Dame Gertrude More Unbound
Upholding Susan Felch’s assertions in “The Backward Gaze” (EEMW 21-39) that (1) early modern women writers were first and foremost religious and (2) the males who edited their work were not constantly censoring their writing due to the fact that they were females, Gertrude More’s Spiritual Exercises, was made available/printed “with approbation” by “her only spiritual Father and Director the Ven. Fa. Baker”–or so it appears in the limited information so far available to me from the front page of Spiritual Exercises and from parsing through Gertrude More, poetry from Clark edition of Bodleian MS Rawlinson C 581 and Augustine Baker, Life and Death of Dame Gertrude More. Baker expresses respect for More in the paragraphs that accompany her exercises–or “Confessions of a louing soule” as stated on the headers of each page–for her humbleness and devotion, continually referring to her (I think) as “our virgin.”
On the first spread past the cover appear, on the right facing page, a portrait of “D. Gertrvde More” and on the left, a meditation on her “Grace,” “in this dark vayl,” etc.–a poem/meditation on More that I assume to have been written by Baker, but cannot tell for sure. Further confusing (to me) is that the phrase “Sir Thomas More” appears in the marginalia to the left–does this mean that Gertrude More was related to Sir Thomas More (and if so I assume she was younger than him)? It appears, according to a quick Google search that I did to thomasmorestudies.org, that she is the child of More’s descendant Cresacre More who with his wife Elizabeth had three children, one named Helen “Born in 1606” who “became a Benedictine Nun at the Monastery of Our Lady of Consolation at Cambrai, Flanders. Known in religion as Dame Gertrude More. Died at Cambrai on 17th August 1633,” who had a brother, “Only son and heir,” Thomas More V. I further learned that Thomas More and John Donne were related, making Gertrude More related to two very well-known writers and therefore surprising that her work has been buried for so long and seems to remain, per a cursory search in the WSU library, little examined by literature scholars (perhaps it is examined more in religious studies?).
What does it say about me that I am compelled to trace out Gertrude More’s biography before I start close-reading her poetry? I guess the critical imperative of the “death of the author” has not fully happened for me, possibly due to the way my brain works or my compulsion to grasp the who/what/where/when/why of the text and how it got to me before delving more deeply in. I am accustomed to reading texts with critical introductions, sometimes biographical timelines, etc., which typically precede/contextualize texts, grounding them in “reality” before I read them, so that I might be a reader dependent on the editor (perhaps something this class can help me grapple with). The experience I had delving into the text before my above-mentioned Internet searches revealed a general impression of More as a Catholic mystic who was devoted to how the “inner” world poured forth into the outer world, with God residing in the inner world, and her exercises presented to assist (other nuns?) with locating this inner light. I am looking forward to looking more closely into the following questions: In what ways are More’s works metaphysical? How does her poetry relate to that of other Catholic, continental mystics such as St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross? So far, I see More calling Jesus the beloved and likening him to a lover (Avila), and am interested in looking for aspects of a dark night of the soul experience (JOTC). One image I really like so far that More uses is that of flowing in God’s ocean as in the “sands of the sea” imagery (in her St. Augustine section) and (at the bottom of page 286) “thee, who dost in mercy flow.”
Works Cited
