By Malak Bazzi and Kelly Plante
Two strands of critical praxis comprise feminists’ response to early modern women writers such as Gertrude More: to locate women’s writings and to recover women’s agency. In 1989, Dorothy Latz edited More’s writings in her 1989 book, “Glow-Worm Light”: Writings of 17th-Century English Recusant Women from Original Manuscript. This recovery of More’s texts made it possible for later scholars to consider More’s agency by studying her writing. Both Kitty Scoular Datta and Jenna Lay, for example, participate in this strand of feminist praxis by analyzing More’s work in order to identify early modern women’s agency. Their scholarship is especially groundbreaking because feminist scholars have historically ignored the writings of English nuns such as More, who may not at first glance display enough agency or proto-feminism to fit into modern feminism paradigms. Also, many nuns’ writings still remain in manuscript and are therefore little known among critics even today. This critical introduction focuses on how twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminist scholars have presented More’s writings in order to track shifting perceptions of her legacy.
In 1989, Latz prefaced her edition of More’s poetry with a biography detailing her early life and her later connection with her spiritual mentor, the famously provocative mystic Augustine Baker. Latz’s presentation and analysis of More’s writing to a scholarly (not necessarily a Benedictine or a Catholic) audience made More’s work more widely accessible. Latz preemptively defends More’s poetry, arguing that “Neglect of Dame Gertrude’s powerful poetry—which is in the tradition of both the sixteenth century Spanish Mystics and of the French Grand Siècle of mysticism—possibly may be due to turn-of-the-century insipid, ‘sing-songy’ modernizations of her highly original poem, interspersed throughout her prose” (25-26). She also defends More’s poetry against criticism on aesthetic grounds, stating it is notable for its metaphors, symbols, and symbolic figures and that More’s use of literary devices “show[s] that the English language was used to transmit ideas of the Continental spiritual writers and mystics, and in this way, they could have come into the mainstream of the seventeenth century English literature including metaphysical poetry” (30-31). An example of More’s poetic style may be seen in “To our Blessed Lady the Advocate of Sinners.” In this poem, More praises God and presents a way to “refresh” her soul by seeking Mary, “the Queen of Heaven and earth”:
Who art the Queen of Heaven and earth,
thy helping hand me lend,
That I may love and praise my God,
and have a happy end.
And though my sins me terrify,
yet hoping still in thee,
I find my soul refreshed much
when I unto thee fly.
(ll. 13-20)
Through alliteration (“helping hand”) and poetic inversion (“me terrify”), More emphasizes both Mary’s intercessory power and her own powerlessness. Yet as this excerpt also demonstrates, More cultivates a plain style that is efficient and unpretentious. While Latz attempts to assert More’s place in the canon by associating her with the metaphysical poetry of Donne and Marvell, her plain style actually belongs to the more modest tradition of religious verse popularized in metrical Psalters, hymns, and ballads.
In 2002, Datta delved deeper into the political context of More’s writing. Datta notes that More’s “writing is at first sight modest, in a low key, done primarily for herself and her fellow nuns” (54). Yet as Datta shows, More’s writings defended the controversial teachings of Baker, who advocated a model in which the individual soul received its direction from God rather than a confessor. Indeed, these polemical aspects led to the 1658 publication of More’s writing, which in turn exerted influence on early modern English Catholics (Marotti, xvi). By focusing on More’s agency within the disputes over Baker’s mysticism, Datta situates More as a proto-feminist and thus recuperates her for a feminist audience.
In 2016, Lay built upon Latz and Datta’s scholarship in order to spotlight More’s role in supporting the development of female agency within the context of her convent. As Lay observes, obedience, or “the question of whom to obey, when, and how much,” “was central to both Catholic and Protestant representations of spiritual crisis” (90). While obedience occurs frequently as a motif in More’s writings, her representation of power relationships (whom to obey, when, and how much) was not traditional, as Lay argues: “More represented herself as a contemplative scholar whose most immediate spiritual relationship was with God, but her writings nonetheless addressed local conflicts over the proper form of prayer and spiritual direction for female monastics” (91). Addressing other female monastics, More redefined obedience as being “dependent not only upon community hierarchies but also upon the individual’s experience of the divine” (91). This focus on the individual rather than the community is in line with the feminist emphasis on women’s agency. In downplaying obedience to other human beings (such as a male confessor), More rewrote traditional hierarchies of power and authorized herself and her readers to encounter God directly without a male intermediary.
In 1633, when More was dying of smallpox in her Cambrai convent, the nuns taking care of her asked if she wished to see a confessor or Baker before her death. More responded that she would see “no man.” In her life, her writing and her death, More’s anti-authoritarian, proto-feminism resonated with the women that surrounded her in her leadership role in the convent. Through the work of feminist scholars, More’s proto-feminist ideas of encouraging women’s agency continue to live on.
Works Cited
Datta, Kitty. “Women, Authority, and Mysticism: The Case of Dame Gertrude More (1606-33).” Literature and Gender: Essays for Jasodhara Bagchi, eds. Supriya Chaudhuri and Sajni Mukherji, pp. 50-68. Orient Longman, 2002.
Latz, Dorothy, ed. “Glow-Worm Light”: Writings of 17th Century English Recusant Women from Original Manuscripts, pp. 21-50. Universität Salzburg, Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1989.
Lay, Jenna. Beyond the Cloister: Catholic Englishwomen and Early Modern Literary Culture, pp. 89-119. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
Marotti, Arthur F. “Gertrude More.” The Early Modern Englishwoman: A —. Gertrude More, ed. Arthur F. Marotti. The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works. Series II. Printed Writings, 1641-1700. Part Four. Vol. 3. Routledge, 2009.