Samuel Clarke and the ‘Lives’ of Godly Women in Seventeenth-Century England

Abstract

When Samuel Clarke’s The Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons in this Later Age was published posthumously in 1683, the ‘godly life’ was a well-established genre of Puritan literature. Clarke himself had contributed to its popularity with his various compilations of’lives’ of ministers and laity culled primarily from published funeral sermons and spiritual biographies by other authors. Today such editions would be regarded as blatant plagiarism, but in the mid-seventeenth century, before the advent of the copyright laws, they were widely appreciated, and in the Introduction to this, his last work, Clarke wrote, I have been encouraged to make this collection, and now to publish it, finding that my former labours in this kind have been accepted with the Saints, and in the Church of Christ: which is apparent, for that they have been printed four times in a few years space, and yet never less than a thousand at a time.

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 — 25 citations exist upstream.

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