First steps in literacy: The reading and writing experiences of the humblest seventeenth‐century spiritual autobiographers

Abstract

The spiritual autobiographies of the seventeenth century include the first subjective accounts, written by men from the countryside from yeoman parentage or below, of childhood, education, the importance of literacy and the importance that their religious convictions had for them. They therefore contain first-hand accounts, or rather fragments of accounts, of the amount of education available, and its effects, by the relatively humble. They thus provide insight into the effects of literacy which is not provided by any other source. There are very, very few of these accounts, and those which do exist suffer from the disadvantage of the genre. The spiritual autobiographers were Puritans and dissenters,' and therefore were socially slanted in whatever way Puritans and dissenters were socially slanted. They must also be considered even more a-typical than Puritans and dissenters in general, because the urge to write autobiography in itself defines an exceptional man.2