Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation 1500–1660How 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. |
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Page 18
... Father, his Household and his Descendants, 222.4 x 330.2 cm, oil on canvas, 1593. National Portrait Gallery, London. Unknown artist, Sir Henry Unton (15577–1596), 74 x 163.2 cm, oil on panel, 1596. National Portrait Gallery, London ...
... Father, his Household and his Descendants, 222.4 x 330.2 cm, oil on canvas, 1593. National Portrait Gallery, London. Unknown artist, Sir Henry Unton (15577–1596), 74 x 163.2 cm, oil on panel, 1596. National Portrait Gallery, London ...
Page 25
... father's , and the form and aspect of them was quick and lively like my Mother's . The haire of myne head was Browne ... Father , full Cheekes and round face lyke my Mother , and an exquisite shape of Bodie resembling my Father.15 The ...
... father's , and the form and aspect of them was quick and lively like my Mother's . The haire of myne head was Browne ... Father , full Cheekes and round face lyke my Mother , and an exquisite shape of Bodie resembling my Father.15 The ...
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... Father , he numbred the days of it , from August 24 1693 to August 24 1694 , when he finished it . And when he concluded it , he thus wrote in his Diary This Day finisheth my commonly Dying - Year , which I have numbred the Days of ...
... Father , he numbred the days of it , from August 24 1693 to August 24 1694 , when he finished it . And when he concluded it , he thus wrote in his Diary This Day finisheth my commonly Dying - Year , which I have numbred the Days of ...
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... because they should bear my name ' , he wrote , ' I could do no less than set in every one of them their father's picture or counterfeit , to represent to those who should use the children the form and favour of their parent'.
... because they should bear my name ' , he wrote , ' I could do no less than set in every one of them their father's picture or counterfeit , to represent to those who should use the children the form and favour of their parent'.
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... father's and my mother's side as he who may spend thousands of pounds of yearly inheritance.17 Thus, as his songs are sung and his life story is read, their father's authorship and identity are stamped alongside a coat of arms which ...
... father's and my mother's side as he who may spend thousands of pounds of yearly inheritance.17 Thus, as his songs are sung and his life story is read, their father's authorship and identity are stamped alongside a coat of arms which ...
Contents
18 | |
Time Death and Memorialization | |
Travelling Selves | |
Language and the Mirror | |
The Expedition to Cadiz 1625 | |
The Civil | |
Autobiographical Writings by Three Early Modern Women | |
Womens Wills | |
Bibliography | |
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Common terms and phrases
authors autobiography body Cadiz Cambridge Cecil century Clifford clock Conduct Literature Coryate Couerte cultural Dallam death depicts diary discourse early modern English Elias Ashmole Elizabeth Elizabethan Elyot England English entries eternal example experience eyes Fleet gender genre God's hath Henry Henry Unton Hoby husband identity individual inheritance John Josselin kind King Lady Anne Lady Anne Clifford Lady Grace Lady Margaret life-writing lives London looking glass Lord Madox marriage Mildmay mind mirror moral narrative Norwood offers one's Oxford painting physical Pike poem portrait Ralph Josselin readers record reflection relationship Religio Medici Renaissance Richard Richard Rogers Rowland Lockey self-representation selfhood sense servant seventeenth-century Shakespeare ships siege Sir Thomas social soldiers Sonnets soul Spanish spiritual suggests temporal texts Thomas Coryate Thomas Salter Thomas Whythorne travel journals University Press unto voyage Whythorne's widow wife woman women Women Writers Project words writing