employed maternal metaphors for themselves^145 as John Cotton illustrates, “[b]rests
are parts and vessels that give milk to babes of the Church, which resemble the
Ministers of this Church of the Jews.”^146 Readers must remember the biblical source
of this Puritan imagery, recognizing that Jesus himself spoke of being a mother hen
(Mt 23:37). The Old Testament includes other examples of God as a mother of the
faithful (e.g. Is 42:14, 49:15-16, 66:13). Therefore, when a Puritan minister spoke of
feeding his congregation through his breasts he was not acting in a sexually aberrant
manner but rather mirroring Jesus Christ and God the Father. Of course, these
examples of gender inversion of Jesus as Mother are not unique to the Puritans but
common among medieval males, such as Bernard, and to a lesser extent to females
such as Gertrude of Helfta and Mechtild of Hackeborn.^147 This obviously raises
questions regarding contemporary gender issues, however, since they were not
germane to the seventeenth-century they cannot be examined here.
Contrary to Longfellow who is misled by Scheper’s limited reading of the
sources on spiritual marriages I have found that many Puritans used erotic imagery to
stimulate their experience of spiritual marriages.^148 More broadly many scholars find
a deep interaction between sexual love and spiritual love in the Puritan writings on
145
See for example Dillon, “Nursing Fathers and Brides of Christ.” cf. Leverenz,
Language of Puritan FeelingCanticles,” 150-1. , esp. 143-5 and Webster, “Gender Inversion and
(^146) Cotton, Brief Exposition on Canticles, 198.
(^147) Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 110-69, 189-90, 131n72, 211-2n132. cf. McGinn,
Flowering of Mysticism 148 , 169.
Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing, 29. See Williams, “Puritan Enjoyment
of God,” 183n123, 192n155, 195 for a critique of Scheper. On the pervasiveness of
erotic language in Puritanism see Jones, “Union with Christ,” 201-2; Porterfield,
Female Piety in New Englandof God,” 195-9, 202-3. , esp. 26-9, 36-9, 44, 72; Williams, “Puritan Enjoyment