Abstract
This article juxtaposes two of Richard Baxter's autobiographical accounts written 5 years apart but along very different lines. In the final chapter of A Holy Commonwealth (1659), Baxter confidently asserted the rightness of Parliament's cause in the civil wars; for Baxter, it is a strikingly optimistic, triumphalist and providentialist account. In the Reliquiae Baxterianae, which he began to write in 1664, he explicitly distanced himself from any such claims about the wars and he wrote in a more chastened fashion. The former account, and the kind of autobiography it intimates, brings Baxter's purposes in writing the Reliquiae more clearly into focus. The article advances on recent scholarship by Kathleen Lynch while investigating the nature of autobiography. The iterations of Baxter's autobiography demonstrate that such accounts are first a story that the author tells himself or herself. If events negate that story, it is never told.