My paper analyses the pervasive presence of discourses relating to the emotional self in conversion narratives by Elizabethan and Stuart puritans. It is my view that the number of these introspective writings and the nature of their content are such that they constitute an important area of research for the historian of ideas and of emotions.

The central claim of my study is that the heterogeneous area of English puritanism constituted in fact an identifiable and coherent minority cultural community. I argue that what separated it from formal or less extreme Anglican culture was not theology, but emotionology, that is distinct emotional norms and practices more than doctrinal differences. By postulating the coexistence within the larger religious community of Elizabethan and Stuart England of two main emotional communities championing competing emotional styles, my study endorses Barbara Rosenwein's theory that ‘more than one emotional community may exist – indeed normally does exist – contemporaneously’.

In view of its focus on the emotional norms and styles of a particular religious community, my paper explores the same domain as Christina Lutter's important study of twelfth- and thirteenth-century monastic communities, also included in the present volume. In this light, our two articles may be seen as chapters of the same history of the cultural construction of the emotional self in religious communities.