ABSTRACT
A number of factors impact on how we might read this complex little text. It exists in manuscript; it was generated by an elite woman; it blends a key and widely shared cultural resource (the Bible or a Bible story) with the story of Orpheus which is of a more enigmatic cultural location and purchase. It articulates the fixing experience of imprisonment and may suggest that this particular death is liberating and transforming for the subject even as it leaves the writer frozen in grief. The stories on which it draws complicate the positioning of the sex of the beloved and the one left behind. He is transfigured and she is transfixed, but the same event transforms each. As with so many pieces of textual evidence from seventeenthcentury England, the methods and categories hinted at by the term ‘popular culture’ seem both appropriate and unhelpful in relation to such a text. Both the product of an aristocratic woman and the repository of a blending of classical and biblical stories, the mixed nature of these words invites us to consider its relationship to different aspects of culture and the way, in its combining of classical and Christian stories, that it foregrounds the complexity of the relationship of distinct material. What can ‘popular culture’ as an analytical category mean, both for Hutchinson’s brief comment and more widely?
