“[T]ouching the ground of Truth”: An Collins and Sectarian Spiritual Autobiography

Critics have long acknowledged that An Collins’s Divine Songs and Meditacions is deeply autobiographical, with its modern editor Sidney Gottlieb going so far as to note that despite “the methodological dangers of and critical warnings against reading poetry autobiographically, Collins presents her writing as personal and experiential, and invites us to read the poems [in this way].”1 Since Collins’s collection of verse represents her own spiritual journey in order to aid readers in theirs; since this representation and didactic goal are also typical of seventeenthcentury women’s sectarian spiritual autobiographies; since she employs rhetorical strategies and topoi that intersect with those common in these texts; and since Collins’s own spiritual outlook has been convincingly connected with what we might call the period’s dissenting sensibility,2 it makes sense to frame an analysis of Divine Songs and Meditacions in terms of the burgeoning discourse of women’s sectarian life-writing. Collins’s volume shares many connections with the spiritual autobiographies and testimonies of dissenting writers ranging from Anne Wentworth and Barbara Blaugdone to Joan Vokins and Elizabeth Stirredge; among the most important are those related to the representation of the female authorial self and the detailed justification for writing, particularly through the employment of the rhetoric of reticence, illness, debility, and self-abnegation; the careful construction of the relationship between writer and reader to support the didactic utility of autobiographical revelation and the writer’s construction as authoritative spiritual teacher; and finally the deeply retrospective and doctrinally informed representation of the conversion experience and the experiential self.