Mistress Bradstreet
Page 31
Notes
CHAPTER ONE:Arrival
1. Bradstreet, “Autobiography,” in Works, 241. (back to text)
2. Francis Higginson had written, “All Europe is not able to afford so great Fires as New-England. A poor servant here that is to possesse but 50 acres of land, may afford to give more wood for Timber and Fire . . . than many Noble men in England can afford to do.” Quoted in Cronon, Changes in the Land, 25. (back to text)
3. See Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker’s description of the Puritans’ identification with the Jews in The Puritan Oligarchy: The Founding of American Civilization (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947). (back to text)
4. It was only many years later that Anne would describe how she resisted the New World. See “Autobiography,” in Works, 241. (back to text)
5. Morgan, Puritan Dilemma, 57. (back to text)
6. Higginson, New England’s Plantation (1630), quoted in White, Anne Bradstreet, iii. (back to text)
7. Winthrop, “Saturday, 12 [June],” Journal of John Winthrop, ed. Dunn and Yeandle, 27. (back to text)
8. Francis Bremer writes, “Endecott in the summer of 1629 had supervised the erection of a large home, designed as a place for the new governor to live . . . on a neck of land protruding into Massachusetts Bay between the Mystic and Charles rivers.” In Bremer, Winthrop, 192. (back to text)
9. Cronon gives a complete description of Indian agricultural technique in Changes in the Land, chaps. 1 and 2. (back to text)
10. Winthrop, “Saturday, 12 [June],” Journal of John Winthrop, ed. Dunn and Yeandle, 27. (back to text)
11. Bremer, Winthrop, 193; ed. J. Franklin Jameson, Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence, 1628-1651 (New York: Scribner’s, 1910), 66. (back to text)
CHAPTER TWO:Lilies and Thorns
1. John Cotton, “Limitation of Government,” in American Puritans, ed. Miller, 85. (back to text)
2. Quoted in Ziff, Career of John Cotton, 62. (back to text)
3. Bradstreet, “Autobiography,” in Works, 240-41. (back to text)
4. “Beclouded . . .” is from a later poem, “For Deliverance from a Fever,” in Works, 257, line 11. All other phrases are from “Autobiography,” in Bradstreet, Works, 240. (back to text)
5. Bradstreet, “Autobiography,” in Works,240-41. (back to text)
6. Shepard, “The Journal,” in McGiffert, God’s Plot, 93. (back to text)
7. Ibid., 98. (back to text)
8. Edmund Morgan characterizes Dudley as “immature,” “lack[ing] in discretion,” “col[d]” and “belligeren[t],” in Puritan Dilemma,103-4. Bradstreet, “To the Memory of My Dear and Ever Honoured Father Thomas Dudley Esq. Who Deceased, July 31, 1653, and of His Age 77,” in Works, 202, line 43. (back to text)
9. Bradstreet, “To the Memory . . . ,” in Works, 202, lines 42, 80. (back to text)
10. Ibid., lines 10, 46. (back to text)
11. Bradstreet, “Autobiography,” 243; “The Vanity of All Worldly Things,” in Works, 219, lines 1-2; “The Flesh and the Spirit,” in ibid., 215-16, lines 7, 27. (back to text)
12. White, Anne Bradstreet, 37. (back to text)
13. Bradstreet, “An Epitaph on My Dear and Ever-Honoured Mother, Mrs. Dorothy Dudley, Who Deceased December 27, 1643, and of Her Age, 61,” in Works, 204, lines 17, 16, 2, 11, 13. (back to text)
14. In the two centuries since the Black Death, England’s population was exploding once again, and there was not enough land or food to sustain its growth. In response to years of poor harvests, the gentry had invested in an extensive project of draining the fens to create more arable fields and grazing land, and they relied on the expert knowledge of their Dutch neighbors, whose sophisticated network of canals was now legendary. (back to text)
15. Second Part of a Register, II, quoted in Edmund Morgan, Visible Saints, 7. (back to text)
16. Ziff, Career of John Cotton, 58. (back to text)
17. Roger Virgoe, ed., Private Life, 87. (back to text)
18. Ziff, Career of John Cotton, 49. (back to text)
19. Memorials of Affairs of State in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James I, ed. E. Sawyer, vol. 2 (London: 1725), quoted in White, Anne Bradstreet, 39. (back to text)
20. Bradstreet, “Autobiography,” in Works,240-41, 243. “The New England Primer,” in Concise Anthology of American Literature, ed. George McMichael, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 54-55. (back to text)
21. Bradstreet, “Autobiography,” in Works, 244. (back to text)
22. William Hubbard, quoted in Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, 362. (back to text)
23. John Winthrop, ibid. (back to text)
24. It was not until “God . . . shut a door against . . . us from ministering to him and his people in our wonted congregations, and calling us by a remnant of our people, and by others of this country to minister to them [in America], and opening a door to us this way,” that Cotton believed it was time to emigrate. He still debated this issue, wondering if God did not want him to stay in prison in England, but finally he decided, after consultation with other Puritan leaders, that he could serve God more fully in the New World. “Mr. Cotton’s Letter Giving the Reasons of His and Mr. Hooker’s Removal to New England,” in Heimert and Delbanco, Puritans in America, 95. (back to text)
CHAPTER THREE:Sempringham
1. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, quoted in White, Anne Bradstreet, 54. (back to text)
2. Ibid. (back to text)
3. Bradstreet, “To the Memory of My Dear and Ever Honoured Father Thomas Dudley Esq. Who Deceased, July 31, 1653, and of His Age 77,” in Works, 202, lines 33-35. (back to text)
4. The title of Elizabeth’s book was, appropriately enough, The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie. It was printed at Oxford and was twenty-one pages long. White, Anne Bradstreet, 54. (back to text)
5. Richard Mulcaster, quoted in White, Anne Bradstreet, 58. This is the advice Sir Ralph Verney wrote to his ambitious and literary goddaughter Nancy Denton in Memoirs of the Verney Family, ed. Frances Parthenope, Lady Verney, and Margaret Verney, vol. 3 (1894), 73-74, quoted in White, Anne Bradstreet, 59. (back to text)
6. The Divine Weekes and Workes was translated into English by Joshua Sylvester in 1605 and went through many editions by the Restoration. (back to text)
7. Bradstreet, “In Honour of Du Bartas, 1641,” in Works,192-93, lines 28, 33. (back to text)
8. Bradstreet, “Autobiography,” in Works, 241. (back to text)
9. Although it is unclear when Anne actually read these books, her comfort with their ideas suggests that she encountered them at an early age. Also, these were books that would have been readily available in Sempringham and in her father’s library. (back to text)
10. Philip Sidney, “Sonnet 1,” from Astrophel and Stella in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1, eds. M. H. Abrams et al. (New York: Norton, 1979), 486. (back to text)
11. For this argument about literacy—the difference between being able to read as opposed to being able to write, see Hall’s Worlds of Wonder, especially 32-33. (back to text)
12. Richard Mather, Two Mathers,60-61, quoted in Charlotte Gordon, “Incarnate Geography: Anne Bradstreet’s Discovery of a New World of Words in 17th Century New England,” PhD diss., Boston University, 2000. (back to text)
CHAPTER FOUR:A Man of Exemplary Discretion and Fidelity
1. Cotton Mather, quoted in White, Anne Bradstreet, 74. (back to text)
2. Anne does not describe this time in her life with any detail except to lament her “carnal heart.” Instead, it is through her later poems to Simon that we learn how she viewed him as a lover, counselor, soul mate, and good friend. (back to text)
3. Bradstreet, “Autobiography,” in Works, 242. (back to text)
4. Bradstreet, “Another,” in Works, 228, lines 32, 38; “A Letter to Her Husband,” in ibid., 226, line 8. (back to text)
5. Bradstreet,
“Autobiography,” in Works, 241. (back to text)
6. Ibid. (back to text)
7. Bradstreet, “Youth,” in Works, 56, lines 199, 202, 183-84. (back to text)
8. Joshua Moody, quoted in Daniels, Puritans at Play, 7. (back to text)
9. The most influential work that supports this idea of the Puritan ability to enjoy sex is by Edmund S. Morgan, particularly his early essay “The Puritans and Sex,” New England Quarterly 15 (1942): 591-607. I find his arguments somewhat persuasive, but it is important to note that many of his ideas have been successfully challenged by more recent scholars, among them Michael Zuckerman, “Pilgrims in the Wilderness: Community, Modernity, and the Maypole at Merry Mount,” New England Quarterly 50 (1977): 266-70, and Kathleen Verduin, “Our Cursed Natures: Sexuality and the Puritan Conscience,” New England Quarterly 56 (1983): 222-24, 229-30. (back to text)
10. The minister Thomas Hooker wrote, “There is wild love and joy enough in the world, as there is wild thyme and other herbs, but we would have garden love and garden joy.” Quoted in Daniels, Puritans at Play, 12. The Puritans became famous for the bizarre cases they prosecuted in order to maintain their standards of behavior concerning sexuality. A man named Thomas Grainger who would plead guilty to “buggery with a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves, and a turkey,” would be summarily executed. William Bradford, quoted in ibid., 126. (back to text)
11. Bruce Daniels writes, “Excessive passion, deviant sex, fornication, and even masturbation constituted acts of such profound rebellion against deeply held beliefs of the church and community that pious persons could not embrace any of these sins without deeply troubling their souls.” Ibid., 127. (back to text)
12. Bradstreet, “Youth,” in Works, 56, lines 177, 180. (back to text)
13. Cotton Mather, “The Life of Simon Bradstreet, Esq.,” in Magnalia Christi Americana, bk. 2, 19. (back to text)
14. In some communities, the couple was considered legally bound after the banns had been announced three times; in others, the initial proclamation of the banns was all it took. Once the Puritans had emigrated to New England, such premarital “confusions” were punished severely by the courts with public whippings that were made all the more humiliating because the law stipulated that the perpetrators had to be stripped to the waist. Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers,67-69. (back to text)
15. Michael Wigglesworth, for example, a somewhat dour Puritan minister who had lost his wife when he was middle-aged, confessed to a woman whom he wished to marry that he was deeply attracted to her and that after they had met, “my thoughts and heart have been toward you ever since.” But this assay was actually not meant to win her affections. Instead, Wigglesworth went on to assure her that he had of course questioned his desires, and only after “serious, earnest, and frequent seeking of God for guidance . . . [have] my thoughts . . . still been determined and fixed upon yourself as the most suitable person.” Daniels, Puritans at Play, 128. (back to text)
16. Bradstreet, “Autobiography,” in Works, 241. (back to text)
17. Bradstreet, “Youth,” in Works, 57, line 224. (back to text)
18. Isle of Man, “Diseases,” in “Manx Note Book,” ed. Frances Coakley, at www/isle-of-man.com/manxnotebook/famhist/genealogy/diseases.htm. (back to text)
19. Bradstreet, “Autobiography,” 241. (back to text)
20. Bradstreet, “Youth,” in Works, 57, line 221. (back to text)
21. Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson (Everyman’s Library, 1936), 51, quoted in White, Anne Bradstreet, 90. (back to text)
CHAPTER FIVE:God Is Leaving England
1. Terrorized by the most visible “purifying” techniques of Puritan radicals—smashing, burning, stealing, shouting, breaking, and even murdering—frightened devotees of Rome invented the term itself as an angry epithet in a tract published in 1565 by Thomas Stapleton, an English Catholic who had fled the country in the wake of antipapist violence. (back to text)
2. For an example of Anne’s bloodthirsty predilections, see Bradstreet, “A Dialogue between Old England and New,” in Works, 187, line 279. (back to text)
3. Reputedly, Anne’s father’s ancestor had actively supported and participated in the killing of Protestants. Dudley’s grandfather, George Sutton Dudley, in verifiably Dudley fashion, had been neither a quiet nor a moderate Catholic. He had stormed readily into battles, a violent warrior on behalf of his convictions, as well as an undercover assassin. Impelled by a vision of a purely Catholic England, George had plotted to overthrow Henry VIII and then to murder his son, King Edward, and he greeted the accession of Mary with relief and joy. No ancestor could have been more shameful for the Dudleys to claim as their own. George had clearly aided and abetted the queen, whom they regarded as a monster. (back to text)
4. Most Puritans referred to The Book of Martyrs as an essential text, and many had memorized long passages from the book. It quickly became one of the cornerstones of most Puritans’ education because it was placed in English churches of all stripes to allow the reading public to encounter this hair-raising work whenever they so desired. (back to text)
5. John Foxe, “A lamentable spectacle of three women, with a sillie infant,” vol. 2, 1764, in “Selected Woodcuts and Passages,” from Actes and Monuments or The Book of Martyrs (Center for Electronic Text and Image, University of Pennsylvania Library, Annenberg Rare Book & Manuscript Library, at http://oldsite.library.upenn.edu/etext/furness/foxe/infant.) (back to text)
6. “Persecutions in England during the Reign of Queen Mary,” chap. 16 in Foxe, The Book of Martyrs, ed. William Flatbush (Center for Reformed Theology and Apologetics, www.reformed.org/books). (back to text)
7. Even though it was God who determined one’s eternal destination, certain actions made hell seem more likely than others, and most people believed that heresy was the kind of sin that led to damnation. Accordingly, it was better to withstand the temporary torture of earthly flames and adhere to one’s Puritan beliefs than to recant and risk being plunged into their infernal counterpart. (back to text)
8. Bishop Latimer, quoted in Green, A Short History of the English People, 359. (back to text)
9. Mark Kishlansky, Civilization in the West, vol. 2 (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 422. (back to text)
10. Ibid. (back to text)
11. Bradstreet, “A Dialogue between Old England and New,” in Works, 187, lines 271, 279. (back to text)
12. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, 16. (back to text)
13. Bradstreet, “Autobiography,” in Works, 241. (back to text)
14. As the situation worsened, many of the ministers who would one day lead New England congregations fled the country: Thomas Shepard, Hugh Peter, and John Davenport, to name just a few. However, although David Cressy agrees that these “radical ministers” were indeed hounded from the country, he seriously questions the extent of persecution that most Puritans endured. He writes, “The old notion . . . that Puritan migrants to America had to escape from Charles I’s England through an underground network is seriously wrong. Hardly any of the families involved in the great migration were actually fleeing from persecution.” Cressy, Coming Over, 140. Cressy’s argument is persuasive, but he also concedes that many of the Puritans believed that they were being persecuted and spread rumors to this effect in both the Old and New Worlds. Anne and her family are among this latter category. There is no evidence of any actual persecution, but the Dudleys were among the most important proponents of the idea of Puritan suffering and the need for escape. See especially Anne’s rendition of Puritan victimization at the hands of Laud in “A Dialogue between Old and New England,” Works, 184, lines 177-190. Shepard, “The Autobiography,” in McGiffert, God’s Plot, 53. (back to text)
15. Shepard, “The Autobiography,” in McGiffert, God’s Plot, 53. (back to text)
16. John Smith, quoted in Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers,115-16. (back to text)
17. John Brereton, A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (London, 1588), quoted in Cressy, Coming Over, 2. For Smith’s renaming strategy, see Cressy, Coming Over, 6. (back to text)
18. Bradstreet, “Autobiography,” in Works, 241. (back to text)
19. State Papers Domestic, Charles I, vol. 72, no. 36, Calendar of State Papers, Venetian—Charles I, 1626-28, 119, quoted in White, Anne Bradstreet,87-88, 81. (back to text)
20. R. C. Winthrop, Life and Letters of John Winthrop, vol. 1 (Boston, 1869), 304, quoted in ibid., 94. (back to text)
21. Francis Higginson, ‘New Englands plantation’ (London, 1630), quoted in Cressy, Coming Over, 12. (back to text)
22. Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Savior in New England (London, 1654), in Miller, American Puritans,29-30. (back to text)
23. John Pory, Emmanuel Altham, and Isaak de Rasieres, Three Visitors to Early Plymouth: Letters about the Pilgrim Settlement in New England During Its First Seven Years, ed. Sydney V. James Jr. (Plymouth, Mass.: 1963), 6-17; William S. Powell, John Pory, 1572-1636: The Life and Letters of a Man of Many Parts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 83, 93, 96, quoted in Cressy, Coming Over,7-8. (back to text)
24. For the Sagadahoc, Maine, experiment, see Charles Andrews, The Colonial Period in American History, 4 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1934-38), vol. 1, 78-97, quoted in Cressy, Coming Over,3-4. (back to text)
25. William Alexander, The Mapp and Description of New England (London, 1630), 30, quoted in Cressy, Coming Over, 9. (back to text)
CHAPTER SIX:Preparedness
1. William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647, vol. 1 (Boston, 1912), 56, quoted in Cressy, Coming Over, 147. (back to text)
2. Ibid. (back to text)
3. Bradstreet, “The Flesh and the Spirit,” in Works, 215, lines 14, 16-17, 20-21. (back to text)
4. Bradstreet, “A Dialogue between Old England and New,” in Works,179-81, lines 31-32. (back to text)