Assistances and Encouragements in the Ways of Piety: Conceptions of Private Devotion in Early Modern England

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Notes

¹ Erica Longfellow characterizes early modern England as “a society that was much more communally organized than our own” and argues that the term “private” meant little more than “whatever did not pertain to the nation or community.” People practiced solitary devotion, but “they did not always refer to these aspects of life as private or conceive of them as something wholly separate from their communal existence” (313, 315, 321).

² Susan Felch connects the diversity of early modern English pieties and practices to the “sheer variety of books designed for household prayer,” as their “divergence from the Book of Common Prayer pushed the experience of prayer outward toward diverse individual practices” (32).

³ Evans is repeating a commonplace: this list appears in numerous prayer manuals. See, for instance, John Day, “To the Reader,” A Booke of Christian Prayers (London, 1578).

⁴ See also Longfellow 321.