“For though I meet with many Contradictions”: An Collins’s Divine Songs and Meditacions (1653) as Spiritual Autobiography

Abstract

This essay aims to cultivate critical dialogues on early modern women’s engagement with religion through literature. Examining the autobiography of spiritual verse by the mid seventeenth-century Englishwoman An Collins, I explore the ways in which religious consciousness interplays with the gendered and afflicted female body. With a focus on Collins’ Divine Songs and Meditacions (1653), a collection written by a woman who suffered from disabilities and its anguish during her whole life, I look in particular at the ways in which a disabled woman constructs her autobiographical subject and complicates early modern beliefs about the mutually constitutive relationship between physical and spiritual affliction.