‘Like to an anatomy before us’: Deborah Huish's Spiritual Experiences and the Attempt to Establish the Fifth Monarchy

Abstract

And indeed, the whole is an Epistle that may be seen and read by all discerning Christians, to have been written on her heart, by the Spirit of the living God; which I hope will more commend it to every gracious soul, then anything from man can do.1Textual 'anatomies' were published frequently in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A reader would have expected an attempt by the author to present a detailed analysis of his or her chosen subject, dividing it into parts for closer examination. Like the sense of the word 'anatomy' referring to 'the artificial separation of the different parts of a human body' in order to discover the mysteries of its insides, a textual anatomy delved deeply into obscure areas for the benefit of its readers. The subject under discussion became an organic body, to be explored and analysed in public, imitating the public dissections occurring in anatomy theatres of the period.2 Jonathan Sawday notes that 'by the 1650s, it has been calculated, an average of eighteen anatomical texts were being published in England each year, a threefold increase when compared with the situation in the period before the civil war'.3 Readers, and theatre observers, were eager to learn more about their interiors, and it is not surprising that the word 'anatomy' came to be applied to anything that sought to lay knowledge open to a wider audience or readership.As textual 'anatomies' could dissect bodies, it was a logical step that they would also look at spiritual matters, examining the inward 'hearts' of men and women. If divine order could be observed in the construction of the human body, it could also be seen in the examining of the work of God on men's hearts by their spiritual experiences.4 Separatist and Baptist writers encouraged believers to look inwardly in order to discover the 'work of God on their hearts' in order to examine whether they were one of his elect. Deborah Huish's experiences, recorded by her brother-in-law William Allen as The Captive Taken from the Strong: Or, A True Relation of the Gratious Release of Mistrisse Deborah Huish, published in 1658, present us with an example of this 'heart work' including her forbearance during many trials before believing God would save her. These sufferings stemmed from an intense belief that she was damned to hell, and that God had turned his face from her. This, often painful, introspection was a kind of spiritual 'dissection' which believers were encouraged to carry out on themselves, and, just as anatomies might be carried out in public, examples of spiritual self-dissection were published both as examples to others, and as advertisements and vindications of this separatist practice. The preface to Huish's conversion narrative, written by her brother-in-law John Vernon, a prominent Baptist and later Fifth Monarchist, likens her condition to that of an 'anatomy': her dissected separatist 'heart' is published as an example to others, and to give them strength on their way to conversion. The exploration of her spiritual 'inward man', as in medicine, 'takes place in order that the integrity and health of other bodies can be preserved'.5 Huish's narrative is transcribed, not only for her own spiritual 'reckoning up', but for the benefit of others in her prospective Baptist congregation at Loughwood, in the parish of Dalwood, East Devon, and further afield to the 'saints' in Ireland. As Neil Keeble has written in The Literary Culture of Nonconformity, such writing, because of its allusiveness, 'sets up trains of thought which reach out beyond the individual to all time and space. In that sense, nonconformist style is expansive: it begins in the experience of the individual and comes to encompass all experience.'6 Through her narrative's depiction of suffering and recovery, Huish becomes an example of how to convert, repent, and hence be 'cured' of her sin. The publishers of Huish's text had a more particular idea of what 'cured' her sense that she was damned eternally: adult baptism. …