Diane Purkiss

Women, Texts and Histories 1575-1760.

Contributors include: Rosalind Ballaster, Hero Chalmers, Helen Hackett, Lorna Hutson, Kate Lilley, Bridget Orr, Sophie Tomlinson, Susan Wiseman

Literature, gender and politics during the English Civil War

Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Dismembering and remembering: the English Civil War and male identity 2. Republican politics 3. Opening the kings cabinet 4. Charles I 5. Cromwell 6. Monsters and men 7. Milton and monsters 8. Matthew Hopkins and the panic about witches Conclusion Notes Index.

Sounds of Silence: Fairies and Incest in Scottish Witchcraft Stories

This chapter is about storytelling, about two stories told by two seventeenth-century Scottish women accused of witchcraft. The stories these women told are fairy stories, in every sense; stories that had been told before, stories that pass the time, stories that express cultural truths, stories that circulate in oral form and baffle those who wish to add them to the written lexicon, and above all, stories about fairies. I want to argue here that Scottish witches told stories about fairies not out of any straightforward belief in fairies, not out of any longing to satisfy their interrogators, but because the court setting allowed these women to talk about feelings, experiences, and desires that could never normally be given a hearing within their cultures. The women might have told the stories before, but here they were giving their stories to their entire world. The fairy stories I am going to be discussing are the sounds of silence in two senses. Firstly, they represent a moment when a normally silent group — women of the lower orders — makes an appearance as storytellers on the historical stage. Secondly, they represent the things those women could not ordinarily say.

What Do Men Want? Satan, the Rake, and Masculine Desire

If John Milton is ever to succeed in his epic task of justifying the ways of God to men, prior questions need to be addressed: what do men want? When we think of “justification,” we might think of reason, but what will give men pleasure? What will satisfy them? The education that Paradise Lost attempts might well be premised on right reason, but most of its critical cruxes come about when our own “baser” longings intersect and cross over that rational deliberativeness. Desire and attraction play central parts in the poem; though Milton does indeed try his best to foreground the superior charms of thought and rationality, he is no more successful than the liberal and Whig satirists whose visions of liberty and of what men want he in part sets out to correct. The vision in question might run like this: I Rise at Eleven, I Dine about Two, I get drunk before Seven, and the next thing I do; I send for my Whore, when for fear of a Clap, I Spend in her hand, and I Spew in her Lap; Then we quarrel and scold, till I fall asleep, When the Bitch, growing bold, to my Pocket does creep. Then slyly she leaves me, and to revenge th’affront, At once she bereaves me of Money and Cunt. If by chance then I wake, hot-headed and drunk,

Anna Trapnel’s Literary Geography

Anna Trapnel’s utterances were shaped — though not dictated — by the godly networks around her. Each choice she made narrowed the subsequent choices available to her. Her prophecies were an outcome of her dense network of godly interactions.1 Those interactions were socially shaped by her encounters in and outside church, and physically shaped by the geography of her London. By tracing the places and the people she mentions in The Cry of a Stone and her other writings, we can begin to reconstruct who and how and where she knew, and how the networks which embraced her forged her ideas. In this essay, I will explore the way Trapnel’s godly intellect and doctrine were shaped by London — not as a whole city, site of urbanisation, but as the series of village-like fragments. Some were only the size of a street. London itself might well have boasted a quarter of a million people, but Trapnel’s own London was a series of thin slices through those swarms and herds. She partook of discursive, intellectual and literary networks with were created in parishes, and by their leading clergy and lecturers. It was Trapnel’s precise locations within London which allowed her to become a voice for radicalism.