Rewriting Epic and Redefining Glory in Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder

Since the 1999 rediscovery of Order and Disorder, her epic-length paraphrase of Genesis, the Puritan poet Lucy Hutchinson (1620–1681) has received a well-deserved critical revaluation, drawing attention to her Reformed poetics and her Lucretius translation. However, surprisingly little scholarship has examined Hutchinson’s interest in Virgil’s Aeneid, which takes up substantial space in her commonplace book. In this essay, I argue that Hutchinson’s biblical epic intertextually draws on the Aeneid to contrast the glory of Aeneas and Augustus with that of Abraham, suggesting that true glory consists not of conquest, but of humbly receiving divine blessing and extending it to others.