These devotional texts range in how closely they model themselves on the Bible: from metrical translations that turn biblical passages into poetry, verse by verse and chapter by chapter, to more free adaptations in which biblical texts provide motifs, narratives, or patterns which poets integrate into their works. While it is tempting to look on such texts as derivative and pedantic, close examination of individual works shows women writers engaging with questions of creation, authority, and poetic inspiration. Frequently poets use the idea of “framing verse” to refer to their poetic making; in so doing, they also reference God’s framing of the universe.

In the metrical Psalms of Mary Sidney Herbert, she uses this double meaning of ‘frame’ to reflect on her position as a poet engaging in an act of praise while also thinking about her own creation by God. In this way, she indexes both her indebtedness to God, and particularly to the Word of God that she is turning into verse, while also suggesting that her role as poet is divinely sanctioned, ingrained into her very being from the origin of her creation. Sidney Herbert’s gesture is followed in the seventeenth-century by several women writers that similarly use this tension between copying the Bible and being poetically inspired as a site in which to reflect on their own abilities and vocations as poets. This talk argues that rather than viewing biblical borrowings as constraining these poets, they instead act as catalysts, enabling women poets to express their politics, religious views, and even their emotional states in a manner that evokes understanding, sympathy, and the assent of the reader.

Dr. Nikolina Hatton is Assistant Professor at the chair of Early Modern English Literature at LMU Munich, Germany. Her current book project examines the biblical paraphrase poetry of Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Anne Southwell, Hester Pulter, and Lucy Hutchinson. She completed her PhD at the University of Freiburg, Germany in 2018. Her first book, The Agency of Objects in English Prose, 1789–1832 was published by Palgrave in 2020. More recently, she has published on Hester Pulter’s devotional poetry in Renaissance Studies (2023) and Poetica (2024) and contributed to the open-access edition The Pulter Project. She is currently co-editing a special issue of Anglistik on Early Modern Futures and co-organizing an upcoming online workshop entitled “Women Writing Violence” (April 2025).