SOURCE: MacLennan, George. “Bunyan and Trosse: The Pathology of Puritanism.” In Lucid Interval: Subjective Writing and Madness in History, pp. 55-77. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992.

In the following essay, MacLennan examines the use of the autobiography by Puritan writers, using Bunyan and George Trosse as examples, focusing on their of revealing Puritan spiritual beliefs and concerns as revealed through life's journey.

I

The seventeenth century, the heyday of English Puritanism, saw a profusion of autobiographical writings of the ‘progress of the soul’ type. Puritan spiritual autobiographies were not only more numerous than Catholic and Anglican counterparts but were also characterised by a greater degree of inwardness: ‘spiritual experiences are no longer simple, objective events, but moments of intense emotional contact between God and the individual soul.’¹ The Protestant concerns of introspective self-scrutiny, the need to be spiritually reborn in God, and a requirement for ‘experimental Evidences of the...