PhD candidate Lauren Pearl Holmes was delighted to present a paper at the Society for the History of Women in the Americas (SHAW) 2025 Conference. The conference, held on 11 July 2025 at Leeds Beckett University and the University of Leeds, explored the theme of emotion in scholarship on women in the Americas.
Lauren’s paper was entitled “But plants new set to be eradicate”? Representations of the natural and unnatural in Anne Bradstreet’s grandmaternal grief poetry.’ It considered how we an reflect on and engage with poetic representations of grief in Early American women’s religious writing in order to deepen our understanding of the historical contexts of their literature.
A review of the conference and further details on its proceedings can be found here.
The abstract for Lauren’s paper is as follows:
Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) is well established in the existing literature as a proto-sentimental poet. Writing to unify her readers with her dually publicised and private emotion, Bradstreet authored her works with an emotional and rhetorical fluency which served as a precursor to the sentimentalism of later centuries. Yet, it is not well understood within the academy to what purpose Bradstreet’s proto-sentimental grief poetry served in a wider cultural sense. “In Memory of my Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet, Who Deceased August 1665, Being a Year and a Half Old,” “In Memory of my Dear Grandchild Anne Bradstreet Who Decease June 20, 1669, Being Three Years and Seven Months Old,” and “On My Dear Grandchild Simon Bradstreet, Who Died on 16 November 1669, Being but a Month, and One Day Old” all demonstrate a conventional Puritan piety. Yet, Bradstreet also deliberately quashes any challenge to God’s decision to end the lives of her young grandchildren in the texts; this deliberate silencing of her own grandmaternal rage and grief speaks to a proto-sentimental foregrounding of those very emotions and of an atheism veiled behind a devotional rhetoric. Within the isolationist and reflective space of archival research, moreover, the emotional and affective impact of Bradstreet’s grandmaternal grief poetry is compounded and heightened, underscoring the cultural work of the texts in questioning the naturalness and divinity of the children’s deaths. This paper will explore Bradstreet’s grandmaternal grief poems as indicative of an emotional and proto-sentimental subversion of the historical narrative of Puritan thought and belief.