Abstract
In the opening paragraph of her autobiographical ‘Booke of Rememberance’ (1638–9), Elizabeth Isham (1608–54) echoed the words of Psalm 71 in a bold statement of vocation: ‘yet unto Olde age and gray head O God forsake me not but \untill/that I have decleared thine arme unto this generation and thy power to them that shall come’.1 But if in these words she placed her literary effort alongside the evangelism of the psalmist, she was quick to clarify that her own anticipated audience was much more circumscribed. ‘not that I intend to have th[is] published’, she explains in the margin, ‘but to this end I have it in praise a than[k]fullnes to God. and for my owne benefit. which if it may doe my Brother or his children any pleasure I think to leave it them. whom I hope will charitable censure of me’.
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Notes
Lucy Hutchinson’s prefaces adopt a rhetorical posture of humility that was common for both male and female writers — and went unremarked when Order and Disorder (1679) was attributed to her brother. Erica Longfellow, Women and Religions Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 204–5.
The most influential definition of autobiography is Georges Gusdorf, ‘Conditions and Limits of Autobiography’ in James Olney (ed. and trans) Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 28–48.
Gusdorf’s model has been criticised as presupposing a unified self that is often unattainable for women; see especially Shari Benstock, ‘Authorizing the Autobiographical’ in Shari Benstock (ed.), The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 10–33.
Michelle Dowd and Julie Eckerle summarise the implications of these theories for early modern texts in the Introduction to their volume, Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 2–4.
Adam Smyth, for example, cautions those who expect to find ‘a glimpse of a coherent, self-reflexive subjectivity that is in the process of emerging’ in early modern life writings. Adam Smyth, ‘Almanacs, Annotators, and Life-Writing in Early Modern England’, ELR 38 (2008), 200–44.
Kimberly Anne Coles, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 6.
For histories of the Isham family see Isaac Stephens, ‘The Courtship and Singlehood of Elizabeth Isham, 1630–1634’, HJ 51 (2008), 1–25.
Mary E. Finch, The Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families 1540–1640 (Oxford: Northamptonshire Record Society, 1956), pp. 6–37.
and Sir Gyles Isham, (ed. and Introduction) The Correspondence of Bishop Brian Duppa and Sir Justinian Isham 1650–1660 (Lamport Hall, Northamptonshire: Northamptonshire Record Society, 1955).
Princeton fol. 9r. I understand moderate puritanism, as Peter Lake denned it, as resting in ‘a capacity, which the godly claimed, of being able to recognize one another in the midst of a corrupt and unregenerate world. That capacity, in turn, rested on a common view of the implications of right doctrine, both for the private spiritual experience of the individual and for the collective.’ Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 282.
By establishment Calvinists I intend those divines who held official office while ‘sharing much with their puritan confreres but in no sense puritans themselves’, such as John King, a significant influence on Elizabeth Isham. James S. McGee, ‘On Misidentifying Puritans: The Case of Thomas Adams’, Albion 30 (1998), 401–418 (404).
Isham’s booklists, in Northamptonshire Record Office Isham Correspondence MSS IC 4829 and IC 4825, included John Dod, Ten sermons tending chief-ely to the sitting of men for the worthy receiuing of the Lords Supper (London: William Hall for Roger Jackson, 1609).
John Abernethy, A Christian and heavenly treatise containing physicke for the soule (London: I. Beale for John Budge, 1615).
John Preston, The saints daily exercise (London: W. L. for N. Bourne, 1629).
The family library surviving at Lamport Hall includes several similar books not in Isham’s booklists, such as Arthur Dent, The plaine mans path-way to heauen (London: for Robert Dexter, 1602).
George Webbe, ‘A short Direction for the dayly exercise of a Christian’, in William Perkins, et al., A garden of spirituall flowers (London: W. White for T. Pavier, 1610), fols F6r-v.
Richard Rogers, ‘A Direction vnto true happines’, in William Perkins et al. A garden of spirituall flowers (1610), fols A8v, Br.
Nehemiah Wallington, Guildhall Library MS 204, p. 409. Dionys Fitzherbert’s account of her religious melancholy, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 154 and MS e. Mus. 169, and Lambeth Palace Library MS Sion arc L.40.2 E47. Kathryn Hodgkin’s edition of Fitzherbert’s account is forthcoming from Ashgate, and she kindly allowed me to read the informative Introduction. For further discussion of autobiographical genres in this period, see the essays in Dowd and Eckerle, Genre and Women’s Life Writing; Sharon Cadman Seelig, Autobiography and gender in early modern literature: reading women’s lives, 1600–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
and Kate Hodgkin, Madness in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007).
Alice Eardley, ‘“Like hewen stone”: Augustine, Audience and Revision in Elizabeth Isham’s “Booke of Rememberance” [c. 1639]’, in Anne Lawrence-Mathers and Phillipa Hardman (eds), Women and Writing, c.1340-c.1650: The Domestication of Print Culture (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2010), pp. 177–95.
Lady Grace Mildmay’s autobiographical reflections are in the Northamptonshire Studies Collection in Northamptonshire Central Library. They have been rearranged and edited in Linda A. Pollack (ed.), With faith and physic: the life of a Tudor gentlewoman, Lady Grace Mildmay, 1552–1620 (New York: St Martin’s, 1995).
Rose Thurgood and Cecily Johnson appear to have been influenced by continental traditions in writing their early examples of the conversion narrative. Naomi Baker (ed.), Scripture Women: Rose Thurgood, ‘A Lecture of Repentance’, and Cicely Johnson, ‘Fanatical Reveries’ (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2005).
Saint Augustine of Hippo, Saint Augustines confessions translated, trans. William Watts (London: John Norton for John Partridge, 1631).
Mary A. Papazian, ‘The Augustinian Donne: How a “Second S. Augustine”?’ in Mary A. Papazian (ed.) John Donne and the Protestant Reformation: New Perspectives (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), pp. 66–89, esp. 67–9.
The closets at Lamport Hall appear to have served multiple functions; see Lena Cowen Orlin, ‘Gertrude’s Closet’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 134 (1998), 44–67.
Princeton fol. 11v. Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement c. 1620–1643 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 52–3.
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Longfellow, E. (2010). ‘Take unto ye words’: Elizabeth Isham’s ‘Booke of Rememberance’ and Puritan Cultural Forms. In: Harris, J., Scott-Baumann, E. (eds) The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558–1680. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289727_10
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