Abstract
In 1616 the Hanmer family of Wales began to compile an intriguing assortment of domestic documents that now reside in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Folger MS V.a. 347, best described as a manuscript commonplace and receipt book, seems to have served a wide variety of practical and spiritual purposes for the Hanmer family. The manuscript is labeled “A Sermon booke” on the flyleaf and begins, appropriately enough, with twenty-two pages of sermon notes, concluding with notes from a sermon on Romans 7:21. A mere turn of the page, however, brings the reader to a very different set of notes: a recipe entitled “to pot hare” (fo. 23r), one of several recipes that fill the manuscript’s next five pages. This juxtaposition of sermon notes, recipes, and other personal records continues throughout the manuscript.’ The Folger collection also includes a late seventeenth-century manuscript (MS V.a. 468) owned by Elizabeth Fowler that shares many of the characteristics of the Hanmer document. This book begins with numerous pages of recipes, with titles such as “to pot venison” (fo. 1r), “To make Goosbury Creame” (fo. 7r), and “To Stew Mutton” (fo. 22r). Later in the manuscript, however, we find sermon notes in different italic hands, a few medicinal recipes, and, on the final page, a devotional poem.
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Notes
The multiple hands of the text and the historical span of the individual entries (over one hundred years) preclude a precise attribution of authorship to this text. However, the name of “Dorothy Philips,” who married John Hanmer in 1652, appears in multiple places on the flyleaf, suggesting that she had at least a tangential role to play in the book’s compilation. For the difficulty of ascribing authorship to manuscript miscellanies and commonplace books, see Elizabeth Clarke, “Women’s Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England,” in Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, ed. Susanne Woods and Margaret P. Hannay (New York: MLA, 2000), 52–60, esp. 54–57;
Earle Havens, Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 68;
and Victoria Burke, “Women and Early Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Culture: Four Miscellanies,” The Seventeenth Century 12.2 (1997): 135–150, esp. 135–136. For biographical information about the Hanmer family, see Wales and the Marches: Catalog of Stanley Crowe, Bookseller and Printseller, No. 64. (London: Stanley Crowe, 1960), 41.
For the variety and irregularity that exists even within the genre of the commonplace book, see Havens, Commonplace Books, 65; and Janet Theophano, Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
For the connection between commonplace book compilation and patterns of thought, see Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
For women’s management of domestic properties, see Erickson, Women and Property; and Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies, 15–51. For the decline in the number of official positions open to devout women (whether Catholic or Protestant) see Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500–1720 (London: Routledge, 1993), 75;
Margaret King, Women of the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 136;
and Laurence, Women in England, 196. As Kathleen Davies and Margo Todd have argued, it is important not to exaggerate the changes in family life and women’s roles brought about by the Reformation. See Davies , “Continuity and Change in Literary Advice on Marriage,” in Marriage and Society: Studies in the History of Marriage, ed. R.B. Outwaite (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981), 58–80;
and Todd , Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
However, as Patrick Collinson and others have shown, real changes—including the increased focus on the family unit and the wife’s household responsibilities—did occur, though they did so gradually. See Collinson , The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 92–93; and Crawford, Women and Religion, 40.
Christine Peters, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 201.
For the emphasis placed on interiority and self-scrutiny by Protestant reformers, see Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997);
Peters, Patterns of Piety, 195–206; William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 179–180;
Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 19–20;
and Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 116–168.
For the importance of personal piety to the lives of Christian women in the early modern period, see A History of Private Life: Passions of the Renaissance, vol. 3, ed. Roger Chartier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 71; Akiko Kusunoki, “‘Their Testament at Their Apron-Strings’: The Representation of Puritan Women in Early-Seventeenth-Century England,” in Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, ed. S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 185–204, esp. 186–189;
and Diane Willen, “Women and Religion in Early Modern England,” in Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe: Public and Private Worlds, ed. Sherrin Marshall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 140–165. Though men were certainly enjoined to practice devotion at home, the pious regime was more strongly associated with women in cultural discourse. In Recreations with the Muses (London, 1637), the Earl of Stirling famously argued that “[t]he weaker sex” was “to piety more prone” (107).
Though my own study is limited to Protestant texts, the link between housework and piety was certainly not unique to Protestant women. See especially Frances E. Dolan, “Reading, Work, and Catholic Women’s Biographies,” English Literary Renaissance 33.3 (2003): 328–357;
and Claire Walker, “Combining Martha and Mary: Gender and Work in Seventeenth-Century English Cloisters,” Sixteenth Century journal 30.2 (1999): 397–417.
See for example Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, Clv; and William Perkins, Christian Oeconomie: Or, A Short Survey of the Right Manner of erecting and ordering a Familie, according to the Scriptures (London, 1609), Blv–B5r.
For puritan concepts of the spiritualized household, see Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, “Introduction: The Puritan Ethos, 1560–1700,” in The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700, ed. Durston and Eales (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 1–31, esp. 27.
Robert Cleaver, A Godlie Forme of Householde Government: For the Ordering of Private Families, according to the direction of Gods word (London, 1598), L5v–L6r.
See also Gervase Markham, The English Housewife, ed. Michael R. Best (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986), 5;
and Thomas Tusser, Five hundreth points of good husbandry united to as many of good husswiferie (London, 1573), S3v.
For the sexual division of labor in the early modern home, see Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 189;
Laurence, Women in England, 196; Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 42 and 252;
and Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 68–70.
Elizabeth Clarke, “Diaries,” in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 609–613, esp. 609–610.
Richard Rogers, Seven Treatises (London, 1603);
John Featley, A Fountaine of Teares (London, 1646);
and John Beadle, The Journal or Diary of a Thankful Christian (London, 1656). All citations will refer to these editions of the texts. See also Mendelson, “Stuart Women’s Diaries,” 185–186; Crawford, Women and Religion, 76; Sara Heller Mendelson, The Mental World of Stuart Women (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 94–95;
Owen C. Watkins, The Puritan Experience: Studies in Spiritual Autobiography (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), 11;
Valerie Raoul, “Women and Diaries: Gender and Genre,” Mosaic 22.3 (1989): 57–65, esp. 61;
Durston and Eales, “Introduction,” 10; John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 85–126;
and Effie Botonaki, “Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen’s Spiritual Diaries: Self-Examination, Covenanting, and Account Keeping,” Sixteenth Century journal 30.1 (1999): 3–21.
For biographical information on Lady Hoby, see Joanna Moody, introduction to The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby 1599–1605, ed. Moody (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1998), xv–lii.
For Hoby’s association with puritan theology, see also Mary Ellen Lamb, “Margaret Hoby’s Diary: Women’s Reading Practices and the Gendering of the Reformation Subject,” in Pilgrimage for Love: Essays in Early Modern Literature in Honor of Josephine A. Roberts, ed. Sigrid King (Tempe: ACMR, 1999), 63–94.
Other important critical studies of the Hoby diary include: Elspeth Graham, “Women’s Writing and the Self,” in Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 209–233, esp. 226;
Margaret P. Hannay, “‘O Daughter Heare’: Reconstructing the Lives of Aristocratic Englishwomen,” in Attending to Women in Early Modern England, ed. Betty S. Travitsky and Adele F. Seeff (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 35–63;
Sharon Cadman Seelig, Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1600–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 15–33;
and Helen Wilcox, “Private Writing and Public Function: Autobiographical Texts by Renaissance Englishwomen,” in Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, ed. S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 47–62.
For useful discussions of puritan beliefs and the historical context of puritanism in early modern England, see Durston and Eales, “Introduction,” 1–31; Peter Lake, “Defining Puritanism—Again?” in Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith, ed. Francis J. Bremer (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993), 3–29;
and Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 1–15.
Dorothy M. Meads, ed., The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby 1599–1605 (London: Routledge, 1930);
and Joanna Moody, ed., The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby 1599–1605 (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1998). Moody adopts the punctuation of Meads’s 1930 edition.
Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorigue (London, 1553). For further discussion of epideictic rhetoric, see Marjorie Donker and George M. Mulldrow, Dictionary of Literary Rhetorical Conventions of the English Renaissance (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982), 91–94;
and Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 131–135.
Katherine Philips, “In memory of that excellent person Mrs. Mary Lloyd of Bodidrist,” in The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, The Matchless Orinda, ed. Patrick Thomas, vol. 1 (Essex: Stump Cross Books, 1990), 111–114.
Clifford’s diaries are spread out across several different documents. A 1603 memoir was appended to the manuscripts of the 1616–1619 diary, which I will refer to as the Knole Diary, following the D.J.H. Clifford edition of the diaries. The later diary, 1650–1675, will be referred to as the Kendall Diary. During the last year of her life (1676), Clifford dictated her diary entries to as many as four different scribes. This record exists as a separate document, though I will refer to it here as part of the Kendall Diary for the sake of simplicity. For more information on the different diaries and manuscripts, see D.J.H. Clifford, introduction to The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. Clifford (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1990), x–xvi;
and Katherine Osler Acheson, “The Modernity of the Early Modern: The Example of Anne Clifford,” in Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism, ed. Viviana Comensoli and Paul Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 27–51, esp. 36 n.6 and 44.
Anne Clifford, The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. D.J.H. Clifford (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1990). All citations refer to this edition of the diaries.
For more detailed discussion of the legal disputes, see Lewalski, Writing Women, 125–151; Mary Ellen Lamb, “The Agency of the Split Subject: Lady Anne Clifford and the Uses of Reading,” English Literary Renaissance 22.3 (1992): 347–368;
Acheson, “The Modernity of the Early Modern,” 36–39; and D.J.H. Clifford, prologue to The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. Clifford (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1990), 1–18.
See Megan Matchinske, “Serial Identity: History, Gender, and Form in the Diary Writing of Lady Anne Clifford,” in Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England, ed. Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 65–80, esp. 67.
For detailed discussions of Clifford’s building projects and their traces in her diaries, see O’Connor, “Representations of Intimacy,” 86–88; Wilcox, “Private Writing,” 51–52; and Susan Comilang, “English Noblewomen and the Organization of Space: Gardens, Mourning Posts, and Religious Recesses” (Ph.D. diss., The George Washington University, 2001), 106–146.
D.J.H. Clifford, “The Years Between, 1620–1649,” in The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. Clifford (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1990), 83–102, esp. 91.
Helen Wilcox, “Entering The Temple: Women, Reading, and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Religion, Literature and Politics in Post-Reformation England, 1540–1688, ed. Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 187–207, esp. 192.
George Herbert, “The Family,” in The Temple, The Complete English Poems, ed. John Tobin (London: Penguin, 1991), 128.
George Herbert, “The Church Porch,” in The Temple, The Complete English Poems, ed. John Tobin (London: Penguin, 1991), 6–22.
Scholars have debated the exact nature of Herbert’s religious allegiances (the socalled “religious wars” in Herbert criticism). Relevant studies include Helen Vendler, The Poetry of George Herbert (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975);
Stanley Fish, The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978);
Rosemond Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978);
Barbara Lewalski, “Emblems of the Religious Lyric: George Herbert and Protestant Emblematics,” Hebrew University Studies in Literature 6 (1978): 32–56;
Leah S. Marcus, “George Herbert and the Anglican Plain Style,” in ‘Too Rich to Clothe the Sunne’: Essays on George Herbert, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980), 179–193;
Chana Bloch, Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985);
Christopher Hodgkins, Authority, Church, and Society in George Herbert: Return to the Middle Way (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993);
and Christina Malcolmson, Heart-Work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
George Herbert, “Discipline,” in The Temple, The Complete English Poems, ed. John Tobin (London: Penguin, 1991), 168–169.
George Herbert, “Business,” in The Temple, The Complete English Poems, ed. John Tobin (London: Penguin, 1991), 105–106.
George Herbert. “The Family,” in The Temple, The Complete English Poems, ed. John Tobin (London: Penguin, 1991), 174. Malcolmson reads this poem as demonstrative of “the coordination of holy motive and sanctified action” (Heart-Work, 170).
For studies of domestic drama and its popularity during this period, see Andrew Clark, Domestic Drama: A Survey of the Origins, Antecedents, and Nature of the Domestic Play in England, 1500–1640 (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1975);
Viviana Comensoli, “Household” Business: Domestic Plays of Early Modern England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996);
Diana E. Henderson, “The Theater and Domestic Culture,” in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 173–194; and Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture.
For the particular problems faced by early modern dramatists as they wrestled with issues of iconography and the nature of religious spectacle within a decidedly visual and representational generic medium, see Diehl, Staging Reform; Paul Whitfield White, Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993);
and Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theater: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
Though Anne is first introduced “as newly come from the Wedding,” (1.2), the actions of the rest of the play suggest that a great deal of time elapses before Act 5. Indeed, Old Harding dies in Act 4, leaving Anne a widow and available to marry Forest at the end of the play. In other words, even though Anne is introduced as a new wife, she does not remain in that position throughout the course of the play. We will see a similar time scheme present in A Woman Killed with Kindness. See Thomas Heywood and William Rowley, Fortune By Land and Sea, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, ed. R.H. Shepherd, vol. 6 (London: John Pearson, 1874), 359–435. All citations refer to this edition of the play. This edition has no lineation.
Kathleen E. McLuskie locates Heywood’s plays within the context of popular Protestantism in Dekker and Heywood: Professional Dramatists (London: St. Martin’s, 1994), 41–48.
Marilyn L. Johnson compares the representation of women in Heywood’s plays, including Fortune, to contemporary Protestant marriage manuals in Images of Women in the Works of Thomas Heywood (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1974), 103 and 131.
Paul Whitfield White, “Theater and Religious Culture,” in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 133– 151, esp. 150 and 151.
Ian Green argues that a large number of “Protestant” publications were “of dubious orthodoxy” and were more interested in promoting good behavior than specific theological positions. This was particularly true of cheap print (including printed plays), which, Green argues, “said a great deal about God, but little about Christ.” Partially as a result of government censorship, plays from the period often tended to focus on “story-telling and pious morality rather than the finer points of official doctrine.” See Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 556 and 565. See also Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle, and William Haughton, The Pleasant Comodie of Patient Grissill, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 212–298. All citations refer to this edition of the play.
For the importance of a closely aligned devotional genre, cases of conscious, to seventeenth-century women’s piety, see Mary Ellen Lamb, “Merging the Secular and the Spiritual in Anne Halkett’s Memoirs,” in Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England, ed. Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 81–96.
For discussions of the play’s domestic disorder in terms of its Christian overtones, see Diana E. Henderson, “Many Mansions: Reconstructing A Woman Killed with Kindness,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 26.2 (1986): 277–294, esp. 277;
Michael Wentworth, “Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness as Domestic Morality,” in Traditions and Innovations: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. David G. Allen and Robert A. White (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 150–162, esp. 150–151;
Nancy A. Gutierrez, “Exorcism by Fasting in A Woman Killed with Kindness: A Paradigm of Puritan Resistance?” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 33 (1994): 43–62;
and White, “Theater and Religious Culture,” 149. For the link between domestic economy and moral conduct in the play, see Laura G. Bromley, “Domestic Conduct in A Woman Killed with Kindness,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 26.2 (1986): 259–276;
and Ann Christensen, “Business, Pleasure, and the Domestic Economy in Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness,” Exemplaria 9.2 (1997): 315–340.
Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness, ed. Brian Scobie (London: A & C Black, 1985). All citations refer to this edition of the play. Though the play begins with a new marriage, internal evidence suggests that many years actually pass during the course of the plot. For example, in scene 13 a maid brings in two ofAnne and John Frankford’s children, suggesting the passage of several years over the course of their marriage.
See Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture, 137–181, esp. 167. On the complex gender ideologies associated with hospitality, see also Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). Heywood vividly dramatizes the implicit dangers of hospitality in The Rape of Lucrece (London, 1608). Lucrece’s rape is represented as a direct, though unintended, consequence of her exemplary housewifery and her generosity as a hostess.
For a discussion of the significance of both table and bed to marital relationships, see the following essays in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): Catherine Richardson, “Properties of Domestic Life: The Table in Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness,” 129–152; and Sasha Roberts, “‘Let me the curtains draw’: The Dramatic and Symbolic Properties of the Bed in Shakespearean Tragedy,” 153–174.
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© 2009 Michelle M. Dowd
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Dowd, M.M. (2009). Divine Drudgery: The Spiritual Logic of Housework. In: Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230620391_4
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