Other Maids: Religion, Race, and Relationships Between Girls in Early Modern London

Abstract

Compiled and published by Baptist minister Henry Jessey in 1647, The Exceeding Riches of Grace documents the words and experiences of 15 year old Sarah Wight in the course of the spiritual, physical and psychological crisis she underwent that year. Feminist scholarship has read it to illuminate women’s involvement in the radical cultures of Civil War London. Kate Chedgzoy mines its extensive and complex documentation of early modern girls’ interactions with each other for new insights into the emotional, spiritual, and social textualisation of early modern female adolescence. A key feature of the text is Jessey’s transcripts of a series of ‘conferences’ between Sarah and anonymous ‘maids’ (young girls and women) who came to seek her advice on their own experiences of crisis and distress. Analysing these conferences as well as examining the text’s representation of Sarah’s relationships with the household maid, Hannah Guy, and a further help-seeking ‘maid’ tentatively identified as ‘Dinah the Blackmore’, Chedgzoy argues that The Exceeding Riches of Grace bears witness to the historical formation and literary representation of girlhood through the intersections of religion, race, and status as well as age and gender. As a rare published text recording at length the voice of a child, it extends and enriches the canon of early modern literatures of childhood. The chapter participates in the scholarly effort to bring girlhood into the scope of debates about Renaissance literary cultures, and to explore the gendered history of children’s literature.