Abstract
Anna Trapnel’s utterances were shaped — though not dictated — by the godly networks around her. Each choice she made narrowed the subsequent choices available to her. Her prophecies were an outcome of her dense network of godly interactions.1 Those interactions were socially shaped by her encounters in and outside church, and physically shaped by the geography of her London. By tracing the places and the people she mentions in The Cry of a Stone and her other writings, we can begin to reconstruct who and how and where she knew, and how the networks which embraced her forged her ideas. In this essay, I will explore the way Trapnel’s godly intellect and doctrine were shaped by London — not as a whole city, site of urbanisation, but as the series of village-like fragments. Some were only the size of a street. London itself might well have boasted a quarter of a million people, but Trapnel’s own London was a series of thin slices through those swarms and herds. She partook of discursive, intellectual and literary networks with were created in parishes, and by their leading clergy and lecturers. It was Trapnel’s precise locations within London which allowed her to become a voice for radicalism.
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Notes
Trapnel’s life is still under-researched, but see Hilary Hinds edition of Cry of a Stone (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000). All further references will be to this edition. See also Hilary Hinds, ‘Sectarian Spaces: The Politics of Space and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Prophetic Writing’ Literature and History, 13 (2004), 1–25.
Susan Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Rachel Trubowitz, ‘Female Preachers and Male Wives’, in James Holstun (ed.), Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution (London: Cass, 1992), pp. 112–133.
Matthew Prineas, ‘The Discourse of Love and the Rhetoric of Apocalypse in Anna Trapnel’s Folio Songs’, Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 28 (1997), 90–110.
Katharine Gillespie, ‘Anna Trapnel’s Window on the Word: The Domestic Sphere of Public Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Nonconformity’, Bunyan Studies: John Bunyan and His Times, 7 (1997), 49–72.
Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heterodoxy’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 183.
Keith Lindley, Popular politics and religion in Civil War London (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997).
Christopher Durston, ‘Puritan rule and the failure of cultural revolution’ in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (eds), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 210–33.
Paul Seaver, The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics of Religious Dissent, 1560–1662 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970) and below, note 15.
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On Greenhill, see Greaves and Zaller (eds.), Biographical Dictionary; Seaver, The Puritan Lectureships; ODNB; and Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: the Separate churches of London, 1616–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 76.
Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 171.
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Bernard Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism (London: Faber, 1972).
John Simpson, The great joy of saints in the great day of the resurrection (London: [n.p.], 1654).
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Richard L. Greaves, Saints and Rebels: Seven Nonconformists in Stuart England (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, c. 1985).
Walter Thornbury, ‘Aldgate, the Minories and Crutched Friars’, Old and New London, 2 (1878), 245–250. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx? compid=45094
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Robert Davenport, A New Tricke to Cheat the Divell (London: printed by John Okes for Humphrey Blunden, 1639).
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On the book trade during the Civil War, see C. Blagdon, ‘The Stationer’s Company in the Civil War’, Library 5th series 13 (1958), 1–17.
See H. R. Plomer, Dictionary of Booksellers and Printers…1641–67 (London: Bibliographic Society, 1907).
Peter W. M. Blayney, ‘The Bookshops in Paul’s Cross Churchyard’, Occasional Papers Bibliographic Society, 5 (1990).
Peter W. M. Blayney, ‘John Day and the Bookshop That Never Was’, in Lena Cowen Orlin (ed.), Material London, ca. 1600 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), pp. 322–28.
Martin Dzelzainis ‘“The Feminine part of Every Rebellion”: Francis Bacon on Sedition and Libel, and the Beginning of Ideology’, HLQ, 69 (2006), 139–152; Plomer, pp. 31–2, 42–3 and 98.
On Matthew Simmons, see Don McKenzie, ‘Milton’s Printers: Matthew, Mary and Samuel Simmons,’ Milton Quarterly, 14 (1980), 87–91, and D. M. Wolfe (general ed.), Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 volumes (New Haven: Yale University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1953–1982), especially Volume III, and Plomer, p. 164.
Don McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: British Library, c.1986).
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© 2010 Diane Purkiss
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Purkiss, D. (2010). Anna Trapnel’s Literary Geography. 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_13
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