ABSTRACT
Seventeenth-century readers of An Collins’s Divine Songs and Meditacions would not have been surprised by the author’s explicit association between her spiritual and physical states.1 In the context of early modern medical science, when psychology and physiology were understood to be mutually informing of each other, the body’s ailments signified temperamental affliction, and emotional suffering would be thought naturally to bear a corporeal mark. Given the explanatory power of religion, moreover, the travails of the body were particularly subject to moralizing, typically experienced as manifestations of (and opportunities to assess) the individual’s relative connectedness to God. Anne Hunsaker Hawkins points out that for early modern “pathographers” of illness, religious belief is the “organizing construct” that renders sickness “inherently meaningful and purposive.” Illness “serves as a visible sign of an underlying and invisible spiritual condition”; physical symptoms are “diagnostic indicators of a spiritual malaise.”2 Thus Collins’s discussion of her various physical discomforts, from frailty to weakness to chronic pain, would represent for readers evidence of the poet’s attempt to discover the condition of her soul, but at the same time, references in her work to a disabled or unhealthy body are not merely what Sidney Gottlieb has called “a predictable metaphor” for spiritual disquiet.3
