ABSTRACT
On one of the prefatory pages to her manuscript Book M, Katherine Austen has written: 'Whoso euer shallook in these papers and shal take notice of these personal occurrences: wil easily discerne it concerned none but my self: and was a private exercise directed to my self. The singularity of these Conceptions doth not aduantaige any'. 1 Book M is a small, quarto volume in Austen's autograph, composed predominantly between 1664 and 1668. It contains devotional meditations in prose, musings on readings, autobiographical notes and contemplations of familial affairs; interspersed among these are 34 devotional meditations cast into verse. Austen's disclaimer, insisting on her document's privacy, is typical of femaleauthored devotional texts in the period, and women's coyness about claiming public authorship has contributed to the common assumption that female-authored pious writing in the seventeenth century 'was intended to remain private; most of the women who versified as part of a religious exercise had no interest in communicating their individual experience to outsiders' (Greer, 13).
