Abstract
In the midst of the violence and turmoil of the English Revolution, Lucy Hutchinson completed a translation into couplets of Lucretius’s De rerum natura. Left in manuscript until its publication in 1996, it remains a significant accomplishment, both for its priority among English translations and for its authorship by a woman best known for the Protestant piety prominently on display in her Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. As a thinker associated with some of the more rigid variants of Calvinism, Hutchinson seems exactly the sort of writer who would repudiate a classical poet infamous for his materialism and atheism. Hutchinson did indeed denounce the doctrines of her early Lucretian apprenticeship in a preface to her translation and also in a work only recently identified through internal and external evidence as hers: Order and Disorder. David Norbrook established the attribution of this retelling of the book of Genesis in part by demonstrating the many close parallels between it and her translation,1 without, however, fully considering the implications of this odd convergence of piety and philosophical materialism in a writer who supposedly preferred the role of dutiful wife to that of learned poet.2
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Notes
David Norbrook, “Lucy Hutchinson and Order and Disorder: The Manuscript Evidence,” English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 9 (2000): 257–91.
Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, ed. David Norbrook (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 4, on teachings that carry the taint of “vain, foolish, atheistical poesy.” For the text of the poem, I cite Norbrook’s edition parenthetically by canto and line number.
See David Norbrook, “John Milton, Lucy Hutchinson and the Republican Biblical Epic,” in Milton and the Grounds of Contention, ed. Mark R. Kelley, Michael Lieb, and John T. Shawcross (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003), 37–63, and his “Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson: Identity, Ideology and Politics,” In-Between: Essays and Studies in Literary Criticism 9.1–2 (2000): 179–203.
Londa Schiebinger, “Women of Natural Knowledge,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 192–205.
Jonathan Goldberg, The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 5.
Lucy Hutchinson, Lucy Hutchinson’s Translation of Lucretius: De Rerum Natura, ed. Hugh de Quehen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
Stuart Gillespie, “Lucretius in the English Renaissance,” in Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 242. Gillespie and Hardie provide extensive citation of earlier studies on the reception of Lucretius. For useful bibliography of editions and translations of the DRN,
see Cosmo Alexander Gordon, A Bibliography of Lucretius, 2nd ed., ed. E. J. Kenney (Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1985).
I borrow the title of this section from Philip Hardie, Lucretian Receptions: History, The Sublime, Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), the latest study to detect a direct influence of Lucretius upon Milton.
See Reid Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics: Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).
Catherine Wilson, “Epicureanism in Early Modern Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism, ed. James Warren (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 286. Epicureanism became an authoritative and fashionable source of subversive doctrine soon after its introduction in the 1640s. According to Robert Boyle, once infected by Epicurean philosophy, his English contemporaries lost no time in invoking chance to explain the workings of creation and referring all the motions of matter “to the casual Concourse of Atoms.” See A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things (London: Printed by H.C. for John Taylor, 1688), 160–1.
H. A. J. Munro, “Mrs Lucie Hutchinson’s Translation of Lucretius,” The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology 4 (1858; reprint, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1970), 121.
Lucy Hutchinson, On the Principles of the Christian Religion, Addressed to Her Daughter (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brown, 1817), 18.
Erica Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 182.
James J. O’Hara, Inconsistency in Roman Epic: Studies in Catullus, Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid and Lucan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 64–5;
see also John G. Fitch, “Situated Knowledge: Responding to Lucretius,” Arethusa 34.2 (Spring 2001): 211–20.
Lucretius merited careful study from some devout English readers: Richard Bentley, Master of Trinity College and sworn foe of atheism, copiously annotated his copy of De Rerum Natura, ed. Le Fevre, now in the British Library. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, ed. Tannegui Le Fevre (Saumur 1662).
Edmund Waller, “To His Worthy Friend Master Evelyn upon His Translation of Lucretius,” in John Evelyn, An Essay on the First Book of T. Lucretius Carus de Rerum Natura (London: Printed for Gabriel Bedle and Thomas Collins, 1656), n.p.
See Manfred Weidhorn, Dreams in Seventeenth-Century English Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), 24–38;
And Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 75–6.
Shannon Miller, Engendering the Fall: John Milton and Seventeenth-Century Women Writers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 107–35.
Emma L. E. Rees, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 56.
See N. H. Keeble’s essay, “‘The Colonel’s Shadow’: Lucy Hutchinson, Women’s Writing and the Civil War,” in Literature and the English Civil War, ed. Thomas Healey and Jonathan Sawday (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 227–47. See also Sharon Cadman Seelig, Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1600–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 88.
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© 2011 Judy A. Hayden
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Snider, A. (2011). Hutchinson and the Lucretian Body. In: Hayden, J.A. (eds) The New Science and Women’s Literary Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118430_3
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