Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Naked History Displayed
- 1 ‘Merely a Superior Being’: Blake and the Creations of Eve
- 2 The Last Strumpet: Harlotry and Hermaphroditism in Blake's Rahab
- 3 Sex, Violence and the History of this World: Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Enoch
- 4 Bridal Mysticism and ‘Sifting Time’: The Lost Moravian History of Blake's Family
- 5 ‘A Secret Common to Our Blood’: The Visionary Erotic Heritage of Blake, Thomas Butts and Mary Butts
- 6 Changing the Sexual Garments: The Regeneration of Sexuality in Jerusalem
- 7 Philoprogenitive Blake
- 8 ‘Seeking Flowers to Comfort Her’: Queer Botany in Blake's Visions, Darwin's Loves and Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman
- 9 ‘Or Wilt Thou Go Ask the Mole?’: (Con)Figuring the Feminine in Blake's Thel
- 10 Gendering the Margins of Gray: Blake, Classical Visual Culture and the Alternative Bodies of Ann Flaxman's Book
- 11 The Virgil Woodcuts Out of Scale: Blake's Gigantic, Masculine Pastoral
- 12 Closet Drama: Gender and Performance in Blake and Joanna Baillie
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
4 - Bridal Mysticism and ‘Sifting Time’: The Lost Moravian History of Blake's Family
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Naked History Displayed
- 1 ‘Merely a Superior Being’: Blake and the Creations of Eve
- 2 The Last Strumpet: Harlotry and Hermaphroditism in Blake's Rahab
- 3 Sex, Violence and the History of this World: Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Enoch
- 4 Bridal Mysticism and ‘Sifting Time’: The Lost Moravian History of Blake's Family
- 5 ‘A Secret Common to Our Blood’: The Visionary Erotic Heritage of Blake, Thomas Butts and Mary Butts
- 6 Changing the Sexual Garments: The Regeneration of Sexuality in Jerusalem
- 7 Philoprogenitive Blake
- 8 ‘Seeking Flowers to Comfort Her’: Queer Botany in Blake's Visions, Darwin's Loves and Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman
- 9 ‘Or Wilt Thou Go Ask the Mole?’: (Con)Figuring the Feminine in Blake's Thel
- 10 Gendering the Margins of Gray: Blake, Classical Visual Culture and the Alternative Bodies of Ann Flaxman's Book
- 11 The Virgil Woodcuts Out of Scale: Blake's Gigantic, Masculine Pastoral
- 12 Closet Drama: Gender and Performance in Blake and Joanna Baillie
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
In November 1750, a young English couple, Thomas and Catherine Armitage, approached the London Moravian congregation for membership. Two years later, the now-widowed Catherine married James Blake, father of the poet. Those few years when Blake's mother worshipped at Fetter Lane coincided with a period of great turmoil in the spiritual life of the Moravian Church. Blake's, like most people's, conception of the past owes less to the work of conventional historical writing than to a host of other, more ubiquitous influences among which family tradition must have played a part. In the Moravian community of the mid-eighteenth century are to be found specific and definable practices, beliefs and customs which all contribute towards suggesting the spiritual milieu with which the young William Blake would have been familiar. It is not just simple curiosity that makes us want to know what sort of relationship he had with his father; how his mother's death affected him; whether he knew his grandparents. We need to know what lives his parents led and what stories they might have told.
What is distinctive about the Moravians is not their theology, not a body of doctrine, which their opponents sought to traduce as heretical and antinomian, but their spirituality, their search for transcendence – a spirituality, in line with the Moravian leader Count Zinzendorf 's Ehereligion (marriage religion), that was Christocentric, focusing on Christ as the husband.
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- Information
- Blake, Gender and Culture , pp. 57 - 70Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014