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This chapter analyses the ways in which this influential devotional work by a Scottish Episcopalian minister and professor of divinity was edited and adapted for different denominations and communities during a period of over 150 years. The manuscript has not previously been described. The principal editions were by the latitudinarian Gilbert Burnet, the Scottish Episcopalian Patrick Cockburn, the Scottish moderate Presbyterian William Wishart, the Arminian Methodist John Wesley, the American Episcopalian William Smith, the Baptist Unitarian Joshua Toulmin, and the Church of Ireland bishop John Jebb. Scougal’s book was transformed from an originally private letter to a female friend into a public means of educating new generations of readers, clerical and lay, male and female, rich and poor, and of combating what its editors from their very different perspectives perceived to be their contemporaries’ false representations of religion.

This chapter looks at the offer of consolation in late medieval devotional writing. It distinguishes between classical traditions, in which consolation was meant to eradicate grief and return the bereaved to civic life, and medieval ones, in which comfort was to be found in the recognition of both God's infinite goodness and the intense depravity of sinful humans. Medieval books of comfort sought to teach readers how they should feel about their “wretchedness;” the preface to Kempe's Book identifies it as offering “solace” to the “sinful wretches” who read it, to Kempe herself, and to her scribe. This chapter tracks the Book's exploration of communal experiences of high devotional desire, comfort, joy, and emotional expression as a replacement for isolated individual experiences of “wretchedness.”

This chapter explores the involvement of English Baptist and Congregational women in the anti-slavery movement in the 1820s and 1830s. Focusing on Mary-Anne Rawson (1801-1887), a Congregationalist in Sheffield, and Maria Grace Saffery (1772-1858) and Anne Whitaker (1774-1865), Baptists from rural Wiltshire, the chapter examines the different articulations of abolitionist commitment by women: in public societies, school teaching, poetry and devotional writing. The chapter argues that a closer attention to piety and to local denominational cultures will yield a deeper understanding of the terms of women's engagement with anti-slavery and the wider missionary reform movement of which it was a part.

This chapter examines the faith–science controversy through an analysis of a major text by a confirmed believer who doubted science, John Donne's meditation on disease and the problem of embodiment, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. This chapter argues that Donne's disease prompts him to investigate the manner of God's method—of communication, mercy, and ultimately redemption—that will serve as the model for his own critical reaction to both the epistemological and experiential crises of disease and doubt. In the face of these issues, Donne fashions a new method—of observation, analysis, and recording. In the Devotions, Donne constructs a discourse, a new science writing, that enables the apprehension of God's method and that allows for a new understanding of embodiment and materialism, together with a new model for human experience predicated upon a theology of exemplarity.

This chapter takes up one of The Christian Year’s most provocative interpolators, Christina Rossetti. Examining her devotional books, it makes a particular study of Time Flies: A Reading Diary, a miscellany of daily reading that combines lyric poetry and prose meditations. In Time Flies: A Reading Diary, Rossetti embraces the apparent synchronizations of liturgical and clock time that Keble’s volume implies. Among the time signatures that Rossetti tries on, in addition to the more familiar ones of liturgical time, are ones shaped through the possibilities of the quotidian. Time Flies playfully reveals how heterotopic or “eternal” time is produced through a material relation with the book as diurnal reading/writing object.

This chapter analyses William Blundell's entries on devotional writing and religious histories in his commonplace books. It considers how Blundell used his reading to bolster his own religious beliefs and discusses religious beliefs based on his engagement with the Bible and other devotional works. The analysis of his commonplace books indicates that certain aspects of Catholicism caused him problems, particularly the details of saints' lives. This chapter also describes how Blundell read and rewrote Catholic and Protestant history to add credibility to the former.

Christian devotional culture took very seriously the instruction of the Bible maxim “In all thy works remember thy last end [memorare novissima tua] and thou shalt never sin” (Sirach 7:40). From it were derived all kinds of practices and schemes for meditating on the so-called “last things”: death, judgment, hell, heaven, and (once the belief was codified dogmatically) purgatory. The introduction explains why the period from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century was crucial for the dissemination and transformation of instructions for meditating on death and the afterlife, and draws attention to the importance of written texts in enabling and supporting individual believers in their daily routines of devotion and meditation.

The chapter argues for the centrality of the rhetorical trope of paradiastole in the Middle Ages: paradiastole redescribes something in terms of something else that is like it for the purposes of argument, so a virtue may be redescribed as an adjacent vice, or a vice redescribed as an adjacent virtue. Widespread in Classical rhetoric, the trope was said to have vanished in the Middle Ages, only to be rediscovered in the renaissance, when its corrosive effects were widely used to show the manipulability and instability of all moral categories. But this chapter argues that the figure never went away. In medieval pastoral and devotional theory, paradiastole became part of a subtle body of thought about the hypocritical or self-deceiving vices that nevertheless manage to ‘masquerade’ as virtues, as well as about virtues that turn into, or turn out to be, vices. This internally conflicted figure was thus central to medieval psychological, ethical, and devotional thought. However, paradiastole and the mutating vices and virtues also appear in medieval satirical and political writings. They are also widely used in medieval allegory, where they take the form of the paradiastolic ‘hypocritical personification’: this is a personification that involves some kind of structural contradiction signalling deceit—a figure whose name, appearance or words may signal virtue, for instance, but who nevertheless acts like the vice that is adjacent to the virtue. The chapter claims that such hypocritical figures are all-pervasive in medieval literature and allegory.

The thirteenth-century Latin treatise De doctrina cordis (The Doctrine of the Hert) emphasises spiritually efficacious language, explicitly equating words that comfort with words that feed. The Middle English version of De doctrina is known for its similar emphasis on words that both comfort and sustain. Both translations also liken God's Word to the sweet sound emitted by chiming silver. Like the vast majority of Christian devotional writing of the Middle Ages, De doctrina is organised around biblical quotation and supporting patristic allusion, and displays overt reliance on the Vulgate text of the Bible. It appears to be more reliant on Old Testament sapiential literature than other contemporary Middle English devotional texts.

This section examines the use of tenses to refer to the dead—and above all to Christ—in a range of genres that belonged to the practices of devotion and prayer. The genres studied are: devotional poetry and prose, hagiography, martyrology, and meditational writing (ranging from homilies printed for silent reading to poetic meditations on Christ’s Passion).