The study of autobiographical writing in early modern England has become particularly vibrant in recent years, with critical discussion of these texts expanding from close readings and biographical assessment to include topics such as subject formation, narrative structure, political engagement, gender, and class. In Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World, Kathleen Lynch makes an important and timely contribution to this critical conversation. Focusing specifically on seventeenth-century spiritual autobiographies, including canonical works by John Donne, John Bunyan, and Richard Baxter, in addition to somewhat lesser-known narratives by Richard Norwood and Agnes Beaumont, Lynch demonstrates that these texts were agents of “circum-Atlantic community formation” (4). Reading Protestant spiritual autobiographies in terms of their outward, communal effects rather than exclusively for the evidence they offer of internal conflict or self-discovery, she productively resituates these narratives within the nuanced history of their initial reception and, in doing so, draws attention to the ways in which the rhetoric of salvation and conversion could become both discursively available and politically useful to a larger community of believers. In addition to positioning Protestant life writings within a broader, transatlantic frame, one of the most notable contributions of Lynch's study is the specificity with which she locates these texts within the early modern book trade. Documenting the printers, publishers, and booksellers who contributed to the dissemination of these conversion narratives, Lynch offers a compelling and highly detailed portrait of the collective energies that helped shape Protestant identity formation in the period.

Lynch begins her study with a chapter focused on English translations of Augustine's Confessions and their reception in the 1620s. She traces the way these translations not only indexed tensions between Catholic and Protestant claims to Augustine's confessional identity but also played a role in intra-Protestant debates about religious orthodoxy and the nature of autobiographical authority. In the second half of the chapter, Lynch turns to John Donne's Pseudo-Martyr (1610) and Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624), arguing that the first text projects the image of a converted self while simultaneously “refusing to narrate a conversion” (51) and that the second, which resembles the Confessions in its deployment of the historical present tense, depicts conversion as the act of turning to God at the moment of death. The second chapter juxtaposes an analysis of Eikon Basilike (1649) and its publication history with a discussion of nonconformist Sarah Wight's narrative in The Exceeding Riches of Grace Advanced (1647). She argues that both texts reveal, in quite different ways, the cultural pressures to produce first-person conversion narratives driven by individual conscience. Situating both texts within the book culture in which they were produced and disseminated, Lynch demonstrates that publication was a crucial “validating witness” (85) to the experience of conversion, making available forms of identity that could then be taken up by various Protestant communities.

In the next two chapters, Lynch provides two microstudies, the first devoted to a year (1653) and the second to a place (Bedford). Chapter 3 considers several English and American anthologies of Protestant conversion narratives published in 1653 and argues that the radically religious aimed through these publications to develop and disseminate reliable methods for determining spiritual credibility. Even though their views of spiritual experience did not prevail in the end, they nevertheless played a significant role in contesting ideas about identity and spiritual veracity. In the following chapter, Lynch situates John Bunyan's writings in the historical context of the Bedford community of which he was a part, reading Bunyan's works alongside the narratives of Agnes Beaumont, John Gifford, and John Child. In contrast to those who view Bunyan purely as an exemplary individual figure, Lynch convincingly demonstrates that Bunyan's autobiographical account was deeply embedded in contemporary political, religious, and social networks, and represented the “shared investments of an individual and a community of like-minded believers” (232). The final chapter considers Richard Baxter's Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696) and argues that this text was instrumental in shaping history writing into the eighteenth century. Baxter, Lynch demonstrates, understood textual revision to be a process of self-revision, and his refusal to write a traditionally structured conversion narrative displays a cyclical understanding of both self and history rather than a linear process of development.

Lynch excels both at providing insightful, nuanced close readings of these autobiographical narratives and at situating them within the larger book trade of which they were a part. Indeed, one of the most refreshing and significant claims of Protestant Autobiography is its assertion that autobiographical writing was a collective endeavor, influenced as much by social pressures and political exigencies as by individual prerogatives. By documenting the role of printers and publishers in the dissemination of seventeenth-century Protestant conversion narratives, Lynch makes a powerful case for the collective nature of authorship and print, reminding us that literary production depended on the “labor of many” (231) rather than on the singular achievements of a few. However, while there are invariably some disadvantages to Lynch's focus on formal similarities between conversion narratives written from strikingly different cultural vantage points (by Amerindians as opposed to English Baptists, for example, or by Charles I as opposed to the adolescent Sarah Wight), she succeeds in bringing needed attention to the synchronic discourses of religious identity that subtended the early modern transatlantic world. Protestant Autobiography is elegantly written, impressive in its depth of research, and meticulous in its attention to detail. Providing an important new assessment of early modern autobiographical writing, transatlantic religious politics, and the history of the book, Lynch's study will be a highly valuable resource for scholars in these fields.