‘Have a little book in thy Conscience, and write therein': Writing the Puritan Conscience, 1600–1650 1

Readers of the first printed English translation of John Calvin’s The Institution of Christian Religion (1561) would have encountered a grim eschatological scene. Placed before God, Calvin describes how the sinner shall encounter ‘a most seuere examination, that shall pearce into the most hidden thoughtes of the heart … whiche shal compell the lurking and vnwillyng conscience to vtter al thinges that now are fallen out of remembrance’. ² Nonetheless, almost a century later, things could not have been more different. Amidst the rancour and revolutionary rhetoric of 1649, the renowned casuist Isaac Ambrose had other ideas. In his spiritual manual Media: The Middle Things, Ambrose extolled his Puritan readers to: ‘Have a little book in thy Conscience, and write therein’. ³ Here Ambrose’s depiction had implications for Calvin’s vision of final reckoning, as Ambrose would have his Puritan readers ‘take an account of their lives’ and write of their sins now in ‘Diaries or Day-books’. ⁴ In order to prove their election, the saints would no longer have an ‘vnwillyng conscience’ that merely revealed their sins at the Day of Judgement. Now the ‘godly’ would write their own confessions on earth, rather than have them read out to them in heaven.