Daughterly Desires: Representing and Reimagining the Feminine in Anna Hume’s Triumphs

Abstract

Daughterly desires, both dutiful and dissenting, haunt the extant published writing of the Lowland Borders writer Anna Hume (fl. 1644). Her only known incarnation is as a loyal daughter, faithful to the memory of her father, Sir David Hume of Godscroft (c.1560-c.1632), pre-eminent ‘Scoto-Latinist’ poet and humanist historiographer.’ Amidst political controversy, she ensured the posthumous publication of his work, The History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus, a seemingly arduous duty but one which she honoured in the apparent fulfilment of her father’s desire.² In 1644, the History was published by the Edinburgh printer, Ewan Tyler; the daughter’s translation of Petrarch’s first three Trionfi, entitled The Triumphs of Love: Chastity: Death: Translated out of Petrarch, was issued by the same press and in the same year, conceivably the textual incarnation of her desire to be ‘other’ than the dutiful daughter. This essay suggests that Hume constructs a new ‘daughterly’ identity for herself in the realm of the symbolic: the auctoritas of the literary father, Petrarch, is transferred to a new female auctoritas, the Princess Palatinate, daughter of Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, to whom the work is dedicated and to whom Hume presents herself as ‘the humblest of your Highnesse servants’.