Lyn Bennett
Book Review
Anna
Trapnel, Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea;
or, A Narrative of Her Journey from London into Cornwall. Edited by Hilary Hinds.
The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, Vol. 50, ITER (Toronto, 2016) and
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Tempe AZ, 2016), 155 +
xvi pp. ISBN: 9780866985581
1> In her introduction
to Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea,
Hilary Hinds reminds us that Trapnel’s writing lay long dormant “until recent
scholarship rekindled a sense of the fascination and importance of her life and
work.” First published in 1654, Trapnel’s account of her itinerant preaching
through Cornwall and subsequent trial and imprisonment at Bridewell was, Hinds
notes, only one among “six texts authored by her to be published in six years” that,
taken together, suggest something of the extent of “public interest” in the
author and her work (28).
2> Perhaps
best known for her very public twelve-day trance at Whitehall and the resulting
prophecies recorded by an unnamed “relator” and published as The Cry of a Stone in 1654, Trapnel was
a Fifth Monarchy Baptist whose voice was enabled by conditions of publication
dramatically altered over the course of two Civil Wars as well as the singular religious
and political context in which she spoke and wrote. In broad and fine strokes,
Hind’s generous introduction sketches a world very much turned upside down, the
King displaced by the oft-despised Oliver Cromwell, the New Army General and
Lord Protector Trapnel challenged in speech and in print, and a once-united
religion split into a dizzying array of factions and sects. Those factions, as
Hinds explains, included those that divided Baptists who may have been united
in common rejection of infant baptism but were split into Calvinist believers
in predestination (those Particular Baptists that included Trapnel) and
Arminian heretics who upheld the possibility of personal redemption. In this
and other ways, Hinds’ admittedly brief but wide-ranging account of “the
turmoil generated by the unprecedented and fast-moving events” (5) gathers a
perfect storm of Interregnum conditions that signalled for the Fifth
Monarchists an imminent Second Coming and afforded Trapnel a prophetic place
near its center.
3> Unlike the
mediated The Cry of a Stone, which
was in 2000 published in a modern edition also by Hinds, the Report
and Plea is a first-person narrative recounted by Trapnel herself; like the
earlier work, however, Trapnel’s account of her journey and trial stands out
also as the product of a prophet whose role transcended that of “religious
polemicist, political commentator, or biblical exegete” (10). In the earlier
prophecies, Trapnel speaks not in slavish imitation of the Scripture on which The Cry of a Stone heavily draws, but in
highly rhetorical and imaginative re-visioning of its most cryptic Book of
Revelations. Hinds likewise notes an equally “striking” use of “linguistic
resources” evident not only in the Report
and Plea’s abundance of biblical imagery but, fittingly enough for the
self-proclaimed daughter of a shipwright hailing from Stepney Parish east of
London, also in the frequent invocation of “nautical metaphor to flesh out a
spiritual point.” Reading the later narrative as more than an historical
artifact of personal biography and “religious life” (12), Hinds does well to
underscore its interest as a literary text.
4> It is not only
in Scripture’s “sweet unfoldings” (99) or in Christ’s “bowels of compassion”
(97) that Trapnel’s authorial voice proves lively and inventive. Including accounts
of what she observed as she walked “in a curious garden” (55) and elsewhere
outdoors, what she experienced in her arrest and transportation back to London,
and what she suffered from the dreadful sickness that befell her during her imprisonment
at Bridewell, Trapnel’s narrative does much to convey the richness of lived
experience. That she sometimes recounts details as small as what she ate, from
the fasting “draught of small beer or cider” and the occasional “little piece
of toast” (100) that appear also in The
Cry of a Stone, to the “piece of pie” (105) she brought from Plymouth and
consumed on the way to Portsmouth, further attests to her attentiveness as a
storyteller. Transforming the literal into the figurative in describing, for
example, the fragility of “partridge eggs of the largest kind” transported by
an accompanying Lieutenant and bound as a gift to Cromwell (105), and later
invoking those “eggs that are subject to rot or to break before they come to be
large partridges” as antithetical to the grace conferred upon the elect by the
“great Jehovah” and “his son Christ” (108), she also reveals more than a
modicum of poetic sensibility and argumentative sense. Finding and using the
available mean of persuasion in fashioning a script uniquely her own, Trapnel
recognizes possibility in the tool she uses; like every cognizant rhetor, however,
she is also aware of its “dangerous ambiguity” and the corollary necessity
that, as Hinds puts it, language – like those fragile eggs – is “always to be
handled with care” (26-27).
5> Suggesting
something of the knowledge yet to be gleaned from an already-fascinating text, Hinds’
introduction is complemented by extensive explanatory notes offering scriptural
cross-references and detailed explanations of legal proceedings as well as
information about the people Trapnel encountered and the places she traveled. Including
some relevant contemporary texts, the appended bibliography also provides
references to secondary works whose number is necessarily limited by a body of scholarship
that, Hinds explains, is of “such quantity now that it is no longer possible to
do full justice to all who have contributed to it” (31). Indeed, Hinds’ edition
of The Cry of a Stone has surely done
much to encourage interest in Trapnel’s long-overlooked corpus, and her work on
the Report and Plea will likely prove
even more timely and relevant to an audience of diverse interests. The volume
would serve well as an assigned text for upper-level undergraduate and graduate
students of literature, history, gender, politics, religion, and women’s studies,
and will be a welcome addition to the libraries of established scholars. As
with the other titles so far included in The
Toronto Series, Anna Trapnel’s Report
and Plea is a high-quality volume certain to endure intellectually,
academically, and materially.
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Associate
Professor at Dalhousie University, Lyn
Bennett teaches classes in rhetoric, writing, and early modern literature.
She has recently published in the Journal of Medical Humanities,
and her monograph, Rhetoric, Medicine, and the Woman Writer, 1600-1700,
is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. She is currently working on a
grant-funded collaborative project titled Early Modern Maritime Recipes.
_____
APPOSITIONS:
Studies
in Renaissance / Early Modern
Literature and Culture,
Literature and Culture,
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