Elizabeth Scott-Baumann

Forms of engagement : women, poetry, and culture 1640-1680

Introduction: Reading, gender and form 1. Margaret Cavendish, Nature, and Originality 2. Margaret Cavendish as Editor and Reviser 3. Katherine Philips and Abraham Cowley: Solitude, Dialogue, and the Ode 4. Katherine Philips and Lucy Hutchinson Reading John Donne 5. Lucy Hutchinsons Elegies, the Country-House Poem and Female Complaint 6. Lucy Hutchinson, the Bible, and Order and Disorder Afterword: Untracked paths

“Bake'd in the Oven of Applause”: The blazon and the body in Margaret Cavendish's Fancies

In Poems, and Fancies (1653), Cavendish uses the lavishly idealizing language of Petrarchan love poetry in humorously gruesome recipes. Extravagant, luxurious images are shown to itemize and prepare their subject for consumption like a recipe. It is argued that Cavendishs poems manifest the influence of mid seventeenth-century Cavalier poets such as Herrick and Lovelace. In her corporeal but anti-erotic poems, Cavendish plays with the Cavaliers’ imagery, pushing it to breaking point. It is also argued that Cavendishs startling fusion of food and scientific images does not represent a desire to domesticate science. Instead, Cavendish uses scientific vocabulary and a vitalist natural philosophy to create an alternative poetic representation of the female body to that of Renaissance blasonneurs. It is suggested that Cavendishs poems, as much as her explicitly philosophical prose, demonstrate an innovative and interdisciplinary appropriation of scientific thought.

Lucy Hutchinson, Gender and Poetic Form

While Milton famously rejected rhyme in Paradise Lost, the Genesis poem by his contemporary Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, is in rhymed couplets. This article asks how Hutchinson used the couplet, how her couplets were read by the seventeenth-century readers who encountered her work, and whether the manuscript of her poem can be treated as evidence of how poetic regularity and irregularity were coded with political and gendered meanings in the seventeenth century, and how differently they are so today.

Lucy Hutchinson, the Bible and Order and Disorder

Lucy Hutchinson’s full corpus has only recently come to light, and she now appears as one of the most talented, prolific and adventurous poets of the seventeenth century. Hutchinson was a republican and religious Independent, and her Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson has long been a source for civil war historians, more recently demanding the interest of literary scholars.2 Hutchinson has emerged as a major poet, and several manuscripts have been discovered, re-attributed, or re-considered in the past decade. Hutchinson’s ‘Elegies’ on her husband’s death have received renewed attention, as has her translation of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, one of the earliest into English.3 Alongside consummate classical translation, Hutchinson was also a political polemicist. Like many firm supporters of the power of parliament, Lucy Hutchinson saw Oliver Cromwell becoming a new tyrant with a different name. She wrote a poem exposing Cromwell’s tyranny, and showing Hutchinson’s characteristic hatred of political and literary duplicity.4 For Hutchinson, the name ‘Puritan’ was a term of opposition, which she proudly embraced for exactly the reasons it was used as a pejorative term. In Memoirs she describes puritan being used as a label for any who voiced political dissent, support for the godly and the honest, and opposition to ‘court caterpillars’.5