By love to them, I cease loving of thee. Michael Wigglesworth

Michael Wigglesworth was a Puritan minister and a renowned preacher. Little did his contemporaries know that Wigglesworth was also tormented by recurring homoerotic urges that brought him a deep sense of his own depravity. Through journalling, Wigglesworth left an extremely rare record of the interior life of a seventeenth-century Puritan minister who harboured strong passions towards other men. Highlighting Wigglesworth’s adherence to the tradition of Protestant conversion and the practice of Puritan diary-keeping, this book argues that journalling despair with his same-sex experience was itself Wigglesworth’s pursuit of divine remedy.