"Holy Huswifry": Devotion and the Domestic in English Atlantic Poetry, 1643-1725

This dissertation examines the relationship between devotional practice and domestic experience in English colonial poetry from 1643 to 1725. I argue that New England puritan poetry responded to settler colonialism, imperialism, and doctrinal debates through imagery rooted in intimate and familiar settings, objects, and relationship, adapting the language of domesticity in the poetry of old England, from poets like George Herbert and Francis Quarles, for settler-colonial contexts. Following a contextualizing introduction, chapter two shows how Roger Williams’s poetry describes the English domestic space as a site of spiritual complacency in the settler colonial context. Chapter three, on the other hand, argues that Michael Wigglesworth’s poetry relies on and disrupts an assumed domestic setting to generate spiritual affect. Chapter four outlines how Anne Bradstreet uses maternal metaphors to describe divine activity and biblical metaphors for divinity to describe her labor as mother, and chapter five identifies how Edward Taylor describes divine action in terms of the sustaining labor of housewifery. Finally, in a forward-looking coda, I turn to Emily Dickinson’s concept of God as neighbor, outlining briefly how a poet at once resistant to and fully-steeped in the legacy of New England puritanism adapts domestic paradigms for new contexts. Employing methodologies linked to domesticity, devotional practice, and material culture, my project redefines ways of thinking about transmission and influence in Anglo-American colonial poetry. To that end, my project reveals the flow of poetic form and content across the Atlantic during the early American period, identifying the real and imagined networks in which devotional poets wrote and the relevance of domestic materialities to Anglo-American religious experience.