Article: Mistress Hutchinson and Lucretius.(Books)(On Books)

Lucy Hutchinson concludes her "argument of," or introduction to, Book IV of her translation of "De Rerum Natura" ("On the Nature of Things") by telling how Lucretius "Last doth of Wedlocks fruite and its want treate / Advizing weomen to be cleane and neate / And well behavd."

Whether Mistress Hutchinson, as Stendhal would later style her, was herself well-behaved was another question: What was a Puritan wife in the 1650s doing anyway, neglecting domestic duty to loiter among and then pass on to other Christian folk the irreligious pagan's "foppish casuall dance of atoms" and the rest of it - and this, apparently, before any Englishman tackled the job from start ...

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