Professor Emerita Dalhousie. Editing Winter’s Tale for @CUP_LitPerform /Coediting Anne Southwell’s amazing verse for Other Voice. Supporting Ukraine always 🇺🇦
@UPS package posted in Vancouver 9/9, guaranteed 2 day delivery to Halifax and STILL waiting 12/9. Tracking claims unable to deliver, but no notice left and I was waiting by the window. Really frustrated!
If there are any early modernists left on this platform: please, I need to know what a “sweating cradle” - a “cradle to sweat in” is! Treatment for syphilis perhaps? Appears in an inventory of Anne Southwell’s household goods.
@owilliamsdc Good idea, but I think I’ve tracked it down as this supportive frame (cradle) which, when attached to a heat source and tightly covered with bedclothes, allowed the thus enclosed person to sweat out excess humours (such as melancholy).
@paul_salzman Yes, exactly- but make no assumptions, say I. In one poem she writes: “Nature, mistress of affection/Gave my love to thy protection/Where it hath received infection/ and is dying.” Never took this literally, but …
@rhetorician@SAAupdates “All married men desire to have good wives/ But few give good example by their lives.” She was also acutely conscious of the position of all early modern women in relation to men.
@rhetorician@SAAupdates “Dare you but write, you are Minerva’s bird, / The owl at which these bats and crows must wonder. / They’ll criticize upon the smallest word /That wanteth number, case, that tense and gender.” Southwell was acutely conscious of her own position as a writing woman.
@rhetorician@SAAupdates “Raise up thy faculties, my soul, ‘tis time/ To wake from idleness the child of death!” If you know Southwell, you will want to heed her call; if you don’t, a few teasers will convince you that you should!