by Adams, Max;
In 1647, at the height of that conflict, with King Charles recently imprisoned, Anne’s brother-in-law, the Rev. John Woodbridge, sailed to England and, apparently without Anne’s knowledge, presented a collection of her poems for publication as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, ‘by a gentlewoman in those parts’. It was printed in London in 1650. Anne, naturally enough, recorded her reaction to this underhand compliment in verse, in which the sharp wit and sly humour that has won her so many admirers is fully displayed…
The Author to Her Book
Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth did’st by my side remain,
Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad, exposed to public view,
Made thee in rags, halting to th’ press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call.
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
Thy visage was so irksome in my sight;
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could:
I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.
I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run’st more hobbling than is meet;
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But nought save homespun cloth, i’ th’ house I find.
In this array ’mongst Vulgars may’st thou roam.
In critic’s hands beware thou dost not come,
And take thy way where yet thou art not known;
If for thy Father asked, say thou hadst none;
And for thy Mother, she alas is poor,
Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.12
In Anne’s world, full of tensions between her old home and new life, of spiritual and political convulsions and the incompatibilities of radicalism and conservatism, we find at least partial explanations for some of the undercurrents of her praise for Elizabeth. In her poetic failure to explore and exploit Elizabeth’s paradoxical relationship with symbolic marriage and actual chastity can, perhaps, be read an aversion to drawing on the Catholic trope of the biblical mother of Christ and the theological and liturgical trappings of the old faith.
But what of the coded message of the poem, which must have been composed after about 1630 and before 1647? I believe that in showering praise on Elizabeth’s ‘high and mighty’ majesty, on her Protestant virtues, on her combination of female wisdom, justice and clemency and her martial – even virile – defence of her country’s interests, Anne is showing the queen to be in conspicuous possession of all that King Charles I, who presided over civil and religious war and (for Puritans) betrayed his people by rejecting the Protestant Reformation, was not. He is the poem’s unspoken object. If, by the time of the poem’s publication, Charles had not lost his head, then Anne Bradstreet’s verse might well have been read as sedition in the old country. As it was, in 1650 she found herself in perfect harmony with the new Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell.
The will of Ana de la Calle
After two centuries of colonial rule, the Andean cultures that had produced women shamans like La Señora de Cao and vibrant, exuberant ceramics like the Mochica stirrup vessels, and propelled Malintzin to integrate with the armies of conquest, Spanish laws, customs and language had been grafted onto native culture. Indigenous beliefs in life cycles, chaos, sacrifice and priesthood survived alongside an institutional Catholic church and an oppressive trade in slaves. Native peoples were severely disadvantaged under imperial masters from the Old World, but they were also alive to opportunities afforded by a powerful legal system to protect and consolidate their own interests. A large number of legal testaments exists from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Peru and these were often written or commissioned by women of African origin or descent. Like the will of the Anglo-Saxon noblewoman Wynflæd,Ω some eight centuries earlier, these wills offer intriguing insights into women’s status, possessions, self-image and ambitions for their own and their children’s souls.
Women slaves were largely employed in domestic service and since, in these roles, they were often able to develop social relations with their masters, they were also more likely than males to be freed by means of a carta de libertad≈ or to be able to afford to buy their own freedom. Some women slaves probably had sexual relations with male members of free households, consensually or otherwise, while, one suspects, many male slaves were killed by the physical hardship of manual labour. Under Spanish law, slave status was matrilineal, so a female slave who won or earned her freedom automatically freed her offspring. Freed women might earn a living by continuing in domestic service, by opening and running small shops or chicherías, or by lending money at interest. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century South America, as in Europe, knowledge of the domestic, legal and financial cultures of their masters empowered women to operate in areas far beyond the heavily circumscribed lives of male labourers and, often, beyond their own origins.
Ana de la Calle was a free woman, a bread-seller, of Trujillo on the Moche River in northern Peru, who wrote her will in April 1719. She was a woman of mixed blood, a morena, but she also identified herself as a member of the Lucumí caste, a term used to denote slaves originating among the West African Yoruba people who thought themselves superior to the slaves of other countries.
Ana’s will, dictated to a public notary, begins with legal and religious formalities, standardised to ensure the document’s legitimacy and the testator’s adherence to the Catholic faith. Here we are told that Ana is ‘sick in bed of an illness that God our lord has seen fit to give me’. Should she die, she wishes to be buried with her husband, Pasqual de Segama (also a free moreno) who has predeceased her, in the monastery of St Francis, to which she leaves 4 reales. Ana then reveals a first layer of complexity in her history. She bore no children with Pasqual, but…
I declare that at present I was married and veiled according to the order of Our Holy Mother Church with Agustín de Saavedra, free moreno, of which we also do not have any children…
I declare that before I contracted my first marriage with the said Pasqual de Segama, as a weak woman I bore a daughter who is alive today named María de la Cruz, parda [a free-born morena]. I declare her, as such, to be my daughter.13
Now, having established the status of her principal beneficiaries, she disposes of her property. She owns a house, which, she says, she bought in 1692 with her first husband and in which she inherited sole rights after his death. Her second husband, Agustín, is to be given 25 pesos – comprising silver reales, at 8 to the peso – for his own burial and a life interest in Ana’s house, while her daughter María and ‘her creditors’ benefit to the tune of 461 pesos. A fifth of Ana’s property is to be used for her burial and masses for her soul. And…
Item: I also declare as my property a little black criolla girl named Eduvigia, who is a little more than a year old…
Item: I declare as my property a large trunk of Panamanian cedar with its lock and key.
Item: A table with its drawer and carved legs.
Item: A copper pan, a large tray, and another, smaller one.
Item: Also a black woman named María Isabel of casta lucumí [the mother of one-year-old Eduvigia]
And heeding that I have no more heir than the said María de la Cruz, I name her as such my universal heir so that after my death she may have and inherit my property with God’s blessing and mine because this is my will.
Like Wynflæd before her, and like many other women who made wills to dispose of their property, Ana ensures that the bulk of her legacy goes to her daughter, with the church as secondary beneficiary. Like Wynflæd, too, she bequeaths slaves, a mother and daughter, an indication of their value as current and future domestic servants but also, one i
magines, a reflection of Ana’s status as a free woman and slave owner. Her possessions are fewer and much more modest than those of the Anglo-Saxon noblewoman and yet the worth of individual items of furniture, especially the trunk that can be locked, tells us about the value women placed on these important domestic centrepieces. Her ability to dispose of her house, first to her surviving husband and then to her daughter, echoes an ongoing theme in these stories: the rights and privileges of widows who became sole owners of land and property. It is also significant, I think, that her illegitimate daughter María is, effectively, legitimised by the taking of a new name – de la Cruz – and by her status as principal beneficiary.
Ana tells us even more, on a closer reading, about her identity. She has given herself the surname ‘de la Calle’ – of the street, perhaps the moniker by which she was known in public among her customers and suppliers. She took neither of her husbands’ names, preferring her own professional identity. For her daughter, though, something more modest: she is María de la Cruz – of the cross – an identifier of lower-class piety in the colony.
The portrait of Ana that can be drawn from the contents and wording of her will already suggests a multi-dimensional woman. The fact that two more documents survive to add nuance to her portrait is the social historian’s very good fortune. The first, a brief codicil to the will, was recorded less than a month later and states that the little slave girl Eduvigia, daughter of her slave-woman, María Isabel, is bequeathed directly to Ana’s granddaughter, Juana de Silva – another new surname, this time more neutral and carrying no hint of diasporic slave origins. A second document, undated, records the actual goods and chattels left at Ana’s death, which ended up in the hands of María’s husband, Baltasar de los Reyes – a military member of the city council. The document formed part of a dossier compiled by Juana de Silva (Ana’s granddaughter) and her husband, Don Faustíno Vidaurre, in a legal action for recovery of those goods against de los Reyes in 1727. These items are even more revealing than the will of the sorts of possessions that a successful free woman of colour in the colonies might accumulate over a lifetime…
First, a gourd adorned in silver that is worth about four pesos.
Item: A piece of the True Cross adorned in Prince’s metal with its glass cover that is worth about eight pesos.
Item: A mirror that is worth about two pesos.
Item: A new copper frying pan that is worth about three pesos.
Item: A wheat-coloured shawl that is worth about ten pesos.
Item: And a worn, iridescent skirt that is worth about four pesos.
Item: A length of lace underskirting that amounts to 20 reales.
Item: Also a small piece of false gold jewellery mounted with stones of amethyst, ruby, and diamonds of alchemy that is worth about four reales with another four stones of alchemy that is worth another four reales…
Item: Also a bedstead that is worth 25 pesos.
Item: Also a canopy that is worth 14 pesos.
Item: Also a dais with its Holy Christ surrounded by engravings that is worth about three pesos.
Item: A spit that was my grandmother’s with the value of one peso.
Item: A small statue of the Most Pure Virgin with its little silver crown, that is mine, that is worth three pesos.
Item: In the possession of the said Baltasar de los Reyes, a snuff box with its silver fringe that is worth about three pesos.
Item: All the papers of bills, receipts, payments and settlements executed by the said María de la Cruz Cavero for Ana, who they commonly call Mama Anica, who was mother of the said María de la Cruz Cavero…14
What we see here is the result of a dispute. María evidently died intestate, leaving her husband in possession of chattels that Juana believed should revert to her through the female line. It is significant that the special keepsakes of symbolic or religious importance, evidently cheap paste or souvenirs, are worth much less than the bedstead – a woman’s prize possession, judging by its value, just as it was with Anglo-Saxon women – and a wheat-coloured shawl, whose technical excellence rather than its showiness must have made it a precious, and saleable, commodity. It is also significant, as historian Rachel O’Toole observes in her revealing study of Ana and her will, that Ana enjoyed another identity. O’Toole points out that the nickname Mama Anica – used of her by her granddaughter – may be a discreet reference to a woman who had earned a second income practising unorthodox spiritual rituals; that is to say, someone whom Wynflæd might, in an earlier time, have referred to as a cunning-woman or seeress.
* A spokesperson or emissary.
† Cortés was known as Lord Malinche.
‡ Making a neat, if remote, pair with Snorri, the child of Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, half a millennium earlier.
§ The implications of such practices are intriguing. The son of a king’s wife might be anyone’s; only the children of his sister were sure to be of royal blood.
# See page 123.
∫ In a popular sitcom of British television in the 1960s and 1970s, Till Death Us Do Part, a new husband, socialist Mike, played by Tony Booth, comes to live with his wife Rita’s (Una Stubbs) conservative parents Alf and Else Garnett (Warren Mitchell and Dandy Nicholls). The matrilocal set-up and incompatible politics provide the pivotal tensions on which the plots devolve.
Ω See page 68.
≈ A deed of manumission, the legal guarantee of freedom.
Chapter Eight
The unquiet chorus
✥
THREE FACES OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI ~ MALICE DEFEATED: ELIZABETH CELLIER ~ MARY ASTELL’S SERIOUS PROPOSAL ~ CELIA FIENNES
From the Old World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an unquiet chorus of women singing from the wings edges onto the public stage: artists, scientists, philosophers and travellers, the overture to a European Enlightenment. The themes of women’s health, education and social justice, and the intrepidity of the restlessly creative, resonate with the lives of Egeria and Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, with Trota the Salernitan medic and with Christine de Pizan. Their stories are absolutely relevant in the modern world; and none more so than that of the Italian Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi, whose Caravaggesque mastery of shade and colour, startlingly original compositions and overtly feminised subject matter are markers for a new era in women’s self-imagery.
Three faces of Artemisia Gentileschi
Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, of about 1638–9,* stops you in your tracks and takes your breath away; in its day, it was revolutionary. It is one of the earliest self-portraits by a woman artist to survive. We see Artemisia in profile – a feat of considerable technical skill, requiring the use of multiple mirrors – her bare right arm raised high to the canvas with brush in hand. She wears a deep-green silk dress shot through with hues enriched by candlelight and by the folds of the material; her body is angled towards the viewer with the eye drawn to her pale cleavage, from which a gold necklace with masked pendant hangs, almost casually; red lips are pronounced and cut directly against the dark green of her shoulder. This artist is a sexual being, the more so because her eyes are intent on her work; she is uninterested in what art historians identify as the ‘male gaze’ – a marker for the essential prurience of much Renaissance art. The foreshortening of her facial features is a deliberate self-advertisement for the artist’s acknowledged brilliance as a disegna, a draughtswoman. Implicitly, she is painting herself painting herself –a fine pre-surrealist joke on infinity and mortality and the philosophical paradoxes of paint on canvas. As Mary Garrard showed in the first major analysis of Gentileschi’s work,1 both necklace and wild hair, which falls unruly from her temples, are nods to a description of pittura – the female embodiment of the skills of artists – by Cesare Ripa in his Iconologia (1593: the year of Artemisia’s birth). She alone of Baroque artists might intensify the allegory by portraying herself in the role. That the picture was produced at the court of, and possibly for, Charles I,
whose narcissism ended up costing him his own pretty head, is an unintentional but neat irony.
Artemisia (1593–1656) was the only daughter of Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639), a well-connected and successful Roman painter among whose acquaintances and inspirations was the brilliantly innovative Caravaggio (1571–1610). Artemisia’s mother, Prudentia, died when she was twelve, leaving the precocious young artist to grow up in an all-male household with four brothers. One of her earliest surviving works, Susanna and the Elders, painted when she was about seventeen and in the year of Caravaggio’s mysterious disappearance, justified her father in boasting of his daughter’s brilliance; she had already assisted him in some important commissions.
If the Self-Portrait is not the most famous of Artemisia Gentileschi’s works, it is because her more conventional subject matter – interpretations of familiar female biblical heroines and wronged women like St Cecilia, the cephalophoric martyr† – carries such loaded and shocking overtones: shocking because of the infamous rape trial of 1612 in which her father’s colleague, Agostino Tassi, was accused of violent sexual assault on Artemisia in her own home. Judith Slaying Holofernes of 1613 and several later depictions of that story have been read, unsurprisingly, as narratives of revenge.
In May 1612, Artemisia testified that Tassi had raped her with the connivance of another family friend, a woman named Tuzia, who owned an adjoining apartment. He had then offered, or been forced to agree, to marry her; but he failed to fulfil his promise. In any case, he was already married and had, in fact, previously been convicted of incest. The graphic testimony of a very public trial of 1612 survives. In it, Artemisia describes attempting to kill her attacker with a knife, while the defendant consistently defames her with fabricated accusations of sexual availability and consent, which the court found incredible. Artemisia was tortured with thumbscrews to determine the truth of her account; Tassi served six months in prison before being released.