Sources for Writing the Self in Early Modern Europe

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Below you'll find a (growing) list of sources for Writing the Self in Early Modern Europe. This list represents only a tiny fraction of the sources available on the topic.

The symbol † indicates a source available at the Christopher Center. Other sources can be ordered through interlibrary loan.

You can download a print version of this list here.

Primary Sources

England

  • Barros, Carolyn A., and Johanna M. Smith, eds. Life-Writings by British Women, 1660-1850: An Anthology. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000.†
  • Boswell, James. The Journals of James Boswell, 1762-1795. Ed. John Wain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.†
  • Browne, Sir Thomas. Works. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.†
  • Bunyan, John. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. Ed. Roger Sharrock. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.†
  • Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. New York: Norton, 1975.†
    • The classic novel of early modern "individualism."
  • Evelyn, John, and William Bray. The Diary of John Evelyn. London: Dent, 1925.†
  • Graham, Elspeth, ed. Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth Century Englishwomen. London: Routledge, 1989.†
  • Hoby, Margaret Dakins, and Dorothy Mary Meads. Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599-1605. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930.†
  • Josselin, Ralph. The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616-1683. Ed. Alan Macfarlane. Records of social and economic history, new ser., 3. London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1976.
    • An electronic edition of this source is available here.
  • Martin, Randall. Women Writers in Renaissance England. Longman annotated texts. London: Longman, 1997.†
  • Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.†
  • Pepys, Samuel. The Illustrated Pepys: Extracts from the Diary. Ed. Robert Latham. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.†
  • Shepard, Thomas. God's Plot; The Paradoxes of Puritan Piety; Being The Autobiography and Journal of Thomas Shepard. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972.†

France

  • Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Penguin classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966.†
  • Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau. New York: Modern Library, 1945.†
  • Saint-Simon. Louis de Rouvroy. The Memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon on the Reign of Louis XIV. and the Regency. Trans. Bayle St. John. New York: J. Pott & Co, 1901.†

Germany/Switzerland

  • Glückel of Hameln. The Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln. New York: Schocken Books, 1977.
  • Petersen, Johanna Eleonora. The Life of Lady Johanna Eleonora Petersen Written by Herself: Pietism and Women's Autobiography in Seventeenth-Century Germany. Ed. Barbara Becker-Cantarino. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.†
  • Platter, Thomas. The Autobiography of Thomas Platter: A Schoolmaster of the Sixteenth Century. B. Wertheim, 1839.
  • Platter, Thomas. Journal of a Younger Brother: The Life of Thomas Platter As a Medical Student in Montpellier at the Close of the Sixteenth Century. London: F. Muller, 1963.†
  • Sastrow, Bartholomäus. Social Germany in Luther's Time: Being the Memoirs of Bartholomew Sastrow. Trans. Albert D. Vandam. Westminster: A. Constable, 1902.

Italy

  • Cellini, Benvenuto. The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. Trans. John Addington Symonds. Illustrated by Salvador Dalí. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co, 1946.†
  • Ferrazzi, Cecilia, and Anne Jacobson Schutte. Autobiography of an Aspiring Saint. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.†
  • Modena, Leone, and Mark R. Cohen. The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena's Life of Judah. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988.
  • Petrarch, Francesco. "Letter to Posterity." The Internet Medieval Sourcebook. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/petrarch1.html

Spain

  • Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Ecco, 2003.†
    • Though not an autobiography, this seminal novel is nonetheless offers abundant material for reflecting on selfhood and writing in early modern Europe.
  • Ignatius of Loyola. The Autobiography of St. Ignatius Loyola, With Related Documents. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.†

Secondary Sources

General works

  • Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. New York: Knopf, 1981.†
    • A sweeping account of attitudes towards death in European history. Offers insights into the emergence of ideas of individuality, especially as they relate to confession and the fear of death.
  • Chartier, Roger, ed. A History of Private Life. Vol. 3. Passions of the Renaissance. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989.
  • Duby, Georges, ed. A History of Private Life. Vol. 2. Revelations of the Medieval World. Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988.
  • Elbaz, Robert. The Changing Nature of the Self: A Critical Study of the Autobiographic Discourse. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987.†
  • Goodwin, James. Autobiography: The Self Made Text. Studies in literary themes and genres, no. 2. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993.†
  • Jelinek, Estelle C. The Tradition of Women's Autobiography from Antiquity to the Present. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.†
  • Olney, James. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972.†
  • Olney, James. Studies in Autobiography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.†
  • Spengemann, William C. The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.†
  • Sturrock, John. The Language of Autobiography: Studies in the First Person Singular. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.†
  • Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.†
  • Weintraub, Karl Joachim. The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.†

Early Modern

  • Amelang, James S. The Flight of Icarus. Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.
  • Bedford, Ronald, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly, eds. Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006.
  • Bedford, Ronald, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly. Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and Self-Representation, 1500-1660. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007.
  • France, Peter. Rousseau, Confessions. Landmarks of World Literature. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: Cambridge University Press, 1987.†
  • Grossman, Marshall. The Story of All Things: Writing the Self in English Renaissance Narrative Poetry. Post-contemporary interventions. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 1998.†
  • Hindmarsh, D. Bruce. The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
  • Ibsen, Kristine. Women's Spiritual Autobiography in Colonial Spanish America. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999.†
  • John N. Morris. Versions of the Self: Studies in English Autobiography from John Bunyan to John Stuart Mill. New York: Basic Books, 1966.
  • Mascuch, Michael. Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591-1791. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1996.†
  • Nicholas D. Paige. Being Interior: Autobiography and the Contradictions of Modernity in Seventeenth-Century France. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
  • Seaver, Paul S. Wallington's World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1985.
  • Seelig, Sharon Cadman. Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women's Lives, 1600-1680. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
  • Sherman, Stuart. Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660-1785. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.†
  • Spadaccini, Nicholas, and Jenaro Taléns. Autobiography in Early Modern Spain. Minneapolis, MN: Prisma Institute, 1988.
  • Spufford, Margaret. "First Steps in Literacy: The Reading and Writing Experiences of the Humblest Seventeenth-Century Spiritual Autobiographers." In Literacy and Social Development. Ed. Graff, pp. 125-150.† (JSTOR)
  • Webber, Joan. The Eloquent "I"; Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968.†
  • Whelan, Ruth. 'Writing the Self: Huguenot Autobiography and the Process of Assimilation'. In From Strangers to Citizens: The Integration of Immigrant Communities in Britain, Ireland and Colonial America, 1550-1750, 463-77. Ed. Randolph Vigne and Charles Littleton. Brighton and Portland (OR): The Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland and Sussex Academic Press, 2001.
  • Zemon Davis, Natalie. Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives. Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Reference Works

Encyclopedias

  • Boynton, Victoria, and Jo Malin. Encyclopedia of Women's Autobiography. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2005.†

Bibliographies

  • British Autobiographies; An Annotated Bibliography of British Autobiographies Published or Written Before 1951. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955. †

Author: Matthew Lundin <Matthew.Lundin@valpo.edu>

Date: March 21, 2009

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