Lucy Hutchinson

This chapter traces the development of Lucy Hutchinson’s religious views and discusses the role of writing in both recording and driving her formation as a Puritan through the decades of Civil War, Interregnum, and Restoration. It shows how she and her husband, the regicide Colonel John Hutchinson, together came to repudiate the Laudian and Presbyterian national churches and explores the ways in which her Puritanism, especially her deepening commitment to the Calvinist doctrines of double predestination and divine providence, shaped her major literary achievements—the Life of her husband and her paraphrase of Genesis—and complicated her involvement with the translation of Lucretius. This chapter provides a reassessment of Lucy Hutchinson as an early modern female religious author from the new perspectives opened up by recent editions of her Lucretius and her biblical epic.