A type of written confession

The most common reason for keeping a diary in the seventeenth century was to keep an account of providence or God's ordering of the world and of individual lives. Ralph Josselin called the diary he kept between 1641 and 1683 'a thankfull observation of divine providence and goodness towards me and a summary view of my life'. As Isaac Ambrose put it in 1650, a diarist 'observes something of God to his soul, and of his soul to God'. Diaries also allowed their authors to meditate regularly on personal failings - a type of written confession in a protestant world that had rejected the need for a catholic priest to mediate sins. Or the diarist could count his blessings, and give thanks for births or marriages or seek consolation for illness and death. In an age when life in this world and salvation in the next were both uncertain, diaries were a way of making sense of and ordering existence. In short, they reflected the intensely introspective and anxious, self-examining religiosity of the seventeenth century, particularly (though by no means exclusively) among the 'hotter sort' of protestants, such as the presbyterians, independents, baptists and quakers.

Sobre os diários do século XVII, aqui.