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COPYRIGHT 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press
The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw the production of a spate of conduct manuals written by English mothers to their children.(1) These texts addressed a range of public and private concerns including the vocational decisions of sons, breastfeeding, and the naming of grandchildren. Although all of these maternal advice books were directed to specific children, many were published, and one, Dorothy Leigh's The Mothers Blessing (1616), became the seventeenth century's best selling text authored by a woman.(2) Betty Travitsky accounts for the existence of texts like The Mothers Blessing in terms of the enhanced role that the "new mother" of the Renaissance played in the domestic realm. As an advance over the narrowly defined responsibilities of their medieval counterparts, mothers in the Renaissance were encouraged to participate actively in educating their children.(3) While some authors of maternal advice books explained their texts as literary extensions of their parental responsibilities, others described them as legacies designed to enable them to guide their children from beyond the grave. In general, according to Wendy Wall, the supposed imminence of death implicit in the drafting of wills made legacies an important means through which women "could publicly challenge cultural demands for their silence": "These public/private declarations, eased into print through the authority of death, provide a vocabulary through which women could offer their words to the public."(4) By thinking through Wall's assertion, we might begin to consider legacies not only as publishing vehicles but also as autobiographies of how early modern women comprehended their own significance: just what does it mean for a woman to make her literary career subject to "the authority of death"?
Perhaps the most dramatic example of an early modern woman whose writing self-consciously reflects on the dilemma of attempting to articulate a self within a literary culture of death is Elizabeth Jocelin. The author of The Mothers Legacie, To her unborne Childe (1624), Jocelin tells the child within her womb that she writes her text because she fears death in childbirth: "And not knowing whether I shall live to instruct thee when thou art borne, let me not be blamed though I write to thee before. Who would not condemne mee if I should be carelesse of thy body while it is within me?"(5) As she had anticipated, she died of puerperal fever nine days after the birth of her first child, Theodora. And, as promised, she bequeathed to her daughter a text that outlines a pattern of godly living by providing devotional instructions for each part of the day, along with more general exhortations for avoiding the devil. More than just a conduct manual, the Legacie comprehends the fact that it provides Theodora's only memorable contact with her mother.
Death not only inspires the writing of the Legacie but also accounts for Jocelin's professed desire that it remain a private text. Even her husband, Tourell, was not aware of the existence of her text until after her death in 1622 when it was discovered in her desk. She accounts for her reticence in a letter to him that accompanied her unfinished manuscript:
But I know thou wonderest by this time what the cause should be that we two continually unclasping our hearts one to the other, I should reserve this |advice on child-rearing~ to writing. When thou thinkest thus, deare, remember how grievous it was to thee but to heare me say, I may die, and thou writ confesse this would have been an unpleasant discourse to thee.(6)
Recognizing that her husband was troubled by the thought of her dying in childbirth, Jocelin felt compelled to make her last wishes known through a written will. And although she claims to fear that being exposed in print, even after her death, will tarnish her reputation, she deems the purpose of her text to be worth the risk: "Nor the feare this may come to the worlds eye, & bring scorne upon my grave, can stay my hand from expressing how much I covet thy salvation" (11).(7) Her express concern with privacy notwithstanding, the clergyman Thomas Goad explains that he determined to publish her manuscript because it so admirably provides "an everlasting portion for her hoped issue" as well as for "all those, who, by the common kindred of Christianity, may claime their portion in this Legacy."(8) In his rather pompous "Approbation" of Jocelin's text, Goad insists that he "subscribed" his "Approbat for the registering this Will, among the most publique Monuments (the rather worthy, because proceeding from the weaker sex)" because he found himself "bound to do right unto knowne vertue" (A).
Despite his overweening desire to celebrate Jocelin as an unrivaled paragon of maternal devotion, Goad stumbles when he describes how resolutely she identified maternity with death. Although maternal mortality rates in this period were high, he cannot comprehend why "the common lot of child-birth, within some months approaching" would prompt a healthy twenty-seven year old woman to contemplate her death with such clarity (A).(9) Nevertheless, he insists, even her most extraordinary preparations for death can be reconciled in terms of her equally extraordinary piety:
Accordingly when she first felt herselfe quicke with childe (as then travelling with death it selfe) shee secretly tooke order for the buying a new winding sheet: thus preparing and consecrating herselfe to him who rested in a new Sepulcher wherein was never man yet layed (A).
Goad can, if reluctantly, accede to Jocelin's claim that to be "quicke with childe" is to travel "with death it selfe" by...
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