ABSTRACT
The kind of self-examination described here is largely replaced oral confession to a priest, which was of course abolished at the Reformation. It quite soon became a recognized practice, however, for confession to be made in writing, usually in the form of a diary. John Rogers became Vicar of Wethers-field, Essex, in 1574 and was an influential member of the early Puritan spiritual brotherhood. His diary embodies the essential features of the Puritan tradition of self-examination, which were to remain basically unchanged until well into the eighteenth century. In 1642 a converted Jesuit missionary, Richard Carpenter, published his Experience, Historie, and Divinitie, in which he told how he had travelled ‘in his raw, greene, and ignorant yeares, beyond the seas’ to France, Spain, and Rome. Self-defence was also an important motive for some, particularly the vulgar prophets, who hoped an appeal to experience would be harder to refute than one based on argument.
