Introduction

Dionys Fitzherbert was born around 1580 into an Oxfordshire gentry family. She never married, and she died in London in the early 1640s. Like most women of her class and time (especially the childless and single) she would normally have left little trace in historical records – at most a name in family wills or on church brasses and pedigrees. Unlike most of her peers, however, Dionys Fitzherbert left her own record: a manuscript account of her life, and specifically of its most dramatic episode, a spiritual and mental crisis experienced and written down when she was in her late twenties. This account, along with various related papers, is what is published here.