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Chapter 5 - Rachel Speght and the “Criticall Reader”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2022

Christina Luckyj
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia
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Summary

establishes Speght’s position within a Calvinist community of writers, preachers, and printers that included her father and husband. Like Whately’s sermons, Speght’s A Mouzell for Melastomus (1617) deploys domestic and biblical rhetoric to give “good councell” in the political realm. If, for Speght, the doctrine of male superiority becomes a manifesto of the obligations of the ruler, the wife is authorized to enforce those obligations as a significant influence on her husband’s ability to exercise good government. In her later work Mortalities Memorandum (1621), Speght offers a prefatory Dreame in which a distinctively female voice provides a Calvinist framework for the pursuit of godly knowledge that draws on the Song of Songs. Mortalities Memorandum, the lengthy poem that follows, capitalizes on this voice to deliver a significant religious and political message to English men and women at a crisis point in their history.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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