In Christian tradition, it is God’s breath that transforms man from a senseless body to a living creature: ‘And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul’ (Genesis 2.7, KJV). Pulter’s use of the verb ‘inanimate’ might have called to mind, for her readers, the Latin title of Aristotle’s influential treatise on the soul, De anima. It is also a word used frequently in this sense by John Donne. In sermon XV, for example, Donne scolds the sinner: ‘Thou hast made thy sin, thy soule, thy life; inanimated all thy actions, all thy purposes with that sin’ (LXXX sermons preached by that learned and reverend divine, John Donne (London, 1640), O5r). Confusingly, the term was also used, during this period, in our modern sense of ‘inanimate’ or lifeless, and this was probably the dominant sense for most readers. The poem seems to play with this flickering ambiguity, with ‘inanimated’ appearing momentarily to refer back to the senseless earth of line two, before the meaning resolves itself into the life-giving action of line three. The ancient Greek psyche originally meant ‘life’ in the sense of ‘breath’, but also, by derivation, referred to the spirit or soul. Philosophers debated the nature of the soul and the moment at which it entered the body, and these debates continued into the early modern period. In Deaths duell, Donne engages with the question of precisely when this ‘quickening’ or becoming animate, happens, reflecting ‘Therefore as soone as wee are men, (that is, inanimated) quickned in the womb) thogh [sic] we cannot our selves, our parents have to say in our behalf, wretched man that he is, who shall deliver him from this body of death?’ (London, 1632, B4r-v). Note also Abbot’s use of ‘inanimated’ (‘Curations’).