Protestant Autobiography In The Seventeenth Century Anglophone World

This book provides a new view of the historical conditions and methods by which godly communities turned personal experience into an authorizing principle. A broad range of life-writing is explored, including Augustine's Confessions, John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, and Richard Baxter's Reliquiae Baxterianae.

Autobiographical narrative is seldom viewed as a catalyst for the social and political upheavals of mid-seventeenth-century England and its colonies. Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World argues that it should be. Focusing on the inward search for signs of election as a powerful stimulus for new, written forms of self-identification, this study directs critical attention toward the collective processes through which 'truthful' texts of spiritual experience were constructed, validated, and endorsed. This new analysis of the rhetoric of authentic selfhood emphasizes the ways in which personal accounts of religious awakening became another opportunity to conceptualize experience as an authorizing principle. A broad spectrum of Protestant life-writing is explored, from Augustine's Confessions, first translated into English in 1620, through John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) and Richard Baxter's Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696). The forms in which these landmark texts were circulated and the interests that those circulations served are examined in such a way as to put canonical texts back into conversation with the outpouring of individual life writings that dates from the middle of the 17th century on. As the first new historicized account of the seventeenth-century Protestant conversion narrative in a generation, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World contributes to the reintegration of the scholarly fields of literature, religion, and politics. It revitalizes the study of proto-literary forms which, while devotional in nature, were deeply political in their consequences, contributing as they did to the emerging discourse of personal liberties.

The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume2. Early Modern explores life-writing in England between 1500 and 1700, and argues that this was a period which saw remarkable innovations in biography, autobiography, and diary-keeping that laid the foundations for our modern life-writing. The challenges wrought by the upheavals and the sixteenth-century English Reformation and seventeenth-century Civil Wars moulded British and early American life-writing in unique and lasting ways. While classical and medieval models continued to exercise considerable influence, new forms began to challenge them. The English Reformation banished the saints' lives that dominated the writings of medieval Catholicism, only to replace them with new lives of Protestant martyrs. Novel forms of self-accounting came into existence: from the daily moral self-accounting dictated by strands of Calvinism, to the daily financial self-accounting modelled on the new double-entry book-keeping. This volume shows how the most ostensibly private journals were circulated to build godly communities; how women found new modes of recording and understanding their disrupted lives; how men started to compartmentalize their lives for public and private consumption. The volume doesn't intend to present a strict chronological progression from the medieval to the modern, nor to suggest the triumphant rise of the fact-based historical biography. Instead, it portrays early modern England as a site of multiple, sometimes conflicting possibilities for life-writing, all of which have something to teach us about how the period understood both the concept of a 'life' and what it mean to 'write' a life.

This book explores the impact of the sixteenth-century Reformation on the plays of William Shakespeare. Taking three fundamental Protestant concerns of the era – (double) predestination, conversion, and free will – it demonstrates how Protestant theologians, in England and elsewhere, re-imagined these longstanding Christian concepts from a specifically Protestant perspective. Shakespeare utilizes these insights to generate his distinctive view of human nature and the relationship between humans and God. Through in-depth readings of the Shakespeare comedies ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, and ‘Twelfth Night’, the romance ‘A Winter’s Tale’, and the tragedies of ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Hamlet’, this book examines the results of almost a century of Protestant thought upon literary art.

Scholars have associated Calvinism with print and literary cultures, with republican, liberal, and participatory political cultures, with cultures of violence and vandalism, enlightened cultures, cultures of social discipline, secular cultures, and with the emergence of capitalism. Reflecting on these arguments, the essays in this volume recognize that Reformed Protestantism did not develop as a uniform tradition but varied across space and time. The authors demonstrate that multiple iterations of Calvinism developed and impacted upon differing European communities that were experiencing social and cultural transition. They show how these different forms of Calvinism were shaped by their adherents and opponents, and by the divergent political and social contexts in which they were articulated and performed. Recognizing that Reformed Protestantism developed in a variety of cultural settings, this volume analyzes the ways in which it related to the multi-confessional cultural environment that prevailed in Europe after the Reformation.

The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I traces the emergence of Anglophone Protestant Dissent in the post-Reformation era between the Act of Uniformity (1559) and the Act of Toleration (1689). It reassesses the relationship between establishment and Dissent, emphasising that Presbyterians and Congregationalists were serious contenders in the struggle for religious hegemony. Under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts, separatists were few in number, and Dissent was largely contained within the Church of England, as nonconformists sought to reform the national Church from within. During the English Revolution (1640-60), Puritan reformers seized control of the state but splintered into rival factions with competing programmes of ecclesiastical reform. Only after the Restoration, following the ejection of two thousand Puritan clergy from the Church, did most Puritans become Dissenters, often with great reluctance. Dissent was not the inevitable terminus of Puritanism, but the contingent and unintended consequence of the Puritan drive for further reformation. The story of Dissent is thus bound up with the contest for the established Church, not simply a heroic tale of persecuted minorities contending for religious toleration. Nevertheless, in the half century after 1640, religious pluralism became a fact of English life, as denominations formed and toleration was widely advocated. The volume explores how Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers began to forge distinct identities as the four major denominational traditions of English Dissent. It tracks the proliferation of Anglophone Protestant Dissent beyond England—in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Dutch Republic, New England, Pennsylvania, and the Caribbean. And it presents the latest research on the culture of Dissenting congregations, including their relations with the parish, their worship, preaching, gender relations, and lay experience.

This study examines women’s prophetic writings in seventeenth-century Britain as the literary outcome of a discourse of social transformation that integrates religious conscience, political participation, and gender identity. The following pages approach prophecy as a culture, a language, and a catalyst for collective change as the individual prophet conceptualized it. While the corpus of prophetic writing continues to grow as the result of archival research, this monograph complements our particular knowledge of women’s prophecy in the seventeenth century with a global assessment of what makes speech prophetic in the first place, and what are the differences and similarities between texts that fall into the prophetic mode. These disparities and commonalities stand out in the radical language of prophecy as well as in the way it creates an authorial centre. Examining how authorship is represented in several configurations of prophetic delivery, such as essays on prophecy, poetic prophecy, spiritual autobiography, and election narratives, the different chapters consider why prophecy peaked in the years of the civil wars and how it evolved towards the eighteenth century. The analyses extrapolate the peculiarities of each case study as being representative of a form of textually-based activism that enabled women to gain a deeper understanding of themselves as creators of independent meaning that empowered them as individuals, citizens, and believers.

This book is a survey of personal illness as described in various forms of early modern manuscript life-writing. How did people in the seventeenth century rationalise and record illness? Observing that medical explanations for illness were fewer than may be imagined, the author explores the social and religious frameworks by which illness was more commonly recorded and understood. The story that emerges is of illness written into personal manuscripts in prescriptive rather than original terms. This study uncovers the ways in which illness, so described, contributed to the self-patterning these texts were set up to perform.