scholarship has effectively compounded the Welsh locals’ status: in addition to the comparatively little consideration given to the Welsh social history that would cover these topics, scholars have also at times re-set the poems in England, and even suggested that the Welsh inhabitants actually symbolise or otherwise represent English people. Minimising, disregarding, and altering the poems’ Welsh settings limits, and even misshapes, any meaningful poetic analysis. I argue that in each poem a deep understanding of the local cultural histories of the respective Welsh setting – Cardiganshire in ‘Simon Lee’ and Monmouthshire in ‘Tintern Abbey’ – produces a more comprehensive appreciation of the poems themselves. Furthermore, rather than acting as signs of a people unchanged since antiquity (another consensus among many literary scholars), these poems’ muted Welsh residents record the results of far-reaching social change, specifically the loss of traditions, community life, and economic stability. Such an approach enhances our understanding of wider contexts, including: Wordsworth’s authorship; Romantic Wales; the Welsh in the English imagination; and eighteenth-century Wales. I demonstrate these points by incorporating primary materials to complement my accounts of each poem, including contemporary histories of Cardiganshire in my examination of ‘Simon Lee’, and English poems of the period on Tintern Abbey and Monmouthshire in my examination of ‘Tintern Abbey’.
... Commentators have praised the heterogeneity of themes, theories, methods and sources being used in historical sociology as a major strength of this tradition (Calhoun 1998;Crow 1997;Delanty and Isin 2003;Mann 1994;Mouzelis 1994;Smith 1991). Indeed, some authors persist in claiming that only some theories (such as rational choice, Hechter 1991, 1998) and methodological principles (such as the use of primary sources, Goldthorpe 1991, Skocpol 1984a) must be adopted across the board, but this is an ongoing debate that is unlikely to be settled once and for all. 73 Secondly, it has been noted that this is a tradition that has 73 Debates on this issue have been carried out in the British Journal of Sociology (Bryan 1994;Hart 1994;Mann 1994;Mouzelis 1994) and the American Journal of Sociology (Boudon 1998;Calhoun 1998;and Somers 1998). ...
The equation between society and the nation-state in sociology has been subject to severe criticisms in recent times. This equation has been given the name of ‘methodological nationalism’ and is underpinned by a reading of the history of sociology in which the discipline’s key concept, society, and modernity’s major sociopolitical referent, the nation-state, allegedly converge. At the critical level, my thesis argues that this is too restrictive a view of the history of the discipline and at the positive level it reconstructs the conventional version of sociology’s canon in relation to nation-states. The first part of the thesis surveys the main trends in the current sociological mainstream, reviews the rise of the critique of methodological nationalism and establishes a distinction between a referential and a regulative role of the idea of society in sociology. The body of the thesis constructs a history of the sociology of the nation-state in its classical (K. Marx, M. Weber and E. Durkheim), modernist (T. Parsons and historical sociology) and cosmopolitan (U. Beck and M. Castells) moments. As an essay on the history of sociology, this thesis seeks to uncover how the conceptual ambivalences of sociology reflect the actual ambivalences in the position and legacy of nation-states in modernity.
Há pelo menos dois séculos o historicismo é o horizonte em que se desenvolve a formação cultural no ocidente. Portanto, deveria ser relativamente simples compreender de que modo a historiografia apresenta os seus próprios objetos. Porém, estilos de pensamento que nos parecem óbvios e garantidos são na realidade plenos de incertezas, aporias e perguntas não respondidas pelos próprios especialistas da área. Assim, podemos perguntar se se pode reclamar da historiografia a “verdade” sobre o passado ou se essa pretensão é o fruto de uma ilusão já superada. O objetivo desta intervenção é chamar a atenção sobre a importância epistemológica (e talvez, ético-política) dessas perguntas, ainda que com consciência das dificuldades de chegar a soluções unívocas e satisfatórias. Então, esta investigação retoma a aspiração rankeana de apenas mostrar como as coisas realmente aconteceram, aborda os impactos da linguistic turn, a tradição hermenêutica e a controvérsia sobre o papel narrativo da história entre White e autores como Momigliano e Ginzburg. Partindo da semelhança entre as tarefas do juiz e do historiador, o trabalho se utiliza do “negacionismo” para evidenciar o difícil desafio da historiografia, que pode adquirir não apenas um valor cognitivo, mas também “civil”.
Mary Shelley’s celebrated response to The Excursion might have softened if she had persisted to the end of the poem, as Shelley’s was, but the shock of the lost leader’s self-exposure on the first page of his book was ne’er so well expressed: ‘he is a slave’.1 The dedicatory sonnet ‘To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Lonsdale, K.G. etc. etc’ makes this instalment of The Recluse as much the poem to Lord Lonsdale as The Prelude was the poem to Coleridge, and it seems a gross instance of self-abasement that the author of The Prelude—the definitive celebration of a child’s upbringing through interaction with the rocks and trees and fells and waters that are his birthright—could write these lines:
Oft, through thy fair domains, illustrious Peer! In youth I roamed, on youthful pleasures bent; And mused in rocky cell or sylvan tent, Beside swift-flowing Lowther’s current clear.2
Wordsworth’s childhood was mortgaged to the Lowthers, and he grew up ‘a determined enemy to aristocracy’. Perhaps one should celebrate the magnanimity of a poet who can come to terms with the present Lowther. One can certainly grasp the romantic as well as pecuniary attractions to a once itinerant Bard of finding a niche at the fireside of a cultured patron (if Lonsdale was at all ‘illustrious’ it was as a patron).
This article considers “safe spaces” for students—in particular LGBT students—as a worthy goal for educators, but ultimately a vision for learning that can shelter and limit the kinds of ethical encounters that provide opportunities for students to engage with contested narratives, histories, and perspectives on LGBT issues. As an alternative, the article explores “spaces of becoming” that work beyond safe spaces to be more inclusive of competing and contentious perspectives on LGBT issues. To examine how spaces of becoming work, two concepts from educational theory informed by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze—becoming and fabulation—are put to use in analyzing data from a qualitative study of a high school social studies teacher׳s unit on LGBT history in the United States. Examples of fabulation are highlighted to suggest how the narration of LGBT histories in two lessons of the teacher׳s ninth grade U.S. History course work both for and against a space of what the author terms “becoming-American” in this social studies classroom. Some implications from this study are drawn for social studies educators, namely how social studies education can push beyond awareness and visibility for LGBT persons for more radical curricular possibilities.
This chapter has four sections: 1. General; 2. Herbert; 3. Donne; 4.Milton. Section 1 is by William Baker; section 2 is by
James Doelman; section 3 is by Anne James; section 4 is by Matthew Mroz.
What is the case for and how would one begin to construct a sociology of impairment? This paper argues that the realignment of the disability/impairment distinction is vital for the identity politics of the disability movement. The body is at the heart of contemporary political and theoretical debate, yet the social model of disability makes it an exile. The transformation of the body from a reactionary to an emancipatory concept implies a sociology of impairment. This paper explores the contribution that post-structuralism and phenomenology might make to this end.
An Collins's Divine Songs and Meditacions (1653) presents a tenuous and tentative dissenting subject. Produced at a time of national turmoil and personal crisis, the volume signals the fluidity of the boundaries between denomination and dissent, conformity and subversion. While the Society of Friends was not yet a fully fledged community, Collins's work expresses significant, if irresolute, Quaker leanings. In turn, her devotional self enables her to redefine and rethink the feminine. The Quaker tendency to attempt to transcend the limits of the worldly allows her to reshape social categories, so that the religious impetus to undo and remake the self opens up a space for the speaker to take apart and reformulate the feminine. Traditional signs of femininity, such as bodily frailty and physical enclosure, which seem to define the frame of the speaker's life, become a means of arousing a fertile inner world and releasing an active mind so as to give birth to a newly conceived, if provisional, female writing subject.
This book is the first study to reconstruct the political origins of English women's poetry between the execution of Charles I and the death of Queen Anne. The book shows that, between Katherine Philips (1632-1664) and Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720), English women's poetic tradition developed as part of the larger political shifts in these years and particularly in women's fascination with the figure of the female monarch. Writers discussed in the book include Aphra Behn, Katherine Philips, Anne Killigrew, Jane Barker, and Anne Finch.
Early Modern Women: Courageous Or Silent? The period under discussion in this chapter, approximately 1550 to 1700, was an immensely exciting time in terms of the history of women and literature in England. Female writers were beginning to publish their works, both through manuscript circulation and in printed books, in an enormous variety of genres including poems, plays, conversion narratives, advice books, translations, letters, devotional texts, prophecies, pamphlets, memoirs and works of philosophy and fiction. In social and political terms, too, this was an era when female rulers – seen by John Knox and no doubt other contemporaries as a 'monstrous regiment' – came to prominence. When Mary Tudor became queen in 1553, she was England's first Queen Regnant since the disputed rule of Matilda in the twelfth century. The iconic female image of Elizabeth I, Mary's half-sister who succeeded her on the throne, is a symbol of the political and cultural dominance of the 'Virgin Queen' during the second half of the sixteenth century. Though Elizabeth felt the need to represent herself as possessing the 'heart and stomach of a king' in spite of having the body of a 'weak and feeble woman', she was in this way – paradoxically – not afraid to draw attention to her gendered identity (Elizabeth I, 2000: 326). Spurred on by her example, as well as by frustration with prevailing patriarchal values, Elizabeth's female subjects began to publish defences of their own sex, even though they often did so under the protection of a pseudonym.
This essay argues that in the Despair and House of Holiness episodes of Faerie Queene I Spenser exploits the overlap of medical and devotional discourses to find "fit medcine" for Redcrosse's grief. The idea that despair or a "wounded" conscience requires healing appears in English Calvinist writing on both a metaphorical and literal level: through the idea of "curing" the soul of both sin and desperate guilt, and by addressing grief as a product of melancholy, a bodily disorder. Writers within a generally Calvinist framework took advantage of medical rhetoric and the ambiguous relationship between physical and spiritual concerns to understand and enable their own therapeutic interventions in what was, strictly speaking, a preordained transaction between God and the individual soul. Although the existence of despair, as a sin, is predicated on a distinction between the effects of a crazed body and eternal (predestined) soul, the practical treatment of despair in both Protestant exhortation and physic binds together body and soul and redefines their interactions. Spenserian allegory, which externalizes the inner self in much the same way that medicine and medical rhetoric do, thus provides a particularly effective mode for depicting despair as susceptible to methodical reparation.
Des écrivaines et femmes devotes qui vivaient en Grande-Bretagne au dix-septième siècle nous ont légué des textes qui expriment leur conception de Dieu et leurs désirs et qui donnent forme à la perception que les femmes avaient d’elles-mêmes. Dans les écrits de An Collins, de Dame Gertrude More et de l’auteur anonyme de Eliza’s Babes, les femmes ne se considèrent pas comme des êtres passifs, mais comme des théologiennes, des femmes de Dieu et des esprits éclairés. La psychanalyse lacanienne nous aide à comprendre leurs travaux et nous oriente vers une conception différente du désir et de la femme, cette dernière étant consciente à la fois de fragmentation et de complétude.
The middle decades of the seventeenth century in England were momentous in political, religious and material terms - with the country in the throes of political crises, religious sectarianism, and civil as well as foreign warfare - but they also represent a significant turning point in the history of English literary activity. The structures of patronage which had sustained and framed the literary output of previous generations (as discussed by Graham Parry in Chapter 4) were by now severely weakened and in some cases totally demolished. The court, the focal point of national culture (for good or ill) in the days of Elizabeth I and James I, had become the polarising, unfixed and shadowy entourage of Charles I at war, and after 1649 it moved into exile abroad. The English Church, instigator and inspiration of so much literary production since the Reformation, was divided, fragmented and ultimately disestablished until 1660. The public theatres, the material and financial context for a substantial amount of early modern writing, were closed between 1642 and 1660. Although some of the kinds of writing previously fostered by these three major institutions (for example, the lyric) continued to be produced, and although some of the issues that they had formerly expressed - love, religious devotion, power - continued to drive the texts of the mid-century, these new writings began to reveal the environment from which they predominantly came: the household.
There was a war of words and images as well as a war of swords and muskets in mid seventeenth-century Britain, and it was a war fought with the same venom and the same determination. It was, to an even greater extent than the clash of arms, a war of religion or a series of wars of religion: the established Church of England was dismantled and the unity of the godly disintegrated. On the battlefield, the fighting followed existing good military practice, and the codes of honour were adhered to. There was no such restraint on the printed page: innovation, inventiveness, a spoliating invective was everywhere to be found. The heady cause of religious liberty was advanced with a freedom of form, syntax and vocabulary that startled, troubled and disturbed. This war of religion was waged across the period in a bewildering diversity of polemical strategies and forms in both prose and poetry. On all sides, but perhaps especially on the Puritan side of the polemical exchanges, the religious writing in the period 1640-60 is a literary equivalent of the mid nineteenth-century opening up of the American West. It was frequently characterised by an exhilarating freedom, a high dependence on contingency, a rugged individualism, extraordinary improvisation and a central authority trying and largely failing to impose rules and inappropriate order. The most exhilarating (for us) and alarming (for many contemporaries) feature of this was the freedom that men and (more dramatically) women had to think unthinkable thoughts, to challenge those beliefs about the way the world was that previous generations had been incapable of thinking of questioning.
An Collins' 1653 collection of poems, Divine Songs and Meditacions, contains all that we know about the writer. But in these poems, she tells us much about the books that she had read, and about her indebtedness to the catechetical works of the Elizabethan Puritan theologian William Perkins in particular. By varying the degree to which her source texts are visible, Collins also tells us about her political affiliations. We can now place her among the Presbyterians of the 1650s. The method of reading outlined here, attending to the relative visibility of source texts being quoted and paraphrased, will be of use to scholars investigating formulaic genres like meditations and prayers—genres in which women writers were particularly active in the early modern period.
Katherine Paston and Brilliana Harley: Maternal Letters and the Genre of Mother?s Advice by Raymond A. Anselment AMONG the conduct books popular in the early seventeenth cen-tury are several on maternal advice written by women whofound in the newly acknowledged responsibilities of motherhood the potential for personal fulfillment.1 In particular, the numerous editions of works by Elizabeth Grymeston, Dorothy Leigh, and Elizabeth Joscelin reflect the growing Protestant recognition that mothers must share with their husbands the obligation to ensure their children?s welfare.2 For any woman who has ??carried her child within her, so neere 1 Betty S. Travitsky remains among the first and foremost proponent of this view of motherhood: ??A new mother [a description now commonly accepted] was developed who was a learned, pious, and responsible woman with increased and clear-cut responsibility for the raising of her children as well as a clearly recognized right to selfdevelopment for her own sake?? (??The New Mother of the English Renaissance (1489? 1659): A Descriptive Catalogue,?? Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 82 [1979]: 64). As she notes in a subsequent essay, her characterization of motherhood comes from the title of Erasmus?s colloquy, ??The New Mother?? (??The New Mother of the English Renaissance: Her Writings on Motherhood,?? in The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature, ed. Cathy N. Davidson and E. M. Broner [New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1980], 33?43). 2 The fourth edition of Elizabeth Grymeston?s Miscelanea. Meditations. Memoratiues (London, 1604) was published around 1618; the nineteenth edition of Dorothy Leigh?s The Mothers Blessing (London, 1616) appeared in 1640; Elizabeth Joscelin?s The Mothers Legacie, To her Vnborne Childe (London, 1624) went through seven impressions, the last in 1635. Sometimes included in the genre of mother?s advice books are Elizabeth Clinton, countess of Lincoln, The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie (Oxford, 1622); Elizabeth Richardson, A Ladies Legacie to her Daughters (London, 1645); M. R., The Mothers Counsell, or, Liue within Compasse (London, 1630?); and Susanna Bell, Legacy of a Dying Mother (London, 1673). See Betty Travitsky, ed., The Paradise of Women: Writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 50?68; Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 431 ? 2004 The University of North Carolina Press Tseng 2004.8.31 12:56 7159 STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY / 101:4 / sheet 77 of 122 432 Katherine Paston and Brilliana Harley her hart, and brought it forth into this world with so much bitter paine,?? Dorothy Leigh writes, the duty to nurture is undeniable: ??Will shee not instruct it in the youth, and admonish it in the age, and pray for it continually???3 The bond formed in the womb, as Elizabeth Grymeston further emphasizes, becomes a means of fulfillment: ??There is no loue so forcible as the loue of an a?ectionate mother to her naturall childe: there is no mother can either more a?ectionately shew her nature, or more naturally manifest her a?ection, than in aduising her children out of her own experience.??4 And yet, paradoxically, maternal nature and affection seem largely secondary, if not absent, in the ??true portraiture of thy mothers minde?? Grymeston leaves her son;5 nor are they strikingly apparent in the legacies of the other authors to their children.Their desire to ??shew my selfe a louing Mother, and a dutifull Wife??6 is more complexly and movingly apparent in the writing of two other women not traditionally associated with mother?s advice books, the letters of Katherine Paston (1578?1629) and Brilliana Harley (1600?43) to their sons.7 Unlike the writing of these two mothers? published counterparts, the private correspondence of each began when her firstborn left for university and was never intended for publication, so neither mother has any need to justify her advice. The other authors exploit the threat of imminent death as an occasion not only for their own self-presentation, 266?85; Sylvia Brown, ed., Women?s Writing in Stuart England: The Mothers? Legacies of Dorothy Leigh, Elizabeth Joscelin, and Elizabeth Richardson (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1999). The role Protestant writers such as Thomas Becon...
women;writing;women writers;monumental figures;katherine philips
women's poetry;divine songs and meditacions;moral authority;margaret cavendish;poems and fancies
