Anxious acts: Religion and autobiography in early modern England (John Donne, John Milton, Thomas Browne, John Bunyan)

This dissertation examines the curious tendency of seventeenth-century religious prose to digress into autobiography. Paradoxically, while the authors in this study seem drawn toward confessional modes, the resulting self-portraits are often so carefully controlled as to be either unrevealing or downright misleading. I argue that intense religious anxiety motivates these self-explorations, but that same anxiety ensures that the resulting autobiographical personae reflect not actual, but idealized selves. These rhetorical performances are not seamless, however. By examining the works' historical and biographical contexts and putting pressure on the places in which the texts manifest internal conflict, my dissertation recovers both the circumstances and the motivation for these authors' ventures into autobiography.; In my first chapter I consider John Donne's Pseudo-Martyr and Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. I argue that both works, written some thirteen years apart, show Donne grappling with his conversion from Roman Catholicism and attempting to present himself as a conforming and contented member of the Church of England. My second chapter focuses on John Milton's political tracts. Even as Milton assures his reader that in supporting the antiprelatical and republican causes he is doing God's will, his increasingly elaborate and often contradictory self-defenses suggest that he is not nearly so convinced as he would have his reader be. In my third chapter I look at Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, using the work's earliest manuscript copies to argue that the popular notion of Browne as a man of genial tolerance is wide of the mark. I argue, instead, that anxiety over several possibly heretical beliefs motivated Browne's profession of faith. Finally, in my fourth chapter, I focus on John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. By comparing the work's conclusion with its lengthy central portion, I argue that Bunyan is actually conflating the period of his imprisonment with that of his conversion. In doing so, I demonstrate that Bunyan is not the self-assured crusader of legend, but rather that his imprisonment led him to question his calling to the ministry---and indeed his very salvation.