Ruth Connolly

A Proselytising Protestant Commonwealth: The Religious and Political Ideals of Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh (1614–1691)

(2008). A Proselytising Protestant Commonwealth: The Religious and Political Ideals of Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh (1614–1691) The Seventeenth Century: Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 244-264.

Editing Intention in the Manuscript Poetry of Robert Herrick

This essay describes the editing of Robert Herrick’s manuscript poetry and evaluates what the evidence can tell us about the evolution of Herrick’s literary style, modes of publication in manuscript, and the shaping of his literary reputation in that medium. Arguing that the distinguishing quality of manuscript publication is collaboration, the essay proposes using the principle of agency rather than authority when conceptualizing new editions of manuscript poetry.

New modelled cavaliers

ABSTRACT This discussion considers the military and royal chaplain Edward Symmons’ description of the cavalier, delivered in a sermon to Prince Rupert’s troops in 1644. It briefly contextualises Symmons’ description within the hostile description of the cavalier produced by preaching and print sympathetic to Parliament. It then moves to outline the findings of the new research and analysis presented in this issue which examines the culture, writings and afterlife of mid-century royalism. This work revises the currency of the term “cavalier” both for historical and literary scholarship of the seventeenth century.

Bestiaries of feeling: flies, snails, toads and spiders in Richard Lovelace’s Lucasta : PosthumePoems (1659)

ABSTRACT A number of poems in Lovelace’s Posthume Poems describe tiny creatures: snails, spiders, flies, ants and toads. These poetic subjects are bound up literally in their own or others’ substances – ingested or digested by spider’s webs, toad’s spume or magpies’ bellies. This essay reads these tiny bodies as metaphors for particular affective states closely connected to the intestine conflicts of civil war. Interpreting these feelings through a combination of contemporary affect theory, and the symbolic histories of these tiny creatures within the emblem book tradition, this essay argues these poems draw attention to how the material losses experienced by Royalists render the emotional demands of exemplary self-fashioning increasing difficult to sustain. Lyric poetry becomes an unexpectedly appropriate vehicle to articulate this ambivalence. Declared surplus to requirements (at least by Thomas Hobbes) in the new and heavily politicised aesthetic proposed by William Davenant and Hobbes in The Preface to Gondibert (1650), these “tiny creature” poems exploit the perceived inadequacies of the lyric form to diagnose the conditions of a non-monarchical world.

Hester Pulter's Childbirth Poetics

ABSTRACT Hester Pulters poem from the lying-in chamber, “when I Lay Inn”, exemplifies a wider practice in her poetics of foregrounding the sexed female body in her work. This poem’s literalization of the metaphor of the poet-in-childbirth begins Pulters re-examination of her cultures positioning of her body and her writing from the point of view of experiential and experimental knowledge. The configurations of bodies—heavenly and human—offered by the early modern habit of thinking about worlds, minds and wombs by correspondence with one another offer Pulter a route to that positioning and to construct a counterperspective from which to survey it.

Viscountess Ranelagh and the Authorisation of Women’s Knowledge in the Hartlib Circle

In late 1658, the Hartlib circle was in crisis. Two of their figureheads were aging and ill and their financial as well as political patrons were struggling to assist them. Its long-held ideal of European Protestant unity was imploding on the battlefields of Northern Europe and panicky members were still considering plans to support a military attack on the Vatican.1 In a moment in which he despaired for the future of Protestantism, an emotion heightened by news of Oliver Cromwell’s death, Peter Figulus, a senior figure amongst the circle at Amsterdam, translated and circulated amongst his correspondents a series of letters from another member, Lady Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh, which had been sent to him by the circle’s principal secretary and founder Samuel Hartlib.2 These letters, composed eighteen months earlier, perhaps directly to Hartlib, would see her hailed by her European readers as a ‘sybila’ whose powerful and erudite arguments could justify the network’s principles and renew their ambitions.3