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It has been my central contention throughout this book that early modern Metaphysical literature cannot be fully comprehended unless one takes account of the relationship between nature, naturalness, and representation. I am fairly certain that there exists a concrete world of atoms, elms, boulders, and cats. As philosopher Kate Soper argues, however, physical nature ‘may recommend certain types of action, and it will always have its say in determining the effects of what we do, but it does not enforce a politics’ (p. 33). In other words, while three-dimensional nature may limit what humans can accomplish in terms of medicine or architecture, our thoughts, desires, identities, and actions acquire ideological meaning and value when they are deemed to be natural or unnatural.

Aemilia Lanyer devoted herself to God and other women. Her visions of past and future Utopian worlds consistently place love of the deity in and through a community of women at the centre of personal happiness and social justice. In her only known work, Salve Deus Rex Judœorum, the commingling of religious piety, a defence of women, and a celebration of their mutual passion and devotion engagingly denaturalizes customary power relations and gender identities.1

Following the execution of King Charles I on 29 January 1649, there appeared an anonymous pamphlet entitled A Miracle of Miracles: Wrought by the Blood of King Charles the First, of happy Memory. This curious chapbook narrated the fate of a young Deptford woman who had contracted an untreatable strain of scrofula, the ‘Kings Evill’: ‘thus was the poore silly soul past all hopes of recovery, being discomforted with words, blind of her sight, forsaken by the Physicians, and left off by acquaintance’ (p. 3). Happily, though, God intervened in the girl’s sorry plight by inspiring Master John Lane, a London woollen draper, to share with her a piece of his handkerchief ‘which had been dipped in the Kings blood on the day that he was beheaded’ (p. 5). When this precious fabric touched the girl’s eyes her sight was restored and her strength returned; because of the fame of this restoration ‘many hundreds of people came daily to see her both from London and other places’ (pp. 5–6). Pilgrims and readers alike, we are informed, took away with them the certainty that the regicides were nothing but ‘envious Matchevils’ (p. 9) who reft England of ‘a precious Jewell’ (p. 6).

One of modern Western culture’s more disturbing inheritances from the seventeenth century is that era’s growing conviction that there is a morally essential correspondence between gender identity and sexual preference. The all-too-familiar story holds that it is unnatural to desire (let alone prefer) erotic relations with members of one’s own gender. Over the past twenty years, however, scholars have uncovered vibrant literary, artistic, and historical evidence that many men in early modern England imagined and experienced a full range of homoerotic passions and practices.1 In this chapter I would like to turn attention to a more critically neglected aspect of early modern sexuality and literature: female homoeroticism. Both John Donne and Andrew Marvell composed poems which, in whole or in part, speak of passionate love between women. In Donne’s elegy ‘Sapho to Philœnis’ and, especially, Marvell’s country-house poem Upon Appleton House, techniques of cultural denaturalization draw attention to the coercive limitations of conventional gender and sexuality paradigms. Literary Metaphysicality in these poems principally underscores desire’s unruly potential and, as a result, the subjective variability of moral interpretation. In their portraits of ‘lesbian’ desire, Donne and Marvell make available for readers opportunities dissidently to reflect on purportedly everlasting and universal truths about human sexual proclivities, capacities, and pleasures.

In 1764 Horace Walpole’s press at Strawberry Hill issued 200 copies of Edward, Lord Herbert of Chirbury and Castle-Island’s autobiography. While he went to the bother and expense of bringing (for the first time ever) this obscure manuscript to public attention, Walpole’s admiration was far from unequivocal. Similar to Samuel Johnson’s contemporaneous comments on Donne and Cowley, Walpole’s introduction to the volume and several related letters to friends indicate that he regarded Herbert’s persona and work as being frequently over-mannered and contrived. This facet of Herbert’s character and book could, however, be the source of substantial mirth, as Walpole mischievously reveals in a letter in which he describes reading the text aloud to friends: ‘My Lady Waldegrave was here in all her grief — [Thomas] Gray and I read it to amuse her — we could not go on for laughing and screaming’ (Correspondence 2:130).1 While I too have found myself chuckling over certain outlandish passages in Herbert’s self-narration — a proposed duel over the snatching of a little French girl’s favourite ribbon springs to mind — I believe that a study of Herbert’s autobiography, in conjunction with his theory of perception, epistemology of truth, and demanding corpus of poetry, reveals elements of cultural interrogation that are germane to other Metaphysical writers’ approaches to knowledge, desire, and identity.

Like many other people, I possess standards of beauty, truth, order, and justice that, most days, appear to me to be rooted in obvious common sense. Why, I sometimes wonder, don’t all my friends agree with me that Andy Warhol can’t hold a candle to Georges de la Tour or, a little more controversially, that the quest by some activists for same-gender marriage rights entails an unnecessary endorsement of an unpleasant status quo? It’s only natural to think the way I do.