Lucy robartes's ‘a meditation uppon the lords day’ : A puritan palimpsest and english sabbatarianism

John Robartes, 1st Earl of Radnor, gave his young wife Lucy a 1562 Geneva Bible, which belonged to his mother, the puritan matriarch Frances Hender, on 6 May 1631. They had married a year earlier in April 1630 when Lucy was fifteen, and sealed a strong puritan alliance. Factional divisions on chiefly religious grounds amongst the Cornish gentry had emerged by this time, and it is in relation to the debate of Sabbatarianism that Lucy Robartes made a rare literary incursion. Her brief discourse, which she entitled "A meditation uppon the Lords day", is scripted on one of several blank pages at the back of the Geneva Bible, composed sometime after 1633, in three installments, and it is this which enables people to examine her use of an individual Bible as a tool to express her own theological and political opinions. Though it is admittedly only a short text, Lucy Robartes's "Meditation" sheds fascinating light on the way in which an early modern woman writer was able to interact with a key contemporary controversy of political and theological importance. Here, Harris endeavors to demonstrate how the particular books within a remarkable private library can be better appreciated for what they offer literary history.

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