Lucy Hutchinson (1620–1681)

Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Margaret J. M. Ezell

Many who lived through the English Civil War penned memoirs of their experiences, some of which were published after their deaths, such as Richard Baxter’s life writings and Thomas Fuller’s accounts of the worthies of England, or wrote and published topical public histories, including John Milton’s history of Britain. Samuel Pepys’s and John Evelyn’s diaries are among the most important sources about the Restoration years. Others such as Lucy Hutchinson wrote memoirs for their family or, like Margaret Cavendish, to defend the reputation of a family member. There was also interest in the history of foreign cultures, past rulers, and antiquarian topics.


This collection of twelve original essays by an international team of eminent scholars in the field of book history explores the many ways in which early modern books were subject to reworking, re-presentation, revision and reinterpretation. Their history is often the history of multiple, sometimes competing, agencies as their texts were re-packaged, redirected and transformed in ways that their original authors might hardly recognize. The essays discuss the processes of editing, revision, redaction, selection, abridgement, glossing, disputation, translation and posthumous publication that resulted in a textual elasticity and mobility that could dissolve distinctions between text and paratexts, textuality and intertextuality, manuscript and print, author and reader or editor, such that title and author’s name are no longer sufficient pointers to a book’s identity or contents. The essays are alive to the impact of commercial and technological aspects of book production and distribution (discussing, for example, the career of the pre-eminent bookseller John Nourse, the market appeal of abridgements, and the financial incentives to posthumous publication), but their interest is also in the many additional forms of agency that shaped texts and their meanings as books were repurposed to articulate, and respond to, a variety of cultural and individual needs. They engage with early modern religious, political, philosophical and scholarly trends and debates as they discuss a wide range of genres and kinds of publication (including fictional and non-fictional prose, verse miscellanies, abridgements, sermons, religious controversy) and of authors and booksellers (including Lucy Hutchinson, Richard Baxter, Thomas Burnet, Elizabeth Rowe, John Dryden, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lucy Hutchinson, Henry Maundrell, John Nourse; Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, John Tillotson, Isaac Watts and John Wesley).


2021 ◽  

The civil war between Charles I and his parliament broke out in England in 1642; rebellions were already underway in Scotland from 1637, and in Ireland from 1641. The conflict culminated with the trial and execution of the king in 1649. Through the 1650s Britain was governed as a republic, then as a Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell from 1653. But the regime unraveled after Cromwell’s death in 1658, ultimately leading to the Restoration of monarchy under Charles II in 1660. The civil wars were fought on the page as intensely as on the battlefield, producing an outpouring of rich and diverse literature, including (to barely scratch the surface): the poetry and prose of John Milton, Andrew Marvell, the cavalier poets, Katherine Philips, Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, Gerrard Winstanley, Thomas Hobbes, the Earl of Clarendon, Marchamont Nedham. This vibrant and important body of writing was, for much of the 20th century, neglected and poorly understood. The closure of the theaters in 1642, the collapse of royal court culture, and a critical fashion that dismissed writing sullied by political engagement: these factors all produced the illusion of a hiatus in the literary tradition, a “cavalier winter.” These misplaced assumptions, however, have been overturned since the 1980s by a new wave of scholarly interest, galvanized by a renewed recognition of the value and excitement of politically engaged writing. Scholarship informed by different branches of historicism, combining literary criticism variously with New Historicism, with the history of political thought, with social history, and with book history, have all transformed our appreciation of civil war literature. As such, work by historicist critics—and by historians—is inescapably central to this bibliography, and fundamental to our understanding of the period’s literature. But, as will become apparent, plenty of space remains for a diversity of approaches including gender studies, queer studies, critical theory, reception studies, and formalism. This bibliography is organized thematically, rather than around major individual authors, of whom there are many, most of whom appear in multiple sections. For this reason, no attempt has been made to include scholarly editions, though reader-friendly anthologies are listed, many of which make valuable scholarly contributions. Key studies on politics and literature appear in Literature and Politics: Essential Studies, followed by more focused sections on royalism, cavalier poetry, republicanism, and Cromwellian writing. Other sections cover scholarship on printing and pamphleteering, on radicalism, on women’s writing, on gender and sexuality, on drama, and on international and colonial contexts.


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