This volume historicizes the study of life-writing and egodocuments, focusing on early modern European reflections on the self, self-fashioning, and identity. Life-writing and the study of egodocuments currently tend to be viewed as separate fields, yet the individual as a purposive social actor provides significant common ground and offers a vehicle, both theoretical and practical, for a profitable synthesis of the two in a historical context. Echoing scholars from a wide-range of disciplines who recognize the uncertainty of the nature of the self, these essays question the notion of the autonomous self and the attendant idea of continuous identity unfolding in a unified personality. Instead, they suggest that the early modern self was variable and unstable, and can only be grasped by exploring selves situated in specific historical and social/cultural contexts and revealed through the wide range of historical documents considered here. The three sections of the volume consider: first, the theoretical contexts of understanding egodocuments in early modern Europe; then, the practical ways egodocuments from the period may be used for writing life-histories today; and finally, a wider range of historical documents that might be added to what are usually seen as egodocuments.

This Element develops and showcases a new methodological framework in which to study the connections between early modern travel writing and life- and self-writing. Turning the scholarly focus in the study of travel writing from eye-witnessing and proto-ethnography of foreign lands to the 'fashioned' and portrayed selves and 'inner worlds' of travellers – personal memory, autobiographical practices, and lived yet often heavily mediated travel experiences – it opens up perspectives to travel writing in its many modes, that extend both before and after 'lived' travels into their many pre- and afterlives in textual form. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Redreaming the Renaissance seeks to remedy the dearth of conversations between scholars of history and literary studies by building on the pathbreaking work of Guido Ruggiero to explore the cross-fertilization between these two disciplines, using the textual world of the Italian Renaissance as proving ground. In this volume, these disciplines blur, as they did for early moderns, who did not always distinguish between the historical and literary significance of the texts they read and produced. Literature here is broadly conceived to include not only belles lettres, but also other forms of artful writing that flourished in the period, including philosophical writings on dreams and prophecy; life-writing; religious debates; menu descriptions and other food writing; diaries, news reports, ballads, and protest songs; and scientific discussions. The twelve essays in this collection examine the role that the volume’s dedicatee has played in bringing the disciplines of history and literary studies into provocative conversation, as well as the methodology needed to sustain and enrich this conversation.

A fascinating survey of biographical genres

Explores Natalie Zemon Davis's concept of history as a dialogue, not only with the past, but with other historians.

How did early modern English people write about themselves, and how do we listen to their voices four centuries later? The authors of Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation 1500-1660 argue that identity is depicted through complex, subtle, and often contradictory social interactions and literary forms. Diaries, letters, daily spiritual reckonings, household journals, travel journals, accounts of warfare, incidental meditations on the nature of time, death and self-reflection, as well as life stories themselves: these are just some of the texts that allow us to address the social and historical conditions that influenced early modern self-writing. The texts explored in Early Modern English Lives do not automatically speak to our familiar patterns of introspection and self-inquiry. Often formal, highly metaphorical and emotionally restrained, they are very different in both tone and purpose from the autobiographies that crowd bookshelves today. Does the lack of emotional description suggest that complex emotions themselves, in all the depth and variety that we now understand (and expect of) them, are a relatively modern phenomenon? This is one of the questions addressed by Early Modern English Lives. The authors bring to our attention the kinds of rhetorical and generic features of early modern self-representation that can help us to appreciate people living four hundred years ago as the complicated, composite figures they were: people whose expression of identity involved an elaborate interplay of roles and discourses, and for whom the notion of privacy itself was a wholly different phenomenon.

Curated by acclaimed scholar Nicholas Terpstra, Lives Uncovered is a captivating collection of early modern primary sources organized around the human life cycle. The collection begins with a short essay titled "How to Read a Primary Source," which helps readers recognize different kinds of primary sources and introduces the idea of critical reading. A second brief essay, "Life Cycles in the Early Modern Period," details the organization of the volume and explains each stage in the life cycle within its historical context. Over 150 readings examine men and women from different social classes and different religious and racial groups, addressing topics that include sex and sexuality, food and drink, poverty, crime and punishment, religious tension and coexistence, and migration and emigration. Using a creative range of sources such as letters, wills, laws, diaries, fiction, and poems, Terpstra gives readers a comprehensive picture of everyday life in early modern Europe and in other parts of the globe that Europeans were beginning to settle and colonize. Each of the life-cycle chapters includes a combination of longer readings, shorter readings, and images. Every reading begins with a short introduction that sets the context of the primary source, while review questions complement the main themes of the readings. Over 30 illustrations serve as non-textual primary sources. An index is also provided.