A Strange Sadness: Margaret Baxter on the Trauma of Conversion

Abstract

This article seeks to recover a familiar but unappreciated female voice from English Puritanism of the seventeenth century, that of Margaret Baxter. Various challenges to such recovery are examined, most notably the nature of her relationship to her pastor and husband, Richard. Extant literature from Margaret’s hand focuses on the events surrounding her conversion and life-threatening illness shortly thereafter. The present analysis of these texts and their circumstances concludes that Margaret was a faithful but critical heir of the practical theology of her day, and that in her lived expression of that tradition one observes the enduring scars of the trauma of her conversion.