Stenke, Katarina ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4006-3826 (2026) Making (a little) time for siblings: miniature piety and watch-paper devotion across the Steele family archive. In: BSECS 55th Annual Conference of the British Society for Eighteenth‑Century Studies, 7th - 9th January, 2026, Pembroke College, Oxford.

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Abstract

This paper presents material from an almost-completed article on cross-gender temporal habits and rhythms in the devotional and secular manuscript writings of eighteenth-century Particular Baptist poet Anne Steele (1717-78), her brother William Steele, Jr. (1715-1785), and her half-sister Mary Steele Wakeford (1724-72). It returns to a topic I last published on quite some time ago, with a new focus on material culture and temporalities, and thereby builds on and extends recent work by Cynthia Aalders on nonconformist women’s devotional culture, in which the Steele family features as a revealing case-study. I’ll start by explaining a bit about who the Steeles were, and introducing the most telling of their archival manuscripts: a set of little poems about time; set against archival evidence from William Steele’s commonplace books, it seems likely that they were designed and for miniaturized transcription on watch-papers, discs of paper that covered eighteenth-century pocket-watches. These verse miniatures (brief, in terms of word-count and line-length, but also calligraphically small-scale) therefore ask to be read in the context surviving eighteenth-century commercial and private watch-papers, examples of which I take from the British Museum’s digital collections. These in turn send us back to the material substrate of the manuscript poems to trace little pieces of evidence that suggest the ways in which the siblings’ devotional habits and sense of time were entangled with the temporalities of embodied, gendered experience; of politics and history; and with the dynamics of financial capital.

Item Type:	Conference or Conference Paper (Paper)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	eighteenth-century religious poetry, nonconformist women’s writing, Anne Steele, manuscript culture, watch-papers, time in poetry, material culture, eighteenth-century timber trade, collaborative authorship, sibling relation, empire and domesticity
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics P Language and Literature > PR English literature Z Bibliography. Library Science. Information Resources > Z004 Books. Writing. Paleography
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Law, Arts and Social Sciences Faculty of Law, Arts and Social Sciences > School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Last Modified:	01 Jun 2026 15:52
URI:	https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/53635

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