Incarnational Fruit: Authorization and Women's Anonymous Seventeenth-Century Devotional Writing

Abstract

This dissertation asserts that women’s anonymity in seventeenth-century devotional texts functions as a performance to be understood rather than a mystery to be solved. Anonymity has long been framed as merely a protean form of authorship or a barrier to the recovery of a lost literary history. The archive frequently renders anonymity invisible or reveals anonymity at the moment of its undoing; however, this study of women’s anonymity contends that, although women applied anonymity to avoid the stigma of print, their anonymity functions less as a blind than as a frame to emphasize those traits they wished most to expose. In my first and second chapters, I demonstrate how the anonymous Eliza’s Babes (1652) and the nearly anonymous An Collins’s Divine Songs and Meditacion (1653) use the anonymous text to replace the signification of sick, infertile, and therefore volatile female bodies with an imitative production of devotion that constitutes the text as a divinely-restored, alternatively-productive body through which they relate to God and reader. Readers’ positive reception of this devotional re-signification of the body’s productivity countermands stereotypes readers hold against women writing, affirms the woman writer as faithful, and reincorporates both reader and writer in a corporate body of believers through their mutual participation in devotional practices. My third chapter affirms the perceived authority of anonymity’s corporate voice through the exploration of George Hickes’s retroactive attribution of several late seventeenth-century anonymous devotional texts to Susanna Hopton. I argue that the derivative nature of the anonymous devotional collections invests them with a corporate voice Hickes finds to be a valuable asset in his defense of Hopton’s devotional acumen. Drawing together scholarship on seventeenth-century relationality and intersubjectivity, readership, devotion, and women’s health, this study reconsiders the signification of women’s anonymity and their unoriginality as a tool that facilitates agentive reading and rehabilitates women’s claim to corporate belonging.