UC Berkeley

In the seventeenth century, Puritans would record detailed accounts of their lives, searching for signs of salvation—or damnation—in their everyday experiences. But given the highest possible stakes, these texts are remarkably inventive, wry, and skeptical about the reliability of autobiography itself. Case-studies of Thomas Browne, Richard Norwood, and Laurence Clarkson show how the autobiographies’ speculative fictions and stylized picaresque detachment baffle the expectations of confessional identity. In very different ways, John Milton and John Bunyan demonstrate a knowing skepticism about spiritual autobiography as a forthright transcription of belief and experience. Milton’s career-long anxiety about and attraction to autobiography—always inherently an account before God—critiques the genre’s propensity for self-justification and continual refashioning. Bunyan’s Grace Abounding works as a complex and deeply ironical pastoral instrument. By playing with the anti-narrative premise of Calvinism—the fixed status of one’s election—Bunyan modulates readerly identification and authorial self-aggrandizement, ensuring that the artistry of his “paradigmatic” spiritual autobiography would be inimitable. Breaking the fundamental rules of their genre every time, all of these writers give us new ways to think about their influence on narrative aesthetics and the complex nature of religious belief in the early modern period.