ABSTRACT
By the middle of the seventeenth century, collations of scripture verses, meditations on psalms, applications of scripture to one’s experience —the whole range of scriptural devotion—begin to appear with some regularity in collections of family papers. 1 By the end of the century, such manuscripts are common. The papers of Anne Halkett, Katherine Austin, Mary Rich, and the Egerton family are some of the better known; we could add the papers of Owen and Elianor Stockton and the Finch-Hatton family of Northamptonshire. 2 Hester Pulter, Anne Conway, and Dorothy Calthorpe wrote scripturally-based verse; Elizabeth Packington and Elizabeth Baxter left manuscript books of prayers. 3 We don’t think twice about the fact that a layman, John Milton, wrote the greatest religious literature of the Restoration. Indeed, John Bunyan, George Fox, and other “mechanick” preachers witness the sense of entitlement that those without university training felt to record and share their understanding of Scripture. Yet, as this book has detailed, this situation, which in hindsight we take for granted, was not the immediate or inevitable consequence of the Reformation. And it did not come about without resistance and anxiety. In the years leading up to the civil wars, in fact, lay writing on Scripture, along with the devotional practices surrounding it, raised clerical hackles. That voluntary lay devotion proved a fresh source of clerical anxiety indicates how significantly lay Scripture reading and the writing that resulted had redrawn the early Stuart religious landscape.
