“HERSCHEPT HET HERT”: Katherine Sutton’s Experiences (1663), the printer’s device and the making of devotion

Religiously-motivated accounts of the self, particularly those composed by members of England’s gathered churches in mid-seventeenth-century England, were orally recounted before church members, collected and edited, and often disseminated by the press. Printed conversion accounts and spiritual testimonies were concerned with individual experience, and were devotional in that many sought to produce affective experience in their readers. But they were also highly mediated, social products, located within, and produced by, circuits of communal activity extending from the individual convert through to publishers, printers, and booksellers, who often underscored their own confessional commitments by financing, mechanically producing, and distributing these publications.

This chapter considers how spiritual transformations were constructed, collectively authorized by a spiritual community, and sent out into the world as part of the Particular Baptist’s proselytizing campaign in the early 1650s. Print and publication transformed devotional experiences into a platform designed for individuals, both from within and outside of the Particular Baptist Church, to read for their own edification and spiritual reformation. Print made devotional experiences, but the print marketplace was also the site of contestation of religious experience. As this chapter shows, the radically decontextualizing forces of transmission and consumption could just as easily unmake printed manifestations of early-modern devotionality.