The Performance of Religious Language in the Eighteenth-Century Conversion Narrative Anonymous College

In his writing on the physiology of reading in Restoration England, Adrian Johns recalls a story concerning the natural philosopher Robert Boyle. Finding himself with a ‘tertian ague’ whilst at school, Boyle was encouraged to divert his melancholy by reading romances, which far from curing him, ‘unsettled his thoughts’, and as Johns concludes, the ‘effects of reading those romances […] proved permanent, and Boyle simply had to live with them’. To a modern reader, the prescription of a written romance as cure for a physical ailment seems bizarre, but such an example serves to illustrate the eighteenth-century’s continued anxieties surrounding the behavioral effects of reading upon the reader, illuminating to us the invested belief in the ability of words and language to perform action or enact change in some way. Since the seventeenth century, private reading had become increasingly normalized as puritanism placed an emphasis on private devotion to God, and the picture of the private reader that emerged at this time was one Johns describes as ‘intimate involvement of the reader with the text’, and a picture ‘with far-reaching implication for this and later periods in its emphasis on the potential hazards of that involvement.’...