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Providential Gifts and Agricultural Plenty: The Psalmes of Mary Sidney Herbert

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Women, Food Exchange, and Governance in Early Modern England

Part of the book series: Early Modern Literature in History ((EMLH))

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Abstract

This chapter investigates Mary Sidney Herbert’s practice of augmenting and ‘Englishing’ psalmic metaphors of husbandry and agricultural cultivation in her substantive and rich translation of the Psalms. In arguing that her translation choices foreground the providential belief that food was a gift from God, the chapter also draws attention to the corollary, that the years of crop failure and food shortages experienced in 1586–7, and especially in 1594–7, must be considered a form of divine punishment. National and regional food supply and security, Sidney Herbert’s translations imply, is a political issue to be addressed through foreign, not domestic, policies that realign England with militant factionalism and God’s ostensible will.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Privy Council, Orders deuised by the especiall commandement of the Queenes Maiestie, for the reliefe and stay of the present dearth of Graine within the Realme (London, 1586) (Privy Council 1586); The renewing of certaine Orders deuised by the speciall commandement of the Queenes Maiestie, for the reliefe and stay of the present dearth of Graine within the Realme: in the yeere of our Lord 1586. Nowe to bee againe executed this present yere 1594 vpon like occasions as were seene the former yere (London, 1594) (Privy Council 1594). On the Books of Orders see Steve Hindle, ‘Dearth, Fasting and Alms: The Campaign for General Hospitality in Late Elizabethan England’, Past and Present 172 (2001): 44–86 (Hindle 2001); and Paul Slack, ‘Books of Orders: The Making of English Social Policy, 1577–1631’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 30 (1980): 1–22 (Slack 1980).

  2. 2.

    Privy Council, Orders…for the relief and stay of the present dearth, p. 13.

  3. 3.

    Privy Council, The renewing of certaine Orders, p. 9.

  4. 4.

    Privy Council, The renewing of certaine Orders, p. 13.

  5. 5.

    Privy Council, A New Charge giuen by the Queenes commandement, to all Iustices of Peace, and all Maiors, Shiriffes, and all principall Officers of Cities, Boroughs, and Townes corporate, for execution of sundry orders published the last yeere for staie of dearth of Graine, With certaine additions nowe this present yeere to be well obserued and executed (London, 1595), p. 17 (Privy Council 1595).

  6. 6.

    Privy Council, A New Charge, p. 19.

  7. 7.

    See Elizabeth I, A Proclamation for the dearth of Corne (London, 1596) (Elizabeth 1596); The Queenes Maiesties Proclamation, 1. For obseruation of former Orders against Ingrossers, & Regraters of Corne…(London, 1596) (Elizabeth 1596); By the Queene. Whereas an vntrue and slaunderous reporte…(London, 1597) (Elizabeth 1597).

  8. 8.

    Privy Council, Orders conceiued…to be put in execution for the restraint of killing and eating of flesh (London, 1580) (Privy Council 1580). These orders were reprinted in 1588, 1589, 1591, 1592, 1593, 1595, 1596, 1597, 1598, 1599, and 1600.

  9. 9.

    Elizabeth I, A Proclamation straightly commanding that no Corne nor other Victuall, nor any Ordonance, nor furniture for shipping be caried into any of the king of Spaines countries, vpon paine to be punished as in case of Treason: nor that any of the like kinds be caried out of the Realme to other Countries without speciall licence vpon sundry great paines (London, 1591) (Elizabeth 1591).

  10. 10.

    Michael Brennan suggests that Sidney Herbert completed a draft in 1594, in ‘The Date of the Countess of Pembroke’s Translation of the Psalms’, The Review of English Studies, New Series 3.132 (1982): 434 (Brennan 1982).

  11. 11.

    See John Donne’s ‘Upon the translation of the Psalms by Sir Philip Sidney, and the Countess of Pembroke his sister’, in John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A.J. Smith (New York: Penguin, 1971), pp. 332–4, line 46 (Donne 1971).

  12. 12.

    J.C.A. Rathmell, ‘Introduction’, in The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke (New York: New York University Press, 1963), p. xxvi (Rathmell 1963).

  13. 13.

    Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, ‘To the Angell spirit…’, in The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert Countess of Pembroke, Vol. 1. Poems, Translations, and Correspondence, ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), pp. 110–12 (Sidney Herbert 1998). Debra Rienstra and Noel Kinnamon, ‘Circulating the Sidney-Pembroke Psalter’, in Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800, ed. George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 52 (Rienstra and Kinnamon 2002). Rathmell quite bluntly claims that critical opinion lies heavily on the side of Sidney Herbert in terms of quality, with Sidney’s section ‘decidedly inferior’, ‘Introduction’, p. xxvi.

  14. 14.

    Rathmell, ‘Introduction’, p. xx.

  15. 15.

    As the editors of her Collected Works, Vol. I  note, alongside her development of metaphors pertaining to women, clothing, accounting, the law, and the court, she ‘expands agricultural metaphors’ as well; see Hannay et al., ‘Introduction’, p. 72. A similar observation has been made by Gary Waller, who sees Sidney Herbert extending the ‘imagery of planting and growing’ and ‘organic development’ in Psalm 44, and by Mary Trull, who notes the ‘harvest and feast imagery’ of Psalm 65, in which ‘the earth’s fertility demonstrates God’s power’. Gary Waller, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke: A Critical Study of Her Writings and Literary Milieu (Salzburg, Austria: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universität Salzburg, 1979), p. 207 (Waller 1979); Mary Trull, ‘“Theise dearest offrings of my heart”: The Sacrifice of Praise in Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke’s Psalmes’, in English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625, ed. Micheline White (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), p. 49 (Trull 2011).

  16. 16.

    Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, ‘Psalm 44’, in The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert Countess of Pembroke. Vol. II. The Psalmes of David, ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998, 2003), pp. 35–8, line 6 (Sidney Herbert 2003 [1998]). Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes come from this edition; henceforth, line numbers will be parenthetically cited.

  17. 17.

    William J. Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France, and England (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 164 (Kennedy 2003).

  18. 18.

    For discussion of the Sidney/Dudley alliance in relation to Sidney Herbert’s Psalmes, see especially Margaret P. Hannay’s ‘“Princes you as men must dy”: Genevan Advice to Monarchs in the Psalmes of Mary Sidney’, ELR 19 (1989): 22–41 (Hannay 1989).

  19. 19.

    Julie Crawford, Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production in Early Modern England (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 33 (Crawford 2014).

  20. 20.

    Margaret P. Hannay, ‘“So May I with the Psalmist Truly Say”: Early Modern Englishwomen’s Psalm Discourse’, in Write or Be Written: Early Modern Women Poets and Cultural Constraints, ed. Barbara Smith and Ursula Appelt (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001), p. 106 (Hannay 2001).

  21. 21.

    Suzanne Trill, ‘“Speaking to God in his Phrase and Word”: Women’s Use of the Psalms in Early Modern England’, in The Nature of Religious Language: A Colloquium, ed. Stanley E. Porter (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), p. 274 (Trill 1996).

  22. 22.

    See Edward A. Gosselin, ‘David in Tempore Belli: Beza’s David in the Service of the Huguenots’, Sixteenth Century Journal 7.2 (1976): 31–54 (Gosselin 1976); and W. Stanford Reid, ‘The Battle Hymns of the Lord: Calvinist Psalmody of the Sixteenth Century’, Sixteenth Century Journal 2 (1971): 36–54 (Reid 1971). For the Reformist agenda of sixteenth-century psalm translation, see Robin A. Leaver, ‘Ghoostly psalmes and spirituall songes’: English and Dutch Metrical Psalms from Coverdale to Utenhove, 1535–1566 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991) (Leaver 1991).

  23. 23.

    Reid, ‘Battle Hymns’, p. 42. See also ‘Literary Context’, in Sidney Herbert, The Collected Works Vol. II, pp. 3–32.

  24. 24.

    Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 6 (Hamlin 2004).

  25. 25.

    Hamlin, Psalm Culture, pp. 6–13. For a discussion of the psalms’ ‘mutability’, see  Linda Phyllis Austern, Kari Boyd McBride, and David L. Orvis, eds, ‘“Introduction” in Psalms in the Early Modern World, (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), p. 4 (Austern et al. 2011).

  26. 26.

    Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 281 (Walsham 1999). Numerous critics observe that the Psalmes assume the highly politicized equation between Israel and England, including modern editors Hannay, Kinnamon, and Brennan; see in particular remarks in Volume I of Sidney Herbert’s Collected Works on ‘Even now that Care’, pp. 92–104.

  27. 27.

    Steven W. May and Arthur F. Marotti, Ink, Stink Bait, Revenge, and Queen Elizabeth: A Yorkshire Yeoman’s Household Book (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2014), ch. 2, esp. pp. 126–33 (May and Marotti 2014) and ‘Two Lost Ballads of the Armada Thanksgiving Celebration [with texts and illustration]’, ELR 41.1 (2011): 46–9 (May and Marotti 2011).

  28. 28.

    A Psalme and Collect of thankesgiuing, not vnmeet for this present time: to be said or sung in Churches (London, 1588), sig. A2 r (Psalme and Collect of… 1588).

  29. 29.

    Psalme and Collect, sigs. A2 v–A3 r.

  30. 30.

    Psalme and Collect, sig. A4 r.

  31. 31.

    National Maritime Museum MS SNG/4 quoted in May and Marotti, Ink, p. 127. The songs are reproduced as Poems 8 and 9 in Steven W. May, Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), pp. 19–23 (May 2004).

  32. 32.

    May and Marotti discuss both poems in Ink, p. 132; May, Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, Poem 8, line 6.

  33. 33.

    May and Marotti, Ink, p. 131; May, Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, Poem 8, line 10, Poem 9, lines 2, 5, 7–8.

  34. 34.

    Blair Worden, ‘Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England’, Past and Present 109.1 (1985): 60 (Worden 1985).

  35. 35.

    Walsham, Providence, p. 5. See pp. 20–32 for a discussion of rival ideologies to providentialism.

  36. 36.

    ‘A Sermon how dangerous a thing it is to fall from God’, in Certaine Sermons or Homilies, Appointed to be Read in Churches…Two volumes in one (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimilies & Reprints, 1968), 1.54 (Certaine Sermons 1968). This warning is repeated at the beginning of ‘The second part of the Sermon of falling from God’, and occurs again in the ‘Homilie of the Right Vse of the Church’, 1.55, 2.1.

  37. 37.

    Walsham, Providence, pp. 3, 33.

  38. 38.

    Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), pp. 106–7 (Thomas 1980).

  39. 39.

    Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 327. See also ch. 5, pp. 327–94, for a discussion of God’s book of nature in relation to these ideas (Walsham 2011).

  40. 40.

    William Averell, A wonderfull and straunge newes, which happened in the Countye of Suffolke, and Essex, the first of February, beeing Fryday, where it rayned Wheat…a notable example to put vs in remembraunce of the iudgements of God, and a preparatiue, sent to moue vs to speedy repentance (London, 1583), sig. B2 v (Averell 1583).

  41. 41.

    Averell, A wonderfull and straunge newes, sigs. B3 r, B5 v.

  42. 42.

    G.E. Fussell, ed., Robert Loder’s Farm Accounts 1610–1620 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1936), pp. 36, 38 (Fussell 1936).

  43. 43.

    Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 8 (Overton 1996).

  44. 44.

    John Walter and Keith Wrightson name the decade ‘disastrous’, in ‘Dearth and the Social Order in Early Modern England’, Past and Present 71 (1976): 25 (Walter and Wrightson 1976); and M.J. Power, ‘London and the Control of the “Crisis” of the 1590s’, History 70 (1985): 371–85 (Power 1985); and R.B. Outhwaite, ‘Dearth, the English Crown and the “Crisis of the 1590s”’, in The European Crisis of the 1590s : Essays in Comparative History, ed. Peter Clark (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), pp. 23–43, among others, adopt the term ‘crisis’ (Outhwaite 1985). John McGurk is perhaps more understated in his identification of the years as a ‘period of stress’, but goes on to qualify that statement with a long list of trials that includes the plague, famine, war, increased taxation, inflation, population growth, court factionalism, and ‘large sporadic outbreaks of disorder’, in The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: The 1590s Crisis (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997) p. 51 (McGurk 1997).

  45. 45.

    For late sixteenth-century military contexts see Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I: War and Politics 1588 – 1603 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) (MacCaffrey 1992); Paul E.J. Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars: War, Government and Society in Tudor England, 1544 – 1604 (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) (Hammer 2003); and McGurk, Elizabethan Conquest.

  46. 46.

    Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, pp. 143–4.

  47. 47.

    Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600 – 1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 14 (Grove 1995).

  48. 48.

    Deborah E. Harkness observes that ‘denizen’ was a legal identity denoting the first step in the ‘process of cultural assimilation’ and journey towards Englishness, in The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 53 (Harkness 2007).

  49. 49.

    For a discussion of Sidney Herbert’s sources, see Hannay, Kinnamon, and Brennan, ‘Literary Contexts’, in Sidney Herbert, Collected Works, Vol. II, pp. 3–32.

  50. 50.

    The Geneva Bible, Geneva Bible, 1560 fasc. edn. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969) (Geneva Bible 1969) uses ‘yles’, as does Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins’ The Whole Booke of Psalmes (London, 1562) (Sternhold 1562). Calvin’s commentaries—The Psalmes of Dauid and others, With M. Iohn Caluins Commentaries, tr. Arthur Golding (London, 1571) (Calvin 1571) use the more general term ‘Ilands’, and Anthony Gilby’s translation of Theodore Beza—The Psalmes of Dauid, tr. Anthony Gilby (London, 1580)—provides a more allusive paraphrase, interpreting ‘yles’ as ‘within the small & narrowe bounds of one people’ (Psalm 97:1) (Beza 1580).

  51. 51.

    Donne, ‘Upon the translation of the Psalms’, lines 18–22.

  52. 52.

    The Crown’s own response to the quake can be found in The order of prayer, and other exercises, vpon Wednesdayes and Frydayes, to auert and turne Gods wrath from vs, threatned by the late terrible earthquake (London, 1580) (Privy Council 1580).

  53. 53.

    Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, and Sir Philip Sidney, The Sidney Psalter: The Psalms of Sir Philip and Mary Sidney, ed. Hannibal Hamlin, Michael G. Brennan, Margaret P. Hannay, and Noel J. Kinnamon (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 308 (Sidney Herbert and Sidney 2009).

  54. 54.

    Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 27 (McRae 1996). This position is also reflected in the pages of almanacs, which approach husbandry from a predictive angle. As Bernard Capp notes, these manuals tend to support the idea that the ‘husbandman had an honourable and indispensable position in society, even if it was not always recognized’, in English Almanacs 1500–1800 : Astrology and the Popular Press (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 103 (Capp 1979).

  55. 55.

    Sir Thomas Smith, The Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England, ed. Elizabeth Lamond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1893), pp. 57, 59 (Smith 1893).

  56. 56.

    See the Doctor’s discussion of husbandry’s virtues in Smith, Discourse of the Common Weal, pp. 57–65.

  57. 57.

    Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W.L. Renwick (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), pp. 156–7 (Spenser 1970).

  58. 58.

    ‘An Act for Maintenance of Husbandry and Tillage’, in The Statutes at Large of England and Great Britain: from Magna Carta to the Union of the Kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 4, ed. John Raithby (London: George Eyre and Andrew Strahan, 1811), p. 499 (Act for Maintenance 1811).

  59. 59.

    On the biblical georgic, see Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 156–67 (Low 1985).

  60. 60.

    McRae, God Speed the Plough, pp. 27–8.

  61. 61.

    Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 26 (Davis 2009). See also Charlotte Scott, Shakespeare’s Nature: From Cultivation to Culture (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), esp. pp. 1–33, for a discussion of the ethical and social force and implications of husbandry (Scott 2014).

  62. 62.

    Conrad Heresbach, Fovre Bookes of Husbandry, 1577 facs. edn., tr. Barnabe Googe (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; New York: Da Capo, 1971), fol. 6 r (Heresbach 1971).

  63. 63.

    Leonard Mascall, A Booke of the Arte and maner, howe to plant and graffe all sortes of trees (London, 1572), sigs. A2 r, B1 r (Mascall 1572).

  64. 64.

    Mascall, Arte and maner, sig. A2 r.

  65. 65.

    See Margaret P. Hannay’s description of the Pembroke estate, along with a discussion of Moffett, in Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 113–5 (Hannay 1990).

  66. 66.

    For biographical information on Moffett see Frances Dawbarn, ‘New Light on Dr Thomas Moffett: The Triple Roles of an Early Modern Physician, Client, and Patronage Broker’, Medical History 47 (2003): 3–22 (Dawbarn 2003); V.H. Houliston, ‘Sleepers Awake: Thomas Moffett’s Challenge to the College of Physicians of London, 1584’, Medical History 33.2 (1989): 235–46 (Houliston 1989). Moffett also wrote the posthumously published dietary, Healths Improvement: Or, Rules Comprizing and Discovering the Nature, Method, and Manner of Preparing all sorts of Food Used in this Nation (London, 1655), and an extensive manual on insects, also published posthumously in Latin (Moffett 1655). This was translated into English and published as part of Edward Topsell’s The History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents…Whereunto is now Added, The Theater of Insects; or, Lesser living Creatures: As Bees, Flies, Caterpillars, Spiders, Worms, &c. A Most Elaborate Work: By T. Muffet, Dr. of Physick (London, 1658) (Topsell 1658). Moffett’s manuscript biography of Philip Sidney, likely written in 1593, is available in a modern edition, Nobilis, or A View of the Life and Death of a Sidney and Lessus Lugubris, intro., tr., and notes Virgil B. Heltzel and Hoyt H. Hudson (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1940) (Moffett 1940).

  67. 67.

    Thomas Moffett, Silkewormes, and their Flies: Liuely described in verse, by T.M. a Countrie Farmar, and an apprentice in Physicke. For the great benefit and enriching of England (London, 1599), sig. D2 r. V.H (Moffett 1599). Houliston suggests that he wrote the manual for the Queen’s planned visit to Wilton in 1599, Thomas Moffett, ‘Introduction’, in The Silkewormes and their Flies, facs. edn., ed. Houliston (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989), p. xvii (Moffett 1989). Also see Katharine A. Craik, ‘“These Almost Thingles Things”: Thomas Moffat’s The Silkewormes, and English Renaissance Georgic’, Cahiers Elisabéthains 60 (2001): 53–66 (Craik 2001).

  68. 68.

    Dawbarn, ‘New Light on Dr Thomas Moffett’, p. 10.

  69. 69.

    Moffett, Silkewormes, sig. K2 r; Joan Thirsk, Alternative Agriculture: A History from the Black Death to the Present Day (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 120 (Thirsk 1997).

  70. 70.

    Moffett, Silkewormes, sig. A2 r.

  71. 71.

    Rathmell, The Psalms, p. 48, lines 69–72. All citations of Sidney’s psalms come from this edition; henceforth, line numbers will be parenthetically cited.

  72. 72.

    See Trull, ‘“Theise dearest offrings”’, for an extensive discussion of Sidney Herbert’s engagement with theological debates concerning the topic of sacrifice, including Psalm 50.

  73. 73.

    Geneva Bible, fol. 248 r.

  74. 74.

    Charles Stevens and John Liebault, Maison Rustique, or The Covntrie Farme, tr. Richard Surflet (London, 1600), sig. A8 v (Stevens and Liebault 1600).

  75. 75.

    Liebault, Maison Rustique, sig. b1 r.

  76. 76.

    John Fitzherbert, Fitzharberts Booke of Husbandrie, 1598 fasc. edn. (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; Norwood, NJ: Walter J. Johnson, 1979), sig. A3 v (Fitzherbert 1979).

  77. 77.

    Heresbach, Fovre Bookes, fol. 2 v.

  78. 78.

    Heresbach, Fovre Bookes, fol. 5 r.

  79. 79.

    Heresbach, Fovre Bookes, fol. 5 v.

  80. 80.

    Davis, Scripture, p. 12.

  81. 81.

    For a discussion of the link between Elizabeth and David, adopted particularly by militant Protestants, see ‘“Even now that Care”: Literary Context’, The Collected Works. Vol. I, pp. 92–101.

  82. 82.

    Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix, p. 91. Sidney Herbert’s editors point especially to the phrase ‘active times’ as ‘part of the Protestant code’ that promoted continental military involvement as necessary for the protection and spread of Protestantism, ‘“Even now that Care”: Literary Context’, p. 100.

  83. 83.

    Daniel Hillel points out that it was David’s leadership abilities that united the tribes of Israel into a nation, in The Natural History of the Bible: An Environmental Exploration of the Hebrew Scriptures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 179–81 (Hillel 2006).

  84. 84.

    Margaret P. Hannay, ‘“House-confinéd maids”: The Presentation of Woman’s Role in the Psalmes of the Countess of Pembroke’, ELR 24.1 (1994): 49 (Hannay 1994).

  85. 85.

    Walsham suggests that individual experiences of providence became a way to distinguish the elect from the reprobate, with providential trials a part of the process that readied the elect for salvation, in Providence, pp. 15–20. It would follow that the practice of recognizing and warning others about such signs would garner spiritual authority.

  86. 86.

    Thomas Bentley, The Monvment of Matrones: conteining seuen seuerall Lamps of Virginitie: The Fourth Lampe (London, 1582), p. 712 (Bentley 1581). See also the discussion of Bentley in Suzanne Trill’s ‘“Speaking to God in his Phrase”’, pp. 273–4.

  87. 87.

    Patrick Collinson, ‘Biblical Rhetoric: The English Nation and National Sentiment in the Prophetic Mode’, in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 18 (Collinson 1997).

  88. 88.

    Henry Arthington, Provision for the poore, now in penurie. Ovt of the Store-Hovse of Gods plentie (London, 1597) (Arthington 1597). Arthington was best known ‘for his association with the executed Presbyterian William Hacket’, and was arrested alongside him in 1591. He ‘recanted’ his involvement with Hacket and was later given a ‘pension from the Earl of Cumberland’, whereupon he ‘gave himself over to the composition of pious works’, Crawford, Mediatrix, p. 112; Thomas, Religion, pp. 158–9. Crawford further observes Margaret Hoby’s reading of Arthington as part of her Puritan spiritual practice, Mediatrix, p. 112.

  89. 89.

    Arthington, Provision, sig. D4 r.

  90. 90.

    Privy Council, The renewing of certaine Orders, p. 12.

  91. 91.

    Power, ‘London and the Control of the “Crisis” ’ pp. 375–6.

  92. 92.

    Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 12–3 (McEachern 1996).

  93. 93.

    MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I: War and Politics, pp. 48–69; and Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, pp. 1–8 both discuss Elizabeth’s thrift in relation to its often negative effect on the military.

  94. 94.

    Hugh Plat, Sundrie new and Artificiall remedies against Famine.…vppon thoccasion of this present Dearth (London, 1596), sigs. A4 r-B1 r; B4 v-C1 r (Plat 1596). Plat is now best known for his recipe manual, Delightes for Ladies (London, 1600) (Plat 1600).

  95. 95.

    Plat, Famine, sig. A2 r.

  96. 96.

    John Cypriano, A Most Strange And Wonderfvll Prophesie Vpon This Trovblesome world, tr. Anthony Hollaway (London, 1595), sigs. B3 r-v (Cypriano 1595). According to Bernard Capp, English Almanacs, authorities reacted negatively to the pamphlet, seizing the printer’s equipment and banning him from his trade, p. 70.

  97. 97.

    Thomas Hill, A Contemplation of Mysteries (London, 1574) sig. A2 v (Hill 1574).

  98. 98.

    Ben Lowe, Imagining Peace: A History of Early English Pacifist Ideas, 1340–1560 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), pp. 14–16 (Lowe 1997).

  99. 99.

    See Lowe’s discussion of early Protestant attitudes towards war and peace, in Imagining Peace, ch. 6.

  100. 100.

    Thomas Procter, Of the Knowledge and conducte of warres (London, 1578), fols. 44 r, 47 r (Procter 1578).

  101. 101.

    Procter, Knowledge and conducte, fol. 47 v.

  102. 102.

    See Psalm 68 in ‘Variant Psalms’, Collected Works, Vol. II, pp. 268–72, especially ll. 17–30.

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    Madeline Bassnett

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Bassnett, M. (2016). Providential Gifts and Agricultural Plenty: The Psalmes of Mary Sidney Herbert. In: Women, Food Exchange, and Governance in Early Modern England . Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40868-2_2

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