Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World

Abstract

Autobiographical narrative is seldom viewed as a catalyst for the social and political upheavals of mid‐seventeenth#x2010;century England and its colonies. This book 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 in the book trade and the agendas 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 date from the middle of the seventeenth century on. This book 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.

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