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Women of Faith and the Pen, a transatlantic Reading
Joy A. J. Howard
Online Publication Date: 01 December 2007
To cite this Article Howard, Joy A. J.(2007)'Women of Faith and the Pen, a transatlantic Reading',Prose Studies,29:3,394 — 404
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Joy A. J. Howard
WOMEN OF FAITH AND THE PEN,
A TRANSATLANTIC READING
Anna Maria Van Schurman (1607– 1678),
Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz (1648– 1695), and
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Anne Bradstreet (1612– 1672)
‘Women of Faith and the Pen’ asserts that a particular situation existed where the
sixteenth-century transatlantic literary marketplace would and indeed did open for female
authors who successfully demonstrated three qualities in their writing. The marketplace
accepted female authors with an acute Biblical familiarity, the wit to interact with other
dynamic authors of their period, and the willingness to make their readers and critics aware
of the previous two conditions. Anna Maria van Schurman of the Netherlands, Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz of New Spain, and Anne Bradstreet of the Massachusetts Bay Colony all
experienced the literary success that came with being identified as a ‘tenth muse,’ a woman
of genius and value in her respected culture. This essay opens a conversation about the
strategies of these tenth muses and suggests future veins of inquiry to bring writers such as
these together across colonial situations.
Keywords seventeenth-century; women; transatlantic; religion; comparative; colonial
In 1650, a book of poetry from America was published in London by Anne Bradstreet’s
brother-in-law under the title: The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America. In 1689, the
poetry of another women of the Americas was published in Madrid; Sor Juana Inés de la
Cruz was described on her title page as ‘the Tenth Muse.’ In the seventeenth century,
transatlantic trade exploded; travel and colonial expansion burst onto the Atlantic
Ocean and goods, materials, bodies, and ideas circulated over the water and between
continents like never before. In the old country, Anna Maria van Schurman gathered
her various treatises on the subject of women and published them from Utrecht, the
Netherlands, in 1641 – just prior to the publications of de la Cruz and Bradstreet. Van
Schurman was hailed as the ‘Tenth Muse’ of Europe.1 The epithet ‘Tenth Muse’ was
designated a woman who inspired creative thought; it could also refer to a woman
regarded as embodying a muse. As Stephanie Merrim illustrates, ‘Tenth Muse’ also
effectively ‘provided a fiction to make sense of or explain the emergence of significant
women writers in the colonial literature market.’2 In short, it allowed for quick and
Prose Studies, Vol. 29, No. 3 December 2007, pp. 394-404
ISSN 0144-0357 print/ISSN 1743-9426 online q 2007 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/01440350701679214
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WOMEN OF FAITH AND THE PEN
easy marketing of complex female authorial identity; their writing was yet another
commodity from the New World to be exported to the Old and vice versa.3
As several literary critics have adeptly pointed out, the seventeenth-century
writings of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz of Mexico City and Anne Bradstreet of New
England beg comparison.4 They were women writers who defended female
intelligence, faith, and reason, and each was published within her own lifetime.
Comparisons grow admittedly difficult, however, because their poetic styles were
influenced by such widely varying cultures. Similarities grow clearer when de la Cruz
and Bradstreet are positioned within a larger field of transatlantic discourse, rather than
when we focus on their colonial influences, style, and reception. ‘Writers of the stature
of Anne Bradstreet and Sor Juana,’ Merrim writes, ‘never knew each other. Indeed,
because the “facts” of conquest and colonialism implied a particular organization of
social relations and knowledge, women writers in history could neither know each
other nor form political and social ties.’5 De la Cruz, writing in New Spain, was
intimately acquainted with a colonial project that co-opted religion and faith as colonial
control, as the Brevı́ssima relación la destrucción las Indias, written by Bartolomé de Las
Casas, so aptly asserted. Issues of faith and control were also uniquely intertwined in
the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Studying these women who were all connected to the
colonial projects of their nations together in the same space, this essay attempts to
articulate the benefits of understanding a wider transatlantic situation where the
marketplace seemed so willing to accept yet another tenth muse.6
Cotton Mather commented in Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion (1692) on the
‘women of pens’ God was raising up. He offered Anna Maria [van] Schurma[a]n, ‘a Dutch
theologian and scholar’ as a positive example, but Mather’s reaction to Van Schurman was
not indicative of his peers. For women to take up the pen and write about issues of faith
and religion was no small matter; they risked being read as witches or mad. John
Winthrop wrote in his journal in 1645 that a woman in the community had ‘fallen into a
sad infirmity, the loss of her understanding and reason, . . .by occasion of her giving
herself wholly to reading and writing.’ The female writer had the potential to be read as
mad, but these three authors were widely acclaimed during their lifetimes and after. They
acknowledge the risks they faced even as they wrote. The well-known Bradstreet said: ‘I
am obnoxious to each carping tongue/Who says my hand a needle better fits,/A poet’s
pen all scorn I should thus wrong,/For such despite they cast on female wits:/If what I do
prove well, it won’t advance,/They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance.’ She
withheld from her reader the originality of women’s complaints by making them herself.
Bradstreet revealed a sharp wit and an even more honed understanding of the systems of
oppression against her by placing within her poem the very reaction she expected from
many readers – that a woman’s time and talent is better set to use sewing and cooking for
her family than wasted with poems. De la Cruz echoed Bradstreet:
Oh, how much harm would be avoided in our country if older women were as
learned as Laeta and knew how to teach in the way Saint Paul and my Father Saint
Jerome direct! Instead of which, if fathers wish to educate their daughters beyond
what is customary, for want of trained older women and on account of the
extreme negligence which has become women’s sad lot, since well-educated older
women are unavailable, they are obliged to bring in men teachers to give
instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic, playing musical instruments, and
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other skills. No little harm is done by this,. . . As a result of this, many fathers
prefer leaving their daughters in a barbaric, uncivilized state to exposing them to
an evident danger such as familiarity with men breeds. All of which would be
eliminated if there were older women of learning, as Saint Paul desires, and
instruction were passed down from one group to another, as in the case with
needlework and other traditional activities.7
De la Cruz writes ironically that if readers dislike the poems they discover she has
written, then they would be better to simply not read them – an interesting alternative
to her not writing them: ‘Godspeed to you, all I do here/is show a piece, but not the
whole;/so if you do not like the cloth,/the bolt were better left unrolled.’ ‘Both
women defended the intelligence, reason, art, and power of their sex.’8
Arguably, van Schurman’s comment regarding women writers and learners
compared with needlework is just as direct: ‘But they are apt to argue that pulling the
needle and distaff is an ample enough school for women. I confess many have been thus
persuaded, and those of today who are maliciously inclined to agree with them in many
cases. But we who seek the voice of reason, not of received custom, do not accept this
rule.’ Each of these arguments centers around the female hand holding a pen rather
than a needle and though separated by language, oceans, and religious traditions, these
similarities are a common thread, to continue the sewing metaphor.
Van Schurman also played with the humbleness expected of women writers and
scholars. There are several self-portraits of van Schurman as lithoprints; she ‘drew’ into
the metal plate with a stylus and then used that as an ink plate to make many copies. She
often included inscriptions in Latin with the self-portraits. One inscription to her
correspondent, Constantijn Huygens, reads:
Why does the Maid conceal those hands
Which never found their equal?
The copper turned this way and that
Has made her fingers black,
And she is ashamed to show them thus.
Reader, let her exonerate her from blame.
‘Tis the fault of the first cut,
That she ever made in all her days.
Her hands are conspicuously stained from working with the material of an artist.
Instead of blaming herself, she blames the medium of art instead. The first cut into the
copper plate was nearly addicting, and she continued to make her art; the ink that
stained her fingertips from the writing she did carried a simple, but powerful
connotation because nowhere does she announce her intention to stop her work.
De la Cruz, a Catholic nun in New Spain, wrote in Spanish and her poetry and
letters are steeped in the lavish and erotic language of Spanish baroque poetry, whereas
Bradstreet, a highly respected wife and mother, wrote in English and was influenced by
a New England Puritan emphasis on plain language, regular meter, and the English
Renaissance. The writings of Catholic nuns were historically confined within the
convent walls;9 Sor Juana was already a published poet and a member of prestigious
courts in Mexico City when she took her vows to join the Convent of Santa Paula with
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WOMEN OF FAITH AND THE PEN
fellow criolla sisters, and both were relationships she would continue until her death in
1695.10 She wrote in Spanish and Latin and read constantly, building a personal library
of tremendous quality and quantity. Near the end of her life, Church officials asked her
to recant many of her previous writings. She refused; consequently, her reputation
within the Catholic Church was severely damaged.
Like de la Cruz and van Schurman, Anne Bradstreet belonged to the elite of her
community. She was born in England around 1612 and sailed to New England with her
husband aboard the same ship upon which John Winthrop traveled. Her father and
husband served as governors, and it was from her father’s library that she gleaned much
of her unconventional education. Unlike these two other writers, Bradstreet raised
children and lived, not in bustling urban centers, but in a frontier colony. Bradstreet’s
life is thoroughly anthologized; this is not to say, however, that much is known. The
place of Bradstreet’s burial is unknown and many other details about her life are lost to
us. Her father and husband secured for themselves lasting positions in history, but the
mother, and goodwife, and daughter was not so carefully documented. What we know
of her life, the joy she found in grandchildren, the anguish of their deaths, the risk of fire,
her husband’s long absences, and her delight in her faith, come to us through her poetry.
Across the Atlantic, Anna Maria van Schurman lived in Utrecht, the Netherlands
and wrote letters and essays revealing an intersection of the art and flair one finds in the
poetry of de la Cruz, as well as the reflection back to the classics one sees in Bradstreet.
Van Schurman was a multilingual writer, as was de la Cruz, an artist, and a well-known
female intellectual, theologian, and philosopher who received a great deal of attention
and respect from her male colleagues. Anna Maria van Schurman was born in 1607 and
would become arguably the most famous learned woman of her time in Europe.11 She
was the only daughter of a noble family that had fled anti-Protestant persecution in the
Spanish Netherlands; they settled in Utrecht. Her father, realizing his daughter’s
exceptional talent, educated her along with her brothers.12 When the founding academy
in Utrecht needed a Latin inscription for its opening celebration, van Schurman was
asked to write it. She corresponded in Latin with André Rivet (1572–1651), a French
Calvinist theologian, on the need for women to study all the sciences and the arts. She
herself achieved what she called for, becoming an expert in philosophic argument and
religious reasoning. She studied the Bible in its original languages and was one of the
most competent Hebrew scholars in the Netherlands and perhaps Europe. She also knew
Dutch, French, Spanish, Arabic, Aramaic, Syriac, Ethopic, Turkish, and Persian. She
wrote to linguists, theologians, and artists, each with equal refinement.13 Not only a
writer and scholar, she painted and etched and carved beautifully. It would seem that she
was simply successful in everything she tried. In 1653, she stopped writing and traveled
to Cologne to care for ailing family members. After they died, she did not reemerge.
She had always been a devout Christian and in 1661, she became a follower of a
Protestant mystic. She supported his cause until her death in 1678.14
In the last two decades, de la Cruz’s work has been made available in both Spanish
and English editions. Selected poems and excerpts of ‘Repuesta a Sor Filotea’ have been
included in recent editions of the Heath Anthology of American Literature, and they are
likewise often taught in Spanish literature classes.15 Like those of de la Cruz, many of
Anne Bradstreet’s poems are widely anthologized.16 Collecting and reading the work of
Anna Maria van Schurman is perhaps the most challenging among these three particular
authors because she was well versed in twelve languages and wrote most often in
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Latin and Greek. She is widely unavailable in English except for some of her writings
translated by Joyce L. Irwin.17
Critics have beautifully commented on representations of the female body in
Bradstreet’s poetry and the sensuality and passion in the poetry of de la Cruz and on van
Schurman’s feminine boldness.18 Likewise, Anna Maria van Schurman offers what appears
to be an ironic circular argument when she says that women should be allowed to study
whatever they wish because there are many who already have. But one sees Schurman’s
fundamental originality, like the subtlety in de la Cruz and Bradstreet, in deeper subtexts.19
The reader is forced to admit, by the nature of her argument’s structure, the ridiculousness
of railing against a learned vocation that has already been accomplished by women.
The densely woven fabric of these women authors fits into the cultural work other
writers, male and female, were doing at the time same and I think this is where the
really fascinating cultural work comes in.20 In the poetry and prose of these authors
similar themes of faith, education, the self, and the body, trace arenas of thought that
are not so separate, although oceans and languages may seem to be barriers. These
women were versed in the forms, functions, literature, and thought of their era. Even
as their communities were widely varied – fellow nuns, New England settlers, or
scholars – their respective libraries each contained the classics in history, theology,
science, and philosophy. Far from only a cursory experimentation with these texts,
each of them united the classics with their subjects, examples range from de la Cruz’s
familiarity with Seneca, Aristotle, and women in Greek mythology to van Schurman’s
entire dissertation on whether a Christian woman should study letters, which was
structured as a formulaic argument.
So, what did it mean to Mather for Anna Maria van Schurman to be a woman of the
pen while other women who wrote were thought suspect by John Winthrop? What
should it mean to our understanding of women of faith who take up the pen, but are
seen as a ‘muse lately sprung up’ in a transatlantic market? As Jane Kamensky writes in
Governing the Tongue, ‘Instead of treating language as a window through which distant
realities can be glimpsed naked and entire . . . we have begun to imagine it as a densely
woven fabric that is sometimes translucent and sometimes opaque. Rather than simply
a mode of communication, speech thus becomes a cultural system whose meanings take
their shape from a nexus of persons, places, and times.’21 In exploring the similarities
of the Biblical texts as the nexus these women used as they explicitly and implicitly
argued for their authorial place, one realizes that each saw themselves woven into a
Christian fabric that supported female authorship and education – their task was to
make others aware of this.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Anne Bradstreet, and Anna Maria van Schurman each
integrated a living faith into all that they wrote; they steeped themselves in Biblical
histories, knowledge of the Bible, and the canonical works that their particular
Christian faith deemed most important for male theologians to know. De la Cruz
borrows the structure of the erotic Song of Songs:
Oh, all the consideration,
the tenderness I have seen:
when love is placed in God,
nothing else can intervene.
...
WOMEN OF FAITH AND THE PEN
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Still, take courage, heart:
when torture becomes so sweet,
whatever may be my lot,
from love I’ll not retreat.
Book 8 of the ‘Song of Songs’ declares, ‘love is as strong as death . . . Many waters
cannot quench love, rivers cannot wash it away.’ Love, in de la Cruz’s sonnet is modeled
after this Biblical love. The love of God is not something from which the heart can
retreat. She becomes the erotic narrator of the canonical Biblical text as a female
author of faith and experience. Perhaps, arguably connected by a long history of female
mystics and writers, the materials that de la Cruz, Bradstreet, and van Schurman drew
upon overlapped, providing interweaving subtexts even as their physical lives did not
overlap.
In a not dissimilar way, the Book of Proverbs provided the structure for Anne
Bradstreet’s ‘Meditations,’ even while her subject reveals a uniquely feminine
experience of the world and the ways in which God is seen in it. She writes, ‘Some
children are hardly weaned; although the teat be rubbed with wormwood or mustard,
they will either wipe it off, or else suck down sweet and bitter together. So is it with
some Christians: let God embitter all the sweets of this life, that so they might feed
upon more substantial food’ (Meditation 38). As other critics have pointed out, many
male Protestant writers of this period referred to the breasts of God or the act of
suckling, but Bradstreet’s details of particular herbs makes this same imagery come
alive. The herb was bitter, but to a good end, and the body metaphor makes the
spiritual reality vivid.22
Sweetness and bitterness appear again in Bradstreet’s letter ‘to my dear Children,’
as do light and darkness. She writes, ‘I have sometimes tasted of that hidden manna that
the world knows not, and have set up my Ebenezer, and have resolved with myself that
against such a promise such taste of sweetness, the Gates of Hell shall never prevail.’ As
her readers would have known, Ebenezer is the name of a memorial stone. The
prophet Samuel sets up a stone to help the people of Israel remember what God has
done for them (1 Samuel 7:12). Bradstreet took paper and pen to memorialize the
moments of her life when she experienced goodness, sweetness from God so that
her children would not forget. Later, in this same passage, she writes, ‘yea, oft have
I thought were it [sickness and pain] hell itself, and could there find the Love of God
toward me, it would bee a Heaven. And, could I have been in Heaven without the Love
of God, it would have been a Hell to me; for, in Truth, it is the absence and presence of
God that makes Heaven or Hell.’ Bradstreet argues that geographical location fails to
define Heaven or Hell; for her, it is the Love and light of God that make life livable.
Milton expressed this same idea, but in reverse, speaking of Hell that cannot be left
behind. He writes in Book 4 of Paradise Lost that Hell is wherever Satan is; Hell is not a
specific location that Satan can leave behind. Satan has a ‘Hell within him, for within
him Hell/He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell/One step no more then
from himself can fly/By change of place’ (lines 20– 24). This is the cultural system
these women lived in. The ideas of light and dark and faith circulated regardless of the
side of the ocean they were on and theological concepts of space and geography are
especially fruitful when remembering how distant Bradstreet was from her home in
England. The didactic nature of Bradstreet’s writing and the Song of Songs flare found
399
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in the poetry by de la Cruz is matched in the Latin writing of van Schurman. Artist,
sketcher, and intellectual, she states:
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I shall not deny that artistic skill is to be included among the gifts of God and that
the spirit of God itself is credited as the author of the arts. For example, in Exodus
31 Bezalel and Oholiab are said to be capable and skilled in accomplishing any
work whatever. . . . Meanwhile I have indeed often wondered what place my study
of arts should hold for me; even from early childhood my talent inclined to and
expressed itself in a remarkable variety of things. When I was scarcely a girl of six
years, I cut out, without any example, outlines and figures from discarded scraps of
paper so skillfully with scissors that almost no one could be found, even among
adult friends, who tried it with similar success.
The passage she references is the building of the tabernacle. The Lord told Moses that
He chose these two particular men to fill with His Spirit and gift them with all sorts of
craftsmanship. The craftsmen were to make the tent of meeting, or the tabernacle. The
verse points to the agency of God and His Spirit to enable his workers to make
‘whatever,’ as van Schurman wrote, God needed them to make, but then, as Bradstreet
becomes an old Testament prophet, and de la Cruz fashions herself a Biblical poet, van
Schurman turns herself into the early modern artist called by not man, but by God
nonetheless. This very self-conscious representation marks these authors as part of a
similar movement toward an acceptance of female writing gifted by a higher spirit and
also higher reason.23 These authors all revealed intense familiarity with Biblical texts
that provided a proper Christian rationale for the classical motif the ‘Tenth Muse’ that
their contemporaries bestowed on them.
Notes
1. The nine muses of ancient mythology are considered to be the daughters of Zeus and
Mnemosyne. They preside over and inspire learning in their respective areas: Clio
(history or the stories of heroes); Calliope (epic poetry); Erato (Love poetry); Urania
(astronomy); Melpomene (tragedies); Euterpe (flute playing); Tepsicore (choir
lyrics); Thalia (comedies); and Polyhymnia (Dance and Music). As I found in my
research and as Stephanie Merrim also points out, the origin for the ‘tenth muse’ is
usually considered to be Greek poet Sappho (c. BC 613 – 570), whom Plato
considered the human counterpart to the nine muses of classical mythology. Merrim
names Marı́a de Zayas y Sotomayor, Anne Bradstreet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and
Anna Maria van Schurman as seventeenth-century ‘tenth muses’ in the description of
her undergraduate comparative literature course for the Spring of 2003. Merrim
argues that the taxonomical category of ‘muse’ allowed readers back in the Old World
to make sense of female writers that clearly were outside of the expected gender and
colonial expectations. See Jed [Merrim], 195.
2. Merrim argues that the taxonomical category of ‘muse’ allowed readers back in the
Old World to make sense of female writers that clearly were outside of the expected
gender and colonial expectations. See Jed [Merrim], 195.
3. See Jed [Merrim], 204.
4. Electra Arenal, Owen Aldridge, Stephanie Jed, and Suzanne Shimek.
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WOMEN OF FAITH AND THE PEN
5. See Jed [Merrim], 205.
6. I am indebted to the transatlantic scholarship of several scholars, including, but not
limited to: Spengemann, William. Mirror for Americanists : Reflections on the Idea of
American Literature. Hanover, NH: Published for Dartmouth College by University
Prees of New England, 1989.; Sacvan Bercovitch, ed. The Cambridge History of American
Literature, Volume 1:1590-1820. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.; and
Mulford, Carla. Teaching the Literatures of Early America. New York: Modern Language
Association of America Press, 2000.
7. Paul offers instruction on what must be taught to various groups in the second chapter
of Titus. ‘You must teach what is in accord with sound doctrine. Teach the older men
to be temperate, worthy of respect, self-controlled, and sound in faith, in love and in
endurance. Likewise, teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not
to be slanders or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good. Then they can
train the younger women to love their husband and children, to be self-controlled and
pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no
one will malign the word of God’ (Titus 2:1– 5).
8. See Arenal, 158.
9. See Kothe.
10. De la Cruz was born Juana Ramirez de Asbaje in 1648 and gained access to the colonial
courts early on; she was intelligent, witty, and beautiful. In other words, she was
quickly on her way to becoming someone’s trophy bride, as her two older half-sisters
had become before her. De la Cruz’s mother was Creole. Her father was Basque. Her
date of birth was accepted as 1651 for many years, but she lied to gain entrance to the
convent and thus made herself younger than she was. She also lied about her legitimacy
as a child conceived in wedlock. See Peden’s introduction for a careful explanation of
gender and racial expectations in New Spain in the seventeenth century; and Shimek.
11. See van Beek, 1995.
12. See King and Rabil.
13. See van Beek, 1995.
14. Various facts of van Schurman’s life were also gratefully gleaned from de Baar. The
only biography of Anna Maria van Schurman in English was published in 1909 by Una
Birch. It was subtitled ‘Artist, Scholar, Saint.’ Joyce L. Irwin argues that it is the title
of ‘scholar’ that gives van Schurman a lasting place and significance in history. I, on the
other hand, am wary of being so easily dismissive of her quality as an artist or the
weight of her religious writings.
15. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 4th edn (ed. Paul Lauter) includes Poems 48
(‘In Reply to a Gentleman from Peru, Who Sent Her Clay Vessels While Suggesting
She Would Better Be a Man’), 94 (‘Which Reveals the Honorable Ancestry of a HighBorn Drunkard’), and 317 (‘Villancico VI, from Santa Catarina’). For example, see
Chang-Rodriguez and Filer. It was also brought to my attention that Poem 92,
‘Hombres necios que acusáis,’ is currently (2004) listed on high school Spanish AP
tests as a possible text for translation and explanation. I am personally inclined to use
Alan S. Trueblood’s English translations or Margaret Sayers Peden’s Bilingual
Anthology. See Juana Inés de la Cruz, 1985 and 1988.
16. For example, in the Heath Anthology of American Literature, the following poems are made
available and most are Bradstreet’s ‘personal’ poetry in which she discusses her family,
husband, or faith: ‘In Honour of Queen Elizabeth,’ ‘The Prologue [To Her Book],’ ‘Upon
the Burning of Our House July 10th, 1666,’ ‘A Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon
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17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
Public Employment,’ ‘Before the Birth of One of Her Children,’ ‘In Memory of My Dear
Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet, Who Deceased August, 1665, Being a Year and Half
Old,’ ‘On My Dear Grandchild Simon Bradstreet, Who Died on 16 November, 1669,
Being but a Month, and One Day Old,’ ‘The Author to Her Book,’ ‘The Flesh and the
Spirit,’ ‘To Her Father with Some Verses,’ ‘To My Dear and Loving Husband,’ and ‘To
My Dear Children.’ Likewise, Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner’s The English Literatures of
America 1500–1800 (1997) and the Norton Anthology of American Literature – Literature to
1820 (2003) include an equal number of Bradstreet’s personal poems. As Hensley states in
her ‘Note on the Text,’ her edition ‘reproduces carefully the second edition, Several Poems,
published in 1678 in Boston. Bradstreet had a hand in editing this edition and thus, Hensley
asserts, we can probably assume that the edition is ‘more nearly the form in which she
intended her work to appear.’ I concur.
See van Schurman, 1998. The dedication to Utrecht University is translated into English
and included in Churchhill. The dedication is translated into Dutch and available in van
Beek, 1997, 321–2. Additionally, a Dutch translation of her dissertation written in
Latin on ‘whether a Christian woman should pursue the study of letters’ has been
beautifully completed by ter Haar with an introduction by Roothaan in van Schurman,
1996. Various facts of van Schurman’s life were also gratefully gleaned from de Baar.
The only biography of Anna Maria van Schurman in English was published in 1909 by
Una Birch. It was subtitled ‘Artist, Scholar, Saint.’ Joyce L. Irwin argues that it is the
title of ‘scholar’ that gives van Schurman a lasting place and significance in history. I, on
the other hand, am wary of being so easily dismissive of her quality as an artist or the
weight of her religious writings. For example, in Eukleria seu Melioris Partis Electio
[Eukleria, or Choosing the Better Part ] (1673), van Schurman sketched out her life as a
scholar, arguing for the separatist community of Jean de Labadie (whose group she
would later join), and also her position in favor of Christian philosophy. It is a
complicated composition of autobiography, theology, and philosophy. Much of her
correspondence with other scholarly women was in Greek and Hebrew, whereas her
letters with men were usually in Latin. She wrote in Latin and Dutch when participating
in philosophical discussions where she expected to be published. See Irwin.
This essay does not pretend to give a comprehensive review of criticism for all three
authors; rather, I seek to guide the reader toward other texts that make connections
between these three authors. For example, see Merrim; Sabat-Rivers; Gurswamy;
Martin; Requa; Salska; Waller; Arenal, 158; Paz, 1982 and 1988.
See van Eck; van Beek, 1995.
Harvey certainly is not the first to call for a different vantage point from which to read
Bradstreet’s formal work. See Stein; Harvey; Arenal.
See Kamensky, 9– 10.
See Blair St George.
The cross-cultural Biblical subtexts are quite stunning, but the interconnectedness of
the multilingual nature of the writers is perhaps just as rich. The classical implications
of logic and rhetoric are another possible direction to explore with these three writers.
Latin was used in the Catholic Church and, by often quoting Seneca, de la Cruz makes
it clear she is also multilingual. Bradstreet’s opinion on the education of a woman is
seen in her own life as she illustrated an intricate understanding of classical history and
texts. As Adrienne Rich writes in the foreword to Hensley’s edition, ‘Bradstreet’s
knowledge and taste in literature shows her brain was alive.. . . The Bible was the air
she and everyone else breathed; but she also knew Raleigh’s History of the World,
WOMEN OF FAITH AND THE PEN
Camden’s Annals of Queen Elizabeth, Piers Plowman, Sidney’s poems; and she was deeply
impressed with Joshua Sylvester’s translation of Guillaume Du Bartas’ La Sepmaine du
Creation. The Divine Weekes and Works, as this elephantine poem was called in English,
was an acknowledged popular masterpiece. Du Bartas, the leading French Calvinist
poet, was admired as a peer of Ronsard.. . . Anne Bradstreet was thus showing no
provinciality of taste in her response to Du Bartas.’ I entirely concur with Rich,
although I would hasten to add that her poems that follow the classical literature she
admired do not read ‘like a commonplace book.’ These less personal poems allowed
Bradstreet to synthesize her education of the historical, the theological, and the
scientific and thereby provide contemporary readers with an excellent opportunity to
see what filled the mind of young Bradstreet as she sat in her father’s library.
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References
Arenal, Electra. “This Life Within me Won’t Keep Still.” In Reinventing the Americas
Comparative Studies of Literature of the United States and Spanish America, edited by
Chevigny B.G. and Gari Laguardia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003.
Blair St George, Robert. Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England
Culture. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Chang-Rodriguez, Raquel, and Malva E. Filer, eds. Voces de Hispanoamerica: Anthologia
Literaria.2nd ed. Boston, MA: Heinle and Heinle, 1996.
Churchhill, Laurie J., Phyllis R. Brown, and Jane E. Jeffery, eds. Women Writing Latin: from
Roman Antiquity to Early Modern Europe. New York: Routledge, 2002.
deBaar, Marjam, Machteld Lowensteyn,Marit Monterio, andA.Agnes Sneller, eds. Choosing the
Better Part: Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678). Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic, 1996.
de la Cruz, Juana Inés. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz POEMS: A Bilingual Anthology. Trans.
Margaret Sayers Peden. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue, 1985.
de la Cruz, Juana Inés. A Sor Juana Anthology. Trans. Alan S. Trueblood. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1988.
Gurswamy, Rosemary Fithian. “Queer Theory and Publication Anxiety: The Case of the
Early American Woman Writer.” Early American Literature 34, no. 1 (1999): 103 –12.
Harvey, Tamara. ‘“Now Sisters . . . Impart your Usefulnesse, and Force’: Anne Bradstreet’s
Feminist Functionalism in The Tenth Muse.” Early American Literature 35 (2000): 5 –28.
Irwin, Joyce L. “Learned Woman of Utrecht.” In Women Writers of the Seventeenth-Century,
edited by Katharina M. Wilson and Frank J. Warnke. Athens, GA: University of
Georgia Press, 1989.
Jed[Merrim], Stephanie. “The Tenth Muse.” In Women, ‘Race,’ and Writing in the Early Modern
Period, edited by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker. London: Routledge, 1994.
Jehlen, Myra and Michael Warner. The English Literatures of America, 1500– 1800, New
York: Routledge, 1996.
Kamensky, Jane. Governing the Tongue. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
King, Margaret L., and Albert Rabil Jr, “Introduction: Anna Maria van Schurman and her
Intellectual Circle.” Whether a Christian Woman should be Educated and Other Writings . . ..
Trans. Joyce L. Irwin. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Kothe, Ana. “Whose Letter it is, Anyway? Print, Authority, and Gender in the Publication
of Sor Juana’s Carta Atenagorica.” Women’s Studies 25 (1996): 352.
403
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404
PROSE STUDIES
Lauter Paul. The Heath Anthology of American Literature: Volume 1. (4th edition). Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
Martin, Wendy. An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich. Chapel
Hill, NC: University of Carolina Press, 1984.
Merrim, Stephanie. Early Modern Women’s Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Nashville,
TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999.
Paz, Octavio. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, o Las Trampas de la Fe. Barcelona: Seix Barral, and
Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982.
Paz, Octavio. Sor Juana, or The traps of Faith. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Peden, Margaret Sayers. “Introduction.” Poems, Protest, and a Dream. New York: Penguin
Books, 1997.
Requa, Kenneth A. “Anne Bradstreet’s Poetic Voices.” Early American Literature 9 (1974):
3– 18.
Sabat-Rivers, Georgia. “A Feminist Rereading of Sor Juana’s Dream.” In Feminist Perspectives,
edited by Stephanie Merrim. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991.
Salska, Agnieska. “Puritan Poetry: Its Public and Private Strain.” Early American Literature 19
(1984): 107 – 21.
Shimek, Suzanne. “The Tenth Muses Lately Sprung up in the Americas: The Borders of the
Female Subject in Sor Juana’s First Dream and Anne Bradstreet’s ‘Contemplations.”’
Legacy 17, no. 1 (2000): 4.
Stein, Robert B. “The Structure of Anne Bradstreet’s Tenth Muse.” Discoveries and
Considerations: Essays on Early American Literature and Aesthetics. Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1976.
van Beek, Pieta. “One Tongue is Enough for a Woman: the Correspondence in Greek
between Anna Maria van Schurman (1607 – 1678) and Bathsua Makin (1600– 167?).”
Dutch Crossing 19 (1995): 24 –48.
van Beek, Pieta. Klein werk: de Opuscula Hebraea Graeca Latina et Gallica, prosaica et metrica van
Anna Maria van Schurman (1607 – 1678). Amsterdam: Universiteit van Stellenbosch
and dbNL, 1997.
van Schurman, Anna Maria. Verhandeling over de aanleg van vrouwen voor wetenschap (1641).
Translated from Latin by René ter Haar. Introduction by Angela Roothaan.
Groningen: University Press, 1996.
van Schurman, Anna Maria. A Practical Problem: Whether the Study of Letters is Fitting for a Christian
Woman. Trans. Joyce L. Irwin. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Waller, Jennifer. ‘“My Hand a Needle Better Fits’: Anne Bradstreet and Women Poets in
the Renaissance.” Dalhousie Review 54 (1974): 436 – 50.
van Eck, Caroline. “The first Dutch Feminist Tract?: Anna Maria van Schurman’s Discussion of
Women’s Aptitude for the Study of Arts and Sciences.” In Choosing the Better Part: Anna
Maria van Schurman (1607–1678), edited by Marjam de Baar, Machteld Lowensteyn,
Marit Monterio, and A. Agnes Sneller. Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic, 1996.
Joy A. J. Howard is a doctoral candidate in English at Purdue University. Her
dissertation, ‘A Culture of Possession in Early America,’ traces the discourse practices of
stories about spirit possession in colonial America. She has also written about Julia A. J.
Foote in Legacy: a Journal of American Women Writers.