By Jaime Goodrich
This website presents the first variorum edition of the poetry of Gertrude More, in two formats: 1) a modernized version aimed at non-specialists, including undergraduates; 2) an unmodernized version intended for scholars. More was the most important poet to emerge from the English Benedictine convents founded on the Continent during the seventeenth century, and her politically engaged poetry and prose have already received some attention from historians and literary scholars. Yet despite More’s historical, literary, and religious significance, no authoritative critical edition of her works has yet appeared. This variorum edition of More’s poetry serves as a starting point for filling that gap even as it seeks to bring More’s verse to new audiences, especially non-specialists and undergraduate students.
The Textual Tradition
Gertrude More’s extant writings include an Apology defending her controversial spiritual advisor Augustine Baker, a series of numbered meditations entitled Confessiones amantis (Confessions of a Lover), some devotional fragments, and a handful of poems. Confessiones amantis and the poetry exist in two distinct forms, presenting an editorial conundrum.
MS Rawlinson C 581, a mid-seventeenth-century manuscript copy of Confessiones amantis currently held by the Bodleian Library, begins with three of More’s longer poems (“Amor Ordinem Nescit,” “Of Suffering and Bearing the Cross,” “To Our Blessed Lady”) and contains two additional short doggerel poems within the meditations themselves (“O Lord my God to thee I do aspire,” “O let me rather death embrace”).
In 1658, Francis Gascoigne, a secular priest and brother to Abbess Catherine Gascoigne of the Cambrai Benedictines, published his edition of More’s writings under the title The Spiritual Exercises of the Most Virtuous and Religious D. Gertrude More. Gascoigne included several key texts not found in the Bodleian manuscript (More’s prose Apology and devotional fragments, poems on St Augustine and St Benedict, and a prefatory poem that may be partially authored by More). Yet as Gascoigne himself notes in the preface, he felt no scruples about reworking More’s texts through the addition of manicules and italics. Furthermore, John Clark’s meticulous comparison of the Bodleian manuscript and Gascoigne’s edition has revealed possible structural manipulations. Each version presents a different sequence of the prose meditations in Confessiones amantis, and Gascoigne’s edition also intersperses poetic fragments, primarily from “Amor Ordinem Nescit” and “Of Suffering and Bearing the Cross,” throughout the prose meditations, while removing the two doggerel poems that appear in the Bodleian manuscript.
To complicate matters, Augustine Baker included fragments of More’s prose confessions and poetry in a slightly earlier text, The Life and Death of Dame Gertrude More (c. 1635; extant in two different manuscript versions at Ampleforth Abbey and Stanbrook Abbey). This work was based on More’s handwritten manuscripts. Furthermore, a miscellany from the English Benedictines at Paris (MS 23, Colwich Abbey) also contains extracts from More’s poetry. Would-be editors of More’s writings are thus faced with a variety of competing versions with no clear rationale for textual precedence.
More’s writings have seen five modern editions, most of which rely on either the Bodleian manuscript or Gascoigne’s edition as a base text. For centuries, Gascoigne’s edition was the best-known and most accessible version of More’s writings, and it thus served as a base text for a modernized edition by Benedict Weld-Blundell (The Inner Life and the Writings of Dame Gertrude More, 1910) and an original-spelling edition by Dorothy Latz (“Glow-Worm Light”: Writings of 17th Century English Recusant Women from Original Manuscripts, 1989). While Latz, for example, was aware of Baker’s Life, she does not mention the Bodleian manuscript and likely did not know of its existence. In 2009, Arthur Marotti published a facsimile edition of Gascoigne’s text as part of the Ashgate series The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works. Although Marotti notes the existence of the Bodleian manuscript, his focus is naturally on the Gascoigne edition and its historical context, not variants between the two versions.
Recent editors have chosen the Bodleian manuscript as a source text, making available an alternative version of More’s texts. In 2007, John Clark produced an original-spelling edition of the Bodleian manuscript for the series Analecta Cartusiana (Confessiones Amantis: The Spiritual Exercises of the Most Vertuous and Religious Dame Gertrude More). In this volume’s substantial editorial apparatus, Clark notes many differences between the Bodleian manuscript and Gascoigne’s edition, observing that the textual transmission of More’s works is unstable. He also provides appendices with material appearing only in the 1658 publication. In 2020, Jacob Riyeff produced the first complete edition of More’s poetry (Poems and Counsels on Prayer and Contemplation), which also included select prose works (the Apology and several fragments). This modernized edition draws together poetry from the Bodleian manuscript, Gascoigne’s edition, and Baker’s Life. Yet as Riyeff observes, he privileged the Bodleian manuscript over other sources: “Since it was an aspect of the reading communities at Cambrai and surrounding religious houses to produce and copy works collaboratively in manuscript, and given that 1658 was mediated through at least two different male hands (Dom Augustine Baker and Fr Francis Gascoigne), I have opted to prefer Rawlinson’s text” (xxxiv). However, we know little about the transmission of the Bodleian manuscript, which may likewise have been mediated by male hands.
This tendency to focus on either the Bodleian manuscript or the Gascoigne edition has obscured the complex transmission of More’s writings. To date, Clark has offered the most detailed analysis of the relationship between the Bodleian manuscript, the Gascoigne edition, and Baker’s Life. While he attributes some of the more superficial differences among the three to scribal errors or poor copy texts, Clark nonetheless notes that Gascoigne’s edition and Baker’s Life tend to present a version of More’s poetry whose language is at odds with the Bodleian manuscript in minor and major ways (xxii-xxiii). In some places, these variations are so considerable that two seemingly different poems emerge. For example, the Bodleian version of “Of Suffering and Bearing the Cross” contains the following stanza on the soul’s inseparability from God:
That none from me can take my Lord,
But for eternity
I shall enjoy my only good,
And to him ever be
United by a perfect love
Which none can interpose,
Being by thee assured then
That him I cannot lose.
(ll. 89-96)
Baker’s Life, however, supplies a very different version of this passage:
That none from me can take my Lord
but for eternity
I shall enjoy my only good
And to him ever be
United by a knot of Love
which nothing shall untie
But will remain as permanent
as his Divinity.
(ll. 9-16)
With the exception of erroneously substituting “unity” for “untie,” Gascoigne’s edition is word for word the same as Baker’s extract. Comparison of the Bodleian manuscript with Gascoigne’s edition and Baker’s Life reveals a textual genealogy that follows two separate paths: the A tradition (the Bodleian manuscript) and the B tradition (Baker’s Life, Gascoigne’s edition, and Colwich MS 23, which has been copied from Gascoigne). Aesthetically speaking, the version of the abovementioned passage in the B tradition is arguably superior to the A tradition, as the “knot of Love” is a stronger, more concrete image for More’s underlying conceit than the more generalized language of “a perfect love.” Indeed, the B tradition shows a more sophisticated poetic voice throughout. From a literary perspective, then, the Bodleian manuscript is actually inferior at points to the versions preserved by Baker and Gascoigne.
How did these two versions come to exist? One possibility is that the Bodleian manuscript preserves an earlier draft of More’s poetry. While the convent sent Baker copies of More’s writings, the nuns may have kept her drafts for themselves. The Bodleian manuscript might thus reveal that those drafts circulated independently of the finalized versions. Alternatively, Riyeff has speculated that Baker intended to publish More’s writings and that Gascoigne brought his work to fruition (Riyeff xxiv). Following this scenario, perhaps Baker revised More’s writings as he incorporated them into the Life and Gascoigne in turn worked from the texts that Baker had produced. Yet several factors argue against this narrative. First, Baker himself wrote a considerable amount of doggerel poetry that displayed a marked lack of interest in literary aesthetics, and he encouraged the Cambrai nuns to speak and write as plainly as possible (Goodrich, “‘Low and plain stile’”). It seems unlikely, then, that Baker would have taken the time to improve More’s imagery and diction. In fact, he carefully included doggerel left out of the Bodleian manuscript and Gascoigne’s edition. Second, Baker himself never published his own work, nor did he believe that mystic texts should be read by a general audience. It is much more probable that Baker was preparing his Life and editing More’s writings for the localized audience of the Cambrai cloister, as he had already done with the Devotions of Margaret Gascoigne. Third, the Gascoigne edition responded to a very particular historical context (the renewed controversy over Baker’s writings at Cambrai in 1655). If Gascoigne did work from Baker’s versions of the texts, the two men were editing More’s writings in very different situations and from very different positions. The historical circumstances behind the development of the A and B traditions of Gertrude More’s poetry thus remain a mystery.
This variorum edition allows readers to explore the differences between the A and B traditions for themselves by presenting all of the poetry found in the Bodleian manuscript, Gascoigne’s edition of the 1658 Spiritual Exercises, and Baker’s Life and Death of Dame Gertrude More. Following the tenets of New Textualism (which decenters the author and recognizes the authorial roles of editors and scribes), we have chosen not to privilege any one version of Gertrude More’s poetry. Rather, we invite you to investigate the various manifestations of More’s poetry that exist within these texts.
Editing Protocols
Audience and Goal
The goal of this edition is to familiarize a diverse audience—composed of non-specialists, advanced undergraduates, and scholars—with Gertrude More’s poetry. Besides providing the first variorum edition of More’s texts, this edition offers modernized and unmodernized versions of More’s poetry as a basis for including her in the canon of English literature. In order to provide the fullest possible representation of More’s verse, we edited all poems as separate entities rather than incorporating fragments from the B tradition into the longer poems from the A tradition. In doing so, we aimed to preserve their individual textual integrity and to facilitate scholarly comparisons of the differences between the A and B traditions. Finally, a series of critical introductions for non-specialists offers a range of different contexts for reading and appreciating More’s poetry.
Editors
This digital edition is the product of a collaboration between Jaime Goodrich (Associate Professor of English, Wayne State), Kelly Plante (doctoral student in English, Wayne State), and the students enrolled in Goodrich’s section of ENG 5030 (Topics in Women’s Studies) in Fall 2019. Over the semester, the students in ENG 5030 conceived the scope and aims of the edition, produced drafts of the base texts for the edition, and composed the critical introductions. Goodrich and Plante then took on the role of General Editors, checking the editions against manuscript copies, producing additional content, and revising the critical introductions.
Source Texts
We based our transcriptions off the original texts themselves (manuscript or print) for three base texts: the Bodleian manuscript, Gascoigne’s edition of the 1658 Spiritual Exercises, and the Stanbrook Abbey copy of Baker’s Life and Death of Dame Gertrude More. For the Ampleforth Abbey copy of Baker’s Life, we relied on the edition of Ben Wekking. We hope to examine the Ampleforth copy at a later date and update this edition accordingly.
Modernization
This edition provides two separate editions of each poem or fragment. The first offers a transcription of the poem “as is,” without any regularization of spelling or punctuation. For corrections silently made to transcription and printing errors in the Scholarly Edition, please consult the Lemma.
The second contains a modernized version of the poem, which updates the spelling and punctuation of the original text. These modernized versions, however, are not translations. Archaic words such as “thou” and “doth” have been retained and glossed for modern readers.
Manuscript conventions that appear in our Scholarly Edition and are modernized in our Modernized Edition include: wch (which), wth (with), ye (the), yt (that), and macrons over vowels (e.g., “frō” for “from”).
Glosses
Our annotations offer brief definitions of unusual words, translations of Latin, and citations for biblical references. Throughout we cite the Douai-Rheims Bible, the standard version used by seventeenth-century English Catholics.
Format and Page Set-up
Editions are offered as printable PDFs, oriented in portrait mode. Line numbers are placed on the right margin.
Folio numbers are placed in the left margin. For those poems transcribed from the Bodleian manuscript (MS Rawlinson C 581) and Francis Gascoigne’s 1658 Spiritual Exercises, the folio numbers in the left margin link to an image of the original text. All images of Gascoigne’s edition are from a copy in the personal collection of Jaime Goodrich.
Works Cited
Baker, Augustine. The Life and Death of Dame Gertrude More, ed. Ben Wekking. Universität Salzburg, Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2002.
Goodrich, Jaime. “‘Low and Plain Stile’: poetry and piety in English Benedictine convents, 1600-1800.” Br. Cathol. Hist(2019), vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 599-618. Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Latz, Dorothy, ed. “Glow-Worm Light”: Writings of 17th Century English Recusant Women from Original Manuscripts.Salzburg, 1989.
More, Gertrude. Confessiones Amantis: The Spiritual Exercises of the Most Vertuous and Religious Dame Gertrude More, ed. John Clark. Universität Salzburg, Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2007.
—. 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.
—. The Inner Life of Dame Gertrude More, ed. Benedict Weld-Blundell. Washbourne, 1910.
—. Poems and Counsels on Prayer and Contemplation, ed. Jacob Riyeff. Leominster, 2020.