‘Take unto ye words’: Elizabeth Isham’s ‘Booke of Rememberance’ and Puritan Cultural Forms

Abstract

In the opening paragraph of her autobiographical ‘Booke of Rememberance’ (1638–9), Elizabeth Isham (1608–54) echoed the words of Psalm 71 in a bold statement of vocation: ‘yet unto Olde age and gray head O God forsake me not but \untill/that I have decleared thine arme unto this generation and thy power to them that shall come’. 1 But if in these words she placed her literary effort alongside the evangelism of the psalmist, she was quick to clarify that her own anticipated audience was much more circumscribed. ‘not that I intend to have th[is] published’, she explains in the margin, ‘but to this end I have it in praise a than[k]fullnes to God. and for my owne benefit. which if it may doe my Brother or his children any pleasure I think to leave it them. whom I hope will charitable censure of me’. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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