Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen's Spiritual Diaries: Self-Examination, Covenanting, and Account Keeping

Abstract

The rise of autobiographical writing in the early modern period and its proliferation in the seventeenth century has been related to various sociopolitical, cultural, and theological factors. Drawing upon women's spiritual diaries, this paper explores the links between diary writing and the Protestant duty of self-examination as prescribed by a large number of devotional manuals. The adoption of the dictates and male discourse of these guidebooks by the women diarists, however, was frequently rather problematic and led to unresolvable contradictions. By following the dictates of the manuals, the passive and meek woman, which the dominant seventeenth-century ideology was striving to mould, was transformed into an authoritative confessor as well as a shrewd account keeper and negotiator.

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