Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:40:58.003Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Writing to redundancy: approaches to spiritual journals and early modern spirituality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Tom Webster
Tom Webster
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The ‘puritan diary’ has received attention from historians and literary critics with little exchange between the approaches. Placing the diary in the context of experimental Calvinist personal discipline reveals that the form emerged independently of the literature of practical divinity. Considering the practice as a ‘technology of the self’ draws attention to the meanings of writing in a protestant context and encourages us to consider the cultural resources available to early modern protestants. Close reading of these texts suggests a greater degree of complexity than is often admitted and allows for a tension between different views of the salvific process. This tension between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ forms is helpful in understanding the religiosity of early modern protestants.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , March 1996 , pp. 33 - 56
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 This paper has benefited from criticisms and suggestions made in the History Research seminars at the University of Wales, Lampeter and the University of East Anglia. In particular I would like to thank Janice Allan, Bob Eaglestone and Julian Thomas for comments at Lampeter and Tom Betteridge, Colin Davis and Vic Morgan at UEA. As the paper was being written I received a great deal of help from Mary Baker, Patrick Finney, Sue Pitt and the Inter-disciplinary group at Lampeter. The debt to the thinking and support of Janice Allan is too great to be acknowledged in footnotes.

2 MacFarlane, A. (ed. ), The diary of Ralph Josselin 1616–1683, Records of Social and Economic History n. s. III (Oxford, 1976), 335.Google Scholar

3 ‘And behold, six men came from the way of the higher gate, which lieth towards the north, and every man a slaughter weapon in his hand; and one man among them was clothed with linen, with a writer's inkhorn by his side: and they went in and stood by the brasen altar.’ (KJV)

4 Aylmer, G. E., ‘Collective mentalities in mid seventeenth century England. I. The puritan outlook’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., XXXVI (1986), 8Google Scholar; P. Collinson, ‘Towards a broader understanding of the early Dissenting tradition’, in idem, Godly people (London, 1984), p. 546.Google Scholar

5 Northrop, Frye, Anatomy of criticism (Princeton, N. J., 1957), pp. 307–8Google Scholar. I owe this reference to Janice Allan.

6 See, for instance, Spengemann, William C., The forms of autobiography: episodes in the history of a literary genre (London, 1980)Google Scholar; Weintraub, Karl J., The value of the individual: self and circumstance in autobiography (London, 1978)Google Scholar; James, Olney, Autobiography: essays, theoretical and critical (Princeton, N. J., 1980)Google Scholar; Hawkins, Anne Hunsaker, Archetypes of conversion: the autobiographies of Augustine, Bunyan and Merton (London, 1985).Google Scholar

7 By the poet Robert Southey, according to John, Pilling, Autobiography and imagination: studies in self-scrutiny (London, 1981), p. 1.Google Scholar

8 Fothergill, R. A., Private chronicles: a study of English diaries (London, 1974)Google Scholar, passim, esp. ch. 7.

9 John, Sturrock, The language of autobiography (Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar. Sturrock wholly neglects the Christian dimension and ignores the godly tradition.

10 For the seventeenth century see Dean, Abner, Autobiography in seventeenth-century England: theology and the self (The Hague, 1971)Google Scholar; Owen, Watkins, The puritan experience: studies in spiritual autobiography (London, 1972)Google Scholar; Shea, Daniel B., Spiritual autobiography in early America (Princeton, N. J., 1969)Google Scholar. Perhaps the most challenging work in this field, albeit for a slighdy later period, is Nussbaum, Felicity, The autobiographical subject: gender and ideology in eighteenth-century England (Baltimore, 1989)Google Scholar, esp. ch. 4 on early Methodist autobiographies.

11 Moira, Monteith (ed. ), Women's writing: a challenge to theory (Brighton, 1986)Google Scholar, esp. L. Anderson, ‘At the threshold of the self: women and autobiography’; Wilcox, H. and Stewart, L., ‘“Why hath this woman writ her own life?”: studying early female autobiography’, in Thompson, A. and Wilcox, H. (eds.), Teaching women: feminism and English studies (Manchester, 1989)Google Scholar; Jelinek, E. C. (ed. ), Women's autobiography: essays in criticism (London, 1980)Google Scholar. For an overview see the introduction to Graham, E., Hinds, H., Hobby, E. and Wilcox, H. (eds. ), Her own life: autobiographical writings by seventeenth-century Englishwomen (London, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Spalding, P. A., Self harvest: a study of diaries and the diarist (London, 1949), pp. 66–7Google Scholar; Watkins, , The puritan experience, p. 18.Google Scholar

13 For a sample of such works with various projects see Caldwell, P., The puritan conversion narrative: the beginnings of American expression (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar; Starr, G. A., Defoe and spiritual autobiography (Princeton, N. J., 1969)Google Scholar; Watkins, The puritan experienceGoogle Scholar. Caldwell does argue against the treatment of the genre as ‘a monolithic, predictable body of expression’ but only to enable her to bracket off the New England material in her pursuit of an astonishingly precocious American exceptionalism, p. 26 and passim. For a bald statement that the immigrants ‘somehow began to speak “New Englandly”… from the first moment the puritans alighted on the holy, hopeful land of America’, Caldwell, p. 41.

14 An expression adapted from Decker, Rudolf M., ‘Ego-documents in the Netherlands, 1500–1814’, Dutch Crossing. A Journal of Low Countries Studies, XXXIX (1989), 61–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The advantage of this term is its lack of familiarity; its disadvantage, as will emerge, is that it risks sneaking in the modern subject through the back door.

15 Lake, P., Moderate puritans and the Elizabethan church (Cambridge, 1982), p. 118CrossRefGoogle Scholar in the context of his exemplary analysis of the commonplace book of Abdias Ashton, pp. 116–68; on commonplace books cf. Todd, M., Christian humanism and the social order (Cambridge, 1987).Google Scholar

16 For examples, see Essex Record Office D/DMs C2; Sheffield University Hartlib MSS 29/2–4; John, Morrill, ‘William Dowsing, the bureaucratic puritan’, in Morrill, J., Slack, P. and Woolf, D. (eds. ), Public duty and private conscience in seventeenth-century England (Oxford, 1993), pp. 179–87.Google Scholar

17 Kendall, R. T., Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford, 1979), esp. pp. 1–13.Google Scholar

18 Knappen, M. M. (ed. ), Two Elizabethan puritan diaries (Chicago, 1933), pp. 69, 71Google Scholar; Richard, Rogers, Seven treatises (1603)Google Scholar. I have used the expanded edition of 1627.

19 The fragment, entitled ‘Sixty memorials for a godly life’ is appended to Cotton Mather's brief biography of Nathaniel Rogers, John's son: Cotton, Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (1704), III, 109–13Google Scholar. Numbers refer to Rogers’ own ordering. This section is no. 48.

20 Ibid. nos. 2, 3; cf. 7, 10.

21 Ibid. nos. 47, 2.

22 Thomas, Shepard, Certain select cases resolved in Works (Boston, Mass., 1853), I, 325.Google Scholar

23 T., M'Crie (ed. ), The life of Mr Robert Blair, minister of St Andrews… Wodrow Society (Edinburgh, 1848), p. 31.Google Scholar

24 For examples, Richard, Mayo, The life and death of Richard Staunton (1673), p. 33Google Scholar; James, Janeway, Invisibles, realities demonstrated in the holy life and triumphant death of Mr John Janeway (1673), pp. 88–9Google Scholar; Samuel, Clarke, A collection of the lives of ten eminent divines (1662), p. 21Google Scholar; Mather, , Magnalia, III, 137–8, 109–13Google Scholar; Clarke, , The lives of sundry eminent persons in this later age (1683), p. 90Google Scholar; Edmund, Calamy, The saints transfiguration (1655), p. 25Google Scholar; John, Fielding, ‘Opposition to the personal rule of Charles I: the diary of Robert Woodford 1637–41’, Historical Journal, XXXI (1988), 769–88Google Scholar; Ann, Hughes, ‘Thomas Dugard and his circle in the 1630s–a Parliamentary-Puritan connection?’Google Scholar, ibid, XXIX (1986), 771–93; Ford, Worthington Chauncy (ed.), Diary of Cotton Mather, 2 vols. (New York, 1911)Google Scholar; Michael, McGifFert (ed. ), God's plot: the paradoxes of puritan piety (Amherst, Mass., 1972)Google Scholar; Morgan, Edmund S. (ed.), The diary of Michael Wigglesworth 1653–1657: the conscience of a puritan (New York, 1965)Google Scholar; Thomas, M. Halsey (ed.), The diary of Samuel Sewall, 2 vols. (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; Diary and correspondence of John Worthington, Chetham Soc. XXXIII (1985)Google Scholar. For bibliographies see Ponsonby, A., English diaries (London, 1923)Google Scholar; idem, More English diaries (London, 1927)Google Scholar; Matthews, W., British diaries: an annotated bibliography of British diaries written between 1442 and 1942Google Scholar; Mendelson, S. H., ‘Stuart women's diaries and occasional memoirs’, in Prior, M. (ed.), Women in English society 1500–1800 (London, 1985), pp. 181–210.Google Scholar

25 Francis, Bacon, The advancement of learning (1605)Google Scholar, Book II sect. 12, cf. Essays, ‘Of travel’; Ben, Jonson, Volpone (1616)Google Scholar, Act IV, Sc. i, line 133.

26 Rogers, , Seven treatises, pp. 526–7Google Scholar. For other examples Paul, Seaver, Wallington's world: a puritan artisan in seventeenth-century London (London, 1985), p. 182Google Scholar; Watkins, , The puritan experience, p. 21Google Scholar; Thomas, Watson, Heaven taken by storm (1669), p. 58.Google Scholar

27 Seaver, , Wallington's world, p. 11.Google Scholar

28 Francis, Peak, Desiderata curiosa (1725–1730), Book XII, p. 25Google Scholar for the account of the original sermon, delivered at Little Leighs on 21 July, which inspired Arthur Wilson to begin his journal. For discussions of Beadle's, Journal or diary of a thankful Christian (1656)Google Scholar see, for instance, Haller, W., The rise of puritanism (Columbia, 1938), p. 96Google Scholar; Keeble, N. H., Richard Baxter, puritan man of letters (Oxford, 1982), pp. 140–3Google Scholar; Watkins, p. 23; Starr, G. A., Defoe and spiritual autobiography (New York, 1971), pp. 7–8Google Scholar; Fothergill, , Private chronicles, p. 17.Google Scholar

29 Stephen, Marshall, The sacred record (1645), pp. 21–7.Google Scholar

30 Richard, Baxter, The mischiefs of self-ignorance, and the benefits of self-acquaintance (1662), p. 304.Google Scholar

31 Isaac, Ambrose, Prima, media and ultima (1674 edn), pp. 117–19Google Scholar. Ambrose started his own diary in 1641.

32 D[octor] W[illiams's] L[ibrary] Baxter MS 59. 2. 274.

33 Shepard, , Certain select cases in Works, I, 304Google Scholar; Baxter, , Practical works (1838 rep.), XVII, 601–2Google Scholar; Cotton, Mather, Parentator. Memoirs of remarkables in the life and death of the ever memorable Dr Increase Mather (1724), pp. 36–48.Google Scholar

34 Seaver, , Wallington's world, p. 8.Google Scholar

35 Mather, , Magnalia, III, 108Google Scholar – he kept his diary ‘with so much Reservation, that it is not known, that ever any one but himself did read one word of it’; Linda, Pollock, By faith and physic: the life of a Tudor gentlewoman, Lady Grace Mildmay (London, 1993) pp. 53, 71Google Scholar; Waters, H. F., Genealogical gleanings in England (Boston, 1901), 1, 211–12Google Scholar. It would be interesting to know how Rogers’ diary came to be among the papers of Richard, Baxter. God's plot, p. 33.Google Scholar

36 Thomas, Gataker, The decease of Lazarus (1640), p. 47Google Scholar; Knappen, , Two Elizabethan puritan diaries, p. 84Google Scholar; Vavasor, Powell, Spiritual experiences of sundry beleevers (1652), p. 12.Google Scholar

37 C., Hambrick-Stowe, The practice of piety: puritan devotional disciplines in seventeenth-century New England (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1982), pp. 188–90Google Scholar. John Hull's diary combines public and private journals at opposite ends of the same volume: ‘The diaries of John Hull, Mintmaster and Treasurer of the Colony of Massachusetts’, Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society, III (1857), 115–16.Google Scholar

38 An expression adapted from Foucault, M., ‘On the genealogy of ethics: an overview of work in progress’, in Rabinow, P. (ed.), The Foucault reader (Harmondsworth, 1984), pp. 340, 348, 358Google Scholar; Foucault, M., The use of pleasure: the history of sexuality, II, trans. Robert, Hurley (Harmondsworth, 1987), 27Google Scholar; cf. Martin, L. H., Gutman, H. and Paden, W. E. (eds. ), Technologies of the self (Amherst, Mass., 1988), esp. pp. 16–50Google Scholar. In this volume Paden, W. E., ‘Theatres of humiliation and suspicion: desert saints and New England puritans’, pp. 64–79Google Scholar is perhaps a little disappointing.

39 On which see Hambrick-Stowe, Practice of piety and Collinson, P., The religion of protestants: the church in English society 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 242–81Google Scholar; Tom, Webster, ‘The godly of Goshen scattered: a puritan clerical conference in Essex in the 1620s and its diaspora’, (Cambridge Ph. D., 1993)Google Scholar, chs. 1–9.

40 For this view see especially Francis, Barker, The tremulous private body: essays on subjection (London, 1984)Google Scholar; Stephen, Greenblatt, Renaissance self-fashioning from More to Shakespeare (London, 1980)Google Scholar, idem, Shakespearean negotiations: the circulation of social energy in renaissance England (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar; this view seems implicitly accepted in Margo, Todd, ‘Puritan self-fashioning: the diary of Samuel Ward’, Journal of British Studies, XXXI (1992), 236–64Google Scholar; for a trenchant and devastating critique, David, Aers, ‘A whisper in the ear of early modernists; or, reflections on literary critics writing the “History of the Subject”’Google Scholar, in idem (ed.), Culture and history 1350–1600: essays on English communities, identities and writing (London, 1992) pp. 177–202Google Scholar. There are some salutary remarks in John, Bossy, ‘Prayers’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th ser., I (1991), 137–50.Google Scholar

41 Aers, , ‘A whisper in the ear’, p. 196Google Scholar but cf. Greenblatt, Shakespearean negotiations, ch. 4, ‘Shakespeare and the exorcists’ and Janet, Halley, ‘Heresy, orthodoxy and the politics of religious discourse: the case of the English Family of Love’, in Greenblatt, (ed.), Representing the English renaissance (London, 1988), pp. 303–26.Google Scholar

42 See Jacques, Derrida, Of grammatology, trans. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (London, 1977), pp. 27–73.Google Scholar

43 Richard, Rogers, Seven treatises, p. 420Google Scholar. On the Kabbalah see, for instance, Blau, J. L., The Christian interpretation of the cabala in the renaissance (New York, 1944)Google Scholar and Yates, F. A., Giordano Bruno and the hermetic tradition (London, 1964), esp. pp. 235–75Google Scholar; on the Adamic language see Katz, D. S., ‘The language of Adam in seventeenth-century England’, in H., Lloyd-Jones, Pearl, V. and Worden, B. (eds. ), History and imagination: essays in honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper (London, 1981), pp. 132–45.Google Scholar

44 Morgan, Edmund S. (ed.), The diary of Michael Wigglesworth 1653–1657: the conscience of a puritan (New York, 1965), p. 49.Google Scholar

45 John, Rogers, The doctrine of faith, 2nd edn (1632)Google Scholar, To the Reader.

46 Daniel, Rogers, Naaman the Syrian (1642)Google Scholar, To the Reader.

47 See, for instance, Clifford, Geertz, ‘“From the native's point of view”: on the nature of anthropological understanding’Google Scholar, in idem, Local knowledge (London, 1993), pp. 55–70Google Scholar; Rosaldo, M., ‘Towards an anthropology of self and feeling’, in Shweder, R. and Levine, R. (eds.), Culture theory: essays on mind, self and emotion (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 137–57Google Scholar. A thoughtful account of issues of self and identity can be found in Mark, Freeman, Rewriting the self: history, memory, narrative (London, 1993).Google Scholar

48 Stephen, Marshall, Works (1661)Google Scholar, Sermon 4. Burroughes, Compare Jeremiah, The rare jewel of Christian contentment (1648)Google Scholar, esp. ch. 5, sect. I and Ambrose, , Prima, media and ultima, pp. 119–54.Google Scholar

49 Marshall, pp. 92–5.

50 Ibid. pp. 97, 116.

51 Sarah, Wright, A wonderful and profitable letter written by Mrs Sarah Wright (1656), p. 5.Google Scholar

52 Thomas, Taylor, The principles of Christian practice in Works (1653), p. 5.Google Scholar

53 Marshall, pp. 96, 122–3.

54 For further examples and a good account of the tensions involved, see Sacvan, Bercovitch, The puritan origins of the American self (London, 1975), ch. 1, esp. pp. 15–24.Google Scholar

55 See, for instance, Bush, S., The writings of Thomas Hooker: spiritual adventures in two worlds (London, 1980), pp. 146–230Google Scholar; Cohen, C. L., God's caress: the psychology of puritan religious experience (Oxford, 1986), pp. 75–110Google Scholar; Webster, , ‘Godly of Goshen’, pp. 103–21.Google Scholar

56 Thomas, Shepard, The sound beleever in Works, I, 140Google Scholar; cf. Arthur, Dent, The plain mans pathway to heaven (1601), p. 32Google Scholar; Richard, Sibbes, The bruised reed and the smoaking flax (1630)Google Scholar; Thomas, Goodwin, A childe of light walking in darkness (1636), p. 74Google Scholar for a more moderate line.

57 Matthew, Sylvester (ed.), Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696), p. 69.Google Scholar

58 Jerome, Brunner, Acts of meaning (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), p. 95Google Scholar; cf. Starbin, Theodore G. (ed.), Narrative psychology: the storied nature of human conduct (New York, 1986)Google Scholar, esp. Stephen, Crites, ‘Story time: recollecting the past and projecting the future’Google Scholar; Freeman, , Rewriting the self pp. 1–18.Google Scholar

59 Michael, Carrithers, Why humans have cultures: explaining anthropology and social diversity (Oxford, 1992), pp. 76–91Google Scholar; Gergen, M. and Gergen, K., ‘The social construction of narrative accounts’, in Gergen, K. and Gergen, M. (eds.), Historical social psychology (Hillsdale, N. J., 1984).Google Scholar

60 For a sense of this variety of interest, see the essays collected in Mitchell, W. J. T. (ed.), On narrative (Chicago, 1981).Google Scholar

61 Paul, Ricoeur, ‘Life in quest of narrative’, in David, Wood (ed.), On Paul Ricoeur: narrative and interpretation (London, 1991), pp. 30–1.Google Scholar

62 Paul, Ricoeur, Time and narrative, trans. McLaughlin, K. and Pellauer, D. (Chicago, 1984), 1, 5–30.Google Scholar

63 Hayden, White, The content of the form: narrative discourse and historical representation (Baltimore, MD, 1987).Google Scholar

64 One major resource that has been neglected here is Foxe's Acts and monuments. How far Foxe provided models for life stories, written and experienced, and what the consequences were, is clearly important, albeit too large a question for this discussion. It would be worth considering Foxe as a source for languages of martyrdom among the godly in the 1630s and after the Restoration. For the cultural resources of martyrdom in another context, see Turner, V., Fields, dramas and metaphors: symbolic action in human society (London, 1974), pp. 60–97Google Scholar. I am grateful to Tom Bettridge for discussions of Foxe.

65 Todd, , ‘Puritan self-fashioning’, p. 247Google Scholar; cf. Robert, Bolton, A threefold treatise (1634), pp. 17–18Google Scholar; Perry, Miller, The New England mind (London, 1939)Google Scholar, ch. 1, ‘The Augustinian strain of piety’.

66 Quoted in Ambrose, , Prima, media and ultima, p. 117.Google Scholar

67 Foucault, , ‘On the genealogy of ethics’, pp. 364–9.Google Scholar

68 Rogers, , Seven treatises, p. 527Google Scholar; cf. Todd, M., Christian humanism and the social order, p. 31.Google Scholar

69 Ambrose, p. 118.

70 On which, see Stachniewski, John, The persecutory imagination: English puritanism and the literature of religious despair (Oxford, 1990), p. 74–5.Google Scholar

71 Thomas, Watson, Heaven taken by storm (1669), p. 58.Google Scholar

72 Seaver, , Wallington's world, p. 182.Google Scholar

73 Daniel, Defoe, The life and adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Harmondsworth, 1965), pp. 83–4Google Scholar; cf. Starr, G. A., Defoe and spiritual autobiography, pp. 74–125Google Scholar; Morgan, Edmund S. (ed.), Diary of Michael Wigglesworth, pp. 91–2Google Scholar; Mather, , Magnalia, III, 137–8Google Scholar; cf. Max, Weber, The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (London, 1947), pp. 22, 67, 124, 238.Google Scholar

74 William, Perkins, Works (1605), p. 937.Google Scholar

75 Richard, Kilby, The burthen of a loaden conscience (1608), p. 2.Google Scholar

76 Thomas, Shepard, The saints jewel in Works, 1, 292Google Scholar; cf. George, Swinnock, Heaven and hell epitomized (1663), p. 131.Google Scholar

77 John, Sheffield, A good conscience the strongest hold (1650), p. 234Google Scholar; John, Bunyan, Of the resurrection of the dead in The works of John Bunyan, ed. George, Othor (Glasgow, 1854), II, 120.Google Scholar

78 Thomas, Goodwin, Childe of light (1636), p. 116.Google Scholar

79 Knappen (ed.), pp. 69, 72, 54, 55.

80 Todd, , ‘Puritan self-fashioning’, p. 252n.Google Scholar

81 God's plot, p. 42.

82 John, Bunyan, Grace abounding to the chief of sinners (Harmondsworth, 1987)Google Scholar, sect. 92; cf. 263. I am grateful to Hazel Storr for discussions on Bunyan.

83 Beadle, , Journal or diary of a thankful Christian, pp. 48, 50.Google Scholar

84 Ibid. pp. 179–80; cf. p. 102.

85 Q[ueen's] U[niversity] B[elfast] Percy MS 7 e.g. fos. 45, 205, 208; Hannah, Allen, Satan his methods and malice baffled (1683), p. 8.Google Scholar

86 Morgan, (ed.), The diary of Michael Wigglesworth, e.g. p. 35.Google Scholar

87 T., M'Crie (ed.), The life of Mr Robert Blair, pp. 32–3Google Scholar. The practice of Nehemiah Wallington and John Parker was similar; Seaver, , Wallington's world, p. 196Google Scholar; Thomas, Gataker, The decease of Lazarus (1640), p. 39.Google Scholar

88 Ambrose, , Prima, media and ultima, p. 118.Google Scholar

89 DWL Baxter MSS 61. 13. 17 no foliation. The tidied-up version edited by Knappen is somewhat misleading in this respect.

90 Augustine, Confessions, Book II, esp. sects 17 and 22; Christopher, Kirwan, Augustine (London, 1989), pp. 167–86.Google Scholar

91 Yates, Frances A., The art of memory (Chicago, 1969)Google Scholar; Guite, A. M., ‘The art of memory and the art of salvation: the centrality of memory in the sermons of John Donne and Lancelot Andrewes’, The Seventeenth Century, IV (1989), 1–17.Google Scholar

92 Bakhtin, M., The dialogic imagination (Austin, Texas, 1981), esp. xix–xx, pp. 259–422Google Scholar; Roman, Jakobson, ‘Language in operation’, in Selected writings, Vol. III. Poetry of grammar and grammar of poetry, ed. Stephen, Rudy (Paris, 1981), II.Google Scholar

93 McGiffert, (ed.), God's plot, p. 206.Google Scholar

94 Ibid. p. 31.

95 Thomas, Shepard, The parable of the ten virgins opened and applied in Works, II, 216.Google Scholar

96 God's plot, p. 161.

97 Thomas, Hooker, The application of redemption… the ninth and tenth books (1659), p. 210.Google Scholar

98 God's plot, pp. 104, 198, 98.

99 Morgan, (ed.), Diary of Michael Wigglesworth, e.g. p. 29Google Scholar; QUB Percy MS 7 e.g. fos. 35, 20.

100 Knappen (ed.), p. 70.

101 On faculty-humour psychology see Cohen, , God's caress, pp. 26–46Google Scholar, and Fiering, N., ‘Will and intellect in the New England mind’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XXIX (1972), 515–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

102 Defined by Kendall, , Calvin and English Calvinism, pp. 8–9, 56–7Google Scholar. Kendall also refers to the practical syllogism as ‘assurance by the reflex act’.

103 Shepard, , Parable of the ten virgins in Works, II, 216.Google Scholar

104 Ambrose, , Prima, media and ultima, pp. 163–8Google Scholar; cf. James, Reid, Memoirs of the Westminster divines (Paisley, 1811), II, 18–19 (Robert Harris)Google Scholar.

105 Kendall, p. 9.

106 God's plot, p. 92.

107 Ibid. pp. 83–4.

108 Ibid. p. 25.

109 Jeremiah, Burroughes, Four books on the eleventh of Matthew (1659), p. 376.Google Scholar

110 Thomas, Brooks, Heaven on earth (1654), p. 316Google Scholar; cf. Thomas, Hooker, The application of redemption (1659), pp. 377–8Google Scholar; Shepard, , Parable of the ten virgins in Works, II, 632.Google Scholar

111 See. Cameron, E., The European Reformation (Oxford, 1991), pp. 79–83Google Scholar. Hambrick-Stowe, Practice of piety is especially concerned to stress continuity between pre-Reformation and puritan forms of piety.

112 E.g. God's plot, pp. 169, 225, 234–35, 186 etc. Holifield reinstates sacramental aspects of piety in New England in Holifield, E. B., The covenant sealed: the development of puritan sacramental theology in old and New England 1570–1690 (London, 1974), passim.Google Scholar

113 E. g. God's plot, pp. 183, 173, 127, 190 etc. Gildrie, R. P., ‘The ceremonial puritan: days of humiliation and thanksgiving’, New England Historical and Genealogical Register, CXXXVI (1982), 3–16.Google Scholar

114 QUB Percy MS 7 fos. 335, cf. 24, 78, 173, 239, 341–2, 361–2. We need to know more about sacramental piety among the godly.

115 John, Rogers, The doctrine of faith (1636), p. 195.Google Scholar

116 Man, Paul de, ‘Autobiography as de-facement’, Modem Language Notes, XCIV (1979), 920.Google Scholar

117 Joan, Webber, The eloquent ‘I’: self and style in seventeenth-century prose (London, 1968).Google Scholar

118 Middlekauf, R., ‘Piety and intellect in puritanism’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XXII (1965), 469.Google Scholar

119 Leverenz, D., The language of puritan feeling: an exploration in literature, psychology and social history (New Brunswick, N. J., 1980), ix, pp. 185–94, quoted at p. 186Google Scholar; cf. Baird, Tipson, ‘The routinized piety of Thomas Shepard's diary’, Early American Literature, XII (1978), 64–80.Google Scholar

120 God's plot, p. 149.

121 God's plot, p. 172; Miller, , The New England mind, pp. 380, 389.Google Scholar

122 God's plot, p. 185.

123 Caldwell, , The puritan conversion narrative, p. 34.Google Scholar

124 Richard, Rogers, Seven treatises, pp. 374, 313Google Scholar; for examples of this tension, see Davis, J. C., ‘Against formality: one aspect of the English Revolution’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., III (1993), 265–88, esp. p. 278.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

125 Collinson, P., The puritan character: polemics and polarities in early seventeenth-century English culture (Los Angeles, 1989), p. 8.Google Scholar

126 Thomas, Brooks, ‘Epistle to the saints’, Heaven on earth, n. p.Google Scholar