Abstract
From the period c.1600-c.1725 at least 50 Scottish religious narratives have survived. About twenty of these were written by ministers, while of the approximately thirty written by lay people, the proportions are nearly equal, with sixteen by women; others are known to have been written.1 Indeed, one woman learned to write at the age of 58 for no other purpose than to tell her own story.2 The prose presented here explores female religious subjectivity in explicitly autobiographical form or in the context of journals which are largely autobiographical in nature. This essay briefly describes eleven of the female narratives and discusses the materials from which their expressions of religious and ‘writerly’ selthood are composed.
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Notes
EUL, Laing MSS, La.III.263: Wodrow MSS, Octavo 33, no. 6; to be published as Mistress Rutherford: A 17 th Century Scottish Woman’s Religious Autobiography, ed. by David G. Mullan, forthcoming in Scottish History Society, Miscellany xiii; and see also David G. Mullan, ‘Mistress Rutherford’s Narrative: A Scottish Puritan Autobiography’, Bunyan Studies, 7 (1997), 13–37.
David George Mullan, ed., Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern Scotland: Writing the Evangelical Self c.1670-c.1730 (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), p. 44. I am grateful to Dr. Louise Yeoman for permission to make use of the article on K. Collace/Ross she has written for the NDNB. See also Andrew Stevenson, Memoirs of the Life of Mr Thomas Hog (Edinburgh: [n. pub.1, 1756), p. 28. Robert Wodrow, Analecta, 4 vols (Edinburgh: In.pub.1, 1842–3), II, 162.
Rutherford wrote a great deal of divinity, and after his death some of his letters appeared as Joshua Redivivus ([Rotterdam], 1664; many subsequent eds). See John Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), esp. ch. 4; and David George Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, 1590–1638 (Oxford: OUP, 2000), pp. 38–41, 161–3, 169.
Mullan, Women’s Life Writing, p. 26; all quotations from Collace appear in this edition.
Select Biographies, ed. by W. K. Tweedie, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Wodrow Society, 1845–7), II, 481–93.
Mullan, Women’s Life Writing, pp. 26–7; all quotations from Campbell appear in this edition.
James B. Paul, The Scots Peerage, 9 vols (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1904–14), I, 520.
Memoirs of the Life of Mrs Veitch, in Memoirs of Mrs William Veitch, Mr Thomas Hog ofKiltearn, Mr Henry Erskine, and Mr John Carstairs (Edinburgh, 1846); see Kenneth W. H. Howard, Marion Veitch: The Memoirs, Life & Times of a Scots Covenanting Family (1639–1732) in Scotland, England and the Americas (Osset, W. Yorks.: Gospel Tidings Trust Christian Bookshop, 1992).
Mullan, Women’s Life Writing, pp. 384–409; all quotations from Blackadder appear in this edition.
Elizabeth West, Memoirs, or Spiritual Exercises (Edinburgh: [n. pub.], 1724), p. 218. 14 Memoirs ofthe Life ofElizabeth Cairns (Glasgow: John Greig, 1762), p. 58.
Elspeth Graham, ‘Women’s Writing and the Self’, in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700, ed. by Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), pp. 211–12.
Sarah M. Dunnigan, ‘Scottish Women Writers c.1560-c.1650’, in A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, ed. by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan (Edinburgh: EUP, 1997), p. 39.
[Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh], Aretina: or, the Serious Romance (Edinburgh: [n. pub.], 1660), p. 7.
Myra Reynolds, The Learned Lady in England, 1650–1760 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920; rpt. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964), p. 94.
Kate Chedgzoy, ‘Introduction: “Voice that is Mine”’, in Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing, ed. by Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen, and Suzanne Trill (Keele, Staffs: Keele UP, 1996), p. 2.
Shaw, p. vii; see John Willison, The Afflicted Man’s Companion (Edinburgh: Samuel Willison, 1755), p. 79. On dating, see my ‘The Royal Law of Liberty: A Reassessment of the Early Career of John Glass’, Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society, 6 (1999), p. 243, n. 52.
A. A. MacDonald, ‘Early Modern Scottish Literature and the Parameters of Culture’, in The Rose and the Thistle: Essays on the Culture of Late Medieval and Renaissance Scotland, ed. by Sally Mapstone and Juliette Wood (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1998), p. 86.
See Leszek Kolakowski, Chretiens sans Eglise: La Conscience Religieuse et le Lien Confessionnel au xvif Siecle, trans. by Anna Posner (1965; Paris: Gallimard, 1987), pp. 640–84.
Mullan, Women’s Life Writing, p. 224.
Barbara Peebles, ‘Me Exercise of a Privat Christian in the 20 of July 1660’, in NLS, Wodrow MSS, Quarto 26, fol. 283v.
Leigh Eric Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scotland and the Making of American Revivalism, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2001), pp. 47–8, refers in the context of communion revivals to the narratives of Mary Somervel, Elizabeth West, and Elizabeth Blackadder.
Cairns, p. 92. Certainly Grizell Love of Paisley sought it, and wrote about it in a lengthy piece of evangelical devotional literature which consistently embraces the visionary. ‘Exercise of Grizall Love in Paislay’, NLS, Wodrow MSS, Quarto 72. fols 193v-194r.
Graham, p. 214; Margo Todd, ‘Puritan Self-fashioning’, in Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith, ed. by Francis J. Bremer (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993), p. 62, 73, 75–6; Mullan, ‘Mistress Rutherford’s Narrative’, p. 28. “Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith, ‘De/Colonization and the Politics of Discourse in Women’s Autobiographical Practices’, in De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, ed. by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1992), p. xviii.
Mary G. Mason, ‘The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers’, in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. by James Olney (Princeton: PUP, 1980), p. 210. This essay was republished in Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography, ed. by Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenk (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988).
Donald A. Stauffer, English Biography before 1700 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), p. 209.
Joan Webber, The Eloquent ‘I’: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose (Madison, WI: U Wisconsin P, 1968), P. 9.
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Mullan, D.G. (2004). Scottish Women’s Religious Narrative, 1660–1720: Constructing the Evangelical Self. In: Dunnigan, S.M., Harker, C.M., Newlyn, E.S. (eds) Woman and the Feminine in Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230502208_13
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