Exciting news - a new portrait of Lucy Hutchinson has surfaced.

John Hutchinson really entered the public stage that Christmas with the story of his resistance widely reprinted. Lucy Hutchinson reworked this material for her two versions.

Although now Parliament goes into recess over the Christmas, in 1643 after a tough year early in the civil war, Parliament found itself in need to sit on Christmas Day. Dr Vivenne Larminie explores some of the urgent matters under discussion:

📢 Excited to announce this Call for Papers for ‘Clio Reframed’, a conference at Oxford on 18-19 June 2026 exploring early modern women as writers of history. @engfac.bsky.social @oxfordcems.bsky.social Abstracts due by 28 Feb! clioreframed.hcommons.org/call-for-pap...

Apsley’s marriage to the daughter of the Lord President of Munster strengthened his Irish connections, a neglected part of Hutchinson’s family background. She says he lived a ‘very disconsolate life’ after her death.

Anne Carew, Lady Apsley, née Anne Bell, daughter of Sir Peter Carew & second wife of Sir Allen Apsley, 1606 (National Trust Images)

On this day in 1642 Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham. John and Lucy Hutchinson were not there to see him, John having fled for fear of capture, and the couple were separated in traumatic circumstances that affected, she believed, the health of the daughter she was about to bear.

Nudging from the margins: Thomas Poulton, Governor of Nottingham Castle, records his capture of a royalist in 1648 with the help of Joseph Widmerpoole. Hutchinson has Poulton insert a note saying he was involved too. When Lucy Hutchinson writes the episode up, Poulton disappears.

The radical clericalism of the chapel makes it the more striking that John 'never mist the Chappell', and that Lucy Hutchinson doesn't retrospectively present him as an overt opponent.

In an Oxford paper David Scott offered a fresh view of Laudianism through the building of Peterhouse chapel, Cambridge.

Only a couple of weeks now until the first of our spring online lecture series. Four top historians over successive weeks on aspects of the 1600s, this time covering subjects from radical republicans, religious groups and the outbreak of the civil war... cromwellmuseum.org/events/cromw...

In this month's blogpost I travel from Oxford to Switzerland in the company of the eighteenth-century eccentric Thomas Hollis. www.rachelhammersley.com/new-blog/2025/4/29/thomas-hollis

The US Naval Academy has been purged of several books about gender in early modern writing. This is at least proof that criticism has efficacy. (Hutchinson survives.)

Historians of Protestantism are versatile people

The Memoirs is on the list, unclear whether it is the incomplete pre-1973 text which is available out of copyright anyway.

Please sign the petition on Change.org to protect authors from predatory AI and see the scope of Meta’s raids which will affect all who write for a living and extends to articles on Lucy Hutchinson.

In a session on Hutchinson and Pulter, David Norbrook compared discourses of patriarchy in their writings, LaJoie J. Lex demonstrated the importance of the Book of Job for Pulter’s religious poetry, and Wesley Garey explored Protestant sublimity in Order and Disorder.

Peter Beal co-edited English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700, in whose special 2000 issue on early modern women’s writing appeared David Norbrook's article on the authorship of Order and Disorder. The 25th anniversary was marked by a session at the Renaissance Society of America in Boston.

Peter Beal built the essential infrastructure for early modern manuscript studies, which was so important for the study of women's writing.

The amazing Esther Inglis [Kello], 1570/71-1624, calligrapher, daughter of Huguenot refugees, depicts herself writing in a New Year's gift book for Henry Prince of Wales in 1607. (Royal Collection Trust, HM CIII) #InternationalWomensDay

Will be on BBC R4’s Start the Week on Monday, 9am. ‘historian John Rees focuses on the group of firebrand parliamentarians at the heart of the English Civil Wars. The Fiery Spirits describes how the radicals influenced other MPs & led to the defeat, and execution, of Charles I.’

Julius Hutchinson did cut many passages he thought readers would dislike and only in 1973 did James Sutherland issue an edition from the original MS. N. H. Keeble followed with a modernized edition. The new edition will for the first time include in full an earlier version written during the war.

The vehemently republican MS was held close by the family and not published till 1806. Julius Hutchinson issued special large-paper copies and boosted subscriptions; it became a best-seller.

Lucy Hutchinson’s life of her husband, written after his death in prison in 1664, is on display in Nottingham Castle Museum’s brilliant ‘Rebellion Gallery’.

The Oxford edition will print both of Lucy Hutchinson's accounts of the siege, where she has Sir John - one of the few Parliamentarian commanders she wholeheartedly praised - lament his side's disunity.

International Women's day lecture on the Hutchinsons, Newark, Friday 7 March

In a reflexive moment, after mourning her husband's mother, Margaret Biron, she recalls that she had served Arbella Stuart, with Jane Owen part of a group of Jacobean women intellectuals, and ‘euen after her marriage, she would steale many melancholly howers, to sitt & weepe in remembrance of her’.

Hutchinson was not the first woman poet to take an interest in Lucretius: apart from her contemporary Margaret Cavendish, in 1610 Jane Owen presented to the Bodleian Library this beatuiful 15th-century MS, the only one then in Britain. Bodleian MS Auct. F. 1. 13.

These are the editions of Lucretius, by Denys Lambin and Daniel Pareus, which Lucy Hutchinson would have consulted 'in a roome where my children practizd the severall quallities they were taught, with their Tutors, & I numbred the sillables of my translation by the threds of the canvas I wrought in'

On the subject of Lucretius, here is how students at Baylor University have responded.

Introducing Lucy Hutchinson’s writings in a few posts. In the 1650s, translation of Lucretius, De rerum natura, a bold atheist epic. How did a Puritan engage with materialist vision of history? Texts available in Oxford Works vol. 1, with Latin text and full commentary; text only ed. Hugh de Quehen.

Hutchinson is likely to have read, in Latin or in the translation of Thomas May, the passage in Lucan’s Pharsalia where Caesar raids the treasury, a key moment in his coup (iii.108-11): Caesar was all: the Senate sit to beare Witnesse of private power, and grant what ere He please to aske.