Abstract
Apetrei’s chapter brings to light two previously unknown manuscripts, situating them within the broader difficulties that printing mystical works could cause female prophets and visionaries. Positioning her discussion within recent work on scribal publication as an alternative to print publication, and in particular the challenges that female authors faced, Apetrei locates Lead’s and Bathurst’s manuscript writings within a context extending to works by, among others, the nun Gertrude More, the prophetess Grace Cary and the visionary Antoinette Bourignon. Apetrei also provides transcriptions of her manuscript discoveries in two appendices that will be helpful to future researchers.
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Notes
- 1.
On the tensions in mystical discourse see, for instance, Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
- 2.
Nicholas of Cusa, Idiota; Tauler and the beggar. See Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), pp. 31–48.
- 3.
Augustine Baker, ‘Directions’ in Gertrude More, The holy practises of a devine lover, or, The sainctly Ideots Deuotions (London, 1657), pp. 24–25.
- 4.
Ibid., p. 168.
- 5.
Augustine Baker, Sancta Sophia (London, 1657), p. 156.
- 6.
George Garden, An Apology for Antoinette Bourignon (London, 1699), pp. 26, 28–29, 34. Garden’s Life of Bourignon and translations of her works by Garden in manuscript also survive. See ‘The Life of Mrs Antoniet Bourignon’, in National Archives of Scotland, MS CH 12/20/14; and Antichrist Discover’d, Aberdeen University Library MS 512.
- 7.
Ibid., p. 165.
- 8.
On the falsity of this persona, see Andrew Weeks, Boehme: An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth-Century Philosopher and Mystic (New York: SUNY, 1991), and Ariel Hessayon, ‘Boehme’s Life and Times’, in Ariel Hessayon and Sarah Apetrei eds., An Introduction to Jacob Boehme: Four Centuries of Thought and Reception (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 13–37.
- 9.
Humphrey Blunden, ‘To the Reader’ in Jacob Boehme, Four Tables of Divine Revelation, trans. Humphrey Blunden (London, 1654), pp. 2–3.
- 10.
John Ellistone, ‘Preface’ in Jacob Boehme, Signatura Rerum, or, The Signature of All Things, trans. John Ellistone (London, 1651), sig. A2v.
- 11.
Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, ‘The Adept Ladys, or the Angelick Sect’, in Complete Works, Selected Letters and Posthumous Writings, eds. G. Hemmerich and W. Benda (Stuttgart: Fromman-Holzboog, 1981), vol. 1, part 1, pp. 384, 396, 404–6, 416.
- 12.
See, for instance, George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker eds., Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Victoria Burke and Jonathan Gibson eds., Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); Jill Seal Millman and Gillian Wright eds., Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).
- 13.
Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 54.
- 14.
Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649–1688 (London: Virago Press, 1988), p. 26.
- 15.
Margaret Ezell, ‘Performance Texts: Arise Evans, Grace Carrie, and the Interplay of Oral and Handwritten Traditions during the Print Revolution’, in English Literary History, 76:1 (2009), pp. 49–73. On the alterations to Carrie’s text for publication, see also Rory Tanner, ‘ “She Mente Well, and Was a Good Woman”: The Vision and Revision of Grace Cary’, in ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 24:1–2 (2011), pp. 81–88.
- 16.
Quoted in Ezell, ‘Performance Texts’, p. 56.
- 17.
Cary’s prophecies were published, with extensive revisions, as Vox Coeli: To England, or England’s fore-warning from Heaven. Being a Relation of true, strange, and wonderfull Visions, and Propheticall Revelations (London, 1646).
- 18.
Ezell, ‘Performance Texts’, p. 57.
- 19.
Garden, Apology, p. 41.
- 20.
Jane Lead, A Fountain of Gardens Watered by the Rivers of Divine Pleasure (London, 1697), p. 3.
- 21.
I am grateful to Mark Philpott for pointing out the Marian allusion to the hortus conclusus.
- 22.
Fountain of Gardens, p. 16.
- 23.
J.L to Richard Roach (31 August 1697), in Bodl., MS Rawlinson D 832, fol. 53.
- 24.
Walton, Notes, p. 192.
- 25.
Ibid., pp. 202–03.
- 26.
Ibid., p. 203.
- 27.
BL, MS Sloane 2569, fol. 90r.
- 28.
Bodl., MS Rawlinson C. 266, fols. 1r-9r.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Jane Lead, Revelation of Revelations (London, 1683), pp. 43–45.
- 31.
9 November 1680, in Fountain of Gardens, vol. III.
- 32.
Revelation of Revelations, p. 1.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 130.
- 34.
Fountain of Gardens, pp. 4–5.
- 35.
Ibid., pp. 6, 46.
- 36.
Bodl., MS Rawlinson D. 1262, D. 1263, D. 1338, Q. e. 28; National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh, MS CH 12/20/9, CH 12/20/11; Chetham’s, Mun. A.7.64; Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg, MS Q. 472, Q. 538. On the St Petersburg manuscripts, see Leena Kahlas-Tarkka and Matti Kilpiö, ‘ “O Thou Sea of Love”: Oxford and St Petersburg manuscripts of Ann Bathurst’s religious visions’, in VARIENG: Research Unit for the Study of Variation, Contacts and Change in English e-series, 9 (2012), http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/series/volumes/09/kahlas-tarkka_kilpio/ . I am grateful to Ariel Hessayon for alerting me to the existence of the Chetham’s version.
- 37.
Richard Roach, The Great Crisis (London, 1727), p. 99.
- 38.
National Archives of Scotland, MS CH 12/20/11, n.p.
- 39.
See Julie Hirst, ‘ “If my pen’s liquor is to be from Eternity, it cannot be written dry”: Anne Bathurst, a Seventeenth-Century Visionary’, in Katherine Quinsey ed., Under the Veil: Feminism and Spirituality in Post-Reformation England and Europe (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), p. 15.
- 40.
Bodl., MS Rawlinson D. 1263, fol. 525v.
- 41.
Ibid., fol. 27r.
- 42.
Ibid., fol. 527r.
- 43.
National Archives of Scotland, MS CH 12/20/9, pp. 1–25.
- 44.
Ibid., p. 23.
- 45.
Ibid., p. 16.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 12.
- 47.
Bodl., MS Rawlinson D. 1262, p. 15.
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Apetrei, S. (2016). Mystical Divinity in the Manuscript Writings of Jane Lead and Anne Bathurst. In: Hessayon, A. (eds) Jane Lead and her Transnational Legacy. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500-1800. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39614-3_8
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