Lucy Hutchinson (1620-1681) was until comparatively recently best-known for her biography of her husband John (d.1664), an officer in the New Model Army and one of the regicides who had signed the warrant for the execution of Charles I. The ongoing publication of her writings (Clarke et al 2019) has, however, made her much more famous, revealing that she was in her own right a profoundly learned individual. She wrote widely across several genres in addition to biography, with outputs including in addition not only a substantial body of poetry but also a translation of Lucretius’s De rerum natura, and important religious treatises such as On the Principles of the Christian Religion and On Theology.
Hutchinson was in all her writing highly sensitive to linguistic nuance, and the proposed case-study, part of a large-scale survey of religious discourse funded by the Leverhulme Trust to be published in late 2026 (Smith forthcoming), locates and contextualises her usage diachronically, focusing, because of time-constraints, on two English phrases of importance in her repertoire: infinite love and saving faith. Neither phrase is scriptural, but both over time have developed special theological significance. This process of cultural mapping or conceptual history – a contribution to the recuperation of what has been called historical theolinguistics – draws on major corpora such as EEBO-TCP, CLMET and COCA, as well as specially curated resources, and harnesses powerful linked digital tools, notably Linguistic DNA, Semantic EEBO and the Historical Thesaurus of English.
References
Clarke, Elizabeth, David Norbrook and Jane Stevenson (eds) 2019. The Works of Lucy Hutchinson: Theological Writings and Translations (Oxford: University Press)
Smith, Jeremy J. forthcoming. Lexicons of English Religion 1380-1850 (Cambridge: University Press)