An Elemental Digression in Mary Roper’s The Sacred Historie

Attributed to an otherwise unknown Mary Roper, The Sacred Historie (c.1669–1670) isa Genesis verse paraphrase of over 7,700 lines that survives in a manuscript at the University of Leeds Brotherton Library (MS Lt q 2). It is an explicitly devotional poem, beginning with a prefatory prayer that frames the poem as a daily exercise in faith. And yet, less than 50 lines into the poem, during her description of God’s creation of the world, Roper digresses into four short poems on the four elements—“The Royall Element of Fire”, “The Princly Element of Aier”, “The Liquid Element of Water” and “The Solid Element of Earth”.

The elements are not, strictly speaking, mentioned in the biblical account of creation that grounds Roper’s poem, but they were frequently interpolated into poetic renderings of Genesis, particularly in the wake of Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas’ French hexameral poem La Sepmaine; ou, Creation du monde (1578). Joshua Sylvester’s early seventeenth-century translation of La Sepmaine into the English Divine Weeks and Works (1608) was enormously popular and, as Peter Auger and Sarah Ross have shown, provided an influential model for English writers of devotional poetry. Du Bartas also importantly supplied these writers with an example of how to interweave science and theology in an encyclopaedic poem that massively expands Genesis and blends it with ancient and contemporary natural philosophical knowledge. In her 1641 elegy “In Honour of Du Bartas”, Anne Bradstreet, for example, praises not only his “Saint-like mind in grave Divinity”, but also his “Art, in Naturall Philosophy”, “peircing skill in high Astronomy” and “curious in-sight in Anatomy” (The Tenth Muse, p.197).

The Sacred Historie begins as a meditation on “Gods Wonderfull Works of Creation” (p.4), a digressional, emblematic mode that allows Roper to draw moral and spiritual significance from the elements and their order. In the Aristotelian tradition the elements were arranged into concentric sublunar spheres by their weight, with earth (the heaviest element) lowest and innermost and fire (the lightest) highest and outermost. Roper’s natural philosophical knowledge underpins the structure of her four poems that unfold in order of elemental weight, beginning with fire and then proceeding through air, water and earth. However, within her description of the world’s creation this order is attributed entirely to God. The elements are initially “Mxyt together” in a “Caos” where “Each did Agree to hinder others Birth / But Every one Combine against the Earth” (p.4) until God intervenes:

    Then God who the Oppressed doeth Relieve
    Resolves Deliverance to the Earth to Give
    Will Make her flourish and She shall possesse
   For Servants those that did her sore Oppresse
                                                                            (p.4)

God’s creation of the world and division of the elements provides here an opportunity to meditate and reflect upon divine benevolence and retribution. The specificities of elemental theory are mediated (and perhaps eclipsed) by the exigencies of faith and, in the case of meditation, genre. 

Indeed, biblical citation and diction are woven densely and inextricably throughout Roper’s elemental poems. In the first 12 lines of “The Royall Element of Fire” nearly every line features a scriptural reference:

Three of these are indicated in the margins: “Christs Eyes were Like a flame of fier his feete / As if they burned in a furnace Greate” directly paraphrases Revelations 1:14–15 in the King James Bible, for instance, where Christ’s eyes are described “as a flame of fire; And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace”. Beyond the three cited passages though, Jill Seal Millman and Gillian Wright identify three further biblical allusions including in lines 3–4 which mix Exodus 24:17 (“And the sight of the glory of the Lord was like devouring fire”) and Daniel 7:9 (“his throne was like the fiery flame”) (p.258, notes to lines 3–4). The first two lines could also be interpreted via a biblical lens. Later in Exodus, God tells Moses “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live” (33:20), while in 1 Timothy 6:16 God is described as “dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, nor can see”.

            Yet could these two lines also refer to seventeenth-century scientific debates? By the time Roper was writing, the theory of the four elements had largely fallen out of favour among contemporary scientists. This was partially a result of advances in optics that had drawn into question the existence of a sublunar fiery sphere, a challenge already evident in The Divine Weeks and Works, originally published around 90 years before Roper was writing, where Du Bartas dismisses those who

    more crediting their eies, then Reason;
    From’s proper place this Essence [Fire] doo disseasin
    And vainly strive, after their Fancies sway,
   To cut the World’s best Elemental away,

(The Divine Weeks and Works of Guillaume de Saluste Sieur du Bartas, Volume 1, trans. Joshua Sylvester, ed. Susan Snyder (OUP, 1979), 1.2.963–66)

Du Bartas claims that elemental, heavenly fire is, unlike earthly fire, too pure to see with the human eye (1.2.991–98). In Roper’s comparable question “What Mortall Eye Can See the Imperiall Seate / Of this Fierce Element” might we see an echo of this scientific debate about the fiery sphere? Is this a rebuke couched in scripture of scientific ambition or presumption?

In an earlier article in this series, Kevin Killeen observed that a poem such as Mary Chudleigh’s The Song of the Three Children Paraphras’d challenges us adjust the lens through which we view biblical poetry and, therefore, to reconceive of where we may find scientific poetry. The Sacred Historie similarly challenges us to recognise the natural philosophy nestled into Roper’s biblical paraphrase that offers the catalyst for devotional meditation.   

Extracts

Below are a couple of lightly modernized extracts from the beginning of The Sacred Historie. The full manuscript is digitized and accessible (with a subscription) via Perdita Manuscripts: Women Writers, 1500–1700 or the University of Leeds Literary Manuscripts: 17th and 18th Century Poetry from the Brotherton Library.

Further Reading

Auger, Peter. Du Bartas’ Legacy in England and Scotland. Oxford University Press, 2019.

Auger, Peter. “Du Bartas’ Pattern for English Scriptural Poets”. In Ronsard and Du Bartas in Early Modern Europe, edited by Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou and Paul J. Smith. Brill, 2021.

Crow, Andrea. “‘She… the Choisest out of them Doth Finde’: Multi-Material Collage and the Poetics of Restoration in ‘The Sacred Historie’”. Early Modern Women 7 (2012): 101–26.

Millman, Jill Seal and Gillian Wright, eds. Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry. Manchester University Press, 2005.

Ross, Sarah C.E. Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain. Oxford University Press, 2015. 

Weiss Smith, Courtney. Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England. University of Virginia Press, 2016.