‘Large folios of eternity’: A critical study of Ann Bathurst and her Meditations and Visions

Keywords: Quirinus Kuhlmann
Manuscript culture
Life writing
Seventeenth century
Ann Bathurst
Philadelphian Society
Meditations and Visions
Women's writing
Jane Lead
John Pordage
Mysticism
Prophecy

This thesis offers the first full-length study of Ann Bathurst and her Meditations and Visions of 1679-1696, and it situates her and her work at the centre of a network of readers, scribes and friends. It draws upon a range of different fields of research to construct a fuller account of Bathurst and her work than has been attempted in scholarship hitherto. It makes use of extensive archival research to piece together the details of Bathurst’s life and to fill in the many gaps and misconceptions that exist about her. It traces the radical influences that shaped her into the author of Meditations and Visions, uncovering her remarkable early association with John Pordage and the influence of her first husband Peter Jurin’s disruptive Huguenot family. It also offers insight into the events surrounding Bathurst’s various spiritual crises throughout her life, and the social, financial, and religious conditions under which she produced her work, including a series of remarkably heterodox undertakings in the 1680s which were quietly excluded from Meditations and Visions. The thesis also engages with the study of bibliography and uses attention to the materiality of Bathurst’s manuscripts to offer greater insight into their creation, and the shared Philadelphian project of textual copying and circulation. It uses this evidence in combination with study of the field of early modern autobiography, and close attentiveness to the language of Bathurst’s descriptions of herself, to interrogate longstanding critical assumptions about her level of education, her process of writing, and her attitude to her readership. Such close reading asserts the literary value and interest of Meditations and Visions, and the benefits of taking it seriously as a crafted piece of writing: something that has previously been lost in an emphasis upon the immediacy and extemporaneity of Bathurst’s work, as both diary and prophecy. This thesis attends to the diction and image systems of Bathurst’s writing in order to reinforce this sense of Meditations and Visions as a sustained and deliberate writerly endeavour, and to uncover some of the ideas that shaped her experience and understanding of her prophetic work. In particular, it examines Bathurst’s conception of her spiritual sight of God in terms of optical views through glass objects, and it attends to the Philadelphian, Behmenist and broader non-conformist influences on this idea. This thesis also explores Bathurst’s development of a vivid idiom of travel, which blurs spiritual and earthly experience into a lively expression of a theological concept. Overall, it contends that Meditations and Visions should be recognised as a sustained, ambitious literary project; a complex, generically hybrid piece of early modern life writing; and a rare, fascinating insight into the creation of a prophetic text that was both personal document and communal record.