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Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England studies how immersion in the Bible among layfolk gave rise to a non-professional writing culture, one of the first instances of ordinary people taking up the pen as part of their daily lives. Kate Narveson examines the development of the culture, looking at the close connection between reading and writing practices, the influence of gender, and the habit of applying Scripture to personal experience. She explores too the tensions that arose between lay and clergy as layfolk embraced not just the chance to read Scripture but the opportunity to create a written record of their ideas and experiences, acquiring a new control over their spiritual self-definition and a new mode of gaining status in domestic and communal circles. Based on a study of print and manuscript sources from 1580 to 1660, this book begins by analyzing how lay people were taught to read Scripture both through explicit clerical instruction in techniques such as note-taking and collation, and through indirect means such as exposure to sermons, and then how they adapted those techniques to create their own devotional writing. The first part of the book concludes with case studies of three ordinary lay people, Anne Venn, Nehemiah Wallington, and Richard Willis. The second half of the study turns to the question of how gender registers in this lay scripturalist writing, offering extended attention to the little-studied meditations of Grace, Lady Mildmay. Narveson concludes by arguing that by mid-century, despite clerical anxiety, writing was central to lay engagement with Scripture and had moved the center of religious experience beyond the church walls.

This book brings together ten essays on John Donne and George Herbert composed by an international group of scholars. The volume represents the first collection of its kind to draw close connections between these two distinguished early modern thinkers and poets who are justly coupled because of their personal and artistic association. The contributors' distinctive new approaches and insights illuminate a variety of topics and fields while suggesting new directions that future study of Donne and Herbert might take. Some chapters explore concrete instances of collaboration or communication between Donne and Herbert, and others find fresh ways to contextualize the Donnean and Herbertian lyric, carefully setting the poetry alongside discourses of apophatic theology or early modern political theory, while still others link Herbert's verse to Donne's devotional prose. Several chapters establish specific theological and aesthetic grounds for comparison, considering Donne and Herbert's respective positions on religious assurance, comic sensibility, and virtuosity with poetic endings. 

\"13 Rooted therein, assurance was firm. Because assurance was also of gradual growth and needed cultivation, believers were therefore instructed to hold fast to God's promises related to salvation and were directed to a range of signs that those promises were being realized in their lives. Sutton preached that \"the end and the meanes to the end are never severed in Gods purpose and decree; and therefore it followes, that all such as doe carefully use the meanes of salvation, are sure in the end to attaine saluation.\" [...]even while ministers preached that assurance was a perception of the faithful heart (\"that assured confidence of our heart, by which it perceiveth and doubteth not that it hath right to what is promised\"), they also spoke of it as a shaped affect or emotional habit, created by devotional practice.21 As an emotional habit, assurance is an example of what Barbara Rosenswein calls a system of feeling typical of an emotion community.22 As Douglas Davies puts it, feelings become \"embedded within sets of emotional attitudes and forms of responses such that social values and attitudes come to be, as we say, second nature to us. [...]it illustrates the way that Herbert imagines sin as an intimate enemy, a force that has power to invade ones very mind, that is both alien and all too frighteningly also oneself. Because the sinful thought is not merely the suggestion of Satan but the intimate within the heart, assurance is a player in a drama that is all the more intense because the speaker feels so deeply that he cannot depend on himself. [...]the speaker then shifts to an appeal. [...]Herbert, pleads, \"make me not their sport\" (1.

Since it is dedicated to Queen Elizabeth and contains devotional writing by Katherine Parr, Elizabeth, and other aristocratic women, as well as by godly gentlewomen such as Lady Frances Abergavenny, Elizabeth Tyrwhit, and Dorcas Martin, we might assume that the Monument exhibits a progressive attitude toward women's religious authority, in line with the commitment of the Reformation's liberal wing to universal scripture literacy and spiritual equality between men and women. Colin and Jo Atkinson have shown, for instance, that in the concluding biographical dictionary of biblical women, in which Bentley claims simply to reprint biblical texts, he \"actually reworks the text to direct women toward submissive, subordinate behavior,\" primarily by \"silently folding in the marginal commentary from the Geneva Bible,\" commentary that directed readers toward a strict Calvinist understanding of the social order (Atkinson and Atkinson 415).

The 1626 funeral sermon for Elizabeth Gouge reported that “with her own hand she penned sundry devout Prayers.… She hath also left written by her self many divine directions for Devotions. She further tied herself by a set daily task to read the holy Scriptures.”¹ One of the most significant changes that the Reformation brought to English women’s lives was a new impetus to read and to write. Most obviously, because women heeded the call to read Scripture, women’s literacy rates steadily increased. Beyond that, Bible reading led to writing. Writing requires something to say and a sense of how

This chapter addresses the question of causation, argues that the note-taking and extracting that accompanied godly reading set men and women on a path that, by teaching a fluent Scriptural style, a mode of gathering matter, and a sense of form, led to independent composition. It describes the texts that lay folk produced, and suggests that in their varied and hybrid forms, all of them point to the iconic place the book, as form and as material object, had come to occupy. This lay culture of devotional writing has been largely lost to sight. Records of prayers by lay people indicate that in fact children would hear their parents praying in this \"Scripture phrase\". For lay people such as Hastings and Bridgewater, women who did not receive the rhetorical training that was central to the humanist curriculum, the practices associated with Bible reading provided an alternative rhetorical education.

Reading the Bible was meant to change hearts. To understand that experience and its impact on layfolk's writing, one need to recapture the ways in which readers felt their reading to have tangible effects on their own spiritual condition, and the ways in which writing about that experience allowed them control their self-understanding and self-representation. Barbara Lewalski has demonstrated the centrality of application to the self in meditation as well as the central role of Scripture as the subject of meditation. Together, reading and application to the self could inform a person's religious identity because the believer was to mold the self according to externally defined criteria for godliness, aiming for a transformation toward a universalizable ideal. For early modern believers, the self's motivation and agency were not ratified by being \"natural\"; similarly, the repression of the spontaneous did not create an \"inauthentic\" consciousness.