Maternal imagination: Reconceiving first impressions

The concept of maternal imagination, whereby the disordered thoughts and impressions of pregnant women are used to explain the prevalence of monstrous births, was at its height during the early modern period, albeit it with many prior and subsequent manifestations. Against a more familiar, and enduring, medieval and Renaissance context of supernatural agency at work, the device of MI was seen as a 'naturalistic' model more in keeping with the advent of Enlightenment scientism. Nonetheless, the debate around it was ferocious and indicative more of a masculine anxiety about female desire and generative power than of a concern for impartial explanation. In problematizing a simply descriptive approach to archival material, my purpose is to explore what is at stake in the competing discourses that seem alternately, and even simultaneously, to empower and degrade the place of the mother. What is the unspoken of an historical debate that prefigures our contemporary interest in feminine excess?

The Church of Scotland and the English apocalyptic imagination, 1630-1650

This article explores the evolution of the eschatological identity of the Church of Scotland within the framework of English puritan apocalyptic thought in the period 1630–50. From the beginnings of reformation, English protestant theologians constructed an elaborate series of readings of Biblical apocalyptic texts through which they attempted to understand contemporary events. By the 1630s, English puritan exegetes had begun to identify within the Biblical text a distinctive role for Scottish Presbyterianism. The Scottish church, which, in the opinion of many English puritans, moved towards a more rigorously reformed ecclesiology as the 1630s progressed, was identified as a harbinger of the millennial glory that English puritans would shortly share. But as the relationship between Parliament and Presbytery turned sour, English puritans increasingly identified the Scottish church as the apocalyptic menace that stood in the way of their millennial fulfilment – a feeling made vivid in the rhetoric of the Cromwellian invasion.