Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633-1700 (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World)

FIGURING MODESTY IN FEMINIST DISCOURSE ACROSS THE AMERICAS, 1633–1700

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series Editors: Allyson Poska and Abby Zanger In the past decade, the study of women and gender has offered some of the most vital and innovative challenges to scholarship on the early modern period. Ashgate’s new series of interdisciplinary and comparative studies, ‘Women and Gender in the Early Modern World’, takes up this challenge, reaching beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Submissions of single-author studies and edited collections will be considered. Titles in this series include: Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas Nora E. Jaffary Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America Angela Vietto Midwifery, Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynaecology The Uses of a Sixteenth-Century Compendium Helen King Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe Kathleen P. Long Women, Imagination and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France Rebecca M. Wilkin

Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700

TAMARA HARVEY George Mason University, USA

© Tamara Harvey 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Tamara Harvey has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Harvey, Tamara, 1966– Figuring modesty in feminist discourse across the Americas, 1633–1700. – (Women and gender in the early modern world) 1. Literature, Modern – 17th century – History and criticism 2. Body, Human, in literature 3. Women in literature 4. America – Literatures – History and criticism 5. America – Literatures – Women authors I. Title 809.9’33561 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harvey, Tamara, 1966– Figuring modesty in feminist discourse across the Americas, 1633–1700 / by Tamara Harvey. p. cm. — (Women and gender in the early modern world) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6452-9 (alk. paper) 1. America—Literatures—History and criticism. 2. America—Literatures—Women authors. 3. Literature, Modern—17th century—History and criticism. I. Title. PN845.H37 2008 810.9’928709032—dc22 2008015494 ISBN: 978-0-7546-6452-9

For Daniel Gordon Stewart and In memory of R. Gordon Harvey

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Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction: Modesty’s Charge: Feminist Functionalism and Seventeenth-Century Feminist Theory

viii ix 1

1 “Now Sisters ... impart your usefulnesse, and force”: Anne Bradstreet’s Feminist Functionalism

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2 “Cuerpo Luminoso”: Body and Soul in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Primero Sueño

51

3 “I doe not thinke the Body that dyes shall rise agayne”: Anne Hutchinson’s Mortalism as Feminist Functionalism

81

4 Femmes fortes: Mysticism and the Female Apostolate of Marie de l’Incarnation

113

Conclusion

141

Bibliography Index

147 157

List of Figures Fig. 1

Title page of Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London, 1616). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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Acknowledgements Lisa Gordis once observed to me that in some sense we both started writing our books as college sophomores in Drew McCoy’s early American history class. Seen from this perspective, Figuring Modesty has been over two decades in the making and in those years I have benefited greatly from the intelligence and generosity of many more people than I can possibly acknowledge here. Michael Clark, Jane Newman, Steven Mailloux, Julia Lupton, and Jacques Derrida all commented on portions of this book when it was first a dissertation. Lisa Gordis, Lisa Logan, Ed Larkin, Zabelle Stodola, Carla Mulford, Denise Albanese, and David Kauffman each read parts of this book in manuscript and provided me with their invaluable insights. Betsey Robinson gave me more information about Arethusa than I could use and has served as my go-to person for the classical world. Lisa Photos, Kari Kalve, Soo La Kim, Brian Loftus, Ellen Weinauer, Kristina Lucenko, Debra Shutika, Eric Anderson, Robert Matz, and Joan Bristol are a few of the many friends who have listened patiently to my rants and given much needed encouragement and advice. I am grateful to the series editors, Allyson M. Poska and Abby Zanger, as well as the outside reader for their very helpful questions and suggestions. Erika Gaffney at Ashgate has been consistently encouraging and responsive, wonderful characteristics in a publisher. Maria Montenegro went above and beyond the call of duty as a proofreader, particularly helping me make key decisions about translations in Chapter 2. In the final stages of writing this book I benefitted immensely from the able assistance of Kathleen Gless. Several dissertation fellowships from the University of California, Irvine, helped me with the first stage of this project. I am very grateful to the English Department at George Mason University for a Terry Comito Junior Faculty Award, which along with my junior leave gave me the time to finish this book. The librarians at Fenwick Library have shown immense patience in obtaining resources for me. This book would not have been possible without the benefit of the collections at the Huntington Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, and Houghton Library at Harvard University. The death of my father, Gordon Harvey, and the birth of my son, Daniel Stewart, marked the writing of this book in ways that I find impossible to describe. I have dedicated this book to the two of them in lieu of trying to express the feelings of love, loss, and wonder wrapped up in these events and in their influence on my life. Neither can I adequately express my gratitude for the support of my mother, Linda Harvey, who has taught me more than she can ever know. Douglas Stewart has perhaps endured the most—sleeplessness, shirked household duties, arcane dinner conversations. His loving encouragement and intelligent suggestions—not to mention the promise of a nice dinner when I finally finished—kept me going. An earlier version of portions of Chapter 1 was published in Early American Literature. Volume 35, No. 1. Copyright © 2000 by University of North Carolina Department of English. Used by permission of the University of North Carolina Press. www.uncpress.unc.edu

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Introduction

Modesty’s Charge: Feminist Functionalism and Seventeenth-Century Feminist Theory It is impossible to overstate the importance of modesty as a virtue for early modern women, particularly those entering public discourse. While most writers and speakers, regardless of gender, had to strike a humble posture, both as a rhetorical courtesy and in order to lessen the possibility of raising the ire of patrons, royalty, and religious authorities, women were also burdened with the need to veil themselves either literally or figuratively as a sign of both their purity and their inherited shame. Pudor, not modestus, is the modesty of women. Commenting on François Fénelon’s assertion that women should have a “pudeur towards knowledge, almost as delicate as that which inspires the horror of vice,” Elizabeth Rapley observes, “[p]udeur went far beyond physical modesty. It represented the feminine identity as it was perceived in the seventeenth century, in all its weakness and limitation” (158). Modesty was a virtue for men as well, but for them modestus or “keeping due measure” was the appropriate Latin cognate—in men, modesty connoted probity, self-government, and reason. In the hierarchical secular world, modesty helped men negotiate the dual roles of governing and being governed. From a religious perspective, modest activity meant acting with faith, humility, and charity, well aware of one’s own fallen nature. For men, modesty was largely a matter of moderation. Immoderate men were characterized as effeminate; they were governed by the body when they should be governing it.1 It should not be surprising that women were aware of this difference. They commented on the imposition of modesty as pudor and argued for their own ability to “keep due measure.” In Anne Bradstreet’s “Of the Four Humours of mans Constitution” we find a common gesture of modesty from the most feminine of the humors, Flegme. Some other parts there issue from the Brain, Whose use and worth to tel, I must refrain; Some worthy learned Crooke may these reveal, But modesty hath charg’d me to conceal. (Tenth Muse 39)

1 See the introduction to Todd W. Reeser, Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture for a useful argument about the role of moderation in Renaissance notions of masculinity.

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Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700

Flegme claims the brain as hers and alludes to Helkiah Crooke’s lengthy description of conception and generation as well as his insistence on the primacy of the brain in his encyclopedic Μικροκοσμογραφια : A Description of the Body of Man (1615— referred to hereafter as Microcosmographia). But he may say what she may not. These lines follow the same formula as a familiar reference to Guillaume du Bartas that Bradstreet includes in “The Prologue,” the first poem in The Tenth Muse Lately sprung up in AMERICA—“A Bartas can, doe what a Bartas wil,/But simple I, according to my skill” (3). In both passages, the first line of a couplet explains her precursor’s achievements while the second admits her own limitations in the same area. However, du Bartas “can” do what he will while Crooke “may” reveal what he knows; Bradstreet does not share du Bartas’s skill, but she does share Crooke’s knowledge by virtue of having read his book. The difference between “can” and “may” distinguishes humility from modesty; Flegme’s feminine modesty requires a veiling of shameful knowledge and is overtly conditioned by social expectations rather than innate abilities.2 It does not, however, deny what she knows and in her deployment of this knowledge elsewhere she stakes a claim for modesty as modestus. Recent treatments of modesty in early modern women’s writings tend to focus on concealment and pudor; expressions of modesty are understood as capitulation to patriarchal assumptions of women’s inferiority or as acts of subversive misdirection that only appear to submit even as they critique these assumptions. In concealing her role in sexual reproduction, Flegme may be read as either submitting to those gendered social expectations that require a feminine humor and a female poet to refrain from speaking that which is “immodest” or practicing a kind of double-voiced discourse by indicating that she knows what she cannot say. In this book I propose a third reading of modesty in the works of four women who lived in the Americas during the seventeenth century. Rather than bemoaning their modesty as submissive or doubting their manifest claims by naming it subversive, we may accept this modesty as an engagement of contemporary discourses that embraces modesty as keeping due measure and understands bodies as functional but symbolically unimportant. The modesty I explore is associated with discipline, practice, and embodied efforts that are always conditioned by the limits of human perception in a fallen world rather than the concealment of shameful female bodies. These women insist that souls do not transcend bodies but rather are served by them in ways that respond to and challenge misogynist claims about sinful, female flesh. 2 In her introduction to Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, Margaret Patterson Hannay writes that “consciousness of defying a prescribed role prompts women to use the modesty topos with vivid intensity” (1). This topos acknowledges social demands that women refrain from public speech, that they remain silent. Hannay does not discuss the origins of this topos in any depth, nor does she explore the distinctions between humility and modesty. Alicia Ostriker likewise argues that “the most continuous term of approbation for a woman poet from the early nineteenth century to the day before yesterday has been modesty” (3). “Stealing” language either under the cloak of modesty or through direct, immodest attack are options she explores in women’s poetry; I argue instead that early modern women are often unironically modest and yet change the stakes of female modesty by substituting moderation for concealment, modestus for pudor, in ways that self-consciously engage gender ideology.

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In citing Helkiah Crooke, Bradstreet displays her learning and expects her readers to understand the allusion; she does not require a twenty-first century feminist to decode her message or observe the paradoxes of her situation. But more to the point, the knowledge she displays is of the works of a medical functionalist. In late Renaissance medical theory, functionalism involves a recognition that all elements of the body have their own purposes and capacities, and thus women’s bodily processes and organs are seen as complete and effective in themselves rather than as deprived forms of male perfection, an argument that is particularly evident in the numerous “controversies” Crooke addresses throughout Microcosmographia. Modest but not unknowing, Flegme consistently uses the medical functionalism outlined by Crooke to argue that “feminine” humors and parts of the body are necessary and fully functional, not lesser as Choler, her masculinist opponent, would have it. In making this claim Bradstreet has Flegme mount a learned and successful challenge to long held beliefs about the inferiority of women’s bodies rooted in Aristotelian notions of sex difference that characterize women as lesser in all ways because of their cooler, less developed bodies. Bradstreet’s Flegme uses what I call “feminist functionalism” to answer the claims and calumnies of Choler, as I explore in greater depth in Chapter 1, a strategy also evident in the writings of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who similarly appeals to functionalist medical theory, as well as the theological arguments and spiritual practices of Anne Hutchinson and Marie de l’Incarnation. Functionalism, as Ian Maclean has shown in The Renaissance Notion of Woman, is not limited to medical thought; it is also apparent in ethical and social debates, especially surrounding the institution of marriage, and is possible in legal and religious discourses. During the Renaissance there arises, along with a greater awareness of differing sexual functions, an emphasis on women’s and men’s different ethical and social roles in marriage in ways that tend toward a form of equity. Maclean focuses on texts by learned men in which functionalism is potentially liberating for women, but does not ultimately lead to great changes in power relations between the sexes. These writers are more often concerned with refuting scholastic modes of argument than changing women’s social positions; thus, functionalism in these works does not extend to any significant assertion of women’s legal equality or alteration of their place as archetypal sinners in Christian theology. Maclean attributes this failure in large part to the coexistence of experimental and observational heuristics that reject “the parallels male/female, active/passive, formal/material, perfect/deprived” (Renaissance 86) alongside persistent characterizations of women as lesser and imperfect. Even in ethics and medicine, disciplines far more open to new modes of analysis than religion and law, “the conservative view of sex difference survives, and causes notable dislocations of thought” (Renaissance 87). Maclean’s conclusions are based on scholarly works by men, a limited pool of texts for his claims about “Renaissance feminism.” Reviewers have paid particular attention to both his neglect of women writers and his disregard for social experiences involving a range of challenges to various forms of dichotomy and hierarchy that not only belie their validity but perhaps even necessitate their persistence (Davis “Review” 212–13; Blaisdell 113). While such critiques are just, my argument here is not about social experience per se. Rather, I look at how women writing in the Americas during the seventeenth century both engaged functionalist

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Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700

discourses that helped reconceive entrenched “notions of woman” and knowingly responded to dislocations within male-authored texts that promised a form of equity while nonetheless perpetuating conservative views of sex difference. In doing so, I focus particularly on the functional body in both medical and religious discourses (discourses that overlap considerably). These treatments of the body as functional challenge body/spirit dualism by insisting on the role of the body in sustaining the soul while refusing to read the body symbolically, thereby mounting a potent attack on arguments for the subordination of women that depend on their association with the body. Functionalist approaches to social roles are also evident in the texts I study, but almost always filtered through associations with the body. By focusing on what bodies do rather than what they mean, these engagements of functionalism claim for women the ability to practice modesty understood as “keeping due measure” in ways that become radical because they are not joined to the social rewards of moderation available to men.3 The “feminism” I claim for these women is not based primarily on either an appeal to women’s gendered experiences or a rejection of sexual differences along the lines of “the soul has no sex,” strategies which revalue women’s association with the flesh either in positive, experiential terms or through negation. Neither is it concerned with equal rights or otherwise oriented toward the future emergence of modern feminisms. Instead, I frame the feminism of these women as a response to prevalent expressions of what Alice Jardine, writing of French modernity, calls “gynesis—the putting into discourse of ‘woman’ as that process diagnosed in France as intrinsic to new and necessary modes of thinking, writing, speaking” (25). This process is not concerned with women as such, but rather with a metaphorical use of the feminine to explore “the master narratives’ own ‘nonknowledge’” (25). Gynesis names verbs, processes, 3 Women’s association with “the body” and embodiment within a dualistic understanding of body and mind or spirit is a key concern in discussions of gender and feminism both in the early modern period and recently. Among numerous works treating associations of women with the body that both confirm and complicate our understanding of this relationship are Sherry B. Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?”; Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution; Carolyn Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women; Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity; Marilyn Westerkamp, Women and Religion in Early America, 1600–1850; essays collected in Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture and in Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, eds, Body Guards; Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body; and Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed.” As these works demonstrate, this dualism and its gendered associations have a complex history. Kathleen Canning provides a useful overview of recent treatments of the body in “The Body as Method: Reflections on the Place of the Body in Gender History.” Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight, Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies, and Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter are among numerous theoretical works that focus on the relationship between material bodies, embodied experiences and practices, and problems of representation associated with symbolic bodies. My concern here is to focus specifically on how a group of early modern women represented functional bodies in ways that challenged prevalent versions of the symbolic body that were limiting to women. Their lived experiences of embodiment are not my primary concern, though these experiences certainly shaped their theoretical formulations.

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a horizon, in other words, an informing (or deforming) instability rather than static objectification. Slippage is evident to the degree that this is an embodiment; these new verbs, these metaphors, are attached to the name of woman and consequently create a different narrative crisis for the women who find their bodies oddly emerging as a horizon, a negativity. This “slippage” described by Jardine is very like the disjunctions Maclean observes in scholarly notions of woman during the Renaissance—new deployments of the feminine are often socially conservative at the same time that they are conceptually radical. Jardine insists on the verb, but slippage occurs because these verbs are always also nouns. Jardine’s emphasis on “new and necessary modes of thinking” may seem presentist to the ears of early modern scholars, but as Ivy Schweitzer has demonstrated, something akin to Jardine’s gynesis was also at work in the seventeenth century (Self-Representation 32–35). Indeed, much of the most interesting recent work on gender in early modern and early American studies interrogates historically inflected versions of gynesis, i.e. the ways in which female otherness is used to constitute male subjectivity and privilege, define the intersection between theology and social order, and shape transatlantic politics.4 Then and now, newness is an important element of gynesis, with the feminine used to challenge entrenched logic and hierarchies. In particular, the strength of (feminine) weakness becomes an enabling paradox for the newly strong—spiritual selflessness, empirical science (dependent upon limited human perception), poststructural critique; women’s weakness is used as a vehicle to characterize this new, paradoxical strength. In the process, assumptions about women’s otherness are reinforced. Frequently, this new thinking is contradicted by familiar assertions that women are by nature lesser than and subordinate to men, turning constructive paradoxes into hypocrisies and contradictions. Thus, gynesis is an aspect of serious philosophies. In engaging gynesis, the women I study are not simply rebutting misogynistic attacks; they are using, refining, and challenging the theories of their contemporaries.5 They particularly 4 Among these are works by Ivy Schweitzer, Patricia Caldwell, Ann Kibbey, Richard Godbeer, Jonathan Sawday, Philip Round, Margaret Olofson Thickstun, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon. Dillon includes an extended analysis of several such works in “Nursing Fathers and Brides of Christ: The Feminized Body of the Puritan Convert,” included in A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America, edited by Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter. 5 In “Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des Femmes,” first published in 1982, Joan Kelly argues that Christine de Pizan’s City of Women, often cited as the first significant pro-woman entry in the querelle des femmes (debates about women) is feminist theory because “Christine’s ‘new thought’ was to investigate as well as rebut misogyny .... Christine had created a space for women to oppose this onslaught of vilification and contempt [from clerical debates on marriage and bourgeois satires], and the example of her citadel served them for centuries” (73). Though useful, defining early feminist theory as a response to misogyny and citing pro-woman debates of the querelle des femmes as the preeminent example of such theory puts too much emphasis on starkly contrasted misogynist and feminist positions. Such contrasts are too pessimistic in the power they accord the most extreme misogyny and too optimistic in suggesting that feminist arguments can emerge that are clearly oppositional to dominant ideology.

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Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700

engage experimental science and lay piety, both disciplines that emphasize practice rather than authority and are relatively more accessible to women and men without formal educations. In both areas, these women emphasize embodied practices that are always partial, fallen, and thus modest while also explicitly challenging symbolic readings of the body. Not surprisingly, they particularly address readings of women’s bodies as weaker, more sinful, more erratic, and generally less perfect than men’s. The activities and functions of the body rather than its abstract materiality are emphasized as linked to and sustaining the soul in Bradstreet’s and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s treatments of medical functionalism and scientific observation, in Marie de l’Incarnation’s characterizations of her mortifications and her practice of Ursuline heroism, and in Anne Hutchinson’s treatment of her body as witnessing object in her civil trial and, more radically, in her mortalism as expressed during her ecclesiastical trial. Unlike the functionalism of male thinkers, their characterizations of the body are developed in ways that enable women’s activities and never rest on the assumption that women are less than fully human. To understand “modesty’s charge” in Bradstreet’s poem as an example of the kinds of feminist responses to gynesis explored in this book, it is useful to look more closely at Crooke’s own treatment of modesty and modest practices as he takes issue with scholastic medical writings and redacts “new” theories that hinge on reconceptualizing all bodies, male and female, as functional. Bradstreet’s opposition between what Crooke may do and Flegme may not overlooks the many constraints placed on the “worthy learned” doctor. First published in 1615, his compendium of anatomical descriptions and controversies “Collected and Translated out of all the Best Authors of Anatomy” was nearly suppressed, both because it included chapters on reproduction and because it was translated into English.6 In other words, his critics felt he revealed too much. Crooke addresses these problems in Microcosmographia by suggesting that his chapters on the generative functions of the body are necessary because they are related to that which is immortal in mankind and because they address “the diseases hence arising, as they bee most fearefull and fullest of anxiety especially in the Female sexe, so are they hardest to be cured” (197). Still, he concedes that “to reueyle the veyle of Nature, to prophane her mysteries for a little curious skil-pride, to ensnare mens mindes by sensuall demonstrations, seemeth a thing liable to heuy construction” (197). He therefore takes steps to avoid censure. As much as possible we haue endeuored (not frustrating our lawfull scope) by honest wordes and circumlocutions to molifie the harshnesse of the Argument; beside we haue so plotted our busines, that he that listeth may separate this Booke from the rest and reserue it priuately vnto himselfe. (197)

Crooke justifies his disclosures as necessary for the health of women, relieving diseases “most fearefull and fullest of anxiety,” but in addressing his critics he relies more on modesty. Crooke presents himself as personally modest, decrying 6 Crooke borrows heavily from both Caspar Bauhin, a relatively progressive thinker whose writings inform Crooke’s descriptive sections, and André du Laurens, who was more conservative and from whom Crooke borrowed most of his discussions of anatomical controversies. See C.D. O’Malley, 11–12.

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“sensuall demonstrations” and vain displays of skill, while constructing the book so it too can be modest, with the chapters containing information on reproduction and birth designed to be easily removed. In the first chapter of the controversial book on the parts of generation, Crooke wishes he could “cast a veile, which it should bee impiety for any man to remooue, who came not with as chaste a heart to reade as wee did to vvrite” (200).7 Crooke justifies his disclosures as providing necessary information for the practice of medicine, but they were also understood to challenge a variety of social distinctions, beginning with that between “the Worshipfvll Company of the BarberChyrurgeons,” who did much of the day-to-day work of tending to the ill and to whom he addresses his preface (n.p.), and Latin-trained physicians. Crooke gave the former access to advanced medical information while appearing to favor their more practical knowledge over the theories of the latter. This was not just a matter of disseminating information, however. As Jonathan Sawday observes, Crooke’s ‘crime’ was to conjoin the illustrations and an English text at a moment when theological sensitivity was particularly intense. Scripturally based notions of patriarchal rule were part of the very fabric of puritanism, at a time when domestic religious policy was one of constant compromise and negotiation between competing factions within the (predominantly) protestant establishment. So, whilst it is easy to dismiss the objections of Crooke’s fellow physicians as a combination of prudery and obscurantism, it was also the case that there was an ideological stake in controling the ever more detailed dissemination of public information on the operation of the reproductive body. (226)

The functionalism Crooke espoused posed a significant challenge to a key component of patriarchal rule—the assumption of women’s inferiority. This is most clearly stated in a section exploring controversies related to sexual difference: “But this opinion of Galen and Aristotle we cannot approue. For we thinke that Nature aswell intendeth the generation of a female as of a male: and therefore it is vnworthily said that she is an Error or Monster in Nature. For the perfection of all naturall things is to be esteemed and measured by the end: now it was necessary that woman should be so formed or else Nature must haue missed of her scope, because shee intended a perfect generation, which without a woman cannot be accomplished” (271). Crooke explicitly links this appreciation of women’s bodies as being as fully functional as men’s to the equality of souls. For the female sexe as well as the male is a perfection of mankinde: some there bee that call a woman Animal occasionatum, or Accessorium, barbarous words to expresse a barbarous conceit; as if they should say, A Creature by the way, or made by mischance; yea some haue growne to that impudencie, that they haue denied a woman to haue a soule as man hath. The truth is, that as the soule of a woman is the same diuine nature with a 7 At least one reader seems to have taken this admonition seriously. Written on the back flyleaf of a copy of the Microcosmographia at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Thomas Yull has written his name several times as well as the following: “god give him grace there on to look.” Underlining in book 4 suggests that at least one of the readers of this volume was particularly interested in “Of the motions of the wombe,” a chapter that touches in part on female orgasm.

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Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700 mans, so is her body a necessary being, a first and not a second intention of Nature, her proper and absolute worke not her error or preuarication. The difference is by the Ancients in few words elegantly set downe when they define a man, to be a creature begetting in another, a woman a Creature begetting in her selfe. (258)

The equality of souls does not depend upon a rejection of sexed bodies, but rather the recognition of women’s bodies as necessary and “a first ... intention of Nature” is coextensive with the understanding that men’s and women’s souls are of “the same diuine nature.” It is this aspect of Crooke’s book that Bradstreet particularly exploits in her quaternion on the four humors, arguing that female bodies are fully functional and in doing so, explicitly challenging the “barbarous conceit[s]” of misogynists identified by Crooke. In other ways, however, Crooke maintains notions of female embodiment and modesty that subordinate women, reinforcing the hierarchies that Bradstreet challenges. While Crooke states that “it was necessary that woman should be so formed,” he does not reject the notions that heat equals preeminence and that men are superior to women, though his functionalism leads in that direction, as Bradstreet recognizes. In the section immediately following his discussion of “controversies” surrounding sexual difference in which he declared that it is wrong to see women as monsters, Crooke explores women’s temperament and debates over whether they are more or less hot than men. Those who have argued that women are hotter assert, among other things, that women are quicker to anger and that “wenches grow faster then boyes, become sooner ripe, and yeeld seede the sooner, which is the worke of the generatiue Faculty; they are also more wanton and lasciuious, as hauing the Testicles hid within their bodies, by which they are heated” (273). Crooke sides with those who insist that women are generally cooler, arguing, “Anger is a disease of a weake mind which cannot moderate itselfe but is easily inflamed, such are women, childeren, and weake and cowardly men, and this we tearme fretfulnesse or pettishnes .... If therefore women are Nockthrown or easily mooued of the hindges, that they haue from their cold Temper, and from the impotencie and weaknes of their mind, because they are not able to lay a law vpon themselues” (276). Likewise, “That Females are more wanton and petulant then Males, wee thinke hapneth because of the impotencie of their minds; for the imaginations of lustfull women are like the imaginations of bruite beastes which haue no repugnancie or contradiction of reason to restraine them” (276). Women may not be monsters to the degree that their creation is imperfect or accidental, but nonetheless Crooke finds that they are inclined to be more bestial than men because they cannot restrain themselves.8 Contradictions between Crooke’s functionalist appreciation of women’s bodies as necessary and “perfected” and his understanding of women as weak and “not able to lay a law vpon themselues” (276) may be understood as a problem of modesty and the difference between pudor and modestus. In providing theological justification for his work, he places great emphasis on the body as “measured” in the sense of 8 See Jean Marie Lutes, “Negotiating Theology and Gynecology: Anne Bradstreet’s Representations of the Female Body” (315–19) for a discussion of contradictions in Crooke’s treatment of the uterus as both functional and therefore healthy but also as the source of almost all maladies in women’s bodies.

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modestus but finds that women are less measured in this way. The body’s “excellency” is evident in the following, according to Crooke: “The frame and composition which is vpright and mounting toward heauen, the moderate temper, the equal and iust proportion of the parts; and lastly, their wonderfull consent & mutuall concord as long as they are in subiection to the Law & rule of Nature: for so long in them we may behold the liuely Image of all this whole Vniuerse, which wee see with our eyes (as it were) shadowed in a Glasse, or desciphered in a Table” (4). Hierarchy, law, and the symbolic reading of images “shadowed in a Glasse” govern this portion of Crooke’s defense, developed both theologically and in terms of the body politic (“And if both Princes and Peasants would weigh and consider the mutuall offices betweene the principall and the ignoble parts, Princes might vnderstand how to rule, and Peasants how to obey. Princes may learne of the braine how to make Lawes, to gouerne their people; of the heart, how to preserue the life, health, and safety of their Citizens; of the Liuer, they may learn bounty and liberality” [13]). The human body, unlike that of animals, is capable of “moderate temper.” Man hath likewise a moderate temper, and is indeed the most temperate of all bodies, as being the μετρον, measure, and rule of all others. The bodies of other Creatures, are either too Earthy, or too Watery: but to Mans, the temperature of all things liuing, both plants and Creatures is referred, as to the Medium generis, as we vse to say, that is, to the middle of the vvhole kind, so that they are sayde to bee hot, colde, moyst, and drie ωξοξτι, that is, according to reference, their temperature being compared with Mans. Againe, Man alone hath encluded in himselfe the temperature of all liuing things; all other creatues are in their seuerall kindes for the most part, of one and the same temper. But if you looke vnto mankinde, you shall finde manie that haue the stomacke of an Estrich; Others, that haue the heart of a Lyon; Some are of the temper of a Dogge, many of a Hog, and an infinite number of as dull and blockish a temper as an Asse. (5)

Studying all the functions and parts of the body allows individuals to “knowe themselues” and to “giue glory to him who hath so wonderfully Created them” (197), but Crooke also humbly describes the soul as exceeding human knowledge and language, for “Onely this is created, not generated” (4). Though at times “Man” seems to encompass both men and women, Crooke’s treatment of moderation is also distinctly hierarchical, informing differences between humans and animals, men and women, as well as differences among men. His functionalist treatment of women’s bodies does not extend to according them the same place in this hierarchy as the most measured of men. This contradiction between levelling functionalism and hierarchical notions of moderation is compounded by the ways in which women’s modesty is figured in terms of pudor on the title page of Microcosmographia. Despite his repeated insistence that books 4 and 5 are rightly veiled from the impure, the title page of the first and most succeeding editions of the Microcosmographia includes a provocative image of a naked woman that advertises these controversial chapters. On the left is a male figure illustrating the veins of the skin “opened and scarified” and on the right, a female figure with abdomen opened, revealing her pregnancy. The male figure, taken from book two on “the parts Investing and Containing the whole Body,” hangs in mid-air, his body fully exposed to the viewer while his own gaze is directed to the side. The female figure, on the other hand, is taken from the controversial fourth

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Fig. 1

Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700

Title page of Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London, 1616)

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book on generation. She stands on a grassy mound, with her right hand covering her genitals and her left over one breast with fingers outstretched toward the other as if that too is being covered by association. This pose, a version of the classical “Venus pudica,” is most familiar to modern audiences through the Venus in Botticelli’s famous painting. Paradoxically, her modesty is emphasized because she is only partially covered. Her head is also tilted to the side, but her gaze turns obliquely to the front, meeting that of the viewer. Like the conceits and blazons of a Petrarchan lover enumerating the virtues of his beloved, Crooke’s circumlocutions and removable chapters allow him both to veil and unveil Nature’s feminized mysteries, a situation further emphasized by this title page.9 In the versions available in Historia Anatomica Hvmani Corporis (1600) by André du Laurens, both figures are standing on the ground.10 Decisions related to the composition of book two may explain why the male figure is “ungrounded,” but the effect is to narrativize female modesty while treating the male figure as neutral. The less posed male figure hanging in space invites a relatively objective consideration of the exposed circulatory system; in contrast, the female figure must be read through the veil of modesty put up by her imperfectly placed hands and the suggestion of narrative provided by her setting and pose.11 Thus, women are treated as less capable of moderation in Crooke’s text while his cover image suggests modesty caught in a dialectic between shame and titillation that renders women objects of speculation rather than functional agents. C.D. O’Malley argues that Crooke puts this particular illustration on the cover of his book as a challenge to the physicians who attempted to have it suppressed (8), reinforcing the idea that ultimately this reflects an argument among men about the nature of (male) agency and power. Bradstreet’s couplet about Flegme’s modesty hinges on tension within the rhyme pair “reveal”/“conceal.” Though he clearly “may” do more than a female figure like Flegme (and a woman writer like Bradstreet), Crooke also must justify his revelations. He does so by insisting on his modesty in order to avoid the charges of both pride and prurience, excesses that a reasonable, moderate man positioned appropriately within social and religious hierarchies should avoid. He both reveals and conceals knowledge by appealing to the moderation of his similarly self-governing readers and warning away those who “came not with as chaste a heart” (200). However, Crooke is not above deploying a more titillating version of the tension between reveal and conceal as evidenced by his cover images, one of which depends on an understanding of 9 Anatomical illustrations that represented an apparently living body opened and revealed were common throughout this period, whether of men or women. See Nancy J. Vickers’ discussion of the violence of the blazon in “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme.” See also Sawday’s The Body Emblazoned, Londa Schiebinger’s The Mind Has No Sex?, Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex, and Vickers’ “Members Only.” 10 O’Malley attributes these illustrations to Caspar Bauhin’s Theatrum anatomicum, published in 1592, while notes for the edition available at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library attribute them to Andreas Vesalius. They are exactly like those found in du Laurens’ Historia Anatomica (1600), a facsimile of which is available online through the website of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (http://gallica.bnf.fr/). 11 See Valerie Traub’s The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England for an extended discussion of anatomical pudica and Crooke’s strategies of simultaneous display and concealment (110–24).

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Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700

female modesty as shame, but a shame that is provocative and, perhaps, feigned (the female figure on his title page has what arguably may be called “a come hither look”). Crooke may be immoderate in this second form of revelation, but it is woman’s modesty and shame that is on display. In other words, his associations of women with modesty as pudor inform his judgment that they are less capable of modesty as modestus, a very familiar double-bind addressed variously by all the women studied in this book. To return to Bradstreet’s couplet, Crooke may reveal what he will because he successfully claims moderation and thus is able to benefit from “subiection to the Law & rule of Nature” (4) in ways that Flegme cannot. Bradstreet, through Flegme, is more consistent than Crooke in developing her functionalism to its logical conclusion insofar as it applies to women’s social status. In Microcosmographia we see several aspects of gynesis and its attendent disjunctions with respect to real women. The discussion and display of women’s bodies is associated with the relatively new practice of human dissection; empirical observation is contrasted throughout Microcosmographia with the fallacies of scholastic commentary. Likewise, the theoretical claims of medical functionalism are reinforced by the surprising and new observation that women’s bodies, like men’s, are fully functional. Jonathan Sawday describes yet another form of gynesis when he argues that anatomies, literary blazons, and other forms of “dissective dynamism” in the early modern period “stress the endless divisibility of the female body” (217) in contrast to perfect male bodies and as a figure for male self-examination. Sometimes women are dismembered, displayed, and circulated as a sign of possession and mastery but at other times the partitioning of (feminine) bodies figures both as a literalized answer to the injunction, “Know Thyself,” and as a figure of Christian humility and Christ-like sacrifice. To open the body of another was, it was true, part of the process of achieving generalized understanding of the human frame and its creator’s wisdom, but the words also led the enquiring human subject to a form of self-analysis. Moreover, that analysis meshed with the rigours of Calvinist self-examination and a tradition of pictorial representation to be found in overtly catholic contexts. (110)

Women are not expected to practice any of these forms of thought associated with gynesis. For one thing, the “empirical” observation that women are less moderate than men bars them from being able to exercise moderation or practice reason and empirical observation themselves. But women’s modesty as pudor is not primarily defined by their lack of modesty as modestus; representations like that found on Crooke’s cover or in literary blazons essentially objectify women and women’s modesty for male consumption. No true agency is imagined because women’s modesty is linked to readings of their bodies rather than the modest activities of their bodies. The association of the dissected female body with religious self-examination is even less accessible to women because such figurative uses of the feminine to imagine an open, submissive, disempowered self short-circuit when one really is a woman. As Ivy Schweitzer asks, “Can women dream of becoming what they already are?” (Self-Representation 18). Thus, their association with modesty as pudor prevents them from practicing moderation while making their exposed bodies more potent as figures for male self-contemplation.

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The conjunction of figurative uses of femininity and hierarchically-informed beliefs about women’s capabilities raises formidable barriers to women’s participation in these discourses, as most scholars of these kinds of gynesis have concluded. Jardine, for instance, brackets the question of women’s responses, explaining, “I have not included their work in any major way here because their rewriting of the men, their repetitions of and dissidence from those men, are exceedingly complex, meriting more attention than one or two chapters could provide” (21). Sawday is particularly quick to admit defeat. “Very occasionally, we can glimpse a woman struggling against this pervasive system, questioning the analogical discourses within which her own language (of necessity) was formed. But usually, the result was a failure” (227). Discussions of women’s responses to gynesis have tended to treat women as naturally more critical of these “analogical discourses” both because of their lived experiences of femininity and their awareness that these analogies enforce power structures from which they do not benefit. However, like Philomel, Sybil, or any number of other women from classical literature, they are also understood to be isolated, individualized and unheard because of this critical insight. Gynesis is an ideological formation that men use collectively, with variations, to be sure, but effectively and, for the most part, unthinkingly. Women’s engagement of gynesis, on the other hand, is assumed to be mostly ineffective because of the very cultural formations that make gynesis work for men. In other words, it is assumed that women respond to gynesis as individuals who know but cannot speak or who do not know and are led to identify against themselves. In this framework there is very little space for effective critical thought within ideology. I argue instead that there is a collective female response, no more uniform than men’s uses of gynesis but reflecting trends conditioned by a shared awareness of gynesis and the underpinnings of misogynistic logic. Men do not conspire together to use gynesis; women do not need to organize in order to have a collective response. Stephanie Merrim makes this argument in discussing the querelle des femmes. Feminism need not have been organized as such, as it is now, to evince either a feminist consciousness or a discursive commonality. Indeed, if the texts I have analyzed are any indication, it is clear that the querelle and the pan-Christian imaginary gave rise to an unceasing, unwitting, almost inevitable, textual sorority between early modern feminists who were unaware of one another and who often worked in isolation. (Early xxii–xxiii)

Similarly, women respond to the metaphorical universe of gynesis by reframing or refusing an assumption at its heart—that bodies can be read symbolically as signifiers for spiritual, intellectual, and legal signifieds. This is not just the shared language of commonplaces and retorts; the responses to gynesis I explore more fundamentally engage debates of the time while shifting characterizations of the body in ways that challenge symbolic readings of the body. Todd W. Reeser’s reading of male moderation usefully shows how ideal masculinity in the Renaissance was frequently characterized as a moderate intermediate between excess and lack. He suggests that women were less inclined to treat moderation in this way, appealing instead to neoplatonic arguments that “often claim or assume that men and women possess the same capacity for virtue and should strive for the same virtues—a position that makes

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moderate masculinity of little direct interest” (43). However, neoplatonic arguments about women’s and men’s capacity for virtue generally bracket the body in ways that may be understood as an implicit rejection. The women I study claim that men and women possess the same capacity for moderation, though not as distinguished from the lack and excess of others on a scale of self-government. Rather, their modesty involves moderate, fallen, human, embodied activity. Repeatedly they reject forms of modesty that are essentially about shame and veiling female bodies. In Chapter 1, I explore the link between Anne Bradstreet’s feminism in The Tenth Muse and her use of medical functionalism, paying particular attention to her staging of a querelle des femmes in her quaternion on the four humors. In this poem, Bradstreet has Flegme, the most feminine humor, answer the sexist assertions of the most masculine humor, Choler, with functionalist arguments drawn from the writings of Helkiah Crooke that challenge the Aristotelian belief that women are cooler than men and therefore inferior. Bradstreet reveals the double-bind that ensnares public women in memorable couplets elsewhere in The Tenth Muse, most notably in “The Prologue” and her elegy on Queen Elizabeth. However, Flegme’s functionalist challenge to Choler’s insistence on male preeminence provides a more fully developed alternative to masculinist thinking, one that may also be used to reconsider her understanding of gender in “The Four Monarchies” as well as less public poems like those written to her husband that were only published in later editions of her poetry. Chapter 2 treats the ways Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, like Bradstreet, uses and questions literary conventions, scientific theories, and theological debates that have implications for understanding gendered hierarchies. I particularly focus on her use of medical knowledge in the poem that many judge to be her masterpiece and that Sor Juana herself claimed was the only work she wrote purely for her own pleasure, Primero Sueño (First Dream). In this dream poem, she chronicles the trajectory of both body and soul during a night’s sleep. While lungs breathe, heart beats, and stomach churns, the soul rises through successive levels of human learning, aspiring to and almost achieving total, divine knowledge, only to awaken. Notably, it is not until the final line of this poem that we learn that the dreamer is female. Like other dream poems, Primero Sueño explores the limits of human knowledge as well as transgressions committed in pursuit of that knowledge. But unlike her models, Sor Juana’s dreamer does not have a guide. While many critics read this poem as another example of the intellectual nun’s attempt to overcome the limits of the female body by emphasizing a neuter spirit, overlooking as they do so the long passages in which Sor Juana describes the body as “the vital mainspring of the human clock,” I argue that Sor Juana emphasizes the functions of the body and not its symbolic value, and in doing so continues a challenge to dominant, patriarchal logic and symbolism begun in other poems by her about gender relations. In Chapters 3 and 4 I turn to functionalist discourses and practices of the body employed by two women known primarily for their religious activities, Anne Hutchinson and Marie de l’Incarnation. In both cases I resist individualist readings of these women by considering the relationship between their theological beliefs, spiritual practices, and social activities. In Chapter 3 I discuss Hutchinson’s engagement of religious debates within a highly politicized public conflict, the

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Antinomian or free grace controversy in early New England. In Hutchinson’s trials we see a clash between her opponents’ tendency to treat the body as a symbol which can be read from the outside (most famously in descriptions of her “monstrous births” that are read as literally embodying her monstrous ideas) and Hutchinson’s insistence that the body cannot be read and has no enduring significance but rather is a conduit of felt spirit. Like Choler and the Aristotelians, Hutchinson’s judges see the body as a base for spiritual and civil values; like Bradstreet, Hutchinson challenges this model by disrupting the symbolic relationship between body and spirit. In this chapter I examine these differences between Hutchinson and her judges in their references to her body as a witnessing object and in their positions on the mortalist heresy (the belief that both soul and body perish at death). It has been argued that Hutchinson displays an early example of “American individualism.” However, her belief that the body is not resurrected with the spirit is an important and often overlooked challenge to the individualist reading of the Antinomian Controversy and its implicitly gendered presuppositions about subjectivity and individual freedom. In my final chapter I look north to the apostolate of Marie de l’Incarnation and the Ursulines of Québec. Several spiritual autobiographies and collections of letters by Marie de l’Incarnation, one of the founders of the first convent in Québec, were published in France during the seventeenth century. Her writings invite comment on the apparent contradictions informing a life that included both mystical visions and efficient business acumen, both secular motherhood and several tenures as Mother Superior. However, Marie’s own treatment of the intersections among the various aspects of her life does not reflect the same sense of paradox found there by many scholars. In writings about her early mystical experiences, we find precise descriptions of the body that are similar to Sor Juana’s emphasis on the body’s presence even as the soul seeks to escape its bonds. Later she expresses more developed ideas about the role of the body in spiritual matters, explaining the need for a “double spirit, for attending to inside and outside” (Corr. 528). But most illuminating for this study are the ways in which both Marie and her fellow Ursulines situate her heroism and her functionalist understanding of the body within Ursuline beliefs and community life. This communal context was minimized or overlooked altogether by early writers about Marie including the writers of the Jesuit relations and her son, whose volumes about his mother contributed significantly to her later fame. Marie’s example provides a rare opportunity among the women I study to locate her thought and practices within a community of women, suggesting ways we may draw further connections among four women writing in three different European colonies across the Americas. Seventeenth-century women who asserted public voices were frequently given titles like Tenth Muse, femme forte, and jezebel that played on a paradoxical relationship between the modesty of their sex and their own public fame or infamy, in each case reinforcing the idea that women by definition are not strong, public actors. When Anne Hutchinson was accused of beliefs that would lead to sexual licentiousness, for example, her transgressions were described in terms of breaking her husband’s marriage covenant and supporting “community of women,” that is the practice of men holding women in common. In other words, she was accused of being sexually transgressive with language that does not describe female sexual agency.

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Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700

The Tenth Muse, a title shared by Anne Bradstreet and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, was a name for talented, prolific women that marked them as exceptional and inhuman, while femme forte, a label used frequently in seventeenth-century feminist writings in France and applied to Marie de l’Incarnation, gained much of its rhetorical power from the apparent contradiction between “strength” and “woman.”12 These paradoxical formulations indicate a double bind for public women, either charging them with impropriety or carving out a new, vexed category that is not “woman.”13 Bradstreet, Hutchinson, Sor Juana, and Marie all remark on this double bind with a version of Bradstreet’s, “If what I doe prove well, it won’t advance,/ They’l say its stolne, or else, it was by chance” (“The Prologue”), demonstrating an understanding of the workings of misogyny that has led each to be identified as a pioneering feminist avant la lettre. But they do not simply observe the unfairness of misogynistic logic. In this book I look beyond the double bind, significant though it is, to arguments made by women that undo this trap by rejecting the symbolic and ontological thinking that sustains it. In addition to showing that women can do what definitions say they cannot and uncovering the masculinist interests of a “should” that understands modesty only in terms of silence and chastity (complicated by frequent demands that women speak and act as sexual objects in situations controlled by men), these women reframe the significance of the body in ways that challenge this logic through various forms of functionalism. In denying symbolic readings of the body and claiming for women the ability to practice modesty as keeping due measure, these women mount what may be called “modesty’s charge.”

12 Among the numerous studies treating these paradoxes and the limits they place on public women are Stephanie Jed’s “The Tenth Muse: Gender, rationality, and the marketing of knowledge,” Joan DeJean’s Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France, and Ian Maclean’s The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A study in the fortunes of scholasticism and medical science in European intellectual life. 13 Kathleen Hall Jamieson usefully catalogues different forms of the double bind that persist today in Beyond the Double Bind: Women and Leadership.

Chapter 1

“Now Sisters ... impart your usefulnesse, and force”: Anne Bradstreet’s Feminist Functionalism In his commendatory poem included at the beginning of Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately sprung up in America (1650), Nathaniel Ward1 praises Bradstreet as “a right du Bartas Girle,” but ends with a warning: “And chode buy Chaucers Boots, and Homers Furrs,/Let men look to’t, least women weare the Spurs” (n. pag.).2 Ward does not say Bradstreet’s poetry was “stolne, or else, it was by chance,” as Bradstreet fears in “The Prologue,” but he does mock the female poet for cross-dressing in the male trappings of the poetic tradition. Bradstreet’s “The Prologue” may easily be read as responding to or anticipating Ward’s gibe. In a particularly pointed stanza, she writes, I am obnoxious to each carping tongue, Who sayes, my hand a needle better fits, A Poets Pen, all scorne, I should thus wrong; For such despight they cast on female wits: If what I doe prove well, it wo’nt advance, They’l say its stolne, or else, it was by chance. (4)

The Pen and the activity of writing poetry, like Chaucer’s boots, Homer’s furs, and a rider’s spurs, are understood to be naturally male while “each carping tongue” finds “a needle better fits” a woman’s hand, and any transgression of these expectations 1 Nathaniel Ward (1578–1652) was both a lawyer and minister who emigrated to New England in 1634. His is among several commendatory poems at the beginning of The Tenth Muse that have been ably treated in Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, “‘The Excellency of the Inferior Sex’: The Commendatory Writings on Anne Bradstreet,” and Ivy Schweitzer, Self-Representation 127–80. Elizabeth Wade White identifies most of the writers of these commendatory poems in her useful chapter on The Tenth Muse (251–92). 2 Throughout this chapter, I cite the first edition of The Tenth Muse, published in 1650 and available in a facsimile edition by Josephine K. Piercy, unless I am referring specifically to emendations made in the second edition of 1678, in which case I cite Jeannine Hensley’s edition as Works. Bradstreet made copious changes to the second edition published in 1678, including dropping the title, The Tenth Muse. However, the earlier versions of these poems more fully reflect the Renaissance sources that interest me here. Because the lines are not numbered in this edition, all parenthetical references are to page numbers.

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will be deemed accidental or illusory. Bradstreet takes the Pen (with a nod, perhaps, to its phallic associations), but softens her poetic ensemble by asking to be crowned with parsley instead of bays in recognition of “this meane and unrefined stuffe of mine.” Critics interested in Bradstreet’s position as a female poet writing within a male poetic tradition almost inevitably comment on “The Prologue” in The Tenth Muse and frequently on Ward’s poem as well. Many, including Wendy Martin, Kenneth A. Requa, Agnieska Salska, and Jennifer Waller, find these early “public” poems imitative or derivative and favor instead Bradstreet’s later “personal” poems for either their more feminine or their more expressive qualities. From this perspective, Bradstreet’s request for parsley instead of bays signals, in Waller’s words, “an obvious sense of inadequacy and unease in approaching a traditionally male preserve” (442). Even when Renaissance conventions are accounted for, this critical approach seems to find Chaucer’s and Homer’s garments ill-fitting adornments for this tenth muse. More recently, critics have read the final stanzas of “The Prologue” as ironic or double-voiced displays of poetic, personal, or female power through wellwrought expressions of powerlessness. Rejecting the Romantic values that privilege Bradstreet’s personal and seemingly expressive poems, critics like Ivy Schweitzer, Timothy Sweet, and Carrie Galloway Blackstock look instead to veiled, deconstructive, and/or ironic strategies like “mimicry” (Schweitzer), “strategies of reformation” (Sweet), and “performativity” (Blackstock) that use and engage dominant traditions and conventions while criticizing and dislocating their gendering as male or not-female. Most of these scholars comment on how Bradstreet successfully uses conventions of her time while nonetheless signaling the difference gender makes in the use of apparently neutral figures and topoi. But whom she is signaling remains unclear. In exploring the interstices between prevailing ideology and resistant or subversive poetic practices, these studies frequently leave us with the sense that Bradstreet is alone and feels herself alone in her struggle with misogynistic literary traditions. If her poetic attire is seen to fit better, though primarily because Bradstreet has cunningly altered it for masquerade, the focus is still on her individual body and her negotiation of what appear to be relatively uniform literary sumptuary laws. Neither of these approaches fully takes into account that Bradstreet and Ward were both engaging a debate tradition they expected their audiences to recognize, and in doing so were struggling over and shaping dynamic, mutable notions of literary propriety, physiological sex differences, and the place of women in society. Though she may at times have felt alone, to characterize Bradstreet primarily as intimidated and/or isolated by dominant literary expectations is to underestimate her project and oversimplify that which is “dominant.” Ward and Bradstreet weigh in on issues about women and culture being debated throughout European literary and scientific circles of the period. Interestingly, Ward is concerned that women might robe themselves in the warm attire of Chaucer and Homer—boots and furs. Greater heat, in Aristotelian medical thinking, is a male attribute, and when women make themselves hotter they are challenging natural categories. (Other commendatory poems make connections between Bradstreet and the (male) sun that, as in Ward, are both praising and mocking). As we shall see, Bradstreet answers this hierarchical notion of heat and gender with a more subtle and effective theory of gender difference presented in a debate poem that openly rather than covertly challenges one kind of antifeminist argument. Throughout The Tenth Muse, Bradstreet consciously and

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intelligently participates in contemporary literary battles of the sexes. I will here pay particular attention to her staging of a querelle des femmes in her quaternion on the four humors in which she uses contemporary medical knowledge, namely medical functionalism, to challenge the Aristotelian belief that women are cooler than men and therefore inferior. Early modern feminists and antifeminists alike use these literary and scientific debates to argue their points, but Bradstreet’s combination of the two is striking. Each debate tradition bears further consideration before proceeding to a reading of this second quaternion, “Of the Four Humours of mans Constitution.” “Sex weigh’d, which best, the Woman, or the Man?”: Conventions and Argument in the Querelle des Femmes Jane Donahue Eberwein is one critic who points to generic debates about women in developing an alternative to both submissive and subversive readings of “The Prologue,” insisting in “‘No Rhet’ric We Expect’: Argumentation in Bradstreet’s ‘The Prologue’” that this poem is best read as “consistently ironic ... in deploying both sides of the argument: inviting both male and female champions (and the vast majority of more tolerant readers) to approach her writing with respect” (“No Rhet’ric” 218). The carping tongues, probably imagined, offered a useful opportunity for forceful, witty expression in this ironic battle of the sexes. Straw men, they were set up only to be knocked down. None of the deference Bradstreet shows in passages of the poem was meant for them. (“No Rhet’ric” 220)

Eberwein’s concern in this essay is to explore how, “[l]ike most of Bradstreet’s successful poems, ‘The Prologue’ is an argument: an attempt to articulate and reconcile opposition by emphasizing discrepancies while hinting at unity” (“No Rhet’ric” 219). Yet in praising Bradstreet’s irony and the sophistication of her rhetorical strategies, Eberwein tends to minimize the misogyny of Bradstreet’s contemporaries, dismissing the work of critics who hypothesize that Bradstreet bore the brunt of gender bias but do not offer specific examples of such oppression. Although many women, including Anne Hutchinson and Bradstreet’s sister, Sarah Keayne, were punished for their public speech, to the best of our knowledge Bradstreet’s poetry was universally praised; thus, Eberwein sets aside many feminist readings by insisting that “Who those carping tongues might be remains a question” (“No Rhet’ric” 220). She chooses to ignore the possibility that Bradstreet was influenced by the examples of Hutchinson and Keayne, and instead suggests that she was entirely self-assured in her sense of herself as a poet and her manipulation of rhetorical irony and humility topoi. In this essay she very usefully reminds us that Bradstreet was a skilled poet addressing an astute audience, though she says little about what difference gender makes.3 3 Eileen Margerum and Jeffrey Hammond also emphasize, as I do, Bradstreet’s engagement of conventions and debates of her time, but with less attention to issues of gender.

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Rosamond Rosenmeier likewise resists reading a general hegemonic misogyny as Bradstreet’s target in “The Prologue,” but she does suggest a source for those carping tongues. A learned reader of Bradstreet’s time might have recognized in these lines a citation of Cornelius Agrippa, who in his treatise “Of the Nobilitie and Excellencie of vvomankynde” condemned those who permit a woman “to know no father [sic] than her nedle and her threede” (cited in Rosenmeier, Anne Bradstreet Revisited 59–60, from the 1542 David Clapam translation). She explains: Agrippa’s treatise belongs to that long-lived Renaissance debate about the superiority of the sexes. Nathaniel Ward may have been referring to this tradition when in his dedication to The Tenth Muse he suggests that Bradstreet’s book provides evidence for settling the question “Sex weigh’d, which best, the Woman, or the Man?” [n. pag.] .... If Bradstreet’s readers, especially an inner circle of readers who shared, say, Ward’s education, interests, and wit, heard the echo of Agrippa’s treatise here, they would have understood the doubleness: those “carping tongues” represent the force of a recent tradition that Agrippa pointed out has not always existed, is not God’s law, and since its sanctions are mere custom, law, and education, can change. Bradstreet’s critics frequently assume that the phrase “carping tongues” refers to Puritan society generally, dominated as it was by androcentric values; critics then equate Bradstreet’s own attitudes with those expressed by her poetic speaker: acquiescent, defensive, deviously subversive. I think it possible that the “carping tongues” represent an indeed prevalent, but in some circles, much discredited view of women’s lives. Thus while appearing to give ominous weight to a publicly antifeminist position, Bradstreet’s line, in its citation of Agrippa, would signal to her readers that she expects them to cry “slander” here, as she assumed they would in the elegy to Queen Elizabeth [in which Bradstreet writes, “Let such, as say our sex is void of reason,/Know ‘tis a slander now, but once was treason]. (Rosenmeier, Anne Bradstreet Revisited 59–60)

Like Schweitzer and Sweet, Rosenmeier emphasizes doubleness, but a doubleness that would have been recognized by Bradstreet’s readers as participating in an ongoing debate reflecting mutable social dynamics. In this reading of “The Prologue,” Rosenmeier also stresses Bradstreet’s unusual use of the declarative present tense to emphasize a present but not eternal situation. This too, she argues, would have been evident to attentive readers in the seventeenth century. Like Eberwein, Rosenmeier insists on the skill of Bradstreet’s argument, but she also emphasizes the ways in which Bradstreet’s poetry continually registers an attention to change, change that throughout The Tenth Muse is frequently related to gender relations. Bradstreet’s possible allusion to Agrippa highlights the influence of conventions and ideas from the tradition of the querelle des femmes or what Linda Woodbridge calls the “formal controversy about women” (13). Nathaniel Ward acknowledges this debate even more directly, asking, “Sex weigh’d, which best, the Woman, or the Man?” A brief discussion of his commendatory poem usefully highlights some of the issues and conventions Bradstreet was engaging. Ward, who describes women of fashion in The Simple Cobler of Aggawam in America as “ill-shapen-shotten shellfish, Egyptian Hyeroglyphicks, or at the best ... French flurts of the pastery” (20), is often identified as one of the misogynist carping tongues who put Bradstreet on her guard, but as Robert D. Arner reminds us, “the war between men and women has long been one of the mainstays of comedy and humor” (280) and Ward’s productions

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in this genre, both in this dedicatory verse from The Tenth Muse and in The Simple Cobler, need to be read in terms of this comic tradition and not merely as meanspirited, misogynistic attacks. Indeed, Ward was Bradstreet’s minister and a family friend during her years in Ipswich, and likely used his influence with Stephen Bowtell, the publisher of The Simple Cobler, to help bring The Tenth Muse to print (also published by Bowtell). Arner goes on to condemn the “historical myopia” of many modern feminist readings of Ward’s work, insisting that women are not the only or even the most significant objects of ridicule in his writings. He explains parenthetically, “even his famous—or infamous—misogynist attack on women and their fashions in The Simple Cobler occupies only a few highly wrought pages, while his criticism of the King and Parliament is sustained throughout the tract” (280). Arner’s remark highlights an important aspect of the querelle des femmes. As many scholars of the Renaissance have observed, this debate tradition and humor about women more generally are driven by aims other than “the woman question.”4 According to Woodbridge, most texts within the formal controversy were undertaken as “a kind of intellectual calisthenics” (17), exercises in argument and rhetoric that may contain political agendas and certainly reflect social issues of their time, but rarely are really concerned with the status of women themselves.5 Both defenses and attacks frequently take the form of dialogues filled with familiar exempla and commonplaces; discussions of women’s intellectual capacity, physical strength (or weakness), and virtue; and catalogues of good and bad women. The querelle des femmes has its roots in medieval literature, but its form and function shifts with the rise of humanism.6 Ian Maclean suggests that apparently antifeminist assertions by Renaissance humanists should be read as intellectual jokes that are meant ironically. In each case it seems that the satire is directed against an object other than woman: socinianism, prejudice, academic ponderousness. In each case, the effect of the joke is to reinforce the contrary proposition: woman is a human being. It may be coincidental that 4 Ian Maclean, Linda Woodbridge, and Constance Jordan, among others, discuss the characteristics and significance of querelle des femmes texts and explore their relationship to Renaissance culture and manifestations of Renaissance feminism. See also Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki, eds., Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 for more recent scholarly debates over the querelle des femmes. 5 Benjamin Franklin’s eighteenth-century consideration of women’s education also reflects this rhetorical tradition. In The Autobiography he describes a written exchange with John Collins about “the propriety of educating the female sex in learning” undertaken primarily as an exercise in argumentation and composition. Franklin confesses, “He was of opinion that it was improper .... I took the contrary side, perhaps a little for dispute’s sake” (14). His conclusions are about the importance of “correct spelling and pointing,” not women’s education. 6 Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Prologue” stands as the best known English example of medieval feminist/antifeminist debate, one which is arguably more antifeminist than feminist, but without taking a firm stand on women’s issues either way. Christine de Pizan’s response to Jean de Meun’s portion of the Roman de la Rose is the most significant early example of a woman’s participation in this tradition. Both Chaucer and Christine raise questions about power and point of view in the authoritative antifeminist tradition, but without relying on humanist paradox to undermine this tradition.

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Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700 woman is chosen as a vehicle for satire in this way; or it may be that she is particularly well suited to be such a vehicle, as it will be evident to those to whom the satire is addressed that there is a discrepancy between what she is and what she is said to be according to traditional authorities. One way of escaping from the infrastructure of scholastic thought would thus appear to be by the use of humour. (Renaissance 85–86)

Thus, the querelle des femmes tradition as practiced by men may serve as an opportunity to practice argumentation or attack scholastic commentary, but even when it manifestly favors women it does little to further materially their cause. Agrippa’s proposal that women are superior to men in “Of the Nobilitie and Excellencie of vvomankynde” may be read as humorous in just this way; in its extremity it lampoons the other extreme which asserts the absolute inferiority of women. In the process he acknowledges legitimate social injustices and the false logic of those who argue that women are fit only to wield needle and thread when they are allowed only to wield needle and thread. And yet in his introduction, Agrippa describes his arguments as “these trifles of my youth” (40); his defense of women is only a playful entry within a larger, more significant intellectual agenda. The subversive potential of Renaissance “feminist” humor is limited by the fact that, according to Maclean, “the proposition that woman is equal or superior to man can still be held to be a paradox, and exploited for its artistic potential, in the middle years of the seventeenth century” (Renaissance 91). Even Anna Maria van Schurman calls her defense of women’s learning Dissertatio logica and structures it as a logical exercise (Whether 25–37)7 while Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s most biting critique of misogynistic hypocrisy is found in a poem entitled “A Philosophical Satire” (Poems 148–51). Ward exploits this kind of paradox in his commendatory poem; the possibility of equal or superior women is never seriously considered and is primarily used to augment his comic portrait of Apollo, whose pronouncements, like the Simple Cobler’s, sound foolish because of their foolish subject, women. In his defense of 7 Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678) is best known as a scholar though she was also accomplished in painting, embroidery, engraving, and paper-cutting. Her Latin treatise on women’s education was translated into French in 1646 and into English in 1659 as The Learned Maid; or, Whether a Maid may be a scholar and is now readily available in a modern English translation as Whether a Christian Woman Should Be Educated. Among her many correspondents was Bathsua Makin, known to early Americanists for her mention of Anne Bradstreet in An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen (1673). See Mirjam de Baar, et al., Choosing the Better Part for more on van Schurman, including a discussion of her “Self-portrait as Modesty.” Criticism of the querelle as a whole raises many of the same issues I have touched on in discussing Bradstreet’s modesty—frequently the author’s motivations are questioned while the conventions of the debates are read as ideologically conservative or contained in a way that prohibits, as Katherine Romack puts it, the development of “a recognizably feminist consciousness” (219). The querelle is often cited as the premier example of early modern feminism and then judged an insufficient precursor to that time, according to Joan Kelly, “when a women’s movement joined feminist theory and practice” (69). However, Bradstreet’s engagement of this tradition responds to its paradoxes in ways that go beyond rebuttal; she is not unduly constrained by the rhetoric or logic of its conventions.

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the humorous intentions of Ward’s satire, Arner fails to acknowledge the material implications of this humor. That the figure of woman is used as a minor vehicle for his commentary on King and Parliament trivializes women both as “flurts” and tropes. Ward’s obsession with what women wear—whether French fashions or Chaucer’s Boots and Homer’s Furs—points to an important assumption about gender and bodies that pervades the dedicatory poems to The Tenth Muse. In these poems, the artistic paradox Maclean points to is frequently developed through images of heat and cold. In Ward, proper clothing reflects the thoughts of those who wear the clothing: silly women wear silly fashions, modest women wear modest clothing, and skilled poets wear the figurative garb of the male poetic tradition. A woman robed in the trappings of the male literary tradition is apt to appear foolishly cross-dressed, a figure even more absurd than Apollo in his “crackt leering-glasses.” But that boots and furs are particularly at issue suggests the belief that men are generally hotter than women and that women who are hotter than some men are in danger of being less than women. Similarly gendered paradoxes are evident in other dedicatory poems, as when Benjamin Woodbridge contrasts the power emanating from Bradstreet’s female moon to that of the normally preeminent male sun, or when “N.H.” and John Woodbridge use other images of suns and stars to illuminate her surprising skill. “C.B.” writes, “I cannot wonder at Apollo now/That he with Female Lawrell crown’d his brow” (n. pag.), again observing as marvelous the relationship between a feminine entity and a god associated with the sun. Even when celebrating Bradstreet’s success, the paradoxical conjunction of hot and cold, male and female, is used to mark her as an exception and even as a threat. These paradoxes are not simply misogynistic impositions that Bradstreet must resist. By acknowledging the humorous and philosophical traditions that inform them, Eberwein and Rosenmeier are able to stress Bradstreet’s skill as a poet by showing how both she and male authors like Ward participate in an ongoing debate. And yet Bradstreet’s interest in the querelle des femmes is predictably more invested in the actual status of women than Ward’s. This argumentative tradition has many elements and takes many forms, and Bradstreet’s first collection of poems includes several of these elements.8 Her praise of exceptional women in her elegy on Queen Elizabeth and her descriptions of female rulers in “The Foure Monarchies” demonstrate the conventional use of exempla while her rebuttals to the slanders and slights of those who disparage women’s wit in “The Prologue” and the Queen Elizabeth elegy explicitly engage arguments about women’s roles and conceptions of Woman. In each of these poems, stereotypes about women are characterized as historically relative products of unjust power relations between the sexes. The quaternions also include elements of the querelle des femmes, though their feminist arguments may be less obvious, especially to modern readers, because this historical argument is largely absent in poems about the elements, humors, ages of man, and seasons. Instead, Bradstreet answers Aristotelian arguments about the inferiority of women hinted at in Ward’s concerns about proper clothing with an alternative knowledge system that is emphasized as a better knowledge system by the debate format of these poems. Especially in the quaternion on the four humors, 8 See Maclean, Woodbridge, and Jordan for more detailed discussions of these conventions.

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scientific arguments that bear on the cultural roles and status of women are marshaled in a manner that effectively answers the paradoxes and bullying of antifeminist humor. She also reverses the tendency for entries in the querelle des femmes to be really about something other than women. Bradstreet’s debate appears to be about the primacy of a given humor but is more essentially a debate about theories that undergird power hierarchies between the sexes. “Of Milk my breasts”: Humoral Medicine and the Use and Action of All Bodies The absence of a historicist feminist argument in Bradstreet’s quaternions allows her to focus on ontological questions, reconceiving power as something other than might and answering, in a manner, the emphasis placed on male solar and sartorial heat in the commendatory poems at the beginning of The Tenth Muse. One of the keystones of antifeminist thought into the Renaissance is the Aristotelian belief that women are inferior to men, imperfectly developed because of their lack of vital heat. Bradstreet challenges this belief most fully in her poem on the four humors, but touches on it throughout the quaternions. In “The Four Ages of Man,” the third of Bradstreet’s quaternions but the first to involve male speakers (Childhood, Youth, Middle Age, and Old Age), there is an odd confusion of gendered traits. Throughout most of this poem, Bradstreet emphasizes the development and daily pursuits of men rather than humankind. This is especially evident in her description of Youth’s military bravado and sinful carousing: Sometimes I cheat (unkind) a female Heir, Of all at once, who not so wise, as fair, Trusteth my loving looks, and glozing tongue, Until her freinds [sic], treasure, and honour’s gone. (47)

However, at the end of this section Youth says: Of Marrow ful my bones, of Milk my breasts, Ceas’d by the gripes of Serjeant Death’s Arrests (48)

Like marrow, milk is a sign of vital life that Youth finds threatened by disease and impending death. But why does Bradstreet attribute milk to a male persona? Perhaps this reference to milk is a slip, evidence of the bastard status of Bradstreet’s ill-begotten offspring, as she calls these poems in her second edition. Indeed, the second, edited edition of this poem in Several Poems changes these lines to “Of aches full my bones, of woe my heart,/Clapt in that prison, never thence to start” (Works 57). The first two quaternions have female speakers, a consistent staging, which is foregrounded by Choler’s discussion of her momentary departure from her naturally masculine state. Thus, it is clear that Bradstreet has considered the lack of consistency between the feminization of abstractions and the attribution of many of those abstractions primarily to men. Bradstreet is consciously struggling with the several registers on which gender operates in the quaternions; Youth is a male persona, but also representative of all youth, including girls and young women, and Bradstreet, unlike her male predecessors, is quite aware of the specificities of

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women’s bodies and their experiences of youth. So perhaps this original slip is a sign of Bradstreet’s specific female experience erupting within the masculine abstractions of her third quaternion, a sign of the continuing tension between abstraction and experience in all her quaternions. Yet male milk is not unheard of; Helkiah Crooke discusses it in his Galenist medical encyclopedia, Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (1615).9 Bradstreet was familiar with Crooke’s book—she refers to him in “Of the Four Humours of mans Constitution,” the quaternion that immediately precedes “The Four Ages of Man” (see Introduction). Flegme claims responsibility for the benefits of the brain as part of her rebuttal to Choler, modestly referring us to “Some worthy learned Crooke” for elaboration of this point (39). Bradstreet also refers to “Galenists” in her first quaternion, “The Foure Elements,” when she has Earth explain the importance of her drugs and herbs for both professionally and domestically concocted curatives.10 Bradstreet’s use of Crooke provides insight into her understanding of gendered bodies and the relationship between body and soul. Crooke’s anatomical text is an encyclopedic compilation of medical knowledge culled from a wide variety of classical and contemporary texts and presented in English for the benefit of those not adequately schooled in Greek, Latin, and French. In arbitrating various medical debates in the section of “Controversies” accompanying each book of his text, Crooke develops his position as a seventeenth-century Galenist. His version of Galenism is interesting both because of its contribution to Bradstreet’s representation of interdependence among the humors and because of its relevance to prevalent medical opinions about the nature of woman. According to Maclean, seventeenth-century doctors tended to reject Aristotelian axioms that declared men nobler than women because of their greater heat. These axioms were primarily concerned with the general form and function of the body and characterized women as lacking vital force. Seventeenth-century doctors were more concerned with the specific function of each sex as well as each of the body’s components. Thus, “both sexes are needed for reproduction; one sex begets in another, the other in itself, and 9 Thomas Laqueur discusses male lactation among other “cross-gender” attributes that constitute the pre-enlightenment one-sex model of sexual difference (36, 106). See Richard Godbeer, “‘Love’s Raptures’” and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, “Nursing Fathers and Brides of Christ” for discussions of “nursing fathers” as a religious trope in New England. 10 In a brief article entitled “Anne Bradstreet, Jean Bertault, and Dr. Crooke,” Helen McMahon carefully identifies those passages that demonstrate Bradstreet both read and borrowed language from Crooke’s Microcosmographia, rendering Flegme’s reference “a footnote indicating a rather substantial debt” (121). Jean Marie Lutes also discusses Bradstreet’s knowledge of Crooke as one factor in her treatment of bodies throughout her written works. Lutes’ conclusion that Bradstreet consistently rejects associations between female bodies and sin by 1) emphasizing human frailty, 2) privileging childbirth and nursing as painful duties honorably fulfilled, and 3) treating both literary and reproductive conception as positive acts of creation resonates with my own treatment of functionalism, though Lutes places greater emphasis on Bradstreet’s personal embodied experiences, particularly of illness and maternity, than I do. As I discuss in Chapter 3, Sor Juana also discusses Galenists in a manner that highlights both functionalist medical theory as well as the practice of concocting medicines.

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each has an appropriately differentiated physiology” (Maclean, Renaissance 33). This position modified Galen, who differed from Aristotle significantly only in his belief in the existence of female semen. Otherwise, Galen agreed that women are dominated by cold and moist humors, are deficient in essential heat, and are thus passive, imperfect humans. But following a variety of changes, including a greater knowledge of female anatomy coming out of the work of Gabriele Falloppio, Galenist doctors developed a notion of functionalism that dominated medical circles by the seventeenth century. Medical functionalism marks an important change in Renaissance notions of woman, though Maclean persuasively argues that these changes did not extend to other aspects of Renaissance culture like theology and law.11 Crooke’s discussion of the breasts helps illustrate this functionalist perspective and its significance for notions of gender. According to Galen, breasts are glandules that have a use but no action. However, Crooke argues that breasts are more properly considered glandulous bodies because like testicles and kidneys they have both a use and an action. Thus, the uses of breasts are to provide milk and keep the heart and upper chest warm, while their action is the concocting of milk. This explanation of the function of breasts figures women’s bodies not in terms of lack or deprivation, but rather in terms of appropriate action. Though he does not explicitly discuss more sexual functions, his observation that breasts have conspicuous blood vessels and “exquisite sense” (193) likens their characteristics as glandulous bodies to those of male sexual organs. Another aspect of functionalism, Maclean argues, is its rejection of “the Aristotelian and Galenic argument of vestigial, non-functional organs in each sex (nipples in man, testes in woman)” (Renaissance 33). Among other things, this position leads to an appreciation of the uterus and female genitalia as active, functional organs that are not just poor shadows of male organs. Ovaries are no longer non-semen-producing, vestigial testes; the uterus becomes a remarkably generative organ rather than an empty space signifying women’s deprivation; and stimulation of the clitoris, or “womans yard,” is seen as a necessary part of conception, for “so the profusion of their seede is stirred vp for generation, for which businesse it was not necessary it should be large” (238). His functionalism also leads Crooke to address the problem of male breasts and male milk. Nothing, after all, is without a function of some kind. Crooke and several of his predecessors solve this problem by asserting that there are two kinds of milk, one nourishing and the other waterish and unnourishing. This second milk, according to Crooke, “ariseth of a remainder of the proper nourishment of the breasts” and “may bee ingendered in growne & ripe

11 Functionalism does develop in attitudes toward ethics and social construction, particularly surrounding the institution of marriage. Hierarchical distinctions are minimized in favor of emphasis on equally necessary, interdependent social and familial roles. This social functionalism is also important for considerations of Bradstreet’s marriage poems and early American women’s writing generally. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s analysis of early American women’s social roles in Good Wives demonstrates the limited but real agency such functionalism allowed.

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maydens, and well blooded men, whose bodies and vessels do abound with laudable iuyces” (194). Hieronimus Cardanus in his Bookes de subilitate saith, that hee saw a man about thirtie foure yeares old, out of whose breastes so great a quantity of Milke did flow, that it was almost sufficient to nourish a childe. They that haue trauailed into the new world do report that almost all the men haue great quantity of Milke in their breasts. (193–94)

Thus, milk in men is a product of “laudable iuyces” at work in a body nourishing itself. Crooke’s functionalist perspective requires just such an explanation. Here the abnormal production of milk is seen as a sign of vigor; generally in Crooke the actions of the female body are presented as being strongly positive. It is not at all clear that Bradstreet is consciously referring to this body of knowledge when she writes of the milk in Youth’s breasts. However, if she is not simply making a slip with respect to the gender of her speaker, this line may be seen as drawing on a body of knowledge that sees both women’s and men’s bodies as active and vigorous while razing, with a memento mori that is curiously feminized, a hierarchy in which men wear the spurs and Youth cheats female heirs. Though these traces of a feminist argument are faint in Bradstreet’s treatment of youth, they are fully developed in her quaternion on the four humors, in which she directly employs Crooke’s functionalist understanding of both the use and action of corporeal bodies in the service of a consciously feminist critique of male preeminence. “What differences the Sex, but only heat?”: Bradstreet’s Querelle des Femmes Among the Humors Now Sisters, pray proceed, each in her course, As I; impart your usefulnesse, and force. (“Of the foure Elements” 9)

While many of Bradstreet’s comments about male scorn of female abilities draw on the invective of the querelle des femmes, her quaternion on the four humors may be read as a more sustained example of such debates. Of the quaternions, “Of the Four Humours” contains the most clearly polarized argument between masculine and feminine positions. The medical controversies explored by Crooke crucially inform this debate about the nature and value of the feminine. While the elements debate their relative strength and primacy, and the seasons and ages of man tend to catalogue their respective attributes without much argument, the struggle between the four humors is strongly marked by the opposing positions of the first humor to speak, Choler, and the last, Flegme. Choler establishes the initial terms of the contest when she insists on speaking first, claims the position of monarch, and assumes a hierarchy in which male heat translates symbolically into worldly preeminence. Blood and Melancholy respond to Choler’s calumnies and argue for their own importance, yet their responses are guided by the form and terms of Choler’s attack—they vie for preeminence along the same symbolic scale. But Flegme, who in many ways appears to be most angered by Choler, changes the terms of the argument so as to win on her own terms and on Choler’s. She wins a direct confrontation while nonetheless arguing

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for a peaceful coexistence that challenges the logic of hierarchical confrontation. Moreover, she employs functionalist medical theories that belie Choler’s Aristotelian symbolism. Flegme remarks on the dichotomy between herself and Choler when she says of Choler’s “injurious taunts”: “Nor wonder ‘twas, for hatred there’s not smal,/ Where opposition is diametrical” (37). This polarized argument between Choler and Flegme is a thinly veiled debate between the sexes that in the end links Bradstreet’s functionalist understanding of the body, expressed by Flegme, with a feminist critique of misogyny and male preeminence. Choler begins by arguing that her high-born pedigree and masculine character give her the right to rule “Monarch-like.” To shew my great descent, and pedigree, Your selves would judge, but vain prolixity. It is acknowledged, from whence I came, It shal suffice, to tel you what I am: My self, and Mother, one as you shal see, But she in greater, I in lesse degree; We both once Masculines, the world doth know, Now Feminines (a while) for love we owe Unto your Sister-hood, which makes us tender Our noble selves, in a lesse noble Gender. Though under fire, we comprehend all heat, Yet man for Choler, is the proper seat. I in his heart erect my regal throne, Where Monarch-like I play, and sway alone. Yet many times, unto my great disgrace, One of your selves are my compeers, in place: Where if your rule once grow predominant, The man proves boyish, sottish, ignorant, But if ye yeeld sub-servient unto me, I make a man, a man i’th highest degree (22)

Her claim to rule alone is largely undergirded by her essential masculinity and her responsibility for creating “man i’th highest degree.” Choler then proceeds to support her claim by asserting her preeminence in war, her intellectual spirit, and her responsibility for a “Princely quality, befitting Kings” (25). Finally, she returns to sexual difference and propagation in her concluding remarks. And yet to make, my greatnesse far more great: What differences the Sex, but only heat? And one thing more to close with my narration. Of all that lives, I cause the propagation. (26)

Sexual difference and the claim that the sexes are distinguished by their relative heat frame Choler’s argument and establish the initial terms of the debate among the humors. Although she says little about the physiological mechanisms of her humor, in the end Choler insists that her heat causes propagation, decides sexual difference, and creates male preeminence, rendering her “greatnesse far more great.” Significantly, Choler is asserting the kind of Aristotelian and older Galenist theory

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of sexual difference with which functionalists like Crooke take issue. Choler asserts her preeminence based on a scale of greatness: she has the noblest lineage, the most military might, the greatest intellectual vigor, and the most heat. Her organ, the heart, reigns in a princely fashion over the body. The actions of the heart are the source of her power in the body, while her use is a drive to military power and brisk intelligence. Military might locates her in history, while lineage, inherited power, and maleness further justify her rule. Significantly, Choler’s preeminence also comes from a symbolic translation of body heat into social power; her heat is as much a symbol of her greatness, an emblem of divine right, as it is a cause of greatness. Each of the remaining humors follows the basic outline of Choler’s argument. After an introductory comment that generally responds to Choler’s initial claim for preeminence and to the criticisms of the preceding humors, each touches on her martial bearing, her influence on intelligence, and her physiological functions. Each humor provides details about her action and use, that is the action of those organs and bodily functions that fall within her domain as well as the usefulness of those actions for the activities and survival of the body in the world. However, Bradstreet’s skill in this poem is especially evident in the way she mirrors the characteristics of the humors, often ironically, in the logic and rhetoric of each speaker. For instance, Choler begins by strongly asserting her superiority and right to reign over the other humors, but ends by claiming, “I have been sparing, what I might have said,/I love no boasting, that’s but childrens trade” (26). Blood immediately points out this hypocrisy. To pay with railings, is not mine intent, But to evince the truth, by argument. I will annalise, thy so proud relation; So ful of boasting, and prevarication. Thy childish incongruities, Ile show: So walke thee til thou’rt cold, then let thee go. (26–27)

Blood’s argumentative, analytical style turns Choler’s own words against her, accusing her of childish boastfulness proven by the incongruity of claiming otherwise. Sophistically, Blood is able to transform Choler’s heat into cold through the power of her argument. This transformative function, though logically suspect, is reinforced by the action of the liver, the organ ruled by sanguine. Blood explains, Of all your qualities I do partake, And what you singly are, the whole I make. Your hot, dry, moyst, cold, natures are foure, I moderately am all, what need I more (30)

Whereas Choler rhetorically asserts her greatness along a monological scale measured by heat, masculinity, and nobility, Blood uses a more synthetic logic to argue for the preeminence of her concocting power. Still, she follows Choler in claiming individual rule (“I moderately am all, what need I more”). These lines presage Flegme’s final plea for cooperation among the humors, but here unifying force is put forward as an argument for hierarchical dominance, whereas in Flegme’s

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solution, as we shall see, unity is a sign of bodily integrity that reconfigures the concept of preeminence. Melancholy, in turn, rejects Choler’s rage and expresses a certain ironic suspicion of Blood’s professed reason and humility. Faire rosie Sister, so might’st thou scape free, I’le flatter for a time, as thou did’st me, But when the first offenders I have laid, Thy soothing girds shal fully be repaid (33)

Throughout her defense, Melancholy represents herself as wary and wounded because of the claims of the preceding humors. What Blood describes as an analytical synthesis related to the concocting function of the liver, Melancholy reads as flattering, “soothing gird” that must be guarded against while answered in kind. She concludes by confessing: My sicknesse cheifly in conceit doth lye, What I imagine, that’s my malady. Strange Chymera’s are in my phantasie, And things that never were, nor shal I see. Talke I love not, reason lyes not in length. Nor multitude of words, argues our strength (36)

As with the others, these characteristics are enacted in her discourse, especially in her suspicion of Blood’s flattery. Choler, Blood, and Melancholy all frame their arguments in terms of individual dominance, while the psychological characteristics of each are ironically reflected in her discourse, often undermining this bid for single rule. The symbolic foundation of their bids for power, that is the translation of bodily greatness into worldly greatness, may even enable this irony because of disjunctions between the several registers at work. In other words, their power rests on an illogical connection between bodily action and social hierarchy, the same discrepancy evident between Crooke’s treatment of functional female bodies and his declaration that women are by nature less moderate than men (see “Introduction”). Flegme’s discourse proves an exception to both the individualism and unconscious irony of her sisters’ arguments. From the first, Flegme is portrayed as resisting the contest in which the other humors participate. In the introduction to this quaternion, the narrator says “Cold flegme, did not contest for highest place,/Only she crav’d, to have a vacant space” (22), echoing Bradstreet’s plea for parsley instead of bays in “The Prologue.” And yet Flegme quickly enters the fray, referring to “the injurious taunts of three,” but then focusing on Choler, and in doing so returning to the battle of the sexes format first suggested by Choler’s insistence on her hot manliness. I’ve not forgot how bitter Choler spake, Nor how her Gaul on me she causlesse brake; Nor wonder ‘twas, for hatred there’s not smal, Where opposition is diametrical: To what is truth, I freely wil assent,

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(Although my name do suffer detriment) What’s slanderous, repel; doubtful, dispute; And when i’ve nothing left to say, be mute (37)

While Blood and Melancholy each argue for her place and importance in the same economy of values outlined by Choler, Flegme emphasizes diametrical opposition in order to establish an alternative economy of values. Several of her tactics are ironic. For instance, both Blood and Melancholy challenge Choler’s assertion of preeminence based on military might by suggesting that they are better able to rule and conquer in her stead. (Blood argues that she too “love[s] the blade,” though King David, a musician as well as a soldier, is her model, and Melancholy confesses she is no fighting soldier, but argues that leadership depends on her: “If in a Souldier rashnesse be so precious,/Know, in a General its most pernicious,” [33].) Addressing Choler (and thereby emphasizing a two-sided battle of the sexes), Flegme denies all military ability, explaining, “Valour I want, no Souldier am, ‘tis true,/I’le leave that manly property to you;” (37). But she then uses her lack of heat to achieve a different kind of conquest. I love no thundering Drums, nor bloody Wars, My polish’d skin was not ordain’d for skars, And though the pitched field i’ve ever fled, At home, the Conquerours, have conquered (37)

Flegme goes on to describe the captains and princes enslaved by her “Lilly white,” concluding with a reference to Helen of Troy. Thus, her first tactic is to assert her female power through a familiar ironic inversion. By beginning with a discussion of the power of female beauty, Flegme firmly grounds her response in terms of gender, answering Choler’s final remark about “What differences the Sex, but only heat?” A conquering weakness allows Flegme a victory on terrain mapped out by Choler: generals fall to her. This section also involves a kind of historical revisionism familiar to the querelle des femmes when Flegme invokes Helen positively despite her frequent inclusion by antifeminist writers in lists of bad women.12 However, this inversion is a limited tactic because of its dependence on the very antifeminist commonplaces it engages. It combines an ironic inversion of Choler’s most vaunted characteristic, military might, with historical revision, but leaves in place misogynistic notions about women’s bodies: cool, bloodless skin is the source of this victory. In Flegme’s discourse, there is also an ironic transformation of the affinities between rhetoric and psychology that govern the previous three self-descriptions. One might read the rhetorical flourishes of Flegme’s paean to the eyes (“O! good, O bad, O true, O traiterous eyes!” [39]) as a sign of characteristic instability, but this is a stretch; the more compelling irony is that she agrees with imputations against her that do not appear in her discourse. Two characterizations by the others bear most on her presentation. As Melancholy summarizes it: “I’ve done, pray Sister 12 Both Henricus Cornelius Agrippa and Christine de Pizan cast in a positive light the stories of women frequently cited in misogynist texts. The Wife of Bath’s plaintive “Who peyntede the leoun, tel me, who?” (l. 692) also raises the problem of historical representation.

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Flegme proceed in course,/We shal expect much sound, but little force” (37). Flegme acknowledges this at the end of her defense. To Melancholly i’le make no reply, The worst she said, was, instability, And too much talk; both which, I do confesse, A warning good, hereafter i’le say lesse. (40)

Flegme’s repeated promise to “say lesse” and fall mute “when i’ve nothing left to say” (37) may be read either as acquiescing to misogynist assumptions about talkative women or as defending against the dangers of public speech—this most feminine of humors is, after all, taking a strong public stand against male privilege. However, Flegme’s is the shortest of the four arguments, and the one that most forcefully counters Choler’s initial claims by changing the terms of the argument. In citing Crooke, she is also more overtly learned than her sisters, proving her scholarly competence in a manner that either they find unnecessary or, given Flegme’s claims on the brain, they cannot achieve. The revision of Helen and the irony of the conquest of conquerors are taken one step further with this irony in Flegme’s discourse. The others’ critiques are indirectly revealed as slanders insofar as Flegme’s apologies are at odds with her concise and reasonable argument. While Choler, Blood, and Melancholy are not entirely aware of their boastfulness, sophistry, and paranoia, respectively, Flegme seems aware of her brevity and focused, knowledgeable argument even as she denies both. Thus, her promise to fall silent involves ironically conceding to slurs that an astute reader will recognize do not fit her argument. Her promise to say less suggests modesty as shame while her argument is better understood as an exercise of modesty as keeping due measure. Both of these strategies are limited because antifeminists so easily misread them. They have the guerrilla potential of double-voiced discourse, but they also require readers attuned to their irony. Flegme’s most persuasive and direct challenge to Choler occurs when she argues for the brain’s primacy. She begins this largest section of her defense by reiterating Choler’s assertion that the heat of Choler and the matter of Flegme together constitute the power of the brain. Next difference betwixt us twain doth lye, Who doth possesse the Brain, or thou, or I; Shame forc’d thee say, the matter that was mine, But the spirits, by which it acts are thine; Thou speakest truth, and I can speak no lesse, Thy heat doth much, I candidly confesse (38)

Here Flegme apparently accepts a female=matter, male=spirit order of things, implying that she is indeed simply asking for “a vacant space” within the dominant symbolic order, as the prologue to this quaternion suggests. But after conceding these spirits to Choler, Flegme spends the remainder of the poem insisting that the Spirit is actually hers. The Brain’s the noblest member all allow, The scituation, and form wil it avow, Its ventricles, membrances [sic], and wond’rous net,

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Galen, Hipocrates, drives to a set. That divine Essence, the immortal Soul, Though it in all, and every part be whole (38)

Flegme grants Choler vital spirits, that is the heat emanating from the heart, but she then distinguishes this spirit from “divine Essence, ... immortal soul.” The description that follows echoes Helkiah Crooke’s argument that the soul is indivisible, immaterial, and “Is wholly in the whole, and wholly in euery particular part” (4). Crooke uses similar language to describe spirit as quintessence, i.e., the fifth, heavenly essence that exists in addition to the four humors. The Spirit is the quintessence or fift essence, æthereal, in proportion (as sayth the Philosopher) answering to the element of the starres; the foure humors are called the foure sensible elements of the bodie. Choler in temper the most hot and raging, resembles fire. Blood hot and moyst, resembles the ayre. Flegme cold & moyst, resembles the water. Melancholy, cold and dry, is fitly compared vnto earth. (7)

Thus, Flegme opposes Spirit as quintessence to the vital spirit claimed by Choler, and in doing so transcends the field of the battling humors in order to claim a connection with the ethereal. Her first gesture in this section is to claim preeminence by insisting that her matter is the seat of a more important spirit than Choler’s heat, whether it be quintessence or soul. (Crooke separates the two but uses almost identical language to describe them; Bradstreet’s use of both “essence” and “Soul” in the context of a discussion of the humors may suggest a conflation of the two.) It is somewhat surprising that after what one would expect to be the deciding argument in the work of a Puritan poet, Flegme then goes on to insist that her matter is also the seat of more worldly faculties such as reason and the senses. Within this high built Cittadel doth lye, The Reason, Fancy, and the Memory; The faculty of speech doth here abide, The spirits animal, from whence doth slide, The five most noble Sences, here do dwel, Of three, its hard to say, which doth excel (38–39)

This leads into a discussion of Sight as the Queen of Senses (as opposed to Choler’s kingly reign) and the eyes, physically pertaining to Flegme, as the seat of the Soul. Bradstreet’s discussion of the senses does not actually digress from the spiritual argument since she here draws directly from a section in Crooke entitled, “How profitable and helpefull Anatomy is to the knowledge of God.”13 But what especially 13 Crooke writes: His incredible wisedome appeareth in the admirable contabulation or composition of the whole, made of so many parts, so vnlike one to another. Enter thou whosoeuer thou art (though thou be an Atheist, and acknowledgest no God at all,) enter I beseech thee, into the Sacred Tower of Pallas, I meane the braine of Man, and behold and admire the pillars and arched Cloysters of that princely pallace, the huge greatnesse of that stately building, the Pedistals or Bases, the Porches & goodly frontispice, the 4.arched Chambers, the bright

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interests me is Flegme’s claim on “spirits animal,” that is, the principle of sensation and voluntary action arising from nervous stimuli (linked to the soul from the Latin animam). Early in the quaternion, as part of the passage in which she challenges Flegme over rule of the brain, Choler contentiously claims animal spirits in addition to her uncontested vital spirits, and then immediately suggests that Flegme will disagree. Flegme does indeed disagree, insisting that the animal spirits are hers in this passage that is once again indebted to Crooke. (It is easy to overlook this point of contention since Flegme does not emphasize it.) Crooke challenges Aristotelian theories, writing, .... Wherefore seeing the Peripateticks doe confesse, that the Organs of sence and motion are more conspicuous in the Braine then in the heart: why will they not yeeld to the Physitian, that the Animall faculty is in the braine, the Vitall in the Heart, and the Naturall in the Liuer; but make all the worlde witnesses of their refractarie mindes, then which in a true Philosopher nothing is more illiberall? (43)

Crooke, drawing heavily on the works of Caspar Bauhin and André du Laurens, develops medieval ideas about the three spirits or faculties—animal, vital, and natural—to challenge the Aristotelian claim that heat emanating from the heart is the single motivating force of the body. Thus, Flegme’s insistence that the animal spirits are hers forces a notion of the body that is far more complex than the simple hierarchy of heat subscribed to by Choler and Aristotelian medical theorists. This argument does not simply give Flegme “a vacant space,” but rather serves as a bid for “highest place.” According to Crooke, “The Braine therefore, not the Heart is the first Moouer, and first Sensator” (41). Anticipating objections from Aristotelians “that the Braine hath no sence,” he insists that its sensations are operative not passive. It receiueth not the species or Images of sensible things; but like a Iudge it taketh knowledge of their impressions, and accordingly determineth of them. They say, the Braine is vnapt for motion, because it is cold: we answere, it was necessary it should bee cold, that is, lesse hot, for the better performance of the functions. For if the Braine had exceeded in heate, then would his motions haue been rash and vnruly, and his sensations giddie and fond as in a phrensie. (41)

and cleare Mirrour, the Labyrinthæan Mazes and web of the small arteries, the admirable trainings of the Veines, the draining furrowes and watercourses, the liuing ebullitions and springings vp of the sinnewes, and the wonderfull fœcundity of that white marrow of the back, which the wiseman in the Book of the Preacher or Ecclesiastes calleth the Siluer cord. From the braine, turne the eye of thy minde to the gates of the Sun, and Windowes of the soule, I meane the eyes, and there behold the brightnesse of the glittering Cristall, the purity and neate cleannesse of the watery and glassy humors, the delicate and fine texture of the Tunicles, and the wonderfull and admirable volubility of the Muscles, in turning and rowling of the eyes. (15) Bradstreet reverses the order of this discussion, describing the eyes and then the “marrow of the back.” McMahon cites later passages on the eyes, but fails to identify this earlier passage that directly links these parts and functions to knowledge of God.

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This division of the faculties reflects Crooke’s medical functionalism, i.e., his belief that all parts of the body are operative rather than passive. Here the coldness of the Brain is functional rather than a sign of lack (just as women’s body parts are described as functional elsewhere in Microcosmographia). His ranking of the Brain as most noble directly challenges the peripatetic theories about heat invoked by Choler and insists on a more multivalent and functional vision of the body’s parts. Bradstreet echoes Crooke’s language from this passage closely in Flegme’s discourse: A foolish Brain (saith Choler) wanting heat, But a mad one, say I, where ‘tis too great, Phrensie’s worse, then folly, one would more glad, With a tame foole converse, then with a mad. (39)

Though his functionalism supports a certain kind of feminist argument, Crooke’s discussion of the brain in no way engages questions of gender. Elsewhere Crooke argues that “women are Nockthrown or easily mooued of the hindges” because they are generally cooler and thus unable to “lay a law vpon themselues” (276). Coolness allows the brain to moderate the body “like a Iudge” but prevents women from doing so. This is a contradiction in Crooke’s thinking that Bradstreet deftly avoids. Though clearly a paraphrase of Crooke, within the gendered contest established between Choler and Flegme in this poem Bradstreet’s lines contribute to an argument against male preeminence. While Crooke is merely trying to explain how the body works, Bradstreet is using his functionalism within what amounts to a debate about women to undermine a patriarchal symbolic structure that equates greater heat with greater power. At the end of this quaternion, Flegme is awarded the victory (this is the only quaternion with a victor) for her suggestion that the humors all join hands since peaceful coexistence is necessary for the survival of all. This resolution has been hailed as femininely mutual and process-oriented (Martin 44–45) or as “a folkloric dance of village cultural social mediation” (Round 188), but in the context of medical functionalism it stands as a more pointed challenge to misogynistic medical theory. (Such a resolution is also the conventional ending of debates among body parts since anything but final unity will obviously lead to disaster.) Within the newer theories of Crooke and his peers, the brain and nerves, ruled by Flegme, are no longer passive, but rather are, in Crooke’s terms, “a Iudge” overseeing the “wel gouerned Citty or Common-wealth” (46) of the body. The masculine monarchy of Choler is replaced by a more republican system with no single leader but most nobly legislated by the cool Brain. Significantly, Bradstreet combines this medical theory with the genre of debates about women to develop a sophisticated feminist argument that goes beyond crying slander or ironically subverting misogynistic conventions. A simple symbolic order in which amplitude in one area translates into greatness in another is replaced by a functionalist vision that bars such translations of value and insists instead on a sense of dynamic community without strongly hierarchical power relations. Crooke’s medical functionalism is neither primarily nor necessarily feminist. His privileging of dissection and experimentation disrupts the authoritative tradition foregrounded by scholastic commentary, but throughout Crooke’s text there is also evidence of conservative, misogynistic ideas about women. By deploying these

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theories within a querelle des femmes, Bradstreet rebuts direct attacks based on gender privilege leveled by figures representing traditional authority and the symbolic order. Likewise, certain key components of the querelle des femmes tradition are altered as Bradstreet uses new ideas about both the body and government to thwart the paradoxes of someone like Ward that depend upon a “commonsense” notion of sexual hierarchy. Of the four humors, Choler is the least specific about the physiological actions of the heart, her organ, and yellow bile, her fluid. Rather, the bodily mechanisms of heat and vitality are taken for granted until the very end, and inherited power and martial conquest are the more obvious signs and sources of her preeminence. In other words, Choler is primarily concerned with a symbolic order that transcends the body; most of her discussion of humoral medicine relates to the weaknesses of and the illnesses caused by the other humors. On the other hand, Flegme’s use of medical theory is extensive as she describes the actions of her humor. Since she cannot claim mental superiority within Choler’s symbolic order, she must do so by elaborating a medical theory that demonstrates her importance for the brain and nerves in the face of accusations of passivity and witlessness. Functional action rather than symbolic significance is the crux of her argument; she uses science to fight the misogynistic commonplaces that inform the primary attacks on her from the other humors. In developing this analysis of Bradstreet’s feminist argument, I am especially interested in how the body is characterized functionally to subvert a symbolic system in which heat=masculinity=nobility. Flegme’s discussion of both the soul and the senses also emphasizes that the soul depends upon the functional body rather than transcending it, an observation that brings into question prevailing assumptions about fallen bodies and sinful women. “My Sun is gone”: Heat and Masculinity in Bradstreet’s Political and Marriage Poems Bradstreet’s quaternion on the four humors is arguably her most feminist text, debating as it does the nature of sexual difference and the social and political ramifications of those differences, with particular criticism leveled against Choler’s claim of preeminence based solely on heat, “Whence flow fine spirits, and witty notions” (24). Choler intones further, “Thus arms, and arts I claim, and higher things;/The Princely quality, befitting Kings” (25) while Flegme scathingly retorts, Again, none’s fit for Kingly place but thou, If Tyrants be the best, i’le it allow; But if love be, as requisite as feare, Then I, and thou, must make a mixture here (40)

This portrait of “man i’th highest degree” (22) is decidedly unflattering, but in other poems the heat of kings and husbands is treated more favorably. “The Four Monarchies,” Bradstreet’s chronicle of the acts of kings, many of them tyrants, is ambiguous in its treatment of monarchy, as scholarly debates make clear, while in her marriage poems, she writes movingly of the heat missing from their home in

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the absence of her husband, Simon. Still, Bradstreet’s poems on monarchies and marriage are not primarily concerned with either female weakness or strength. They are better understood as elaborating the debate between Choler and Sanguine over competing models of masculinity and in doing so continuing a less direct feminist critique of the most extreme assertions of male preeminence. Throughout her political and family writings Bradstreet emphasizes the dangers of superabundant heat while using correlations between the body as microcosmos and the operation of both family and state to privilege masculinity defined in terms of function and moderation. In “The Four Monarchies,” the biggest threat to order is excessive heat; in her marriage poems, it is a complete absence of heat. In “The Prologue,” Bradstreet famously eschews “sing[ing] of Wars, of Captaines, and of Kings,/Of Cities founded, Common-wealths begun” (3) as too difficult for a woman poet, but in “The Four Monarchies” these “superior things” are in fact her subject. She apologizes three times for not finishing the Roman monarchy, each time blaming her weakness but also, in the final apology, associating her failure with politics, characteristically framed in terms of physical malaise.14 No more I’ll do sith I have suffered wrack, Although my monarchies their legs do lack; Nor matter is’t this last, the world now sees, Hath many ages been upon his knees. (Works 178)

This conjunction between a monarchy on its knees and the limping verse of a poet hobbled by the weakness of her sex as well as real illness and misfortune is more than a felicitous way to justify the infelicities of her poem. History and bodies go together in this poem, but apart from these apologies, the bodies in question are usually male and never Bradstreet’s. Elizabeth Wade White suggests that this is a “choleric” poem, reflecting Bradstreet’s own pent up anger and frustration (237– 38). This is certainly a poem filled with violence and rage. Her descriptions of monstrously creative acts of torture and murder are limited only to the degree that, as she puts it, “I Rhethorick want, to poure out execration” (100). Additionally, if Flegme feels that modesty demands she veil her sexual functions, Bradstreet feels no such compunction in chronicling incest and “voluptuousness.” However, the choler in this poem does not reflect Bradstreet’s pent-up frustrations but rather pertains to her portrayal of dangerous, masculine assertions of preeminence. In many ways, the challenge of interpreting these apologies and the monarchies as a whole may be framed as a question of the relationship between the personal and the political, though not in the sense implied by the catch-phrase of 1960s feminism. For Bradstreet, analogies and interdependence between the microcosmos of the body and family and the macrocosmos of the social and divine order are central, as is evident in Old England’s discussion in “A Dialogue between Old England and New” of her “weakned fainting body,” wracked by “This Phisick-purging-potion I have taken” (180–81). As we have seen, Bradstreet cites Crooke’s Microcosmographia; she also refers to a “little world” twice in her works. At the end of one of her marriage poems, 14 See Rosenmeier, Anne Bradstreet Revisited 62, for an insightful reading of these apologies.

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Bradstreet describes their home as Simon’s “little world”, while in Meditation 62 she writes, “As a man is called the little world, so his heart may be called the little commonwealth” (Works 286), elaborating a conceit about the movement of thoughts and the “great court of justice” that is conscience. “[S]o absolute is this court of judicature that there is no appeal from it, no not to the court of heaven itself” (Works 286). Bodies, households, and states all depend on justice, moderation and harmony amongst their parts. Bradstreet’s understanding of the relationship between the personal and political becomes feminist insofar as she uses it to challenge all monological hierarchies in favor of systems, consistently reining in unbridled male power in places where her sources often continue to assert female subordination. These subtle changes are evident in the ways Bradstreet distills and versifies Sir Walter Ralegh’s The History of the World (1614) in “The Four Monarchies.”15 Her motivations in writing this poem were at least partly political; by the time Bradstreet was writing, Ralegh’s History, published in 1614 while he was in prison, was being read as much more anti-monarchical than he intended (it was a favorite book of Oliver Cromwell’s). According to Anna R. Beer, “The History’s power lies in the relentless and repetitive rehearsal of God’s judgments upon kings; Ralegh will never justify the overthrow of a monarchy but he will illustrate it again and again” (46). Beer argues that Ralegh places himself “firmly within a militarist honour culture which is offered as an alternative to courtly, factional corruption” (52) while Stephen Greenblatt finds that “Ralegh’s criticism of the successful counselor, captain, or courtier is a criticism of the flexible man, the man who has mastered the art of self-fashioning” (145). We see Ralegh’s critique of dishonorable flexibility, for instance, in an aside in the first section of his chapter on Alexander the Great: “There is indeed a certaine Doctrine of Policy (as Policy is now a-dayes defined by falshood and knauery) that deuised rumors & lies, if they serue the turn, but for a day or two, are greatly auaileable” (IV. ii.1.140). Bradstreet also focuses on the character of monarchs, but she repeatedly emphasizes “heat” and function where Ralegh stresses “knavery” and honor. Ralegh frequently distinguishes between manliness and effeminacy throughout The History of the World. At times Bradstreet closely parrots his characterization of dangerous effeminacy, as when she describes Sardanapalus in “The Four Monarchies” as “wallow[ing] in all voluptuousnesse” (71).16 He “revell’d with his Whores./Did wear their garb, their gestures imitate,/And their kind t’excel did emulate” until his servant Arbaces, “His master like a Strumpet chanc’d to spy,/His manly heart disdained, in the least,/Longer to serve this Metamorphos’d beast” (71). The manly Arbaces takes up arms against the king, gaining allies by explaining his master’s “disease” (71) to those close at hand and promising power and freedom to forces farther away. Ralegh notes that when the army of Bactria came to assist Sardanapalus, Arbaces “perswaded so strongly by promise of liberty, that those forces ioyned themselues with his” (II.xxii.12.477). Resonances with English politics of the 1640s are evident in Bradstreet’s rendering of this encounter. 15 See Helena Maragou for further discussion of Bradstreet’s sources. 16 The pagination is faulty in this section of The Tenth Muse. Bradstreet’s treatment of Sardanapalus begins on a page numbered 81 that in fact should be 71. I cite the proper pagination here in order to avoid sending the reader to the wrong page 81.

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From Bactaria an Army was at hand, Prest for this service, by the Kings command; These with celerity, Arbaces meets, And with all termes of amity, he greets, Makes promises, their necks for to un-yoak, And their Taxations sore, all to revoake, T’infranchise them, to grant what they could crave, To want no priviledge, Subjects should have (72)

In “The Four Ages of Man,” Bradstreet makes her Puritan interpretation of this monarchy even more obvious when she has Youth liken himself to Sardanapalus, adding, “if what I am you’d hear,/Seek out a British, bruitish Cavaleer” (48). While the distinction between manly figures like Arbaces and effeminate, ineffectual monarchs like Sardanapalus are common in Ralegh, this description is unusual for Bradstreet. Indeed, her treatment of Sardanapalus in “The Four Ages of Man” demonstrates her more common approach. Rather than characterizing him as unmanly, Bradstreet juxtaposes Sardanapalus’ vanity and frivolity with the inevitable decay of bodies in the memento mori discussed above that ends with the drying up of bone marrow and breast milk. Bradstreet’s reframing of Ralegh’s emphasis on male honor is more overt in her treatment of Alexander, whose reign comprises over a quarter of her poem.17 For instance, Ralegh notes that Alexander’s plans were disturbed when the Persians and Greeks became allies, forcing him to “[turn] his sword from the ignoble and effeminate Persians, against which he had directed it, towards the manly and famous Græcians, of whose assistance he thought himself assured” (IV.ii.1.141). In the following pages Ralegh describes the victory of Alexander’s soldiers, who “came to fight,” over those of Darius, who “tooke more care how to embroder with gold and siluer their vpper garments, as if they attended the inuasion but of the Sunne-beames, than they did to arme themselues with yron and steele” (IV.ii.1.142). Ralegh describes Darius’ enormous army as sumptuously arrayed and accompanied, moreover, by a large group of court women. Now followed the Reareward, the same being led by Sisygambis the kings Mother, and by his Wife, drawn in glorious Chariots, followed by a great traine of Ladies their attendants on horse-backe, with fifteene Wagons of the Kings children, and the wiues of the Nobility, waited on by two hundred and fiftie Concubines, and a world of Nurses and Eunuchs, most sumptuously apparrelled. By which it should seeme that Darius thought that the Macedonians had bin Comedians or Tumblers; for this troope was far fitter to behold those sports than to bee present at battailes. (IV. ii.4.148)

17 Like Ralegh, Bradstreet both admires and finds fault with Alexander. In “Civil War and Bradstreet’s ‘Monarchies,’” Eberwein associates Bradstreet’s celebration of the reign of Alexander with her admiration for the rule of Queen Elizabeth I, while her very short, troubled treatment of the Roman monarchs reflects her dismay over the reign of the Stuarts; Bradstreet’s concluding observations about a monarchy “upon his knees” reinforces this argument that her poem is strongly contextualized by contemporary politics.

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Bradstreet includes many of these details, but without replicating Ralegh’s emphasis on Macedonian manliness and Persian effeminacy. Instead, her description dwells on the pomp and beauty, however vain, of Darius’ army and attendants. And on he goes Darius for to meet; Who came with thousand thousands at his feet, Though some there be, and that more likely, write; He but four hundred thousand had to fight, The rest attendants, which made up no lesse; (Both sexes there) was almost numberlesse. For this wise King, had brought to see the sport; Along with him, the Ladyes of the Court. His mother old, beautious wife, and daughters, It seemes to see the Macedonians slaughters. Sure its beyond my time, and little Art; To shew, how great Darius plaid his part: The splendor, and the pompe, he marched in, For since the world, was no such Pageant seen. (122)18

Bradstreet describes this pageant for another page, omitting Ralegh’s reference to “a most vnnecessary traine of Strumpets” (IV.ii.4.148) and instead stressing: Great Sisigambis, she brought up the Reare; Then such a world of Wagons did appear, Like severall houses moving upon wheeles: As if she’d drawne, whole Sushan at her heeles. This brave Virago, to the King was mother; And as much good she did, as any other. (123)

Bradstreet’s description is ironic throughout—Sisigambis was as useless as the rest of Darius’ well-dressed and cowardly army. However, she does not portray the soldiers as effeminate or the court women as strumpets and her description of Sisigambis as a “brave Virago” imbues her with a courage that is wholly Bradstreet’s creation.19 This departure from Ralegh’s model of manliness comes into sharper focus a few lines 18 Passages such as these lead Maragou to conclude that Bradstreet’s praise of Alexander and other powerful and sometimes tyrannical monarchs should be taken as evidence of her interest in worldly objects and displays rather than her choleric temper (78), in line with Ann Stanford’s reading of Bradstreet as “the worldly puritan.” I argue instead that Bradstreet’s treatment of choler and material display often revise Ralegh’s gendering of public virtues. Her “worldliness” here and elsewhere cannot be wholly explained in terms of her relationship to Puritan orthodoxy. 19 Eberwein mentions this episode, but treats Bradstreet’s departure from Ralegh as an act of modesty rather than a conscious reframing of the highly polarized sexual characteristics he uses to define honor culture. She writes, “Here Ralegh introduced a characteristic digression on motivation of soldiers, a topic on which the Puritan gentlewoman forebore to speculate. An unfortunate consequence of following Ralegh was that Bradstreet muted her own voice, deferring to him and to other sources when possible but falling into silence when she felt it unseemly for a housewife to hazard an opinion. She remained hidden within her poem, overwhelmed by subject matter that constantly reminded her that she could never summon

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later when Bradstreet describes the casualties in Alexander’s army—280 compared to 200,000 Persian dead and 40,000 taken prisoner. Ralegh writes, I do verily beleeue, that this small number rather died with the ouer-trauaile and painestaking in killing their enemies, than by any strokes receiued from them. And surely if the Persian Nation (at this time degenerate & the basest of the World) had had any sauour remaining of the ancient valour of their fore-fathers, they would neuer haue sold so good cheape, and at so vile a price, the Mother, the Wife, the Daughters, and other the kings children; had their owne honour beene valued by them at nothing; and the kings safetie and his estate at lesse. (IV.ii. 4.148–49)

Bradstreet, on the other hand, writes, Two hundred eighty Greeks he lost in fight, By too much heat, not wounds (as Authors write.) (124)

What Ralegh calls “ouer-trauaile and paines-taking,” Bradstreet calls “too much heat,” thereby changing fastidiousness into intemperance and humoral imbalance. Rather than criticizing the Persian failure to defend their women (more important, in Ralegh’s telling, than protecting their own honor or the king’s person and estate), Bradstreet takes a small gibe at the excesses of Alexander’s men. Throughout, she studiously avoids Ralegh’s emphasis on manly honor defined by the protection of women and in opposition to the “effeminacy” of other men. Bradstreet makes a similar reference to heat in her description of Cambyses, a Persian ruler who conquered Egypt: “If all his heat, had been for a good end,/ Cambyses to the clouds, we might commend” (91).20 Cambyses is known for increasing his empire but also for many ignoble acts, including incest, as Bradstreet makes clear: Cambyses, no wayes like, his noble Sire, But to enlarge his state, had some desire; His reign with Bloud, and Incest, first begins, Then sends to finde a Law for these his sins; That Kings with Sisters match, no Law they finde, But that the Persian King, may act his minde; Which Law includes all Lawes, though lawlesse stil, And makes it lawful Law, if he but wil (90)

One of Cambyses’ first acts upon ascending the throne was to ask his judges if there was precedent for a king marrying his sister. Herodotus writes, “When, therefore, Cambyses put his question, they managed to find an answer which would neither violate the truth nor endanger their own necks: namely, that though they could the confidence Ralegh derived from decades of achievement as solider, explorer, courtier, and royal counselor” (“Bradstreet’s ‘Monarchies’”121). 20 Bradstreet refers to Cambyses later in “The Four Monarchies” when she observes that Daryus Nothus “The King, his sister, like Cambyses, wed” (109) and in the revised version of “The Foure Elements” included in Several Poems when Earth describes her ability to overthrow “Cambyses’ army” with a sand storm (Works 25), suggesting that he was a particularly charged exemplum for her.

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discover no law which allowed brother to marry sister, there was undoubtedly a law which permitted the king of Persia to do what he pleased” (166). Ralegh, following Herodotus, admires Cambyses’ conquests, which he treats first, as well as his destruction of religious idols, but then excoriates the specious justification for incest offered by his judges as well as a host of other “barbarous cruelties” (III.iv.3.37). Bradstreet’s reference to Cambyses’ heat is perhaps a versification of Ralegh’s observation that, After his returne from the attempt of Æthiopia, he caused Apis the Egyptian Bull, vvorshipped by that Nation as God, to be slaine: a deed very commendable, had it proceeded from true zeale, and bin executed as in seruice of him that onely is, and liueth. (III.iv.3.37)

Again, she puts a humoral spin on Ralegh’s characterization of mad Cambyses, describing his insanity and “barbarous cruelties” as “heat.” This might be considered simply a minor preference in diction if it were not for other changes Bradstreet makes that shift the treatment of gender. One of Cambyses’ most gruesome acts was also related to matters of the law. Upon learning that a judge, Sisamnes, had taken a bribe, Cambyses ordered him flayed and then had the seat Sisamnes used at court upholstered with his skin. He then made Sisamnes’ son, Otanes, justice in his father’s place, “and told him not to forget what his chair was made of” (Herodotus 288). Ralegh makes the hypocrisy of this brutal defense of justice clear by treating it in the same paragraph as he does Cambyses’ justification of incest, writing, “And yet, where it concerned not the Kings priuate satisfaction, he caused Sisamnus, one of his Iudges, and perchance one of those which fauoured his incestuous match, to be flayed a-liue, for an vniust iudgement giuen, and the same his hide to be hung vp ouer the iudgement seate” (III.iv.3.37).21 Bradstreet introduces this episode after

21 Ralegh diverges from Herodotus in reading this scene as evidence of hypocrisy. Herodotus does not include the story of Sisamnus among the many examples he provides of Cambyses’ insanity. Instead, he refers to this episode when introducing the son, Otanes, “the one who had the remarkable chair” (288). Intriguingly, this scene served as a positive exemplum iustitiae and was painted frequently on the walls of courts and judges’ chambers throughout the Netherlands in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries (see Hugo van der Velden). Writing in English, Richard Brathwaite cites Cambyses as a positive exemplum in his chapter “Of Justice”: Of all the Acts which King Cambyses did, There was no one that better merited; Then when he (for abuse of Iustice) made The skin of Iudge Sysambris to be fleade, And to deterre all others from like wrong Caused it neere the Iudgement-seate be hong. (n. pag.) Though she likely used “admire” as a neutral expression of wonder, Bradstreet may have also had such uses of Cambyses as a positive model partly in mind when she wrote, “Thy cruelty will Ages still admire.”

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narrating another of Cambyses’ notorious cruelties: killing his pregnant wife for criticizing the murder of their brother. His sister, whom incestuously he wed, Hearing her harmlesse brother thus was dead, His woful fate with tears did so bemoane, That by her Husbands charge, she caught her owne; She with her fruit was both at once undone, Who would have born a Nephew, and a Son. O hellish Husband, Brother, Vnckle, Sire, Thy cruelty will Ages still admire. This strange severity, one time he us’d, Upon a Judge, for breach of Law accus’d; Flayd him alive, hung up his stuffed skin Over his Seat, then plac’d his Son therein; To whom he gave this in rememberance, Like fault must look for the like recompence. (91–92)

Bradstreet’s description of Cambyses’ wife/sister bemoaning the death of their brother is more evocative than Ralegh’s, suggesting either that she was more moved by the plight of this pregnant woman or that she had read Herodotus or a source that followed Herodotus more closely in describing this episode. But unlike either Ralegh or Herodotus, Bradstreet plays with the multiplied kinship roles in this tale driven by both incest and royal succession to frame Cambyses as a cruel, unnatural family member rather than an injudicious tyrant before similarly treating the story of Otanes as a perversion of family relations. Social functions, not honor, are her concern, a difference reflected in her treatment of the humoral body in contrast to Ralegh’s concern with masculinity and effeminacy. Many scholars have observed that Bradstreet gestures toward providential history, but is not successful in bringing it to a close for reasons that go beyond the weakness and misfortune she confesses to in her apologies. Rosenmeier reads this poem as an attempt, however vexed, at providential history (Anne Bradstreet Revisited 62–68) while Eberwein finds that Bradstreet forecloses the possibility of providential history, despite her partial dependence on the book of Daniel, by focusing on monarchs rather than empires in ways that channel her profound anxieties over monarchy during the era of the English civil war (“Bradstreet’s ‘Monarchies’” 130–31).22 Beer observes that the combination of cyclical and linear views of history in Ralegh’s History of the World, one humanist and the other Protestant, is not uncommon (46) and I choose to assume the same about Bradstreet’s treatment of history. There is a religious component to her portrayal of masculinity in this poem that correlates with religious models of male moderation that may not be providential but are not wholly secular. Alexander is a figure of heat in Bradstreet’s telling: “This is the heegoat, which from Grecia came,/Who ran in fury [“choler” in Several poems], on the Persian Ram” (120). He reigns alone, preeminent over all. 22 J.F. Maclear, on the other hand, reads Bradstreet as unqualified in her optimism about the millennium (“New England and the Fifth Monarchy: The Quest for the Millennium in Early American Puritanism” 236).

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Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700 Thus to Darius he writes back again, The Firmament two Suns cannot contain; Two Monarchies on Earth cannot abide, Nor yet two Monarchs in one World reside (130)

Bradstreet echoes Ralegh’s admiration of Alexander, but throughout her political writings she registers discomfort with this model of masculine greatness. Drawing on Daniel 7, she concludes the third monarchy with a contrast between Alexander’s ram and other aggressive beasts representing the Persian monarchies, on the one hand, and the superior rule of Christ, on the other: “But yet this Lion, Bear, this Leopard, Ram,/ All trembling stand, before that powerfull Lambe” (174). The historical movement of this poem does not successfully follow a providential design, it is true, but we may see in Bradstreet’s characterizations of male virtue an emphasis on moderated heat that evokes Christ’s lamb and other biblical and contemporary figures (King David but also Queen Elizabeth and Sir Philip Sidney). In the quaternion on the four humors, Blood suggests a similar critique of unbridled heat while defending her more moderate, biblically informed masculinity. She acknowledges that the “vital spirits” of Choler are nobler “yet mine/Shal justly claime priority of thine” (29). This priority is based not only on the moderating function of blood in tempering the extremes of the other three humors (“I moderately am all, what need I more” [30]), but also in an appeal to another authoritative model of masculinity. Thy foolish provocations, I despise, And leave’t to all, to judge where valour lyes. No pattern, nor no Patron will I bring, But David, Judah’s most heroick King (27)

Blood finds in David an exemplum who combines musical and martial skill in a more balanced, judicious expression of manhood. She reinforces her critique of Choler and Choler’s authorities by calling into question Choler’s cruelty and pride. Wilt thou this valour, manhood, courage cal: Nay, know ‘tis pride, most diabolical. (28)

Blood does not provide the final word on honorable manhood, for she is prone to sin and pride. However, given mankind’s innate sinfulness, hers seems to be the model of masculinity most privileged by Bradstreet. The antithesis to Cambyses as “hellish Husband, Brother, Vnckle, Sire” (91) may be found in Bradstreet’s description of Middle Age in “The Four Ages of Man.” Middle Age is associated with choler and fire, but his virtues involve fulfilling roles linked functionally to others. Be my condition mean, I then take paines; My family to keep, but not for gaines. If rich, I’m urged then to gather more, To bear me out i’ th’ world, and feed the poor, If a father, then for children must provide: But if none, then for kindred near ally’d.

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If noble, then mine honour to maintaine, If not, yet wealth, Nobility can gain. (49)

Bradstreet’s version of Sidney’s and Ralegh’s honor-culture does include conventional celebrations of military and literary conquest, but she also celebrates male moderation in accord with Christian humility and what Crooke calls the ability to “lay a law vpon themselues” (276). However, this male moderation is opposed to other, immoderate and usually superheated men, not female weakness. As in the quaternion on the four humors, Bradstreet often treats male preeminence by virtue of greater heat as a sign of tyranny rather than just rule. Indeed, throughout much of Bradstreet’s poetry, male figures are the archetypal sinners and tyrants, characterized as such when they are unable to moderate their excessive heat. Unlike many learned women of the seventeenth century including the others I treat here, Bradstreet does not directly respond to St. Paul’s injunction against women speaking and teaching in church or on religious matters. Nor does she say much about the sinfulness of Eve or the perfection of Mary (she emphasizes maternal sorrow rather than female guilt when she describes Eve holding the infant Cain in “Contemplations”).23 Likewise, her portrayal of queens in “The Four Monarchies” does not focus unduly on gendered characteristics, save for a rather more positive portrayal of “brave virago[es]” than in Ralegh, as we have seen in her treatment of Sisigambis.24 Instead, we find her opposing competing models of masculinity rather than masculinity and femininity. With heat comes dangerous, sinful pride, and the answer she provides is a more temperate form of manhood aligned with religious values and necessary to the smooth and virtuous functioning of both household and state. Unlike “The Four Monarchies,” Bradstreet’s marriage poems are intimate, personal, and generally well-regarded. Yet here too we find her abiding concern with the microcosmos of the body as it relates to larger social functions. In “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment,” Bradstreet accepts the principle that man is hotter than woman while characterizing their relations as interdependent, reflecting the ethical functionalism that begins to predominate in writings about marriage (Maclean, Renaissance 47–67). In language that echoes Crooke on generation, Bradstreet writes, My Sun is gone so far in’s zodiac, Whom whilst I ‘joyed, nor storms, nor frost I felt, His warmth such frigid colds did cause to melt. My chilled limbs now numbed lie forlorn; Return, return, sweet Sol, from Capricorn; In this dead time, alas, what can I more Than view those fruits which through thy heat I bore? (Works 226)

23 See Lutes for a discussion of Bradstreet’s valorization of the maternal, including a reading of Bradstreet’s portrait of Eve in Contemplations (325–26). 24 Semiramis (67), Sisigambis (123), and Cleopatra (Works 171) are all called “brave virago” in “The Four Monarchies,” while Elizabeth I is honored as “our dread Virago” (201) in Bradstreet’s elegy for her. These are the only uses of “virago” listed in Raymond A. Craig’s concordance of Bradstreet’s works (1033).

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The conceit of this poem describes a body torn asunder. Bradstreet’s husband is addressed as “My head, my heart, mine eyes, my life, nay, more,/My joy, my magazine of earthly store,” but three lines later she explains that head has been severed from heart by their separation, bringing on the chill that will only disappear when he returns: But when thou northward to me shalt return, I wish my Sun may never set, but burn Within the Cancer of my glowing breast, The welcome house of him my dearest guest.

When Bradstreet laments, “So many steps, head from the heart to sever,” it is unclear who is head and who is heart, but her desire to have her Sun return to her breast, as well as much of the imagery in this poem and others written to her husband, suggest that he is heart (heat, sun, blood). This coincides with the conventions of love poetry, as does the distance of the beloved. It also, as Rosamond Rosenmeier has shown, has typological resonances (“Study” 194–97). But just as this distance is also a function of Simon’s role as a man and a member of the colonial elite in New England, the descriptions of him as Sun and heart coincide with the conventional medical belief that men were hotter. On the other hand, Bradstreet’s similarly conventional insistence that they two are one in marriage is reinforced by her allusions to a functional body understood as little world or microcosmos that relies on all its parts equally. Indeed, Bradstreet uses the phrase “little world” at the conclusion of one of her other poems in which the speaker begs Phoebus to tell her husband that “His little world’s a fathom under water,” drowned in her tears and requiring “his ardent beams ... to dry the torrent of these streams” (Works 228). Their marriage and domestic life are figured as a body—it is his world just as his heat enables conception, but ultimately codependence takes precedence over hierarchy. Bradstreet can be read as the head in this poem, echoing Flegme’s claim to the brain. She also writes of the fruits she bore (the heat is his but the verb belongs to her). Thus, she is an agent, though dependent and incomplete without Simon. In short, in terms of her use of medical thought, Bradstreet characterizes men as hotter, more noble (to use Choler’s word), more active, and thus more in possession but also dependent on feminine principles. In “The Four Monarchies” and her marriage poems, Bradstreet seems to accept the social hierarchy of patriarchy as well as the political hierarchy of monarchy that Crooke insists on when he writes: [A] woman is so much lesse perfect then a man by how much her heat is lesse and weaker than his; yet as I saide is this imperfection turned vnto perfection, because without the woman, mankinde could not haue beene perfected by the perfecter sexe. (216–17)

However, Bradstreet does not focus on women as “lesse perfect” and explores the dangers of immoderate male heat to such a degree that “the perfecter sexe” is revealed as hardly that. In other words, she accepts these hierarchies to a degree, but without dwelling on women’s weakness and the paradox of “imperfection turned into perfection.”

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Bradstreet Among Women Stephanie Jed has provocatively argued that Bradstreet and Sor Juana, America’s “Tenth Muses,” and their poetic works were exploited new world resources, commodified and transported to Europe to be classified and added along with other New World rarities to the museums and collections that were among the mechanisms by which European knowledge-systems exercised power over the distant Americas (198). More recently, Phillip H. Round has developed a nuanced treatment of Bradstreet’s engagement of shifting modes of literary circulation and discourse, placing greater emphasis on her conscious negotiation of literary culture, but still positioning her largely at the mercy of patriarchal influence, albeit the much more local patriarchy of father, husband, and family literary lion, Sir Philip Sidney. Her formal poems in The Tenth Muse should be understood, he argues, as “a kind of dutiful performance, the literary equivalent of keeping up her social status in the community” (164). Round treats Bradstreet as a liminal figure—self-consciously identifying with her famous relative, Sir Philip Sidney, and the Renaissance intellectual culture reflected in her father’s library but deployed for more political ends by those interested in selling the New England project to potential supporters in England. Thus, she unwillingly enters the market of ideas circulating the Atlantic. Taking issue with Schweitzer’s claim that John Woodbridge uses Bradstreet “as a figure of gynesis” to develop his own subjective position, Round finds that in English print culture Bradstreet became “marked as a compiler of cultural truths and as an example of transatlantic cultural continuity” (195), still a figure of gynesis, but one deployed to help make the Massachusetts Bay Colony appear less peripheral to the metropolitan center. His reading of her motivations is strikingly psychoanalytic in ways that seem to be at odds with the more political circulations of transatlantic discourses that he so ably analyzes. While the married daughter acknowledges her mature identity as the wife of Simon Bradstreet, she is still anxious to stitch together a poetic fabric out of her and her father’s shared cultural assumptions, highlighting her father’s good qualities and his culture’s valuable ideas. Thus, her allusions to Walter Raleigh’s History of the World (1614), Helkiah Crooke’s Microcosmographia (1615), Richard Knolles General History of the Turkes (1603), and Plutarch’s Lives all serve to cement a cultural bond between father and daughter extending outward from the family to become a pattern of assumptions that could then underwrite the sort of learned and witty Reformed Protestant culture that Bradstreet had envisioned in the Sidney elegy. The inclusion of works that probably were a part of Dudley’s personal library (Knolles’s text certainly was) depicted her father as intellectual mentor and the paternal domicile as the repository of cultural heritage in the colony. (181)

Round’s argument about the shifting meaning of the The Tenth Muse as it moves from a family manuscript invested in honor-culture and familial class identity to a public document intended to modify metropolitan assumptions about the New England colony is marred by these suggestions that her ideas must be understood predominantly as a submission to her family’s values tinged by an almost Freudian

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resistance to growing up and becoming properly cathected to “her mature identity as wife.” The transatlantic circulation of works by women writers served many purposes that were beyond the control of the authors themselves, as Schweitzer, Round, and Jed have persuasively argued. Moreover, these women were invested in ideological systems that assumed male preeminence; there is, for instance, ample evidence that filial duty owed Dudley and honor-culture as represented by Sidney were very important to Bradstreet. However, the tendency to treat seventeenthcentury women in the Americas in isolation also leads critics to emphasize their psychological makeup and poetic productions as overdetermined by patriarchy, however local and specific these male influences may be. Scholarly and fictional works on these women are permeated with conjectures about relationships with their husbands, fathers, and sons as well as public men who exercised a limiting influence on their writings including Francisco Aguiar y Seijas (Archbishop of Mexico), François de Montmorency Laval (Bishop of Québec), John Winthrop, John Cotton, and Bradstreet’s father and husband, Thomas Dudley and Simon Bradstreet, acting in their official capacities. Though these influences are important, the greater availability of information about prominent men, the tendency to treat public women in isolation, and the enduring impact of great men/ladies’ auxiliary history all work to overdetermine this influence. Bradstreet was also developing feminist positions that coincided with those of other seventeenth-century women because they were responding to the same authorities and commonplaces, as will be especially evident as we turn to the works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Bradstreet asks for parsley rather than bay laurels in her “Prologue,” but this quiet request for “some small acknowledgement of ours” is not simply a backhanded indictment of the illogical consequences of men’s tyrannical fears. Nor is she simply accepting roles that are separate and lesser than those of men. The “parsley” line may evoke a sense of separate spheres, but as I have argued in this chapter, Bradstreet uses functionalist understandings of the body as microcosmos to insist on the actions of female agents as both positive and necessary while warning of the dangers of unchecked male preeminence. Recognition does not amount simply to peeping into the kitchen or marveling at a cross-dressing “epicene,” as several of the commendatory poems would have it. Bradstreet uses functionalism to remap gender relations, insisting on the social implications of the theories she engages. In “Of the Four Humours,” Bradstreet does not disagree that men are generally hotter than women, but she does reject male claims of preeminence based solely on greater heat. Likewise, in her history and family poems she privileges moderation based on self-government and Christian humility and in writing about her family, characterizes herself as a functional agent within the “little world” of domestic life. Though not as overtly feminist as her poem on the humors, her characterizations of men’s proper roles favor modesty while also carving a place for her own modest behavior in the same terms. Responsibility and moderation rest here on a sense of human sin and fallibility (Lutes 320), but they also demand action. Medical functionalism is likewise grounded in activity insofar as it arises from experimental science and is often defended in direct opposition to traditions of scholastic commentary. The consequences for women are two-fold: first, the functions of women’s bodies are understood as necessary and their parts as fully formed, belying

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centuries of commonplaces about women derived from Aristotelian notions of women’s physical inferiority, and second, scientific activity no longer requires a university education (though it helps if one hopes to have one’s observations taken seriously). After asserting that the brain, her organ, is the seat of the soul, Flegme claims “Reason, Fancy, and the Memory” as well as “the five most noble Sences” (38–39). This appeal to the senses does not simply reflect Bradstreet’s interest in the material world, but is also linked to the grounds for her argument that women are capable of reason and exercising modesty as due measure—they, like all humans, perceive the world and act on those perceptions. As we shall see, Sor Juana also uses functionalist medical theories to lay claim to reason based on knowledge gained through the senses. Unlike Bradstreet, Sor Juana had the leisure, interest, and means to conduct experiments; her take on functionalism is less concerned with functional roles and more concerned with claiming for women the ability to engage in human intellectual endeavor. Like Bradstreet, her argument rests on an exploration of the body’s functions as sustaining both the soul and the intellect.

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Chapter 2

“Cuerpo Luminoso”: Body and Soul in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Primero Sueño Included in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s second volume of poems published in Madrid is a well-known epistolary romance (a form of ballad) with the title “In Reply to a Gentleman from Peru, Who Sent Her Clay Vessels While Suggesting She Would Better Be a Man” (Romance 48). In this poem, Sor Juana follows extravagant praise of the gentleman’s literary and ceramic efforts (and apologies for her own failings) with a promise to try to become a man, “although I judge no strength on earth can enTarquin.” Sor Juana cannot become a man and would not want to become the rapist Tarquin, but she also goes on to suggest that she is not, properly speaking, a woman. Y en el consejo que dais, yo os prometo recibirle y hacerme fuerza, aunque juzgo que no hay fuerzas que entarquinen: porque acá Sálmacis falta, en cuyos cristales dicen que hay no sé qué virtud de dar alientos varoniles. Yo no entiendo de esas cosas; sólo sé que aquí me vine porque, si es que soy mujer, ninguno lo verifique. Y también sé que, en latín, sólo a las casadas dicen úxor, o mujer, y que es común de dos lo Virgen. Con que a mí no es bien mirado que como a mujer me miren, pues no soy mujer que a alguno de mujer pueda servirle; y sólo sé que mi cuerpo, sin que a uno u otro se incline, es neutro, o abstracto, cuanto sólo el Alma deposite. (I: 138) As for the counsel that you offer, I promise you, I will attend with all my strength, although I judge

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Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700 no strength on earth can en-Tarquin: for here we have no Salmacis, whose crystal water, so they tell, to nurture masculinity possesses powers unexcelled. I have no knowledge of these things, except that I came to this place so that, if true that I am female, none substantiate that state. I know, too, that they were wont to call wife, or woman, in the Latin uxor, only those who wed, though wife or woman might be virgin. So in my case, it is not seemly that I be viewed as feminine, as I will never be a woman who may as woman serve a man. I know only that my body, not to either state inclined, is neuter, abstract, guardian of only what my Soul consigns. (141)1

As with Bradstreet, both praise and criticism of Sor Juana often suggested that she was male or unfeminine. In this witty, ironic poem, Sor Juana replies to the gentleman from Peru with praise and humility in ways that subtly reject his assumption that literary talent is innately masculine. Before insisting that her body is neuter or abstract (the “or” is not evident in Peden’s translation), Sor Juana demonstrates that gender itself is abstract. In this fallen world, where there is no Salmacis to transform women into men, the concept of woman is a human construct, as artificial as the category of “wife” and essentially disconnected from the bodily states of virginity or sexual experience (with a passing suggestion in her reference to Tarquin that women are defined by sexual experiences and perceptions of sexual experience that are often forced upon them. She makes a similar point in “A Philosophical Satire” which begins “Foolish men” [“Hombres necios”—my translation; Plancarte I: 228]).2 Thus, when she calls her body a neuter or abstract depository of the Soul’s gifts, Sor Juana is building on a statement about abstraction that has imbedded in it a critique of natural notions of gender. Sor Juana characterizes masculinity through an unflattering extreme—Tarquin—just as Bradstreet insists on the excess of tyrannical male heat represented by Choler, Cambyses, and others. And as in Bradstreet’s 1 Unless otherwise noted, all English versions are from Poems, Protest, and a Dream, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. Spanish originals are from Obras Completas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, edited by Alfonso Méndez Plancarte. Unless necessary for clarification, I provide both Spanish and English texts for poetry only. 2 Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell begin their translation of this poem, “You foolish and unreasoning men” (Answer 157), while Peden translates “Hombres necios” as “Misguided men.” Later I quote a longer section of the Arenal and Powell translation, but for the sake of clarity I use a simpler translation here.

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quaternion on the four humors, masculinist assumptions about gender “facts” are turned into debatable positions; Sor Juana ends this portion of her poem by finding that this is all a “question” that must be left since it cannot be resolved through reason (“Let us renounce this argument,/let others, if they will, debate;”/“Y dejando esta cuestión/para que otros la ventilen” [141; Plancarte I: 138]). Bradstreet’s strategy in the quaternion on the four humors and poems treating monarchs and family hierarchies is to insist on the functional and moderated roles of male and female principles, rebutting claims of male preeminence sustained by greater heat suggested by Ward and caricatured in Choler. Sor Juana’s strategies are more varied; as Jean Franco puts it, “she followed no consistent path at all, but rather, opportunistically, took advantage of the moves that were open to her within the patronage of court and Church. In these interventions she sometimes drew attention to the fact that she was a woman; at other times she deployed an impersonal subject or adopted a male persona” (29). Though Sor Juana clearly critiques gender definitions and defends her own propensities as natural and not masculine, her attitude toward women and femininity in this poem is more ambiguous. Is she critiquing fixed and arbitrary notions of gender or is she making herself a special case? Can this strategy be understood as empowering women, bodies and all, or does it reflect either a separation between body and soul or a third gender state between man and woman, virgin and sexually experienced wife, that leaves intact assumptions about gender identities and women’s bodies as abject and weak? In short, what is the nature of her transgression? Undoubtedly, being a woman limited Sor Juana’s ability to pursue a life of the mind and she was intensely aware that others made assumptions about her intellect and soul based on their perceptions of her body. She tells us in her Respuesta a Sor Filotea, a defense addressed to the Bishop of Puebla who had publicly taken her to task in the guise of a fellow nun for her unwomanly intellectualism, that upon first learning of the schools and university in Mexico City, “I began to plague my mother with insistent and importunate pleas: she should dress me in boy’s clothing and send me to Mexico City to live with relatives, to study and be tutored at the University” (15).3 Appearing male was pragmatic; later she describes her decision to become a nun as similarly expedient. “And so I entered the religious order, knowing that life there entailed certain conditions (I refer to superficial, and not fundamental, regards) most repugnant to my nature; but given the total antipathy I felt for marriage, I deemed convent life the least unsuitable and the most honorable I could elect if I were to insure my salvation” (15–17). In distinguishing her state as a nun from that of uxor in the poem addressed to the gentleman from Peru,

3 Octavio Paz’s biography, translated into English as Sor Juana, or, The Traps of Faith, and the introductions by Ilan Stavans to Poems, Protest, and a Dream and by Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell to The Answer/La Respuesta further detail Sor Juana’s life and critical reception. Irving A. Leonard’s Baroque Times in Old Mexico provides useful historical and cultural background as does Mark A. Burkholder and Lyman L. Johnson’s Colonial Latin America. An extensive bibliography of recent works on Sor Juana is available online at The Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Project sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Dartmouth College (www.dartmouth.edu/~sorjuana/).

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Sor Juana may be read as carving a place for herself within the limits of social expectations and in the spirit of literary raillery in a poem directed to someone she does not seem to dislike. If she needs to appear manlike or choose the convent in order to pursue an intellectual life, so be it. These lines addressed to the man from Peru do not seem simply expedient, but read alongside the autobiographical portions of Respuesta and through a critical lens that assumes that ambitious women are often in some way male-identified, her claims of being neuter have often been read as enabling personal expression rather than developing a more sustained critique of patriarchy. As is also evident in discussions of Bradstreet, the influence of men and male-identification is often used to describe public women. The most notorious example of this in Sor Juana scholarship is Louis Pfandl’s argument that she suffers from a masculinity complex. Octavio Paz takes issue with Pfandl’s reductive psychoanalysis of the learned nun, but sounding a bit like the gentleman from Peru he develops an alternative narrative of Sor Juana’s artistic development that depends on her freeing herself from the constraints of her sex. The life and work of Juana Inés can be summed up in a single sentence: knowledge is a transgression committed by a solitary hero who then is punished. Not the glory of knowledge—denied to mortals—but the glory of the act of knowing. Transgression demands masculinization; in turn, masculinization resolves itself into neutralization, and neutralization, as we have seen, into a return to femininity. Sor Juana’s ultimate victory is to adopt the Neoplatonic maxim: souls have no sex. (Paz 85)

Paz’s estimation of her unusual genius is limited by his masculine-heroic definition of poetic transgression and his failure to take into account the range of feminist literary criticism and historiography that has placed her within a tradition of female thought. As Electa Arenal, Stephanie Merrim, and Emilie Bergmann, among others, have observed, Paz is unable to properly locate the learned nun’s transgressions because he overemphasizes her rebellion as a proto-modern poet while underemphasizing the scope of her gender critique. He puts undue weight on her psychosexual development because, as Merrim puts it, he “provides insufficient information, be it social or literary, regarding the woman’s world in which Sor Juana lived and wrote” and makes only “negligible efforts to situate [Sor Juana’s] works either in a female literary tradition or within the context of women’s writing” (Merrim, “Toward” 20). Her artistic and intellectual development was not shaped simply by a desire for proficiency and recognition in a male world of thought. She participated in the debates of her time as a woman, engaging the gendered power dynamics of intellectual life in Mexico City and aware of female precursors and contemporaries (Arenal, “Comment” 555; Bergmann 168–69). Most Sor Juana scholars, however, have joined Paz in aligning Sor Juana with philosophical schools—predominantly Neoplatonism but also Cartesian, scholastic, and Aristotelian thought—in ways that oppose body to soul or neglect the body altogether. The Neoplatonic notion that “souls have no sex” has been read as providing Sor Juana with an intellectual argument that allowed her to escape or challenge the gender identities that shape her world. Readings of her use of Neoplatonism and “neuter” or “androgynous” strategies are varied and complex, but for the most part

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they rest on an assumption that the body is a problem and that Sor Juana seeks to solve this problem by escaping or bracketing the body, especially in her masterpiece, Primero Sueño. But the body is neither absent nor rejected in her works. Even in Romance 48, Sor Juana uses the inclinations of her body as the basis for asserting that it is a vessel for the Soul’s gifts. She searches for the right word (“mi cuerpo ... es neutro, o abstracto”), invoking and rejecting “neuter” in order to emphasize that the Soul’s relationship to the body cannot be limited by the logic of male/female/neuter, while at the same time not fully declaring that it is merely “abstract.” In concluding that this “cuestión” is best left to others because it cannot be clarified by reason, she further critiques the false logic of gender categories. Attending to the body’s activities and inclinations in order to minimize its defining or symbolic power is a strategy that we also find in the thinking of Anne Hutchinson and Marie de l’Incarnation. As with Hutchinson and Marie, critics frequently emphasize this apparent rejection of the body, either as evidence that the woman in question accepts and wants to escape the subordinate status of women’s bodies or that she is performing some form of ironic critique of this subordination. In the process, the appeal to the body itself is often overlooked. Work by Caroline Walker Bynum and others has debunked assumptions that mystical transports and mortifications of the body are simply attempts to reject the body; Sor Juana’s engagement of Neoplatonism and other schools of thought likewise involves a far more nuanced use of the body. In this chapter I argue that Sor Juana represents the body as sustaining the activities of the mind and soul without asserting a symbolic significance for the body, most vividly in her masterpiece, Primero Sueño. Dreaming Without a Guide: Beyond the Body/Soul Dualism of Neoplatonism In her Respuesta, Sor Juana insists, “I have never written of my own will, but under the pleas and injunctions of others; to such a degree that the only piece I remember having written for my own pleasure was a little trifle they called El sueño” (65). In this poem, Sor Juana describes the coming of night and sleep, and then maps the range of human knowledge as she traces the soul’s journey toward a kind of transcendence ultimately interrupted as the sun rises and the dreamer, speaking at last in the first person, awakens. It is not until the final word of the poem, “despierta,” that we also learn that the speaker of the poem is female. This “trifle” or papelillo (scrap of paper) is frequently read as a kind of intellectual autobiography, though an unusual one because it omits personal history and does not foreground the subjectivity of the dreamer. Consequently, many have called it impersonal and abstract, but the activities of both body and soul are described in passionate, even melodramatic detail. We may not know much about the dreamer’s waking life, but we are provided, for instance, with a vivid portrait of her chyle’s sacrifice, “whether from true compassion or senseless/arrogance,” as this partially distilled product of digestion interposes itself between the warring extremes of heat and humidity, choler’s heart and phlegm’s lungs, and as a consequence, allows the soul to be transmuted into its immaterial being so that it may undertake its ultimately failed quest for divine knowledge (ll. 234–93). Sor Juana describes the body as “a cadaver with a soul,/dead to life and alive to death” in this poem (ll. 202–203; “un cadáver con alma,/muerto a la vida

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y a la muerte vivo”)4, but in doing so she neither rejects nor seeks to escape the body, building instead a much more complex and only superficially paradoxical relationship between body and soul, humanity and the divine. As in Bradstreet’s quaternion on the four humors, the functions of the body sustain the soul in a manner that disrupts a symbolic relationship between the two. Primero Sueño or “First Dream” was published in the second volume of Sor Juana’s works released in 1692, though it was written earlier and mentioned in the 1691 Respuesta.5 It is, as the title makes clear, a dream poem indebted to Neoplatonic and hermetic accounts of spiritual dream voyages (other seventeenth-century examples of this genre include John Donne’s Ignatius His Conclave [1611], Johannes Kepler’s Somnium [1634], and Athanasius Kircher’s Iter exstaticum [1656]) (Paz 361). However, Sor Juana’s poem varies from traditional dream poems in important ways outlined by Paz. First, she writes in verse rather than prose, transforming apparently true accounts of ecstasy into allegorical representation epitomized in an exemplary night. Second, the protagonist of her poem is without name, age, or gender until the very end of the poem. Third, unlike almost every other dream vision of this nature, there is no supernatural guide instructing and leading the dreamer. And finally, there is no revelation; the dreamer’s vision is ultimately thwarted (Paz 365–67). Athanasius Kircher’s Iter exstaticum is understood to be a particularly significant precursor to Sor Juana’s dream poem. In two portraits of Sor Juana painted in the eighteenth century, the works of Kircher figure prominently (Findlen 333–35). His influence was enormous throughout the seventeenth century; his appeal in the Americas was in no small part due to his encyclopedic and radically syncretic treatment of world cultures, including those of the Aztecs.6 In Romance 50, Sor Juana even turns his name into a verb—Kirkerizar—and innumerable readings of Primero Sueño trace his influence in the architectures and movements of this poem (Findlen 333). For some her use of Kircher is a sign of Sor Juana’s provincialism— Ilan Stavans calls Primero Sueño “a peripheral work of art generated by the declining echoes of Renaissance thought. Its syncretism is the colonial mask under which it hides: no original philosophical system is offered, only a quilt made of bits and pieces, a sum of disparate parts” (Sor Juana, Poems xl).7 For others, it signals her 4 Maria Montenegro, the able proofreader for this volume, suggested this translation and provided many useful comments on the translations used in this chapter. 5 Critics continue to debate why it is called the “first” when no second appears to have been written, though most follow the title page of the first edition in assuming that this poem was written “in imitation of [Luis] Góngora” (“imitando a Góngora”) and specifically his numbered Soledades (“Solitudes”). Paz justifies the “first” by pointing out that the adventures of the soul continue even though the dream ends (378), while Peden suggests the more novel but grammatically correct translation, “First I Dream,” rendering the poem more personal at least in its title. 6 Kircher, for instance, compares Egyptian and Aztec pyramids in ways that influenced both Primero Sueño and Sor Juana’s earlier Neptuno alegórico. See Paula Findlen 332 and Arenal, “Where” 135–37. For more on Kircher, see Joscelyn Godwin, Athanasius Kircher: A Renaissance Man and the Quest for Lost Knowledge. 7 See Ruth Hill, 23–24, for a critique of arguments that the Enlightenment was late in coming to the Spanish colonies. Such arguments of provincialism are compounded for Sor Juana by her position as female encyclopedist.

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sophistication and modernity in critiquing scholasticism and narrow Aristotelian thought while using the Neoplatonic maxim “the soul has no sex” to defend her intellectual endeavors. Debates about this poem almost inevitably treat the question of her modernity and almost as frequently her engagement of gender, both questions that often draw on Neoplatonism. For instance, Paz and Jean Franco each treat both the soul’s apparent escape from the body and its failure to achieve transcendence when the dreamer awakens in her body, as a culmination of Sor Juana’s insistence that the soul has no sex.8 For Paz, this demonstrates Sor Juana’s proto-modernist recognition “that we are alone and that the world of the supernatural has dissipated. In one way or another, all modern poets have lived, relived, and re-created the double negation of First Dream: the silence of space, and the vision of nonvision” (367). Franco, on the other hand, reads both the soul’s attempt to escape the body and its inevitable return as a reflection of the social contradictions constraining a female poet; her poem demonstrates both the potential and the limitations of the “the soul has no sex” through strategies that are both subversive and witness to the poet’s need for subterfuge. Among other things, the fact that the dreamer sleeps lessens her responsibility for the soul’s intellectual boldness (38). Paz reads the soul’s failure in Primero Sueño as evidence of Sor Juana’s reverence for the act of knowing rather than knowledge itself (unconvincingly linked through the figure of Phaeton to her childhood identification with the masculine world [385]), while Franco emphasizes the subversions and social contradictions revealed by her emphasis on failed or limited acts of knowing. Without either a guide or a final revelation, Sor Juana may be seen as either rejecting or rejected by the traditions that shape other dream poems. Both Paz and Franco emphasize the paradoxes of doublenegation as evidence of either a modern challenge to metaphysical certainty or a feminist critique of gender oppression. It could be said, however, that Sor Juana has herself been Kircherized. Clearly Kircher’s work influenced this poem. His Iter exstaticum is an obvious influence on her own dream poem. The buildings and mechanisms of the book—pyramids, obelisks, the Tower of Babel, Pharos at Alexandria (a lighthouse), hidden waterways, the magic lantern—all may be traced to his lavishly illustrated books.9 Paz declares that “it fell to me to tie up the loose ends and to prove that the hermetic tradition, of which an essential part is the vision of the soul freed through dream from its 8 Though the neutral soul predominates in this poem, it should be added that it may also be read as privileging the feminine. Georgina Sabat de Rivers, whose El «Sueño» de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Tradiciones Literarias y Originalidad remains the most thorough study of the literary sources and traditions informing Sor Juana’s poem, argues in “A Feminist Rereading of Sor Juana’s Dream” that “the preponderance and importance of feminine characters and of feminine nouns” (146) in this poem is evidence that “[w]hat really mattered to her was to give to the feminine sex a literary and intellectual status equal to that of men” (145). Though her emphasis on neuter subjectivity is one gesture she makes in this direction, another is to be found in her use of female characters and language. Sabat de Rivers’ argument is helped along by the happy chance that the word for soul in Spanish, “alma,” is feminine. Consequently, the grammar of Primero Sueño is predominantly feminine as well. 9 See Findlen, 348–59, for an extended discussion of Sor Juana’s knowledge of Kircher’s works.

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bodily chains, came to Sor Juana primarily through Kircher” (363) and until recently most critics seem to have accepted that his influence is reflected in a polar relationship between body and soul in this poem.10 As with Bradstreet’s association with du Bartas, the influence of Kircher has been used to render Sor Juana a lesser acolyte of the master encyclopedist (at least with regard to the breadth and depth of her knowledge), as is evident in Stavans’ evaluation of the poem’s philosophical contribution, thereby masking her critical engagement of assumptions shaping the encyclopedic projects of her sources.11 Assumptions about the Neoplatonic dualism guiding this poem also frequently distract scholars from attending to how Sor Juana uses the body in this poem. In taking issue with the prevailing reading of this poem as Neoplatonic, Ruth Hill makes a simple but important observation—Primero Sueño is a poem built on the perceptions of the senses. For her, motion or force did not indicate a hidden, internal cause, as the hermeticists believed when they held to their antipathies and sympathies. Sor Juana’s understanding of movement was got from the senses, reasoning through appearances, and experimentation to confirm natural reason. (50)12

Hill’s sophisticated reading reconsiders not only Sor Juana’s most significant poem, but Enlightenment thought in Spain and the Spanish colonies that has long been the victim of anti-Spanish sentiments and a Cartesian bias in histories of European thought during this period. According to Hill, Francis Bacon and Pierre Gassendi, not Descartes and Kircher, allowed Sor Juana to develop a humanism that negotiated between scholasticism and modernity (1); she “sought the middle ground as the prudent way to safeguard Catholicism, increase human knowledge and live peacefully with other humans” (46). Unlike both Neoplatonic and Cartesian thought, in Gassendi’s epicurean skepticism “it was not the senses but the intellect that erred about a thing since it fell to this superior faculty to inquire which of the appearances produced in the senses conformed to the thing” (Hill 48). Hill usefully foregrounds the status of the senses as feeding the “intellectual flight” (l. 301; my translation—“el vuelo intelectual”) of the soul rather than impeding it. Although this flight depends upon the soul being “freed from/governing the senses” (ll. 192–93), all the thoughts of this night depend upon information gained from the senses. Showing how Gassendi’s distinctions between the corporeal soul, whose functions are the five senses, and the incorporeal soul, which is “the spiritual or rational soul of man” (60), are reflected 10 In addition to scholarship cited by Paz, Elías Trabulse discusses Sor Juana’s use of hermeticism in El círculo roto (75–91) as does Georgina Sabat de Rivers in El Sueño de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Tradiciones Literarias y Originalidad (137–40). 11 Cartesian readings also often move quickly to the soul while neglecting the persistence of the body throughout this poem. See, for instance, Susan McKenna and Francisco López Cámara. Stephanie Merrim argues that Sor Juana embraces a “categorical skepticism” reflected in her contradictory gestures toward both empiricism and Cartesian pure thought (Early 244). 12 Paz, on the other hand, argues that Sor Juana develops “a discourse on a reality seen not by the senses but by the soul” in contrast with Góngora, who provides “a verbal transfiguration of the reality perceived by the senses” (359).

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in Sor Juana’s poem, Hill explains that fantasy, the faculty of the corporeal soul, is the source of all thought. “The phantasy has three operations. First, naked or simple apprehension, entirely dependent on the senses. Second, composition and division, or the forming of judgements and propositions. Third, reasoning, or the inferring operation” (Hill 60). This treatment of the senses distinguishes Gassendi and Sor Juana from the Neoplatonists and Cartesians, both of whom fail to account for the relationship between sensory perception and the soul. Thus, in Primero Sueño the first stage of the dreamer’s intellectual flight fails because the soul is overwhelmed by its perceptions of “this vast aggregate,/this enigmatic whole” (ll. 446-447; “cuyo inmenso agregado,/cúmulo incomprehensible”) and “with cowardice, withdrew” (l. 453; “retrocedió cobarde”). The following sections of the poem explore first Galenist science and then Aristotelian categories and other philosophical systems as human attempts to arrange and understand what is gleaned from the senses but cannot be apprehended in its totality by the weak human mind. Hill’s use of Gassendi allows us to understand the philosophical significance of the senses in this poem. Also useful for my argument is Hill’s observation that Sor Juana repeatedly refers to mythological figures before turning to natural explanations. Hill argues that this tendency reflects Sor Juana’s Epicureanism. “Like Lucretius, Sor Juana resorted to myth in order to dismiss it, ultimately, by explaining the principle of nature that was beneath it” (54). As we shall see, this tendency to follow myth with natural explanations both highlights the significance in this poem of the body as understood through new scientific models and allows Sor Juana to disrupt cultural assumptions about bodies, especially those reflected in commonplaces about women. Hill ignores issues of gender, perhaps because her reading of Sor Juana and other Spanish humanists is concerned with how they work within and justify Catholicism and monarchical absolutism. But as I argue throughout this book, we may gain a more sophisticated understanding of gender politics and feminism by taking into account just such allegiances and resisting simplified notions of individual rebellion—the most interesting feminism of this period is not starkly oppositional. Questions of gender are treated more fully in another recent study by Licia Fiol-Matta that challenges dualistic readings of the relationship between body and soul in this poem. In summarizing treatments of the neuter as feminist strategy in Sor Juana’s poetry and particularly Primero Sueño, Fiol-Matta concludes that the opposition between soul and body persists to some degree in much of this scholarship in ways that “appear as utopian and temporary spaces that dispense with the problematic of gender sexuality, creating a space of writerly indifference” (350). This indifference is reflected in readings of the dreamer as neuter or androgynous. If the body is “left behind” as the soul achieves its pursuit of knowledge, and if, magically, in that resistant last verse, the body becomes gendered once again as female, then the poem has not performed a significant intervention into the body. Additionally, if the soul in the Dream is a pure, genderless intelligence or faculty, then there is no necessary correlation between the last verse and the subject represented in the poem as the soul, unless one believes that the body is a fairly static object existing on the poem’s fringes until the soul finishes its journey and is ready to rejoin the body. (Fiol-Matta 350)

In other words, we need to account for the body in the poem if we are to understand its awakening, the gendered “despierta” with which the poem ends. The body is

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far too dynamic in the poem, despite its apparent corpse-like stasis, to be simply opposed to the soul. Fiol-Matta invokes Walter Benjamin’s understanding of the functioning of allegory in German baroque drama, finding in Sor Juana’s treatment of the body in this baroque poem a melancholy remainder. Echoing Paz’s characterization of Sor Juana’s “vision of non-vision” even as she takes issue with the dualism he emphasizes, Fiol-Matta finds in the poem a call to “intelligent gazing, nonvisual gazing” (367) and in the final lines of the poem “an admonition to avoid vision” (368) or “the birth of a subjectivity within the context of subjection” (368). She reads the body throughout Sor Juana’s works as signifying “the emergence of a modern subjectivity, a Cartesian subjectivity that denies the presence of the body yet creates a singularly complex discursive and material regime to track this body and extract value from it” (354). While distancing herself from “expressivist” readings of the poem, she firmly embraces the school that reads Sor Juana as a proto-modernist, in this case one who understands the abjection and melancholy discussed by Judith Butler and Benjamin. I find Hill’s reading of the relationship between the body and soul in this poem more persuasive, but Fiol-Matta helpfully emphasizes the importance of getting beyond the body/soul divide if we are to understand the implications of this poem for Sor Juana’s feminism. This is a vaporous, hydraulic, mechanical, acoustic, and luminous poem. Shadows creep, vapors rise, bodies eat and digest, sounds drone. Throughout, matter in motion is transformed through processes that seem at times alchemical, at times mechanical, and at times biological. In Miguel Cabrera’s painting of Sor Juana from 1750, the works of Kircher are represented by a single slim volume entitled Kirqueri Opera, a visual joke, according to Paula Findlen, both because he wrote so much and because his influence on Sor Juana was so great (Findlen 334–35). Nonetheless, works by Galen and Hippocrates are placed in the center, in large volumes on a shelf just above the learned nun; likewise, in the reading that follows, Sor Juana’s discussion of Galenists as representative scientists is more important than her engagement of Kircher’s Neoplatonism. Sor Juana mentions “sympathies or antipathies” (ll. 527–28; my translation—“simpatías/o antipatías”), but she does so in a passage about Galenists’scientific pursuit of homeopathic remedies, not Neoplatonic attractions. Her discussion of Galen builds on her earlier treatment of the body’s functions while helping to establish the importance of empirical science as a flawed but useful human endeavor. Scientific practice is a human and therefore necessarily modest endeavor and one that is linked particularly to the study of the body. This modesty, however, is complicated by modesty as shame once female bodies are introduced. The fact that the dreamer has no guide in Primero Sueño is central to the sense of failed knowledge emphasized by both Paz and Franco; a guide provides access to knowledge which it would be hubris to suggest could be attained without supernatural assistance. I argue that there is no guide, not because Sor Juana is exploring solitude and the modern theme of the “vision of nonvision” (Paz 367) nor because of the female poet’s unauthorized foray into the realm of creation and “truth activities” (Franco 47), though her poetry likely influenced the moderns and was influenced by the illegitimacy of her intellectual endeavors in the eyes of patriarchal society.13 There 13 Other interpretations of the lack of a guide in Primero Sueño include Merrim, Early 229; Emilie Bergmann 159; Aída Beaupied 11–12.

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is no guide because the body is not separate from the soul, but rather is continually evoked as both sustaining and threatening it; the constant connection between body and soul prevents the intercession of a guide. The body is a dynamic presence in this poem, silent and seemingly still, but not inactive, and herein lies what I describe as Sor Juana’s functionalism. The subordination of body to soul or simple translation of body into soul outlined in Paz’s summary of Neoplatonic thought is not evident in this poem as he describes it. Rather, Sor Juana emphasizes the functions of the body not as the basis for higher meaning, but rather as the active site of even the most rarefied intellectual and spiritual endeavors. Likewise, the movement from bad knowledge-seeking to heroic but necessarily limited knowledge-seeking described by Franco should not be read simply as a reflection of Sor Juana’s struggle to assert her own and female subjectivity. As we shall see, throughout Primero Sueño we find discussions of empirical science, medical knowledge, and bodies that play an important part in our understanding of gender and the search for knowledge that go beyond issues of individual power and powerlessness. “Fiel testigo”: The Faithfulness of the Body in Primero Sueño The body plays an important role in Primero Sueño by first feeding the dreamer’s fantasies, the raw material for her philosophical inquiries, and then interrupting her intellectual quest when hunger puts an end to dreaming. Additionally, these inquiries are bracketed by detailed descriptions of the body falling asleep and awakening, descriptions that are themselves part of the intellectual content of the poem, though they are not introduced as such. But before focusing on either the dreamer’s body or her intellectual quest, Sor Juana describes atmospheric movements framed as the consequence of human vanity and failure. A note of defeat is struck from the first, when the poem begins with a somber description of humankind’s waking attempts to reach the heavens and attain knowledge. The shadow of obelisks thrusting unsuccessfully toward heaven touches but does not encompass the moon, figured as the triple goddess Hecate (“el orbe de la Diosa ... tres veces hermosa”).14 Instead, quedando sólo dueño del aire que empañaba con el aliento denso que exhalaba; y en la quietud contenta de imperio silencioso, sumisas sólo voces consentía de las nocturnas aves, tan obscuras, tan graves, que aun el silencio no se interrumpía. (ll. 16–24) 15 ... [it] conquered only air, misted the atmosphere 14 According to Méndez Plancarte, Luna in the sky, Diana on earth, and Proserpina in Hades (Sor Juana, Obras I: 582). 15 Line numbers refer to both the Spanish text and English translation, unless otherwise noted.

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Night ascends toward rather than descending from the stars and moon, and the air becomes thick with exhaled breath held close to the earth by the rising shadow, muffling the noise of those few creatures still awake. This silence both causes and is caused by sleep through the mechanics of breath and sound alike, as Sor Juana emphasizes further at the end of a passage describing the daughters of Minyas who were turned into bats for “telling of heroic deeds” rather than honoring Bacchus (ll. 41–42). With Ascalaphus they sing “a tuneless and appalling a capella” (l. 57; “componían capilla pavorosa”), y pausas más que voces, esperando a la torpe mensura perezosa de mayor proporción tal vez, que el viento con flemático echaba movimiento, de tan tardo compás, tan detenido, que en medio se quedó tal vez dormido. Este, pues, triste són intercadente de la asombrada turba temerosa, menos a la atención solicitaba que al sueño persuadía; antes sí, lentamente, su obtusa consonancia espacïosa al sosiego inducía y al reposo los miembros convidaba (ll. 59–72) hoping, perhaps, the apathetic drone might quicken in intensity, or else, phlegmatically, the wind might stir to song, a tempo so lethargically composed that halfway through, the wind itself might doze. This gloomy, then, and fluctuating strain from the penumbrous, awe-inspiring throng, less than a summoning to wakefulness, persuasion was to sleep; but first, and slowly, the prolonged and consonant refrain invited peacefulness, lulling the body gently to its rest (ll. 60–72)

The phlegmatic wind gently induces sleep, despite the desires of the mythical night birds. The play between mythic personification and physical description is confusing here, as elsewhere in the poem; Sor Juana imagines the night birds hoping that the song would quicken of its own volition or be stirred by the wind, then personifies the

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wind itself falling asleep to the strains of this lethargic song, before describing the body in the process of being slowly lulled to sleep. As we have seen, Hill argues that this tendency reflects Sor Juana’s Epicureanism, observing that myth is dismissed in favor of natural principles (54). Two aspects of this complex play are especially important to my reading of this poem. First, Sor Juana uses this shifting personification to make connections between myth, the cosmos, and the microcosmos of the body in which the body is not transcended and does not serve as symbolic vehicle. Second, her repeated “perhaps” (“tal vez”) blurs the line between body and mind, allowing myth and natural explanation to inform each other, even as the latter is privileged by placement—myth is not so much dismissed as displaced. Declaring that “Sleep, in summary, now possessed all things” (l. 147—“El sueño todo, en fin, lo poseía”), Sor Juana then describes the body itself in over 160 lines of poetry with a specificity that belies Paz’s claim that dreaming depends on the passivity of the body. Tired from the day’s labors and pleasures, the senses are suspended, but not ended. El conticinio casi ya pasando iba, y la sombra dimidiaba, cuando de las diurnas tareas fatigados —y no sólo oprimidos del afán ponderoso del corporal trabajo, mas cansados del deleite también (que también cansa objeto continuado a los sentidos aun siendo deleitoso: que la Naturaleza siempre alterna ya una, ya otra balanza, distribuyendo varios ejercicios, ya al ocio, ya al trabajo destinados, en el fiel infïel con que gobierna la aparatosa máquina del mundo)—; así, pues, de profundo sueño dulce los miembros ocupados, quedaron los sentidos del que ejercicio tienen ordinario —trabajo, en fin pero trabajo amado, si hay amable trabajo—, si privados no, al menos suspendidos, y cediendo al retrato del contrario de la vida, que—lentamente armado— cobarde embiste y vence perezoso con armas soñolientas (ll. 151–77) Nearly past, the darkest hour of the night, shadow marking midpoint to the dawn, relieved of his diurnal tasks, man welcomes reprieve, fatigued, not only by the cumbrous toll of physical exertion, but also by the

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Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700 pleasant toil of delectation (for any action, overly repeated, may tire the senses, even pleasure; persistently, Nature lifts and lowers one, and then the other, of her pans, distributing her several chores—now restful leisure, now gainful activity— on the imbalanced balance with which she rules the world’s complex machinery); being, then, the body engaged by deep and welcome sleep, and, if not ended what might be thought the normal occupation of the senses (work, after all, but well-belovèd work —if labor may be savored), at least this while suspended and surrendered to the image of the antipode to life, as sopor (oblivion its weapon) furtively attacks and indolently quells the humble shepherd and the royal prince

Sor Juana insists on the pleasure of the senses as a kind of worldly labor. Rather than representing the soul as transcending the baser body, she celebrates the labors of the world as enjoyable in themselves as well as necessary precursors to welcome sleep. Her image of Nature distributing her various chores “on the imbalanced balance with which she/rules the world’s complex machinery”16 simultaneously invokes the precision and impersonality of a balance and the very human activity of a woman juggling burdens and tasks during a common work day. Sor Juana may be describing the suspension of active sensory perception, but this evocation of the onset of sleep is very physical and does not herald the cessation of bodily activities identified by Paz. The senses are introduced as suspended rather than ended in a formulation that once again poses an extreme option only to fall back on a more moderate and distinctly embodied characterization of sleep. Like the mythic reading of sleep in the first section of the poem that gives way to a more natural description, here Sor Juana rejects the possibility that the senses and body are entirely superseded by the disincarnate soul. We might think back to the “neuter or abstract” of Romance 48 as

16 Peden translates “el fiel infïel” as “imbalanced balance.” “El fiel,” in this sense, refers to the needle on a balance that moves back and forth, even as it indicates an accurate measure of equilibrium (see Sabat de Rivers, En Busca 378-379 for a useful discussion of the balance among many other mechanisms in this poem). In this way it is one of many figures in this poem of faithful truth-seeking that are both flawed and functionally effective. That “el fiel infïel” can also be rendered “the faithful infidel” also suggests that these figures of human fallibility are always measured against divine knowledge and judged by the standards of religious faith. I am grateful to Maria Montenegro for urging me to deal more fully with this complicated figure.

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well. That poem seems to take the opposite tack, moving from the more embodied description of the speaker’s inclinations as neuter to one that appears to reject the body altogether through abstraction before settling on the assertion that the body, however it is characterized, is best understood as the soul’s vessel. But in all these cases the effect is to posit a denial or transcendence of the body, only to then revise this extreme position and deemphasize the symbolic thinking that informs it. In Romance 48, Sor Juana does this by emphasizing the body as vessel for the soul; in Primero Sueño she says more about how the functional body sustains the soul’s activities. The soul can only pursue knowledge when it is “freed from/governing the senses” (ll. 192–93). It is in describing this freedom at the beginning of the soul’s flight that Sor Juana writes of the body as “a cadaver with a soul” (ll. 202, my translation) but after declaring this freedom she develops in more detail than before the activities of the body. She suggests an absolute break between body and soul only then to reveal that this observation is itself the product of failed human perception. El alma, pues, suspensa del exterior gobierno—en que ocupada en material empleo, o bien o mal da el día por gastado—, solamente dispensa remota, si del todo separada no, a los de muerte temporal opresos lánguidos miembros, sosegados huesos, los gajes del calor vegetativo, el cuerpo siendo, en sosegada calma, un cadáver con alma, muerto a la vida y a la muerte vivo, de lo segundo dando tardas señas el del reloj humano vital volante que, si no con mano, con arterial concierto, unas pequeñas muestras, pulsando, manifiesta lento de su bien regulado movimiento. (ll. 192–209) The soul, then, freed from governing the senses (by which endeavor and activity it deems the day is well or poorly spent) now, it seems, does but administer (remote, if not completely disconnected from the temporary death of languid limbs and inert bones) the gift of vegetative warmth, the mortal shell in restful lassitude, cadaver, yet with a soul imbued, dead in life, but living still in death, and, of life’s continuation giving silent indication,

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Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700 the vital mainspring of the human clock: its movement marked not by hands but harmony of vein and artery, the slow, pulsing, regulation of the heart.

The body appears cadaverous, but the soul is present in the vital spirits that impel the human clock (“el reloj humano”). Just as the senses were suspended (“suspendidos”), not ended (“privados”) after the labors of the day, the soul is remote (“remota”) but not completely disconnected (“del todo separada no”). The corporeal soul no longer needs to govern the senses, but it does from a distance continue to administer vegetative warmth (translated above as a “gift” but in the Spanish, literally “the wages of vegetative warmth”/“los gajes del calor vegetativo”). The soul as weary yet responsible administrator gives way to regulation by the heart, “the vital mainspring of the human clock.” Once she turns to the organs and humors, Sor Juana, like Bradstreet, begins with the “sovereign” heart. Este, pues, miembro rey y centro vivo de espíritus vitales, con su asociado respirante fuelle —pulmón, que imán del viento es atractivo, que en movimientos nunca desiguales o comprimiendo ya, o ya dilatando el musculoso, claro arcaduz blando, hace que en él resuelle el que lo circunscribe fresco ambiente que impele ya caliente, y él venga su expulsión haciendo activo pequeños robos al calor nativo, algún tiempo llorados, nunca recuperados, si ahora no sentidos de su dueño, que, repetido, no hay robo pequeño—; éstos, pues, de mayor, como ya digo, excepción, uno y otro fiel testigo, la vida aseguraban, mientras con mudas voces impugnaban la información, callados, los sentidos —con no replicar sólo defendidos—, y la lengua que, torpe, enmudecía, con no poder hablar los desmentía. (ll. 210–33) This, then, sovereign organ and lively core of vital spirits, paired with the auxiliary bellows of the lungs, like a magnet attracting air in constant, unvarying, to and fro, contracting first, and then expanding the muscular conduit of the throat wherein the breath resounds, cool air from the surrounding atmosphere,

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a moment held and then expelled as warmth, avenges its summary expulsion with incessant theft of body heat, only briefly wept but never more retrieved, losses that, though scarcely now perceived, repeated teach no theft of life is small; these, then, to review, exceptional two (both heart and lung impeccable informants), affirmed that life went on, while the senses, with their silence, impugned that affirmation, all sound withdrawn (quiescence implying refutation), and the tongue, clumsy, muted by sleep, wordlessly voiced its contradiction.

Sor Juana describes the mechanisms of heart and lungs as faithful witnesses (“uno y otro fiel testigo,” translated above as “impeccable informants”) that belie the apparent death implied by the silence of the suspended senses. A waking observer may be doubly misled, assuming that the cessation of sensory activity in the sleeping body indicates death while overlooking the exhalation of heat that is a truer indication of death, a small theft of life by the vengeful air. This description of the organs fits with functionalist medical theory, emphasizing use and action over appearances. It also leads to an allusion to the body as laboratory that will be extended in treatments of empirical science throughout the remainder of the poem. Sor Juana’s reference to the faithful testimony of the organs (earlier she describes Nature’s balance as “el fiel infïel”) bears on the limitations of human reason that must rely on the testimony of the body; as we shall see, Galenists rely on their senses as they develop experiments meant to uncover the workings of the humors and organs. Having insisted on the dependability of organs in sustaining the body and their reliability in testifying to the continuation of life, Sor Juana elaborates further on the competence and precision of the body’s mechanisms, shifting to a greater emphasis on the humors and introducing in the sacrifice of chyle17 a new narrative element. 17 Peden translates “quilo” as “chyme,” while Luis Harss, arguing that “chyle” “sounds remote in English” (Sor Juana’s Dream 91), chooses to translate it as “nutrient sap.” Alan S. Trueblood retains “chyle” (A Sor Juana Anthology 177). According to Helkiah Crooke, chyle, concocted by the stomach, is then transformed into chyme, a precursor to blood and the four humors. I prefer the technical term, which emphasizes Sor Juana’s use of physiological language but also likely touches on larger theological and philosophical debates in a manner consistent with the rest of this poem. For instance, Crooke writes that the heat that concocts chyle must be understood as “not ... the heate as it is heate (for by that reason fiery and aguish heate which corrupteth all things, should be the cause of concoction) but as it is the instrument of the soule” (170–71). I do not know Sor Juana’s specific sources for these lines, particularly her emphasis on chyle produced by “unremitting heat,” but one may assume that her ideas were shaped by many of the same sources Crooke was engaging in his compilation of ancient and modern knowledge. Chyle, like the mythical figures in this poem and the dreamer herself, is impure and incomplete, yet her sacrifice is significant and productive, enabling the production of humors which feed the brain.

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Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700 Y aquella del calor más competente científica oficina, próvida de los miembros despensera, que avara nunca y siempre diligente, ni a la parte prefiere más vecina ni olvida a la remota, y en ajustado natural cuadrante las cuantidades nota que a cada cuál tocarle considera, del que alambicó quilo el incesante calor, en el manjar que—medianero piadoso—entre él y el húmedo interpuso su inocente substancia, pagando por entero la que, ya piedad sea, o ya arrogancia, al contrario voraz, necia, lo expuso —merecido castigo, aunque se excuse, al que en pendencia ajena se introduce—; ésta, pues, si no fragua de Vulcano, templada hoguera del calor humano, al cerebro envïaba húmedos, mas tan claros los vapores de los atemperados cuatro humores, que con ellos no sólo no empañaba los simulacros que la estimativa dió a la imaginativa y aquésta, por custodia más segura, en forma ya más pura entregó a la memoria que, oficiosa, grabó tenaz y guarda cuidadosa, sino que daban a la fantasía lugar de que formase imágenes diversas. (ll. 234–66) That most competent and scientific laboratory, dispensing warmth to all the body, withholding never, ever diligent, neither to neighbor showing preference nor slighting one remote, with nature’s instrument is taking note of precise measurements of chyme [chyle] it will assign throughout the soma, distilled by unremitting heat, and then, in selfless sacrifice (benevolent its intercession) between Humidity and fire impose itself, and, paying the price, give up its substance, whether from true compassion or senseless arrogance, in total abnegation —expected punishment, although forgiven,

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for one who intervenes in others’ quarrels; this, then, if not Vulcan’s furnace, the candent, bubbling, cauldron of human heat, transmitted to the brain misty, yet so transparent, vapors from the fluid store of humors, four, their presence did not obscure or blur the simulacra reason forwarded to the imagination, it, in turn, for safer preservation, surrendered them to memory, now in their purest form, to be punctiliously graved and guarded, offering to fantasy occasion to release its many images.

The stomach as laboratory produces chyle that sacrifices itself in the conflict between fire and humidity. Through this process, the fluid humors are transported as vapors to the brain where they feed the imagination and enable the release of the soul from its corporeal chains, a release which is never pure because of the physiological roots of fantasy. Sor Juana suggests a kind of melodrama of the humors akin to the debate Bradstreet stages in her quaternion. Unlike Bradstreet, she does not emphasize the gender of the humors, though in telling of the sacrifice of chyle, punished for intervening in others’ quarrels, we may read a privileging of an intermediate between the poles of male and female, an asexual position reinforced by her reference to the cuckolded Vulcan. Characteristically, both heart and lungs are accorded respect, with the sovereign heart receiving particular acknowledgment. But, as Georgina Sabat de Rivers observes, the brain is the seat of the soul, not the heart (El «Sueño»135); though less combative and overtly pro-woman than Bradstreet’s debate poem, Primero Sueño similarly rejects Aristotelian models of male heat and preeminence. The body is both a clock and a laboratory (complete with alembic and, later in the poem, retort), emphasizing both its duties over time and the transformations it achieves in order to sustain life and the intellectual flights of the soul. The body’s activities are likened to empirical scientific experimentation, enabled by God and Nature, but the study of the body by humans is also valued insofar as these descriptions of the body do not simply describe what sustains the soul but are in themselves a first step in the soul’s intellectual inquiries. Because these descriptions are inserted before the soul’s flight, they are present as knowledge but not fully acknowledged as a stage in the intellectual investigations of the soul, just as the mechanisms of the body are present and essential but largely unrecognized by imagined observers.18 Questions of reliability and faithfulness as reflected in uses of 18 Jean Franco’s discussion of digressive examples “irrelevant to the main argument” but signaling knowledgeable readers of hidden meanings, transgressions that would have gone unobserved by the general, censorious public is useful here (35). However, I treat these passages as insisting on the functions of the body as important but not symbolically significant rather than as transgressive.

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the word “fiel” to describe the body are also significant—Nature’s scales are “el fiel infïel” and the lungs and heart, unlike the senses, are “uno y otro fiel testigo”—and bear on the frailty of both body and intellect. They also raise questions about the social dangers of both intellectual pursuits and human transformations of the body, as becomes evident later in the poem. Almost 100 lines of poetry about the body’s organs and humors intervene between Sor Juana’s initial statement that the soul is freed from governing the senses and her reiteration that it has thrown off its “corporeal chains.” The Soul “transmuted into/beauteous essence and discarnate being” (“toda convertida/a su inmaterial sér y esencia bella”) is finally freed from “the corporeal chains/that vulgarly restrain and clumsily/impede the soaring intellect” (“corporal cadena,/que grosera embaraza y torpe impide/el vuelo intelectual”) but only after “absorb[ing] these offerings,/ made in His image, and treasuring/the spark of the Divine she bears within” (ll. 292–301; “aquella contemplaba,/participada de alto Sér, centella/que con similitud en sí gozaba”). The description of the bodily functions that comes between the two expressions of the soul’s freedom emphasizes the significance of these offerings, which may be both the vital spirits provided by the organs and humors of the sleeping body and “the simulacra reason forwarded to the imagination” which were, “in turn, for safer preservation, surrendered [...] to memory” (ll. 259–61). With this freedom, the intellectual flight can now move from human bodies to heavenly bodies (l. 305; “los cuerpos celestiales”). Though the next section of the poem treats different methods for making sense of “all creation;/this vast aggregate,/this enigmatic whole” (ll. 445–47) by moving from one philosophical system to the next, physiology and medical science remain important elements of her quest for knowledge. The poem soars and falls in cycles, and knowledge of the body is an important part of these cycles. In her first enthusiasm, the soul tries to embrace everything she perceives, only to be overwhelmed and withdraw in cowardice. She must then regroup and try a different approach to understanding. After describing the recovery in darkness of eyes blinded by the bright sun and, by extension, of an intellect overwhelmed by abundant information about the world, Sor Juana makes a comparison to Galen on homeopathic remedies. —recurso natural, innata ciencia que confirmada ya de la experiencia, maestro quizá mudo, retórico ejemplar, inducir pudo a uno y otro Galeno para que del mortífero veneno, en bien proporcionadas cantidades escrupulosamente regulando las ocultas nocivas cualidades, ya por sobrado exceso de cálidas o frías, o ya por ignoradas simpatías o antipatías con que van obrando las causas naturales su progreso (ll. 516–29)

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—a natural recourse, the instinctive science that experience has now confirmed, enabling Galen, a silent master, though exemplary orator, to direct disciples to extract from lethal poisons, in carefully apportioned quantities, their hidden, noxious qualities, scrupulously measured, whether for an already known excess of heat or cold, or for other, as yet unknown, antipathies and sympathies with which natural causes give confirmation of their progress

Sor Juana introduces Galenist homeopathic treatments and investigations as positive, likening the use of small amounts of poison to cure diseases of the body to the balm of darkness for eyes and intellect overwhelmed by the immense diversity of the world. Good may come from bad, cure from poison, insight from darkness. Sor Juana celebrates the Galenists’ discoveries, but she also insists on the limits of human knowledge. Galenists have learned to use lethal poison (“mortífero veneno”) in “carefully apportioned quantities” (“en bien proporcionadas cantidades”), but do so in order to correct both “already known excess/of heat or cold, or for/other, as yet unknown, antipathies/and sympathies” (ll. 521–28). She continues to insist on this combination of precision and ignorance in a parenthetical passage about scientific labors: (a la admiración dando, suspendida, efecto cireto en causa no sabida, con prolijo desvelo y remirada empírica atención, examinada en la bruta experiencia, por menos peligrosa), la confección hicieran provechosa, último afán de la Apolínea ciencia, de admirable trïaca, ¡que así del mal el bien tal vez se saca!—: (ll. 530–39) (offering, for our admiration, sure effects from causes not yet explained, but gained through wakeful nights and scrupulous, empirical attention, then verified on animals—that being less dangerous) and concoct a compound to denote the goal of Apollonian science: a wondrous antidote, that, from the fatal, blessing be obtained

Empirical inquiry, complete with animal testing, is admirable both for its effects, regardless of whether the investigator discovers true causes, and for “sleepless” (“desvelo”)

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attention paid to the problem. Sor Juana repeatedly emphasizes that these studies may not yield causes, suggesting that modesty as “keeping due measure” is essential to the truth-seeking activities of science. The organs’ functions are more reliable than the activities of the senses; that scientists must rely on their senses (they are awake, unlike the dreamer) to investigate the body’s functions limits their abilities to find absolute truth. In the next section of the poem, the protagonist replaces the soaring promise and crash of overwhelming sensory knowledge with the more measured practice of identifying categories and pursuing, step by step, an understanding based on sensory input but “ennobled too/by inner qualities (will, reason,/memory), propitiously/ bestowed by the hand/of an Omnipotent Deity—” (ll. 666–70). This pursuit also ends in failure, but this time in a way that links intellectual humility and modesty understood as feminine shame. Estos, pues, grados discurrir quería unas veces. Pero otras, disentía, excesivo juzgando atrevimiento el discurrirlo todo, quien aun la más pequeña, aun la más fácil parte no entendía de los más manüales efectos naturales; quien de la fuente no alcanzó risueña el ignorado modo con que el curso dirige cristalino (ll. 704–14) These, then, were the steps I wished to follow, even repeat, but others of my sisters disagreed, decreed it was too bold for one who understood so little of the least, of the most tractable, of natural effects to ponder greater things while ignorant of how Arethusa curved her crystalline course beneath the deepest seas

In the preceding stanza she emphasized the masculine universal, capitalizing “Hombre.” “Man, in sum, the greatest marvel/posed to human comprehension” (ll. 690–91; “el Hombre, digo, en fin, mayor portento/que discurre el humano entendimiento”—note that in Spanish she writes “digo” [“I say”], emphasizing her own first person voice). Now female gender is more pronounced. This is the first time that the criticism of others, rather than physiological and perceptual limitations, hinders the soul’s journey, and the critics are “otras,” translated here as “my sisters.” These female critics suggest that the dreamer cannot even know the path of Arethusa, much less more rarefied mysteries, but in the course of the poem Arethusa herself serves as a model of a transgressive female search for knowledge that enjoys a limited success, in some way belying the others’ criticism. There may be no waters of

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Salmacis in this world that can change women into men, but the example of Arethusa reminds us that women are capable of transgressing productively in the realm of knowledge, though Arethusa herself remains a mystery thwarting human perception. Several critics have pointed to Arethusa as one of the most successful and feminist of the three failures with whom Sor Juana ends this poem.19 With partial but instructive knowledge, the speaker demonstrates that she knows the story of Arethusa and its significance, even if she does not know the secret paths that Arethusa as waterway follows.20 This backhanded introduction of her knowledge within an expression of ignorance is reminiscent of her earlier discussion of the body’s mechanisms in which knowledge again is introduced but is not explicitly marked as a significant part of the soul’s intellectual flight. In contrast, her thoughts later turn explicitly to Phaeton (ll. 785–86), another significant failure, who receives more lines of poetry and serves as both a warning exemplum and a figure who earns praise for his efforts, “making of fear a form of flattery/to nurture courage” (ll. 807–808). Arethusa brings knowledge that Persephone lives to the disconsolate Ceres, thereby helping to restore springtime and flowers to an earth made barren by grief. In the following stanza the speaker once again moves from myth to science, confessing that she is also ignorant of the science of flower reproduction and why some flowers are white and some are red, unfolding de dulce herida de la Cipria Diosa los despojos ostenta jactanciosa, si ya el que la colora, candor al alba, púrpura al aurora no le usurpó y, mezclado, purpúreo es ampo, rosicler nevado: tornasol que concita los que del prado aplausos solicita: preceptor quizá vano —si no ejemplo profano— de industria femenil que el más activo veneno, hace dos veces ser nocivo

19 Franco pays particular attention to the function of this passage as both poetic and female transgression (35–37). Beaupied reads Arethusa, a fountain, as a figure of baptism that connects this poem with Sor Juana’s autosacramental, The Divine Narcissus (61–62). Merrim reads Arethusa as continuing a matrilineal impulse in the poem and signaling “the unfathomable complexities of knowledge” (Early 237). 20 The complexity of Arethusa’s underground course from the Peloponnesian city of Elis to Syracuse in Sicily is magnified by the ancient belief that waters could join and part without mixing. Thus, the waters of Arethusa could maintain their integrity while flowing from modern-day Greece to Italy (Jones 44–45). In classical literature, this had colonial implications; for instance, Prudence Jones observes that the allusion to Arethusa’s journey in the opening of Virgil’s tenth Eclogue “evokes the transfer of pastoral poetry from Arcadia to Sicily” (45, n. 28). That the speaker of Primero Sueño finds this confusing is not surprising. The possibility that Sor Juana was also aware of some of these issues of colonialism and literary transmission is also intriguing. I am grateful to Betsey Robinson for this citation and other information about Arethusa.

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Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700 en el velo aparente de la que finge tez resplandeciente. (ll. 743–56) to bare, with boastful ostentation, the red of Venus’s blood, colors appropriating from the dawn its milky light as well as rosy beam, creating crimson snow and silvery vermillion iridescence that puts to shame the meadow’s pretty show, a vain preceptor —if not profane example— of female industry that makes of noxious poisons potions doubly vile, powders to mask the truth, paints for those who would recapture youth.

The treatment of science in this passage resonates with her earlier description of Galenists. The speaker is revealing her ignorance of plant reproduction (the Galenists were also described as often ignorant of causes) but also plant hybridization, i.e. human interventions in plant breeding. While homeopathic medicine is praised for its benefits, plant breeding is vain, even irreligious. In this way it is like the manufacture and use of cosmetics. In homeopathy, poisons were made useful through the labors of scientists who, like the dreamer, seek knowledge at night and are only partially successful; here they are used by women to deceive. The earlier treatments of a body which is “fiel,” though not entirely known by humans, are countered by the deceit of cosmetics and vain hybridization. In other words, the poem turns from modesty as due measure to modesty as female shame, a female shame that Sor Juana treats as merited just at the point that she humbly confesses her ignorance in response to the criticism of others. She treats those who practice this “female industry” (“industria femenil”) as scientists (in La Respuesta, Sor Juana famously observed that much may be learned by performing the domestic tasks of women: “had Aristotle prepared victuals, he would have written more” [Poems 43]), but theirs is a deceitful, immoral science that seeks to change rather than understand or mend nature. Emilie Bergmann reads this passage as “an exploration of plant reproduction in a flower that is a clear metaphor for the female body in cycles of virginity, sexual blossoming, and motherhood” (161), adding that Sor Juana’s use of Renaissance commonplaces for describing female beauty “transforms poetic cliché and redirects the tradition” (163) without elaborating on that transformation in this particular poem.21 Bergmann’s article usefully focuses on the body and feminism in many of Sor Juana’s works, including Primero Sueño. She observes that unconscious physical processes remain important throughout the poem (159), but primarily treats how women’s bodies are represented in the landscapes, mythological allusions, and, in this passage, lyric conventions of the poem. But Sor Juana shifts attention from 21 Sabat de Rivers similarly cuts her reading of this passage short, finding in Sor Juana’s references to cosmetics “a new feminine rhetoric to theatricalize everyday aspects of women’s lives” (“A Feminist Rereading” 154).

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how women are represented as objects to how they behave as subjects, not only in portraiture but in her treatment of science. William Shakespeare makes a similar association in The Winter’s Tale, when he has Perdita reject carnations and “gillyvors” (pinks), “For I have heard it said,/There is an art, which in their piedness shares/With great creating Nature” (IV.4, ll. 86–88).22 Sor Juana is critical of cosmetics, but she is not embracing artless grace, as does Perdita. Rather, she is associating herself with modest, not shameful science. In engaging the commonplace distinction between natural women and shameful face painters, it is not natural being but modest inquiry and practice that she favors. In this way, this passage may be seen as a rejection of numerous Renaissance treatments of artlessness and female purity and beauty. Instead, Sor Juana makes the point that science and human endeavors are useful, as exemplified by homeopathic remedies and the success of Arethusa’s storytelling, even if they are limited by the impossibility of total knowledge and understanding. The virtue and necessity of modest practice are evident throughout the remainder of the poem. Sor Juana continues to explore the theme of inevitable failure that in the case of both Phaeton and the dreamer is linked to the limits of human bodies that cannot do what gods do. Phaeton falls and the dreamer awakens. But neither the failed pursuit of complete knowledge nor life in the body are to be condemned. Hunger awakens the dreamer; the nourishment “born of the union of Humidity/and heat in Nature’s/marvelous retort” (“resultaba ... de la unión entre el húmedo y ardiente,/en el maravilloso/natural vaso”) has ceased, and the body, “weary of weariness” (“del descanso cansados”) slowly begins to stir (ll. 841–43, 855). Consequently, the night’s fantasies flee the brain, just as the precise figures of the magic lantern disappear with the day’s splendor. Put to flight, the night puts up resistance, “a coward slowed/by craven fear/and braggadocio” (ll. 924–26), but inevitably must retreat to another hemisphere, mientras nuestro Hemisferio la dorada ilustraba del Sol madeja hermosa, que con luz judiciosa de orden distributivo, repartiendo a las cosas visibles sus colores iba, y restituyendo entera a los sentidos exteriores su operación, quedando a luz más cierta el Mundo iluminado, y yo despierta. (ll. 967–75) while our Hemisphere was inundated by a flood of gold that radiated from a solar 22 Elias Rivers mentions this passage from The Winter’s Tale in providing background for his discussion of science, art and nature in the works of Sor Juana and other Spanish poets, but does not discuss this particular passage from Primero Sueño (258–59). Nathaniel Ward’s comment on Bradstreet’s poetic cross-dressing and his association of fashion-obsessed women with a range of unorthodoxies (the Apocrypha, foreigners, alchemized coins, and religious toleration) provides further context for debates over the relationship between nature and art that take women as examples. Both Bradstreet and Sor Juana engage and critique these arguments by, first of all, treating women as thinking subjects.

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The dreamer finally awakens to the bright sun, and the revived senses are welcomed as an affirmation of life. This may appear to flawed human perception as a return of the suspended body, but as Sor Juana repeatedly insists, the body has been present and active throughout, sustaining life with breath and blood and feeding fantasy with its humors. This emphasis on the mechanisms of the body is clearly a form of medical functionalism; Sor Juana finds a purpose for all body parts as well as a physiological source for human intellectual activity. This emphasis on physiological functions informs a larger challenge to the symbolic separation of body and spirit that underlies many misogynistic assumptions of the period. While in the beginning of the poem she emphasizes the failures of human perception, in the end she insists on the virtue of seeking even limited, flawed knowledge, despite the criticism of others. Her assertion that all humans are both hampered by and dependent upon their bodies serves the dual purpose of critiquing those who think too much of their perceptions while opening the possibility for explorations on the part of those declared too bold and ignorant.23 “Y yo despierta”: Awakening to the Body In “A Philosophical Satire,” subtitled, “She proves the inconsistency of the caprice and criticism of men who accuse women of what they cause,” Sor Juana famously takes to task, Hombres necios que acusáis a la mujer sin razón, sin ver que sois la ocasión de lo mismo que culpáis (I: 228) You foolish and unreasoning men who cast all blame on women, not seeing you yourselves are cause of the same faults you accuse (The Answer 157)

23 McKenna’s Cartesian reading of this poem is another that moves quickly from the body to the soul, insisting on the soul’s escape. She argues that this poem ends on a note of defiance, not disillusionment. But like many readings that bracket the body, she does not entertain the possibility of truly modest practice in the body. This is not the pudor of a woman bowing to patriarchal dictates, but neither is it a subversion or defiant assertion of her rights. Rather, Sor Juana offers a sophisticated engagement of contemporary thought that yields a philosophy available to all people but especially meaningful to women who suffer from symbolic readings of the body in opposition to the soul.

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As in Primero Sueño, this poem ends in failure, here the failure of her logic to persuade men who cannot be shaken from their illogical arrogance. Bien con muchas armas fundo que lidia vuestra arrogancia, pues en promesa e instancia juntáis diablo, carne y mundo. (I: 229) Thus I prove with all my forces the ways your arrogance does battle: for in your offers and your demands we have devil, flesh, and world: a man. (The Answer 159)

Throughout this poem, Sor Juana uses rhymes and inversions as well as argument and reason to uncover the false logic of the men she accuses. In the final stanza, Sor Juana despairs of seeing any change in this arrogant, illogical misbehavior, and consequently the joining of devil, flesh, and world indicates a failure of reason and piety. This may be read as asserting that men will continue to pursue their sins of the flesh, but it also suggests that (female) bodies are associated with the devil through the false logic and double standards of these foolish men. In Primero Sueño, Sor Juana likewise argues for the separation of devil and flesh as she insists on the function of the body in the soul’s flight while nonetheless deemphasizing the significance of these functions. Both Bradstreet’s Flegme and Sor Juana’s dreamer acknowledge modesty as a matter of female decorum in passages that allude to the poets’ own possibly indecorous knowledge. Flegme conceals what she has learned from Crooke about human sexual reproduction; Sor Juana’s dreamer professes ignorance of plant reproduction and decries the unnatural transformation of both plants and women through science. These acknowledgements and repudiations of female shame foreground social context more than other parts of both poems; the voices of others frame these modesty topoi. These treatments of social convention may even be read as double-voiced critiques of social hypocrisy—Crooke may do what Flegme may not while the dreamer’s critique of cosmetics comes in a passage about others’ criticism, the only time in this poem when the pursuit of knowledge is explicitly limited by social convention. However, the larger point of each work is a reframing of the relationship between body and soul in which the functions of the body are emphasized and treated as part of intellectual endeavors. (Remember that Flegme claims preeminence based on her functions in the brain, which she also argues is associated with the soul.) The use of scientific discourse within these poems and their respective conclusions make the point that humans, including women, should exercise modesty understood as keeping due measure. The search for knowledge is necessary and necessarily flawed in a fallen world. Sor Juana’s debt to the encyclopedic knowledge and radically syncretic worldview of Athanasius Kircher has been celebrated in much the same way that Bradstreet was labeled “a right Du Bartas Girle” and “Deer Neat An Bartas” in the prefatory materials to The Tenth Muse. Contemporaries both wondered at the breadth of their knowledge and ambitions and subordinated them to more illustrious male models. Modern scholars have continued in this vein to a certain extent, focusing on how

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each poet defends her legitimacy or signals her sense of illegitimacy on the one hand and analyzing the range of their knowledge on the other. For instance, Stephanie Merrim provocatively reads Sor Juana’s engagement of scientific empiricism through a “poetics of the autodidact” (Early 235), arguing that the dreamer has no guide and ultimately fails to achieve enlightenment because, “The female auto-didactus has been denied the privileges and the ecstasy of a male Theo-didactus taught by God” (Early 229). She finds in Bradstreet and Sor Juana as well as the writings of Margaret Cavendish, a “gendered encyclopedism, driven by the exclusion of women from the world of knowledge” (Early 228). However, it is important to notice that these female encyclopedists are not merely defending women’s intellectual endeavors or proving the breadth of their learning. Neither are they simply finding in empiricism access to the pursuit of knowledge apart from scholarly traditions from which they are excluded. Rather, they rework the entire encyclopedic enterprise by emphasizing the functional body as necessary to the supremely cerebral endeavor of amassing and categorizing knowledge. In this reading, I am not suggesting, as many do, that Sor Juana opposes natural science and religion. In this, I agree with Hill and Beaupied who have both argued for readings of this poem that align it with Spanish Catholicism by refusing oversimplified binary oppositions between science and theology or old science and new science. If she is heterodox in this poem, it is not through sly subversion of Catholicism but through a characterization of scientific empiricism as modest, fallen, and Christian that also reworks the relationship between body and soul. This poem is not as obviously feminist as entries in the querelle des femmes like Sor Juana’s Respuesta or Bradstreet’s quaternion on the four humors. However, the opposition of Galenist science and “female industry” as well as her final foregrounding of her female body are used to emphasize modest practice exercised by a body that may be either male or female. Sor Juana and Bradstreet use medical treatments of the body arising from empirical science to counter arguments that separate body and soul in ways that limit women insofar as they are associated with the body. In the following chapters, I explore the functionalist arguments of two religious women likewise concerned with the conjunction of devil, flesh, and world. Both Anne Hutchinson and Marie de l’Incarnation treat the body as something that sustains the spirit in this world but has no symbolic significance. The body as “faithful witness” is also a vexed issue for them—both Hutchinson and Marie describe the activities of the body while insisting on its insignificance as a way to testify to their special relationship with God; the functions of the body serve as evidence of this relationship with God primarily because the body is merely functional and not symbolic. In developing these arguments, they challenge centuries of thinking that read women’s bodies as symbolic of their fallen nature. Like Sor Juana, they contrast the faithfulness of the body with the deceit of appearances. Jean Franco opposes Sor Juana’s rationalism to mysticism understood as a feminine space outside of discourse (xv); both Marie and Hutchinson have been considered mystics, but their understanding of the relationship between soul and body has more in common with Sor Juana’s philosophy than this opposition suggests. Like Bradstreet and Sor Juana, both their theologies and their understandings of social relationships involve well-reasoned functionalist treatments of the body.

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The dreamer in Primero Sueño is fundamentally both body and soul. The body is not valued as the basis for the symbolic significance of the soul, but neither is it rejected in favor of a transcendent individual spirit. The limits the dreamer faces are most evident in sensory failures, especially instances of physical and intellectual blindness, but the ambitions of the individual soul are as responsible as the mechanics of vision for its inevitable defeat. And yet this cycle of striving and defeat is both the source of human salvation and the site of an intellectual privilege usually accorded only to men. Sor Juana was silenced after she sent her Carta Atenagórica to the Bishop of Puebla. In this letter she argues that Christ’s greatest fineza, his greatest gift, was withholding his love, thereby allowing humankind to strive for his grace. In representing repeated attempts of the soul to achieve pure knowledge, she is showing the process of intellectual labors, which, like the labors that induce sleep, are their own reward but also evidence the yearning for God that will lead to salvation. That the dreamer is finally revealed to be female joins gender explicitly to the functionalist descriptions of this poem, moving beyond the limited challenges posed by neuter subjectivity in other poems to insist on the point developed in all the texts addressed in this book—that the body is the site of functions that are crucial to worldly and spiritual activities but that embodied sexual differences have no transcendent symbolic value. Throughout this poem and especially in her descriptions of the relationship between body and soul, Sor Juana insists on apparent but incomplete separation between the two, using these observations to create rhymes, antitheses, and fine distinctions of meaning and logic that are central to the intellectual conceits at the heart of her poetry. In other words, her version of the Baroque vitally depends upon a joining of body and soul despite apparent divisions; for her, neither intellect nor spirit simply transcends the corporeal. We will see this persistence of bodily activity again in Marie de l’Incarnation’s descriptions of her mortifications and in the embodied movements of the spirit described by Hutchinson, all functionalist uses of the body within mystical, theological, and philosophical frameworks that may appear to reject the body but in fact depend upon its functions while refusing to value it symbolically. Likewise, Sor Juana’s identification of an apparent separation between body and soul that she then demystifies involves a form of argumentation similar to that in her poems critiquing the logic of misogyny. Just as the subordination of women by men is founded on a false opposition and hierarchical logic arising from male blindness to their own logical fallacies, the human apprehension of an absolute separation between body and soul during sleep reflects sensory limitations.

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Chapter 3

“I doe not thinke the Body that dyes shall rise agayne”: Anne Hutchinson’s Mortalism as Feminist Functionalism Bodies are emphasized throughout the Antinomian Controversy and its aftermath, from the notorious “monstrous births” of Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer to rampant language of infection and licentiousness to the martyr’s pose of Hutchinson’s statue in front of the Massachusetts State House. A great deal has been written about how Hutchinson’s body is invoked within the bitter polemics arising from the controversy; more still has been written about how female embodiment may have shaped Hutchinson’s participation in the controversy. However, scholars have largely neglected how Hutchinson herself treats bodies—not her body but all bodies—in the testimony of her two trials. For Hutchinson, bodies and the Word are not stable signs that signify God’s will but rather are conduits for the Holy Spirit, witnessing to God’s will functionally. This functionalism is apparent both in her approach to the legal requirements of testimony in her first trial and in her argument for mortalism, i.e. the endurance of undifferentiated Spirit alone at the time of the Resurrection, in her second trial. In claiming an “immediate revelation” and insisting that individual bodies are not resurrected, Hutchinson does not reject bodies but, like Anne Bradstreet and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, emphasizes function over symbolic value in ways that challenge a dualistic relationship between body and soul as well as patriarchal privileges based on the association of women with flesh. Though Hutchinson, perhaps as part of her knowledge of midwifery, may have been familiar with the concocting of medicines in a manner similar to that employed by the Galenists referred to by Sor Juana and Bradstreet, there is no evidence that she had any particular interest in medical functionalism or challenges to Aristotelian notions of sex difference. That does not mean, however, that experimental science is alien to this theological and political controversy. In his introduction to John Winthrop’s A Short Story of the Rise, reign, and ruine of the Antinomians, Familists & Libertines (1644), Thomas Weld describes “being earnestly pressed by diverse to perfect [the first edition of A Short Story], by laying downe the order and sense of this story” (Hall 201).1 In a rebuttal, John Wheelwright or his son, writing as 1 In 1644, John Winthrop had A Short Story of the Rise, reign, and ruine of the Antinomians, Familists & Libertines published in England as part of an effort to defend the New England project from criticism. The full text of this document is included in Hall 199–310.

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Mercurius Americanus, or “Mr. Weld his Antitype,” does not let Weld get away with even this rather conventional gesture of humility.2 Where we meet first with some Apologeticall passages, one of which, is the perfecting of a book lately come forth out of the Presse, to which, he saith, he was pressed by divers; wherein perhaps he intends, to be Rhetoricall, but what is the Result of this pressing, to extract (forsooth) the quintessence and spirits of the Author: in what? In perfecting the History; which terme perhaps he useth secretly to exccuse the Incompleatnesse of his Notions for those things which are perfective, of another especially per modum formæ supervenientis materiæ, (Such as his are pretended) use to be Incompleat .... (Wheelwright 185–86)

In extracting “the quintessence and spirits of the Author,” Wheelwright is particularly concerned with the misuse of evidence by Weld (it is unclear whether he knew about John Winthrop’s role as principal author and compiler of A Short Story). He argues that Weld uses “History” to mask a polemic that privileges form over matter, imperfect ideology over facts. “But how will he perfect it? He tels us how, by laying down the sense and order of the story: What have we here? a mythologie? Reall Histories use to carry their own sence, matters of fact need no comment, fictions have their senses, Fables their Morals” (Wheelwright 186). The order Weld brings to the story is in fact an imposition, Wheelwright argues, based on presumptions that are both irreligious insofar as he claims to know God’s will and unscientific because he does not have facts enough to support his worldly claims. Through this alchemical conceit by which Weld is introduced as pressing and distilling events to suit his needs, Wheelwright reverses Weld’s repeated presentation of the Antinomians as spreading contagion (Hall 202), “vent[ing] their wares” (Hall 201), playing pied piper and tempting harlot (Hall 204, 205), and, most tellingly for this conceit, “administer[ing] their Physicke, till they had first given good preparatives to make it worke, and then stronger & stronger potions, as they found the Patient able to beare” (Hall 206). Rather, Weld is the one who is interested and literally partial, i.e. incomplete and unbalanced in his characterization of events. This critique of Weld’s ideologically biased “Notions” masking as perfected history is extended to a particularly damning reversal of Weld’s and Winthrop’s well-known treatment of Hutchinson and Dyer, both of whom Wheelwright introduces as “she, who (he sayes) had the monster” (197–98). In his preface to A Short Story, Weld introduced physically graphic descriptions of miscarriages by Hutchinson and Dyer with a claim that these were physical manifestations of God’s judgment.3 God himselfe was pleased to step in with his casting voice, and bring in his owne vote and suffrage from heaven, by testifying his displeasure against their opinions and practises, as clearely as if he had pointed with his finger, in causing the two fomenting women in the 2 Sargent Bush, Jr. has suggested that John Wheelwright, Jr. was the true author of Mercurius Americanus because of the style of this tract and because it helps explains Wheelwright’s later publication of A Brief, and Plain Apology (1658). See Bush 42–44. Citations to Mercurius Americanus are from John Wheelwright, His Writings. 3 Winthrop includes a similarly graphic description of Dyer’s births among the documents compiled in A Short Story (Hall 280–81).

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time of the height of the Opinions to produce out of their wombs, as before they had out of their braines, such monstrous births as no Chronicle (I thinke) hardly ever recorded the like. (Hall 214)

Wheelwright excoriates the rhetoric and logic of A Short Story’s polemic while highlighting the contested issue of interpreting divine will that is so central to the debates that divided the Massachusetts Bay Colony a decade before. He questions the source of information about Hutchinson’s and Dyer’s miscarriages in A Short Story (“did the man obtestricate?”) and suggests that “If any of the men he cals Familists, &c.” had offered such an interpretation of God’s will in these births, he would be deemed “irreligious,” “relishing of profanenes,” or, at best, “unsavourie” (Wheelwright 196). Wheelwright then reads as symptomatic what he understands as a logically flawed and socially immodest metaphor. As for his Analogy, which he observes betwixt her productions and opinions ... It is a monstrous conception of his brain, a spurious issue of his intellect, acted upon by a sweatish and Feaverish zeal, which indeed beats almost in every line; and resolves his in themselves imperfect sometimes, if not feigned facts into phanatique meditations. (196)

While Weld suggests that God’s judgment is evinced in Hutchinson’s monstrous travail, Wheelwright finds that the inexact correspondence between births and opinions is partial evidence of “Feaverish zeal” resolved into “phanatique meditations,” adding that “his Notion is impertinent, for he brings in defects of Nature, amongst defects of Manners .... [B]y the same reason he may under the same title discover all the weaknesses and naturall imperfections either of man or woman, and fix a kind of morality upon them” (196–97). Having declared that Weld, not Hutchinson, has conceived monsters and dangerously claimed full knowledge of God’s will, Wheelwright concludes this critique by suggesting that at the very least he is immodest. Evidence that Hutchinson’s births are the result of an “extraordinary defect” (197), i.e. an unnatural flaw, would “require a most accurate physicall inspection which I think his learning will not reach, although (for ought I can see) his modesty might: for he tels us of women purging and vomiting, what if the distemper we usually call Cholera did for the present oppresse those women? must it needs be proclaimed? must it needs be in print?” (197). Thus, Weld is doubly emasculated—he does not exercise the reason, moderation, and charity of a man charged with honoring the truth and protecting women’s modesty and, more radically, he himself is pregnant with the “monstrous conceptions” he projects onto Hutchinson and Dyer.4 One should not seek to perfect history, imposing a fiction while claiming to make order out of disorder, according to Wheelwright, and in reading the evidence of the body one should look first to nature before claiming “extraordinary” causes. Elaborating, he writes about Mary Dyer, 4 In addition to being pregnant with malice, the author of A Short Story is also charged with being superheated with “Feaverish zeal,” recalling Anne Bradstreet’s indictment of immoderately hot tyrants in “The Four Monarchies.” In his discussion of “moderate masculinity,” Todd W. Reeser suggests that moderation as a male virtue is positioned in opposition to both excess and lack (19). Here Wheelwright observes both excessive heat, characteristically understood as male, and feminine lack of reason and restraint.

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Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700 whether the conceptions of her brain had influence upon the conceptions of her wombe, or these of the wombe upon those of the brain, I will not discusse. This discoverer inclines to the former, I think he might by a deeper search have reached the naturall cause whilest he in his Method telling us her penaltie, judges her for her errours immediately sentenced from heaven: in which passage, as in many other in his book, a spirit of censure and malice is pregnant. (198)

The author of A Short Story is characterized as irrational; he is a bad scientist and a bad theologian for failing to seek natural causes in his diagnosis of these women before claiming that their anomalous pregnancies are physical manifestations of their dangerous thoughts and thus evidence of God’s displeasure. Indeed, he risks falling into “irreligious” heresy by claiming direct knowledge of divine truth. And again Wheelwright rhetorically unmans Weld and Winthrop, finding the author of A Short Story “pregnant” with “a spirit of censure and malice” as well as humorally imbalanced and unchivalrous in these charges against Hutchinson and Dyer. In all, Wheelwright, like Hutchinson during her civil trial, reveals the hypocrisies and inconsistencies of the logic and rhetoric used to identify Hutchinson’s immediate revelations as well as her monstrous female body as the source of Antinomian errors. Indeed, much of Mercurius Americanus reads like the insightful discourse analysis of a feminist polemicist, repeatedly referring to Weld’s promise that “you shall see a litter of fourescore and eleven of their brats hung up against the Sunne” (Hall 202; Wheelwright 196 and elsewhere) as a tellingly horrific extension of the monstrous analogy he uses to indict Hutchinson and Dyer. But Wheelwright is not primarily concerned with misogyny; he charges both Hutchinson and Dyer, like the author of A Short Story, with feminine instability. Despite observing that Hutchinson was “a woman of good wit, and not onely so, which is all he will allow her, but naturally of a good judgement too” (197), he finds that, “In spirituals indeed she gave her understanding over into the power of suggestion and immediate dictates, by reason of which she had many strange fancies, and erroneous tenents possest her, especially during her confinement, where she might feel some effect too from the quality of humors, together with the advantage the devill took of her condition attended with melancholy,” adding that Dyer “was devoted to Mrs. Hutchinsons fancies” (197). Hutchinson and Dyer were both given to “fancies” linked to humoral imbalance, fancies not unlike the “Feaverish zeal” and “phanatique meditations” he attributed to A Short Story’s author.5 Their bodies affected their brains, he hypothesizes, driven on by abnormal pregnancies and in Hutchinson’s case, melancholy brought on by her confinement during the winter of 1637–38. As in Sor Juana’s Primero Sueño, concerns about moral and ethical knowledge-practices despite limited human understanding get played out in the tension between modest empiricism and immodest transformations of natural phenomena and divine truths. And again, women’s shameful bodies are objects of interpretation at the heart of these debates. This chapter and the next are about the ways in which bodies are situated within testimonial relationships by religious women and those who comment on them. Legal, religious, and historical considerations of testimony shape the 5 See Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England 64 and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Gender 98–100 for other interpretations of the treatment of Hutchinson and her critics in Mercurius Americanus.

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discourses of the Antinomian controversy just as medical debates and responses to Aristotelian and scholastic learned traditions influenced Bradstreet’s and Sor Juana’s encyclopedic poems, and once again the women I study resist interpretive strategies that read the body as a static sign, fallen and shamefully feminine. In their useful overview of the study of testimony in the last decades of the twentieth century, Anne Cubilié and Carl Good offer a basic definition that is shared by those interested in its “politically interventionist” aspects and those concerned with “the aporetic unrepresentability” of that which is testified to: testimony is “a mode of bearing witness to the unrepresentable” (5). God’s plan for individuals and the colony could only be determined through inevitably imperfect interpretations of signs, events, and feelings. While the theological debate concerned what testified to one’s justification (the Word, the spirit, faith), legal testimony was also important in the trials held toward the end of the conflict, as is evident in Hutchinson’s demand that two witnesses against her take an oath. Likewise, the dynamics of testimony also bear on historical interpretations of the controversy and its key players, both in the immediate aftermath and since. In addition to the disagreements over the perfectability of history registered by Wheelwright, Robert Baillie fanned the flames of controversy when he wrote, “what if we had their full History from any faithful hand? it seems that many more mysteries would be brought to light, which now are hid in darknesse” (65).6 While Baillie and others conspiratorially wrote of “darknesse” in contemporary narratives of the controversy, scholars continue to wrestle with the limits of the archive and the obfuscations of competing polemics in seeking both what Michael P. Winship calls “a plausible story consistent with ... surviving documents” (10) and what Anne Myles calls “a usable past” (“Monster” 19). Of the women I treat in this book, the archive related to Hutchinson herself is thinnest and the ratio between scholarship and recorded words is greatest. Testimony, then, is also about the familiar problem of contested histories and the place of women within those histories. Hutchinson’s critics spoke and wrote of bodies, particularly Hutchinson’s body, as objects that testified to God’s judgment while Hutchinson herself, rhetorically and theologically, treats bodies as temporary, dynamic conduits of the Spirit. In other words, Hutchinson and her critics situate bodies differently within testimonial relationships in ways that bear significantly on the gender politics of the controversy. Sor Juana describes the organs as “faithful witnesses” as compared to the more visible but less trustworthy senses; Hutchinson likewise treats the body as a functional but symbolically insignificant testament to God’s will. Testament and Covenant: The Controversy over Testimony God’s will—unrepresentable and unknowable—is at the heart of the Antinomian or free grace controversy that raged during the early years of the Massachusetts 6 A minister in the Church of Scotland, Robert Baillie’s A Dissuasive against the Errours of the Time (1645) aimed to discredit congregationalism in favor of presbyterian church organization by attacking the Antinomian errors of John Cotton. Cotton responded in The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared (1648). See Hall 396–97, for a brief introduction to this exchange and Philip Gura 155–84, for a more extended discussion of presbyterian polemics on the Antinomian controversy and congregationalist responses.

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Bay Colony. Faced with the need for some form of assurance among ministers and parishioners alike, early Puritan divines developed theological arguments that allowed believers to develop a degree of shaky confidence that they were saved. By the time of the controversy, sides had formed in New England on this complex matter of theology and spiritual practice. On one side were preparationists who, following the writings of William Perkins and others, developed methods by which assurance could be found in faith and sanctified living; on the other side were spiritists who looked to theologians like Richard Sibbes as they insisted that assurance was only to be found in the “seal of the Spirit.” In New England, Thomas Shepard and Thomas Hooker exemplified the preparationists while John Cotton and John Wheelwright were the most prominent ministers preaching free grace and the seal of the spirit. According to Winship, “Doctrinally the core energizing question of the controversy was whether or not you had to know that God loved you before you could trust the signs that you loved him” (228). In other words, it was about the testamentary relationship between God and the elect. Janice Knight frames the issue more clearly in terms of testimony, explaining that a central disagreement during the early years of the New England colony was “over the normative characterization of [the bond between God and humankind] as either a covenant or a testament—conditional and requiring faith, or absolute and wholly of God’s doing” (89). Both the Cambridge [spiritist] theologians and their preparationist counterparts acknowledged that there was a difference between the terms covenant and testament. A covenant, according to the Oxford English Dictionary and the general usage of the period, was understood as “a mutual agreement,” a “league” or a “contract.” Hooker [a leading preparationist] writes, “As in a covenant there are articles of agreement between party and party, and so between God and his people.” A testament, on the other hand, is unilateral; it directs the bequest of goods and property after death. As Richard Sibbes [a leading spiritist] explained, a testament “indeed is a covenant, and something more.” That something more was precisely the freeness of the gift. A testament “bequeatheth good things merely of love”—in this case Christ’s free love made manifest by his sacrifice. As Sibbes goes on to explain the difference, “A covenant requireth something to be done. In a testament, there is nothing but receiving the legacies given.” (92)

Noting that “the issue is not doctrinal consistency, but rhetorical emphasis” (92), Knight emphasizes how ministers on either side of the debate characterize humans as either passive recipients of God’s grace, a testament of his love, or as agents in a two-sided covenant requiring human activity despite the absence of any guarantee that grace would be forthcoming.7 The distinctions between preparationists and spiritists were not, however, clearly defined. As Winship argues, John Winthrop could in his conversion narrative express something very like an experience of the seal of the spirit even as he inveighed 7 Other key works on covenant theology and antinomianism include William K.B. Stoever, ‘A Faire and Easie Way to Heaven’: Covenant Theology and Antinomianism in Early Massachusetts and Norman Pettit, The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life as well as Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression.

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against the so-called Antinomians. Lisa Gordis observes that even Hutchinson’s “immediate revelations,” the “proofe” upon which her opponents based her conviction, were based on biblical interpretations guided by the spirit that in later years resonated with exegetical practices promoted by one of her staunchest critics, Thomas Shepard. In “The Antinomian Language Controversy,” Patricia Caldwell argues strongly that Hutchinson and the Antinomians were highly suspicious of human language and interpretations, arguing, “If human language is imprecise and uninformed before grace and swept away in a tidal wave of spirit after grace, then words cannot consistently be relied upon to fulfill their basic denotative function .... This assumption is borne out in Mrs. Hutchinson’s testimony by her tendency to separate words from their referents—and never more so than in treating of the operation of grace itself” (353). But in fact all Puritans were suspicious of human language and interpretations. As Michael Clark has demonstrated, even orthodox Puritanism insisted upon an “antihumanism” that rejects “human agency as the source of cultural forms and the meanings associated with those forms” (122). In other words, Hutchinson and her judges share a suspicion of denotative language; what differs is how they conceptualize language’s performative actions. Since Patricia Caldwell wrote of the “Antinomian language controversy,” numerous readings have focused on the ways language and signification work in the trials of Anne Hutchinson, paying particular attention to the disjunction between signifier and signified, expression and truth. While both sides of the controversy are acknowledged as recognizing the failure of human expression and cognition to coincide with God’s will, Hutchinson and the Antinomians are read as being more modern in their awareness of an epistemological gap. In readings that extend this analysis to consider the political and economic implications of this debate, the rise of capitalism and a liberal public sphere are likewise associated with Hutchinson’s recognition that human words never fully signify divine truth as well as her privileging of individual conscience over the authority of ministers, governors, and perhaps even the Word. As Michelle Burnham puts it, “Ultimately, the theological, linguistic, and economic dimensions of this crisis cannot be treated in isolation, not only because they each repeat the others’ terms, but because together they represent a complex articulation of a crisis in subjectivity that registered its effects in all of these domains” (341). These readings reflect modern and postmodern theories of language that read the inevitable disjunction between signified and signifier paradoxically—truth is expressed through language that always-already fails to convey the truth. Drawing on linguistics, psychoanalysis, and Marxism, these theories are concerned with exchange and commensurability on some fundamental level as well as the displacements and excesses that arise when signifiers slip, traumas produce symptoms, and labor yields surplus value. The focus on semiotics and exchange usefully situates the Antinomian Controversy with respect to larger epistemic shifts that undoubtedly have roots in this period.8 The Reformation, the rise of the middle class, transformations in the public sphere—all move toward more twentieth-century notions of the individual and of 8 See Patricia Caldwell (“The Antinomian Language Controversy”), Ross Pudaloff, Michelle Burnham, Sacvan Bercovitch, and Dillon among others, for discussions of the Antinomian controversy as marked by significant epistemic shifts between modes of interpretation, exchange, and subjectivity.

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representative signs, discourses, and money that circulate in exchange economies from which they gain their meaning. Hutchinson is characterized as “caught” in large part because her body is read by her opponents according to older models of signification and social order while she attempts to assert a newer model of signification. Focusing on differences in treatments of testamentary relationships helps us see something other than representation and exchange. In particular, it helps us consider a residual “thingness” at play on both sides of a debate concerned with metaphysical truth as well as issues of social relationship and ethics that were not rooted in individualism. Preparationists are not so firm in insisting that language and the social order are metaphysically guaranteed; spiritists are not so modern in their notions of discourse and individual subjectivity. Moreover, considering the Antinomian controversy in terms of testimony allows us to better situate bodies theologically and legally. Rather than focusing on how bodies are represented (particularly those of Hutchinson and Dyer) or how embodiment shapes discourse (especially Hutchinson’s and Dyer’s), I suggest we consider how both the Word and certain bodies function as third terms in testimonial relationships. Testimony is required when facts cannot be reliably ascertained and although testimonial relationships are usually transactions between two entities—the one who testifies and the one to whom the testimony is directed—they are essentially triadic, with a third object sealing the relationship. In Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, Jacques Derrida writes that “testimony always goes hand in hand with at least the possibility of fiction, perjury, and lie. Were this possibility to be eliminated, no testimony would be possible any longer; it could no longer have the meaning of testimony” (27). In a multivalent treatment of “passion” with respect to testimony and literature that includes Christ’s passion, “experience without mastery,” and martyrdom in ways that resonate with Puritan concerns, Derrida concludes that “above all” testimony requires “the endurance of an indeterminate or undecidable limit where something, some X—for example, literature—must bear or tolerate everything, suffer everything precisely because it is not itself, because it has no essence but only functions” (28). This, for Derrida, is the third party in a testimonial relationship, that which seals a relationship that is always indeterminate and conditioned by the possibility of a lie. In “The Faithful Covenanter,” Richard Sibbes likewise insists on suffering and a function that exceeds essence when he describes a testament as “a covenant, and something more,” adding, “It is a covenant sealed by death” (4). Knight identifies this “something more” as “precisely the freeness of the gift ... —in this case Christ’s free love made manifest by his sacrifice” (92), emphasizing the ways in which the covenant of grace, especially as characterized by spiritists, exceeds human notions of economy and exchange. However, her gloss minimizes the “thingness” of this “something more.” Puritan notions of testimony, both among humans and in relationship to God, recognize the necessity of a third object that witnesses or seals the testimony. Christ’s body and the Word serve as thirds that testify in this way, beyond economy and essence, with the “possibility of a lie” residing in human interpretation. But falsehood is also possible in more worldly examples of testimony, so here too a witnessing third is required.9 9 In citing Derrida, I too am putting Puritanism in conversation with poststructuralism. I insist on the thingness of the witnessing third rather than the incommensurability between signs

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That Puritans were intensely aware of the triadic nature of testimony is nicely exemplified by Hutchinson’s request that her accusers take an oath, which preceded her famous declaration that “what in my conscience I know to be truth” was revealed to her by “an immediate revelation.” During the first day of her trial, prosecutors used alleged statements from an earlier meeting between Hutchinson and leading ministers as evidence against her. Arguing that 1) this pastoral conversation should not be used as evidence and 2) that she was being misrepresented, Hutchinson begins the second day by asking that two witnesses take an oath. The following pages of the trial transcript are filled with wranglings over who will testify under oath and why. To modern eyes, it looks like the ministers are prevaricating, perhaps even that they have been caught in a lie. It is practically a commonplace in scholarship on this trial to observe that Puritans took oaths very seriously.10 Framed in terms of individual conscience, one’s willingness to swear an oath is a personal matter, but this exchange puts equal weight on the social and legal nature of witnessing: there must be at least two witnesses because one person’s word against another’s, even when delivered under oath, is not sufficiently reliable. Caldwell identifies Hutchinson’s request for an oath as a striking contradiction in her use of language: “Mrs. Hutchinson’s suspiciousness of words leads her into the curious inconsistency of asking that her accusers take an oath in General Court” (“Antinomian” 351).11 Nonetheless it is clear that John Cotton as well as Hutchinson accepted these rules of testimony and oath-taking as biblically ordained and legally binding. In “An Abstract of the Lawes of New England as they are now established” (1641), the first legal code of the colony, Cotton begins his chapter on civil and criminal trials, “In the tryall of all Causes, no judgement shall passe, but either upon confession of the party, or upon the Testimony of two witnesses” (13). The biblical precedent for this is Deuteronomy 19:15: “One witnesse shall not rise against a man for any trespasse, or for any sinne, or for any fault that he offendeth in, but at the mouth of two witnesses or at the mouth of three witnesses shall the matter bee stablished.”12 Cotton also appeals to this law frequently in The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared (1648), in which he implies that Baillie, to whose A Dissuasive against the Errours of the Time (1645) he is replying, has accepted “Table talke” where two reliable witnesses are required (Hall 427). When Hutchinson calls for the ministers to swear an oath, she says, “Now the Lord hath said that an oath is the end of all controversy; though there be a sufficient number of witnesses yet they are and meaning (divine or otherwise) in order to 1) acknowledge the metaphysical assumptions of this debate, 2) explore how structures of testimony and witnessing are foregrounded in the controversy, and 3) consider how Hutchinson responds to the objectification of women as flesh and possessions through her characterization of bodies as objects that are functional, like the Word, and not symbolic. 10 See, for instance, Hall 328. 11 This difficulty in Caldwell’s argument is also evident in her assertion that Hutchinson will not “assent to the communal consensus of scriptural interpretation” (“Antinomian” 351) and yet is operating within the older oral/aural culture described by Walter J. Ong. As I discuss later, this contradiction is also reflected in criticism that fails to make sense of Hutchinson’s radical rejection of individualism in her mortalism. 12 All biblical citations in this chapter are to the Geneva Bible (London 1594).

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not according to the word, therefore I desire they may speak upon oath” (Hall 327), acknowledging the need for at least two witnesses but also citing Hebrews 6:16 in which “an othe for confirmation is among them an ende of all strife.” In other words, she acknowledges the need for a witnessing third in two ways: at least two witnesses are required to take an oath so that one’s word is not pitted against another’s and “the word,” i.e., an oath, must seal the testimony. Cotton and Hutchinson recognize the legitimacy of oaths as both biblically ordained and necessary for “the end of all controversy”—they are not fixated on interior movements of the spirit in this regard. Likewise, Hutchinson’s opponents reveal their own awareness of the contingency of testimonial statements, anticipating Derrida’s assertion that “testimony always goes hand in hand with at least the possibility of fiction, perjury, and lie” when, for instance, Richard Brown expresses his scruples in response to Hutchinson’s request that two of the ministers take an oath.13 “If I mistake not an oath is of a high nature, and it is not to be taken but in a controversy, and for my part I am afraid of an oath and fear that we shall take God’s name in vain, for we may take the witness of these men without an oath” (Hall 328). The status of the Word as testament to God’s will is also reflected in the names of opprobrium applied to Hutchinson’s party by their opponents. “Antinomian” was a pejorative term applied to Hutchinson and others that draws on the distinction between covenant and testament. David D. Hall summarizes the significance of this word as follows: Antinomianism in its root sense means “against or opposed to the law.” In theology it is the opinion that “the moral law is not binding upon Christians, who are under the law of grace.” In New England it denoted the opposition between man’s obedience to the law, or his works, and the saving grace communicated by the Holy Spirit. But the colonists in Massachusetts who stood for “free grace” against the “legall” preachers did not call themselves Antinomians since to them, as to most seventeenth-century Protestants, the term implied licentious behavior and religious heterodoxy. (Hall 3)

Hutchinson and her party were opposed to a notion that God was bound to a contract with humans by a legalistic covenant. In calling them “Antinomians,” their opponents rightly named their opposition to legal approaches to the relationship between God and humankind, but then shifted the emphasis to moral laws that bind the individual with respect to both God and society. Thus, there is also a shift from questions of salvation and grace to concern with both divine and civil punishment. Highlighting doctrinal issues, Winship adds that “contemporaries in New England used the term ‘familist’ far more than they did ‘antinomian’ to describe their radical opponents, for they were deliberate in their choice of terms” (25).14

13 For discussions of biblical precedent and legal practices related to Hutchinson’s request that the ministers swear an oath, see Winship 173–76, Ditmore 359, and Gordis 179. 14 “Familism” refers to the beliefs of adherents to the Family of Love, a seventeenthcentury British sect which practiced free love. In addition to the issues related to the Word as testament described here, the name “Familism” also suggested licentiousness, which becomes particularly relevant, as we shall see, during Hutchinson’s ecclesiastical trial.

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As the early Massachusetts chronicler Edward Johnson puts it; “Antinomians ... deny the Law of God altogether as a rule to walke by in the obedience of Faith, and deny good works to be the Fruit of Faith ... Familists ... forsake the revealed Will of God, and make men depend upon strong Revelations, for the knowledge of Gods Electing Love toward them.” The distinction is roughly accurate .... Antinomianism was perceived to bring with it soul-damning moral laxity; familism, on top of that, brought revelationdriven Münsterian chaos and the abandonment of the Bible, and it was familism that the winning side in Massachusetts thought they were struggling against, not entirely without reason. (25–26)

Familist, the much stronger term, suggests not only a disregard for faith and good works as enjoined by the law and serving as signs of assurance but also a denial of the Word as a testament of God’s will. Hutchinson did not reject the Word as testament, but she did see its function as a testamentary third in ways that differed significantly from Winthrop and her other judges. Though similarities between the parties outnumbered the differences, polarization arguably was exacerbated by social issues that contributed to the debate and reflected growing dissension in the colony; the spiritists were generally aligned with those who opposed aspects of Winthrop’s government, including merchants who objected to price controls15 and opponents of the Pequod War.16 Those who opposed the Antinomians, on the other hand, largely favored the ruling power structure in ecclesiastical, civil, and domestic realms, a power structure challenged in all these areas by the Antinomians. John Wheelwright preached a fast-day sermon that helped spark the controversy, while Henry Vane, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony from May 1636 to May 1637, was the leader of a political party aligned with the Antinomians, so Hutchinson was by no means the sole or even the principal leader of the movement. Nonetheless, she was described by Winthrop as “the breeder and nourisher of all these distempers” (Hall 262), and her conventicles, semi-weekly meetings attended by a large number of women, as well as her “helpfull[ness] in the times of childbirth, and other occasions of bodily infirmities ... [when] shee easily insinuated her selfe into the affections of many” (Hall 263) were seen as crucial influences that not only set “division betwixt husband and wife” (Hall 209), but also influenced men who attended her meetings. She was a pivotal figure whose influence galvanized a controversy over the civil and ecclesiastical role of women as well as the more central theological debate. Doctrine and social issues overlap during the controversy, with

15 See Bernard Bailyn’s The New England Merchants of the Seventeenth Century and “The Apologia of Robert Keayne,“ Darrett B. Rutman’s Winthrop’s Boston: A Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630–1649, Emery Battis’s Saints and Sectaries: Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Burnham, “Anne Hutchinson and the Economics of Antinomian Selfhood in Colonial New England.” 16 This war waged by the colonists against the Pequod Indians was extremely brutal. In his autobiography, Thomas Shepard (1605–49) enthusiastically describes the decimation of a Pequod village and all its inhabitants (68–70). The relationship between the Antinomian Controversy and the Pequod War is explored in Edmund Morgan’s “The Case Against Anne Hutchinson” and Anne Kibbey’s The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence.

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women’s shameful bodies playing a central role. Modesty as humble interpretation and ethical interactions gets confused with modesty as womanly shame. In providing a rich history of the Antinomian controversy that shifts attention to important but neglected figures like Thomas Shepard and Henry Vane (marginalized in large part because of his dangerous power—polemicists did not risk alienating him or his supporters in England), Winship emphasizes the ways in which Hutchinson’s centrality to the controversy was manufactured after the fact as a kind of “spin control,” evident in the writings of Weld, Winthrop, Wheelwright, Baillie, and numerous others, which transformed a larger controversy in which Hutchinson played a central role into one in which she played the central role (184). Her immediate revelations, her influence over women, and her monstrous birth as well as that of Mary Dyer were substituted for the more fundamental religious and political differences of what he calls the “free grace controversy” as a way to emphasize the theological issues—in 1644 Wheelwright could write “she who ... had the monster” without explanation. She was the “Anne” in “Antinomian,” and “Antinomian,” like “Familist,” “Libertine,” and “Sadduceean,”17 was a slur that polemicists used to put a sexualized and gendered spin on debates over testimony and the acts or experiences that could or could not signify justification or “the seal of the spirit.” Echoing treatments of Bradstreet’s and Sor Juana’s autodidacticism, Winship concludes that Hutchinson was “inadequately socialized as a theologian, and that, combined with personal and intellectual ambitions difficult for a woman or any ordinary lay person of the time to realize, as well as the wrong patron and bad political sense” was her downfall (193). He extends this charge of manipulation and misrepresentation of events to modern critics as well: those who focus solely on Hutchinson and issues of gender, he notes, do so “at the expense of neglecting her considerable skills as a creative and polemical biblical exegete, tak[ing] the disavowal of her far past what Winthrop and his brethren attempted” (185). In the remainder of this paragraph, however, Winship redirects our attention back to Vane, Wheelwright, and Cotton, figures who he argues crucially formed Hutchinson’s thinking, deflecting attention himself from those considerable skills.18 In order to appreciate Hutchinson’s considerable skills, I find it necessary to consider the gender issues at play in this controversy as both “spin” and Hutchinson’s anticipatory response to that spin. From first to last she demonstrated an awareness of gender issues, as is evident in the argument with Winthrop over women’s public speech in her first trial and, more subtly, in her position on mortalism in her second trial. Feminist readings of Hutchinson’s case focus on several issues including her snappy exchange with Winthrop, which highlights the status of women in the eyes of both civil and religious law at the time; her theology and model of signification; her immediate 17 As I discuss below, the charge of Sadduceeism relates particularly to mortalism, i.e., the belief that individual bodies and souls do not endure until the Resurrection. In rejecting the resurrection of individual bodies, one is understood to reject moral law, since nothing will endure to face the last judgment. As with familism, issues of eschatology and interpretation are transformed into questions of moral behavior. 18 Winship is also concerned to dispel the belief that Hutchinson simply followed Cotton, only to be betrayed by him during her ecclesiastical trial and after. As is the case throughout Making Heretics, he usefully avoids conventional narratives about rebellious women and their male influences.

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revelation as a form of mysticism, making links between the body, signification, and political discourse as they position Hutchinson within the seventeenth-century world of sectarian women; and how she is positioned through polemics, particularly Winthrop’s discussion of her monstrous births in A Short Story.19 I too focus on Hutchinson’s rhetoric, her critique of patriarchy, and the link between language and the body in what may be called her mysticism. However, rather than arguing that Hutchinson’s critique can be found in a language or understanding of God that is somehow opposed to or deconstructive of dominant discourse, I focus particularly on the status of her body as witnessing object in her discourse and that of her judges. In this chapter I consider two aspects of the Antinomian controversy that have been largely neglected, at least insofar as they relate to the gender politics of Hutchinson’s trials. The first aspect is the functioning of Hutchinson’s body in the testimony of her civil trial. The second is the feminist implications of her mortalism in her ecclesiastical trial. In her first trial she refers to her body in ways that emphasize function rather than significance; in her second, her functionalism is more theoretically developed into a position on the relationship between body, soul, and divine truth. “He that denies the testament denies the testator”: The Politics of Witnessing in Anne Hutchinson’s Civil Trial The most dramatic moment in Anne Hutchinson’s civil trial comes when, after the extended dispute over oaths, Hutchinson launches into a personal spiritual narrative beginning “If you please to give me leave I shall give you the ground of what I know to be true” and ending with the revelation that she found answers to her many doubts and questions “By the voice of his own spirit to my soul” (Hall 336–37). Winthrop declares that “a speciall providence of God” led Hutchinson to “deliver her into the power of the Court, as guilty of that which all suspected her for, but were not furnished with proofe sufficient to proceed against her” (Hall 274). For modern readers, this is the moment that stands out as most incomprehensible—Hutchinson seems to be prevailing and then she gives her judges the grounds for convicting her that they could not elicit themselves. As Marilyn Westerkamp observes, this break has been variously attributed to fatigue, fear of success, her “unruly member,” a female inability to hold her tongue, and menopause (“Anne Hutchinson” 490), all secular versions of Winthrop’s own reading of Hutchinson’s female body. But in recent decades scholars have moved away from simply arguing that Hutchinson “lost it.” The questions of modernity that permeate scholarship on Sor Juana’s Primero Sueño are also rife in scholarship on Hutchinson’s role in the Antinomian 19 There is an enormous body of scholarship on Anne Hutchinson and the role of gender in the Antinomian Controversy. A few key texts not cited elsewhere in this chapter include Lyle Koehler, A Search for Power: The ‘Weaker Sex’ in Seventeenth-Century New England and “The Case of the American Jezebels: Anne Hutchinson and Female Agitation during the Years of Antinomian Turmoil, 1636–1640”; Amy Schrager Lang, Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson and the Problem of Dissent in the Literature of New England; Elisa New, “Feminist Invisibility: The Examples of Anne Bradstreet and Anne Hutchinson”; and Lad Tobin, “A Radically Different Voice: Gender and Language in the Trials of Anne Hutchinson.”

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controversy. The controversy clearly took place on the cusp of something—the English civil war most immediately though Americanists have long situated it as a turning point in the culture of what would become the United States. But unlike Sor Juana, Hutchinson is seen as caught and condemned in this moment of shifting epistemes, misperceiving a shift away from older oral culture (Caldwell) or biblical hermeneutics and Congregationalist models of consensus (Gordis) or anticipating more modern notions of the individual and the state, associated with the liberal public sphere (Dillon), contractualism (Pudaloff), mercantilism (Burnham), or an emerging American mythos (Bercovitch). My focus, however, is not on the relative modernity of the parties in the controversy, but on debates that are firmly rooted in contemporary debates about both legal and spiritual testimony. In November 1637 and March 1638, Anne Hutchinson was tried by first civil and then ecclesiastical courts in New England for her leadership role in the Antinomian Controversy. Her civil trial appropriately focused on issues of civil and religious authority. Governor John Winthrop first charges her with breaking the fifth commandment (“Honour thy father and thy mother“) and violating Paul’s dictum against women preachers (I Corinthians 14:34–35) by critiquing the ministers’ weekly sermons at her meetings. She then is required to answer for specific comments she made during a private meeting with several ministers. Hutchinson positions herself within the social order and subservient to the ruling authority when she justifies her preaching by citing Titus 2:3–5: “The elder women likewise, that they bee ... teachers of honest things, That they may instruct the yong women ....”20 However, as the trial progresses she more frequently defends her actions and statements as matters of conscience. Finally, in her first long statement of the trial, Hutchinson defies social authority by claiming that she knows through divine revelation that the majority of the Bay Colony ministers preach a covenant of works and are not sealed by the grace of God. Mrs. H. .... The Lord knows that I could not open scripture; he must by his prophetical office open it unto me. So after that being unsatisfied in the thing, the Lord was pleased to bring this scripture out of the Hebrews. He that denies the testament denies the testator, and in this did open unto me and give me to see that those which did not teach the new covenant had the spirit of the antichrist, and upon this he did discover the ministry unto me and ever since. I bless the Lord, he hath let me see which was the clear ministry and which the wrong. Since that time I confess I have been more choice and he hath let me to distinguish between the voice of my beloved and the voice of Moses, the voice of John Baptist [sic] and the voice of antichrist, for all those voices are spoken of in scripture. Now if you do condemn me for speaking what in my conscience I know to be truth I must commit myself unto the Lord. Mr. Nowell. How do you know that that was the spirit? Mrs. H. How did Abraham know that it was God that bid him offer his son, being a breach of the sixth commandment? Dep. Gov. By an immediate voice. Mrs. H. So to me by an immediate revelation. Dep. Gov. How! an immediate revelation. Mrs. H. By the voice of his own spirit to my soul .... (Hall 336–37) 20 In La Respuesta, her own self-defense against charges of public theologizing, Sor Juana refers to this same passage from Titus to counter I Corinthians 14:34–35.

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Hutchinson then claims that she knows by divine revelation that she will be delivered from the sentence of the court just as Daniel had been delivered from the lions’ den, adding, “You have power over my body but the Lord Jesus hath power over my body and soul, and assure yourselves thus much, you do as much as in you lies to put the Lord Jesus Christ from you, and if you go on in this course you begin you will bring a curse upon you and your posterity, and the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it” (Hall 338). This is the key moment in the first trial, for she appears to claim an unmediated relationship with God that was heretical to the Puritans and that she uses to justify in the strongest terms her negative judgment of the ruling ministers and those who only “have power over my body.” But as Gordis and Michael Ditmore have shown, this “immediate revelation” is strikingly biblical—Hutchinson is not claiming that she heard voices or saw visions. As Gordis puts it, “Hutchinson turned to the biblical text in her perplexities—as she had been instructed to do by the preaching of the ministers—and felt the agency of the Spirit enabling her reading” (170). Gordis further argues that Hutchinson’s interpretation of the Bible follows closely not only methods she would have learned from John Cotton, but even resonates with Thomas Shepard’s later writings about experiencing God through the Word (170–71). That Hutchinson’s knowledge is mediated becomes more apparent when we consider her biblical citations in this speech. In giving the court “the ground of what I know to be true” (Hall 336), Hutchinson first cites I John 2:18 in which false prophets are identified as those who deny that Christ came in the flesh and then Hebrews 9:16 in which Christ’s bodily sacrifice is explained as the “Mediator” of the New Testament. These citations move from a relatively simple test of belief—did Christ come in the flesh?—to a more complicated statement about the nature of the new testament and Christ’s bodily sacrifice evident in Hebrews 9:13–17. 13 For if the blood of bulles and of goates, and the ashes of an heifer, sprinkling them that are vncleane, sanctifieth as touching the purifying of the flesh, 14 How much more shall the blood of Christ, which through the eternall spirite offered himselfe without spotte to God, purge your conscience from dead workes, to serue the liuing God? 15 And for this cause is hee the Mediatour of the newe Testament, that through death which was for the redemption of the transgressions that were in the former Testament, they which were called, might receiue the promise of eternall inheritance. 16 For where a Testament is, there must bee the death of him that made the Testament. 17 For the Testament is confirmed when men are dead: for it is yet of no force as long as he that made it, is aliue. (Hebrews 9:13–17)

The gloss for verse 16 in the 1602 version of the Geneva Bible reads, “A reason why the Testament must be established by the death of ye Mediator, because this Testament hath the condition of a Testament or gift, which is made effectuall by death, and therefore that it might be effectuall, it must needes be that he that made the Testament, should die.” Both Ditmore and Gordis note that this passage is misquoted—it does not say “He who denies the testament denies the testator.”21

21 Ditmore argues that Hutchinson’s use of the word “testator” suggests that she consulted as many as three different bibles (368, n. 34) while Gordis simply notes the difference.

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It is striking that at the beginning of this explanation of her thinking, Hutchinson emphasizes the functions of testimony—a testament depends on the death of the testator and is, as the gloss says, a gift, a legacy that exceeds the quid pro quo of law. Christ’s death is the third, the mediator, that seals the Testament while the Testament in turn is the third that seals the relationship between God and the elect. Hutchinson’s “immediate revelation” is radically mediated by Christ’s sacrifice and the Word, but not in ways that were necessarily recognized by her opponents. Hutchinson repeatedly describes passages being “brought” or “opened” for her; she does not deny the testamentary power of the Word as the accusation of Familism would suggest, but her reading practices were guided by the Spirit (see Gordis). In this way she is led to open and interpret passages from Jeremiah and Daniel as foretelling her deliverance. Winthrop also sees this text from Daniel as a sign from God, but unlike Hutchinson, he takes it for evidence that God favors the court. In A Short Story, Winthrop writes, Mistris Hutchison having thus freely and fully discovered her selfe, the Court and all the rest of the Assembly (except those of her owne party) did observe a speciall providence of God, that (while shee went about to cover such offences as were laid to her charge, by putting matters upon proofe, and then quarrelling with the evidence) her owne mouth should deliver her into the power of the Court, as guilty of that which all suspected her for, but were not furnished with proofe sufficient to proceed against her, for here she hath manifested, that her opinions and practise have been the cause of al our disturbances, & that she walked by such a rule as cannot stand with the peace of any State; for such bottomlesse revelations, as either came without any word, or without the sense of the word, (which was framed to humane capacity) if they be allowed in one thing, must be admitted a rule in all things; for they being above reason and Scripture, they are not subject to controll .... (Hall 274)

For Winthrop, Hutchinson’s testimony proves that she is guilty of undermining “the peace of any State” because her “bottomlesse revelations” are not sufficiently grounded in the Word. In adding that the Word was “framed to humane capacity,” he also suggests that she lacks modesty in claiming that her interpretations are guided by the spirit.22 The argument that Hutchinson appeals to private conscience and Winthrop to public order does not do justice to their disagreement—both are concerned with finding ways to read the Bible and organize social relations that reflect God’s will truly. Still, Winthrop clearly frames his objections in terms of worldly order and the peace of the State; God created the law and had Hutchinson incriminate herself in order to protect the law. His warning against the “bottomlesse revelations” of her spiritism reinforces a symbolic relationship between bottom and top, signifier and signified, that guarantees social responsibility and order.

22 Sandra M. Gustafson argues that Winthrop sees Hutchinson’s language as “more literally feminine” because of its rhetorical excesses, an analysis that coincides with my reading of Wheelwright’s indictment of Weld and Winthrop—this kind of speech is immoderate and unmanly. Thus, “bottomlesse revelations,” like the “phanatique meditations” Mercurius Americanus identifies in A Short Story, are “above reason and Scripture.” But Winthrop, unlike Wheelwright, adds that they are “not subject to control,” indicating that ungrounded speech challenges state and law in addition to religion and reason.

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Hutchinson’s description of “immediate revelations” and Winthrop’s description of God’s “speciall providence” illustrate some important differences between their models of witnessing. Both refer to scripture and the power of the testament. For Winthrop, the Word is a necessary intermediary between God and mankind, “framed to humane capacity” and defending against “bottomlesse revelation.” Once Hutchinson denies this regulatory power of the scripture she is guilty of disturbing the peace. According to Winthrop, the problem is not that she might be wrong, but that if there is no fixed word, there is no possibility of control. Repeatedly in her civil trial and Winthrop’s account of her errors in A Short Story she is charged with insisting that “the whole Scripture in the Letter of it held forth nothing but a Covenant of works,” a reference in part to a discussion with Nathaniel Ward she recounts in her civil trial in which she cites 2 Corinthians 3:6: “Who also hath made vs able ministers of the new Testament, not of the letter, but of the Spirit: for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giueth life” (Hall 264, 325–26; see also 221).23 Much of the Antinomian controversy centered on the relationship between letter and Spirit, with both sides accepting to some degree that Word and Spirit were not separable while placing different emphases on the authority of one or the other. For Winthrop, the letter of Scripture is a manifestation of God’s grace rather than a binding promise operating within a covenant of works (though Hutchinson accuses him of the latter). Here the literal Word acts as the third that seals a testamentary relationship between God and the individual believer. The Word is neither guaranteed by nor a guarantee of absolute truth, but rather itself witnesses to a relationship that must be taken on faith. Yet, the Word also fixes a certain social order—in its objectness it provides a standard for a fallen world and holds each individual to a model of behavior that also binds a community together. The Word may be located in the place of the object or third arising out of the testimonial relationship between two agents, God and the individual but also God and the community. The problem with Hutchinson’s position, Winthrop finds, is that she flouts the authority of the letter of Scripture and thus embraces a dangerous relativism that threatens the social order. As he puts it in A Short Story, “most of her new tenents tended to slothfulnesse, and quench all indevour in the creature,” a consequence, in part, of feeling herself free to “interpret all passages at her pleasure” (Hall 264). She is a familist in his eyes, flouting the Word as well as the law. Scripture works as a testimonial third in Hutchinson’s system just as it does in Winthrop’s. However, Hutchinson speaks of Scripture not as a stabilizing object or as a manifestation of God’s grace but rather as an object that 1) bespeaks a legacy that is indeed “above reason,” to use Winthrop’s phrase, and 2) acts as a conduit or tool of God’s grace. She speaks of it as something that is “opened,“ not as something that “holds forth“ (Winthrop insisted that “the letter thereof holds not forth a covenant of works, but of grace“); the word is permeable rather than 23 Geoffrey F. Nuttall discusses the relationship between letter and Spirit at length in The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience, particularly in chapter 1. The Quakers, he argues, were the first to “disturb this conjunction, upset this equilibrium, between God’s Word in Scripture and the Holy Spirit” (26), but even then the tendency to dissociate Word and Spirit “was no more than a tendency, [which] was already implicit in Puritanism” (33).

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stable and fixed.24 Hutchinson’s party avoided anything suggesting a covenant of works, including interpretative models that focused on the letter of the Scripture as a binding reflection of God’s will and promise to mankind. The spirit speaks to Hutchinson and guides her interpretation of the Bible, opening the Scripture for her and ultimately bypassing the written word as stable object in favor of the immediate revelation of “the voice of his spirit to my soul.” In other words, Scripture testifies to Christ’s love and sacrifice and provides a conduit for the Holy Spirit through its function and the functions it enables, not what it represents as sign. Significantly, both Hutchinson and Winthrop treat her body as a signifying object in ways that coincide with their understanding of the Word. Winthrop sees the Word as an object that is essentially approached and interpreted from the outside; it comes into existence between mankind and God because man requires something suited to his capacity, and God’s grace involves a commitment to mankind. Likewise, Winthrop insists on Hutchinson’s body as a sign of the relationship between God and his followers. In the passage quoted above, he emphasizes Hutchinson physical presence when he writes of “a speciall providence of God, that her owne mouth should deliver her into the power of the Court,“ and elsewhere in A Short Story he describes her arrival in the Bay Colony as a trial sent by God. More gruesomely, he discusses in vivid detail Hutchinson’s attendance at Mary Dyer’s “monstrous birth,” which Winthrop reads as a sign of God’s opprobrium. In general, Winthrop treats Hutchinson’s body as a signifier that may be read according to the letter. Hutchinson, on the other hand, discusses her body as an object but not as something that may be interpreted from the outside. It is merely a tool, a site of “immediate revelation” that does not signify in itself. This use of the body is most developed in her discussion of mortalism during the ecclesiastical trial, but even in her statement at the end of this “confession” that “You have power over my body but the Lord Jesus hath power over my body and soul” (Hall 338), Hutchinson transforms the body from an object manipulated within the legal system into something that along with the soul submits to Christ. Throughout this section of her civil trial, often identified as a form of spiritual autobiography, Hutchinson links body and soul, but not in a symbolic relationship with body as the base for spiritual transcendence; body and soul are coextensive, with greater emphasis placed on soul, but both submitting to spirit. Both in opposing the power of Christ to that of her judges, and in explaining that “immediate revelation” came to her as “the voice of his spirit to my soul,” the body is implicated but its value is minimized. As we have seen, this is very similar 24 Both the “opening” and “holding forth” of scripture are conventional terms that would have been used by people on both sides of this debate. However, in the documents of the controversy, those who tend toward Hutchinson’s position, including John Cotton, discuss an “opening” of scripture more often than their opponents. This emphasizes their insistence on their powerlessness to interpret scripture without God’s grace; their opponents, on the other hand, more frequently use terms like “holds forth” to insist upon the importance of the ministry. The oratorical concept of “holding forth” suggests a stable position informed by Scripture as object whereas the “opening” of scripture suggests a permeability of Scripture that emphasizes the movement of grace rather than the objectness of the Word. See Gordis and Knight for further discussions of the interpretive practices and rhetorical differences shaping this controversy.

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to the way Scripture works as an object for her. As in scholarship on Sor Juana, Hutchinson has been described as either rejecting the body (Barker-Benfield) or becoming masculinized through her association with male prophets (Ditmore). But Hutchinson does not reject the body. Throughout her trials I find that she reframes the relationship between body and soul in functional ways. The body, like the Word, is a witnessing object that, to use Derrida’s words, “has no essence but only functions.” Within both Hutchinson’s and Winthrop’s systems, her body and the Scripture are treated as witnessing objects. They both treat her body in this way; Winthrop does not put his body in that position. Indeed, he is not even called upon as a subject to explain himself—when Hutchinson asks at the end of her trial to know why she is banished, Winthrop curtly replies, “Say no more, the court knows wherefore and is satisfied” (348). His person stands in for the “court,” a symbolic entity, and is not required to witness as an object. In his conversion narrative, written one year before Hutchinson’s trials in the midst of the Antinomian Controversy, Winthrop describes a relationship with Christ that is in some ways akin to Hutchinson’s account of her immediate revelations, but again his body does not work as an object in the same way hers does.25 I was now about 30 yeares of age, and now was the time come that the Lord would reveale Christ unto mee whom I had long desired, but not so earnestly as since I came to see more clearely into the Covenant of free grace. First therefore hee laid a sore affliction upon mee wherein hee laid mee lower in myne owne eyes than at any time before, and shewed mee the emptines of all my guifts and parts, left mee neither power nor will, so as I became as a weaned child I could now no more look at what I had been or what I had done nor bee discontented for want of strength or assurance mine eyes were onely upon his free mercy in Jesus Christ. I knew I was worthy of nothing for I knew I could doe nothing for him or for my selfe .... I did not long continue in this estate, but the good spirit of the Lord breathed upon my soule, and said I should live .... Now could my soule close with Christ, and rest there with sweet content, so ravished with his Love, as I desired nothing nor feared any thing, but was filled with joy unspeakable and glorious and with a spirit of Adoption. Not that I could pray with more fervency or more enlargement of heart than sometimes before, but I could now cry my father with more confidence .... I was now growne familiar with the Lord Jesus Christ hee would oft tell mee he loved mee. I did not doubt to believe him; If I went abroad hee went with me, when I returned hee came home with mee. I talked with him upon the way, hee lay down with mee, and usually I did awake with him. Now I could goe into any company and not lose him: and so sweet was his love to me, as I desired nothing but him in heaven or earth. (Winthrop, Papers 342–43)

In this passage, distance from Christ is reflected in distance from self. When Winthrop cannot “see more clearely into the Covenant of free grace,” he describes himself as “lower in myne owne eyes”; his relationship to both free grace and himself are described in distancing visual metaphors. This sense of distance is furthered by his 25 See Winship 23–24 and Ditmore 354 for discussions of the similarities between Hutchinson’s spiritism and Winthrop’s experience of “the immediate witness of the Spirit” as described in this narrative. Schweitzer discusses Winthrop’s use of feminine imagery to describe his spiritual state in a letter to his first wife as an example of gynesis in Puritan male spiritual thought (Self-Representation 5).

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assertion that during this period he “became as a weaned child”—he uses simile to enhance the sense of a cognitive break, both from a sense of false assurance but also from “the good spirit of the Lord” which had yet to “breathe[] upon my soule.” But as the passage continues, Winthrop’s relationship with Christ becomes increasingly affective and direct. Failed vision and simile are replaced by descriptions of talking, lying, and waking with Christ that do not appear metaphorical. When dependent upon his own cognitive powers, Winthrop is mired in the inadequacies of fallen language and perception, but with God’s grace simile is transformed into direct experience of an infusion of spirit. Rather than being as a child, Winthrop becomes a true son, filled with “a spirit of Adoption” and able to cry “my father with more confidence.” This description of his relationship with Christ appears more embodied than Hutchinson’s, but it depends upon a symbolic relationship between body and soul that renders these descriptions of the body vehicles for a spiritual tenor. Winthrop’s use of sexual imagery from Canticles relies upon an understanding that the erotic is being transformed into something higher and purer. Likewise, his ability to cry “my father” after being filled with “a spirit of Adoption” implies that he has come into his estate through an empowering submission to the name of the Father. This has both spiritual and worldly consequences; Winthrop’s “Adoption” allows him “to goe into any company and not lose [Christ],” thereby enabling his likely Election as both magistrate and saint. Puritan women are less likely to refer to either Adoption or the bride/bridegroom imagery of Canticles in this way.26 Indeed, for women the metaphorical charge of this description would be reversed; while the sexual description of a relationship to Christ would be understood more literally and perhaps avoided or modified for that reason, the language of Adoption would be more symbolic and distant, for women had no worldly access to fathers’ estates. Winthrop concludes this description of his spiritual state by acknowledging continuing trials in a manner that emphasizes his attitude toward both the body and witnessing. But still when I have been put to it by any suddaine danger or fearfull Temptation, the good spirit of the Lord hath not fayled to beare witnesse to mee, giveing mee Comfort, and Courage in the very pinch, when of my self I have been fearefull, and dismayed .... When the flesh prevayles the spirit withdrawes, and is sometimes so greived as he seemes not to acknowledge his owne work. Yet in my worst times hee hath been pleased to stirre, when hee would not speak, and would yet support mee that my fayth hath not fayled utterly. (Winthrop, Papers 344)

The spirit of the Lord witnesses to Winthrop’s salvation, stirring his faith even when flesh has upset the proper hierarchical relationship between body and soul. In many ways this sounds like Hutchinson’s statement, “The Lord knows that I could not open scripture; he must by his prophetical office open it unto me.” However, by saying that the spirit “hath not fayled to beare witnesse to” him, Winthrop suggests that he is the recipient of testimony rather than a testimonial object himself. The 26 In addition to Schweitzer’s introduction to The Work of Self-Representation: Lyric Poetry in Colonial New England, see Elizabeth Reis, Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England, Amanda Porterfield, Female Piety in Puritan New England: The Emergence of Religious Humanism, and Dillon, “Nursing Fathers and Brides of Christ.”

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object acting as the witnessing third is unclear in this passage; I would suggest that it is once again the Word and the world as Word which Winthrop is constantly reading as evidence of god’s grace toward himself. The hierarchy between flesh and spirit is co-implicated with this covenantal model of witnessing, for all matter becomes witnessing objects. Winthrop disassociates his essential self from this matter, for his soul is a party to this covenant with the spirit and therefore not a witnessing object. Moreover, his body disappears when the flesh is properly subservient; it is never read as a stable witnessing object. Hutchinson’s flesh is always with her (as a sign for Winthrop and a vehicle for Hutchinson); his may be tamed by the spirit, effectively disappearing until its next upheaval. Ironically, his symbolic order creates the possibility of libertine flesh which is then attributed more essentially to her even though only his body seems to rise in this way. Winthrop generally presents himself as a recipient of testimony; the witnessing third is an external object that seals his relationship with God. Indeed, his own body can act as such an object, for even his most affective descriptions of stirrings generally end in the submission of flesh to soul and spirit. Hutchinson more frequently treats herself, body and soul together, as positioned in the place of the witnessing third. She minimizes the significance of the body, but she never suggests a hierarchy between soul and body; such a hierarchy exists only between the spirit and her soul and body taken together. For Winthrop, both Hutchinson’s body and scripture are stable objects that can be read from the outside; they are in this way the bases for a symbolic economy. For Hutchinson, both body and scripture are conduits for the spirit that cannot be read according to the letter; even when she speaks of conscience, she appears to be employing a more localized way to speak of the spirit. Winthrop’s symbolic economy, she argues, reflects a legalistic covenant of works that has nothing at all to do with the spirit. Sandra M. Gustafson observes that “Hutchinson and her opposers employed competing tropes of the body to figure different theological paradigms of redemption. With the preparationist victory, physical signs were invested with meaning, and Miriam-like subjection became a type of the humiliated sinner that men as well as women could occupy” (32). Hutchinson, by contrast, “described her relation to the Bible as simultaneously passive and procreative” (Gustafson 29). This is a useful distinction, but I argue instead that Hutchinson tends to emphasize function rather than significance in her treatment of both her body and the Word, suggesting something like “passivity and procreation,” but without appealing to women’s unique bodily experiences. Though I do not discount readings that focus on language shaped by maternity and other female experiences, my attention to the third as witnessing object is meant to clarify Hutchinson’s response to the objectification of women’s bodies in theological rather than experiential terms—she minimizes the significance of bodies while insisting on their function in ways that challenge the stability valued by Winthrop when he insists on both letter and bodies as signifying objects that witness for and outside the believer. It has been often observed that Hutchinson ironically gains social power by selflessly giving into the spirit, which allows her to locate authority outside worldly institutions. Though the most apparent, I do not think this is her most important form of self-empowerment, in part because it somewhat cynically disavows her theological argument. Rather, in treating body and Word as thirds that

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witness in their functions, not their essence, she may be understood as aggregating to herself the power of the Word. She treats her body as witnessing object in ways that suggest that when she says “He who denies the testament denies the testator,” she too is a testament.27 In her ecclesiastical trial Hutchinson explains her evolving understanding of the relationship between individual soul and body that transforms the rhetorical emphases of her civil trial into a more thoroughgoing theory of bodies as functional rather than symbolic. “Adam dies not except his soule and Body dye”: Mortalism as Feminist Functionalism in Anne Hutchinson’s Ecclesiastical Trial These connections between the body as object and the Word as object are both more fully developed and complicated during Hutchinson’s second, ecclesiastical trial. For Wheelwright it is here rather than in her first trial that Hutchinson’s reason gave way to “strange fancies, and erroneous tenents possest her” following upon her winter of house arrest, “where she might feel some effect too from the quality of humors, together with the advantage the devill took of her condition attended with melancholy” (Wheelwright 7). Indeed, Hutchinson interrupts Cotton’s admonition to declare, “I did not hould any of thease Thinges before my Imprisonment” (Hall 372). At the center of this trial is her mortalism, a theological position on the body that builds on her emphasis on functional rather than symbolic bodies in her civil trial. In her ecclesiastical trial, Hutchinson was asked to defend herself against several charges of heresy, but the central debate was over the mortality of the soul. Mr. Cotton. Your first opinion layd to your Charge is That the Soules of all Men by nature are mortall and die like Beastes, and for that you alledge Ecclesiastes 3.18–21. Mrs. Hutchinson. I desire that place might be answered; the spirit that God gives returns. Mr. Cotton. That place speaketh that the spirit ascends upwards, soe Ecclesiastes 12.7. Mans spirit doth not returne to Dust as mans body doth but to God. The soul of man is immortall. Mrs. Hutchinson. Every Man consists of Soul and Body. Now Adam dies not except his soule and Body dye. And in Hebrews 4 the word is lively in Operation, and devides between soule and Spirit: Soe than the Spirit that God gives man, returned to God indeed, but the Soule dyes and That is the spirit Ecclesiastes speakes of, and not of the Soule. Luke 19.10. (Hall 354)28

Hutchinson distinguishes between the soul and the spirit, and asserts that the soul dies with the body, with no chance of resurrection, while the spirit endures. This is 27 In this, she is moving toward a Quaker conception of the body as “a sign” or “living testimony,” though her formulation is found in her rhetoric and theology, not in a practice of living testimony. See Nuttall 26; Mack, Visionary 236–61; and Michele Lise Tarter, “Quaking in the Light: The Politics of Quaker Women’s Corporeal Prophecy in the SeventeenthCentury Transatlantic World” and “‘varied trials, dippings, and strippings’: Quaker Women’s Irresistible Call to the Early South” 80–82 for more on Quaker notions of “living testimony.” 28 Following David D. Hall’s suggestion in the second edition of The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History (xx, note to p. 350), I have eliminated all italicization from the ecclesiastical trial transcripts except for the names of those speaking.

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a radical attack on individuality, belying or at least complicating the many readings of the Antinomian controversy that associate Hutchinson with greater individualism linked to emerging changes in the public sphere or narratives of women’s selfdetermination. For Hutchinson, Adam sinned and therefore was condemned to die. Nothing that pertains to his individuality, to his essential Adamness, is immortal. Only the Holy Spirit that was never individual, the same spirit that presumably spoke to Hutchinson’s soul, is lasting. Later, Cotton reminds Hutchinson that according to doctrine, “both soule and body are united to Christ,” to which John Davenport (Mr. Damphord in the transcript), another judge, adds that Christ “rayseth us the same Body and not another Body for substance” (Hall 361). Hutchinson disagrees, insisting that “We all rise in Christ Jesus,” and if any substance rises at all, it is only his body (Hall 361). In short, the only lasting substance for Hutchinson is Christ’s body and the Holy Spirit. Hutchinson is here expressing a form of the mortalist heresy. Mortalism has a long history, dating at least back to third century Arabian beliefs mentioned in Eusebius’ Church History (Burns 17). Though repeatedly debated, mortalism has been effectively proscribed as heresy throughout most of western European church history.29 And yet Hutchinson and her followers are not alone in their interest in mortalism—Sir Thomas Browne in Religio Medici, Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, and John Milton in Christian Doctrine (Bk. I., Ch. 13: “Of the Death which is Called the Death of the Body”) all embrace forms of mortalist doctrine. There are two basic branches of Christian mortalism, that is mortalist beliefs rooted in scriptural argument rather than in non-Christian beliefs: “soul sleepers” and “annihilationists” (Burns 13–18; Maclear “Anne Hutchinson” 84). Soul sleepers believe there is no individual immortality until the time of resurrection. “Psychopannychists” are those soul sleepers who believe that the soul, a corporeal substance, sleeps along with the body, while “thnetopsychists” believe the soul is no more than a life force that does not sleep, but rather dies with the body until resurrection. Annihilationists deny the resurrection of both body and soul, arguing that only an impersonal, divine essence endures in God. It is this latter form of mortalism that is most pertinent to our understanding of the Antinomian Controversy, for it is this group that is associated with “Libertinism,” “Familism,” and “Sadduceeism”—all terms used by Hutchinson’s judges to label her heresies. As Norman Burns explains, mortalist thought would seem to coincide with the Protestant reformation because it serves as a strong challenge to Catholic notions of purgatory and the invocation of the saints (18). However, mortalism remained heresy because most reformers retained a traditional view of the soul. “Then as now,” he explains, “belief that spirit is incorruptible, possessed of its own vitality, superior 29 J.F. Maclear’s “Anne Hutchinson and the Mortalist Heresy” provides the most useful synthesis of scholarship on mortalism as it relates to the Antinomian Controversy. Norman T. Burns’ Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton provides a more extensive discussion of this heresy and its manifestation in the literature and philosophy of reformed England, while George Huntston Williams’ The Radical Reformation and Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down locate this heresy among other radical movements in Europe and England of the time.

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to and independent of matter, seemed to most men the obvious and necessary consequence of being a Christian” (19)—any suggestion that the soul sleeps or dies with the body disrupts this belief. This is the relationship between flesh and spirit assumed by Winthrop in his spiritual autobiography, but the women I study in this book repeatedly deny that this understanding is “obvious and necessary.” Like her model of witnessing, Hutchinson’s mortalism denies a symbolic divide between matter and spirit. Significantly, her judges respond with charges of sexual licentiousness, further reflecting the gendered inflections of this debate. “Antinomian” was a derogatory term used by opponents that fairly named their insistence on free grace over “legal” paths to salvation. It carried with it connotations of licentiousness because of its traditional link to a belief that moral law is not binding to those operating under a covenant of grace. Hutchinson was critical of all notions that individuals could work for their salvation; the law she opposed was that of the covenant of works. By shifting the emphasis to moral law, Winthrop and others were able to impugn their opponents as libertines. This aspect of the debate does not arise in Hutchinson’s civil trial, though these ideas were already in circulation as evidenced by the terms used to name her party. In her first trial, the concern is primarily with Hutchinson’s rights as a woman to speak publicly, and with problems of witnessing and authority. Hutchinson’s immediate revelations, bypassing of the “ministry of the word” (341), and critique of the clergy as not sealed by the spirit “like the apostles before the ascension” (346–47)30 provide the grounds for her banishment. But in her ecclesiastical trial, issues of morality come to the fore precisely around the question of mortalism and specifically annihilationism. On the most basic level, annihilationism raises the possibility of licentiousness because the individual soul and body do not endure to be judged. As Burns explains, The annihilationists struck at the roots of orthodox Christianity, for their views could not be reconciled with the traditional doctrine of an afterlife in which discrete souls are personally judged in their individuality as fit either for eternal bliss or eternal pain. Their mortalism thus destroyed the traditional sanctions that supported the Christian moral system. (14–15)

Just as immediate revelation and a radical emphasis on a covenant of grace proved a threat to colonial New England theocracy, annihilationist mortalism threatens the moral code that sustains this social order. This danger in Hutchinson’s position according to the ministers is elaborated in the following exchange: Mr. Buckle. I desire to know of Mrs. Hutchison whether you hould any other Resurection than that of ... Union to Christ Jesus. And whether you hould that foule, groce, filthye and abbominable opinion held by Familists, of the Communitie of Weomen. Job 19.25. Philippians 3. Mrs. Hutchison. I hould it not. But Christ Answers now, I know thou hast a Divell. That was the Conclusion thay made agaynst Christ when he sayd thay that beleeve in me shall not dye: I doe not beleeve that Christ Jesus is united to our Bodies. 30 William Coddington, one of Hutchinson’s supporters, responds to the ministers’ distress at this last accusation by noting, “methinks the comparison is very good” (Hall 347).

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Brother Willson. God forbid. Mr. Damphord. Avoyd31 ... Mr. Buckles question for it is a right principle for if the Resurrection be past than Marriage is past: for it is a waytie Reason; after the Resurection is past, marriage is past. Than if thear be any Union betwene man and woman it is not by Marriage but in a Way of Communitie. Mrs. Hutchison. If any such practice or Conclusion be drawen from it than I must leave it, for I abhor that Practise. Governor. The Familists doe not desire to evade that question for thay practise the Thinge. And thay bringe this very place to prove thear Communitie of Weomen and to justify thear abhominable Wickedness. It is a dayngerous Error. Mr. Leverit. But our sister doth not deny the Resurrection of the Body. Mrs. Hutchison. No. Mr. Simes. She denies the Resurrection of the same Body that dyes. Therefore to prove that the same body that dyes shall rise agayne, I prove it Job 19.35 and .... Mrs. Hutchison. That it is all the question for I doe not thinke the Body that dyes shall rise agayne. (Hall 362–63)

When Peter Bulkeley [“Mr. Buckle” in the transcript] asks whether Hutchinson “hould[s] that foule, groce, filthye and abbominable opinion held by Familists, of the Communitie of Weomen,” that is free love understood as the holding of women in common outside marriage, his concern is derived in part from the fear that if body and soul are annihilated at death, then at the time of resurrection nothing of the individual remains to be held responsible for the sins of the flesh. But J.F. Maclear suggests that Hutchinson’s judges also recognize in her position a tendency, though not clearly articulated or even likely fully developed in her mind, toward a “spiritualization of eschatology.” In all its forms, mortalism threatens traditional eschatology as well as the worldly authority derived from an eschatological vision of history. At its most radical, spiritualized eschatology suggests that resurrection takes place at the time of union with Christ in this life—one is reborn in this world and not later. When John Davenport insists that “it is a right principle for if the Resurrection be past then Marriage is past,” he is implying that Hutchinson recognizes resurrection of the individual only in the seal of the spirit in this life and not as the end of history, and therefore is guilty of something like adultery on top of all her other crimes because she is deluded into thinking that all worldly institutions, including marriage, are past. John Cotton elaborates on the moral implications of mortalism, while nonetheless defending Hutchinson against charges of actual adultery, in his formal admonition during her ecclesiastical trial. Consider in the fear of God that by this one Error of yours in denyinge the Resurection of thease very Bodies you doe the uttermost to rase the very foundation of Religion to the Ground and to destroy our fayth yea all our preachinge and your hearinge and all our sufferinges for the fayth to be in vayne if thear be no Resurection than all is in vayne and we of all people are most miserable. Yea consider if the Resurection be past than you cannot Evade the Argument that was prest upon you by our Brother Buckle and others, that filthie Sinne of the Comunitie of Woemen and all promiscuus and filthie cominge togeather of men and Woemen without Distinction or Relation of Marriage, will necessarily follow. And though I have not herd, nayther do I thinke, you have bine unfaythfull to your 31 Maclear interpolates as “Avoyd [not] ...” (“Anne Hutchinson” 90).

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Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700 Husband in his Marriage Covenant, yet that will follow upon it, for it is the very argument that the Saduces bringe to our Saviour Christ agaynst the Resurrection: and that which the Annabaptists and Familists bringe to prove the Lawfullnes of the common use of all Weomen and soe more dayngerous Evells and filthie Unclenes and other sines will followe than you doe now Imagine or conceave. (Hall 371–72)

Cotton agrees with his fellow ministers about the moral threat of Hutchinson’s beliefs regarding resurrection, though he is careful to insist that she is not an adulteress, but only that her logic opens the way to “dayngerous Evells and filthie Unclenes.” Indeed, none of her judges seriously accuse Hutchinson of sexual impropriety; their charges always follow from the logical implications of her argument. Ironically, they only seem able to develop these implications in terms of male sexual agency; as Cotton puts it, Hutchinson’s husband’s marriage covenant is threatened by “the common use of all Weomen.” The stakes of this irony are made clearer when we consider Christ’s debate with the Sadducees described in Matthew 22:23–33 (quoted here), as well as Mark 12:18–27, and Luke 20:27–38, which Cotton alludes to in his explanation of Hutchinson’s errors. 23 The same day the Sadduces came to him (which say that there is no resurrection) and asked him, 24 Saying, Master, Moses sayd, If a man die, hauing no children, let his brother marie his wife, and raise vp seed vnto his brother. 25 Now there were with vs seuen brethren, and the first married a wife, and deceased: and hauing no issue, left his wife vnto his brother. 26 Likewise also the second, and the third, vnto the seuenth. 27 And last of all the woman died also. 28 Therefore in the resurrection, whose wife shall she be of the seuen? for all had her. 29 Then Iesus answered, and said vnto them, Ye are deceiued, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God. 30 For in the resurrection they neither marrie wiues, nor wiues are bestowed in marriage, but are as the Angels of God in heauen. 31 And concerning the resurrection of the dead, haue ye not read what is spoken vnto you of God, saying, 32 I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Iacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the liuing. 33 And when the people heard it, they were astonied at his doctrine. (Matthew 22:23–33)

Questions of marriage and the possession of women are used as vehicles to discuss resurrection. The Sadducees assume that worldly laws attend worldly bodies, but Christ explains that rebirth at resurrection dissolves the link between bodies and human law, for all “are as the Angels of God in heauen.” The danger of sexual impropriety is implicit in this question, but Davenport and others of Hutchinson’s judges make this threat explicit. While Christ de-emphasizes the human covenant of marriage, they reemphasize it, shifting attention from the resurrection to worldly morality. These questions of earthly and heavenly covenants coincide with the basic debates of the free grace controversy, but here worldly law is discussed in terms of possession of women.

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Sadduceeism is thus another term, like Familism and Libertinism, that refers to a rejection of accepted eschatology and, concomitantly, of moral law.32 Part of what is at stake in the theological debates of the Antinomian Controversy is the status of women as possessions within marriage. Many scholars have remarked on the sparring between Hutchinson and Winthrop in her first trial over the place of women as teachers; fewer have explored the implicit challenge to the exchange of women raised by Hutchinson in her ecclesiastical trial. The concept of marriage—both in marriage to Christ and in questions about marriage after resurrection—is referred to and implicitly debated in ways that reflect differing attitudes toward male possession of women in marriage. Thus, the judges insist on a hierarchical separation between flesh and spirit in order to guarantee a system of judgment and order based on a disciplined body. In doing so, they also sustain a worldly notion of marriage founded on the possession of women by men. Hutchinson, on the other hand, rejects the significance of the body except as a vehicle for immediate union with Christ, and in doing so undermines the system that authorizes the judges and sustains patriarchal privilege. Hutchinson flatly denies these charges of libertinism, but there is within her beliefs a logic that does challenge the idea of possession of women, and with it the worldly institution of marriage. Her judges recognize a threat to male sexual and marital dominance, but they cannot think outside a symbolic order in which passive women are possessed by active men. Hutchinson, on the other hand, uses several tactics during the debate over mortalism to undermine the hierarchical rights of men, who are, after all, only human. For one thing, as Maclear points out, to the degree that Hutchinson embraces a spiritualization of eschatology she threatens the temporal grounding for worldly authority. When pushed, she denies any notion that resurrection occurs with knowledge of grace in this life, insisting “I scruple not the Resurection but what Body shall rise,” but according to Maclear, “her scriptural references showed a stubborn emphasis on the saint as a new man already alive from the dead” (“Anne Hutchinson” 90). That said, if we take her at her word that she “scruple[s] not the Resurection,” we are left with a razing of the hierarchical relationship between body and individual soul that in itself challenges the basis of much worldly authority. The abstract challenge to temporal authority evident in her implied refusal of eschatology is joined to more explicit issues of gender when Hutchinson asserts her mortalism by insisting, “Adam dies not except his soule and Body dye.” The death of Adam coincides with her spiritist challenge to binding covenants, for as Knight explains, preparationists tended to see the saint as “restored to the image of Adam before the Fall” on the judgment day, whereas spiritists saw the soul as 32 It is interesting to note that Cotton Mather entitles the section of Magnalia Christi Americana describing the Salem witchcraft trials, “Sadducismus Debellatus,” that is, “Sadducism stormed” (II. 471), presumably because witchcraft tampers with spiritual matters outside of eschatological time while posing a threat to social and moral law. That it is a charge frequently leveled against women and carrying with it connotations of sexual impropriety is striking given the biblical question of proper possession of women associated with the Sadducees’ challenge to resurrection.

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“utterly reconstituted into a new Christic likeness” (20).33 For the male proponents of these positions, this reflects differences over the valuing of the human. But for Hutchinson and her female followers there would be other reasons to reject Adam as the image of resurrected perfection. By insisting on the eternal annihilation of Adam, Hutchinson also annihilates Eve and undermines one of the most significant sources of the woman-as-body/man-as-head paradigm. After this first declaration that both soul and body die and are not reborn, the debate over marriage and sexual impropriety becomes more heated, as we have seen. Issues of adultery, testimony, judgment, and the relationship between the body and the spirit are all suggested by Hutchinson’s citation of John 8:51–52 in defense of her position on mortalism. When Hutchinson responds to Bulkeley’s accusation by firmly insisting that she is not a Familist, she continues, “But Christ Answers now, I know thou hast a Divell. That was the Conclusion thay made agaynst Christ when he sayd thay that beleeve in me shall not dye: I doe not beleeve that Christ Jesus is united to our Bodies” (Hall 362). In John 8, Christ responds to accusations that he is an agent of the devil by asserting that those who believe in him will not die. Hutchinson sees this as evidence that the individual body is not resurrected, for since individual bodies obviously die, believers can avoid death only by being united to the body of Christ. Her choice of chapter is interesting because of its treatment of testimony and the body. John 8 begins with the scribes and Pharisees bringing a woman caught in adultery to be judged by Christ. He responds to their assertion that according to Mosaic law she should be stoned with the proclamation, “Let him that is among you without sinne, cast the first stone at her” (John 8:7). He then continues, “I am that light of the world: hee that followeth mee, shall not walke in darkenesse, but shall haue that light of life” (John 8:12). Hutchinson uses more light imagery in her ecclesiastical trial, perhaps indicating that during her winter of house arrest between her two trials, this chapter about the judgment of a woman was of particular interest to her. Her reference to this chapter also bears on the issues of testimony evident in the civil trial. The Pharisees respond to Christ’s assertion that he is the light by insisting, “Thou bearest record of thy selfe: thy record is not true” (John 8:13), thereby invoking the requirement that all testimony needs a witnessing third. Christ answers with a discussion of testimony and the body. 14 Iesus answered, and said vnto them, Though I beare record of my selfe, yet my record is true: for I know whence I came, and whither I go: but ye cannot tel whence I come, and whither I goe. 15 Ye iudge after the flesh: I iudge no man. 16 And if I also iudge, my iudgement is true: for I am not alone, but I and the Father, that sent me. 17 And it is also written in your Lawe, that the testimonie of two men is true. 18 I am one that beare witnesse of my selfe, and the Father that sent me, beareth witnesse of me. (John 8:14–18) 33 Jesper Rosenmeier also discusses images of Adam and Christ in “New England’s Perfection: The Image of Adam and the Image of Christ in the Antinomian Crisis, 1634–1638,” while Winship comments on an “anti-Adamic speculative environment” (191) informing Hutchinson’s position.

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Hutchinson’s response to her judges could have just as easily been, “Ye judge after the flesh,” for they hold to the same rules of testimony and bodies as witnessing objects that Christ challenges in this chapter of John. Christ simultaneously denies the standards of judgment of a fallen world, and accedes to them, arguing that there are two witnesses because of the presence of divinity in himself. Thus, this passage reinforces Hutchinson’s claims for immediate revelation and her challenge to the model of testimony asserted by Winthrop, while contributing additional emphasis to the idea that the flesh is transitory and insignificant with respect to final judgment. Hutchinson’s defense of mortalism in her ecclesiastical trials furthers her challenge to bodies and the Word as stabilizing objects that guarantee social order and a covenant with God. I have already suggested that her tendency to see both bodies and the Word as witnessing functionally rather than as signs disrupts a symbolic relationship between body and spirit that would have been more accessible to men, who were not weighed down by analogical associations to the body, than to women. By professing mortalist beliefs that insist on the death of Adam and alluding to passages in the Bible that undermine the ability of earthly, sinful men to pass judgment because they “judge after the flesh,” Hutchinson further minimizes the importance of the body without in any way raising the power and significance of the soul—the Holy Spirit remains as the great leveling force. The questions of marriage and sexual propriety raised by the judges in this trial help to illuminate the feminist stakes of Hutchinson’s challenge to the symbolic hierarchy between body and soul. According to the judges, her beliefs render earthly covenants like marriage meaningless because they are no longer guaranteed by the threat, or promise, of final judgment, and so “Communitie of Weomen” holds sway. Their civil and theological systems require objects like the body or the Word to ensure and stabilize a workable social order and provide the grounds for responsibility. Ironically, they can only figure these issues of marriage and sexual responsibility in terms of male agency. As he confesses in his spiritual autobiography, Winthrop struggles to keep his flesh in check; interestingly, Hutchinson’s judges punish her for beliefs that allow for the free reign of male flesh.34 In other words, the self that finds salvation by the subordination of flesh to soul or spirit is male in their symbolic order. Hutchinson insists that she is not a Familist, but the logic of her Antinomianism does at the very least reframe earthly covenants such as marriage, while her judges’ insistence on possessive individualism in matters of marriage keeps them from accepting her more essential argument. 34 Bryce Traister sees a similar dynamic both in the invisibility of midwifery as a practice (as opposed to the public registry of births by men) and in the description of Hutchinson’s ideas and her monstrous birth in male terms (notably, Winthrop describes her miscarriage as “twenty-seven several lumps of man’s seed, without any alteration, or mixture of any thing from the woman” [Winthrop, History I: 271]). Traister writes, “As a type of ‘revelation,’ in short, the evidence refers only to the male contribution to the monstrous birth. Unable to dislodge the male body from its attachment to God’s special dispensation, Winthrop calls attention to an admixture of female invisibility and male visibility in the monstrous product of the antinomian body” (146). Traister’s article is particularly useful for the ways in which he addresses gender while challenging readings of the Antinomian Controversy that focus solely on female bodies.

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“I abhor that Practise”: Responsibility, Agency, and the Functional Body In both Hutchinson’s civil and ecclesiastical trials, assumptions that women are not fully legal or moral subjects play a role. Accusing Hutchinson of breaking “her husband’s marriage covenant” or holding “that foule, groce, filthye and abbominable opinion held by Familists, of the Communitie of Weomen” seems almost nonsensical to modern feminists—how can she be understood as a transgressor when she has no agency, either legal or sexual? Hutchinson does not demand equal rights or social power in response to these assumptions—her battle is firmly grounded in religion. Neither does she claim a specifically feminine agency or reject femininity by asserting that “the soul has no sex.” She is charged in the polemics of the time with being feminine insofar as she is both rhetorical and overwhelmed by the body, charges that are bandied about on both sides of the controversy against men as well as women, as Mercurius Americanus illustrates. In focusing on the function of bodies as testamentary thirds in her thought, we can see a response to the objectification of bodies, particularly women’s bodies, that turns these object/bodies into functional sites rather than signs for interpretation by others. She treats all bodies as functional but meaningless in a manner consistent with theological arguments of her time but at odds with patriarchy. As is frequently noted, her theological positions are not unique. However, given the prevalent readings of her body and women’s bodies as signifying objects, her treatment of bodies as witnessing thirds may be understood as anticipating and responding to the readings of her body as disorderly that do not apply to expressions of the interdependence of spirit and letter, body and soul evident in the theology of Cotton as well as the spiritual practices of opponents of the Antinomians like Winthrop and Shepard.35 Hutchinson clearly has much in common with sectarian mystics and prophets both in her warning to her judges that “if you go on in this course you begin you will bring a curse upon you and your posterity, and the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it” (Hall 338) and her treatment of the body and soul together as a “testament.” But as Winship observes, “Hutchinson was a puritan biblical exegete, not a Quaker prophetess, and given to arguing, it was said, not in raptures but in syllogisms” (177). Though she is moving toward Quaker ideas about the indwelling of the spirit, she never embraces a practice of living testimony. However, the distinction Winship makes here between syllogisms and raptures implies an opposition between reason and mystical revelations that does not do justice to the arguments implicit in much mysticism. Assumptions about the individual motivations of mysticism and its rejection of the body and worldly interactions frequently prevent us from seeing the implicit arguments of prophecy and ecstasies. The forms of mysticism that share a kinship with Hutchinson’s thinking are not solipsistic strategies for escape from the body, society, or worldly responsibility. As Mack writes with respect to the Quakers, “while these collective experiences were certainly emotional and cathartic, they were not undisciplined or unconscious” (“Feminine” 474). 35 See Jesper Rosenmeier, “The Teacher and the Witness: John Cotton and Roger Williams” and Anne G. Myles, “Arguments in Milk, Arguments in Blood: Roger Williams, Persecution, and the Discourse of Witness,” especially 145–48 for further discussion of the link between body and spirit in both orthodox and dissenting treatments of witnessing.

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The work of Westerkamp, Mack, and others who associate Hutchinson with protestant mysticism and prophecy usefully insists on the religious and social nature of thought and practices like Hutchinson’s. She is not an individualist either in her revelations or in her argumentative stance. As Mack writes, the assumption that visionary women were pursuing a covert strategy of self-assertion ignores the very real problem of agency for seventeenth-century religious actors. For the ground of women’s authority as spiritual leaders was their achievement of complete self-transcendence, surely a very different subjective experience from that of the modern social activist or career woman. This suggests not that women as prophets were devoid of personal ambition but that they had a different, more complex view of the self and of the meaning of personal success. (Visionary 5)

Mack goes on to explain that the mystic’s “enlightened condition did not imply detachment from the world but connectedness with humanity and nature: a ‘unity with the creation,’ as George Fox said. Society made individuals; salvation made bonding” (Visionary 8). Hutchinson likewise insists on “connectedness with humanity” but through her emphasis on both the testimony of the spirit and in testimonial relationships among fallen humans, not through an embodied experience of the “loss of control” or “rush of energy” Mack finds in visionary experiences nor through what Westerkamp describes as “a union that cannot be realized except through a final leap away from logic to experience” (“Anne Hutchinson” 494). We may see in Hutchinson’s uses of the body yet another example of modesty as keeping due measure—the body is not denied but it is not held as an object to be judged either in this world or the next. Hutchinson, like Marie de l’Incarnation, uses the body functionally as a testament to her relationship with God. The body mediates, despite the appearance of immediacy. In both cases it is important to take their statements about body and soul seriously—they are not secretly secular in their aims, claiming divine revelation primarily in order to circumvent worldly authority. Implicit in this attitude toward the body is a different kind of ethics and communal interdependence than that legislated by Hutchinson’s judges.36 Hutchinson’s 36 The social order Hutchinson’s judges argue must be enforced by holding the body as an object for judgment clearly does not serve women; Hutchinson responds with an alternative that challenges social stability sustained by an understanding of bodies as objects that may be possessed or judged, highlighting as she does so the ways in which the existing system holds all bodies up to judgment but situates women’s bodies more than men’s bodies as possessions. Mack’s interrogation of Victor Turner’s distinction between structured society and relatively unstructured communitas through an analysis of George Fox, Francis of Assisi, Gandhi, and their respective groups is useful here (“Feminine” 457–61). Just because a particular movement is critical of dominant modes of social organization, it does not follow that it promotes unstructured communitas. Too often this distinction correlates with questionable oppositions between nature and culture that share much with body/spirit dualism (Mack, “Feminine” 460). In this essay, Mack observes disjunctions between the uses of feminine symbolism by male leaders of these movements and the opportunities they offer real women, providing yet more examples of the kinds of gynesis to which the women I study respond (“Feminine” 465–67). Mack’s proposal that we rethink women’s engagement of activism associated with these groups as “active parenthood” is similar to my argument here about female functionalism, but my argument about functional bodies does not appeal to experience, especially gendered experience, in the same way.

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commitment to communal standards is suggested by her respect for oaths and her repeated insistence that she believes in Resurrection after death and abhors the practice of “Union betwene man and woman ... in a Way of Communitie” (Hall 362). The success of her conventicles and of Antinomianism as a social movement more generally also suggests this. Still, the kind of communal agency and worldly responsibility enabled by Hutchinson’s thinking is nascent. In “Of the Four Humours of mans Constitution” and Primero Sueño respectively, Bradstreet and Sor Juana conclude by emphasizing practices of modest endeavor in community, despite the limitations of human knowledge and embodiment. As we shall see in the next chapter, Marie de l’Incarnation’s mortifications are enabled by a body that is subordinate to the soul but necessary and active; her spiritual activities are also situated within the necessary demands of life in community both before she enters the convent and after. Hutchinson does not address daily activity so directly—her trials provide little opportunity to do so. Still, her positions are suggestive in this regard, especially when compared to the other women treated in this book. Throughout the Antinomian Controversy, a degree of miscommunication, frequently willful on both sides, permeates the debates because of the shifting register of “law.” That many women sided with the “Antinomians” reflects, many have suggested, an experience of the symbolic order and the law that reinforces their sense of a disjunction between worldly activity and social or symbolic reward. That their critique is met with a different interpretation of law that allows the judges to label their bodies as immodest while authorizing their punishment helps illuminate the social and political stakes informing the arguments I categorize as functionalist. As Hutchinson declares during her civil trial, “You have power over my body but the Lord Jesus hath power over my body and soul” (338). This is not simply the declaration of a self-styled martyr; Hutchinson recognizes the limits placed on her body, limits inflected by her gender, but challenges the accepted relationship between body and soul and in doing so, redefines “power” such that her body is no longer a manipulated object within a symbolic hierarchy, but rather a transitory vessel serving as a conduit for the Holy Spirit.

Chapter 4

Femmes fortes: Mysticism and the Female Apostolate of Marie de l’Incarnation Sending news of the death of Marie de l’Incarnation, one of the founders of the Ursuline convent in Québec, to the Ursulines in France, Mère Marguerite de S. Athanase described at length Marie’s fortitude in the face of her painful final illness, declaring that she had “the title and the quality of femme forte” (Marie de l’Incarnation, Corr. 1011).1 That Marguerite did not merely call Marie “strong” but rather emphasized that she had earned the title of “strong woman” speaks to her sense of Marie’s exceptional nature. This is not surprising—Marie led a noteworthy life. In addition to her central role in establishing the convent in Québec, Marie was wellknown during her lifetime as a mystic, a renown that only increased after her death with the publication by her son of several volumes based on two autobiographical relations and hundreds of letters.2 Indeed, early in her life she was both a mystic and a very effective and practical businesswoman; her visions persuaded her and others that she should help found the convent in Québec while her business skills helped her lead the convent once she was in Canada. Jérôme Lalemant, one of her spiritual directors in Québec and author of many of the Jesuit Relations, called her “a second Saint Teresa” or “the Teresa of Canada,” a title frequently given her to this day. Even Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, a staunch critic of mysticism, overlooked Marie’s own mystical past in repeating Lalemant’s epithet and praising her as an exemplary religious woman (Bruneau 178).3 In 1980 she was beatified and efforts continue to have her canonized. But Marguerite’s letter and her use of this title are also interesting because of the way she describes Marie’s fortitude and life achievements as heroic while positioning Marie’s exceptionalism within the larger context of Ursuline activities; the title femme forte applied to others as well. Marie’s obituary in the Jesuit Relations, attributed

1 Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from Guy-Marie Oury’s edition of Marie de l’Incarnation’s Correspondance are my translations. Hereafter, parenthetical citations to this edition use the abbreviation Corr. 2 Marie wrote thousands of letters but only a fraction of these survive, gleaned from various sources. Oury includes 278 in his authoritative edition of Marie’s correspondence. 3 Bossuet is sometimes credited as the source of this title, though Mère Marguerite de S. Athanase (Corr. 1012) and Claude Martin (Vie 753) both refer to her spiritual advisor’s praise decades before Bossuet calls Marie another Teresa in his Instruction sur les états d’oraison (584).

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to Claude Dablon by English translator Reuben Gold Thwaites, draws heavily on Marguerite’s account but with much of this context edited out. Dablon also begins by calling Marie a “femme forte,” translated by Thwaites as “able woman.” The life of this able woman—such a one as Solomon represents to us—in whatever state we consider her, whether in the bonds of matrimony, or in widowhood, which gave her liberty to leave the world and become, as she did, a most worthy daughter of saint Ursula,—being a work of the Holy Ghost, who found pleasure in that soul and was pleased to enrich it with his choicest gifts of grace,—demands an entire volume and an intelligence better informed than mine in its acquaintance with her conduct, in order to give with exactness the characteristics and outline of that life. (Thwaites, v.56, 1671–2: 287)

The femme forte, “such a one as Solomon represents to us,” refers to Proverbs 31:10, “A good wife who can find?/She is far more precious than jewels.”4 An important feminist commonplace in seventeenth-century France, “The femme forte takes her name from the first verse of the Alphabet of the Good Woman in the Book of Proverbs ..., in which, following the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the qualities of a capable wife of good reputation and sound business sense are outlined” (Maclean, Woman 81). In listing Marie’s various states as wife, widow, and nun, Dablon echoes the emphasis in Proverbs on the worldly roles of a good woman. Marguerite, on the other hand, suggests that Marie earned this title not because she fulfilled conventional female roles but because she exceeded them. After describing in great detail the bile, fever, abscesses, and other physical maladies that plagued Marie during her final illness, Marguerite interprets this fortitude as reflecting a life “that she had passed in a continual and generous practice of the most heroic virtues” (Corr. 1011). This continual practice of heroic virtues is what, according to Marguerite, earned Marie the title of femme forte. Tellingly, much of this passage is included in the Jesuit Relations, but Marie’s suffering is described as blessed while no mention is made of her heroic endeavors and the title femme forte is dropped from this section. Marguerite and Dablon are agreed that Marie is a femme forte, but one attributes this to heroic virtues and physical endurance that in some way belie gender expectations while the other locates it wholly within traditional female roles. Marguerite’s use of femme forte fits in many ways with its use in feminist literature of seventeenth-century France. Ian Maclean frames his discussion of the femme forte in feminist literature with the observation that it is essentially a paradoxical formulation. Citing Torquato Tasso’s Discourso della virtú feminile e donnesca (1582), he explains that “Chastity and courage are seen, therefore, in some sense as opposite virtues when placed on a sexual spectrum” (Woman 19; also Renaissance 62). Modesty is seen by moralists as the most effective guardian of chastity; its most dangerous enemies are sensuality, ambition, and avarice .... In the figure of the femme forte, the counter-virtues of continence, stoic apathy, and liberality are stressed; again there is an opposition to be detected between the female sex as a whole in which these virtues are thought to be prevalent, and the femme forte. (Woman 69) 4 Biblical citations in this chapter are to the Revised Standard Reversion of The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha.

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The force of this figure, he explains, depends largely on the assumption of female weakness, the “paradox of strength in weakness, of virtue in the female sex” (73). Significantly, the femme forte is not primarily a modest woman—rather than veiling the body, the femme forte is understood to participate in worldly activity. Part of the paradox is that she uses her body but is not unchaste, a paradox that is also apparent in writings about the Virgin Mary that flourished in seventeenth-century France and attributed to her many of the same characteristics as the female heroism of the femme forte (Maclean, Woman 73). This paradox is apparent when Marguerite writes of both Marie’s heroic fortitude and her “angelic” modesty (Corr. 1011). However, the significance of the femme forte in Marguerite’s letter is not confined to this basic paradox; her feminism does not involve simply challenging social and ontological categories as applied to individual women. Throughout this letter she emphasizes Marie’s commitment to la vie commune or community life, concluding her description of Marie’s many talents with the statement: “Our Father accorded her the consolation before her death of seeing several people in this small community capable of succeeding her and full of the same zeal that she had” (1013). This sentence is omitted in the Jesuit Relations and la vie commune is characterized instead as “hidden” rather than heroic—Dablon is willing to celebrate Marie’s achievements but does not acknowledge the organized efforts of the Ursulines as a whole even though those are explicitly remarked upon in his source. Maclean treats the figure of the femme forte primarily as a rhetorical commonplace in feminist literature often written by men for purposes that are not necessarily concerned with the lives of real women. Femme forte used in this paradoxical way serves to isolate exceptional women in a manner that echoes Dablon’s use of the term; “the constant play on paradox leads to the evocation of surprise and admiration in many of these works” (Maclean, Woman 87). Though this literature “is genuinely concerned with the improvement of woman’s social and intellectual lot where this does not necessitate any change in the structure of society,” Maclean finds that the play of paradox itself outweighs this concern (80). In Tender Geographies: Woman and the Origins of the Novel in France, Joan DeJean pays more attention to the use of the femme forte in writings by women like Madeleine de Scudéry’s 1642 Femme illustres in ways that emphasize characterizations of the femme forte tied to the activities of women who had a significant impact on French literature and society. Like Maclean, she observes that “[t]he femme forte openly violated the standards for acceptable female behavior proposed by contemporary critics” (32). However, rather than looking for patterns among instances of a given commonplace, as Maclean does, DeJean examines the development of a female literary tradition and is therefore more concerned with the genealogy of the figure of the femme forte. For her the crux of the femme forte is not in its rhetorical use of paradox but rather in the “complex and continuous intermingling [of history and literature] throughout the seventeenth-century development of heroinism .... The most notable women’s writing of the day can be seen as a type of political ‘event,’ literature as call to action .... Inversely, the most influential political activity performed by women was always surrounded by an aura of mythmaking that can clearly be termed literary” (36). Real women used and inspired the figure of the femme forte as they consolidated a certain amount of literary and, for a time, political power. In her letter, Marguerite takes care to indicate that Marie as femme forte may be exceptional, but she is not alone.

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The title femme forte as she uses it participates in the kind of mythmaking described by DeJean, but as we shall see, Marguerite and Marie both refer to the vie commune and other women in the convent in ways that link Marie to the larger history of the Ursulines and especially their mission in Canada. DeJean is concerned primarily with elite secular women whose writings led to the rise of the novel and the early flourishing of a women’s literary tradition in France. Linda Lierheimer’s treatment of the femme forte in Ursuline rhetoric usefully builds on the work of Maclean and DeJean. But rather than seeing the femme forte solely as an exemplary figure set in relief against ordinary women or as a complex mix of historical figure and literary representation, Lierheimer shows how “the femme forte epitomized the active life of the Ursulines” (202). In contrast [to the femme forte in feminist writings described by Maclean], the Ursuline femme forte offered a model for Christian heroinism in the world and was defined in terms that articulated the specific ideals and goals of the order. The figure of the femme forte became a symbol of militancy that situated the Ursulines within an apostolic tradition of women in Christian history. (203–204)

Lierheimer, like DeJean, explores women’s representations of themselves as historical actors within larger traditions that were understood by others. Like Maclean and DeJean, Lierheimer is concerned with the femme forte as a contested rhetorical figure, but her approach to rhetoric admits a greater degree of practice, pedagogy, and habit, “shifting the focus of the history of eloquence and rhetoric from intellectual debates, from which women were normally barred, to ordinary practitioners” (10). Rather than treating the femme forte primarily as a contested or evolving figure manipulated by writers trying to make a point within intellectual or literary debates, Lierheimer finds that for the Ursulines the femme forte was a model for emulation by writer and readers alike. If there is something paradoxical in Ursuline uses of femme forte, its rhetorical aim is not to surprise but to teach women how to negotiate the apparent paradox between spiritual withdrawal and worldly action (and between chastity and activity), to reinforce community conceived at least partially in military terms, and to justify women’s apostolic activity in this era of colonization. The ways Marie invokes functionalism in her discussions of the body as she negotiates these three elements of the femme forte is the focus of this chapter—we find in these writings an emphasis on practice, community, and apostolic activity, all of which require a sense of the body as useful but without symbolic value. The femme forte as a mark of both Marie’s exceptional nature and her immersion within a community that is organized to encourage many women is one useful anchor for our understanding of Marie’s functionalism. Like the emphasis on Marie’s various roles at the beginning of her obituary in the Jesuit Relations, many recent books about her have subtitles like “mystique et femme d’action,” “femme, mystique et missionnaire,” and “femme d’affaires, mystique, mère de la nouvelle France” that exploit the apparent contradictions among these descriptions, suggesting that Marie exceeds categories while understanding her in terms of those categories. Abundant praise joined to a rhetoric of excess or inexpressibility that names a woman exceptional, isolating her and often inadvertently proving the rule of women’s limitations, tempts modern feminist and pro-woman writers as it did writers, editors,

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and publishers of the seventeenth century. Such praise shares the same rhetorical and logical structure as the title of “Tenth Muse” though with an emphasis on multiple roles rather than multiple fields of knowledge and literary achievement. Marguerite’s letter suggests that we can understand Marie as an exceptional woman among other exceptional women. This enables a greater understanding of her in relation to the well-known literary women of her age, while suggesting heuristics for understanding the achievements of the femmes fortes of the seventeenth century in less individualistic ways. In particular, Marie’s immersion within Ursuline culture provides a communal context less apparent in the lives of women celebrated for their literary achievements like Bradstreet and Sor Juana. “This poor body allowed itself to be guided like someone dead”: Mysticism and the Functional Body Forte may be translated as “able” or “strong”; evidence that Marie was both is abundant in the major events of her life. She was born Marie Guyart in 1599 in Tours, France, the daughter of a master baker. Her family life was marked by piety and commerce—a conjunction of the spiritual and practical that would persist throughout her life. She was literate and may have attended school—one of her mystical dreams involved Christ coming to her in a school yard. At an early age she embraced the piety of her family but despite early inclinations toward a religious life (at the age of 14 she asked to enter a Benedictine convent), she married a silk manufacturer, Claude Martin, when she was 17 in obedience to her family, and was widowed with a young son two years later. During the years of her early widowhood she ably discharged her husband’s many debts (he left both debts and scandal arising from the now obscure claims of another woman) and helped run her sister and brother-in-law’s carting business while actively discouraging further proposals of marriage. During this period she also became more devout, practicing extreme bodily mortifications and having mystical dreams and visions that she chronicled in two autobiographical relations. When she was 31, she left her son and entered the convent of the Ursulines. In the following years she began to dream of Canada and through numerous letters to her spiritual advisor and other influential people, she helped bring about her selection as one of three nuns who sailed to Canada in 1639 to found the first Ursuline convent in Québec, which also served as a school for French and Native American girls. They were accompanied by their benefactress, Madame de la Peltrie, and three hospital nuns who established the Hôtel-Dieu to care for the sick in the colony. For the next 33 years she helped lead the convent, serving as mother superior for a total of 18 years,5 overseeing the rebuilding of the 5 She was the first superior of the Québec Ursulines and also served 12 years as dépositaire and two as assistante in addition to the offices she held in Lyons (Marguerite de S. Athanase to the Ursulines in France, Corr. 1011). See Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins for a fuller discussion of the life of Marie de l’Incarnation in conjunction with biographical essays on two other remarkable women of the seventeenth century. MarieFlorine Bruneau’s Women Mystics Confront the Modern World and Anya Mali’s Mystic in the New World are also intelligent, extended studies of Marie written in English.

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convent after a fire in 1650, learning at least three languages, Iroquois, Algonquin, and Huron, and writing dictionaries or catechisms in each of these languages (all now lost). Soon after her death in 1672, her son, then a Benedictine, published La Vie de la Vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, a semi-autobiographical work “taken from her relations and letters.” This was the first of three books Dom Claude Martin published about his mother.6 Marie practiced extreme mortifications of the flesh on an ongoing basis for only a few years of her long, busy life. They are, however, an obvious starting place for an investigation of functionalism and discourses of the body, in no small part because on the surface they suggest a rejection of the body that might serve as a counterexample to the feminist functionalism I have been exploring. Mortifications as practiced by Marie and other Christian mystics are both a discipline meant to humble and punish the worldly self and evidence of an inspired state that in some way takes the penitent out of this self. Aware that her mortifications could be interpreted as vain or crazy, Marie is careful to note, “All these exercises were so strongly inspired that my confessor permitted them” (Jamet I: 173).7 In this way, her mortifications are akin to visions, states of possession by the Lord, and other mystical experiences and transports that made her one of the best known mystics of the seventeenth century. Extreme, often spectacular spiritual expressions have always captured the imagination; some of the best known women from the seventeenth century gained their notoriety through physical manifestations of the spirit including mortifications and violence directed toward the mystic’s own body. To modern eyes, these transports and mortifications frequently suggest either internalized self-loathing in a world in which women had little or no power or a form of paradoxical power in which the mystic gains attention and authority through dramatic experiences of selflessness; discussions of Hutchinson and Marie frequently appeal to both these interpretations. But though these mortifications may suggest a dualistic, punishing relationship between spirit and body, Caroline Walker Bynum observes that late medieval and early modern mysticism should not be understood as a rejection of the body and the world. “Rather,” Bynum argues in a formulation that coincides with and informs my understanding of functionalism as challenging a symbolic, hierarchical relationship between body and spirit, “late medieval asceticism was an effort to plumb and to realize all the possibilities of the flesh .... [I]t was compatible with, not contradictory to, new philosophical notions that located the 6 See Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, Publishing Women’s Life Stories in France, 1647–1720 for a discussion of Claude Martin’s role in the publication of Marie’s writings. Goldsmith persuasively argues that Claude “hit upon a formula that was to prove immensely appealing to other editors of women’s memoirs and letters” through the paradox of presenting “a woman as a writer but not an author, as an individual from whom readers learn the most to the extent that they are not being directly addressed” (36). This formula, she explains, promises the reader “an intimate knowledge of the woman writer’s secret self while at the same time sustaining the reader’s belief in that author’s modesty or reserve, and in the male hegemony over the printed text” (36). 7 All translations from Dom Albert Jamet’s authoritative edition of Marie de l’Incarnation’s writings are my own unless otherwise noted. These passages are cited parenthetically as “Jamet.” Except in a few instances, I use Irene Mahoney’s translation of Marie’s relation of 1654, cited parenthetically as “Mahoney.”

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nature of things not in their abstract definitions but in their individuating matter or particularity” (294–95). In introducing her mortifications, Marie writes, “As often as my soul approached God and saw the disproportion between the creature and his infinite purity, my self-hatred and humility increased and induced me to perform acts increasingly humiliating to nature” (Mahoney 60). “Self-hatred” (“cette haine de moi-même” Jamet II: 209) does not at first glance accord with what I have been calling feminist functionalism. And yet Marie’s practices and discourse about those practices do not reveal a rejection of the body. Neither does characterizing the effect of these practices as paradoxically self-empowering explain either her aims or the significance of her actions. Marie’s functionalism adds to our understanding of this strategy by emphasizing 1) a discipline or practice performed as a part of daily life that 2) must be understood within community and not simply within a unitary economy of “self.” I suggested in the previous chapter that over-emphasizing Hutchinson’s self-empowerment in secular terms keeps us from appreciating her theological argument about the relationship between body and soul. This dynamic is even more obvious in the case of Marie, in large part because her life and the activities and organization of the Ursulines are so well-documented. In this chapter I look first at her practice of mortifications and then at her understanding of the “mixed life,” in part because the former introduces us to bodily practices while the latter gives a clearer sense of the ways in which these practices were situated within the Ursuline apostolate. We know of Marie de l’Incarnation’s early devotions and mystical experiences primarily through her spiritual relations of 1633 and 1654. In both relations she covers much of the same material in describing her life and spiritual history up until 1633, including her practice of mortifications (the relation of 1654 then continues to chronicle her life after 1633, with particular emphasis on events surrounding her participation in the mission to Canada). But in 1633 Marie uses the first person to describe her disciplines in great detail while in 1654 she uses less detail and writes of what the soul did to the body rather than what she herself did. A close examination of these two relations demonstrates continuity in her functionalist descriptions of the body while also revealing a shift away from her earlier emphasis on individual subjectivity that signals a growing attention to embodied practices within community. Marie wrote the relation of 1633 at the behest of her spiritual director, Père Georges de la Haye, two years after she entered the Ursuline convent at Tours and six years before she left France for Québec. Using the first person, Marie describes both the painful sensations of her practices as well as the minute particulars by which she found and pushed her physical limits. To sleep on boards was too sensual for me. I stretched out a cilice on which I slept. The disciplines of nettles, which I used on myself in the summer, were so painful after having employed three or four handfuls each time, that I felt like I was in a hot boiler, and ordinarily, I felt it for three days, after which I recommenced. The pain of it was so great that I did not feel the spikes, after willing myself to use them. I did not leave off use of a discipline of chains, but this was nothing in comparison to the pain of the nettles. I ate wormwood with my food, and, after the meal, I kept it a long time in my mouth, and having tasted fully the bitterness, I ate it. But I was forbidden to use it further because my stomach deteriorated. I so frequently had the hair shirt and cilice on my back that

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Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700 this was turned into a habit. If I saw someone amusing themselves with vain things and they wanted me to amuse myself with them, I stole away quietly and went to the attic to discipline myself because it was impossible for me to taste any pleasure in which there was something of the world; however I tried to satisfy everyone and at no point make myself difficult or troublesome. Those I saw regularly would never have judged that I had settled on these exercises of mortification; this would have been enough to make them think I was crazy, so I devoted myself to taking care that no one became aware of them. The length of time lying on the boards with the cilice macerated my flesh so strongly on the side on which I lay, that it became insensible such that in touching it I felt nothing. This mortification is the most painful that I ever did because the hardness of the wood and the heaviness of my body made the hair enter into my skin so that I could only half sleep, always feeling the pain of the pricks. I took pleasure in denying nature all that she loved, and it was not possible to do myself good in any case. (Jamet I: 172–73)

In this long passage, Marie details the effects of these mortifications on her body through vivid similes (the nettles made her feel as though she were in a hot boiler) and precise explanations of the physiological consequences of her disciplines (the cilice sandwiched between her heavy body and the hard boards upon which she slept made the hair enter her skin). Moreover, she repeatedly tests the limits of her body, determining the duration and intensity with which she could practice her mortifications without destroying her body utterly. She describes holding the wormwood (absinthe) in her mouth long enough that she could fully taste the bitterness, but she also admits that she gave up the practice because of the damage to her stomach. Likewise, she takes breaks in her use of the discipline of nettles so that her body can regain its feeling, both in order to maximize the pain of the mortification and to sustain life. In addition to mapping the limits of her body through these practices, Marie indicates that they are woven into her daily life and relationships with others. Thus, she describes her use of the hairshirt and cilice as habits in order to amplify her description of these disciplines but also as an indication that these were ongoing practices. There is an emphasis on duration and repetition in this passage that highlights the everyday nature of these practices. As we shall see, Marie repeatedly observes the ways in which she is tied to the world through daily activities and commitments; her mention of habit here puts her mortifications on a continuum with her other duties, not in opposition to them. She may steal away from frivolous pleasures, but that too is presented as a description of her practices rather than as a sign of a stark opposition between the spiritual and the worldly. Marie also makes it clear that these habits are not practiced in isolation. She emphasizes that she was discrete out of fear of discovery but also out of regard for others. In recognizing the social consequences of her mortifications, Marie in part signals an awareness of the danger of vanity that comes with mortifications but she also shows her concern for community. Though associating these extreme practices with modesty understood as keeping due measure seems hardly appropriate, they are not gestures of female shame. Marie’s mortifications are practices of the body in community. One striking aspect of this treatment of her mortifications in her relation of 1633 is the discourse of pleasure and desire that permeates it. In this way her practices are focused on her subjective experiences. Expanding on her earlier explanation that

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“it was impossible for me to taste any pleasure in which there was something of the world, however I tried to satisfy everyone and at no point make myself difficult or troublesome,” Marie emphasizes her “désir” to mortify herself: I was insatiable and could not find enough instruments of mortification to satisfy my desire. My interior occupation increased as I mortified myself, and I said to the Word Incarnate: “My sweet Love, since I cannot keep my thoughts for considering the torments of your holy Passion, and because you draw my spirit directly to your divine Person, I can at least endure something small, in order to imitate and follow you, O my Beloved!” (Jamet I: 173–74)

Marie explains her insatiable desire for further mortifications in terms of imitatio Christi expressed in a direct address to the Word Incarnate. This address is described as an “interior occupation” that adds to her mortification—her thoughts cannot stay focused on his Passion so she can only hope to follow him in enduring physically a little of what he endured. In addressing the Word Incarnate directly, Marie signals that this is intended as a movement toward Christ grounded in a humble recognition of her inability to keep her mind focused wholly on his passion. This is functionalist to the degree that the body is understood as an instrument; notably Marie does not describe these practices as symbolic. They substitute for the failures of the mind through practices that compensate for lapses in sustained meditation. Again it is a matter of duration—her meditations are broken up by her daily duties and her mental or spiritual limitations and she cannot satisfactorily bridge the gap between the world and the divine through mental exercises alone. The functional body does not face the same symbolic gap; her disciplines lead to a suffering that is quantitatively and qualitatively lesser than Christ’s, but conceivable on the same scale.8 According to Bynum, “In a religiosity where wounds are the source of a mother’s milk, fatal disease is a bridal chamber, pain or insanity clings to the breast like perfume, physicality is hardly rejected or transcended. Rather, it is explored and embraced” (249–50). Marie’s 1633 relation provides a particularly vivid example of this exploring and embracing. In her relation of 1654, by contrast, Marie is less concerned with the possibilities of the flesh, paying greater attention to the motivations of the soul as agent of these practices. She introduces her mortifications with a description of her new attunement to the world around her, arising in part from “self-hatred.” Again, I quote this passage at length and although I generally rely on the relatively accessible Mahoney translation, I have translated this passage myself for a very important reason—throughout this passage Mahoney’s translation uses “I” as the agent of these practices (e.g., “I forced myself to go where there were infected corpses in order to fully endure the stench” [60–61]) whereas Marie herself makes the soul the agent of most of these acts (“she made it go where there were very infected corpses ....” [Jamet II: 211]). In 1633 she wrote of denying nature “what she loved”; in 1654 the feminine soul, not feminine nature, is the prominent “she” of her discourse. 8 Natalie Zemon Davis emphasizes this aspect of Marie’s mortifications, arguing that both mortifications and “the ecstasy of writing” yielded for Marie “the imitation of Christ and especially union with Christ” (263, n. 19).

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Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700 [A]s often as my soul approached God and I understood the disproportion of the creature with respect to his infinite purity, this hatred of myself and humility increased and made me perform acts more and more humiliating to nature. ... She [my soul] did everything imaginable to win his heart, and he, he gave her a new spirit of penitence which made her treat her body like a slave [“une” in 1654/“un” in Claude Martin’s Vie]. She burdened it with hair shirts, cilices and chains, made it sleep on boards, and for bedclothes, a cilice; she made it spend part of each night in bloody self-disciplines; she made it eat absinthe, for fear that it would take pleasure in food; she let it sleep only the little that was necessary in order not to let it die, because she wanted it to suffer. Along with these penances, other domestic activities, and the labors of daily bothers, she made it dress foul-smelling wounds and subjugate itself by approaching so close to them that it smelled the stench; she made it go where there were very infected corpses in order to fully endure the stench. Not content, she made it beg a confidante to strike it roughly. She gave it no repose, but rather came up with continual inventions to make it suffer. If it was presented some small diversion, the Spirit dictated that it must leave the company in order to go discipline itself or to go beg some new penance of its director, or he obliged it to withdraw into solitude in order to engage more freely with God; he even had it leave the table for these purposes. This poor body allowed itself to be guided like someone dead and suffered everything without saying a word, because the vigor of the Spirit of grace had conquered and vanquished it. (Jamet II: 209–12)

Marie’s description of her mortifications is less somatic in 1654. In this relation, Marie’s dreams and mystical transports suggest an apparent separation of body and spirit that Marie nonetheless marks as only apparent—in a manner similar to that found in Sor Juana’s Primero Sueño, the body remains a significant vessel throughout these descriptions. Her body may be treated as a slave, but it also has a kind of agency, for it “allowed itself to be guided like someone dead, suffering everything without a word because the spirit had conquered and vanquished it.” While Marie details her physical mortifications and emphasizes that she “took pleasure in denying nature all that she loved” in her relation of 1633 in a manner that suggests an assault on the body and the worldly self it represents, in 1654 she presents a less detailed agon between body and soul in that she is “induced” to act in particular ways. “As often as my soul approached God and saw the disproportion between the creature and his infinite purity, my self-hatred and humility increased and induced me to perform acts increasingly humiliating to nature.” Though Marie writes in both relations of putrefying corpses, bloody disciplines, absinthe, and sleep-deprivation, in 1633 she showed how she tested the physical limits of abjection, motivated by her desire to imitate Christ and her inability to do so except through these habitual, repetitive practices. She says in the earlier narrative that her mortifications were divinely inspired, backed up by the authority of her approving confessor, almost in answer to the doubts and judgments she expects from her readers. By 1654 such doubts are forestalled from the beginning, both through her contextualization of these mortifications and by her substitution of “she” (her soul) for “I.” While in 1633 Marie’s description of her mortifications were surrounded by apostrophes to God (e.g., “My God, I think that I no longer have faith” [Jamet I: 171]), in 1654 Marie begins this section of her relation with a general and impersonal discussion of this particular “state of prayer.” Indeed, the entire relation of 1654 is divided into thirteen states of prayer, suggesting that it

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may serve as a blueprint for the spiritual growth of others, perhaps modeled on François de Sales’ Introduction to the Devout Life and similar devotional manuals. Before describing her mortifications, Marie explains that, “[t]his state of prayer ... withdraws the support coming from the sacred humanity of Our Lord” in order to “enable the soul to advance in the good graces of the Divine Majesty through the virtues bestowed by the spirit of Jesus Christ on all who, with patient humility, work lovingly for their neighbor” (Mahoney 59). My soul was constantly impelled toward God in a purely spiritual way. I longed for him in a way hitherto utterly unknown to me. I found him in all creatures and in the purpose for which he created them. Yet all this was completely spiritual, for my contemplation was so purified that these creatures could not distract me from God. I was given infused knowledge concerning their nature and sometimes I spoke of this with great simplicity, unaware that this was in any way unusual. (Mahoney 60)

Thus, Marie explains both a heightened spirituality as well as a humble willingness to work for her neighbor and a greater attunement to “all creatures” before turning to her mortifications. The “dèsir” of 1633 gives way to a studied deemphasis on subjective experiences both through Marie’s use of “the soul” as the agent of her mortifications and her insistence that all this arises from a greater attachment to others, not an isolating rejection of the world. Both descriptions of Marie’s mortifications are functionalist. The differences between them may be fruitfully compared to the development in Anne Hutchinson’s understanding of the body and soul between her civil and her ecclesiastical trials. In both cases the body is used without being valued, but in the later text this is worked out in less individualized, subjective ways. But while I find in Hutchinson’s mortalism a radicalization brought on, perhaps, by her imprisonment and isolation (she herself insists “I did not hould any of thease Thinges before my Imprisonment” [Hall 372]), the change in Marie’s relations makes her experiences safer by locating agency and pleasure in her soul, not her self. I hypothesize that the development in her thinking may be attributed to Marie’s greater immersion in the Ursuline community between 1633 and 1654. In either case, mortifications use the body rather than rejecting it and are presented as practices, not symbolic sacrifices. Gender is evident in the way Marie weaves these practices into her day between household chores and family commitments and in the gender of the soul, grammatically necessary but leading to an active “she” in the 1654 text. In “Notes on a Ten-Day Retreat,” circa 1633, Marie justifies her mortifications in more theological terms than she used in her spiritual relation of the same year. Significantly, this justification is strongly gendered. In the third meditation of the first day, Marie reflects on Genesis 3:15: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” Like many of her meditations in these notes, she reads this passage allegorically, finding in it not a literal punishment of women and devil for their parts in the fall of man, but rather a statement about the grace God has given as “the means of overcoming the enemies of our soul” (Mahoney 195). Strikingly, she provides two readings of this passage. In the first, the woman is the Church and the serpent is the devil, with the Church and its offspring, the inspirations that lead to

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good works, stomping the devil but also vulnerable to his “poisonous suggestions,” which bring death and hell. Distressed at this perpetual struggle, Marie concludes that God is the source of those things that test and purify believers. This leads her to rework the allegory, arguing now that the “foot of the soul” is humility, which also provides the firm base for the spiritual body, while the serpent is pride, the highest part of sin, which strikes at the foundation of spiritual perfection. “We crush the head of the serpent when we scorn and trample underfoot the glory of the world, the praises, the vanities, and all the pomps of pride” (Mahoney 196). This reinterpretation then serves as justification for Marie’s self-mortifications and humiliations. “I have seen that the fiercest battle that I have to sustain is against thoughts of pride which sometimes attack me; from thence I have been powerfully moved to humiliate myself both interiorly and exteriorly in order to crush the feelings of proud nature which tend constantly to the elevation of self. I have resolved to work hard at this until the head of the serpent is entirely crushed in me” (Mahoney 196). Marie reinterprets the sin of Eve and by extension women as first the church fighting the devil and then the soul fighting pride and worldly vanities. The mortifications she justifies through this reading are figured in terms of battle, something that “crushes,” and not just abasement (though the battle is through abasement). Moreover, the body or heel of Eve is transformed from an institution whose offspring—male in Genesis—are the agents of works to the agent itself, crushing the pride that strikes at it. By invoking an agon between church and devil only to transform it into an ongoing battle between humility and pride, Marie replaces a highly symbolic reading with one that is more useful and instructive. This in turn leads to her discussion of mortifications as practices of a functional body rather than a symbolic one. “I am attached by necessity”: Marie and the Mixed Life Marie’s early mortifications have always been a point of controversy in her biography; advocates are often inclined to minimize or justify them. Her son, for instance, explains her extreme mortifications by comparing his mother to saints who undergo rigorous penances because of “the smallest imperfections and the lightest impurities” (Vie 620) rather than the sins that spark compunction in common men. Mysticism, though it flourished in seventeenth-century France, is likewise a sensitive issue for Marie’s seventeenth-century commentators and a vexed one for more recent critics.9 As an active order, the Ursulines frowned on mortifications 9 Linda Lierheimer writes about the challenge Ursuline mystics like Marie faced in describing their mystical experiences without running afoul of a Church increasingly uncomfortable with mysticism. The relation of 1633 was written after the Ursulines of Lyons returned from the country estate of Claude Bouisson, Marie’s brother-in-law, where they took refuge from the plague. The Ursulines in Loudun, a community that like the Ursulines of Lyons suffered no deaths from the plague, famously experienced numerous cases of demonic possession in the wake of this same epidemic (see Michel de Certeau’s The Possession of Loudun). Marie practiced the mortifications described in the previous section before she entered the convent, but her language in the relation of 1633 may reflect in some measure an awareness of the body following the plague and her third-person treatment of the same material in 1654 may suggest a great caution learned in the aftermath of these possessions.

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and, to a lesser extent, mystical experiences. According to Angela Merici, founder of the Ursulines, extreme mortification of the body was “sacrifice of stolen goods” (Lierheimer 83). The Ursulines were an apostolic order from the beginning; their foundation story describes St. Ursula taking 11,000 virgins on eleven ships to save souls around the world, only to be martyred by the Huns who asked them to choose between their lives and their virginity. The first congregations were not cloistered and did not take formal vows—members promised to remain chaste, lived with their families, and undertook missions of teaching and ministering to the poor. The first French congregation was persuaded to live in community in the late sixteenth century but still went into the world to perform charitable works. Beginning in 1612, with resistance from many congregations, general enclosure began to take place. The “mixed life” (la vie mixte) of the Ursulines, one in which spiritual contemplation is joined to action in the world, is a marked departure from the lives of medieval contemplatives (Lierheimer 94–101); their continuing struggle to live this life despite the imposition of enclosure is yet another example of women challenging assumptions about their innate shamefulness as they engage new cultural formations emerging in the seventeenth century.10 In her letter on the death of Marie de l’Incarnation, Marguerite de S. Athanase describes the elderly nun’s final physical struggles with an attention to detail that echoes Marie’s own descriptions of her mortifications. Like Marie, Marguerite imbues this suffering with meaning even as she mentions those earlier mortifications with discomfort. At first she says she will leave commentary on Marie’s “revelations, visions, ecstasies, ravishments and of the views she had of our mysteries” to “more intelligent people” (Corr. 1012), but the mortifications she “passes in silence,” implying that they do not merit further discussion beyond Marguerite’s surprisingly comprehensive list. I pass over in silence the excessive penances and mortifications, the fasts and vigils, disciplines, girdles, hairshirts and cilices that our dear deceased practiced from childhood until she came to this country, when she quit them by the order that Our Lord gave her. (Corr. 1012)

In fact, Marguerite is anything but silent about these “excessive” mortifications. This sentence, of course, belies its own claim of “silence,” but earlier in the letter she also refers to Marie’s disciplines. Praising Marie’s exact obedience to the rules of their order despite a “flux” and “feebleness of stomach” that made it difficult for her 10 Useful treatments of the development of women’s orders in France in the wake of the Council of Trent may be found in Elizabeth Rapley’s The Dévotes: Women & Church in Seventeenth-Century France and Lierheimer’s “Female Eloquence and Maternal Ministry.” Emily Clark’s Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 provides an informative introduction to the relationship between Ursulines in France and their apostolate in the Americas (her “Prelude” is particularly useful for understanding these activities in the seventeenth century). See also Laurence Lux-Sterritt, Redefining Female Religious Life: French Ursulines and English Ladies in Seventeenth-Century Catholicism for a consideration of the mixed life as a seventeenth-century phenomenon. John W. O’Malley discusses women’s activities and the global apostolate as two complications to post Council of Trent Catholicism that lead him to suggest “early modern Catholicism” as a more inclusive term than “Counter Reformation” or “Catholic Reformation” (136).

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to eat, Marguerite adds that “one can say in truth that the love that she had for the common life had contributed to her final illness” (Corr. 1012). Marguerite goes on to confess that “reproaching her lovingly a little before her death, I told her that she had shortened her days through her too great mortification; she made me the response that when God showed her Canada in a vision, assuring her that she would come here, he had ordered her, unless she were really ill, to follow in every way the communal life; she had decided, having communicated it to her director, that she was obliged to avoid any kind of singularity; that her life was of little importance but that her great business was to obey her divine Majesty” (Corr. 1012). Once again, the difference between Marguerite’s version and Dablon’s is instructive. He records neither Marguerite’s concern over excess nor Marie’s reference to her vision of Canada, writing, “It was that, Our Lord having ordered her, unless she were ill, to make all her habits conform to the rules of the Community, she had decided, after consulting her Director, that she ought to allow herself no exceptional privileges; that her life was of slight importance, but that her chief end was to obey the divine Majesty” (Thwaites, v.56, 1671–2: 297). Marguerite repeatedly registers discontent with this aspect of Marie’s life because of her sense of a conflict between Marie’s perceived excesses and the functioning of the Ursuline community in ways that are not apparent in Dablon’s characterization of Marie’s behavior as both exceptional and obedient (to God, her director, and her mother superior, Marguerite). Marguerite salvages Marie’s final suffering, finding that despite connections to her earlier mortifications, her affliction now reflects a love of communal life. This is the true femme forte, Marguerite implies, working in community among women who share her zeal.11 In this section I explore questions of community and the Ursuline apostolate. For Dablon and others, Marie’s entrance into the Ursulines and particularly her move to Canada is a kind of disappearance read in terms of obedience, self-abnegation, and modesty as pudor. Her earlier mysticism and her apostolic activities in Québec are opposed to one another. Thus Dablon, as we have seen, replaces Marguerite’s concern for la vie commune with his own praise of Marie’s obedience in living a hidden and ordinary life in Canada, simply noting after his description of her “supernatural” call and her fame in France, “The life led by her in this country, as compared with that in the other, was a hidden one, and outwardly ordinary, in accordance with an express order received from Our Lord and approved by her Director” (Thwaites 56, 1671–2: 288–89). In one modern chronology of Marie’s life, the penultimate entry, July 31, 1639, reads “Arrived at Québec. After this moment, the life of Marie of the Incarnation is mixed up with the general history of missions in Canada” (Vie 26, translation my own). (The last entry simply marks her death in 1672.) And in 11 The best known source of information about Marie is Claude Martin’s La Vie de la Vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, published in 1677 (Bossuet, for instance, cites Martin’s book), but details about Marie’s early visions and mortifications were already known, even well known, before its publication. In her letter reporting Marie’s death, Marguerite makes it clear that she knew details of Marie’s visions and early mortifications that she likely learned from reading the relation of 1654 or other writings by Marie. An alternative edition of the relation of 1654 found in the Ursuline convent at Trois-Rivières that is widely believed to follow closely Marie’s original manuscript provides a valuable glimpse behind Martin’s heavy editorial hand. It also stands as evidence that her writings circulated outside official publication channels.

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his reading of Claude’s editorial transformation of Marie’s “baroque body” into a contained object of veneration, Mitchell Greenberg chooses to overlook Marie’s time in Canada as “intensely focused on the daily life of the convent and the colony, on the quotidian cares and practices of the nuns. During this period her bodily manifestations are reduced to the common practices of simple mortification” (167, n. 11). Though by no means deprecating life in community, in each of these cases the practices and challenges of living in a cloister in Québec do not warrant the same comment elicited by Marie’s carefully detailed dreams and mortifications. Broadly defined distinctions between Marie’s activities in old and new France are also evident in works by scholars who pay more attention to Marie’s activities in Canada, many of whom suggest that her immersion in the Ursuline apostolate gave her new outlets for her energies, spiritual and otherwise, that in her youth she had expended in her practice of mortifications. Marie-Florine Bruneau, in particular, frames this shift from old world to new in terms of changing notions of the body and women’s opportunities within seventeenth-century Catholicism, arguing that Marie ultimately chose to imitate the apostolic life of Christ, not his bodily suffering. The opportunities offered to her by the modern conception of the body and the New World were predicated on having an able body, and thus made obsolete the theological justifications for female suffering .... Analysis of her writings reveals that this move cloaked the more personal reasons she had for such a choice, exposing the theological meaning female mystics gave to their suffering as a subterfuge rather than as the ‘true,’ and according to Bynum, exclusive meaning of their choice. (53)

In suggesting this opposition between “female suffering” and “having an able body,” Bruneau is not arguing that Marie rejects the body in France but not in Canada. Rather, she finds that Marie’s understanding of the body changes. Still, this formulation does not do justice to what I see as an emphasis on embodied ability and function in both Marie’s descriptions of her mortifications and in her later treatments of the Ursuline apostolate and life in community. Bruneau’s emphasis on Marie’s quest for individual empowerment is part of the problem. Like Bruneau, other critics who pay nuanced attention to Marie’s engagement of the Ursuline apostolate continue to define her agency in terms of stratagems of individual expression and power. Anya Mali, for instance, concludes her thoughtful analysis of the relationship between mysticism and the Ursuline apostolate in Marie’s thought by asserting that despite widespread church oversight, “there was still room for individuals to follow their own instincts and listen to their own dreams” (173) while Dominique Deslandres, in a more collective formulation, finds that the “mothers” of the colony in New France “were select women, women who chose. They cleared their very own paths to power and succeeded in winning over their fellow settlers” (131–32). Whether out of obedience, subterfuge, or simply being too busy, all these characterizations suggest that Marie’s embodied practices are most meaningful as individual symptoms, expressions, or tactics. Once she moves to Canada, she becomes absorbed into community, which either involves a kind of disappearance or association with a group of women who find individual power and expression in their shared mission. Both Marguerite and Marie suggest that a significant shift takes place between 1633 and 1654, emblematized by Marie’s submission to communal life once she

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heeds the call to Canada. This does not mean, however, that her earlier mortifications and visions are simply dismissed as selfish. In both Marie’s early mortifications and her later discussions of “the mixed life” she treats the body functionally in ways that are meant to enable community and action in this world even as that which she values is always understood in terms of divine will. Natalie Zemon Davis has observed that scholarly hypotheses about women’s relationship to the Protestant Reformation “invoke psychological solutions but do not address themselves to the actual content and organization of the new religious movements” (“City Women” 67). Elizabeth Rapley echoes this observation when she cites Jean de Viguerie’s comment that most work on female education (before 1981) had ignored the groups that were actually doing the teaching. Both in France and in Canada, Marie was concerned with how best to combine spiritual contemplation and worldly activity in ways that cannot be explained solely in terms of her psychological motivations. As she explains to her son in a letter dated October 13, 1660, she is like “those birds who in flying renew themselves. I am the same in matters of the spirit, because in the burdens to which I am attached by necessity, I take solid and continual nourishment” (Corr. 641, my translation; also Lierheimer 105).12 By 1654, Marie had more fully absorbed the Ursuline understanding and practice of “mixed life” (though her skill at combining devotional practice with business in her years with her sister and brotherin-law showed that she was already adept at mixing). Her reading of François de Sales, whose Introduction to the Devout Life “enlightened me on many aspects of the interior life” (Mahoney 55), would have also contributed to her understanding of how to live in the world while devoting one’s life to God. In the relation of 1654, finished at the age of 55 after 15 years in Canada, we find descriptions of her activities before entering the convent that build on her understanding of the relationship between body and spirit during this earlier period using formulations developed during her years as an Ursuline. For instance, Marie explains how when working in her sister and brother-in-law’s carting business, her immersion in prayer “never showed in the bustle of affairs, where, to all appearances, those who saw me believed that I was completely engrossed. This was because my bodily movements were extremely quick and my soul found itself freer than ever because my body was thus occupied” (Mahoney 86). Still, In order to be eternally absorbed in his bosom, the soul yearns to be separated [from the body], for although it dwells in the love of this divine and adorable object, yet these divine embraces must have little interludes for sleep and business. These are like little clouds which, carried along by a strong wind, pass beneath the sun, forming shadows. Then, too, bodily needs creep in, creating intervals which, short as they may be, are a kind of martyrdom for the soul that cannot bear to be separated for a moment from the caresses or the vision of its Beloved. (Mahoney 85)13 12 According to Oury, no one has identified the quote. It may be a version of part ii, chapter 2 in François de Sales’ Introduction to the Devout Life: “Just as wherever birds fly they always encounter the air, so also wherever we go or wherever we are we find God present” (73). 13 See Marie’s letter to Father Joseph-Antoine Poncet of 17 September 1670 for a similar discussion of the relationship between soul and body during daily activities (Corr. 888; Mahoney 276).

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Somewhat like the awakening soul in Sor Juana’s Primero Sueño, her physical abilities and bodily demands both free the soul and martyr it. This twofold logic is evident elsewhere in this relation. If the clock struck, I had to count it on my fingers because this interval of counting, although necessary, interrupted my loving conversation with my Beloved. If I had to speak with my neighbor, my gaze never left him whom I loved. And when my neighbor answered me, my conversation recommenced and my attention to what was necessary never took me away from him. It’s the same with writing where one’s attention is twofold: it is on the divine object and also on the matter in question. The time I have to dip my pen in ink is precious, for then the spirit and the heart make their colloquy. Even if the whole world were present, nothing could distract me. (Mahoney 72)

Writing, work in the world, and respect for one’s neighbors all require attention on “the divine object and also on the matter in question.” Marie’s quick, able body enables the mixed life. We need to understand this relationship between this world and the next, body and spirit as not paradoxical, marvelous, or deceptive, but rather as a fully developed, though complex practice and theory, both of which are functionalist. But in order to get beyond the appearance of paradox or duality in Marie’s many callings, it is necessary to see also that hers is not primarily a story of individual resistance and empowerment but rather one of broader engagement by women of the political, theological, and social practices of their times. In the letter Marie sends her son along with the relation of 1654, she gives him advice about his own call to the “mystical life” (“la vie mystique”), explaining that “few people know the importance of this hidden life” (Corr. 528). In particular, she takes care to explain what she means when she writes that this is a life that “does not suffer mixing” (“ne peut souffrir de mélange”). In elaborating on her use of the word “mélange,” Marie insists that this is not a matter of mixing worldly and divine affairs. When I say mixing, I do not want to speak of employments, although they squander [dissipans], that one can have in temporal and exterior business, especially when they relate to the glory of God and the salvation of one’s neighbor: when God calls a soul, he gives it his double spirit, for attending to inside and outside, in him and for the love of him .... But the mixing of which I speak is we ourselves, with whom we are ordinarily filled, and acting only under the shadow of the zeal of the glory of God, or under the pretext of some other pious motive, we run after the appetites of our own excellence or of our self-love” (Corr. 528; Martin also includes this letter in the prefatory materials at the beginning of La Vie de la Vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation).

Marie argues that many people misunderstand mélange as a problem of inside and outside, when in fact forsaking mélange is a matter of relinquishing self-love. As with Hutchinson’s mortalism, we need to take Marie’s critique of self-involvement and individualism seriously. Just like those she writes of who misunderstand “mélange” in terms of an impure mixing of worldly activity and spiritual contemplation, critical approaches that retain personal power and self-fulfillment as the goal of spiritual and apostolic activities frequently construct oppositions between world and spirit, body and soul, community and individual that end up neglecting or reducing Marie’s

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core assertions about worldly activity, bodily ability, spiritual practice, and life in community.14 The mixed life is a practice that is not about the self, unlike the mélange Marie identifies with self-involvement. Thus, functional notions of the body are evident in both Marie’s writings about her mortifications, visions, and other early spiritual experiences and in later discussions of bodies acting in community. In both cases, her aim is to forsake self-love but not the body or worldly activity. These formulations accord with Ursuline practices begun in the early years of the order but continuing in France as the Ursulines became an enclosed teaching congregation. Ursuline activities in France and Canada depend on the same notions of an active body dedicated to service in community rather than individual expressions of spiritual purity. However, the Canadian mission raises new issues as well, not least the practical challenges of maintaining enclosure and effecting conversions in a frontier outpost, but also those related to publicizing Ursuline activities in the new world in order to garner financial and political support. In addition to highlighting Marie’s immersion in community in her letter to the Ursuline nuns in Lyons upon the death of Marie de l’Incarnation, Marguerite pointedly quotes Marie as attributing her obedience in following communal life to a vision of Canada she received that led to her involvement in the founding of the convent in Québec. This “hidden life,” as Dablon calls it, was publicized in part by the Ursulines through circulaires mortuaries like this one, letters written upon the death of a nun to be circulated around houses of that order. In these as well as many other letters written by the Ursulines in Québec, dreams and visions related to the founding of the convent figure large. These dreams are used by the Ursulines to highlight their practices as well as their calling in ways that are usually not evident in Jesuit treatments of their obedience and exceptionalism. Marie writes about these founding visions repeatedly throughout her life, describing them in detail in her relation of 1654, but also alluding to them in other letters including a “testimony” published in the Jesuit relations that she wrote upon the death of Madame de la Peltrie.15 In the most frequently cited of these visions, Marie dreamed that she was with a secular woman whom she led “with giant strides” 14 While scholars focusing on Marie alone frequently focus on psychological, spiritual, and social motivations related to individual self-realization at the expense of accounting for her immersion in Ursuline community (this is particularly the case for those writing specifically about her mysticism), scholars of the Ursulines and women’s religious orders often treat Marie and other mystics as anomalies. In focusing on Marie’s functionalism, I aim to bridge these two emphases. 15 Marie’s role as founder is treated variously by scholars. Some suggest that her initiative led the way; others treat her as a pawn in a larger colonial/historical movement. It is clear that she was one of many women interested in this kind of apostolic activity, that she showed great initiative in putting forward her cause as well as the cause of religious women generally, that the material support of Madame de la Peltrie was crucial and that Marie’s dream notwithstanding, Marie was introduced to Madame de la Peltrie only after the secular woman had formulated her plans and was looking for religious partners. What I find significant is the number of scholars who either overemphasize Marie’s role as founder as though she was the only person who could get things done or underemphasize her activities within a system and communities that were developing avenues for women’s apostolic activities around the world.

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and “great fatigue” to a beautiful and silent place where they saw the Blessed Virgin with the baby Jesus in her arms. Beneath the pinnacle on which the Virgin was seated was a vast country. The Virgin told Jesus of her plans for this country and for Marie herself as the dreaming nun “strained toward her with outstretched arms” (Mahoney 108–109). When Marie told her confessor of this dream, he told her that this was Canada, a place that until then she had thought “was invented to frighten children” (Mahoney 236, letter to her son October 3, 1645). Later, “the Divine Majesty strongly urged me to reveal everything which had happened to me concerning Canada” (Mahoney 120) so she told her new spiritual director, Father Salin, only to be strongly rebuffed. This, she explains, left her “so cowed that I did not dare say anything about my interest in Canada” (Mahoney 121). Nevertheless, her interest “was discovered.” Eventually, “the Divine Majesty made it clear that he wanted me to do something about the command he had given me, and he strongly urged me to set aside my fear and rise above human respect in order to reveal all that was in my mind about Canada” (Mahoney 121), leading her to contact Georges de la Haye, Father de Lidel, Father Poncet, and Dom Raymond, among others. Eventually Father Poncet met M. de Bernières, which led to the introduction of Marie and Madame de la Peltrie, now assumed to be the secular woman in her first dream (Mahoney 126). Marie describes several such transports in the relation of 1654 anticipating her participation in the mission to Canada. In each of the following passages, the body is described as left behind as she envisions the rigors it will go through in “a life in which I would be hidden and unknown” (Mahoney 130). While it is true that in body I was bound by my rule of enclosure, nevertheless, my spirit did not cease its travels, nor did my heart cease its loving solicitations to the Eternal Father for the salvation of the many millions of souls whom I constantly offered him. (Mahoney 113) My spirit, withdrawn from my body, seemed to have gone beyond me, which caused my body to suffer a great deal. Even while I ate, I was journeying through the country of the savages, working for their conversion and helping the missionaries. (Mahoney 116) For these three days Our Lord possessed me so completely that I could neither eat nor sleep nor do anything else. I was totally withdrawn and separated from everything. I saw all that would happen in Canada. I saw crosses without end: interior abandonment by God, a crucifying trial from creatures, and a life in which I would be hidden and unknown. Then his Divine Majesty spoke to me, piercing me through with his words: “Go and serve me now at your own expense; go and give me proof of the fidelity you owe me in return for the great graces I have already given you.” I cannot tell you the terror I felt at this thought. (Mahoney 130)

In these passages Marie describes withdrawal from her body in order to imagine a still physical participation in the Catholic apostolate, something that nuns were beginning to contemplate more realistically during the seventeenth century even as, paradoxically, their activities outside of clausura were being limited. The dream in which she takes a secular woman by the hand and draws her along “with giant strides” and “great fatigue” (Vie 229) is particularly striking for the way it evokes the

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physicality of dreaming (in another version of this dream, Marie suggests, instead, that they are flying, for they eventually “descended to earth” [Thwaites, v. 56, 1671– 2: 245]). Characteristically, Marie goes on to remark after this final passage that no one noticed this state because she was so engaged in final business and farewells. In this simultaneous withdrawal from and evocation of the body, all in the service of an apostolic mission that challenges rules about the enclosure of nuns that were more strictly enforced after the Council of Trent, we see something akin to the functionalism of Bradstreet, Hutchinson, and Sor Juana—a use of the body without valuing it that challenges a symbolic order attempting to confine women to “female” roles and places. For Marie and other Ursulines, however, this characterization of the body enabled action on a global scale. In their letters, which circulated well beyond the Ursuline houses, the Québec nuns emphasize a “hidden life” that is characterized by selfless ability rather than self-obfuscating obedience. While her own dreams focused on movement around the world to save souls, Marie also writes of another vision anticipating the founding of the convent in Québec in which Native Americans appear in France in order to save the soul of a nun. In a letter sent to the Ursulines in Lyons upon the death of one of her co-founders, Marie de St. Joseph, and soon edited by Père Paul Le Jeune for inclusion in the Jesuit Relations, Marie gives two reasons for sending an account that contains much that is already known to her readers there: first, to show the continuity and progress of God’s influence over her soul and second, to provide a memoir that will instruct those who succeed them in Québec. These reasons are clearly interdependent—Marie de St. Joseph’s spiritual maturation is linked to the institution of the Ursulines in Québec. This is a long letter, much longer than Marguerite’s about Marie de l’Incarnation, reflecting both the close relationship between the two Maries (Marie writes movingly about her personal sense of loss to both her son and Marie de St. Joseph’s sister) and Marie’s interest in reflecting on the founding of the convent in Québec. In his edited version of this letter, Le Jeune’s treatment of female heroism is not as paradoxical as Claude Dablon’s later discussion of Marie de l’Incarnation as femme forte. On the contrary, his additions to Marie’s letter include repeated references to the Ursulines as Amazons, a formulation the Ursulines themselves use, and he observes that their voyage was longer than that of Aeneus. And yet the effect is similar to what we find in Dablon—her heroism is exaggerated in individual terms while “the continual and generous practice” (Corr. 1011) that reflects the progress of both her soul and the Ursulines as an institution in Québec fades. Before treating Marie de St. Joseph’s dream, we need to take a look at how both Marie de l’Incarnation and Le Jeune characterize Marie de St. Joseph’s commitment to chastity because this quality crucially informs her vision. In the first paragraph describing her childhood, Marie de l’Incarnation makes the point that Marie de St. Joseph was extraordinarily invested in purity from an early age by narrating a series of events exemplifying this virtue in a single paragraph: Her mother, walking on wooded paths, sent by a male servant a request that [Marie] join her so they could take some enjoyment together. This man who carried her in his arms, having touched her intimately [à nud], whether by accident or otherwise, she became inconsolable, and she shouted and cried so much that no one could calm her. A man of quality seeing the aversion that she had of those of his sex, wanting to amuse himself,

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stole a kiss, but she was so horrified by this action that she slapped him so hard that he was quite confused. Her father seeing her flee the view of men and without knowing what Religion was, saying she wanted to be a nun, irritated her often for recreation, telling her that he wanted to marry her to a little gentleman her own age, and feigning that some little presents that he gave her were from him. These recreations, however innocent, afflicted her strangely and made her suffer, so much that if her mother had not persuaded her father to stop it, she would be dead of sorrow. (Corr. 437)

In addition to showing Marie de St. Joseph’s strong investment in purity, the multiple examples in Marie’s paragraph also suggest her vulnerability to repeated assaults by men who in all cases, including that of the male servant, may be wellmeaning but nonetheless attempt to assert their power over her in oppressive ways. Le Jeune includes all these events, but separates them so the sense of systemic abuse disappears. He augments the description of the male servant’s assault, citing “a very exact account [she gave me] in New France.” Her parents were taking a walk, one day, in the wooded path on one of their estates, when they sent for their little Marie, who was then only four years old. The valet de chambre, or footman [le laquais] who brought her in his arms, gave her on the way some improper caresses; the poor child began to cry and to resist, in so strange a manner that this astonished man had much difficulty in framing a falsehood to conceal the cause of her tears. Now I would willingly assert that this was the greatest sin against purity she ever committed.... Speaking to me, then, afterward about that man’s caresses, which were over in a moment, she still wept hot tears,—not that she believed she had committed any fault in the matter, but from a holy jealousy for purity, lamenting with sorrow that, after having been so expressly dedicated and attached to the blessed Virgin, she should have had that unfortunate experience, to the detriment of her purity.” (Thwaites, v. 38, 1652–3: 71).

Le Jeune’s description of this as “the greatest sin against purity she ever committed” should not be read, I think, as an all too familiar “blame the victim” response to sexual assault. Indeed, his description of Marie’s sense that she was not at fault and yet still her purity had been compromised could be seen as quite sensitive to the contradictory emotions of sexual assault victims. Still, his telling elevates her purity through this contradiction and emphasizes her victimization through the less ambiguous and more melodramatic narration of the servant’s crime. As with femme forte, he treats her as exceptional because of a paradoxical relationship between sin and purity. What is lost is an emphasis on growth that characterizes Marie’s letter. Her initial discussion of Marie de St. Joseph’s childhood defense of purity provides the groundwork for her narrative of the young woman’s development as first she “begins to have the use of reason” (Corr. 437) and then receives and accepts the call to Canada. Le Jeune omits an encounter that is central to this development. Having taken the veil, Marie describes her as “practicing virtue in a manner even purer and freer than she had during her noviciate” (Corr. 443). She then tells of having given Marie a copy of the life of St. Francis Xavier and of their shared interest in news about the missions in New France that were just coming to their attention, adding that Marie de St. Joseph worried that she would not be able to participate because of her parents, her sex, her condition, and her youth. (Le Jeune says instead, “they both

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regarded as folly [this desire to go to Canada],—not seeing with what fuel it could be fed, and unable to conceive that persons of their sex and condition were destined ever to be sent even unto the ends of the world” [Thwaites, v. 38, 1652–3: 97].) This short section in Marie’s letter ends with what might seem like a non sequitur, a description of Marie de St. Joseph’s struggle with a priest who knew her parents and when he visited her constantly urged her to remove her veil. Now she is able to respond with argument, insisting that she only needs ears to hear him and a tongue to respond to him. When he counters that no one will ever know what happens and she should not fear giving him satisfaction. “This demand supported by motives so base and so human horrified this young nun so much that she responded severely that God was present and it was to him that she bore respect, and that she did not want to witness any more of these actions from him” (Corr. 444). The priest retreats in confusion. Thus, in this section in which the two nuns share their interest in the global activities of St. Francis Xavier, Marie de St. Joseph also takes an important step in learning to guard her purity in a reasoned, active way. All this leads up to the dream that signals her call to Canada. This is how Marie de l’Incarnation writes of it: One night she found herself in spirit at the entrance of a very beautiful and spacious plaza, closed in by houses and boutiques filled with all the instruments of vanity, where the people of the world were accustomed to take themselves and lose themselves. She firmly demured from entering this place, afraid to see that all those who entered there were foolishly attired at these boutiques, where they were charmed by the false brilliance of their vanity and were there being taken as in snares. That which frightened her the most was to see a priest stray there and lose himself there .... Not knowing how to leave for that place where she was obliged to go, seeing that there was no other road, there was a great risk that she would lose herself, she knew not how to resolve her problem. Just as she was in this perplexity, she perceived that all along this place, a large number of young people, strongly resolute but rather ill-made, and dressed like Savages, divided into two bands that were like two hedges through which she passed without peril. Just as she passed, she heard clearly these words, “It is by us that you will be saved” but casting her eyes on the pennant extending there, she noted that it was written in an unknown language and that she couldn’t understand it. She could no longer understand distinctly by whose favor she left this grand peril (Some believe that it was the good angels of the savages) but she remarked that the priest, who was there lost, was he of whom I have spoken, who wanted to make her lift her veil with such curiosity, and who after fell into apostasy twice. (Corr. 445–46)

Thus her dream is the culmination of this series of assaults—Marie de St. Joseph is saved from the world of consumption in which she was raised—a world in which she was herself a valuable commodity (her father’s teasing threat to marry her off reflects a significant fact of life for noble young women). The presence of the bad priest, now lost, enhances the sense that this is another step in the progress of her soul that Marie emphasizes, though not characterized in individual terms as it was before. Marie de l’Incarnation signals their shared interest in the apostolate when she writes of giving Marie de St. Joseph the life of St. Francis Xavier. Marie de St. Joseph is then shown to have the reason and pious righteousness to face the challenge of the bad priest, but her final call comes in the guise of a dream in which native youth save her from the vanity of life in France. The indecipherable flag suggests the later

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successes of Québec Ursulines in learning and teaching native languages just as the secular woman in Marie de l’Incarnation’s dream foreshadows the important role of Madame de la Peltrie. Marguerite’s discomfort with regard to visions and mortifications is founded on a desire to emphasize able bodies in community. But these founding visions are important to the Ursulines sense of themselves and their self-presentation to a public whose support they seek. Marie de l’Incarnation dreams of her spirit escaping her body “bound by my rule of enclosure” (Mahoney 113) while Marie de St. Joseph envisions escaping a world of vanity in which she, as a noble young woman, is an object of value frequently tormented by the objectifying activities of men. But ultimately their dreams depend upon and enable embodied practices in a manner that treats the body functionally, a functionalism that depends both on their dedication to community and their missions to save lost souls. A key issue in understanding Ursuline activities in Québec involves their relationship to the Native Americans they taught and attempted to convert. While their writings about community and the active life clearly challenge the tendency in writings by men to treat them as hidden, exceptional, and subordinate, how did these European women understand their relationship to other groups who were similarly subordinated? Bruneau identifies a telling contradiction in Marie’s position on clausura. She often expressed a desire to be active beyond the bounds of the cloister but when talking about her Indian students, she equated the cloister with civilization and the desire to be outside to savagery (116). Davis, on the other hand, suggests that Marie de l’Incarnation identified “patterns of likeness” between herself and her Indian converts. In his book on Catherine Tekakwitha, Allan Greer suggests that male/female and savage/ civilized polarities shaped discourses about native women that shared many of the contradictions that we have already observed in Helkiah Crooke’s and other male writings about sex difference. Though I do not undertake it here, I suggest that further consideration of the ways in which functionalism and moderation are used to challenge the polarities that position women as objects might also apply to civilized/ savage polarities. In a letter to her son, Marie explains the difficulties the convent faces in the new world, arguing that she is in no hurry to see new sisters sent over who may not prove to be up to the challenges of New France. I assure you that I need a courage stronger than any man to carry the cross which is heaped up in our affairs as well as in the general affairs of the country where all is full of thorns, where one must walk in darkness, and where even the most clear-sighted are blind, and everything uncertain. (Mahoney 250)

Marie makes it clear that the new world experience requires something more of women that makes their endeavor greater. Marie’s discussion of strength gained from the Virgin Mary nicely exemplifies the combination of efficiency and devotion this involved. Marie explains that before their convent burned down in 1650 she had always been devoted to Mary, but she had never experienced the same constant communication with her, despite her given name, that she had with the Word Incarnate (Mahoney 168). However, once she dedicated herself to the rebuilding of their convent,

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Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700 all the aversion I had had toward this plan disappeared and I felt strong and full of courage to spend myself day and night for this work which I considered to belong especially to the most Blessed Virgin, our mother and superior .... I no sooner began than I felt her help in an extraordinary way so that she was continually present to me .... She accompanied me everywhere in all the comings and goings that were necessary for me from the beginning of raising the walls until the very end of the work. As I made my way around I spoke with her, saying, ‘Let us go, my divine Mother, to see the workmen.’ According to circumstances, I would be climbing up or down, along the scaffolding, without any fear, always talking to her in this way. Sometimes I was inspired to honor her by singing hymns or some of the antiphons of the Church. I followed these inspirations, often saying to her, ‘My divine Mother, please keep our workmen safe.’ And it’s a fact that in the whole work of construction she took care of us so well that no one was injured. My weakness needed this assistance to endure all the fatigue I underwent even before the masonry was begun. (Mahoney 168–69)

Marie reports that she was not alone in her vision; someone else was told by the Virgin that she would rebuild the convent herself. Lierheimer cites Rapley and others when she observes that the Virgin Mary was generally depicted in the image of the person venerating her. Thus, the Ursulines portrayed her “as a model for Ursuline teaching and eloquence” (415–16, Rapley 170–73). She was also, it would appear, a model for efficient management and physical endurance. Exceptional Women, The “Vie Commune,” and Functionalism By focusing on functionalism, we can resist overreading the body symbolically in Marie’s mortifications and underreading it as the vehicle of untheorized activity in the new world. In fact, the break between pre-Ursuline mortifications and Canadian activities is not nearly as absolute as many critics imply. In other words, we need to take Marie at her word when she tells Marguerite that “she was obliged to avoid any kind of singularity.” In this context, her functionalist understanding of bodies is fundamental to her understanding of effective activity in community and to her participation in the Ursuline apostolate in Canada. That Bossuet praised Marie speaks to her success in living the mixed life and avoiding unwanted attentions for her mysticism. Bossuet’s praise may also reflect the positive associations that existed between her mysticism and the “hidden” activities of the new world apostolate. But given the copious correspondence of Marie and the other Ursulines as well as the occasional references made to their endeavors in the Jesuit Relations, the description of this life as “hidden” is not entirely accurate. Marie does remark on the slights of the Jesuit Relations16 and occasionally bridles at the limits placed by clausura and the 16 In a letter written to Claude on August 9, 1668, she points out that the Relations do not include much about the Ursulines because they are concerned with “the progress of the Gospel.” “If it is said that we are useless here because the Relations do not speak of us, it would have to be said that Monseigneur our Prelate is useless, that his Seminary is useless, that the Seminary of the Reverend Fathers is useless, that Messieurs the Ecclesiastics of Montreal are useless, and finally that the Hospital Mothers are useless because the Relations say nothing of all this. And yet they provide the support, the strength, and even the honor of the whole

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governance of the bishop; these forces hide their endeavors while Ursuline efforts with their students and letters describing their mission correct the record. But what also seems to be at work in this “hidden” is a self-abnegating modesty marking an absence when described from the outside and positive practice when described from the inside, a distinction made evident by Marie in her letter to Claude describing “la vie cachée” and what it means to avoid mélange. These various uses of “hidden” as both disappearance and as practice are suggestive for our understanding of the women’s archive—we need better models for appreciating the relationship between those who stand out as exceptions, what Stephanie Merrim calls “the Tenth Muse phenomenon” (Early xli), and those who remain “hidden.” In both cases, individual subterfuge does not adequately describe the forms of resistance and critique taking place. Marguerite and Marie repeatedly insist on the link between heroism and “la vie commune” and in doing so see the Ursulines as a dynamic community in ways that reflected ambitions stretching beyond the limits of the convent and obedience to male church hierarchy. For instance, in a letter to Mère Angelique of the Ursuline convent in Tours, written in 1664, Marie writes of her desire to serve God outside the cloister. It is true that our cloister does not yet permit us to follow the preachers of the Gospel in those countries which they are constantly discovering. Nevertheless, inserted into this new Church as I am, Our Lord having done me the honor of calling me here, he has so linked me with them in spirit that it seems to me that I am completely one with them and that I labor with them in their precious and exalted conquests. (Mahoney 264)

She may not openly challenge the patriarchal hierarchy of the church, but her “yet” shows that she understood the practices of the church to be changeable. Though always obedient to her sense of God’s will and largely obedient to the men who stood as his interpreters on earth, Marie indicates by her words and actions that the roles of women in the church are shaped through the practices of communities. Four years earlier she assured Mère Ursule de Ste. Catherine of the Tours community that although the bishop had ordered the mother superior to open all letters sent from France, she obeys by breaking the seals but does not read them. “Reverend Mother and I have always observed this faithfully when we were in charge in order to permit freedom to our Congregations to write to us whatever they wished” (Mahoney 260). Within the limits of obedience, Marie finds ways to challenge or stretch the strictures placed on women. This is not done primarily through individual resistance but rather in conjunction with other Ursulines. Her functionalism, like that of the other women treated in this book, uses the body and that usefulness links her to others. In 1650, the Ursuline convent in Québec burned down when coals left in the dough trough to keep the bread dough from freezing caught fire, quickly engulfing the pine building in flames. When she first describes the fire to Claude in a letter dated 3 September 1651, Marie writes that God prevented her from climbing the stairs to save some clothing and other provisions, an act that would have probably ended in country” (Corr. 802–803; Joyce Marshall 336–37, I have modified this translation). She adds that some references to the Ursulines were edited out in France, mentioning supporters in France who were displeased with these changes.

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her death, by making her “forget this thought, in order to follow that which he gave me to save the business papers of our Community. I threw them from the window of our room, and that which came to hand” (Corr. 413). In La Vie, Claude adds, “excepting those things which served my own needs which I voluntarily abandoned to the fire” (Vie 417). Claude’s addition is clarified in a later letter in which Marie explains in greater detail what went through her mind during the fire. It seemed to me that I had a voice in myself that told me what I should throw from our window and what I should leave to perish in the fire. I saw in a moment the worthlessness of all earthly things, and God gave me the grace of such great destitution that I cannot express the effect of it in either speech or writing. I wanted to throw our Crucifix that was on our table, but I felt restrained as though it was suggested to me that this was disrespectful and that it mattered little if it was burned. It was the same with all the rest, because I left my papers and all that served my personal uses. Those papers were those that you had asked from me, and that I had written after a little in obedience. Without this accident my intention was to send them to you because I had undertaken to give you this satisfaction, but with the condition that you were to burn them after reading them. The thought came to me to throw them out the window, but the fear that I had that they not fall into the hands of just anyone made me abandon them voluntarily to the fire .... After all these reflections, I again put my hand on them as if by accident, and I felt moved interiorly to leave them. (Corr. 425–26)

Among those papers was an early version of her relation of 1654, referred to as those papers Claude had asked for, “voluntarily abandoned to the fire” out of humility and for fear of what might happen to them outside the convent.17 Marie was always very cautious about her writings because of her keen awareness of how they circulated. 18 I conclude with this moment not because I can shed further light on the significance of Marie’s decision or on her motivations, but rather because the image of her life story burning up in the convent, left behind because it should remain cloistered evokes the problem of extracting a single life from a communal endeavor. When we emphasize self-realization and self-fulfillment, we may salvage 17 The psychological drama of this moment is enhanced by Claude’s investment in the personal papers she abandoned. She describes in her relation purposely avoiding touching him when he was child in order to prepare him for her withdrawal into the convent. When she did finally leave him at the age of 12, he famously went to the doors of the convent crying, “Rendez-moi ma mère” (“Give me my mother!”—Mahoney 96, Vie 187). 18 Carla Zecher and Elizabeth Goldsmith have written about Marie’s epistolary strategies. Goldsmith explains that most life stories by women circulated during the early modern period, including Marie’s, were written “to record and justify an experience of separation from their household” (3). “In France, the first women to circulate their life stories were engaged from the outset with a community of readers. They presented their stories to the public because they wanted a larger role in the shaping of their own identity, which they understood from the beginning to be an interactive process. Whether the point of departure for the circulation of these stories was a ‘command’ to write coming from a spiritual director, or a public scandal making it imperative that the testimony of a particular woman be heard, women circulated and published their autobiographies to contribute and respond to other forms of public discourse” (Goldsmith 7). One of the challenges we face as readers is locating these writings within a context that allows us to appreciate goals beyond self-realization.

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an endangered story from the flames, but in doing so it becomes a survivor and a relic out of context. An important element of my argument in this book is that “subjectivity” and models of ironic “subversion” do not sufficiently explain the feminist strategies of the women I study because these terms refer to formulations of the self that were only beginning to emerge in the seventeenth century and are often associated with characterizations of these women as isolated and situated in opposition to patriarchal norms. The women I study engaged the discourses of their time critically and directly; they also participated in community and institutions that were an integral part of their thinking. Their use of functionalist notions of the body to rework assumptions about the hierarchical relationship between body and soul is often framed as demanding a modesty that enables both a deeper spirituality and responsible activity within community. In addition to providing another example of functionalist challenges to a dualistic relationship between body and soul that enable women’s activity in this world and ungendered spiritual contemplation of divinity, the writings of Marie de l’Incarnation add to this study a fuller appreciation of community that in turn serves to highlight those aspects of functionalism that challenge individualism. Like Sor Juana, Marie has ambitious dreams, but rather than reaching upward and falling as she explores the vanity of human and artistic endeavors, in her dreams Marie moves outward, striding around the world with other women as part of apostolic activities that participated in the imperial ambitions of the age. Marie’s functionalist understanding of the body as a mystic is always attuned to community, but once she enters the Ursuline convent, it is transformed into a more fully realized practice in community. In Hutchinson’s radical challenge to individualism, the dance of the sister humors in Bradstreet’s poem, and the connectedness of Sor Juana’s dreamer to this world, we also see the significance of the collective. The women I study did not see themselves in isolation and we are mistaken if we impose that isolation on them.

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Conclusion Functionalist arguments developed by Anne Bradstreet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Anne Hutchinson, and Marie de l’Incarnation reframe the demand that women remain modest and silent by arguing for an understanding of the body that does not emphasize its value or assert the self arrogantly. Simply by making these arguments, the women I study refuse the injunction to remain silent while challenging the assumption that to speak is to be unchaste. However, their positions are more nuanced and complex than this, arguing for the activity and functionality of the body in this world while refuting characterizationss of the body as something which must be transcended by the soul in both this world and the next. Each of these women is responding to gynesis in influential discourses of the period. In the scientific realm, Helkiah Crooke and others unveil the female body and assert that women are not errors or monsters in part to signal their more modern attitude toward medical inquiry—women’s bodies allow them to distinguish empirical investigations from scholastic commentary. In early modern theology and spiritual discourse, the feminine is used to mark a personal transformation—a new awareness of one’s sin and of grace. Puritans would have understood this rhetoric as a new way of thinking (albeit also an old way of thinking insofar as it professed to return to an earlier purity), separating them from Catholics, heathens, and less enlightened Protestants. Meanwhile, seventeenth-century treatises on lay devotion by clerics like François de Sales use women and femininity to mark the newness of early modern Catholic thought and practices. As Jonathan Sawday observes, in both Catholicism and Protestantism the passivity, divisibility, and/or penetrability of women’s bodies is used metaphorically to figure both Christ’s sacrifice and male spiritual subjectivity (217). Finally, both Protestants and Catholics wrote of exemplary women in the new world in order to garner support for their endeavors in the Americas. The strategies used by Catholic and Protestant women to respond to metaphorical and symbolic figurations of women’s bodies are likewise similar. Although there are important distinctions between the Catholic nuns and Puritan goodwives I study in this book, the more relevant distinction, I find, is between poets and religious activists. Bradstreet and Sor Juana specifically claim the works I study in this book as their “own,” written privately, they insist, to satisfy their own artistic and intellectual impulses. Bradstreet declares in a poem addressed to her father included at the beginning of The Tenth Muse, “My goods are true (though poor), I love not stealth” (ll.36–41) while Sor Juana’s describes Primero Sueño as “the only piece I remember having written for my own pleasure” (Answer 65).1 Both Bradstreet’s and Sor Juana’s 1 Sor Juana’s assertion of ownership is in part an act of modesty—she has not willingly made her writings public. For Bradstreet it is an act of humility—she has not copied du Bartas. In the second edition of her poems, however, Bradstreet also suggests that she did not willingly publish her poems—her “rambling brat” and fatherless, “ill-formed offspring” entered the wider world without her knowledge. Feigned or real, in both cases this assertion of ownership suggests that these are not merely derivative poems and it is therefore unsurprising that they would develop arguments that differ from those of their models.

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poems are encyclopedic (literally, encompassing “the whole circle of liberal arts” [van Schurman, Christian 26]) and have been treated as trespasses and examples of cross-dressing (responses of which they were aware). But these poems they “own” are not simply exercises in mimicry or acts of transgression into forbidden territory. Both ground their surveys of knowledge and philosophical schools in a functioning body that is positioned as hierarchically subordinate to reason and spirit but in such a way that everything within the hierarchy depends upon the working body. For both, this is a modest body understood as moderate and well-functioning—the very modesty that early modern male writers like Crooke and François Fénelon regularly denied women. More importantly, it is neither the vehicle of metaphor nor the base for spiritual transcendence. Thus, the moderate, largely unsymbolic body is used to challenge or at least fundamentally reframe the hierarchies that are frequently used against women. In these instances Bradstreet and Sor Juana do not demonstrate their own moderation by recognizing and admonishing the immoderate behavior of other women. They reframe the argument in ways that concepts like “subversion” and “identification” do not adequately address. Both detail the functions of the body as part of these encyclopedic poems, referring specifically to the works of Galenists in concocting cures and acknowledging the limits of human sensory perception even as they praise the gains that can be made through observation, however limited. As we have seen in Crooke’s writings, men are assumed to be better able to moderate their humors and “lay a law vpon themselues” (276). Thus, medicine, the law, and social hierarchies reinforce each other, with those who are easily “Nockthrown” like women, children, and cowardly men rightfully lower on the social hierarchies. In this way, knowledge and moderation go hand in hand. In claiming particular ownership of poems about knowledge, both Bradstreet and Sor Juana are also laying claim to their own moderation and their gestures of modesty with respect to this knowledge are also expressions of moderation. Their uses of medical functionalism differ from those of men like Crooke in that they describe a functioning, moderate body as fundamental to spiritual and intellectual advancement without relying on gynetic metaphors or a symbolic relationship between body and spiritual transcendence. In the works I study by Sor Juana and Bradstreet, their most interesting feminist gestures are evident not in their language or tactics of individual self-empowerment but in their engagement of new ideas in ways that both refuse and render irrational gynetic tropes. Unlike men who use gynesis to figure a special relationship with God, Sor Juana and Bradstreet both explore failed or imperfect spiritual connection while insisting on a body that is not neutral so much as moderate. Far from signaling a tragic exclusion from dominant metaphysics, they use this functional body to insist on a humanity that is at once frail, enduring, and unmarked by gender hierarchies. One of the common critiques of early modern literary feminism is that it is not joined to communal action in the way that rights discourse and reform movements are joined in the nineteenth century (see for example Kelly 69). As literary women, Bradstreet and Sor Juana engage gynesis, functionalism, and issues of gender in the realm of ideas. Their concerns in the quaternions and Primero Sueño are with knowledge and subjectivity expressed in systems of thought, not communal action. Although I argue that literary figures like Bradstreet and Sor Juana are wrongly treated as isolated exceptions by their contemporaries and modern scholars alike, the

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intersubjectivity evident in their poems on knowledge is located in 1) their knowing engagement of ideas their audience would recognize and 2) their similar challenges to symbolic readings of the body and especially female bodies. In these respects, theirs is a community of ideas in which their arguments dispute particular notions of bounded, individual subjectivity. What Marie de l’Incarnation and Anne Hutchinson bring to this study is a sharper focus on epistemology and intersubjectivity. While Bradstreet and especially Sor Juana treat scientific observation as emblematic of failed but useful ways of knowing, Hutchinson and Marie are explicitly concerned with ways of knowing God’s will situated within community. In the thinking of both, this is manifested as a concern for how the body testifies to God’s will in its functions and not as a sign to be read from the outside. These issues of spiritual testimony are then extended to issues of publicity and politics, as both navigate public discourses that in the hands of men tend to objectify women as exceptions and as objects of possession. Hutchinson and Marie both describe an immediate relationship with God that is not evident in the writings of Bradstreet and Sor Juana. Nonetheless, they both emphasize moderation and bodily practices in this world—they do not reject the body in ways that suggest spiritual transcendence of the body. Rather, the functioning body is an integral part of their understandings of the soul’s relationship to divinity. Discourses related to physiology and relative abilities to exercise moderation engaged by Sor Juana and Bradstreet are evident in debates surrounding the Antinomian controversy and the Ursuline apostolate as well. We see this, for instance, in the language of humors and fancies used by Mercurius Americanus in response to Thomas Weld’s and John Winthrop’s treatments of the monstrous births or John Calvin’s observation that thnetopsychists believe that the soul “is merely a vital power which is derived from arterial spirit on the action of the lungs, and being unable to exist without body, perishes along with the body” (419, cited in Burns 22). Likewise, Bradstreet’s and Sor Juana’s treatments of medical functionalism are inextricable from arguments about the functioning of soul and spirit. On the surface, Marie’s and Hutchinson’s radical emphasis on movements of the spirit seems vastly different from Bradstreet’s and Sor Juana’s interest in worldly phenomena. Yet in all these cases the body is used functionally rather than made to stand in symbolically for an immaterial and superior spirit. Functionalism, as I have explored it here, challenges versions of the symbolic body that are used to subordinate women by associating them with the body while celebrating the transcendence of spirit over matter. In doing so, it also undermines dominant notions of individual subjectivity; using but not valuing the body can foster a dynamic sense of communal agency. Hutchinson’s mortalism and Marie de l’Incarnation’s engagement of communal life and rejection of self-love are especially pointed in their challenge to individuality, but in Bradstreet’s and Sor Juana’s poetry we also see disruptions to the authority of the poet’s voice, references to female precursors, and thematic explorations of limits placed on the spirit by the body that nonetheless feed a richer experience of the processes of body and spirit by freeing the individual from obsessive contemplation of her or his own integrity. In all these examples, the challenge to traditional notions of individual integrity waged by the razing of the symbolic hierarchy between body and spirit does not mark a tragic

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separation of women from the sources of power or indicate modern transgressions against pre- and early modern metaphysics, but rather opens the possibility for a form of female transgression grounded on recognizing not one’s own exceptionality but rather a female tradition of cultural agency as well as a common, ungendered experience of human frailty. Thus, there are two valences to my argument about functionalism, one focusing on literary arguments and the other on religious discourse and practices, but their fundamental similarities demonstrate a link between literary and activist feminisms long before discourses about individual rights were joined to the activism of women’s reform movements in the nineteenth century. In this book, I am critical of readings that apply poststructuralist feminist formulations like Hélène Cixous’ écriture feminine and Luce Irigaray’s mimicry to early modern texts, imagining them as an Other, female discourse in twentiethcentury terms. These twentieth-century feminist theories make sense as responses to the gynesis prevailing in the post-enlightenment theories that inform them but are not easily applied to dynamics of earlier texts. For this very reason, my reading is also highly influenced by these theories, but rather than looking for écriture feminine in the seventeenth century, I look for ways women challenge the symbolic structures that subordinate women and engage the forms of gynesis prevalent in their own time.2 All these women were religious. If they sought greater worldly power, they did so within a religious context—they were not secretly secular, using their beliefs as subterfuge. Throughout this book I find not embodied forms of discourse but rather theoretical arguments against an opposition between body and soul. In each case, the women I study insist on women’s ability to practice modesty as due measure, often using new ideas and cultural formations developing in scientific, theological, and philosophical debates and practices. In doing so, they put particular pressure on those places in these new theories where women’s modesty is characterized as a function of shame. Sometimes they appear to acquiesce to this form of modesty, but even in these cases the result is that they point out a logical fallacy in the treatment of women in the theories they engage directly rather than subversively. The modesty practiced by the women treated in this book involves acting despite one’s own imperfect knowledge of divine will and the limits placed on perception and knowledge by senses that are fallible and bodies that are weak. Whether through encyclopedic poetry or theological arguments about worldly activity, these women argue that one can learn and act in ways that bring about change. In her critique of Jardine’s notion of gynesis, Elspeth Probyn calls for “a little more modesty in putting our selves forward” (80) so that we are better able to recognize “intersubjectivity.” While Jardine emphasizes the transformation of “woman and the feminine into verbs at the interior of those narratives that are today experiencing a crisis in legitimation” (25), Probyn observes that “coding does have effects. Jardine’s account of the feminine in post/modernity is problematic precisely because of the absence in her argument of an analysis of the effects, both discursive and non-discursive, entailed 2 See Sharon Harris’ introduction to American Women Writers to 1800 for a useful discussion of how and why she situates her own theories of early American women’s reading and writing with respect to more recent U.S. and French feminist theories that nonetheless “remain inadequate” (28).

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in being coded as other. What indeed does it mean to be transformed into a verb?” (50). Probyn goes on to conclude that Jardine treats the feminine solely as an ontological category whereas she insists that both ontological and epistemological registers must be engaged simultaneously. What are the consequences of recognizing slippage? Or of not recognizing it? The epistemological, she argues, introduces the conditions of possibility of the self into our notions of that self (16); in other words, the ontological category of self is learned. It is also always partial because learning is never complete, the definitions of such categories are always multiple, shifting, and historically contingent, and the category of self is propagated within a community, which always disrupts any notion of the purely individual. The works of Bradstreet and Sor Juana demonstrate the openness of these categories to debate, but the theological beliefs and practices of Hutchinson and Marie both put greater emphasis on the processes of spiritual inquiry in a manner befitting religious activists rather than literary feminists. With the Ursulines in particular, we find a group of women dedicated to education and apostolic activity whose institutional practices and rhetoric emphasize embodied moderation and functioning community while foregrounding the processes of learning and teaching. As Marie points out in her circulaire mortuaire on the life of Marie de St. Joseph, her purpose in writing is to instruct those who follow them in the history and practices of the convent and to map the progress of Marie de St. Joseph’s soul. Her text is meant to guide others and document a process of growth that is frequently ignored by those seeking only exceptional women. Students of early America have long sought ways to compare the “remarkable” women of this age. But how do we compare Catholics and Protestants, cosmopolitans and women on the frontiers, women born in the Americas and women who immigrated as adults, celibates and mothers (or, in the case of Marie de l’Incarnation, mothers who became celibates)? Conclusions based on shared experiences are not without merit, especially insofar as these women themselves appealed to women’s common experiences. (Sor Juana, for instance, writes in La Respuesta a Sor Filotea of the scientific observations she has made while cooking, adding, “I often say, when I make these little observations, ‘Had Aristotle cooked, he would have written a great deal more’” (Answer 75).) Stephanie Merrim, Electa Arenal (“This life”), A. Owen Aldridge, and Natalie Zemon Davis (Women on the Margins) are among several scholars who compare women in the Americas both implicitly, by juxtaposing their experiences, and explicitly by comparing their discursive strategies. But there is only so much one can do with experiences so varied within very different cultures. In examining feminist functionalism in the responses of Bradstreet, Sor Juana, Hutchinson, and Marie de l’Incarnation to theological, political, and social discourses that had shared roots in biblical and classical understandings of women, I argue that we may find grounds for comparison. Appeals to their shared use of maternal imagery or other expressions of female embodiment either assume too much about these very different women’s experiences of embodiment or are ways of figuring an alternative to patriarchal thought and language that rests on positively valuing women’s bodies. From a different angle, focusing on “neuter” strategies epitomized in the statement “the soul has no sex” imagines a desire and ability to reject sexed bodies. Both approaches may be understood as attempts to value women’s bodies

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differently, attempts that are apt to end in failure because the symbolic order is not that malleable. In contrast, the claims to modesty as keeping due measure I explore in this book do not focus on the value of the body but rather on its uses, especially insofar as such claims enable modest activity in this world and humble attention to the next. Not only is this form of moderation potentially accessible to all the women I study, regardless of their personal situations and investments, it is also linked to epistemological endeavors that can and do lead to change.

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Index Adam 102–103, 107–109 Agrippa, Cornelius 20, 22, 31n12 Aguiar y Seijas, Francisco 48 Aldridge, A. Owen 145 Alexander the Great 38–41, 43–44 annihilationism. See mortalism Antinomian Controversy 85–112 Antinomianism and 90 colonial social issues and 91–92, 93–94 female invisibility in 109n34 gender issues in 92–93 Hutchinson’s civil trial and 94–102 language and signification in 87–88 marriage and 106–109 mortalism and 102–109 preparationists vs. spiritists in 85–86 testimonial relationships in 88–90, 93–102 Arbaces 38–39 Arenal, Electa 52n2, 53n3, 54, 56n6, 145 Arethusa 72–73, 73n19, 73n20, 75 Aristotelian thought 3, 14–15, 18–19, 23–26, 28, 34, 49, 54, 57, 59, 69, 81, 85 Aristotle 7, 26, 74, 145 Arner, Robert D. 20–23 Ascalaphus 62 Bacchus 62 Bacon, Francis 58 Baillie, Robert 85, 92 A Dissuasive against the Errours of the Time 85n6, 89 Bailyn, Bernard 9n15 Barker-Benfield, Ben 99 Bartas, Guillaume du 2, 17, 58, 77, 141n1 Battis, Emery 91n15 Bauhin, Caspar 6n6, 11n10, 34 Beaupied, Aída 60n13, 73n19, 78 Beer, Anna R. 38, 43 Benjamin, Walter 60 Bercovitch, Sacvan 87n8, 94 Bergmann, Emilie 54, 60n13, 74 Bible. See Word (of God) Blackstock, Carrie Galloway 18 Blaisdell, Charmarie Jenkins 3

blazon 11–12 bodies Antinomian Controversy and 81 brains and 84 complete knowledge and 75 Holy Spirit and 81 Marie de l’Incarnation on 129–30 mortifications and 118–27 mystic visions and 131 in Primero Sueño 61–76 as signifying objects 98–99 sleep and 61–64 souls and 129–30 spirit and 4, 14–15, 76, 78, 101, 104, 108–109, 111n36, 112, 118, 122, 128–29, 131, 142–43 symbolism and 4n3, 102, 142–43 Bordo, Susan 4n3 Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne 113, 126n11, 136 Bowtell, Stephen 21 Bradstreet, Anne 6, 14, 17–49, 52–53, 75n22, 77–78, 81, 83n4, 92, 112, 132, 139, 140–43, 145 on Cambyses 41–43 Crooke and 1–3, 11–12, 25n10 exploitation of 47 Galenism and 25 on heat and masculinity 36–46 “Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment, A” 45–46 marriage poems of 45–46 on masculine preeminence 37–45 on microcosmos of the body 37–38, 45–46 overdetermination of patriarchal influence on 47–8 political poems of 36–45 providential history and 43 Ralegh and 38–45 Sidney and 47 see also Tenth Muse Lately sprung up in America, The (Bradstreet, Anne) Bradstreet, Simon 37–38, 45–48 Brathwaite, Richard 42n21 Brown, Peter 4n3

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Brown, Richard 90 Browne, Thomas, Sir 103 Bruneau, Marie-Florine 113, 117n5, 127, 135 Bulkeley, Peter 104–105, 108 Burkholder, Mark A. 53n3 Burnham, Michelle 87, 91n15, 94 Burns, Norman 103, 104 Bush, Sargent, Jr. 82n2 Butler, Judith 4n3, 60 Bynum, Caroline Walker 4n3, 55, 118, 121, 127 Cain 45 Caldwell, Patricia 5n4, 86n7, 87, 89, 94 Calvin, John 143 Cambyses 41–44, 52 Canning, Kathleen 4n3 Cartesian dualism 54, 58–60, 76n23 Cavendish, Margaret 78 Ceres 73 Certeau, Michel de 124n9 Chaucer, Geoffrey 17–18, 21n6, 23, 31n12 Christine de Pizan 5n5, 21n6, 31n12 Cixous, Hélène 144 Clark, Emily 125n10 Clark, Michael 87 clausura 125, 130–31, 135–37 Cleopatra 45n24 comic tradition, ‘woman’ as object in 20–23 community 15, 35, 97, 112, 115–16, 119–20, 123, 126, 130, 135–39, 143, 145 Cotton, John 48, 86, 89–90, 92, 95, 98n24, 102–103, 105–106, 110 “Abstract of the Lawes of New England as they are now established, An” 89 Way of Congregational Churches Cleared, The 85n6, 89 Council of Trent 125n10, 132 covenant 86–90, 101, 107, 109 Craig, Raymond A. 45n24 Crooke, Helkiah 1–3, 6–12, 29–30, 32, 37, 45, 67n17, 77, 135, 141–42 on brains 34–35 Galenism and 25–27 “How profitable and helpefull Anatomy is to the knowledge of God” 33–34n13 on imperfection of woman’s heat 46 on souls 33 on three faculties 34 Cubilié, Anne 85

Dablon, Claude 113–14, 115, 126, 130, 132 Daniel 95 Darius 39–40, 44 David 31, 44 Davis, Natalie Zemon 3, 117n5, 121n8, 128, 135, 145 de Baar, Mirjam 22n7 DeJean, Joan 16n12, 115–16 Derounian-Stodola, Zabelle 17n1 Derrida, Jacques 88, 90, 99 Deslandres, Dominique 127 Diana 61n14 Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock 5n4, 25n9, 84n5, 87n8, 94, 100n26 Ditmore, Michael 90n13, 95, 99 Donne, John 56 Dudley, Thomas 47–48 du Laurens, André 6n6, 11, 11n10, 34 Dyer, Mary 81–84, 88, 92, 98 Eberwein, Jane Donahue 19–20, 23, 39n17, 40–41n19, 43 Elizabeth I 14, 20, 23, 39n17, 44 Epicureanism of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 58–59, 63 Epstein, Julia 4n3 eschatology, spiritualized 105, 107 Eusebius 103 Eve 45, 108, 124 Falloppio, Gabriele 26 familists 83, 90–92, 90n14, 96–97, 103–10 feminism 3–6, 13–14, 16, 19, 21n4, 21n6, 22, 22n7, 23–24, 27–28, 35–38, 48, 57, 59–60, 73–74, 78, 92–93, 109, 114–16, 139, 142, 144–45 double bind and 12, 14, 16 double-voiced discourse and 2, 18, 20, 32, 77 gendered experience and 3–4, 4n3, 13, 25n10, 101, 111, 111n36 femme forte 15–16, 126, 132–33 Marie de l’Incarnation as 113–17 Fénelon, François 1, 142 Findlen, Paula 56, 57n9, 60 Fiol-Matta, Licia 59–60 Francis Xavier, St. 133–34 Franco, Jean 53, 57, 60–61, 69n18, 73n19, 78 Franklin, Benjamin 21n5 free grace controversy. See Antinomian Controversy

Index functionalism 3–4, 6, 12, 14–16, 61, 78–79, 81, 93, 111n36, 112, 116, 118–19, 121, 123, 129, 130n14, 132, 135–37, 139, 141–45 ethical 45 in ethical and social debates 3, 26n11, 45 of Helkiah Crooke 7–9 of male and female bodies 25–27 medical 3, 12, 14, 19, 28–9, 35, 48–49, 67, 76 mortalism and 102–109 in Primero Sueño 76 Renaissance medical 25–26 Galen 7, 26, 33, 60, 70–71 Galenism 25–26, 28, 59–60, 67, 70–71, 74, 78, 81, 142 Gassendi, Pierre 58–59 gender as abstraction in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 52–53 Antinomian Controversy and 92–93 of soul 123 Godbeer, Richard 5n4, 25n9 Godwin, Joscelyn 56n6 Goldsmith, Elizabeth C. 118n6, 138n18 Góngora y Argote, Luis de 56n5, 58n12 Good, Carl 85 Gordis, Lisa 87, 90n13, 94–96, 98n24 Greenberg, Mitchell 127 Greenblatt, Stephen 38 Greer, Allan 135 Grosz, Elizabeth 4n3 Gura, Philip F. 85n6 Gustafson, Sandra M. 96n22, 101 gynesis 4–6, 47, 99n25, 111n36, 141–42, 144 Microcosmographia and 12 women’s response to men’s uses of 13–14 Hall, David D. 85n6, 90, 102n28 Hammond, Jeffrey A. 19n3 Hannay, Margaret Patterson 2n2 Harris, Sharon M. 144n2 Harss, Luis 67n17 heat bodily functions and 55, 67–69, 71, 75, 83n4 inferiority of women and, 23–24, 26 intemperance and 41–43, 52

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masculine preeminence and 8, 25, 27–36, 48, 53 masculinity and 18, 23, 36–46 Helen of Troy 31–32 Hensley, Jeannine 17n2 Herodotus 41–43 Hill, Christopher 103n29 Hill, Ruth 56n7, 58–60, 63, 78 Hippocrates 60 Hobbes, Thomas 103 Holy Spirit 81, 85–87, 90, 92–100, 101, 103–105, 109, 112 vs. Word in Antinomian Controversy 97–98, 110 Homer 17–18, 23 Hooker, Thomas 86 humility topos 2n2, 19, 82, 141n1 humors 24–27, 41–45, 84, 102, 142–43 in “Of the Four Humours” 1–3, 8, 14, 27–36, 48, 53, 56 in Primero Sueño 66–69, 67n17, 70, 76 Hutchinson, Anne 6, 14–15, 19, 55, 78–79, 81–112, 118, 132, 139–40, 143, 145 ecclesiastical trial 102–109 gender issues, awareness of 92–93 on human expression and cognition 87 humoral imbalance and 84 on marriage 107–108 rhetorical treatment of 82–84 signification of body of 98–99 on testimony and revelation 94–96 see also Antinomian Controversy Irigaray, Luce 144 Jamet, Albert, Dom 118n7 Jamieson, Kathleen Hall 16n13 Jardine, Alice 4–5, 13, 144–45 Jean de Meun 21n6 Jed, Stephanie 16n12, 47–48 Jesuit Relations 15, 113–16, 130, 132, 136 Johnson, Edward 91 Johnson, Lyman L. 53n3 Jones, Prudence 73n20 Jordan, Constance 21n4, 23n8 Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor 6, 14, 51–79, 81, 84–85, 92, 94, 112, 129, 132, 139, 140–43, 145 Arethusa and 72–73 Bishop of Puebla and 53, 79 Carta Atenagórica 79

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Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700 Divine Narcissus, The 73n19 on humors 67–9 “In Reply to a Gentlemen ... While Suggesting She Would Better Be a Man” 51–55, 64–65 modesty and 74–76 Neoplatonism and 55–61 on organs 66–67 “Philosophical Satire, A” 52, 76–77 Repuesta a Sor Filotea 53–54, 55, 78, 94n20, 145 on sleep 61–64 on souls 64–66, 69–72 ‘woman’ as vehicle for satire and 22 see also Primero Sueño

Keayne, Sarah 19 Kelly, Joan 5n5, 22n7, 142 Kepler, Johannes 56 Kibbey, Ann 5n4, 91n16 Kircher, Athanasius 56–58, 60, 77 Knight, Janice 86, 88, 98n24, 107–108 Koehler, Lyle 93n19 Lalemant, Jérôme 113 Lang, Amy Schrager 93n19 Laqueur, Thomas 11n9, 25n9 Laval, François de Montmorency 48 legitimacy of women poets 77–78 Le Jeune, Paul, Père 132–33 Leonard, Irving A. 53n3 Lierheimer, Linda 116, 124n9, 125, 136 Lindman, Janet Moore 5n4 López Cámara, Francisco 58n11 Luna 61n14 Lutes, Jean Marie 8n8, 25n10, 45n23, 48 Lux-Sterritt, Laurence 125n10 Mack, Phyllis 84n5, 102n27, 110–11, 111n36 McKenna, Susan 58n11, 76n23 Maclean, Ian 3, 5, 16n12, 21n4, 23n8, 45 on femme forte 114–15 on medical functionalism 25–26 Renaissance Notions of Woman, The 3, 5 on ‘woman’ in comic tradition 21–23 Maclear, J.F. 43n22, 103, 105, 107 McMahon, Helen 25n10, 34n13 Mahoney, Irene 118n7, 121 Malcolmson, Cristina 21n4 Mali, Anya 117n5, 127 Maragou, Helen 38n15, 40n18

Margerum, Eileen 19n3 Marguerite de S. Athanase 113–17, 125–26, 126n11, 127, 130, 135–37 Marie de l’Incarnation 6, 14–15, 55, 78–79, 111, 113–39, 140, 143, 145 early life of 117–18 “hidden life” and 115, 126–27, 129–32, 135–38 “mixed life” and 124–37 mortifications of 118–27 “Notes on a Ten-Day Retreat” 123–24 relation of 1633 119–23, 124n9 relation of 1654 121–23, 124n9, 128–31 Vie de la Vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, La 118 visions of 130–31, 132, 136 Marie de St. Joseph 132–35, 145 marriage functionalism and 3, 26n11, 45–46 male possession of women in 107 resurrection and 105–109 Martin, Claude, Dom 113n3, 117–18, 118n6, 126n11, 138n17 Martin, Wendy 18, 35 Mary 45, 115, 135–36 masculinity male moderation and 1, 13–14, 37, 43–45, 83n4 in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 51–52, 54 see also heat Mather, Cotton 107n32 Merchant, Carolyn 4n3 Merici, Angela 125 Merrim, Stephanie 13, 54, 58n11, 60n13, 73n19, 78, 137, 145 Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (Crooke) 2–3, 6–12, 35, 37, 47 gynesis and 12 medical functionalism and 25–27 Milton, John 103 Minyas, daughters of 62 modernity 57–58, 93–94 modesty Crooke and 6–11 as female shame 1–2, 8–12, 32, 40n19, 60, 74, 76n23, 77, 83–5, 92, 114, 118n6, 120, 126, 137, 144 as keeping due measure 1–2, 4, 8–12, 14, 16, 32, 48–49, 60, 72, 74, 77, 83–85, 96, 111, 120, 137, 139, 142, 144, 146 in Primero Sueño 74–76

Index modesty topos 2n2, 77, 141n1 Morgan, Edmund 91n16 mortalism 81, 89n11, 92, 103–104, 123, 129, 143 annihilationists and 103, 104 as feminist functionalism 6, 102–109 moral implications of 105–106 soul sleepers and 103 mortifications 55, 79, 117 community and 119, 124–28, 135 functionalist discourse on body and 112, 118–24, 130 mysticism and 118–19, 121n8 Myles, Anne 85, 110n35 Mysticism 113, 136 functional body and 55, 78, 117–27, 139 Hutchinson and 78, 110–11, 193 mortifications and 118–19 Neoplatonism 13–14, 54–61 neuter as feminist strategy 14, 52, 54–55, 57n8, 59, 64–65, 79, 145 New, Elisa 93n19 Nuttall, Geoffrey F. 97n23, 102n27

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Powell, Amanda 52n2, 53n3 preparationists 86, 101, 107 testimonial relationships and 88 Primero Sueño (Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor) 14, 55–76, 84, 93, 112, 129, 141–42 Arethusa and 72–73 functionalism in 76 Galenism in 70–71 humors in 67–69 modesty and 74–76 Neoplatonism and 55–61 organs in 66–67 sleep in 61–64 soul in 64–66, 69–72 Probyn, Elspeth 144–45 Proserpina 61n14, 73 Pudaloff, Ross J. 87n8, 94 Puritanism 97n23 “antihumanism” and 87 oaths and 89 Quakers 97n23, 102n27, 110–11 querelle des femmes 5n5, 13–14, 19–24, 78 in “Of the Four Humours” 27–36

oaths Hutchinson calls for 85, 89–90 testimony and 89, 112 O’Malley, C.D. 6n6, 11, 11n10 O’Malley, John W. 125n10 Ong, Walter J. 89n11 organs 3, 26, 29, 34, 36, 49, 66–67, 70, 72, 85 Ortner, Sherry B. 4n3 Ostriker, Alicia 2n2 Otanes 42–43, 128n12 Oury, Guy, Dom 113n1, 113n2

Ralegh, Walter, Sir 38–45 Rapley, Elizabeth 1, 125n10, 128, 136 Reeser, Todd W. 1n1, 13, 83n4 Reis, Elizabeth 100n26 Requa, Kenneth A. 18 Rivers, Elias L. 75n22 Romack, Katherine 22n7 Rosenmeier, Jesper 108n33, 110n35 Rosenmeier, Rosamond 20, 23, 37n14, 43, 46 Round, Philip H. 5n4, 35, 47–48 Rutman, Darrett B. 91n15

Paul, St. 45, 94 Paz, Octavio 53n3, 54, 56–58, 60–61, 63–64 Peden, Margaret Sayers 52, 56n5, 64n16, 67n17 Peltrie, Marie-Madeline de Chauvigny de la 117, 130–31, 135 Pequod War 91 Perkins, William 86 Persephone 61n14, 73 Pettit, Norman 86n7 Pfandl, Louis 54 Phaeton 57, 73,75 Piercy, Josephine K. 17n2 Plancarte, Alfonso Méndez 52n1, 61n14 Porterfield, Amanda 100n26

Sabat de Rivers, Georgina 57n8, 58n10, 64n16, 69, 74n21 Sadduceeism 92n17, 103, 106–107 Sales, François de 123, 128, 128n12, 141 Salmacis 51–52, 72–73 Salska, Agnieska 18 Sardanapalus 38–39 Sawday, Jonathan 5n4, 7, 11n9, 12–13, 141 Scarry, Elaine 4n3 Schiebinger, Londa L. 4n3, 11n9 scholasticism 3, 6, 12, 22, 35, 48, 54, 57–58, 85, 141 Schweitzer, Ivy 5, 12, 17n1, 18, 20, 47–48, 99n25, 100n26

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scripture. See Word (of God) semiotics. See signification Semiramis 45n24 Shakespeare, William 75 shame (female) 72 cloistered life and 125 in Primero Sueño 74 see also modesty Shepard, Thomas 86, 87, 91n16, 92, 95, 110 Sibbes, Richard 86, 88 “Faithful Covenanter, The” 88 Sidney, Philip, Sir 44–45, 47–48 signification 96 in Hutchinson trials 87–88, 92–93, 98–99 Sisamnes 42 Sisygambis 39–40, 45 sleep 14, 55, 57, 61–64, 67, 70–71, 79, 103–104, 119–20, 122, 128, 131 soul 2, 4, 6, 9, 14–15, 25, 49, 52, 55–56, 58– 61, 67n17, 76n23, 81, 92n17, 93–95, 98–102, 110–12, 128–29, 131–32, 134, 139, 141, 143–45 criticism of others and 72 equality and 4, 7–8, 52–55, 57, 64–65, 110, 145 mortifications and 119–24 in Primero Sueño 64–66, 69–73, 77–79 sensory perception and 33–34, 36, 58–59 vs. Spirit 102–103 spirit, vital and animal 32–36, 44, 58–59, 66, 70, 79, 82 spiritists 86 colonial social issues and 91 testimonial relationships and 88, 96, 99n25, 107 see also Antinomians Stallybrass, Peter 4n3 Stanford, Ann 40n18 Stavans, Ilan 53n3, 56, 58 Stoever, William K.B. 86n7 Straub, Kristina 4n3 Suleiman, Susan Rubin 4n3 Suzuki, Mihoko 21n4 Sweet, Timothy 18, 20 Tarquin 51–52 Tarter, Michele Lise 5n4, 102n27 Tasso, Torquato 114 Tekakwitha, Catherine 135 Tenth Muse (expression) 15–16, 47, 117, 137

Tenth Muse Lately sprung up in America, The (Bradstreet, Anne) 2, 17–45, 141 “A Dialogue between Old England and New” 37 “Of the Four Humours of mans Constitution” 1–3, 14, 27–36, 44, 112 “The Four Ages of Man” 24–27, 39, 44–45 “The Foure Elements” 25 “The Four Monarchies” 14, 37–45, 83n4 “In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess, Queen ELIZABETH, of most happy memory” 14, 20, 23 “The Prologue” 14, 16, 17–18 querelle des femmes and 19–24 Teresa, St. 113 testimony 67, 84–85, 92, 138, 143 bodies and 108–109 functions of according to Hutchinson 94–97 “living testimony” 102, 110 testimonial relationships and 81, 85–88, 100–102, 111 triadic nature of 88–90 vs. covenant in Antinomian Controversy 86 Thickstun, Margaret Olofson 5n4 Thwaites, Reuben Gold 113–14 Tobin, Lad 93n19 Trabulse, Elías 58n10 Traister, Bryce 109n34 Traub, Valerie 11n11 Trueblood, Alan S. 67n17 Turner, Victor 111n36 Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher 26n11 Ursulines 6, 15, 113, 115–17, 124–37, 139, 143, 145 individual expression and power and 127 visions of 130, 135 Vane, Henry 91–92 van der Velden, Hugo 42n21 van Schurman, Anna Maria 22 Vesalius, Andreas 11n10 Vickers, Nancy J. 11n9 virago 40, 45 Vulcan 68–69 Waller, Jennifer 18 Ward, Nathaniel 17–18, 17n1, 20–23, 36, 53, 97

Index Simple Cobler of Aggawam in America, The 20–21, 75n22 Weld, Thomas 81–84, 92, 96n22, 143 Westerkamp, Marilyn 4n3, 93, 111 Wheelwright, John 81–84, 86, 91–92, 96n22, 102, 110, 143 Mercurius Americanus 82–84, 96n22, 110, 143 White, Elizabeth Wade 17n1, 37 Williams, George Huntston 103n29 Winship, Michael P. 85–87, 90, 92, 99n25, 108n33, 110 Winthrop, John 48, 86–87, 92, 109–10, 143 Hutchinson’s civil trial and 93, 94, 96–98, 107 Hutchinson’s ecclesiastical trial and 104 on Hutchinson’s influence 91–92 relationship with God and 99–101 Short Story of the Rise, reign, and ruine of the Antinomians, Familists & Libertines, A 81–84, 93, 96, 97 testimony and 100–101

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witnessing 67, 78, 81, 104, 108–10 biblical precedent for 89 legal nature of 85–90 models of 97, 99–102 oaths and 90 politics of in Hutchinson civil trial 6, 15, 93–102 testimonial relationships and 88, 93 Woodbridge, Benjamin 23 Woodbridge, John 23, 47 Woodbridge, Linda 20, 21n4, 23n8 Word (of God) social order and 97 as testament to God’s will 81, 87–88, 88–89n9, 90–91, 94–97, 99, 100–102, 104, 109 vs. Holy Spirit in Antinomian Controversy 97–98, 98n24 Word Incarnate 121, 135 Zecher, Carla 138n18