The Legacy and Rhetorics of Maternal Zeal

As a mother my duty is to instruct my child like Lois & Eunice as they did Timothy in the true faith vnfainedly and to bring him vp in the nurture & admonition of the Lord & to remember his Creator in the days of his youth; As instruction is nesesary so is reproofe for The Rod & reproofe giue wisdome butt a child left to himselfe bringeth his mother to shame[.] Traine vp a child in the way hee should goe: & when hee is old hee will not depart from it.

—Lady Anne Halkett¹

Lady Anne Halkett, the author of this passage, lost her four-year-old daughter to smallpox in 1660 and a son to a lingering disease one year later. The loss of all but one of her children was intensified by the death of her husband, Sir James Halkett, on 24 September 1670. Meditating on her circumstances, the newly widowed Halkett gains strength from reminding herself of “the only and cheife thing that tyes [her] to the world”: despite her overwhelming grief, she knows her primary duty in life is to continue to care for her one surviving child, Robert, instructing him in the ways of the Church of England.²

Halkett’s text is a mother’s legacy, a genre that offers religious advice from a dying mother to her children as its primary purpose.³ These texts are shot through with a complex set of claims that are grounded in the maternal body; legacy writers assert a vital, corporeal link with their children, which is the unique result of having conceived, carried, and borne them. This bodily connection creates a naturalized bond between mother and child that authorizes composition: the obligation a mother has to nurture her child’s physical body begins in pregnancy and carries over into youth.⁴ Yet bodily authority has its limits. A dying mother—the rhetorical persona behind the legacy—writes on the verge of physical dissolution that spells the loss of the bond she shares with her infant. After all, how can a dead mother provide day-to-day care for her children? In response to this dilemma, legacy writers shift their claims away from their bodily substrate. They espouse an anti-worldly position, encouraging their children to reject the lure of the material world and the desires of the flesh and to focus instead on their spiritual salvation. This maneuver enables legacy writers to create a sphere of command that stretches beyond their lives to influence readers across generations and across time. The conflict is clear—while legacies validate the logic of their writers’ very material maternal bodies, they then repudiate the flesh in favor of the soul. I argue that this tension is bridged by maternal zeal, a concept that draws from both bodily-produced emotions and spiritual obligation.

I. “Like Lois & Eunice”: Model Mothers

Writers of mothers’ legacies were enmeshed in a complex network of ideas on maternity. A sampling of writing from men and women across the religious spectrum from Catholic to Puritan, with statuses ranging from noble to common, suggests the pervasive nature of early modern thought on motherhood—after all, as one historian makes clear, “all people, male and female, begin their lives in the world of women.”⁵ These writers all acknowledge that motherhood is a foundational institution, aver that there are good and bad ways to mother, and maintain that religion is an essential part of maternity.

The image of the selfless, pious early modern mother has its roots in multiple sources, ranging from prescriptive literature to devotional discourses to literary texts, all in circulation between the first half of the sixteenth and the end of the seventeenth centuries.⁶ Educational treatises of the period, for example, often advocate instruction for girls within this context, outlining courses of study that would train girls to perform their duties as wives and mothers.⁷ One of the most widely read and influential educational treatise for girls was Juan Luis Vives’ 1523 De Institutione Feminae Christianae, translated into English by Richard Hyrde in 1528–1529 as Instruction of a Christian Woman.⁸ Vives...