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Eliza’s Babes : Poetry ‘Proceeding from Divinity’ in Seventeenth–Century England
Author(s) -
Longfellow Erica
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
gender and history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1468-0424
pISSN - 0953-5233
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0424.00265
Subject(s) - divinity , poetry , worship , judgement , protestantism , assertion , sociology , politics , tone (literature) , law , literature , philosophy , religious studies , art , political science , computer science , programming language
This article examines the poetry and prose meditations in the anonymous 1652 volume Eliza’s Babes: or The Virgins–offering . The article begins by reconsidering Liam Semler’s recent assertion that Eliza was a Parliamentarian and religiously radical, arguing instead that she was a centrist, loyalist Protestant. The article then examines the handbooks to devotion and meditation from this loyalist tradition that helped define Eliza’s understanding of public and private and how these concepts were gendered. In keeping with writers such as Joseph Hall and Daniel Featly, Eliza views her private devotion as on a continuum which leads to public worship, or ‘thanks’ as she terms it. Eliza uses this paradigm of public and private to justify both the printing of her poems and her very unusual theology of marriage, in which she considers Christ her only true husband. The final section of the article considers whether Eliza’s understanding of public and private offers her more ‘freedom’ than other women writers, and concludes that any judgement of her freedom must be carefully calibrated to the religious and political contexts of her book.