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Reading, the Godly, and Self-Writing in England, circa 1580–1720

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Andrew Cambers
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 4 , October 2007 , pp. 796 - 825
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2007

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References

1 Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Parsons, Talcott (1930; repr., London, 1992), 104, 105, 124Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., esp. 48–52, 64, 71, 82, 124, 151, 158, 180; Franklin, Benjamin, Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. Seavey, Ormond (Oxford, 1993)Google Scholar. The recent disbinding of the manuscript, illustrated in the exhibition The Art of Virtue: Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, shown at the Huntington Library, 17 December 2005–26 March 2006, most clearly demonstrated the composite nature of this work.

3 Stachniewski, John, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar; Mascuch, Michael, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Cambridge, 1997)Google Scholar. Both authors provide subtler associations than Weber, and Mascuch's arguments are heavily qualified, but they nevertheless adhere to the paradigm. For an older literature, see also Leverenz, David, The Language of Puritan Feeling (New Brunswick, NJ, 1980)Google Scholar; Delany, Paul, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1969)Google Scholar; Ebner, Dean, Autobiography in Seventeenth-Century England (The Hague, 1971)Google Scholar; Watkins, Owen C., The Puritan Experience: Studies in Spiritual Autobiography (New York, 1972)Google Scholar.

4 Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination, 78, 135.

5 Haller, William, The Rise of Puritanism (New York, 1938), 38, 98Google Scholar.

6 Collinson, Patrick, “‘A Magazine of Religious Patterns’: An Erasmian Topic Transposed in English Protestantism,” in his Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983), 499–525Google Scholar; Todd, Margo, “Puritan Self-Fashioning: The Diary of Samuel Ward,” Journal of British Studies 31, no. 3 (July 1992): 236–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Webster, Tom, “Writing to Redundancy: Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early Modern Spirituality,” Historical Journal 39, no. 1 (March 1996): 33–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for a related discussion of commonplace books, see Lake, Peter, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982), 116–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Greenblatt, Stephen, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (London, 1980)Google Scholar.

7 The notable exception is Clarke, Elizabeth, “Elizabeth Jekyll's Spiritual Diary: Private Manuscript or Political Document?” in English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700, vol. 9, Writings by Early Modern Women, ed. Beal, Peter and Ezell, Margaret J. M. (London, 2000), 218–37Google Scholar.

8 For some of these models, see Webster, “Writing to Redundancy,” 44–47.

9 For self-examination as preparation for confession in the context of the Jesuit mission, see Bossy, John, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975), 268–69Google Scholar.

10 Rogers, Richard, Seven Treatises, Containing such Direction as is Gathered out of the Holie Scriptures, Leading and Guiding to True Happines, both in this Life, and in the Life to Come (London, 1603)Google Scholar; Brinsley, John, The True Watch, and Rule of Life; or, A Direction for the Examination of our Spirituall Estate, and for the Guiding of the Whole Course of our Life (London, 1606)Google Scholar; Scudder, Henry, The Christians Daily Walke in Holy Securitie and Peace (London, 1627)Google Scholar. For other examples, see Green, Ian, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000), 305–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Beadle, John, The Journal or Diary of a Thankful Christian. Presented in Some Meditations upon Numb. 33. 2. (London, 1656)Google Scholar, started out as a sermon; Wallington recorded hearing Hugh Peter's sermon in his diary; Nehemiah Wallington, “The Growth of a Christian,” British Library (hereafter BL) Add MS 40883, fol. 98v.

12 For later calls to keep diaries, see the examples noted by Webster, “Writing to Redundancy,” 39.

13 Brinsley, The True Watch, 22.

14 For the best survey of the shifting approaches to Puritanism, see Lake, Peter, The Boxmaker's Revenge: “Orthodoxy,” “Heterodoxy” and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Manchester, 2001), 11–16Google Scholar.

15 The approach is encapsulated in Hill, Christopher, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London, 1964)Google Scholar.

16 Collinson, Patrick, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967)Google Scholar, and The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar; Tyacke, Nicholas, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–1640 (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar; Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church.

17 For Puritanism as a destabilizing force, see Bernard, George, “The Church of England, c. 1529–c. 1642,” History 75, no. 244 (June 1990): 183–206CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sharpe, Kevin, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, CT, 1993)Google Scholar. For positions relating to a Calvinist consensus, see n. 16 above.

18 See Fincham, Kenneth, Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James I (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar; Lake, Peter, “Defining Puritanism—Again?” in Puritanism: Trans-Atlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith, ed. Bremer, Francis (Boston, 1993), 3–29Google Scholar, and “Moving the Goal Posts? Modified Subscription and the Construction of Conformity in the Early Stuart Church,” in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660, ed. Lake, Peter and Questier, Michael (Woodbridge, 2000), 179–205Google Scholar; Webster, Tom, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement, c. 1620–1643 (Cambridge, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Tyacke, Nicholas, The Fortunes of English Puritanism, 1603–1640 (London, 1990)Google Scholar; Collinson, Patrick, “Elizabethan and Jacobean Puritanism as Forms of Popular Religious Culture,” in The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700, ed. Durston, Christopher and Eales, Jacqueline (Basingstoke, 1996), 32–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lake, Peter and Como, David, “‘Orthodoxy’ and Its Discontents: Dispute Settlement and the Production of ‘Consensus’ in the London (Puritan) ‘Underground,’” Journal of British Studies 39, no. 1 (January 2000): 34–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Como, David and Lake, Peter, “Puritans, Antinomians, and Laudians in Caroline London: The Strange Case of Peter Shaw and Its Contexts,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 50, no. 4 (October 1999): 684–715CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Atherton, Ian and Como, David, “The Burning of Edward Wightman: Puritanism, Prelacy and the Politics of Heresy in Early Modern England,” English Historical Review 120, no. 489 (December 2005): 1215–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lake, The Boxmaker's Revenge; Lake, Peter, with Michael Questier, The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, CT, 2002)Google Scholar; Como, David, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford, CA, 2004)Google Scholar.

20 For the historiography of reading and potential intersections with the historiography of the Puritan family, see Andrew Cambers, “Print, Manuscript, and Godly Cultures in the North of England, c. 1600–1650” (DPhil thesis, University of York, 2003), intro. and chap. 1. For the importance of the circulation of manuscripts in regulating internal disputes among the godly, see Lake and Como, “‘Orthodoxy’ and Its Discontents,” 34–70.

21 Sheila Ottway, “They Only Lived Twice: Public and Private Selfhood in the Autobiographies of Anne, Lady Halkett and Colonel Joseph Bampfield,” and Ramona Wray, “[Re]Constructing the Past: The Diametric Lives of Mary Rich,” both in Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts, ed. Dragstra, Henk, Ottway, Sheila, and Wilcox, Helen (Basingstoke, 2000), 136–47 and 148–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar, respectively; Wray, Ramona, “Recovering the Reading of Renaissance Englishwomen: Deployments of Autobiography,” Critical Survey 12, no. 2 (2000): 33–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clarke, “Elizabeth Jekyll's Spiritual Diary.” Other examples include Ezell, Margaret J. M., “The Posthumous Publication of Women's Manuscripts and the History of Authorship,” in Women's Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800, ed. Justice, George L. and Tinker, Nathan (Cambridge, 2002), 121–36Google Scholar.

22 See esp. Ottway, Sheila, “Autobiography,” in A Companion to Early Modern Women's Writing, ed. Pacheco, Anita (Oxford, 2002), 231–47Google Scholar.

23 Since the mid-1990s, most scholars, including Patrick Collinson and Peter Lake, have used the terms “Puritan” and “godly” in this way and with much more freedom than had previously been the case. This freedom is itself a product of treating Puritanism as religious culture. For recent examples, see Bremer, Francis J., John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father (Oxford, 2003), xvi–xviiiGoogle Scholar, and Lake, Antichrist's Lewd Hat.

24 For some of the ways in which the works of early Stuart Puritans influenced later Stuart religious identities and for the shared styles of evangelical piety across the seventeenth century, see Cambers, Andrew and Wolfe, Michelle, “Reading, Family Religion, and Evangelical Identity in Late Stuart England,” Historical Journal 47, no. 4 (December 2004): 875–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 For a sophisticated summary, see Ottway, “Autobiography.”

26 See Richard Parkinson, ed., The Autobiography of Henry Newcome (hereafter Newcome, Autobiography), Chetham Society, o.s., 26–27 (1852); Thomas Heywood, ed., The Diary of the Rev Henry Newcome, from September 30, 1661, to September 29, 1663, Chetham Society, o.s., 18 (1849) (hereafter Newcome, Diary); Chorlton, John, The Glorious Reward of Faithful Ministers Declared and Improved. In a Sermon upon the Occasion of the Funeral of that Excellent Minister of Jesus Christ Henry Newcome, A. M. Late Pastor of a Congregation at Manchester in Lancashire (London, 1696)Google Scholar.

27 “Diary of Edmund Harrold,” MS A.2.137, Chetham's Library, Manchester (hereafter CL); Oliver Heywood's autobiography is BL Add MS 45964 and is printed in Turner, Jospeh Horsfall, ed., The Rev. Oliver Heywood, B.A. 1630–1702: His Autobiography, Diaries, Anecdote and Event Books, 4 vols. (Brighouse, 1882–85), 1:133–222 (hereafter Heywood, Diaries)Google Scholar. For Heywood's diary of 1666–73, which is autobiographical in style, see 1:223–303.

28 Jackson, Charles, ed., The Autobiography of Mrs Alice Thornton (hereafter Thornton, Autobiography), Surtees Society, 62 (1875)Google Scholar; “Diary of Edmund Harrold,” MS A.2.137, CL; Macfarlane, Alan, ed., The Diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616–1683 (London, 1976), 161Google Scholar (hereafter Macfarlane, Diary); “Diary of Anne Dawson,” BL Add MS 71626; a classic example is Henry, Matthew, An Account of the Life and Death of Mr Philip Henry (London, 1712)Google Scholar, which Matthew Henry wrote with the aid of his father's diaries.

29 See Macfarlane, Diary, xvii.

30 For the incident, see “Autobiography, or Abstract of Diary, of Henry Newcome,” MS A.3.123, CL, lxxvi (contemporary pagination).

31 Todd, “Puritan Self-Fashioning.”

32 Thornton, Autobiography; for a recent discussion of Thornton's manuscripts, see Anselment, Raymond A., “Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Sources of Alice Thornton's Life,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 45, no. 1 (February 2005): 135–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Webster, Tom and Shipps, Kenneth, eds., The Diary of Samuel Rogers, 1634–1638 (Woodbridge, 2004), 1 (hereafter Webster, Diary)Google Scholar.

34 Macfarlane, Diary, 1–13; Webster, Diary, 1–4; Richard Parkinson, ed., The Life of Adam Martindale (hereafter Parkinson, Martindale), Chetham Society, o.s., 4 (1855), 1 ff.; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter ODNB), s.v. “Evelyn, John.”

35 Examples of this include Henry Newcome, Grace Mildmay, and the author of “The Secret Travell,” MS A.7.64, CL; for Mildmay, see Warnicke, Retha M., “Lady Mildmay's Journal: A Study in Autobiography and Meditation in Reformation England,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 20, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 55Google Scholar.

36 “The Secret Travell,” MS A.7.64, fol. 1r, CL.

37 Nehemiah Wallington, “Letters on Religious Topics,” Sloane MS 922, fols. 2r, 2v–5v, BL; “A Memoriall of Gods Judgments upon Sabbath Breakers, Drunkerds and Other Vile Livers,” Sloane MS 1457, fol. 3r, BL; and “A Record of the Mercies of God: or, A Thankefull Remembrance,” MS 204, Guildhall Library, London (hereafter GL), unpaginated leaves before text.

38 After-Dissenters, or after-Nonconformists, were conforming clergy who resigned or were ejected in the twenty-six-year period following the mass ejections on St. Bartholomew's Day 1662.

39 “A Narrative; or, An Historicall Account of the Most Materiall Passages in the Life of John Rastrick,” MS HM 6131, fol. 1v, Henry E. Huntington Library (hereafter HEHL). References to the manuscript are by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. See also The Life of John Rastrick, 1650–1727, ed. Andrew Cambers (Cambridge, forthcoming). Other autobiographers, such as Alice Thornton, also described themselves in the third person; see Thornton, Autobiography, 75.

40 Williams, J. B., ed., Memoirs of the Life and Character of Mrs Sarah Savage (London, 1819), 236Google Scholar. Clarke's autobiography was appended to his collections of lives after his death. See Clarke, Samuel, Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons in this Later Age (London, 1683)Google Scholar.

41 “A Narrative; or, An Historical Account of the Most Materiall Passages in the Life of John Rastrick,” MS HM 6131, fol. 23r, HEHL.

42 Macfarlane, Diary, 360–61.

43 “A Narrative; or, An Historical Account of the Most Materiall Passages in the Life of John Rastrick,” MS HM 6131, fols. 27v–28v, HEHL.

44 Heywood, Diaries, 1:300–303; 3:214–85 for his covenant book.

45 Thornton, Autobiography, 215.

46 Knappen, Marshall Mason, ed., Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries by Richard Rogers and Samuel Ward (Chicago, 1933), 58, 54Google Scholar; for the slight differences between the printed and manuscript versions of Rogers's diary (Baxter MSS 61.13, Dr Williams's Library, London), see Webster, “Writing to Redundancy,” 48.

47 Wallington, “A Record of the Mercies of God,” MS 204, GL, 117, 45 (contemporary pagination).

48 Wallington, “The Growth of a Christian,” BL Add MS 40883, fols. 88r, 73r.

49 Webster, Diary, 18, 6.

50 Macfarlane, Diary, 530.

51 Webster, Diary, 13, 15, and 123–43.

52 Newcome, Autobiography, 135. The incident took place before his extant diary begins.

53 See ODNB, s.v. “Eyre, Adam.”

54 Thornton, Autobiography, 135, 133.

55 Heywood, Diaries, 1:202, 362.

56 Wallington, “The Growth of a Christian,” BL Add MS 40883, fols. 8v, 25v, and “A Record of the Mercies of God: or, A Thankefull Rememberance,” MS 204, GL, 44a r.

57 Macfarlane, Diary, 112, 156.

58 As such, it echoes recent work on the uses of more administrative documents such as parish accounts. See, e.g., Duffy, Eamon, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven, CT, 2001)Google Scholar.

59 Wallington, “Record of the Mercies of God,” MS 204, GL; “A Narrative; or, An Historicall Account of the Most Materiall Passages in the Life of John Rastrick,” MS HM 6131, HEHL. Wallington was a prolific titler of his books. For a list, see Seaver, Paul S., Wallington's World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (Stanford, CA, 1985), 199–202Google Scholar.

60 Macfarlane, Diary, 1; Hopkins, John, “The Prodigal's Teares; or, The Poor Sinner,” BL Add MS 18774, fol. 1r; Yorkshire Diaries and Autobiographies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Jackson, C., Surtees Society, vol. 65 (Durham, 1877), 1Google Scholar.

61 “The Autobiography of Adam Martindale,” BL Add MS 4239.

62 “The Autobiography of John Gerard,” BL Add MS 37271, printed in Morris, John, Life of Father Gerard, 3rd ed. (London, 1881)Google Scholar. The British Library copy is clearly the work of a group of transcribers and suggestive of an attempt at significant manuscript circulation.

63 Roger North, “Notes of Me,” BL Add MS 32506, fols. 2r–v.

64 Nehemiah Wallington, “A Record of the Mercies of God: or, A Thankefull Rememberance,” MS 204, GL, unpaginated papers before start; for indexes, see “Letters on Religion Topics,” Sloane MS 922, fols. 200r–205r, BL; “A Memoriall of Gods Judgments upon Sabbath Breakers, Drunkerds and Other Vile Livers,” Sloane MS 1457, fols. 105r–v, BL.

65 Thornton, Autobiography, 1.

66 Wallington, “A Record of the Mercies of God,” MS 204, GL, 505–10; “Growth of a Christian,” BL Add MS 40883, fols. 189r.

67 Webster, Diary, 175.

68 Wallington, “Growth of a Christian,” BL Add MS 40883.

69 “The Autobiography of Adam Martindale,” BL Add MS 4239.

70 For uses of margins, paragraphs, pagination, and spacing, see Wallington, “A Memoriall of Gods Judgments upon Sabbath Breakers, Drunkerds and Other Vile Livers,” Sloane MS 1457, BL, and “Growth of a Christian,” BL Add 40883; “Autobiography of Oliver Heywood,” BL Add MS 45964; Thornton, Autobiography, 135; Webster, Diary.

71 Sherman, William H., “Toward a History of the Manicule,” in Owners, Annotators, and the Signs of Reading, ed. Myers, Robin, Harris, Michael, and Mandelbrote, Giles (London, 2005), 19–48Google Scholar.

72 For footnotes beneath a ruled line, see “Autobiography of Edmund Calamy,” BL Add MS 50958, 1–5. For marginal notes, see “The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby,” Egerton MS 2614, fols. 27r, 30r, BL; Heywood, Diaries, 2:243; “Autobiography, or Abstract of Diary, of Henry Newcome,” MS A.3.123, CL, lii; Knappen, Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries, 209. For asterisks, see Webster, Diary. For manicules, see Macfarlane, Diary, 27, 28, 32, 51, 53, 55, 59, 61, 63, 66, 69.

73 For example, Newcome, Diary; Macfarlane, Diary; “The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby,” Egerton MS 2614, BL.

74 See Warnicke, “Lady Mildmay's Journal,” 57.

75 Macfarlane, Diary, xvii.

76 For example, “Diary of Oliver Heywood,” BL Add MS, 45965.

77 Edmund Calamy, “A Historical Account of my own Life with Some Reflections on the Times I Have Lived in,” BL Add MS 50958–59.

78 The historiography has tended to avoid discussion of such patterning, with the notable exception of ur-texts like Augustine's Confessions. For helpful comments on the theological impulses that may be behind such likenesses, see Webster, “Writing to Redundancy,” 55–56.

79 See Cambers and Wolfe, “Reading, Family Religion, and Evangelical Identity,” 875–96.

80 See ODNB, s.vv. “Henry, Philip,” “Henry, Matthew,” and “Savage, Sarah”; for Philip Henry's book of scripture questions for his family, see MS A.2.126, CL; for his diaries more generally, see Geoffrey Nuttall, “The Nurture of Nonconformity: Philip Henry's Diaries,” Transaction of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1997, n.s., 4 (1998): 5–27.

81 See Webster, Diary, xv.

82 Newcome, Autobiography, 14.

83 Ibid., 2; for Henry Newcome junior, see ODNB, s.v. “Newcome, Henry.”

84 Todd, “Puritan Self-Fashioning,” 243.

85 Henry Fishwick, ed., The Note Book of the Rev. Thomas Jolly, A.D. 1671–1693, Chetham Society, n.s., 33, (1895), introduction; Heywood, Diaries, 1:160.

86 See Webster, “Writing to Redundancy,” 38.

87 Wallington, “Growth of a Christian,” BL Add MS 40883, fols. 98r–v.

88 Richard Rogers, Seven Treatises.

89 For Margaret Hoby's reading of Richard Rogers, see Cambers, “Print, Manuscript, and Godly Cultures,” 59; for Bruen, see Clark, Samuel, The Second Part of the Marrow of Ecclesiastical History: Containing the Lives of Many Eminent Christians (London, 1675), 93Google Scholar; Webster, “Writing to Redundancy,” 38–40; Rogers, Seven Treatises, 399–404.

90 Newcome, Autobiography, 48; Wallington, “Letters on Religious Topics,” Sloane MS 922, fols. 7r–22v, BL; Warnicke, “Lady Mildmay's Journal,” 59; Collinson, “A Magazine of Religious Patterns,” 499–525.

91 “Recollections of Dionys Fitzherbert,” MS Bodl. 154, fols. 14–27, Bodleian Library, Oxford. See Como, Blown by the Spirit, 134–36. For other copies of Fitzherbert's recollections, see MS e. Mus. 169, Bodleian Library, Oxford; MS Sion arc: L40.2/E47, Lambeth Palace Library.

92 Robert Markham's interleaved diary within Gadbury, John, Ephemeris: or, a Diary Astronomical, Astrological, Meterological, for the Year of our Lord, 1681 (London, 1681)Google Scholar, BL Add MS 18721; “Pocket-book of Anthony Hammond,” written on the blank pages in The Ladies Diary: or, the Woman's Almanack, for the Year of our Lord, 1717 (London, 1717)Google Scholar, BL Add MS 22584. Adam Winthrop made similar use of Allestree. A New Almanacke and Prognostication (London, 1620)Google Scholar. See Bremer, John Winthrop, 127.

93 Newcome, Autobiography, 1, 229, 261, 270, 305. Newcome's reading of Angier's diary (305) could refer to Angier's manuscript diary for 1662–76, which has been lost since the nineteenth century, or to Heywood, Oliver, A Narrative of the Holy Life and Happy Death of … Mr. John Angier (London, 1677)Google Scholar.

94 Clark, Samuel, The Marrow of Ecclesiastical History, 3rd ed. (London, 1675)Google Scholar.

95 (Newcome, Henry), A Faithfull Narrative of the Life and Death of that Holy and Laborious Preacher, Mr John Machin (London, 1671)Google Scholar.

96 John Harland, ed., Collectanea Relating to Manchester and its Neighbourhood at Various Periods, Chetham Society, o.s., 68 (1866), 187.

97 Parkinson, Martindale, 74, 135.

98 Heywood, Diaries, 2:215.

99 Ibid., 3:18, 65.

100 Ibid., 1:124–28.

101 Notably, Woudhuysen, H. R., Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Love, Harold, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

102 Webster, “Writing to Redundancy,” 47–48, 55.

103 “Diary of Edmund Harrold,” entry for 7 September 1712, MS A.2.137, CL; Macfarlane, Diary, 205.

104 Knappen, Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries, 59.

105 Webster, Diary, lxix.

106 Knappen, Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries, 100.

107 Heywood, Diaries, 2:225, 1:187, for a marginal note (added in or after 1672) to a volume finished in 1666.

108 Macfarlane, Diary, 390.

109 Heywood, Diaries, 3:264, 1:329.

110 For the composition of Jollie's book, see Fishwick, The Note Book of the Rev. Thomas Jolly, 108.

111 Newcome, Autobiography, 157.

112 Ibid., 226–27.

113 Ibid., 257.

114 Ibid., 286.

115 This can be seen in his citation of later passages in the same book. See, for instance, Wallington, “Record of the Mercies of God,” MS 204, GL, 31. For Wallington's notebooks, see Seaver, Wallington's World, 199–208.

116 Wallington, “A Memoriall of Gods Judgments upon Sabbath Breakers, Drunkerds and Other Vile Livers,” Sloane MS 1457, fol. 2v, BL.

117 Wallington, “Letters on Religious Topics,” Sloane MS 922, fols. 205v, BL.

118 Wallington, “Growth of a Christian,” BL Add MS 40883, fols. 190r–v. For goal-orientated reading, see Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present, no. 129 (November 1990): 30–78.

119 Wallington, “Record of the Mercies of God,” MS 204, GL, unpaginated endpapers.

120 Ibid., unpaginated pages at start of volume. The reference is to Jonathan Houghton, Wallington's son-in-law.

121 For social reading, see Chartier, Roger, “Leisure and Sociability: Reading Aloud in Early Modern Europe,” in Urban Life in the Renaissance, ed. Zimmerman, Susan and Weissman, Ronald F. E. (Newark, NJ, 1989), 103–20Google Scholar. Elsewhere Chartier has cautioned against using secondhand accounts alone as evidence of social reading and warned that such descriptions formed part of a discourse intended to underscore the ordered and fraternal nature of rural life and contrast it with the disorder and selfishness of urban existence as much as they described readerly praxis. See Chartier, Roger, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (Oxford, 1988), 163–64Google Scholar. Such caution seems less applicable to the reading of the godly in England, whose social reading practices, whether urban or rural, were recognized by the godly and their opponents as a characteristic part of their devotional style. See Cambers, “Print, Manuscript, and Godly Cultures,” intro. and chap. 1.

122 “Autobiography, or Abstract of Diary, of Henry Newcome,” MS A.3.123, CL, reversed, unfoliated pages.

123 Thornton, Autobiography, 338; Newcome, Autobiography, 285–86; “A Narrative; or, An Historicall Account of the Most Materiall Passages in the Life of John Rastrick,” MS HM 6131, fols. 1v, 2v, HEHL.

124 Will of John Mounsell of Askeaton, co. Limerick, Ireland, 1637, The National Archives: Public Record Office, PROB 11/176, fols. 147v–150v, quotation at fol. 149r. For Whiteway and his connections with Mounsell, see William Whiteway of Dorchester: His Diary, 1618–1635, Dorset Record Society, 12 (Dorchester, 1991), 105, 106, 133, 157. I am grateful to Ian Archer for alerting me to Mounsell.

125 See Wallington, “Letters on Religious Topics,” Sloane MS 922, fol. 1v, BL; “Growth of a Christian,” BL Add MS 40883, title page; and “Record of the Mercies of God,” MS 204, GL, unpaginated page at start of volume.

126 Heywood, Diaries, 2:87; “Diary of Oliver Heywood,” BL Add MS 45965, title page.

127 For example, “A Narrative; or, An Historicall Account of the Most Materiall Passages in the Life of John Rastrick,” MS HM 6131, fol. 89r, HEHL.

128 Thornton, Autobiography, 259. It is noteworthy that the “Book of Advice” written by Thornton's father was frequently copied by family members and circulated among wider kin; see 187.

129 Kirk Session Minute Book, Perth, CH2/521/2, fols. 97v–98r, National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh. See also Todd, Margo, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, CT, 2002), 171Google Scholar.

130 ODNB, s.v. “Henry, Philip”; Newcome, Autobiography, 154.

131 Wallington, “Growth of a Christian,” BL Add MS 40883, fol. 135v.

132 Macfarlane, Diary, 396.

133 Newcome, Diary, 143.

134 Bagshaw, Edward, The Life and Death of Mr Vavasor Powell (London, 1671), 12Google Scholar. Bagshaw's account was extracted from Powell's papers.

135 Knappen, Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries, 84.

136 Macfarlane, Diary, 557, 56. Shepard's autobiography is printed in McGiffert, Michael, ed., God's Plot: Puritan Spirituality in Thomas Shepard's Cambridge, rev. ed. (Amherst, MA, 1994), 35–80Google Scholar.

137 The ODNB provides ample evidence of the sociability among and between these diarists.

138 For Ralph Thoresby's transcript of John Shaw's “Life,” see BL Add MS 4460; for multiple copies of Mary Love's biography of Christopher Love, see Sloane MS 3945, BL, and MS 28.58, Dr. Williams's Library, London. Neither is the original. See ODNB, s.v. “Love, Mary (fl. 1639–1660).” For the importance of scribal copies of diaries, see Clarke, “Elizabeth Jekyll's Spiritual Diary,” 218–37.

139 Webster, Diary, lxxix. For Morrice, see The Entring Book of Roger Morrice, ed. Goldie, Mark et al. (Woodbridge, 2007)Google Scholar.

140 See Foucault, Michel, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Rainbow, Paul (London, 1997), 207–22, 223–51Google Scholar.

141 Heywood, Diaries, 1:133, 138; Macfarlane, Diary, 29–30; Wallington, “Growth of a Christian,” BL Add MS 40883, fol. 180r.