Introduction: No self is an island: The validations of autobiographical truths -- Any politic body: The polemics of conversion in the 1620s -- Icons basilicae: Civil war and religious identity -- 1653: Experiencing election in a true gospel-church state -- Writing religious identities in Bedford: Exemplary lives in historical perspective -- Beyond the lives of particular men
Summary
This book provides a new view of the historical conditions and methods by which godly communities turned personal experience into an authorizing principle. A broad range of life-writing is explored, including Augustine's Confessions, John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, and Richard Baxter's Reliquiae Baxterianae
