Lady Anne Halkett: Selected Self-Writings, and: Witchcraft, Exorcism and the Politics of Possession in a Seventeenth-Century Convent: “How Sister Ursula was once Bewiched and Sister Margaret Twice” (review)

These two editions from the Ashgate series, quite distinct in subject matter and genre, make important contributions to our understanding of early modern women’s writing. Selecting from the manuscripts of Lady Anne Halkett (1621/ 2–1699) in the National Library of Scotland, Suzanne Trill modifies and complicates our understanding of Halkett, hitherto based on her Memoirs or “autobiography” — the British Library MS edited by John Loftis in 1979 and since published in excerpts. In writing her life, Trill asserts, Halkett intended not to romanticize her experiences but to defend her reputation, particularly with regard to her relationship with Colonel Joseph Bampfield. Moreover, Halkett’s enormous output of devotional writings, which formed part of her daily observance in the years of her marriage and widowhood, and which runs to nearly a million words, provides a more characteristic view of her. The manuscripts that Halkett herself carefully compiled and preserved include “Select Meditations,” focusing on biblical texts, and “Occational Meditations,” dealing with a wide array of subjects from illness and childbirth, death and widowhood, to religious and political affairs. Trill’s assertion that these volumes “become increasingly self-reflective and autobiographical, thus epitomizing the intersection between the practice of self-examination and the development of autobiography as a distinct genre” (xxxvi) is not strongly evident in this selection, but the writings do indeed give a much broader sense of Halkett’s interests: her considerable piety; her tendency, characteristic of her generation, to interpret events in the light of her religious beliefs, to see God acting in history and human affairs; her affinity with things Scottish as well as English; and her deep concern with political and ecclesiastical affairs, particularly with the struggle between the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians. Trill includes a particularly moving account of the death of Halketts’ daughter Betty, just thirteen days short of her fourth birthday, a child onto whom the mother clearly projected many of her own religious concerns and attitudes. The meditation on the death of her husband in September of 1670 reflects a great sense of loss, but also resentment toward her stepson, and a good deal of self-justification in her presentation; not coincidentally, to the end of her life, Halkett struggled with finances, in particular with the payment of her jointure. In other telling moments, Halkett meditates on the torture of a Roman Catholic (20 December 1690), the more acutely for the imprisonment of her son Robin; her wish to attend her daughter-in-law during an illness is complicated by her practice of meditating every Saturday, in remembrance of her husband having died on that day.

Given the sheer volume of this material, rigorous selection is obviously necessary, but one regrets that while providing a representative sample of Halkett’s “Occational Meditations,” Trill omits the biblical meditations, which in the case of NLS MS 6500: 1693/4–95, for example, constitute two-thirds of the volume. Although these are perhaps less distinctive, their omission perpetuates the somewhat partial understanding that Trill is attempting to rectify. In most respects, Trill’s editorial practices are exemplary: she describes each manuscript precisely; indicates marginal glosses; reproduces exact spelling, abbreviations, and original pagination, providing the technical information that scholars of early modern texts are eager to have. Her editing of the “Autobiography” (BL Add. MS 32,376) incorporates some of Loftis’s notes and provides additional information, although her decision to alter the punctuation “to assist the modern reader in making sense of...