Anna Trapnel’s Literary Geography

Abstract

Anna Trapnel’s utterances were shaped — though not dictated — by the godly networks around her. Each choice she made narrowed the subsequent choices available to her. Her prophecies were an outcome of her dense network of godly interactions. 1 Those interactions were socially shaped by her encounters in and outside church, and physically shaped by the geography of her London. By tracing the places and the people she mentions in The Cry of a Stone and her other writings, we can begin to reconstruct who and how and where she knew, and how the networks which embraced her forged her ideas. In this essay, I will explore the way Trapnel’s godly intellect and doctrine were shaped by London — not as a whole city, site of urbanisation, but as the series of village-like fragments. Some were only the size of a street. London itself might well have boasted a quarter of a million people, but Trapnel’s own London was a series of thin slices through those swarms and herds. She partook of discursive, intellectual and literary networks with were created in parishes, and by their leading clergy and lecturers. It was Trapnel’s precise locations within London which allowed her to become a voice for radicalism. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 54 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.