Veiled Intent: Dissenting Women’s Aesthetic Approach to Biblical Interpretation

Veiled Intent

Dissenting Women’s Aesthetic Approach to Biblical Interpretation

Natasha Duquette

Foreword by Nicholas Wolterstorff

Veiled Intent

Dissenting Women’s Aesthetic Approach to Biblical Interpretation

Copyright © 2016 Natasha Duquette. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Pickwick Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-62032-412-7

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-0020-3

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-0019-7

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Name: Duquette, Natasha. | Nicholas Wolterstorff, foreword.

Title: Veiled intent : dissenting women’s aesthetic approach to biblical interpretation / Natasha Duquette ; foreword by Nicholas Wolterstorff.

Description: Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2016 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-62032-412-7 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-5326-0020-3 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-5326-0019-7 (ebook).

Subjects: LCSH: Bible. Old Testament—Feminist criticism | Bible. Old Testament—Hermeneutics | Eighteenth-Century Literature | Title.

Classification: BS501 A1 D91 2016 (print) | BS1181.8 (ebook).

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

An earlier version of the introduction was published as Veiled Exegesis: Dissenting Women’s Aesthetic Approach to Theological Hermeneutics and Social Action, in British Women and the Intellectual World in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Teresa Barnard, 107–28. London: Routledge, 2015. Used by permission.

Small portions of Chapters 1 and 4 appeared in Handbook of Women Biblical Interpreters: A Historical and Biographical Guide, edited by Marion Taylor. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012. Used by permission of Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group, 2012.

Portions of Chapters 1 and 5 appeared in Sublimer Aspects: Interfaces between Literature, Aesthetics, and Theology, edited by Natasha Duquette, and are published with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.

A Portion of Chapter 3 was first published as Horrific Suffering, Sacred Terror, and Sublime Freedom in Helen Maria Williams’s Peru, in Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory, edited by Holly Faith Nelson, Lynn R. Szabo, and Jens Zimmermann, 113–27. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010. http://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/press/Catalog/nelson.shtml

To my mother Mary Ada Aleksiuk

painter and scientist

in memoriam

The Bible is kept locked up, the way people once kept tea locked up, so the servants wouldn’t steal it. It is an incendiary device: who knows what we’d make of it if we ever got our hands on it?

—Margaret Atwood, Handmaid’s Tale (1985)

I asked him once if I would ever see / his hidden face so veiled by imagery.

—Michael D. O’Brien, Sophia House (2005)

Table of Contents

Illustrations

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Womb of Morning

Chapter 2: Sublimest Skies

Chapter 3: Oh Suff’ring Lord

Chapter 4: Sisters of the Lyre

Chapter 5: No Beauty but in Christ

Conclusion

Bibliography

Illustrations

1. Detail from General Chart in the back matter of Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck’s Theory on the Classification of Beauty and Deformity (1815). Image copyright @ Chawton House Library. | 13

2. Corot, Jean-Baptiste Camille (1796–1875). Hagar in the Wilderness. 1835. Oil on canvas, 71 X 106 ½ in. Rogers fund, 1938 (38.64). Image copyright @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art. | 69

3. Plate VII: A Fore-view of the Cavity of the Womb, engraving by Jan van Rymsdyk, for William Hunter, Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus 1773 (London: Printed for the Sydenham Society, 1852) 4. Image copyright @ W.D. Jordan Special Collections and Music Library, Queen’s University. | 174

4. Religieuses de Port-Royal des Champs. Conférence dans la solitude. By Varem and Lavieille after Louise-Magdeleine Hortemels’ engraving. In Magasin Pittoresque 18 (1850) 108. Image copyright @ Marzolino. | 221

5. Engraving of a Penitent found in the back matter appended to Schimmelpenninck’s Theory on the Classification of Beauty and Deformity (1815). Copyright @ Chawton House Library. | 225

6. Engraving of a Nun from Lavater found in the back matter appended to Schimmelpenninck’s Theory on the Classification of Beauty and Deformity (1815). Copyright @ Chawton House Library. | 225

7. Raphael. The Alba Madonna, c. 1510. Oil on panel transferred to canvas overall (diameter): 94.5 cm (37 3/16 in.) framed: 139.7 x 135.9 x 14 cm (55 x 53 1/2 x 5 1/2 in.) Andrew W. Mellon Collection. Copyright @ The National Gallery of Art. | 245

Tables

1. Total number of hymns for each specified poet in Andrew Kippis et al., ed., Hymns and Psalms for Public and Private Worship (1795). | 71

Foreword

Modern aesthetics began in the early eighteenth century. During the preceding century, works of the arts were increasingly produced outside the church for absorbed attention by the rising middle class during their leisure. Public concert halls and museums began to be built, the patronage system was being replaced by a market system, and so forth. In short, our modern art world was coming into existence.

In the early eighteenth century theorists began to claim that these developments represented the arts coming into their own, freed from service to purposes outside art to follow their own internal dynamics. What above I called absorbed attention came to be called disinterested contemplation; later in the century it was called aesthetic contemplation.

What Natasha Duquette’s fascinating discussion in Veiled Intent makes clear is that, whatever validity this picture may have as a rough and ready generalization, it overlooks and conceals from view an important development in this period. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century a number of women were becoming skilled as theologians and biblical interpreters and invested in issues of social justice, such as abolishing the slave trade and resisting the suppression of women. It was made clear to them, however, that they were not allowed to teach theology or biblical interpretation, nor to write and publish books that straightforwardly presented themselves as works of theology or biblical interpretation. That was the prerogative of men. Nor were they allowed to write openly in support of social justice issues.

Accordingly they undertook to veil their intent, to use Duquette’s apt terminology. They expressed their theology, their biblical interpretations, and their social concerns in the form of devotional literature, often in verse. Devotional literature, especially in verse form, was an acceptable genre for women authors.

The first writer that Duquette studies in detail is Anna Barbauld. Some of the readers of her early works discerned the theological and hermeneutic intent behind the veil of devotional literature in poetic form and criticized her both for intruding into an area reserved for men and for the content of her theology and biblical interpretation. She responded by writing subsequently for children.

Following Duquette, I have emphasized that the women authors she studies were gifted theologians and biblical interpreters who were forced by the role-assignments of the day to veil that fact. But there is another theme, equally fascinating, that runs throughout Duquette’s discussion. The women she studies were avid readers of the aesthetic literature of the day. Common in that literature was the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. Edmund Burke was the most influential writer on the matter; he firmly associated the sublime with the masculine and the beautiful with the feminine. The sublime is strong and active; the beautiful is weak and compliant.

The writers that Duquette studies were well acquainted with Burke on the sublime and the beautiful; and they bridled—rightly so—over this equation of the sublime with the strong active masculine and the equation of the beautiful with the weak compliant feminine. They subtly employed Scripture, especially the Psalms and poetic passages in the prophets, to undermine Burke’s polarity. From Scripture we learn that the sublime is not the exclusive province of the masculine. Some began to speak of the compassionate sublime.

We human beings create works of the arts for a multiplicity of different purposes; members of the public likewise engage works of the arts in a multiplicity of different ways. One of the ways in which we engage them is that to which the eighteenth-century theorists paid almost exclusive attention, namely, as objects of absorbed disinterested or aesthetic attention. What Duquette studies in fascinating detail is an episode in which works of the arts were created for a very different purpose than to serve as objects of absorbed disinterested or aesthetic attention. They were created to subvert, and to do an end-run around, the insistence in England and other Western European countries, in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, that theology and biblical interpretation are men’s work. I submit that that purpose was at least as important as creating works of the arts for aesthetic engagement.

Veiled Intent is an important contribution to a more rich and nuanced understanding of the role of the arts in human existence than that which the eighteenth century aesthetic theorists propounded.

Nicholas Wolterstorff

Acknowledgments

I first encountered gendered language applied to late eighteenth-century aesthetics while enrolled as a Masters student in a course titled Romanticism and Geography at the University of Toronto with Alan Bewell. The discussion was fascinating but centered very much on male poets, and this prompted me to wonder if women poets were not also writing about beauty and sublimity in the Romantic era of British literature. Through my own research, largely within independent bookstores in the cities of Toronto and Kingston, Ontario, Canada, I discovered eighteenth-century women certainly were crafting their own aesthetic categories through verse. I eventually wrote my doctoral dissertation on the sublime in women’s poetry of the long eighteenth century, at Queen’s University in Kingston. I would like to thank John Pierce, Shelley King, Leslie Ritchie, and Susan Bauman for responding to my early work on women poets and sublimity. A huge acknowledgment of gratitude must also go to Deborah Kennedy, who served as the external examiner for my dissertation; she has been integral in encouraging me to further explore the religious contexts of women poets and philosophers.

Various forms of formal aid have also benefited this project, such as the Chawton House Library Fellowships I held during the summer of 2008 and fall of 2013, as well as multiple Biola University Research Grants, which allowed me to return to the UK and to conduct research at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. My work was further spurred on by a 2012 research fellowship at the Center for Christian Thought in Southern California. Through incisive comments and clear thinking, Nicholas Wolterstorff, George Hunsinger, Craig Slane, Amos Yong, Dariusz Brycko, Gregg A. Ten Elshof, Tom Crisp, Jonathan Anderson, and Liz Hall were stimulating companions during our time together at the CCT. Greg Peters helped with Latin translation. Philosopher Kristen Irwin listened to my ideas and discussed them with me, sometimes in French, during long runs together. Likewise, through their ties to archival research on women writers, Gillian Dow, Stephen Bygrave, Isobel Grundy, Juliet McMaster, Elizabeth Lenckos, Teresa Barnard, Stephen Bending, Fiona Price, and Angela Wright have spoken kind words that helped me persevere. Finally, Marion Taylor at the Toronto School of Theology played a key role in sparking Veiled Intent. In her role as editor of my early essays on women’s biblical interpretation, she asked me, with real curiosity, how eighteenth-century women were able to publish their original perspectives on scripture. In doing so, she showed me someone actually cared about this area of print history.

Here in Toronto, my colleagues at Tyndale University College and Seminary have extended grace as I have taken time to work on this project, and I would like especially to thank Benjamin Reynolds of the Biblical Studies department for telling me about St. John Chrysostom’s comparison of women in the early church to ferocious lions and also for reading a section of my manuscript. In the summer of 2015, President Gary Nelson encouraged me, and Dean Barry Smith showed flexibility in regards to my administrative duties as associate dean, and my colleague Elizabeth Davey labored alongside me on her own book project, inspiring me with her diligence. Two members of the Tyndale Philosophy department—Rich Davis and Paul Franks—enabled me to finish simply by believing in me and showing respect for my work. The people who supported me most as I saw this monograph to completion were my research assistants—Hannah Schaller, Petrina Jap, Gillian Lee, Katie Wilson, and Conor Sweetman—and, of course, my husband Fred Duquette. The title for Veiled Intent arose from creatively collaborative conversation while Fred and I were walking our dogs, Esmée and Zamor, one warm California evening.

Introduction

What tactics did intellectual, Dissenting women deploy in order to introduce their biblical interpretation and theological ideas into the print culture of the long eighteenth century? Early British women writers often felt they had to choose between private familial propriety and public writerly acclaim. Conduct books written by clergymen such as Rev. James Fordyce, made infamous by Jane Austen’s pedantic clergyman Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice (1813), advised women to hide their intelligence in order to maintain an appearance of propriety.¹ Fordyce asked his female audience: Need I tell you that men of the best sense have been usually averse to the thought of marrying a witty female?² Suspicion was cast on women who spent time reading and writing, not only within the established Church of England but also within Dissenting Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Moravian communities that advocated strong links between biblical knowledge, theological discussion, and practiced faith. Presbyterian Calvinist communities, for example, tended to emphasize the head over the heart, abstract philosophical doctrine over lived experiential wisdom, in ways that shut out forms of knowledge perceived as feminine and embodied. This impacted and limited eighteenth-century biblical hermeneutics.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, women such as Anna Barbauld, Phillis Wheatley, Helen Maria Williams, Joanna Baillie, and Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck began veiling their incarnational biblical hermeneutics in a multiplicity of forms that were increasingly seen as acceptably feminine: lyric verse, elegies, devotional literature, aesthetic theory, and educational manuals for teaching children. These women writers were surrounded by theologically trained men teaching in a tradition of rational Dissent, stimulated by emerging fields of science and commerce—educated fathers, brothers, and friends with whom they conversed as intellectual equals and even co-published essays. Nevertheless, as women, and in the case of Phillis Wheatley as an African American and slave, the individuals in this group of highly gifted eighteenth-century female thinkers were barred from earning degrees in the very institutions where their male relatives and friends taught.³ They could listen in from the fringes to the conversations of published, propertied, Dissenting men, but their female voices were not always acknowledged as full participants. Although these women regularly attended non-conformist churches, studying their bibles with passionate intellectual curiosity, they were not encouraged to share their biblical interpretations in the form of scholarly publications. In response to the perceived impropriety of a woman publicly voicing her original perspectives on scripture, theology, and ecclesial community, Dissenting women such as Barbauld, Wheatley, Williams, Baillie, and Schimmelpenninck deployed tactical moves and countermoves to ensure their scriptural exegesis and theological analysis was preserved for posterity. They intentionally placed their biblical hermeneutics and theological aesthetics within the mediums most palatable to an audience resistant to the idea of a public woman theologian. Twenty-first-century critical biographies of Dissenting women have broken fresh ground for considering the innovative modes through which they disseminated their theological arguments.⁴ These Dissenting female poets and theorists veiled provocative hermeneutical claims and calls for social action in aesthetic forms of discourse viewed as more acceptably feminine modes of expression.⁵

Eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century female Dissenters were doubly-marginalised by their gendered and Dissenting societal positions. Due to the Test and Corporation Acts of 1661 and 1673, set up with the restoration of the British Crown after the end of the Puritan Commonwealth, Dissenters in England were not allowed to serve in the British Parliament or enter universities such as Oxford and Cambridge. In order to hold a political or academic position within the British establishment, one was required to take communion in the Church of England. As a result, Quakers, Baptists, and Presbyterians began setting up their own educational institutions, such as the Warrington Academy, where Anna Barbauld’s father John Aikin taught. This empowered Dissenters to an extent, allowing them to take degrees and earn ordination without compromising their theological convictions. However, this only really benefited Dissenting men, since gifted, creative women born into Dissenting families, who received a high degree of informal biblical and even scientific education, could not formally enroll in the Dissenting academies to earn degrees.⁶ These women were doubly-disenfranchised due to both their gender and their familial dissent from the state Church, and they had complex, at times conflicted, relationships to their own families and church communities. For example, Anna Barbauld’s father long refused to gratify her earnest desire of being initiated into classical learning⁷ because proficiency in Latin and Greek was viewed as unfeminine. Barbauld’s family also chastised her when she subtly critiqued the discourse at Warrington Academy as too coldly philosophical. The Scottish Presbyterian Church solicited hymns from Joanna Baillie only to reject them after she had painstakingly crafted beautiful verse paraphrases of scripture. The blocks, censures, and restrictions imposed on Dissenting women writers were paradoxically generative, however. Their double-marginalisation resulted in unique viewpoints that generated subtle, effective literary and socio-political tactics.

Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life provides a sustained definition of the creative, poetic everyday tactics of the disempowered that differ from the didactic, overarching strategies of the powerful. De Certeau links such tactics, which tie together (moral) freedom, (esthetic) creation, and a (practical) act to religious experience, writing, [t]he antecedents of this judgment invested in an ethical and poetic act are perhaps to be sought in the religious experience of earlier times, which was also a kind of tact, the apprehension and creation of a harmony among particular practices.⁸ Such harmoniously veiled, communal tactics can be found amongst the publishing patterns and social connections of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Dissenting women who couched critical thought in aesthetically delightful, even sublime, forms of discourse. The twenty-first-century social ethicist Samuel Wells defines de Certeauvian tactics as actions characterized by patterns of rapidity, rhythm, pertinent intervention, and delay⁹ that empower the resistance of subordinate groups.¹⁰ When discussing literature, Wells focuses on narrative and dramatic prose rather than poetry, but his diction above implies the rhythmic texture and cadence of poetic meter and rhyme, such as that found in Dissenting hymns.

Dissenting women writers were certainly a subordinate group in eighteenth-century England, and they subtly intervened in social discourse by fitting trenchant theological hermeneutics into poetic and aesthetic texts with titles that modestly and cleverly veil their exegetical content. For example, Anna Barbauld wrote critically about the debates she witnessed at the Dissenting Warrington Academy in her Thoughts on the Devotional Taste, on Sects, and on Establishments, originally printed as the introduction to her Devotional Pieces, Compiled from the Psalms and the Book of Job (1775). Within this piece of aesthetic theory, Barbauld questions the pose of masculine, combative, Enlightenment detachment adopted in the theological debates at Warrington and proposes devotional engagement with Hebrew poetics as a corrective. Her work aligns with philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff’s exposure of the limitations inherent to eighteenth-century disinterested contemplation.¹¹ Barbauld acknowledges that free inquiry is undoubtedly necessary to establish a rational belief but also worries that a disputatious spirit¹² could divide her community. Lest she be viewed as anti-intellectual, she continues:

Shall we mention Philosophy as an enemy to Religion? God forbid! Philosophy:

Daughter of Heaven, that slow ascending still

Investigating sure the form of things

With radiant finger points to heaven again.

Yet there is a view in which she exerts an influence perhaps rather unfavourable to the fervor of simple piety. Philosophy does indeed enlarge our conceptions of the Deity, and gives us the sublimest ideas of his power and extent of dominion; but it raises him too high for our imaginations to take hold of, and in a great measure destroys the affectionate regard which is felt by the common class of pious Christians.¹³

Barbauld’s careful quotation from James Thomson’s work The Seasons (1730), a long poem of landscape description, alludes to Aristotle and suggests that philosophy is a gift from heaven that allows us to study the concrete, sure realities of nature in order to discern evidence of a Creator. As a poet, Anna Barbauld admires the empirical methods of philosophy but also believes the human imagination and heart can discern truths beyond the human reason and mind. Like all the Dissenting women in this study, she presents embodied, affective forms of perception as legitimate modes of biblical interpretation. For Barbauld, the active, passionate aesthetic of biblical poetry triggers relish for the sublime, the vast, and the beautiful and thus provides an antidote to cold-hearted dispassionate analytical discussions by allowing for affective "communion with our Maker."¹⁴ Barbauld ends her essay with hope that the high Eastern poetry¹⁵ of the Psalms will be re-embraced by the living voice of the people¹⁶ in more wholistic worship where the spirit of philosophy, and the spirit of devotion, shall join.¹⁷

Barbauld’s critique of Warrington’s intellectual discourse in Thoughts on the Devotional Taste prompted a negative response from her family and community. William McCarthy rightly observes, in her religious life she felt doubly out of place: not just as a Dissenter against the establishment but also as a woman against a male intellectual version of Dissent.¹⁸ McCarthy describes Barbauld’s essay as paradoxical: a philosophical enquiry against philosophy, a haughty plea for understanding, an intimate confession wrapped in an attack.¹⁹ McCarthy’s term wrapped comes close to my argument about veiling, but I am more interested in how Barbauld’s essay functions as an incisive theological and hermeneutical critique wrapped in aesthetic garb. Laura Mandell astutely terms Barbauld’s prose the theologically motivated aesthetic theory of an affective rationalist.²⁰ Indeed, through Barbauld’s inclusion of the words thoughts, devotional and taste in her title, she begins with an intellectually engaged, warmly affective, and aesthetically attuned posture. The word devotional implies not only specific meditative practices, but also devotion to one’s community and family, as well as to God, an implication further highlighted through Barbauld’s filial devotion of her essay to the Revd. John Aikin from his grateful and obedient daughter.

Barbauld’s attempt to veil her intent, and her incisive intelligence, in the innocuous form of a preface to a devotional compilation of scripture was not entirely successful. Despite her modest gesture of filial obedience to her father, which was both sincere and tactical, Barbauld’s prefatory essay Thoughts on the Devotional Taste was received by her community with what her niece Lucy Aikin terms animadversion²¹ in a memoir written shortly after Barbauld’s death. Aikin herself deploys an almost chastising tone towards her aunt, complaining, This piece betrays, it must be confessed, that propensity to tread on dangerous ground which sometimes appears in an instinct of genius. It recommends a spirit of devotion which yet she is obliged to allow to be in some measure incompatible with an enlightened and philosophical theology.²² During her own lifetime, Barbauld’s emotive, almost liturgical approach to the Psalms caused her community to worry about her potential Catholic leanings. An early review in Gentleman’s Magazine accused her of indulging in vague mysticism.²³ Barbauld responded to these critiques by further cloaking her original theological ideas in the even less threatening guise of children’s literature. Her next major publication, Hymns in Prose for Children (1781), was ostensibly written for the very young, but its veiled biblical interpretation and aesthetic theology gained the admiration of adult poets from William Blake to Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Barbauld’s aesthetic veiling set a precedent for younger Dissenting women writers, including Helen Maria Williams, Joanna Baillie, and Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck. In the mid-1780s, Williams followed Barbauld by veiling insightful theological hermeneutics and social commentary in the language of poetic sensibility within her Peru (1784) and Poems in Two Volumes (1786). Though the two women would not formally meet until March of 1790,²⁴ Barbauld’s influence on Williams as a fellow Dissenting woman is discernable. For example, the scriptural epigraphs to Williams’s poems My God, All Nature Owns Thy Sway and Precept Divine! To Earth in Mercy Given—Psalm 74:16–17 and Matthew 7:12—are similar to Barbauld’s footnote to Habbakuk 3:17–18 at the very beginning of her Hymn II (1773).²⁵ For both women poets, the scriptural reference at the beginning of each poem sets up the metrical lines that follow these biblical quotations as exegetical sermons in verse. Joanna Baillie subscribed to Williams’s Poems in Two Volumes in 1786, so we know she was reading Williams’s poetry before publishing her own collection of verse four years later.²⁶ Baillie weaves serious theological reflection on human suffering and divine providence into her own Poems: Wherein it is Attempted to Describe Certain Views of Nature and of Rustic Manners (1790) and into the Introductory Discourse to her Series of Plays in Which it is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind, Each Passion being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy (1798). Christine Colón notes Baillie’s unique theology expressed later on in the 1830s, but Colón ultimately concludes, Working simply from the information in the Introductory Discourse, it would be easy to secularize Baillie’s ideas and place them within the context of a world within which Christianity was losing its relevance.²⁷ I argue, on the other hand, that even Baillie’s early work of the 1790s resists easy secularization. Biblical allusions and nascent theological premises are present in both her Poems and her Introductory Discourse, though they are indeed subtle and veiled. As the daughter of an ordained Presbyterian minister and professor of Divinity at the University of Glasgow, Baillie could not help but integrate theological hermeneutics into even her first publications.

Baillie, Williams and Barbauld’s strong social ties are evident in the multiple ways they were meeting at literary and political gatherings in both central London and in the suburb of Hampstead by the early 1790s.²⁸ Peter Duthie explains Joanna Baillie’s move to Hampstead with her sister and mother in 1791 by remarking, Mrs. Barbauld’s husband was pastor of a Dissenting church in town, one of the attractions of Hampstead for the Baillie women.²⁹ In this same year, 1791, the friendship between Anna Barbauld and Helen Maria Williams intensified, along with their interest in the French Revolution. One of their meetings in a pub associated with radicals—the Crown and Anchor on the Strand near Westminster—caused writer Horace Walpole to compare Barbauld and Williams to two women in the Bible: the prophet-leader Deborah and the tactical guerilla warrior Jael in The Book of Judges. In 1791, Horace Walpole was quick to make the link between Anna Barbauld as a public Dissenting woman poet and the biblical Deborah as political figure and songwriter, but he used the parallel to derisive effect. In a July 26, 1791 letter to his friend Mary Berry, Walpole describes the capture and imprisonment of British supporters of the French Revolution and then adds, Mrs. Barbauld and Miss Helen Maria Williams will probably have subjects for elegies. Deborah and Jael, I believe were invited to the Crown and Anchor and had let their nails grow accordingly—but the prophetesses had no opportunity of exercising their talents or talons.³⁰ Walpole blends biblical, classical, and Burkean allusions to depict Williams and Barbauld as revolutionary harpies,³¹ as well as (ironically) portraying them as prophetic and political agents. Orianne Smith notes, This portrayal of Barbauld and Williams as pseudobiblical prophets and female warriors—Deborah the female judge and prophet, and Jael, a woman who murdered an enemy commander—was typical of the insults leveled against women who meddled in politics.³² However, the very passion of Walpole’s invective also testifies to the powerful, and threatening, potential of Dissenting women united tactically in intellectual friendship, poetic prophesying, and social commitment.

In order to grasp the significance of Walpole’s biblical allusion, it’s best to turn to the depiction of Deborah as a songwriter and female leader in the Bible. The biblical Deborah, as a prophetess who both judged Israel³³ and celebrated victories in battle through song, provided precedent for eighteenth-century women’s entry into the public sphere via politically-engaged and scripturally-based lyric poetry. As we will see, Dissenting women writers of the long eighteenth century did support each other’s work both by gathering socially and via references to one another in their compositions, just as Deborah supported Jael’s political agency with a sublime song. Deborah’s song, found in chapter 5 of the book of Judges, lauds Jael’s assassination of Sisera, the leader of the Canaanites, who had been oppressing the Israelites for twenty years. Deborah begins her poetic tribute or ode with praise of God as the ultimate avenger before evoking the sublimity of the divine justice enacted by Jael.

Blessed above women be Jael,

The wife of Heber the Kenite,

Blessed shall she be above the women of the tent.

He [Sisera] asked for water, and she gave him milk;

She brought forth butter in a lordly dish.

She put her hand to the nail,

and her right hand to the workmen’s hammer.

And with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head,

when she had pierced and stricken through his temples.

At her feet he bowed,

he fell, he lay down:

At her feet he bowed, he fell:

where he bowed, there he fell down dead.³⁴

Regardless of what a modern audience may think of Jael’s violent act, there is no doubt in Deborah’s song of its extraordinary efficacy in defeating an enemy who had been oppressing her community. As a songwriter, Deborah begins by emphasizing Jael’s particular, embodied, identity as a woman uniquely set apart by God. Through the Hebraic, poetic structure of parallelism, where an idea or even exact phrase is repeated for emphasis, Deborah declares Jael blessed above women and more specifically blessed above the women of the tent. As a Hebrew poet, Deborah deploys an amplifying instance of poetic parallelism to laud Jael’s brave political act. Deborah’s ode praises Jael’s courage to transcend above the everyday domestic labor of the tent in a moment of remarkable and sanctifying female political agency pleasing to God.

Deborah and Jael’s shared political and poetic agency was portrayed positively throughout the eighteenth century in music, lectures, and sermons by figures such as George Frideric Handel, Bishop Robert Lowth, and John Wesley. In the libretto written by Samuel Humphreys for Handel’s opera Deborah (1733), the prophetess concludes by reassuring Jael, When men hereafter would proclaim / All that is noble by one name, / O Jael, they will mention thine.³⁵ Deborah was also an important female figure within aesthetic discourse regarding the prophetic nature of poetry generally, which grew exponentially in the latter half of the eighteenth century, leading up to the Romantic period.³⁶ In his Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753 in Latin, 1787 in English), Bishop Robert Lowth commends Deborah for her strength and originality as a poet by referring to her song as the inimitable ode of the prophetess Deborah.³⁷ John Wesley praises Deborah and Jael within his Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament (1756/66) as women whose character remains unimpeached.³⁸ He refers to Deborah as a composer³⁹ whose song⁴⁰ begins and ends with praise of God. Modern biblical scholar Joy A. Schroeder, in Deborah’s Daughters: Gender Politics and Biblical Interpretation (2014), reflects, Wesley’s Deborah is wise, competent, and powerful,⁴¹ and she is also a gifted composer of doxological song. As Carol Myers argues:

Deborah occupies a unique role in Israelite history. Not only is she a judge in the sense of a military leader, but also she is the only judge in the law-court sense of that title (Judg.

4

.

5

) in the book of Judges. Of all the military leaders of the book, only Deborah is called a prophet. She is also the only judge to "sing" of the victory, illustrating the creative role played by women.⁴²

Like Robert Lowth, Myers draws attention to the aesthetic gifting of Deborah as a creative writer, a songstress whose powerful use of Hebraic parallelism carries political weight. The poetic rhythmic repetition is poignant: At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: At her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead. It is indeed a sublime ode to female agency with aesthetic, ethical, and political heft.

The importance of Hebrew parallelism to the poetry generated within the latter half of the eighteenth century is regaining critical attention. Hebraic rhythm was appealing to William Wordsworth, for example, as an accessible and passionate form of poetic expression. In a recent article titled Prophetic Tautology and the Song of Deborah: Approaching Language in the Wordsworth Circle, Eric Lindstrom argues, Deborah and her text would have been important to Wordsworth as a source behind his new agenda for an energizing and inclusive literary form.⁴³ Lindstrom’s argument centers on an 1800 note to The Thorn, within which Wordsworth cites the power of Deborah’s song. In-between Robert Lowth’s mid-eighteenth-century admiration of Deborah’s ode in his Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews and Wordsworth’s praise of Deborah’s passionate song, approximately fifty years later, came the Dissenting poetry of Anna Barbauld, Phillis Wheatley, Helen Maria Williams, and Joanna Baillie, who each incorporated Hebraic sublimity into British poetic practice in the 1770s, 80s, and 90s, thus forming an important bridge between Lowth and Wordsworth unacknowledged by Lindstrom’s article. William Wordsworth’s first published poem was a sonnet titled On Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress (1787), and perhaps the openness to a Hebraic mode of verse came to Wordsworth as much via Williams as Lowth. Bishop Lowth’s praise for Deborah’s inimitable ode⁴⁴ undoubtedly encouraged women poets such as Barbauld and Williams who were seeking to deploy prophetic modes of verse as a means of enacting justice. Though Walpole’s comparison of Anna Barbauld and Helen Maria Williams to Deborah and Jael was intended to be dismissive, it is ironically apt, since Barbauld encouraged younger women’s political agency