David Mullan, who has written previous monographs on Episcopacy and Puritanism in Scotland, draws here on some eighty diaries and memoirs to illuminate patterns of piety and theology in Scotland from 1600 to circa 1730, with a particular focus on the last half of this period, post-Restoration. Just as religious and social tumult in seventeenth-century England stimulated autobiography, so also in Scotland resistance to both “Anglicanism” and sectarianism produced an upsurge of life writing.

Mullan goes over the ecclesiastical history of the Restoration period but does so mainly through first-person vignettes describing the narrators’ world and, importantly, their common experience of suffering and persecution. Outwardly, the themes are “evasion, flight, imprisonment, exile and the execution of others” (42). Presbyterian ministers during these years achieved heroic status as they endured inward and outward tribulations and wrote about them. Their experiences in many cases gave them great authority among a responsive laity and consolidated a common outlook on the world. Although Samuel Rutherford was not himself an autobiographer, his life and writings as an exiled minister, and especially his widely read posthumous letters, Joshua Redivivus (1664), epitomize the affectionate, evangelical piety and devout interior life that would shape the autobiographical genre as it developed.

First-person narratives multiply after the Restoration and have much to say about family, bearing witness to intense religious experiences in childhood and adolescence within homes where husband and wife and parents and children were bound together in bonds of affection and devotion. As death took family members, young and old, the experience of grief was the common lot. With an upbringing regulated by devotional practices and governed by an Augustinian pessimism about human nature generally, diaries and autobiographies speak of the tumult of childhood piety, relapse, and recovery. Educational opportunities, especially for boys, deepened religious experience and strengthened attachment to leaders. By the time they reached adulthood, these writers had been formed to hold strict views on sexuality and to hold strenuous convictions about the centrality of family, affectionate and spiritually minded monogamy, and the responsibility and joys of parenting within this same tradition.

In the last half of the book, Mullan examines the sort of “evangelical self” reflected in these narratives, focusing on three main themes: conversion, providence, and covenant. None of these were uniquely Scottish themes, but they were prominent in the Scottish context where evangelical conversion became central to identity in the midst of persecution and dissent, where discerning the hand of providence in one’s life became a matter of urgency in unstable times, and where national covenanting led naturally to personal covenanting.

Mullan is impressed by the way the inner life of the pious evangelical in Scotland was marked significantly by melancholy. While there was an awareness of natural causes for melancholy, and reason enough in the difficulties of the times for sorrow, there was a “jealous guarding” of the distinctively religious melancholy that was one of the signs of a divine work in the human soul (253). To cope with the challenges of life, the writers from this period made appeal to Scripture, reading it through the lens of piety and personalizing its content by means of typology, especially as they read the Psalter and Song of Solomon. The Psalter was, of course, familiar from childhood. A biblical providentialism was key, though, to personalizing the Psalms and to the way life writers sought to interpret their lives within a divine plan, even as one submitted to those episodes of afflictive and impenetrable providence that could never be fully understood. Providence could be both comforting and distressing, and it sometimes raised issues of theodicy leading writers to be “vexed with atheisticall thoughts, and doubting of the being of a God” in keeping with a distinct trajectory in European philosophical thought (301). But on the whole, the narrative culture of the evangelicals was a bulwark against this atheism, supporting an alternative view of the world.

Although these life writers were only ever a small minority of the population, they were clearly influential in their communities through social prominence and through leadership both clerical and lay. In the end, what we see from the autobiographical point of view is a religion of the people in Protestant Scotland that provided common ground between social elites and lay people but that appealed particularly to those responsive to their leaders, a people who were literate, emotionally sensitive, and even introspective and articulate about their inner life. Certainly, there were always other easygoing souls who did not share in this piety, but still these narratives together can be seen as constituting “a kind of informal religious order, uniting clergy and laity in a shared view of the world,” conversion, and the need to withdraw from the world and its temptations (375–76).

Whereas modern studies of autobiography and popular religion, such as Phyllis Mack’s Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment (2008), tend to emphasize gender and class differentiation in religious life writing, Mullan is much more impressed by the common religious experience of the writers he has examined in the Scottish context. He notes social differences but is hesitant to map the contrast between, say, rationality and “impressions,” or inner-worldly and outer-worldly concerns, straightforwardly onto gender or class or even denomination.

Narratives of the Religious Self is meticulously researched, and Mullan is the sort of experienced historian who has read widely enough to know the significance of what he finds in the archives and on antiquarian bookshelves. At various points, he contributes significantly, and offers new material, to scholarly discussions of marriage and family, education and literacy, gender, and popular religion, and he has an eye for comparative history, placing his material often in the context of similar developments in England and New England or within continental Catholicism and earlier church history. He also draws freely, passim, on insights from religious studies (Bernard Lonergan), sociology of conversion (Lewis Rambo), and autobiographical theory (Sidonie Smith). His main contribution, however, is historical, outlining a distinctive and influential evangelical piety in the Restoration period and offering a portrait of an age that is inside out, coming as it does from the point of view of diaries and memoirs.