Night Seasons: Trauma, history, and the uses of women's martyrdom in seventeenth-century Puritan literature

Night Seasons locates a history of Protestant uses of texts dealing with the traumatic experiences of female martyrs between 1550 and 1693, focusing on the iterations of John Foxe's female martyrs. This dissertation explores the uses of the traumas of Foxe's female martyrs in their relation to the historical rise and transformation of a distinctly Protestant and then Puritan identity from the mid 16th to the late 17th century and also theorize the importance of women's experience to that identity. An analysis of Foxe's text more generally and the widely-read narrative of Ann Askew within it establishes the elements of the Foxean female martyr how they sanctified female dissent in a religiopolitical context, as well as the use of secondary trauma to create social cohesion among Protestants. Perhaps unwittingly, the Foxean female martyr provided models for future Protestant women on how to claim for themselves positions of authority vis-a-vis the sanctified position of the persecuted. The first example is Rachel Speght's polemic A Mouzell for Melastomus, The Cynical Bayter of and Foule Mouthed Barker of Evah's Sex (1617), a response to Joseph Swetnan's The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women (1615), claims that women are persecuted by misogynists. Moving to the New World, this dissertation examines how Anne Hutchinson's trials relate to previous treatments of the woman as exegetical power and martyr, and how Hutchinson appropriated a Foxean model of activity and passivity by claiming exegetical authority during her first trial and then persecution after captivity. Finally, moving to 1682, this text demonstrates how Mary Rowlandson's dissent against Puritan doctrine regarding mourning provided an opportunity for religious authorities following King Philip's war to use personal traumas in order to effect social cohesion in the colony.