ABSTRACT
Reading the Bible was meant to change hearts. To understand that experience and its impact on layfolk's writing, one need to recapture the ways in which readers felt their reading to have tangible effects on their own spiritual condition, and the ways in which writing about that experience allowed them control their self-understanding and self-representation. Barbara Lewalski has demonstrated the centrality of application to the self in meditation as well as the central role of Scripture as the subject of meditation. Together, reading and application to the self could inform a person's religious identity because the believer was to mold the self according to externally defined criteria for godliness, aiming for a transformation toward a universalizable ideal. For early modern believers, the self's motivation and agency were not ratified by being "natural"; similarly, the repression of the spontaneous did not create an "inauthentic" consciousness.
