Metaphysical Women
And the Books that Made Them
Beginning in the late 1500s, a great deal of English books, almanacs, and advertisements were aimed specifically towards women, whom writers began to realize were an untapped readership. Concerning the great mysteries, women had long been considered gossips, and unworthy of the charge of keeping sacred wisdom secret. However, women were already in possession of many secrets of the natural world, some even unknown to men. Moreover, they seemed to moderate men’s desire to horde useful information, since women tended to use and exchange it to help others, such as in the care of the sick, elderly, or expecting.
The books that were marketed towards women were consumed by both working-class and elite female readers, as indicated by their cost and content. *It is important to note that during the seventeenth century, class distinctions were only just forming.* However, much like the literacy within traditionally male trades, there was social strata not only between the elite and the working class, but also among the working classes themselves. Women milliners, dyers, midwives, and apothecaries, for instance, were more likely to purchase books than washerwomen, lower domestic servants, and farmers’ wives. The former group, along with the female aristocracy, then, was the intended audience for a faction of late sixteenth and seventeenth-century books of secrets, almanacs, and medical tracts.
Recipe books like the 1573 Treasurie of Hidden Secrets were among the first alchemical works to appeal to English women, addressing the “Courteous Gentlewomen, honest matrons, and virtuous virgins” in all matter of advice. It boasted knowledge of the names and natural disposition of common diseases, and claimed that it was “not impertinent for every good huswife to use in her house, amongst her owne famelie.” The author, John Partridge, had sold so many editions between 1584 and 1637 that he included on the title page of a 1627 reprint a grateful acknowledgement of his book sales to women.
Curiously, literacy among women has been measured at only sixteen percent in London in the last decade of the sixteenth century, and yet this book was so popular that it was reprinted ten times between 1584 and 1653, when women’s literacy had climbed to about 50% in London. It is unclear whether the rise of female literacy is the direct result of more women writing and publishing their own books, however, the number of works written for and by women towards the middle of the seventeenth century is staggering.
In addition to The Family Physician, Gideon Harvey also wrote The Accomplished Physician, the Honest Apothecary, and the Skillful Surgeon, wherein he warned young would-be pharmacists “to prevent being outwitted by the Herb-women in the markets.” Indeed, “herb-women” had multiplied after the publication of The English Gentleman and the English Gentlewoman by Richard Braithwaite, which was, by today’s estimation, a national bestseller. First printed in 1630, the tome was used by English men and women as a code of conduct, both at home in England and abroad. In it, Braithwaite specifically recommends that his female readership peruse herbal wisdom and then deepen their medical knowledge by way of discussion among their peers.
Section nine of the “Ladies Love-lecture” claims that a thirst for knowledge among women is
such a glorious ambition, as it can never be too aspiring. And in this, many eminent and heroic spirits of their sex show themselves worthy corrivals. Where we shall find some excellently versed in History… Others far above the delicacy of their sex, in the profound search of Philosophy… Examples of such mysterious learning, and high contemplation, as their memory deserves no less admiration than their piety… For serious searchers of profound secrets in Philosophy, [we find] a theoretic Theano, and a divine Diotima, a woman who was so famous a Philosopher, that both Socrates and Plato went to hear her lectures.
To Braithwaite, and no doubt the numerous readers of his book, the perfect English woman possessed an eagerness to learn the “profound secrets” of the world. Secrets were a commodity driven by both the lower and upper echelons of society, and through them, women shared a common interest. Because women’s knowledge was primarily shared with other women, much of what we now call naturopathic remedies were unpublished before the seventeenth century. Still, women served as the early modern backbone of medicinal knowledge, using their kitchens as laboratories for concocting tinctures and cures for their families. Writings by women and for women began to appear in bookshops, coffee-shops, and apothecaries, and seemed to serve and draw together English women from all classes.
There were many books that claimed to hold the private information of monarchs and high-ranking nobles. A Choice Manual was printed in two editions in 1653 and then nine more times between 1654 and 1687. The collection of “rare and select secrets in physick and chirurgery (surgery)” was actually a recipe book belonging to the late Countess of Kent, and was enormously successful. Elizabeth Grey, the Countess of Kent (nee Lady Elizabeth Talbot, 1582–1651), was the daughter of the seventeenth Earl of Shrewsbury and the granddaughter of Bess of Hardwick. She is credited with the authorship of the book, or at the very least having “collected and practiced” the contents within its pages.
The maladies and their treatments are varied; a preservative against the plague included drinking wormwood, a major ingredient found in Absinthe, and the remedy against all aches, “especially of a woman’s breast,” was to boil milk, rose leaves, rose oil, and oatmeal, and “lay it hot under the sore.” That the Duchess of Kent, as well as women all over the country, was practicing alchemical sciences went unnoticed; Most men marginalized the female’s place in medicine by condemning women who practiced for money while still expecting gentlewomen to be learned in the art of physick for the sake of their families and charitable practice.
Receipt-books like the Duchess of Kent’s could be found in many women’s homes, much like the cook Mary Tillinghast’s Rare and Excellent Receipts (1696), Margaret Baker’s supernaturally infused recipe book (1675), and Sarah Wigges’s personal receipts, now owned by the Royal College of Physicians. Because no governing medical authority recognized women as experts in these recipes — many of which were astrological, chemical, and surgical — women read, practiced, and constantly revised the knowledge within books of secrets and almanacs as best fit their needs.
Word of these developing recipes and herbal wisdom, passed from one sister to another, or one family matriarch to another, created a community of women practiced in experimental sciences. Such books aimed specifically towards them reject the developing resistance to women practicing medicine that we see in the next chapter.
Astrology was another outlet that provided a space for women to master knowledge of the natural world. Sometime during the seventeenth century, women began to involve themselves in the writing of astrological almanacs. The 1692 Poor Robin’s Almanac claimed that it was been 56 years since women had begun learning how to make almanacs, but it is quite possible that women had been writing them for longer under male pseudonyms.
Sarah Jinner and Mary Holden’s almanacs were among the more prominent of these, the former having humbly signed her works either “student in astrology” or “student in physick.” Jinner’s almanacs were popular; her 1659 almanac included a letter to the reader, stating “the last year being the first of my appearing into the world of print, has encouraged me again to set pen to paper, seeing it was so well accepted.”
Jinner’s almanacs seem to have been created for a strictly female audience, as she includes feminine wisdom about preventing miscarriages, confections to “cause fruitfulness” in men and women, and a “potion to further conception.” Her astrological forecast for the year covers intriguingly varied subjects. Her February 1659 entry warns women that “many now breeding endure almost like torture in bringing forth” and encourages women to keep their husbands at bay that month. In July, the prognostication turns to the world stage and the threat of Turks in Transylvania and Hungaria. Through these booklets, women were able to assert themselves as experts on varied subjects, in booklets that were nationally recognized.
By the early eighteenth century an astrologer named Samuel Hieron had written in his journal of an old acquaintance named Mrs. Brigham, who died in 1710 at the age of sixty-one, whom he described as the most accurate person (not woman!) that he had ever conversed with in astrology. In a memoir written for his friend, Elias Ashmole, William Lilly touched upon a colleague that he came across during the course of his lifetime:
I was very familiar with one Sarah Skelhorn, who had been Speculatrix unto one Arthur Gauntlet about Gray’s-Inn-Lane, a very lewd fellow, professing physick. This Sarah had a perfect sight, and indeed the best eyes for that purpose I ever yet did see… Sarah told me oft, the angels would for some years follow her, and appear in every room of the house, until she was weary of them. This Sarah Skelhorn, her call unto the crystal began, ‘Oh ye good angels, only and only…’
It is clear that at least some (these being the most popular of the time) serious practitioners found women’s metaphysical gifts to be as useful as those of her male counterparts. Further, it is empowering that numerous accounts raise the probability that more women practiced metaphysical arts than historians are aware of.
In a long history of being silenced, the commerce and commodity of secrets in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries made it possible for women to find their voice and practice within their own homes and through books scattered throughout the country.
