ABSTRACT
Time, Death and Memorialization Reading the Times It is a critical commonplace to argue that the deepest ‘infrastructure’, or ‘habitus’, of the early modern mind is not economy or society, or even politics or law, but God.1 While Raleigh’s History of the World, Clarendon’s Reflections on the Psalms, or the career and speeches of Oliver Cromwell, are unintelligible without a lived sense of the purposes of God in human affairs, so too are more modest selfrepresentational or autobiographical texts, such as Ralph Josselin’s. And God and time form a dense matrix, for time was not ours but God’s. The House of Commons was reminded – routinely one might say – by the puritan preacher Stephen Marshall in 1640 that it was nothing but God’s instrument: ‘the hand of the dial makes not the clock to go’, he declared, ‘but shows how it doth go’.2 The Calvinist William Perkins conceptualized the early modern self as ‘a double person’, arguing that:
Every person is a double person and under two regiments. In the first regiment I am a person of mine own self, under Christ … [and must] humble myself, forsake and deny myself … In the temporal regiment, thou art a person in respect of another. Thou art husband, father … wife, lord, subject and there thou must do according to thine office. If thou be a father, thou must do the office of a father and rule.3
