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The Milk of Wholesome Government: Elizabeth Clinton’s The Covntesse of Lincolnes Nvrserie

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Women, Food Exchange, and Governance in Early Modern England

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

Abstract

This chapter addresses providentialism in relation to breastmilk and maternal nursing, situating divine gifts of food in the bodies of individual women. Published in 1622 amid another period of crop failure, Elizabeth Clinton’s pamphlet appears to respond to the proclamations of James I, which commanded the landed classes back to the countryside to preserve public order by offering hospitality and charity to the needy. In asserting the nutritive plenty supplied by her daughter-in-law Bridget Clinton, Elizabeth Clinton initially confirms her family’s participation in this nationally defined strategy of local and regional feeding. As this chapter proposes, however, the feeding that Clinton praises also anticipates the Puritan secessionism that would lead her daughters aboard the emigrant ship Arbella to Massachusetts in 1630. Local feeding can be nationally supportive, but as Clinton demonstrates, it might also gesture towards the new possibility of forming independent and transnational covenants with God.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Joan Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions 1500–1760 (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), p. 61 (Thirsk 2007).

  2. 2.

    John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton, 27 October 1621, in The Letters of John Chamberlain, 2 vols, ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), 2.404 (Chamberlain 1939).

  3. 3.

    James I, His Maiesties Speach in the Starre-Chamber, The XX. of Ivne. Anno 1616 (London, 1616), sigs. H1 v–H2 v (James 1616).

  4. 4.

    James I, His Maiesties Speach in the Starre-Chamber, sig. H2 v.

  5. 5.

    James I, A Proclamation commanding Noblemen, Knights, and Gentlemen of quality, to repayre to their Mansion houses in the Country, to attend their seruices, and keepe hospitality, according to the ancient and laudable custome of ENGLAND (London, 20 November 1622) (James 1622).

  6. 6.

    James I, Orders Appointed by his Maiestie to be straightly obserued, for the preuenting and remedying of the dearth of Graine and other Victuall (London, 1622), sigs. B1 r, C2 r (James 1622).

  7. 7.

    James I, A Proclamation for reliefe of the poore, and remedying the high prices of Corne (London, 22 December 1622) (James 1622).

  8. 8.

    James I, A Proclamation commanding Noblemen.

  9. 9.

    Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln, The Covntesse of Lincolnes Nvrserie (Oxford, 1622), sig. A4 r (Clinton 1622). All further citations of this text will be provided parenthetically. Clinton’s husband Thomas died in 1619, whereupon her son Theophilus took the title, and moved into Tattershall Castle. Clinton is correctly Dowager Countess; she resided in the hamlet of Sempringham with her three younger sons. For biographical information see Ernest Caulfield, ‘The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie with a Forward by Thomas Lodge; Oxford, 1622’, American Journal of Diseases of Children 43.1 (1932): 151–62 (Caulfield 1932); and Betty S. Travitsky, ‘Clinton, Elizabeth, countess of Lincoln (1574? –1630?)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; Online edn. Oct. 2007) (Travitsky 2004).

  10. 10.

    Caulfield, ‘Countesse’; Michelle M. Dowd, Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), esp. ch. 2 (Dowd 2009); Marilyn Luecke, ‘The Reproduction of Culture and the Culture of Reproduction in Elizabeth Clinton’s The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie’, in Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain, ed. Mary E. Burke, Jane Donawerth, Linda L. Dove, and Karen Nelson (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), pp. 238–52 (Luecke 2000). Although Clinton’s work is often mentioned in the context of discussions of mother’s legacies—Dorothy Leigh’s A Mothers Blessing, or Elizabeth Joscelin’s The Mothers Legacy to Her Unborn Child—it is not a legacy—Clinton neither expects to die nor addresses her children.

  11. 11.

    For discussions of milk, maternal breastfeeding, and nationalism, see in particular Rachel Trubowitz, Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) (Trubowitz 2012); and Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), ch. 4, pp. 127–46 (Wall 2002).

  12. 12.

    Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, Books I and II, ed. Kenneth B. Murdock ass’t by Elizabeth W. Miller (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 239 (Mather 1977).

  13. 13.

    Jacqueline Eales, ‘A Road to Revolution: The Continuity of Puritanism, 1559–1642’, in The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700, ed. Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 190 (Eales 1996). See also Elizabeth Wade White, Anne Bradstreet: ‘The Tenth Muse’ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 57 ff. for further details about the Clintons, including Theophilus’s activities during the civil wars (White 1971).

  14. 14.

    Catharine Gray, Women Writers and Public Debate in 17th-Century Britain (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 49, 145 (Gray 2007); White, Anne Bradstreet, p. 81.

  15. 15.

    For further biographical information, see Caulfield, ‘Countesse’, p. 153; N.H. Keeble, ‘Bradstreet, Anne (1612/13–1672)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; Online edn May 2014) (Keeble 2004); Luecke, ‘Reproduction’, pp. 242–3 n. 14; Roger Thompson, ‘Johnson, Isaac (bap. 1610, d. 1630)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; Online edn May 2006) (Thompson 2004).

  16. 16.

    Thomas Dudley, ‘Gov. Dudley’s Letter to the Countess of Lincoln, 1631’, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Vol. VIII (London and New York: Johnson Reprint Co., 1968), p. 40 (Dudley 1968).

  17. 17.

    Dudley, ‘Gov. Dudley’s Letter’, pp. 37–8.

  18. 18.

    Dudley, ‘Gov. Dudley’s Letter’, pp. 42–3.

  19. 19.

    Randall Martin, ‘Pauline Cartography, Missionary Nationalism, and The Tempest’, in Shakespeare / Adaptation / Modern Drama: Essays in Honour of Jill L. Levenson, ed. Randall Martin and Katherine Scheil (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2011), p. 208 (Martin 2011).

  20. 20.

    Dudley, ‘Gov. Dudley’s Letter’, p. 36.

  21. 21.

    Diane Willen, ‘Godly Women in Early Modern England: Puritanism and Gender’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 43.4 (1992): 565 (Willen 1992).

  22. 22.

    Willen, ‘Godly Women’, p. 569.

  23. 23.

    Willen, ‘Godly Women’, p. 571.

  24. 24.

    Willen, ‘Godly Women’, p. 578.

  25. 25.

    Gray, Women Writers; Christina Luckyj, ‘A Mouzell for Melastomus in Context: Rereading the Swetnam-Speght Debate’, ELR 40.1 (2010): 113–31 (Luckyj 2010); Edith Snook, ‘Dorothy Leigh’s The Mother’s Blessing and the Political Maternal Voice in Seventeenth-Century England’, in The Literary Mother: Essays on Representations of Maternity and Child Care, ed. Susan C. Staub (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2007), pp. 161–84 (Snook 2007); Micheline White, ‘Women Writers and Literary-Religious Circles in the Elizabethan West Country: Anne Dowriche, Anne Lock Prowse, Anne Lock Moyle, Ursula Fulford, and Elizabeth Rous’, Modern Philology 103.2 (2005): 187–214 (White 2005).

  26. 26.

    Trubowitz, Nation and Nurture, pp. 38–42; Curtis Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 116 (Perry 1997).

  27. 27.

    Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), pp. 179–81 (Heal 1990).

  28. 28.

    Helen Hackett, ‘The Rhetoric of (In)fertility: Shifting Responses to Elizabeth I’s Childlessness’, in Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 149 (Hackett 2007).

  29. 29.

    Hackett, ‘Rhetoric of (In)fertility’, p. 150.

  30. 30.

    Hackett, ‘Rhetoric of (In)fertility’, p. 164.

  31. 31.

    John Jones, The Arte and Science of preseruing Bodie and Soule in al Health, Wisedome, and Catholike Religion: Phisically, Philosophically, and Diuinely deuised (London, 1579), sigs. A2 r, Q2 r (Jones 1579).

  32. 32.

    Jones, Arte and Science, sig. B2 r.

  33. 33.

    Jones, Arte and Science, sig. a v.

  34. 34.

    Jones, Arte and Science, sig. G4 v.

  35. 35.

    For further discussion of James’s image as nourishing father, see Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture, pp. 115–49; Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 218–49 (Shuger 1990); Trubowitz, Nation and Nurture, pp. 94–108.

  36. 36.

    James I, ‘Basilicon Doron’, in King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 20, 27 (James 1994).

  37. 37.

    James I, ‘The Trew Law of Free Monarchies’ (1603), in King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 65 (James 1994).

  38. 38.

    The Geneva Bible, 1560 facs. edn (Madison and Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969) (Geneva Bible 1969).

  39. 39.

    William Younger, The Nvrses Bosome: A Sermon within the Greene-Yard in Norwich. On the Guild-day when their Maior takes his Oath (London, 1617), titlepage, sig. A2 r (Younger 1617).

  40. 40.

    Younger, Nvrses Bosome, sig. A2 r.

  41. 41.

    Younger, Nvrses Bosome, p. 3.

  42. 42.

    Younger, Nvrses Bosome, p. 12.

  43. 43.

    OED Online, magistrate, n. 1. b.

  44. 44.

    Younger, Nvrses Bosome, p. 15.

  45. 45.

    Younger, Nvrses Bosome, pp. 15–16.

  46. 46.

    Younger, Nvrses Bosome, p. 22.

  47. 47.

    Younger, Nvrses Bosome, p. 23.

  48. 48.

    Younger, Nvrses Bosome, p. 25.

  49. 49.

    Younger, Nvrses Bosome, p. 7.

  50. 50.

    Gray, Women Writers, p. 38.

  51. 51.

    Gray, Women Writers, p. 53.

  52. 52.

    Gray, Women Writers, p. 49.

  53. 53.

    Christina Luckyj, ‘Disciplining the Mother in Seventeenth-Century English Puritanism’, in Performing Maternity in Early Modern England, ed. Kathryn M. Moncrief and Kathryn R. McPherson (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), p. 114 (Luckyj 2007).

  54. 54.

    John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Godlie Forme of Hovseholde Government (London, 1598), pp. 235–9 (Dod and Cleaver 1598); William Gouge, Of Domesticall Dvties (London, 1622), pp. 507–19 (Gouge 1622); William Perkins, Christian Oeconomie: Or, a Short Svrvey of the Right Manner of erecting and ordering a Familie, according to the Scriptures, tr. Thomas Pickering (London, 1609), pp. 135–6 (Perkins 1609).

  55. 55.

    Ben Jonson, ‘To Penshurst’, in Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (London and New York: Penguin, 1975, 1996), pp. 95–8, lines 93–4 (Jonson 1996 [1975]).

  56. 56.

    William Herbert, Herberts Child-Bearing Woman from the Conception to the Weaning of the Child (London, 1648), pp. 54–5 (Herbert 1648).

  57. 57.

    Anon., The Office of Christian Parents: Shewing how children are to be gouerned throughout all ages and times of their life (Cambridge, 1616), pp. 50–1 (Anon. 1616).

  58. 58.

    Clinton married her seventeen-year-old husband around 1584, when she would have been approximately ten years old; see Travitsky, ‘Clinton, Elizabeth’, ODNB.

  59. 59.

    Younger, Nvrses Bosome, p. 26.

  60. 60.

    Dorothy Leigh, ‘The Mothers Blessing’, in Women’s Writing in Stuart England: The Mothers’ Legacies of Dorothy Leigh, Elizabeth Joscelin, and Elizabeth Richardson, ed. Sylvia Brown (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1999), p. 23 (Leigh 1999).

  61. 61.

    Younger, Nvrses Bosome, p. 24.

  62. 62.

    James I, A Proclamation commanding Noblemen.

  63. 63.

    Jones, Bodie and Soule, sig. a v.

  64. 64.

    Joan Thirsk, English Peasant Farming: The Agrarian History of Lincolnshire from Tudor to Recent Times (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), p. 193 (Thirsk 1957).

  65. 65.

    Eales, ‘Road to Revolution’, pp. 202, 208.

  66. 66.

    Younger, Nvrses Bosome, p. 25.

  67. 67.

    Thomas Phaer, The Regiment of Life (London, 1596), sig. K1 r (Phaer 1596).

  68. 68.

    Thomas Moffett, Healths Improvement: Or, Rules Comprizing and Discovering the Nature, Method, and Manner of Preparing all sorts of Food Used in this Nation (London, 1655), p. 120 (Moffett 1655).

  69. 69.

    Dod and Cleaver, Godlie Forme, p. 237; Jean Baptiste van Helmont, Oriatrike, or, Physick Refined (London, 1662), pp. 797–8 (van Helmont 1662).

  70. 70.

    Desiderius Erasmus, ‘The New Mother’, in The Colloquies of Erasmus, tr. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 283 (Erasmus 1965).

  71. 71.

    Richard Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman (London, 1631), pp. 161–2 (Brathwait 1631).

  72. 72.

    Thomas Elyot, The Castell of Health (London, 1595), p. 52 (Elyot 1595). William Vaughan adds that there is ‘no comparison’ between the milk of a woman and that of non-human animals, in Directions for Health, Naturall and Artificiall (London, 1626), p. 41 (Vaughan 1626).

  73. 73.

    Henry Buttes, Dyets Dry Dinner (London, 1599), sig. N2 v (Buttes 1599).

  74. 74.

    Moffett, Healths Improvement, p. 122.

  75. 75.

    Moffett, Healths Improvement, p. 119.

  76. 76.

    James Guillimeau, The Nvrsing of Children, published with The Happy Deliverie of Women (London, 1612), p. 3; see pp. 2–5 for his full description of a wet nurse’s qualities (Guillimeau 1612).

  77. 77.

    Moffett, Healths Improvement, p. 126.

  78. 78.

    Moffett, Healths Improvement, p. 127.

  79. 79.

    Keith Thomas, ‘Cleanliness and Godliness in Early Modern England’, in Religion, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 62 (Thomas 1994).

  80. 80.

    Moffett, Healths Improvement, p. 122.

  81. 81.

    Moffett, Healths Improvement, pp. 122–3.

  82. 82.

    Guillimeau, The Nvrsing of Children, p. 9.

  83. 83.

    Moffett, Healths Improvement, pp. 126–7. Gerard’s Herbal identifies lungwort, or hawkweed, as ‘of singular vse in the Pthisis, that is, the vlceration or consumption of the lungs’; John Gerard, The Herbal or Generall Historie of Plantes, 1633 facs. edn (New York: Dover, 1975), p. 306 (Gerard 1975).

  84. 84.

    Moffett, Healths Improvement, p. 123.

  85. 85.

    Moffett, Healths Improvement, p. 123.

  86. 86.

    Laurent Joubert, Popular Errors, tr. and annotated Gregory David de Rocher (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1989), p. 193 (Joubert 1989).

  87. 87.

    Guillimeau, The Nvrsing of Children, sig. Ii4 r.

  88. 88.

    Erasmus, ‘New Mother’, pp. 273, 283.

  89. 89.

    Younger, Nvrses Bosome, p. 25.

  90. 90.

    Whether these citations were inserted by Clinton or her printers, they have the same guiding effect on a reader.

  91. 91.

    The Geneva Bible, Isaiah, The Argument, fol. 282 v.

  92. 92.

    Victoria Brownlee argues that ‘Marian maternity becomes a mechanism of deliverance’ in the works of Dorothy Leigh and Aemilia Lanyer; Clinton appears to be thinking in a similarly typological manner. See ‘Literal and Spiritual Births: Mary as Mother in Seventeenth-Century Women’s Writing’, Renaissance Quarterly 68 (2015): 1300 (Brownlee 2015).

  93. 93.

    Anon., Office, pp. 52–3. This passage also references Numbers 11:12.

  94. 94.

    George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, Directions for Preachers (Oxford, 1622), sig. A2 v (Abbot 1622).

  95. 95.

    Younger, Nvrses Bosome, p. 22.

  96. 96.

    Younger, Nvrses Bosome, p. 25.

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    Madeline Bassnett

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Bassnett, M. (2016). The Milk of Wholesome Government: Elizabeth Clinton’s The Covntesse of Lincolnes Nvrserie . 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_3

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