Feminine Self-reflection and the Seventeenth-Century Occasional Meditation

Among the responses to the 1665 publication of Robert Boyle's Occasional Reflections, three are especially noteworthy. The well-known divine and family friend Richard Baxter praises the author for the way 'you call men to the manly worke of Meditation'.1 Baxter has in mind the 'shorter occasionall meditations' that comprise the collection Boyle himself deems 'Trifles' written over a period of years with no intention of publishing them.2 'As the most learned must not disdaine this way of cogitation', Baxter insists, 'so women & weake persons may well make it their frequent profitable worke'.3 In another letter to the author written a month later, Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, encourages her brother Robert to publish additional reflections in a new edition that furthers 'the glory of the Creator' by begetting 'Ingenious & gratefull thoughts in the harts of men towards him'.4 Within a year of the 1668 second edition, Anne Halkett expressed in her 'Occationall Meditations and Select Contemplations' the great 'Sattisfaction' she experienced '[V]pon reading M Boiles occationall reflections'. His collection and the earlier meditations of Bishop Joseph Hall complement, in Halkett's opinion, her own practice of turning 'the accidents of my life' into 'occations' for 'some pious thoughts' and divine praise.5 Other seventeenth-century women confirm that the occasional meditation is especially suited to feminine piety; however, relatively few examples of these women's meditations have survived. Those that have, unlike the 'manly worke' in the number of early modern publications, have a decidedly personal note apparent in the occasional meditations of Anne Halkett, Elizabeth Delaval, Katherine Austen, Alice Thornton, and Mary Rich.6 Their reflections are themselves an occasion for appreciating the distinctive ways in which these women shaped meditative acts of devotion into expressions of spiritual praise and self-revelation.All five women share a contemporary understanding of the genre Bishop Hall defines in The Art of Meditation (1606) as 'nothing else but a bending of the mind upon some spiritual object'. Hall differentiates the occasional meditation from the deliberate: those 'occasioned by outward occurrences offered to the mind' from those 'wrought out of our own heart'. 7 Common among later definitions are the terms extemporary, occasional, sudden, ejaculatory, and rapt as distinct from deliberate, set, and solemn.8 Unlike the deliberate meditation, which typically required the 'holy retirement of the soul, and a fixed exercise of the heart upon spiritual objects',9 the occasional meditation is by its nature brief and less formal. Neither Hall nor Boyle attempts to establish a circumscribed pattern. Others allow the possibility of solemn occasional meditations, where the soul takes the time to dwell more formally on a specific occurrence or subject, but for the most part the extemporal mode recognizes spontaneity and values 'a suddain invention not composed by study'.10 Common is the notion that this form of meditation is a parenthesis in the ordinary business of daily life, one that briefly ponders 'Providences, while they are just new and fresh' or considers passages from the book of nature.11 Boyle's emphasis on the moral and spiritual fulfillment in the 'Heavenly Mindedness' of meditative reflection - 'this way of Thinking' - is shared by other writers who advocate the spiritualization of 'any thing that is sensitive', or presented to the senses.12 Besides the brief flights heavenward and the 'quick interposings of good and holy thoughts', occasional meditation is further valued as a 'sharp spur, and strong provocation, to prayer and praise', a means of thanksgiving for all who 'conscionably' observe and consider 'the things of this life'.13Virtually all the occasional meditations published during the seventeenth century are written by men and are often indebted to contemporary commentary and to the three editions of meditations Joseph Hall published in the 1630s. …