Thursday, February 20, 2025

*** This is a rough transcript of today’s show ***

It is the 20th of February 2025. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

Two days in a row, on account of the vagaries of the calendar, we highlight another name that I am willing to bet is unfamiliar to you… We like to hit the big names and ideas on this show, but sometimes we can find a story as compelling despite the persons or ideas being lost to history.

Yesterday, it was the Norwegian “Deborah,” the famous 17th century author Dorothe Engelbrechtsdatter who died on the 19th, and today- an absolutely towering figure in her own day- one of the most distinguished Christian novelists and poets Elizabeth Singer Rowe who died at home on this, the 20th of February in 1737.

She had been a famous public intellectual and author- one of the first women to be considered as such in the English-speaking world during the shift from a Post-Reformation world into the Enlightenment. Hers was a curious life, and even curios-er death and afterlife as she seems to have planned everything down to the last detail.

She was the daughter of Elizabeth and William Singer- her mother died young, and her father encouraged her poetic and artistic abilities. William was a popular dissenting minister who had spent time in prison under the reign of Charles II. With the coming of the Glorious Revolution, William and his daughter (and future son-in-law Thomas Rowe) became ardent supporters of the subsequent houses of Orange and Hannover and their call for religious toleration. 

Elizabeth first wrote under a pseudonym- “Philomela” (Latin for Nightengale- known for its songs of lament) as it was unbecoming for a woman to seek fame under her own name. But everyone knew Philomela was Elizabeth Singer, and she would attract fans from the famous poet Alexander Pope, the hymn writer Isaac Watts, and Thomas Rowe, a writer and her future husband.

The two were married, and it was a happy marriage, but brief. He died at just 28, and she went back to Frome in Somerset to live with her widowed father. On account of his burgeoning work in cloth, she would have an inheritance such that she was able to give away the considerable money that she made with her publications.

Perhaps her most famous work was Friendship in Death: in Twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living from 1728- this is an early version of the “epistolary” novel wherein the story is told through correspondence (think of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther as a later and popular example of this form). But Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s novel wasn’t in the form of love letters, but rather what she would refer to as “moral and entertaining” as the “20 letters from the Dead” were missives from heaven- a two year old to his mourning mother or men lost at sea and now in the glories of heaven.

She also wrote popular paraphrases of Scripture when King James still ruled the established church. She was able to rewrite sections of Scripture in poetic forms, which are out of favor and style today but made her very popular, if not somewhat controversial. She is the rare female public intellectual and writer of the English Protestant Enlightenment- like the Norwegian Engelbrechtsdatter were she a man she would be a famous preacher and poet but untimely born has suffered as a “one of a kind” with few if any peers.

She seems to have been obsessed with her reputation as a female author and with her own death. With the deaths of her mother, husband, and father, she came to look forward to her own death in a way that is almost unsettling- save she believed herself just one short sleep away from eternal bliss.

In early 1737, the increasingly iSinger Rowe began to get her effects in order- she wrote “farewell” letters to her friends and collected her writings to give to the famous hymn writer Isaac Watts, who she then gave charge to edit and publish her works along with a biography for posterity. Unfortunately as the Augustan age gave way to the Industrial revolution and modernity her forms fell out of style- but we still have her works and that collection provided at her death through Isaac Watts- Devout Exercises of the Heart in Meditation and Soliloquy, Prayer and Praise published a year after her death on this, the 20th of February in 1737. Born in 1674, Elizabeth Singer Rowe was 62 years old.

 

The last word for today is from Elizabeth Singer Rowe: "To thee, O God! my pray'r ascends.”

1 To thee, O God! my pray'r ascends,

But not for golden stores;

Nor covet I the brightest gem

On the rich eastern shores:

 

2 Nor that deluding empty joy

Men call a mighty name,

Nor greatness with its pride and state,

My restless thoughts inflame:--

 

3 Nor pleasure's fascinating charms

My fond desires allure:

But nobler things than these, from thee,

My wishes would secure.

 

4 The faith and hope of joys to come

My best affections move;

Thy light, thy favor, and thy smiles,

Thine everlasting love.

 

5 These are the blessings I desire:

Lord, be these blessings mine!

And all the glories of the world

I cheerfully resign.

 

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 20th of February 2025 brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man who rejects the rhyming of “move” and “love” he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who reminds you that those are called “eye rhymes” because they look similar, but don’t actually rhyme- and they are the worst, but sometimes ok… I’m Dan van Voorhis. 

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.