Theology and interiority: Emotion as evidence of the working of grace in Elizabethan and Stuart conversion narratives

This chapter analyse the pervasive presence of discourses relating to the emotional self in conversion narratives by Elizabethan and Stuart puritans. It argue that what separated it from formal or less extreme Anglican culture was not theology, but emotionology, that is distinct emotional norms and practices more than doctrinal differences. In view of its focus on the emotional norms and styles of aparticular religious community, the chapter explores the same domain as Christina Lutter’s important study of twelfth and thirteenth century monastic communities, also included in the present volume. This chapter begins with a preliminary note on what it considers throughout the chapter as a distinct puritan community in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. Moreover, documentary evidence discussed in the final section of the chapter suggests that puritan emotional practices were identified by their detractors as the more striking element of differentiation and therefore were the favourite target of harsh criticism.