Abstract
Religious melancholy, generated by a belief in one’s utter worthlessness in the eyes of God, was a widely acknowledged phenomenon in the seventeenth century, drawing criticism from such as Robert Burton and Richard Baxter (for whom it was a cause of ‘overmuch sorrow’);1 although, as Jeremy Schmidt has pointed out, for many others at the time it could also be interpreted as a spiritually promising sign of concern for the state of one’s soul.2 One of the major channels for expressing such experiences, and that concern, proved to be the genre of spiritual autobiography. The influence of spiritual autobiography on the development of the early novel has been well documented, and we find the narrative structure and concerns of the former being taken over by such practitioners as Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson in works like Robinson Crusoe and Pamela.3 The structure dictates recurring cycles of sin to repentance in the protagonist’s life until an epiphany delivers what they believe to be evidence of divine grace being extended – the ‘conversion experience’ (the genre is also sometimes referred to as ‘conversion narrative’). Along with the structural pattern also comes a psychological landscape in which despair plays a critical role, with authors making extensive use of the term. The passage to a state of grace is never easy, and involves much mental torture that tests individuals to the limit of their endurance.
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