‘Words more than civil’: Republican Civility in Lucy Hutchinson’s ‘The Life of John Hutchinson’

Abstract

‘Civility’ is probably not the first word that springs to mind in discussing the zealously Puritan writings of Lucy Hutchinson (1620–81). Contrary to contemporary and later ideas of the ladylike writer, she commanded a remarkably large vocabulary of vituperation and deployed it throughout her substantial canon of writings. The wars she chronicled were ‘more than civil’ in wider senses than Lucan’s (Pharsalia, book 1, line 1). And yet civility greatly concerned her. In the normative sense of an ideal of moral or public intercourse, ‘civil’ and cognate words occur more than fifty times in her life of her husband and twelve times in an earlier version. And her apocalyptic zeal did not impede a very strong concern to vindicate the civil sphere against the religious. Her concern for civility proves to throw a broader light on the nature of English republican discourse, as well as illuminating the tight thematic and conceptual unity of a text that has been more often quarried as a historical source than carefully read as a whole.¹